Run - Blake Crouch [32]
Then he was running across the slope, couldn’t feel his legs or the bullet in his shoulder, nothing but the shudder of his heart banging against his chest plate. He saw Dee being chased by two people into the desert and a man with a large revolver following a woman uphill toward the boulder where his children hid.
The man stopped and looked at Jack and raised his gun.
Between the two of them, they exchanged a dozen rounds that never came close to hitting anything.
The slide on Jack’s .45 locked back, the man struggling to break open the cylinder of his revolver, and the woman had nearly reached the boulder. She was thirty-something, blond, and holding an ax under the blade. Naomi and Cole still huddled behind the rock, Jack twenty yards away and moving toward them now at a dead run.
Shotgun reports tore out of the desert.
The woman disappeared behind the far side of the boulder and Jack screamed at his daughter to move over the roar of another shotgun blast.
The blonde emerged behind his children, hoisted the ax.
He crashed into her at full speed and drove her hard into the ground. Grabbed the first decent rock within reach and before he’d even thought about what he was doing, he’d broken open the woman’s skull with seven crushing blows.
Jack wiped her blood out of his eyes, picked up the Glock, and went to his children.
Naomi wept hysterically, holding her brother in her arms, shielding him.
The woman twitched in the dirt.
Down on the desert, someone groaned as they dragged themselves across the ground.
Not Dee.
Jack pushed the slide back and stepped out from behind the boulder with the empty Glock. The man stood ten feet downslope, pushing rounds into the open cylinder of his revolver, and when he looked up his eyes went wide like he’d been caught stealing or worse. Jack trained the Glock on him, a two-handed grip, but he couldn’t stop his nerves from making it shake.
The man seemed roughly the same age as the blonde, who Jack could hear moaning behind the rock. He was sunburned and stinking. Lips chapped. Wore filthy hiking shorts and a pale blue, long-sleeved tee-shirt covered in rips and holes and dark sweat- and bloodstains.
“Drop it.”
The revolver fell in the dirt.
“Move that way,” Jack said, directing him up the hill away from the gun. “Now sit.”
The man sat down against the boulder, squinting at the new sun.
“Naomi, you and Cole come here.” He glanced over his shoulder as he said it, glimpsed a small figure moving toward them on the desert—Dee. In the morning silence, he could still hear that Jeep heading toward the mountains, the noise of its engine on a steady decline.
The man glared at Jack. “Let me help Heather.”
Naomi came around the boulder, struggling to carry Cole who whimpered in his sister’s arms.
“Go put him in the car, Na.”
“Is Mom okay?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see Heather.”
Naomi looked at the man as she moved past. “Why? She’s dead. Just like you’re going to be.”
The man called for her, and when Heather didn’t answer, his face broke up and he buried it in the crook of his arm and wept.
Jack’s left shoulder had established a pulse of its own. Lightheaded, he eased down onto a rock, keeping the Glock leveled on the man’s chest.
“Look at me.”
The man wouldn’t.
“Look at me or I’ll kill you right now.”
The man looked up, wiped his face, tears cutting streaks of red through the film of dirt and dust.
“What’s your name?”
“Dave.”
“Where you from, Dave?”
“Eden Prairie, Minnesota.”
“What do you do for a living?”
It took him a moment to answer, as if he were having to sift back through several lifetimes.
“I was a financial advisor for a credit union.”
“And this morning, out here in the desert, you were going to kill my children.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re fucking right I don’t understand, but if you explain it to me right now, you won’t die.”
“Can I see her first?”
“No.”
Dave stared for a split second at Jack—a look of seething hatred that vanished as fast as it had come.
“Heather and I came out several weeks ago with our friends on a backpacking