Run - Blake Crouch [49]
THE violence of his own shivering woke him.
Jack lifted his head out of the leaves. Dawn. A moment before. Frail blue light upon everything in the brutal cold. He had dreamed but they were too sweet and vivid to linger on.
Worked his way up the mountain for thirty minutes before stopping streamside by a boulder covered in frosted moss. He looked around. Wiped his eyes. Considered all the ways they could have fucked this up—he might have gone upstream when he should’ve hiked down, or Dee and the kids had pushed hard all night and gotten too far ahead of him, or he’d unknowingly passed them in the dark, or maybe they hadn’t even stayed with the stream and become lost elsewhere on this endless mountain.
Another two hundred yards and he came around a large boulder, saw three people lying huddled together in the leaves on the opposite bank.
He stopped. Looked down at his shoes. Looked up again. Still there, and he didn’t quite believe it, even as he rock-hopped to the other side of the stream.
Dee stirred at the sound of his footsteps, then bolted upright with the Glock trained on his chest. He smiled and his eyes burned and then he was holding her as she shook with sobs.
“Do you know how easy it would’ve been for you to pass us by in the dark?” she whispered.
“But that didn’t happen,” he said.
“I heard all those gunshots. I thought you had—”
“That didn’t happen. I found you.”
“I didn’t know if we should wait or keep going, and then I saw all those lights in the woods, and we just—”
“You did exactly what you should have.”
Naomi sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked at her father, scowling.
“Hey,” she said.
“Morning, Sunshine.”
“We can’t go back,” Jack said. He was staring down at the bag of soup cans Dee had brought and the contents of his backpack, which he’d spread out in the leaves. A tent. Two sleeping bags. Water filter. Camp stove. Map. Not much else.
“But what if they leave?”
“Why would they? I saw their cars, Dee. They have no provisions, haven’t fallen in with a big group, so they’re facing the same problems we were—no gas, no water, no food. And they just stumbled across all those things at the cabin, plus shelter, plus two hundred pounds of meat in the freezer.”
“Jack, that place is perfect. We could have—”
“There’s eight of them. Eight armed adults. We’d be slaughtered.”
“Well, I don’t much feel like wandering aimlessly through the wilderness.”
“Not aimlessly, Dee.” He knelt down and opened the Wyoming roadmap. “We’re here,” he said, “northern edge of the Wind Rivers. We’re actually not that far from the east side of the mountains.” He traced a black line north. “Let’s shoot for this highway.”
“How far is it?”
“Fifteen, twenty miles tops.”
“Jesus. And then what, Jack?” He could hear the emotion rising in her voice. “We reach this road in the middle of nowhere, and then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Well, I know. We’ll need a big fucking miracle. Because that’s how we’re going to stay alive from here on out, Jack. Big fucking miracles. That’s how bad a shape we’re in, and you want us to hike across these—” Her voice broke and she turned away and walked off into the woods.
“Mom.” Naomi started after her, but Jack caught his daughter’s arm.
“Let her go, baby. Just give her a minute.”
They were all day hiking the mountainside. The aspen giving way to evergreens the higher they climbed. The stream shrinking toward headwaters, burbling softer and softer, until at last it disappeared into a rocky hole in the mountain, never to be heard from again.
Stopped while there was still plenty of light at a small lake at nine thousand feet. It backed up against a two hundred-foot cliff which had calved