Run - Blake Crouch [99]
Jack turned onto 3rd Avenue North and gunned the engine.
In the distance, tracers streamed into the low cloud deck, giving the eastern sky a radioactive burn.
They were doing eighty down the street, and he could barely see a thing in the absence of headlights and with the wind and smoke rushing into his face.
They shot through several dark blocks where nothing had been touched, Jack driving blind. He had reached to turn on the headlights when muzzleflashes erupted all around them like a swarm of fireflies, bullets striking the Jeep on every side and the windows exploding in fountains of glass, the racket of Dee’s machine gun filling the car as she screamed at him to go faster.
They sped away from the gunfire.
One block of peace.
Jack uncertain whether his hearing was improving or if they were coming up on another battle but the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells became audible over the groaning engine.
At the next junction, he looked down the intersecting street and saw a tank rolling toward them, flanked by a pair of Strykers.
A quarter mile ahead, a succession of ten closely-staggered explosions lit up four city blocks, and Jack could feel the road shuddering underneath him, everything illuminated brighter than midday, as if the sun had gone supernova. He could see people drawn to the windowframes of almost every building they raced past—unarmed, doomed, gaunt faces awash in firelight.
In the rearview mirror, Jack saw that one of the Strykers had launched out ahead of the tank. From it issued several splinters of light and a low-frequency, concussive report, like someone pounding nails. Two 50-caliber rounds punched through the back hatch, one of them obliterating the dash.
They had reached the blast zone, and up ahead, the road vanished into towers of incomprehensible fire.
Jack swung a hard left and drove up a side street parallel to an elementary school, carpet-bombed into molten rubble.
The street teemed with people on fire who had fled the building, fifty of them he would have guessed. Their collective screams as they literally melted onto the pavement made Jack pray for deafness.
He was trying to drive around them, but they kept stumbling in front of the Jeep, and that Stryker was coming, nothing to do but drive through them, over them, Dee screaming, “Oh dear God,” over and over, and then she started shooting.
Two blocks from the school, Jack spotted the sign for the highway, and he veered onto the road and pushed the gas pedal into the floorboard.
The street was empty and they were screaming north, all the fire and death confined to the rearview mirrors.
They shot across a river and through the northern outskirts of the city.
Jack finally turned on the headlights.
They were pushing a hundred now into a vast and welcoming darkness.
North of town, nothing but black, endless prairie. Even forty miles out, they could still see the glow of everything burning and the tracer fire arcing through the sky. Jack had found a pair of sunglasses under the parking brake. He wore them against the wind, driving northeast now, the speedometer pegged and the noise like standing under a waterfall. The kids, and now Dee, crouched in the floorboards to escape it, but he didn’t mind. The rush of wind meant that every passing second that city was falling farther and farther behind, and the Canadian border rushing closer.
Jack had just glanced at the ruined dash, wondering about the time, when he noticed the line of deep blue—just a single shade up from black—lying across the eastern horizon.
DEE woke in the front passenger floorboard, cramped as hell, cold, and staring up at her husband who wore sunglasses, his hair blown back, face