Run - Blake Crouch [16]
Dee lifted the binoculars from the floorboard and leaned out the window and glassed the valley. Even without magnification, Jack could see five of the trucks veer onto the turnoff for Cinnamon Pass.
“Why’s the one stopping?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Let me see. A man’s getting out.”
“What’s he—”
“Everybody get down.”
“What’s wrong?”
Something struck the Rover, and for a split second Jack thought the tires had thrown a rock.
A rifle shot echoed off the mountains.
“Get down on the floorboards.”
The Rover shook and pitched as Jack pushed the speedometer to ten miles per hour, maneuvering to avoid the largest, sharpest rocks that jutted out of the trail. The window at Naomi’s seat exploded in a shower of glass and everyone screamed and Jack shouted his daughter’s name and she said that she was okay.
Another rifle shot. They climbed into the base of a cloud, Jack thinking, He’s aiming for the tires, as a bullet punctured Dee’s door and ripped through his seat, inches from his back.
The mist thickened. The rocks had just been wet. Now they were frosted. The snow melting and streaking the windshield and pouring into the car through the open windows. Jack thought he heard another shot over the engine, but when he glanced out Dee’s window to where the valley should have been a few hundred feet below, there was only a blue-tinted mist cluttered with snowflakes that swirled and fell in disorienting profusion.
They climbed the mountainside, the road exposed, Dee and the kids still burrowed into the floorboards, Jack constantly checking the rearview mirror for headlights.
“Can we get up now?” Cole asked.
“Not yet.”
“It hurts to stay like this.”
The road leveled off and the Rover’s headlights passed over another signpost: Cinnamon Pass Elevation 12,640 Feet. Several inches of snow on everything in this tundra world. No trees or shrubs but only rock and nothing visible beyond fifty feet through the fog and pouring snow, the light more like dusk than early afternoon. In some outpost of emotion, divorced from the horror of the moment, Jack found the isolated beauty of this pass heartbreaking. The kind of wild place his father had loved to take him when he was a boy.
He brought the Rover to a stop, turned off the car and threw open his door.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
“Just checking things out. You guys can sit up now.”
He stepped down into the snow and shut his door. He strained to listen. At first, just the infinitesimal pattering of snowflakes falling on his shoulders, the ticking of the cooling engine, the wind, the invisible shifting of rocks on some obscured peak. Then he heard them—impossible to tell how far away, but the distant groan of engines became audible in the gloom below the pass, muffled by the snow. He got back into the car and cranked the engine and they went on. Jack shifted into four-wheel low. The road descending, the tires sliding on ice down the steeper grades. After two miles, shrubs appeared again. Then tiny, crooked fir trees. They dropped into a forest and a stream fell in beside the road. Still snowing here, but the snow had only begun to collect.
Jack turned off the jeep trail.
They went across a meadow and forded a stream and climbed up the bank into a grove of fir trees. He turned off the car and got out and then walked back to the stream and stared across the meadow toward the road. The mist had all but dissolved in the trees. He looked back at the Rover, parked behind a grouping of blue spruce, then back to the road again. He scrambled down the bank to the edge of the stream and started to cross over to test the soundness of their hiding place from the meadow. The rumbling chorus of engines stopped him. He went back up the bank. Dee and Cole had gotten out of the Rover and were coming toward him. He waved them back. “The trucks are coming.”
“Can they see us from the road?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced back at the meadow and imagined he could see the Rover’s tire tracks in the