Run

He was three hours skinning the elk, two more separating the shoulder from the ribcage. All afternoon removing the backstrap, boning out the meat from between the ribs, peeling off the tenderloins from underneath. Everything laid out to drain and cool on a large blanket. He cut the hindquarters from the pelvic bone as the sun slid down over the desert, trying not to slice the meat itself but still doing a fair amount of damage.

Naomi brought him a can of tomato soup for supper, which he drank down in less than a minute. When he asked about her mother, she told him Dee was sleeping. Had been all day.

In the cold still dusk, thirteen hours after the kill, Jack carried, in five trips, what he estimated to be two hundred pounds of meat to the front porch of the cabin.

The bags of water had frozen solid in the chest freezer, and Jack stowed the meat inside, still wrapped in blankets. He was sunburned and weak and covered in blood, the elk’s and his-several stitches had ripped and the wound in his shoulder had opened again.

He took his first shower since arriving at the cabin. Twenty minutes under near-scalding water scrubbing the blood out of his hair and skin and watching the filth swirl down the drain under his feet. Crawled into a double bed on an aspen frame a little before 10:00 p.m. in the second bedroom upstairs. Cole snoring softly next door. Through the window he could hear the sound of the stream in the woods.

A footstep snapped him awake. He opened his eyes to the silhouette of Dee standing in the doorway. She came over and climbed into bed, their faces inches apart in the dark.

“I hear we have an elk,” she whispered.

“In the freezer. As we speak.”

“You’re your kids’ superhero, I hope you know. I’ve never heard Naomi talk about you like she did today.”

“I’m going to miss being a constant source of embarrassment.”

She put her hand on his face. “You don’t stink,” she said.

“Showers will do that.”

“Why are you up here and not in my bed?”

“Figured you still needed some space.”

She kissed him. “Come with me, Jack.”

SNOW, just a dusting, lay upon the meadow the following morning but it was gone before lunch. Dee replaced the stitches in Jack’s shoulder and he spent an hour butchering steaks out of the tenderloins. Made a dry rub from the available spices in the kitchen and worked it into the meat.

He found a wiffle ball set in the shed. They used empty milkjugs for bases and weeded a pitcher’s mound and held a series, boys versus girls, that concluded in game seven when Cole knocked a line drive over third base and brought Jack home.

The afternoon, Jack spent sitting on the porch drinking beer and watching Dee and the kids play out on the meadow. He wouldn’t allow himself to think back or forward, but only to register the moment-the wind moving through gold aspen leaves, his skin warm in the sun, the sound of Cole’s laughter, the shape of Dee when, every so often, she would turn and look back toward the porch and wave to him. Her shoulders were brown and the details of her face obscured by distance and the shadow of a visor, though he could still pick out the white brushstroke of her smile.

As another day set sail, he grilled the elk steaks and a rainbow and surprised everyone with a bottle of 1994 Silver Oak he’d found hidden away in a cabinet over the sink. They gathered at the kitchen table and ate by candlelight, even Cole getting his own small pour of wine in a shotglass. Toward the end of supper, Jack stood and raised his glass and toasted his son, his daughter, his wife, each individually, and then said to everyone, his voice only breaking once, that of all his days, this had been the finest of his life.

ANOTHER fall day in the mountains, Jack fishing alone with his thoughts and the sound of moving water that never seemed to leave him now, even in dreams. Imagining what winter might be like in this place. An entire season spent indoors.

He caught two brookies before lunch and stowed them away in the cooler. The exhaustion from two days ago still lingered. He found a bed of moss downstream and took off his disintegrating trail shoes and eased back onto the natural carpet. There weren’t as many leaves on the aspen as there had been just a week ago when they’d arrived, the woods brighter for it. He could feel the moisture from the moss seeping through his shirt-cool and pleasant-and the sunlight in his face a perfect offset. He slept.

Walked home in the early evening, the inside of the cooler noisy with the throes of four suffocating fish.

Called out, “I’m home,” as he climbed onto the porch.

Set the cooler down, kicked off his shoes.

Inside, Dee and the kids played Monopoly on the living room floor.

“Who’s winning?” he asked.

“Cole,” Dee said. “Na and I are broke. He’s bought every property he’s landed on. Owns Community Chest and Chance. I just sold him Free Parking.”

“Can you even do that?”

“I think he’s paying us not to quit at this point. It’s all very ridiculous.”

He bent down, kissed his wife.

“You smell fishy,” she said. “How’d you do?”

“Four.”

“Big ones?”

“Decent size.”

“We can eat whenever you’re ready.”

Jack showered and dressed in a plaid button-up and blue jeans that were perhaps a size too small and still smelled strongly of their prior owner. Tinged with the remnant of sweet smoke, cigar or pipe. Something crinkled in the back pocket as Jack walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, and he dug out a receipt for a box of tippet from the Great Outdoor Shop in Pinedale, purchased four months ago with a credit card by Douglas W. Holt.

A three-course meal: freshly-baked bread, one can of broccoli cheddar soup, a rainbow trout, seasoned and grilled. They had learned to eat slowly, to stretch out each course with conversation or some other diversion. That afternoon, Dee had perused a shelf of old paperbacks in the game closet, picked a David Morrell thriller, and now she read to them the first chapter during the soup course.

