Run - Blake Crouch [91]
Through the office windows, daylight filtered in. Down the length of the wall, he studied a photographic series of grinning salesmen. He carried his torch into a breakroom and opened the refrigerator. A dozen cups of undoubtedly-spoiled yogurt. Something wrapped in tinfoil. A Styrofoam box of leftovers that smelled like a rotting corpse.
A water cooler stood nearby.
He lodged the torch in the sink and knelt down on the floor. Held his mouth under the tap and drank until his stomach ached.
He entered a corner office and sat in the leather chair behind the desk. Propped his feet up and stared at framed photographs—a soccer team of boys in green uniforms, a family—sunglassed and screaming—on a raft in the midst of whitewater, three beer-flushed men, arm-in-arm, in the fairway of a golf course. He swiveled around in the chair and rolled toward the window. A half mile to the west, he could see the Missouri. The water gray-green under the clouds. Plains beyond. Down in the plaza, the minivan stood glazed in rainwater.
A plastic inbox tray rattled on the glasstop.
The building shook.
Two seconds later, he heard the blast.
Miles away, south of town, black smoke lifted off the prairie.
He carried the half-filled canister of water down the stairwell and through the lobby.
Outside, a light rain fell, the air cold enough to cloud his breath.
He climbed into the minivan and curled up in the backseat under the little girl’s blanket. Shut his eyes. Rain hammering the metal roof.
My day, he thought. Fire and water.
Black of night, he shot awake.
Not only explosions but gunfire now. Inside the city limits.
He climbed into the front seat and peered through the windshield.
The sky lit up—cushions of cloud overhead and snow falling out of them.
Darkness.
The delayed boom of whatever artillery shell had just exploded.
A brighter flash toward the horizon.
Then black.
No way he was going back to sleep.
JACK watched the sky lighten through the glass, his fists still clenching the steering wheel, as they had for the last two hours. Like listening to a hurricane come ashore and the intensifying terror of the eye wall creeping closer. The sound of war coming.
He straightened up in the seat, pushed open the door, stepped outside. Snow clung to everything, and he brushed it off the minivan’s sliding door to uncover Dee’s name.
Realized he was crying. What if the guards hadn’t allowed Cole into the city? Would Dee have even risked an entry this close to the border? No. She’d have gone around, tried to rush the kids across. They might even be in Canada by now. They might be dead in Wyoming. Might be anywhere. But not here. Not with him.
He sat down in the snow.
They weren’t coming.
They weren’t coming.
They weren’t—
The jackhammer pounding of a machine gun broke out what couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away.
He pulled himself up by the door handle and staggered out into the street which was lined with mostly two- and three-story buildings and trees with a few orange leaves left dangling.
Three blocks down, muzzleflashes blossomed from a top floor window.
The firing went on for a full minute.
When it stopped, silence fell upon the city.
Specks of snow seemed to hang weightless in the air.
Jack stood in the street for a long time, but the shooting was over.
He walked back to the minivan, suddenly hungry, but even more tired, and he was asleep seconds after his head hit the seat cushion. He slept so hard it seemed like barely a minute had passed, and then he was awake again, his eyes burning with strain and disorientation and a noise like Armageddon right on top of him.
He peered over the back of the seat, saw people running through the