Run - Blake Crouch [71]
“I’m just a doctor from Albuquerque,” she said. “Trying to keep my kids safe. Everything I’ve told you is true.”
They walked again.
“Ten days ago, we sent someone out on reconnaissance.”
“They haven’t come back?”
He shook his head. “What’s it like out there?”
“A nightmare. You can’t tell who’s affected until they try to kill you.”
“They aren’t just military?”
“No. They group together and travel in convoys. They recognize the unaffected on sight. I couldn’t tell you how many towns we passed through that have been burned to the ground.”
“We had to put five of our own down a few weeks ago. They killed three people before we stopped them. Is it a virus? Do you know what’s causing it?”
“No,” she said. “It all imploded so fast.”
They crossed over a road—just the faintest depression of tire tracks in the leaves.
“You have vehicles?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She caught movement up ahead—one of the guards cruising the perimeter.
“Two of our women are pregnant. We don’t have a doctor.”
“I’d be happy to see them.”
They veered back out of the woods into the clearing, moved past a group of children standing in the grass, each with their own easel.
“We’re really proud of our school here,” he said. “Naomi and Cole are welcome to attend, of course.”
In the afternoon, Dee examined two women with child and checked in on a fifteen-year-old boy with a low-grade fever and rackety cough, just relieved to engage her mind in her old life, if only for a short while.
“I don’t like this place,” Naomi said. “These people creep me out.”
Dee lay in bed in their cabin under the covers with Cole and Naomi, the boy already asleep.
“Would you agree it’s an improvement on starving to death?”
“I guess.”
Cold air slipped in through the windowframe, just a hint of color in the sky and the tops of the spruce trees profiled against it.
“We staying?” Naomi asked.
“For a few days at least. Get our strength up.”
“Is this like, a militia?”
“I think it might be.”
“So they probably believe all kinds of crazy shit about the government and black people?”
“I don’t know, haven’t asked them, don’t plan to.”
“I’d rather just go to Canada.”
“Could we take it a day at a time for now? At least while they’re still feeding us?”
The knock came in the middle of the night.
Dee stirred from sleep and sat upright and looked around. Not a single source of manmade light, and because she’d extinguished the candle before settling into bed, the room was absolutely dark. She couldn’t recall the layout of her surroundings or even where she was until Mathias Canner’s voice passed through the door.
“Dee. Get up.”
She climbed over Cole, her bare feet touching the freezing floorboards.
Moved through pure darkness toward Canner’s voice.
No locks on the inside of the door, which she pulled open by the wooden handle.
“Sorry to wake you,” Mathias said through the inch of open space between the doorframe and the door. “But you’re a doctor.” He grinned, and in the starlight, she noticed a dark smear across the left side of his face. “Sometimes you get paged in the wee hours, right?”
“Not often. I have a general practice.”
“Well, terribly sorry to inconvenience you, but we require the services of an MD.”
“What happened?”
“Just get dressed. I’ll be waiting right here.”
She followed him through the field, the stars blazing over them in the moonless dark. Arrived at the edge of the woods at a small concrete building half-buried in the ground, which at first blush, reminded Dee of a storm cellar.
Mathias led her down a set of stairs to a steel door.
She hesitated on the last step. “What are we doing?”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Do you think the food and the water and the shelter we’re providing to you and your children have no cost?” He pushed open the door and a waft of blood and shit and scorched tissue washed over Dee and conjured the memory of her ER rotation. She looked away from it and braced herself and looked again.
The man, or what was left of him, lay toppled over on the stone floor, naked and manacled to one of the