After supper, she boiled a pot of chamomile tea.

“That soup was excellent,” Jack said as she carried four steaming mugs over to the table, two in each hand. “You really outdid yourself.”

“Old family recipe, you know. The Campbells.”

“Who’s that?” Cole asked.

“Mom’s kidding around.”

“But seriously, Jack, the fish was incredible.”

He sipped his tea. Could’ve been stronger, but it felt so good just to hold the warm mug in his hands which were still raw from long hours of casting.

“Busy boy today, huh?” Dee said. “Four fish and how much wood did you cut?”

“I didn’t cut any wood.”

“Of course you did.”

He flashed a perplexed smile. “Um, I didn’t.”

“Are you joking?”

“About what?”

“Cutting firewood.”

“No, why?”

“I heard a chainsaw.”

Jack set his mug on the table and stared at Dee.

“When?” he asked.

“Late this afternoon.”

“Where was the sound of the chainsaw coming from?”

“The driveway. I thought you were taking down more trees.”

Cole said, “What’s wrong?”

“Jack, you’re playing around, and all things considered, what we’ve been through, this isn’t funny at-”

“I fished all day. Naomi, did you take the chainsaw out?” But he knew the answer before she spoke, because the mug was rattling against the table in her trembling hands.

Dee started to rise.

“No, don’t get up.”

“We have to-”

“Just listen.” Jack lowered his voice. “If people have found the cabin, then they’re probably watching us right now through that window at your back, waiting until we go to bed.”

“Waiting for what?” Naomi asked.

“Everyone drink your tea and act like we’re wrapping up a nice family evening.”

His mouth had run dry. He sipped his tea and let his eyes move briefly past Dee’s shoulder to the window behind the kitchen table, the only one in the house they hadn’t shielded with a blanket since it backed right up against the woods. Nothing to see at this hour, the sun long since set. Wondered if someone crouched out there in the dark at this moment, watching his family.

“You’re sure you heard it?” he said quietly. “The chainsaw?”

“Yes.”

“I heard it, too.” Tears rolling down Naomi’s face. “I thought it was you, Dad.”

Before supper, Jack had switched off the solar power system to recharge overnight and they’d eaten by firelight. Several candles lit the living room, too. One in each of the upstairs bedrooms.

“The shotgun and the Glock are under our bed,” Jack said. “I think we have a box of ammo for the Glock that’s mostly full, but we’re down to the last half-dozen twelve gauge shells.” He looked at Naomi, then Dee, then Cole. Hated the fear he saw. “We’re going to act like it’s just another normal night. I’ll put Cole to bed. Naomi, you head up to your room. Dee, clear the table and get all the cans of food and whatever bread’s left into a plastic bag, some silverware, too, and a can opener. We don’t know how close they are to the cabin, if they can see inside, see us in the other rooms, so don’t hurry, but don’t take too much time either.”

“What about all our meat?”

“Leave it. I’ll come back downstairs and then Dee and I will blow out the living room and kitchen and bedroom candles. We’ll dress in the dark, all of us, all the clothes we can wear, and then we’ll meet in the other downstairs bedroom-the one near the shed. Naomi, you stay upstairs with your brother after I’ve left and listen for me to call you down. Got it?”

She was crying. “I don’t want to leave.”

“Me either, but can you do this, what I’m asking?”

She nodded.

“Look, maybe there’s nobody out there, but we have to make sure, and we aren’t safe in here until we know.”

“Are we going to take the car?” Dee asked.

“No, because they probably have one blocking us in. I’m sure they were using the chainsaw to cut that tree I brought down across the driveway. So they could drive up. We just need to get into the woods and hide until I can figure out what’s going on.”

Jack carried his son through the kitchen, up the spiral staircase, and into the bedroom. Threw back the covers and laid Cole on the mattress.

“Naomi’s right next door,” Jack said. “You listen to your sister, okay?”

“Don’t blow out the candle.”

“I have to, buddy.”

“I don’t like it dark.”

“Cole, I need you to be brave.” He kissed the boy’s forehead. “I’ll see you real soon.”

Jack extinguished the candle on the dresser and tried not to rush down the steps. The kitchen was already dark, the plastic bag of food tied off and sitting on the hearth. He blew out the candles on the coffee table and moved blindly toward his and Dee’s bedroom, eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness.

Dee stood by the blanketed window.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Just peeking out at the meadow. Haven’t seen anything yet.”

“Let’s get going.”

Jack donned two more pipe-scented shirts, his fingers struggling with the buttons in the dark, heart slamming in his chest. When he’d dressed, he slid two shells into the Mossberg to replace the two he’d used on the elk. He crammed the four remaining into the side pocket of his jeans, grabbed the Mag-Lite from the bedside table drawer, and handed Dee the Glock.

In the living room, Jack called up to his children. Laced his trail shoes while Naomi and Cole descended the stairs, and they all went together past the fireplace into the second bedroom.

