Run - Blake Crouch [88]
“There’s an Air Force base here, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s been on lockdown since everything went to hell. I guess it’s understandable—they’ve got the silos holding the Minuteman nuclear missiles.”
Jack climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“You’ll let me through?”
“Absolutely.” He closed Jack’s door. “Safe travels.”
Jack had passed through the outskirts of Great Falls a handful of times in the last ten years during those long driving trips to see his father when his old man had still lived in Cut Bank. But he hadn’t been in the city proper since he and Dee had left to start a life in Albuquerque, sixteen years ago. Thought this might be the most peculiar circumstance under which to experience the emotion of nostalgia.
Driving the quiet streets, he found it haunting to see the darkness fall upon a city that had no light to raise in its defense.
In the blue dusk, he passed an ice cream shop he and Dee had frequented all those years ago on Friday nights. But everything else, at least what little he could see of it, had changed.
He drove to a hospital and cruised past the emergency room entrance, dark and vacated.
Went on.
There was no one out. The streets empty. The geography of the town might have been an asset, might have stoked his memory, had there been streetlights to guide him. But it was as dark as the countryside in these city limits. He drove for thirty minutes, dipping into the reserve tank, rambling in search of anything that resembled a shelter.
The engine had already sputtered once when he saw the soft smears of light through windows in the distance, and as the form of the building took shape, he recognized it—a high school. People were milling around the steps that climbed to the main brick building, the cherry glow of their cigarettes barely visible in the dark.
Jack pulled over to the curb and turned off the minivan.
He was thirsty again.
“Donald,” he said. “We’re at a shelter. They might have hot food. Clean water. Cots. I’ll find a doctor to look at you. We’re in a safe city now. You’ll be taken care of.”
Donald leaned against the door.
“Don? You awake?” Jack reached over and touched the man’s hand.
Cool and limp.
His neck gave no pulse.
Jack climbed the steps to the school. Inside, candlelight flickered off the lockers and it smelled worse than a homeless shelter—stink of body odor and rancid clothing. Cots stretched down the length of the hallway, and everywhere the noise of hushed conversations and snoring. A baby crying somewhere. He didn’t smell food.
He walked a long corridor, cots on either side and open suitcases—barely enough room him to make his way down the middle without trampling someone’s filthy laundry.
Five minutes of negotiating the crowded hallways brought him to the entrance of a gymnasium, where a woman sat at a folding table reading by candlelight a library-bound edition of Treasure Island. She looked up at Jack with what he imagined to be the no-bullshit demeanor of a mathematics teacher, or worse, a principal.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You from Great Falls?”
“Albuquerque. I’m looking for my family. My wife is Dee. She’s short, brown hair, beautiful. Forty years old. My son is Cole, and he’s…” As he said Cole’s name, he thought about Benny and the roadblocks at the edge of town.
“Sir?”
“He’s seven. My daughter is Naomi and she’s fourteen, looks a lot like her mother.”
“And you think they’re here?”
“I don’t know. We were separated, but I think they might have come to Great Falls—”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but we’ve got over two thousand people here. Look, I wish I could offer you a cot, but we’re maxed out and I don’t know when more food is coming. The Air Force base had been trucking in MRE rations, but we haven’t seen them in five days.” She sounded tired and emotionless. Jack thinking, You haven’t seen anything.
He glanced through the open doors into the gymnasium—a mass of sleeping bodies.
“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this