Run - Blake Crouch [27]
“How’d we do?” Dee asked.
He stood up, lightheaded. “Six gallons.”
“You all right?”
“I just need about fifty breath mints.”
Naomi said, “Come look what we found, Dad.”
He followed them across the wood laminate floor to a sliding glass door behind the breakfast nook. The vertical blinds had been swept back and he looked through the glass into a square of domesticated yard, moonlit and bordered by desert. He saw a dilapidated swing set, a pair of lawn chairs shaded by an umbrella, and closer to the house, a thirty-foot steel antenna mast.
Naomi flipped through the channels on a mammoth television set that looked like it had occupied the same patch of shag carpeting for thirty years. Every station drowned in static.
Jack lifted a telephone, held the receiver to his ear. Silence.
They walked down the hallway, the hardwood groaning under their footsteps.
“Can’t we turn some lights on? I don’t like it dark.”
“Lights might attract someone, Cole.”
“You mean like someone bad?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you think these people went?” Naomi asked.
“No telling. Probably just left their home like we left ours.”
Jack shined his flashlight through the first doorway they passed. A bedroom with two trophy cases and a large photograph above the headboard—a teenage boy riding an enraged bull.
They went on.
Naomi said, “Something smells bad.”
Jack stopped. He smelled it, too. Sharp enough to overpower the gasoline overload in his nasal cavity.
Dee said, “Kids, let’s go back to the kitchen.”
Naomi said, “What’s wrong?”
“Go with your mother.”
“Come on, guys. Jack, be careful.”
“Is it—”
“Na, think about your brother before you say another word.”
“What about me?”
“Come on, Cole, let’s go with Mom.”
Jack watched his family retreat and then turned back toward the closed door at the end of the hall, the smell intensifying with each step. He breathed through his mouth as he turned the doorknob and shined the light inside.
A man and a woman lay in bed. White-haired. Seventy-something. Framed photographs of what he presumed were their grown sons resting on their stomachs. The woman had been shot through the forehead, and the man cradled her to himself, a hole in his right temple, his right arm outstretched and hanging off the bed, a revolver of some caliber on the floor below his hand. The white comforter darkened with blood. Above the bed, Jack put his light on a series of fifty-one photographs that, in the lowlight, looked almost identical. He moved closer. The last photograph of the montage was a recent portrait of the couple on the bed, the man wearing an oversized tuxedo that swallowed him whole, the woman squeezed into a ragged wedding dress many sizes too small, and as Jack ran his light back through the portraits, the couple grew younger and their wedding clothes fit better and their smiles brightened toward something like hope.
Jack walked into the kitchen, found Dee and Naomi standing around the island, drinking from glasses of ice water. In the living room, Cole flipped through channels of static on the television.
“Everything all right?” Dee said.
“They weren’t murdered. He shot her and then himself.”
“Can I see?”
“Why would you want to, Na?”
She shrugged. “You saw it.”
“I had to make sure everything was safe for us. I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
Jack found the radio setup in the den—a low-band rig, microphone, headphones, power meter. The room had no windows, so he turned on the desk lamp and settled into a cracking leather chair. The amateur radio license hanging on the wall above the equipment had been issued to Ronald M. Schirard, callsign KE5UTN.
“What’s all this stuff?” Naomi said.
“It’s a ham radio.”
“What’s it do?”
“Let’s you talk to people all over the world.”
“Isn’t that what cell phones are for?”
Dee said, “You know how to use this?”
“I had a friend in high school whose Dad was a ham. We’d sneak down into the basement at night and use his radio. But this equipment