Run - Blake Crouch [52]
“Night.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
“You know I love you all, right? Do I say it enough?”
“Yes, Dad, you do.”
For a split second, a flash of the Naomi of old—sassy, sarcastic, acerbic.
It elicited his sole smile of the day.
A fragile inch of snow clung to the tent and glazed the rocks. Jack stared at the sky and the lake which reflected the sky—deep cobalt. He was hungry. Starving actually. But the purity of the morning light moved him with a fleeting weightlessness that broke his heart to see it go.
The cirque loomed. Simply no avoiding it. He stood there in the cold trying to see a route, but it all looked steep as hell. Like a stupid fucking thing to even consider, fact aside that he needed to get his seven-year-old son up and over it.
He woke his family, and while Naomi and Cole launched snowballs at each other, Dee pulled the stitches out of Jack’s shoulder. Then they packed up, re-bandaged their blistered feet, drank as much water as their stomachs could hold, and struck out before the sun had cleared the ridge.
They walked around the perimeter of the lake and into a field of car-size boulders. Didn’t even begin to climb until after lunchtime, which passed unacknowledged. By midafternoon the snow had vanished except for in the shadows and they were a thousand feet above the lake which shone like a diamond in the valley’s hand.
Cole had already arrived at the threshold of his endurance with Naomi not far behind, but they kept climbing, even as they cried, the rocks getting smaller and the slope steeper and the sun plunging toward night.
They would climb in increments of fifty feet and then stop while Cole fell apart and Dee and Jack calmed him and primed him to go just a little farther. Big, bold lies that they were almost there.
At four-thirty, Jack gave his pack to Dee and lifted his son onto his shoulders. Climbed another hundred feet and when he stopped this time, the sun perched on the western horizon and it hit him that they’d gone as far as they were going to make it today, that they’d be spending the night on the side of this mountain. He looked up, head swimming. The rock pink, summit spires glowing in the late sun.
“Let’s stop,” he said.
“Stop?”
“We should find a place to hunker down.”
“For the night?” Naomi said.
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the tent going to go?”
“No tent tonight, sweetie.”
Naomi eased down onto the loose rock and the sound of his daughter crying swept down into the basin.
Jack let Cole off his shoulders and crawled over to her.
“I’m sorry, Na. I’m so sorry. I know this is hard.”
“I hate it.”
“Me, too, but we’re going to find the best spot on this mountain. Think about the view we’ll have.”
“I don’t give a shit about the view.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“I hate this fucking mountain.”
“I know, sweetie, I know.”
Jack collapsed in the dirt on the downslope side of the largest stable boulder he could find, his hands raw from eight hours of climbing, eyes irritated with dust. They reclined back against the mountain using their spare clothes for pillows and blanketed under the two sleeping bags. Not a cloud in the sky and everything still and Jack praying it would stay that way.
Already it was freezing. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and Jack could see seven lakes on that treeless tableland below. Each oilblack in the dusk.
Somewhere below, a band of coyotes yapped.
Jack cracked open the last four cans of food and they ate in silence watching the last bit of sun drain away.
The planets faded in and then the stars and soon the sky swarmed with pinpricks of ancient light and they slept, dug into the side of the mountain.
JACK woke cold and stiff and thirsty. His family slept, Cole burrowed into his side completely under the sleeping bag, and Jack let them sleep, a temporary escape from the diamond-cut hardness of this place. The panic was certainly there. Felt it lingering in his blind spot, trying to break in. He’d gotten them into a terrible bind, it whispered—out of food, out of water, twelve thousand feet up a mountain they had no business climbing. He’d utterly