Run - Blake Crouch [93]
Jack stopped.
He could hear the man’s footfalls in the lobby down below.
Now running up the stairs.
Jack moved into a large, open maze of cubicles and desks, his world getting darker every step he took away from those windows.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled under a desk. Couldn’t see a thing. Panting. The noise deafening. He shut his eyes, tried to calm himself, and when his heart finally slowed, he heard the footsteps—soft as mice—moving into the mortgage department toward him.
He took long, slow inhalations through his nose, and even in the dark chill of the bank, lines of sweat were running down out of his hair into his eyes.
The man let out a sharp breath. Couldn’t have been more than four or five feet away.
His footsteps trailed off into the black, only audible when the boot tread caught on the carpet—an imperceptible scratch.
Jack’s legs burned. He’d crammed himself up underneath a desk, the wood digging into his backbone.
Five minutes passed without a sound.
Ten minutes.
Twenty.
Then an hour was gone, maybe longer. Impossible to know.
He leaned forward, rocking slowly back onto his hands and knees, his feet tingling with an excruciating numbness. Crawled several feet into the dark and stood, knees popping.
He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the barest thread of light sliding around a corner. Wondering, should I crawl back under the desk and wait a few more hours? Maybe the man with the red bandana had gone to get a flashlight. Maybe he’d left with no intention of returning. Maybe he was waiting out there just around the corner.
Jack moved forward between the cubicles, back into the light.
He stepped into the hallway.
Back down the stairs, through the lobby. He stood in that glassless window frame looking out across the plaza.
Snowing again. Nothing moving. The minivan riddled with bullet holes. Some of the dead lay beside their weapons, and he felt a subtle charge at the prospect of getting his hands on a gun again.
Ten steps into the plaza, Jack bent down to unwind the strap of a machine gun that had tangled around the arm of a dead man.
Froze as his finger touched the strap. An icy prickle down the center of his back. A door to the minivan was creaking open.
Jack let go and stood up, turning slowly.
The man in the red bandana sat in the front passenger seat, lighting a cigarette. “Finally.” Took a deep drag. “Didn’t want you to see the smoke.”
He started toward Jack, motioning him away from the dead man with his automatic pistol.
“The fountain,” he said.
Jack crossed the plaza, never taking his eyes off the man, as if that somehow kept the balance of control in his favor.
The fountain was a circle of old concrete, fifteen feet across, with a stone feature rising out of the middle that had once rained water. Most of it had long since evaporated, and what remained was stagnant and filled with discs of ice.
The men sat five feet apart.
Jack saw that the man’s hands were covered in dried blood that was cracking on his skin like old asphalt. He looked out at the plaza—the minivan, the dead, the blood on the melting snow.
In proximity, the soldier looked nothing like Jack had imagined. A kinder face. Three-day beard. Thoughtful eyes. Curls of black hair that slipped out from under the bandana. His fatigues weren’t black as Jack had first thought, but some pattern of night camouflage comprised of dark blues.
Might have been Jack’s age, perhaps a year or two younger.
He stared at Jack while he smoked, handgun resting on his leg, trained on Jack’s stomach.
“Is Dee alive?”
Jack didn’t respond.
“Where’s your family, Jack?”
A twinge