Run - Blake Crouch [7]
He hit seventy-five within four blocks, blowing through two-way stops, four-way stops, and one dark traffic signal until he saw lights in the distance—the fast-approaching intersection with Lomas Boulevard.
He let the Discovery begin to slow, finally brought it to a full stop on the curb, and shifted into park. Darkness in the rearview mirror, no incoming headlights. He tried to listen for the sound of tailing cars, but he heard only those muffled telephones and the painful bass throbbing of his left eardrum. He was shaking all over.
He said, “Is anybody hurt?”
Dee climbed out of the floorboard and said something.
“I can’t hear you,” he said. In the backseat, he saw Naomi sitting up. “Where’s Cole?” Dee squirmed around and leaned into the backseat, reaching down into the floorboard where Cole had taken cover. “Is Cole okay?” The murmur of voices grew louder. “Would someone please tell me if my son is okay?”
Dee leaned back into the front seat, put her hands on her husband’s face, and pulled his right ear to her lips.
“Stop shouting. Cole’s fine, Jack. He’s just scared and balled up on the floor.”
He drove six blocks to Lomas Boulevard. This part of the city still had power. The road luminous with streetlights, traffic lights, the glow of fast-food restaurant signs that stretched for a quarter mile in either direction like a glowing mirage of civilization. Jack pulled through a red light and into the empty westbound lanes. The orange reserve tank light clicked on.
As they passed through the university’s medical campus, someone stepped out into the road, and Jack had to swerve to miss them.
Dee said something.
“What?”
“Go back,” she shouted.
“Are you crazy?”
“That was a patient.”
He turned around in the empty boulevard and drove back toward the hospital and pulled over to the curb. The patient already halfway across the road and staggering barefoot like he might topple—tall and gaunt, his head shaved, a scythe-shaped scar curving from just above his left ear across the top of his scalp, the kind of damage it would have taken a couple hundred stitches to close. The wind rode the gown up his toothpick legs.
Jack lowered his window as the man collided breathlessly into his door. He tried to speak but he was gulping down breaths of air and emanating the hospital stench of sanitized death.
At last the man raised his head off his forearms and said in a voice gone soft and raspy from disuse, “What’s happening? I woke up several hours ago. The doctors and nurses are gone.”
Jack said, “How long have you been in the hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know how you got there?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re in Albuquerque.”
“I know that. I live here.”
Jack shifted into park, eyeing the rearview mirror. “It’s October fifth—”
“October?”
“Things started about a week ago.”
“What things?”
“At first, it was just bits on the news that would catch your attention. A murder in a good neighborhood. A hit-and-run. But the reports kept coming and there were more everyday and they got more violent and unbelievable. It wasn’t just happening here. It was all over the country. A police officer in Phoenix went on a shooting rampage in an elementary school and then a nursing home. There were fifty home invasions in one night in Salt Lake. Homes were being burned. Just horrific acts of violence.”
“Jesus.”
“The president made a televised speech last night, and right after, the power went out. Cell phone coverage became intermittent. The internet too jammed up to use. By this afternoon, there were really no functioning lines of communication, not even satellite radio, and the violence was pandemic.”
The man looked away from Jack as gunshots rang out in a neighborhood across the street.
“Why is it happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The power went out before any consensus was reached. They think it’s some virus, but beyond that…”
Dee said, “Do you know how you were injured?”
“What?”
“I’m a doctor. Maybe I can help—”
“I need to find my family.”
Jack saw the man look into their car,