Run - Blake Crouch [67]
Dee leaned over and touched a light gray line that branched off from the bold one denoting the highway they’d been driving all night.
“Here?” she said.
“Yeah, that’s the one we need to find. See how it cuts right across? Once we hit it, we’re only twenty miles from the Bozeman airfield.”
Dee spotted it as they raced past and Ed turned around in the empty highway and headed back. It was an unmarked dirt road that exploited the Jeep’s decrepit shocks, rocking them along for several miles on a gentle climb through pine forest. Just dark enough when passing through the corridors of trees to persuade Ed to punch on the headlights.
“Could we actually fly out tonight?” Dee said.
“Assuming we find a plane with sufficient fuel, I’ll probably want to wait until first light. Really don’t want my first flight in over two decades to be by instrumentation.”
“Can I help fly?” Cole asked.
“Absolutely, copilot.”
Dee stared out the window at the open field they moved across, thinking how flying out of all this madness, of finally getting her kids someplace safe, felt so far beyond the realm of possibility she couldn’t even imagine it happening.
Ed slammed the brake.
She shot forward, painfully restrained by the seatbelt.
Looked up when she’d recoiled back into the leather seat, her first thought her children who were picking themselves up out of the backseat floorboards, and her second the numerous points of light that were moving toward the Jeep.
“Back up, Ed. Back up right—”
The windshield splintered and something warm sprayed the side of Dee’s face as Ed fell into the steering wheel, the horn blaring, other rounds piercing the glass, the night filling with gunshots. Dee unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved the gearshift into park and crawled over the console into the backseat. Sprawled herself on top of Naomi and Cole as bullets struck the car.
“Is he dead?” Naomi asked.
“Yes.”
The firing stopped.
“Either of you hit?”
“No.”
“Make it stop,” Cole cried.
“Are you hit, Cole?”
He shook his head.
Footsteps approached the Jeep, and in the illumination of an oncoming flashlight, Dee could see clear liquid sheeting down the glass of the rear passenger window.
“We have to get out of the car,” she whispered.
Already her eyes were burning, the fumes getting stronger.
“They’ll shoot us if we get out,” Naomi said.
“They’ll burn us alive if we stay in. They’ve shot some of the plastic gas cans on top of the Jeep.”
Dee opened the door and tumbled out. The glare of the flashlights maxed her retinas and she could see little of who was there nor determine their number amid the afterimages that pulsed purple in the dark.
“Stop right there.” A man’s voice. Dee stood and raised her hands.
“Please. I have two children with me. Naomi, Cole, get out.” She felt one of them, probably Cole, glom onto her right arm.
“They’re like me,” Cole said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They have light around their head. All of them.”
“Get back in your car,” the man said, close enough now for Dee to get a decent look—three-day beard, dark navy trousers and parka, aiming an automatic weapon at her face.
He motioned toward the car with the machine gun as others emerged out of the dark behind him.
Dee considered the Glock pushed down the back of her pants. Suicide.
“Bill, check the driver.”
A short, stocky soldier put a light through Ed’s window.
“Gone to be with the Lord, boss.”
“Got your Zippo on you, you chain-smoking motherfucker?”
“Yeah.”
“Particularly attached to it?”
“It was my older brother’s.”
“Cough that shit up.”
“Fuck, Max.”
The lightbeam glimmered off the steel as the soldier chucked his lighter to the man who held Dee and her children at gunpoint, Max catching it with his left hand, never letting the AR-15 waver in his right.
“What are you doing with them, little man?”
“Do not speak to my son.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“What do you mean?” Cole asked.
“You know exactly what I mean.