Run - Blake Crouch [22]
Cole wept hysterically.
“It’s okay, buddy,” Jack said. “It’s okay. We’re all right now.”
“I want to go home. I want to go home now.”
Dee climbed into the back and swept the broken glass off the leather seat and took Cole up into her arms.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. I want to go home, too, but we can’t just yet.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
“When can we?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Jack glanced back and before the overhead light cut out, saw Naomi’s chin quivering, too.
He opened his door, said, “I’ll be right back.”
He crawled through the grass up the embankment and lay on his stomach in the shadow of an overhanging cottonwood at the shoulder’s edge, his heart beating against the ground, listening. He could still hear Cole crying, Dee hushing him like she had when he was a baby. He wiped his eyes. Hands shaking. Cold. The highway silent.
They came so suddenly he didn’t have time to roll back down the hill—two cars tearing around the corner, no headlights, tires squealing, one of them passing within a foot of his head.
They raced on into darkness, invisible, the groan of their engines slowly fading.
Jack had dust in his eyes and grit between his teeth and the odor of burnt rubber was everywhere.
AT dawn, they entered the largest city they’d seen since Albuquerque. The lights were still on. Gas stations beckoned. They undercut an empty interstate, Jack keeping their speed above sixty, and soon the city dwindled away behind them, him watching the image of it shrink in the only reflection left—the cracked side mirror on Dee’s door.
They crested a pass. A small weather station beside the road. Fragile light on this minor range of green foothills. That city thirty miles back and to the south, its lights glittering in the desert. A distant range to the west with still a few minutes of night left to go. Jack was beyond exhaustion, shoulder aching from the twelve-gauge kick, his children awake, staring into the plastic of their respective windows. Catatonic. Dee snored softly.
They rode down from the pass and out of the pines into empty, arid country. As the sun edged up on the world, Jack saw the building in the distance. He took his foot off the accelerator.
The motel had been long abandoned, its name bleached out of the thirty-foot billboard that stood teetering beside the road. Dee stirred and sat up as Jack veered off the highway onto the fractured pavement.
“Why are you stopping?”
“I have to sleep.”
“Want me to drive some?”
“No, let’s stay off the road today.”
He pulled around to the back of the building and turned off the engine.
Stillness. The cathedral quiet of the high desert.
Jack looked at the gas gauge—between a quarter and a half. He studied the odometer.
“Five hundred fifty-two miles,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“How far we’ve come from home.”
The room had two double beds. A dresser. An old television with a busted screen. Graffitied walls. Tied-off and shriveled condoms on the carpet and a bathtub full of shattered beer bottles. Jack carefully turned back the rotting covers so as not to disturb the dust, and they lay their sleeping bags on the old sheets—Jack and Cole on one bed, the girls on the other—and fell asleep as the sun rose.
He sat up suddenly. His wife stood over him. Dust trembling off the ceiling. A glass ashtray rattling across the bedside table.
“Jack, something’s happening.”
They parted the curtains and climbed over the rusted AC wall unit through the open windowframe. Midday light beat down on the desert and the ground vibrated beneath their feet, the inconceivable noise shaking jags of glass out of other windows, doors quivering in their frames. They walked over to the motel office and Jack ventured a glance around the corner of the building.
On the road, a convoy rolled by—SUVs, luxury sedans, beater trucks with armed men riding in the beds, jeeps, fuel trucks, school buses, all moving