Run - Blake Crouch [34]
“Na, get you and Cole buckled in—”
“Just fucking go,” Jack said.
They started back across the desert, and Jack leaned against the door and tried to focus on the passing landscape instead of the fire in his shoulder. The pain was becoming unmanageable and sickening. He must have let slip a moan because Naomi said, “Daddy?”
“I’m fine, honey.”
He closed his eyes. So dizzy. Gone for a while and then Dee’s voice pulled him back. He sat up. Microscopic dots pulsating everywhere like black stars.
“Binoculars,” she was saying. “Can you look down the highway?”
She’d set them in his lap, and he lifted the eyecups to his eyes. Took him a moment to bring the road into focus through the driver side window.
The glint of sun off the distant windshields was unmistakable.
“They’re coming,” he said. “Still a ways off. Couple miles, maybe.”
The awful jarring of the desert disappeared as Dee turned onto the highway.
“Don’t do your safe, gas-mileage conserving acceleration,” he said. “Floor it and get us the hell out of here.”
The motor sounded harsh and clattery as they sped north, and Jack kept fighting the impulse to lean over to see the fuel gauge since the concept of unnecessary movement ran a bolt of nausea through him.
“What’s the gas situation?” he finally asked.
“Little under a quarter.”
“How fast you going?”
“Eighty-five.”
Jack opened his eyes and stared through the windshield—empty desert to the west, jagged mountains to the east. Overcome with the thought, the truth, that they’d reached the end of their five days of running. They were going to use up the last of their gas on this highway in the middle of nowhere and then those four trucks would show up and that would be the end of his family. His eyes filled up with tears and he turned away from Dee so she wouldn’t see.
The smell of smoke roused Jack off the door.
“Where are we?”
“Pinedale.”
The tiny western community had been cremated, the honky-tonk Main Street littered with burned-out trucks and debris from looted stores. Near the center of town, a line of corpses in cowboy hats sitting along the sidewalk like gargoyles, charred black and still smoking.
“Fuel light came on a minute ago,” Dee said.
“That was bound to happen.”
“How you holding up?”
“I’m holding.”
“You need to keep pressure on your shoulder, Jack, or it’s going to keep bleeding.”
They broke out of the fading smoke and Dee accelerated. The morning sky burned blue overhead, oblivious to it all.
Jack straightened and glanced back between the seats—nothing to see through the plastic sheeting that hyperventilated over the back hatch.
“I don’t like how we can’t see the road behind us,” he said. “Pull over.”
Three miles out of Pinedale, Dee veered onto the shoulder and Jack stumbled out of the Rover. Heard the incoming engines before he’d even raised the binoculars to his face—a dive-bomber wail like they were being pushed to the limits of their performance capabilities.
He jumped back into the front seat, said, “Go,” and Dee shifted into drive, hit forty before Jack had managed to shut his door.
“How far?”
“I didn’t even look. Where’d you put the shotgun?”
“Backseat floorboard.”
“Hand it to Daddy, Na.”
Jack took the Mossberg from his daughter, had to yell over the straining engine. “How many times did you shoot it, Dee?”
“I don’t know. Four or five. I wasn’t keeping count.”
Jack flipped open the center console, grabbed a few shells, started feeding them in, the pain brilliant with every twitch of the deltoid in his left shoulder.
“Na, climb into the way back and peek through those holes. See if you can spot whatever’s coming.”
He reached under his seat, grabbed the roadmap. Opened it across his lap to the Wyoming page and traced their route north out of Rock Springs through Pinedale.
“There’s a turnoff coming up, Dee. Highway 352. Take it.”
“Where’s it go?”
“Into the Wind Rivers. Dead-ends after twenty miles or so.”
“Oh my God, I see the trucks.”
“How far, Na?”
“I don’t know. They’re small, but I can see them. Getting