Run - Blake Crouch [96]
“I’m Jack,” he said.
“Hi, Jack, I’m Deanna. Sorry about this mess. Some asshole spilled his coffee all over me.”
And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust—he saw that now—and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.
But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured—a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Deanna’s parents on Thanksgiving night eight years from now, moments of indescribable happiness, long winters of depression, a slow drifting, a betrayal, fear, anger, compromise, stasis, but when it all lay stripped to the bone, whatever mysterious alchemy had been present in this moment, would be present always. Untouched by their failures. Everything changed, and nothing.
This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it. What he still felt, eighteen years later in the same city square, when his eyes met Dee’s again.
She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.
Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.
“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.
“Waiting for you, love.”
The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.
Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.
He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.
Blood ran down the man’s face out of a hole through his left eye.
The blade of the Ka-Bar passed through his chestplate with no effort and Jack buried it to the hilt. Kiernan toppled back into the icy pool, a cloud of murky red surrounding him, the weight of his boots and fatigues pulling him under as the one good eye blinked frantically.
Jack turned around and Dee was there. He pulled her down into the snow and he was on top of her, kissing her, like drinking water again, like breathing, and they came apart only to breathe, both crying like babies. He held her face in his hands and wouldn’t let go for fear she would vanish or he’d wake up and realize it was him dying in the fountain and these were his last thoughts.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” he said, and he kept saying it, and she kept telling him that she was, and that she was real. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and he couldn’t believe this was happening.
“You didn’t have any problems getting Cole into the city?” Jack asked. They were walking up 3rd Street North toward the library, each holding two machine guns taken off the dead men in the square like a pair of bad action-flick heroes. “It was on lockdown when I got here several days ago. They weren’t letting any of the affected in, but I told them you might be passing through with a boy who was.”
“We drove in last night,” Dee said. “The barricade had been destroyed. We almost didn’t make it, Jack. Bombs going off everywhere. Gunfights on almost every block. A couple of really close calls. It’s a full-scale war on the east side of town. Thousands dead. Easily.”
They passed a law office that had been hit with a