Run - Blake Crouch [17]
Jack said, “I’m going to find a spot where I can watch the road.”
“Can I come?”
“No, buddy, I need you to stay here and take care of Mama. I won’t be far.” He looked at Dee. “Be ready to run.”
Jack jogged back toward the stream and ducked behind a boulder that rose to his shoulders. The trees dripping. Snowing hard. He could smell the spruce. The wet rock. Already the ground was white. He poked his head around the rock as the second truck emerged from the trees. It went alongside the meadow. He said, “There are no tracks to see, just keep moving, keep moving,” and it kept moving as the third and fourth and fifth trucks rolled into view—Dodge Rams, snow-blasted except for the engine-warmed hoods and the heated cabs. He could see white faces through the fogged glass of the passenger windows. He ducked back behind the rock and sat down in the snow and studied the smooth motion of his watch’s second hand. When it had made three revolutions, the engine noises had completely faded, and the only sound was the dripping trees. The pounding of his heart.
They unloaded their camping equipment from the back of the Land Rover and Jack unpacked their tent and read its instruction manual. Spent an hour trying to assemble the poles and unravel the mystery of how the tent attached to them. The snow was ankle-deep and still falling when he finally raised the four-man dome. They carried their sleeping bags and air cushions over from the car and tossed them inside. Dee and the kids took off their wet shoes and climbed in.
“I’ll be in in a little while,” Jack said. “Warm it up for me.”
He zipped them in.
With the new hunting knife, Jack cut large squares out of the plastic sheeting. He wiped the snow off the windowframes, dried the wet metal with the sleeves of his shirt, and duct-taped the plastic squares over three windows on the right side of the car and a large rectangle over the back hatch. You couldn’t see anything distinctly through the plastic, so he taped a piece over the intact glass of Cole’s window as well.
He spent the rest of the afternoon picking Naomi’s windowglass out of the backseat and the floor mats. Reorganizing everything in the cargo area. He checked the oil, washer fluid and tire pressure. When he’d finished, he looked for something else to do, needing his hands to be busy, his mind in the moment. It still snowed. He thought the sky had imperceptibly darkened, the afternoon sliding toward dusk. He hacked some limbs off a dead spruce and snapped off a few clusters of brown needles toward the base of the tree that had been shielded from the weather.
The stream was freezing. He picked a dozen fist-size rocks out of the water and stretched out his tee-shirt and loaded them all into the pouch it made. Inside the fire ring, he stacked wads of tissue paper and the browned spruce needles and a handful of twigs and enclosed them all in a framework of larger branches. Last fire he’d built had been at their home in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, and he’d cheated, used a brick of firestarter to get things going.
His hands trembled in the cold as he held the lighter to the tissue paper and struck a flame.
Later, he heard the tent unzip. Dee crawled out, stepped into her wet shoes. She walked over and stood beside him.
“I guess it literally takes the end of the world to get a family camping trip.”
“I’m just trying to get a fire going so we can dry some stuff out.”
A wisp of smoke lifted out of the pitiful pile of blackened twigs and half-burnt tissue paper.
“You’re shivering. Come into the tent