Run - Blake Crouch [80]
Jack could hear the soldiers walking away, the sound of distant voices, still some movement in the pit.
As one of the bodies on top of him began to twitch, a noise rose up at the far end of the pit, followed by another and another, the last one close to where he lay.
He watched as one of the soldiers climbed down into the pit. They held a chainsaw with a three-foot guide bar, wore a white vinyl apron, a helmet with a plexiglass faceplate. He started across the top layer of bodies, slashing at anything that moved.
Jack tried to lay still, ignoring the burn in his shoulder.
The body on top of him sat up, and in the low light, Jack could see her long, black hair falling down her back. She was crying and he reached up to try and pull her down, but the soldier with the chainsaw had already seen her and was wading over through the bodies.
Jack heard her scream just barely and then the soldier swung his giant chainsaw.
She fell back onto Jack and the blood flowed, blinding him, choking him, and he lay there unmoving as the solider passed by, the noise of the chainsaws growing softer.
Someone yelled, “Jones, look at this guy. Untouched. Didn’t even catch a bullet. Keep playing dead, motherfucker.”
The two-stroke wailed and there were seconds of the most horrendous screaming Jack had ever heard, and then the chainsaw motors idled again.
The soldiers wandered through the pit for another ten minutes, and then the chainsaws went quiet and the voices slipped out of range.
Jack didn’t move for a long time. The blood that covered him becoming sticky and cold and not another sound daring to lift out of the open grave.
His shoulder throbbing.
The clouds overhead gone dark and the sky almost void of light.
He pushed the headless body off of him and sat up.
Off in the distance toward the tents, a bonfire raged and there were fifty or sixty men gathered around it, their laughter and voices carrying across the field.
Jack crawled onto the surface of the pit, a few people still barely hanging on, groaning as he moved across them, one man begging for his help. The pain in Jack’s shoulder making it nearly impossible to set his weight on his right arm, but he finally reached the back edge of the pit and climbed out into the grass.
He kept moving on his stomach across the field through that strange and fleeting grayness between twilight and night. A hundred yards out from the pit, exhaustion stopped him. Still had a fifth of a mile to go to the trees, but he couldn’t catch his breath. Lay on his side watching the bonfire and the soldiers in camp, the reflection of the fire bright off the shine of their black leather boots.
Jack crawled again.
Another twenty minutes before he passed through the wall of trees, stopping ten feet inside the forest. Retched his guts out though there was nothing left but the sip of water he’d had hours ago in the back of the tractor trailer.
He crawled to the nearest spruce tree under an overhang of branches.
On the cusp of pitch-black darkness in the shadow of the forest.
He touched his right shoulder—painful and hot, though not as bad as the last bullet he’d stopped. Couldn’t see the wound, but running his hand along the back of his shoulder, he thought he could feel the exit hole—a circular flare of burned skin.
Despite the pain, he felt a detachment from himself so intense it verged on out-of-body, like a filter setting up between what had happened in the field and his emotional connection to it. He felt a beautiful step removed. He watched himself listening to the soldiers. Watched himself lying on his side on the moist ground with his back against the tree trunk. Watched his eyes close as the devastation that was this day sat perched beside his head with the patience of a gargoyle, waiting to crush him.
At some point in the night, a noise from the field woke him, and it took Jack a moment to connect it with the growl of the dozer. Through the branches of the spruce tree, he could just make out the lights on top of its cab blazing down into the pit, the scoop