Run - Blake Crouch [62]
In the total darkness of the cabin, she could hear Cole and Naomi breathing deeply. She pulled off her crumbling shoes and took a bottom bunk—sheeted mattress, no blanket. Hoped her children dreamed of something other than what their life had become.
IN the morning, Naomi had barely the strength to rise out of bed, and the prodding it took rivaled the difficulty Dee had experienced trying to rouse her two months ago on the first school day of the year.
They wandered outside, having slept through most of the morning, and now it was almost warm and the sun was high and there were only patches of snow in the shadows and the forest. They ate as much of it as they could get down.
The pavement was dry. They started down the other side of the pass, Dee cold and more lightheaded than when she donated blood. The spruce trees and the sky seemed to have lost their vibrancy, almost sepia-toned, and the sounds of the forest and their footsteps on the road came muffled.
She wondered if they were dying.
In the midafternoon, Dee glanced up and saw that Naomi was sitting in the road, swaying over the double yellow like windblown sawgrass.
Dee eased down beside her.
“Are we stopping?” Cole asked.
“Yeah, for a minute.”
The boy walked over to the shoulder to investigate a brown sign riddled with buckshot that warned, You Are Now in Grizzly Bear Country.
“I think a rest is a good idea,” Dee said.
“I’m not resting.”
“Then what is this?”
“I’m so hungry and tired and Dad’s probably dead. I just want to die now, too.”
“Don’t say that.”
Naomi turned slowly and stared at her mother. “Don’t you? Be honest.”
“We have to keep going, Na.”
“Why do you say that? We don’t have to do anything. We can stay right here and waste away or you can put us all out of our miseries right now.”
Her eyes flickered to the Glock tucked into Dee’s waistline.
It surprised Dee as much as it did Naomi when she slapped her daughter hard across the face.
Whispered, “You get the fuck up right now, young lady, or I will drag your little ass down this mountain so help me God. I didn’t raise you to quit.”
Dee struggled back onto her feet as Naomi slumped across the road and wept with what little energy she still had.
Dee crying, too. “Come on, Cole, let’s go.”
“What’s wrong with Naomi?”
“She’ll be okay. Just needs a minute.”
“Are we leaving her?”
“No, she’ll be right along.”
They had covered barely a mile by evening when they left the road for a boulder-strewn meadow. No snow or running water anywhere. As the thirst stalked them, all Dee could think about was all the snow they’d passed up earlier in the day, how she should have taken a container from the restaurant at the pass, packed it with ice for later.
The ground was soft and moist from the recent snowfall, and they curled up on the far side of a boulder, hidden from the road, everyone asleep before the stars came out.
DEE woke with the sun in her face and a dehydration headache. Her children slept and she let them go on sleeping. Lethargic and hopeless. Nothing more unappealing than rising from the cool soft grass to trudge on down that road.
She lay there, gliding in and out of consciousness, always returning to the question—where are you? And—are you? It seemed impossible that he could be gone and she not know. Not feel it in the pit of her soul.
She lay facing her daughter, Naomi’s eyes half open, blades of dead-yellow grass trembling between them that Dee had been giving serious thought to eating.
“I hurt everywhere,” Naomi said.
“I know.”
“Are we dying, Mom?”
How to answer such a question.
“We’re in rough shape, baby.”
“Is it going to hurt a lot worse than this? Toward the end, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“How much longer?”
“Naomi. I don’t know.”
Dee had completely lost time, and whether the sun’s position in the sky indicated late morning or early afternoon, she couldn’t tell. She reached over and put her hand to Cole’s back. Confirmed the