Run - Blake Crouch [78]
A man sitting across from him against the other side of the trailer, said, “This is for the guy who just got put in here. Where are we?”
“A mountain pass in Wyoming. Not far from Jackson. Do you know where they’re taking us?”
“Nobody knows anything.”
“How’d you get here?”
“They picked me up two days ago in Denver.”
“Did someone die in here?”
“Yeah, that’s what the smell is. They’re toward the front.”
The pressure in Jack’s ears released as they descended the pass. What was left of his ring finger dripped on his pants, and he tucked his hand under his jacket and tried to wrap his undershirt around the open wound, felt a surge of whitehot pain that nearly made him vomit when he touched the jagged phalange of his ring finger.
The baby went on crying for what he guessed was thirty minutes.
He said finally, “Is someone holding that baby?”
“I’m sorry.” A woman’s voice. “I’m trying to calm her—”
“No, I’m not complaining, I just…I can’t see anything, and I wanted to make sure someone’s holding her.”
“Someone is.”
No light slipped in anywhere.
They rolled down what felt like a winding road, and after a while the sharp turns diminished.
Someone shoved a plastic jug of water into his hands, said, “One sip,” and Jack didn’t even hesitate to lift it to his mouth and take a swallow.
He passed it on to the person beside him.
“Thank you.” Voice of an older woman.
Every passing moment, he was moving farther away from his family, and the thought of them alone out there, every bit as hungry and thirsty and scared as he was, simply made him want to be back with them or die right now. He tried but he couldn’t stop himself from picturing Dee and the kids inside the pipe, beginning to wonder where he was. After a while, when he didn’t return, they’d search the construction site, and soon after, start calling his name, their voices traveling into the forest. Calm at first. He could almost hear them and it broke his heart. He hadn’t told them where he was going. Hadn’t known himself. Maybe they’d walk up to the pass, but there’d be nothing there, certainly not him, and by then, Dee would be getting frantic and Naomi crying. Possibly Cole as well if he grasped the situation. Would they think he’d abandoned them? Wandered into the woods and somehow gotten injured or killed? How long would they keep looking and what would their state of mind be, when finally, they gave up?
Jack opened his eyes. The diesel engine had gone quiet. The baby had stopped crying. His head rested against the bony shoulder of the old woman to his right and he felt her hand on his face, her whisper in his ear, “This too shall pass. This too shall pass.”
He lifted his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“It’s okay, I don’t mind. You were crying in your sleep.”
Jack wiped his eyes.
The rear door shot up and the light of a sunset flooded the semi-trailer with a blast of freezing air. Two soldiers stood on the ramp with automatic weapons, and one of them said, “On your feet everybody.”
The prisoners began to haul themselves up all around him, and Jack struggled onto his feet as well.
He descended the metal ramp into the grass, lightheaded and unstable.
A soldier at the bottom pointed across the open field, said, “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
“Food’s that way.”
“Why are we being—”
The solider rammed his AR-15 into Jack’s chest. “Get going.”
Jack turned and stumbled along with the crowd, everyone moving through an open field and folding into streams of more people filing out of four other semi-trailers—two hundred prisoners by Jack’s estimate. They looked haggard and addled and he searched for the old woman whose shoulder he’d used for a pillow, but he didn’t see anyone who met his mind