Run - Blake Crouch [5]
He stomped the gas, the Discovery accelerating through pure darkness.
“Jack, how can you see?”
“I can’t.”
He made a blind turn onto the next street, drove for several blocks in the dark.
Dee said, “Look.”
A house burned on the corner up ahead, flames shooting out of the dormers, the branches of an overhanging cottonwood fringed with embers while molten leaves rained down into the lawn.
“What is it?” Naomi asked.
“A house on fire.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to see.”
“No, Cole. Stay down with your sister.”
They sped up the street.
“I’m going to run us into something.” Jack flipped on the headlights. The console lit up. “You’re kidding me,” he said.
“What?”
“Way under a quarter of a tank.”
“I told you it was getting low last week.”
“You aren’t capable of pumping gas into a car?”
Three houses down, the headlights swept over two trucks that had pulled onto the lawn of an expansive adobe house.
Jack slowed.
“That’s the Rosenthals’ place.”
Through the drawn shades of the living room windows: four loud, bright flashes.
“What was that, Dad?”
“Nothing, Na.”
He gunned the engine and glanced over at Dee, a death grip on the steering wheel to keep his hands steady. Nodded at the gun in his wife’s lap.
“Wasn’t even loaded, was it?”
“I don’t know how.”
The university campus loomed empty and dark as Dee ripped open a box of ammunition. They passed a row of dorms. The quad. The student union. A squat brick building whose third floor housed Jack’s office. It occurred to him that today would have been the deadline for his bioethics class to hand in their papers on euthanasia.
“There’s a button on the left side behind the trigger,” he said. “I think it releases the magazine.”
“Are you talking about a gun?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to shoot somebody?”
“It’s only to protect us, buddy.”
“But you might have to kill someone?”
“Hopefully not.” Jack watched Dee thumb another semi-jacketed round into the magazine.
“How many will it hold?” she asked.
“Nine, I think.”
“Where are we going, Jack?”
“Lomas Boulevard, then the interstate.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to work that—” Two sets of headlights appeared a hundred yards ahead. “Jesus Christ.”
“You see them, Jack?”
“Of course I see them.”
“What’s happening, Dad?”
In the rearview mirror, a third set of headlights rushed toward them.
“Jack, do something.”
His foot depressed the brake pedal into the floorboard.
“Jack.”
“Sit up kids.”
“What are you doing?”
“Naomi, Cole, sit up. Give me the gun.”
Dee handed over the .45, which he stowed under his seat.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
He took his foot off the brake, the Discovery nearing the roadblock.
“Jack, tell me what you’re—”
“Shut up. Everybody shut up.”
A large oak had been felled across the road, the middle section excised and two pickup trucks parked in front, blocking passage, their high beams glaring into the night.
Dee said, “Oh, God, they’re armed.”
Jack counted four people standing in front of the vehicles, silhouetted by the headlights. One of them came forward as the Discovery closed within ten yards—a man wearing an Isotopes baseball cap and a red windbreaker. He trained a shotgun on the Discovery’s windshield and extended his right hand for Jack to stop.
Jack shifted into park, locked the doors.
“I’ll do the talking. Nobody say a word.”
The third truck pulled within several feet of the Discovery’s back bumper, its headlights halfway up the glass of the back hatch, so they shone directly into the rearview mirror. The man with the shotgun produced a flashlight and circled the Land Rover, shining the beam through every window before arriving back at Jack’s door, where he tapped the glass and made circles in the air with his right pointer finger. Jack noted a cold trickle of sweat gliding over the contours of his ribs. He found the switch, lowered the window eight