Jack crawled across the bed and tugged down the blanket Dee had tacked over the glass and unlatched the hasp.

The window slid up. The night cold rushed in.

Jack climbed over the sill, stepped down into the grass.

“All right, Cole, come on.”

He grabbed his son under his arms and hoisted him out of the cabin. “Stay right beside me, and don’t say a word.”

He helped Naomi through and then Dee. Lowered the window back and pulled his wife in close so he could whisper in her ear.

“We can’t leave without our packs. They’re in the back of the Rover, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait for me to call you over.”

Jack crept across the grass and peered around the corner of the cabin.

The meadow stretched into darkness.

No wind. No moon. No movement.

He sprinted twenty yards to the shed and crouched down behind it, straining to listen and hearing nothing but the internal combustion of his heart.

Jack blew a sharp, stifled whistle, then watched as Dee and the kids emerged from the shadows behind the cabin, running toward him, their pants swishing in the grass for eight agonizing seconds before they reached him.

“Did I do good?” Cole asked.

“You did great. Dee, I’m going around to the front of the shed to get our packs. If something goes wrong, you hear gunshots, me yelling, whatever, take the kids into the woods, all the way back to the stream. I’ll be able to find you there.”

He rose to his feet, moved along the backside of the shed, the shotgun in one hand, flashlight in the other. Rounded the corner, the driveway looming just ahead. He jogged the edge of the woods until he came to it. The single lane descended out of meager starlight into the darkness of the aspen grove, and he followed it down until he came around the first hairpin turn. A Suburban blocked the way, its color indeterminate in the lowlight. A Datsun pickup truck behind it. He put a light through the glass and checked the ignitions of both vehicles. No keys. No idea how to hotwire a car.

He ran back up the driveway. After several minutes in the woods, the clearing appeared almost bright. Stood there for a moment scanning the meadow and the trees around the periphery, but the shadows kept their secrets so well he couldn’t even see his family in the darkness behind the shed.

Twenty strides brought him to the side of it.

He swung around the corner and got his hand on the doorknob and the hinges ground together with a rusty shriek as he slipped inside.

A wave of disorientation accompanied the absolute, unflinching darkness.

Jack knelt down, laid the shotgun in the dirt, and fumbled with the head of the Mag-Lite, trying to turn it on.

Several feet away, a shuffle in the dirt.

Jack froze, bracing against a shot of liquid fear that made his scalp tingle and his throat constrict, thinking it could be a rodent or some tool that had shifted. Or someone pointing a gun at him. Or his frazzled imagination.

Two choices. See it or shoot it.

He lowered the flashlight back onto the dirt floor. As he felt around for the shotgun, a motor coughed ten feet away, like someone had pulled a start rope. Then it sputtered again and the shed filled with the reek of gas and the banshee-wail of a two-stroke. A small LED light cut on-affixed to the handle with black electrical tape-and it sent out a schizophrenic beam that hit the Rover, the shed walls, and the large, bearded man who came at Jack with the screaming chainsaw, gripped like a bat, spring-loaded to swing.

Jack grabbed the shotgun and jacked a shell as the man reached him, no time to stand or brace.

The blast knocked Jack onto his back in the dirt, and at point-blank range, cut the ski-jacketed man in half at the waist.

Jack clambered back onto his feet, pumped the shotgun again, lifted the Mag-Lite, and screwed the bulb to life.

The man still clutched the idling chainsaw, but only in one hand, having nearly severed his right leg at the knee.

Jack leaned down and flipped the kill switch.

In the renewed silence, the man emitted desperate drowning noises. Over them, Jack could hear Dee calling his name through the back wall of the shed. He went to it and put his mouth to the wood and said, “I’m okay. Go where we talked about right now. There’s more of them.”

He hurried over to the Rover and lifted his pack out of the cargo area, trying to recall what all it held, if it might be worth rifling through Dee’s pack or bringing it too, but there wasn’t time.

He shouldered his pack and clipped the hip belt and chest strap and went back over to the man in the ski jacket who’d turned sheet white and already bled a black lake across the dirt.

“How many of you are there?” Jack asked. But the man just stared up at him with a kind of glassy-eyed amazement and would not, or could not, speak.

Jack killed the Mag-Lite and eased open the door to the shed and peered out.

Already, they were halfway across the meadow-four shadows running toward him and two smaller, faster ones out ahead of the others.

He leveled the shotgun, squeezed off three blinding reports.

Four points of light answered, flashing in the dark like high-octane lightning bugs, and bullets struck the wood beside him and punched through the door above his head.

He stepped out and around the side and sprinted to the back of the shed.

His family was gone.

Lightning footsteps approached, the jingle of a chain, snarling. He turned back to see the pit bull tear around the corner, skidding sidelong across the grass trying to right its forward motion.

Jack raised the shotgun, the animal accelerating toward him, and fired as it leapt for his throat, the buckshot instantly arresting its momentum. He pumped the slide and took aim on the second pit bull which ripped around the corner with greater efficiency. He dropped it whimpering and tumbling through the grass.

Jack ran ten feet into the woods and slid out of his pack. He prostrated himself behind a log. Couldn’t hear a thing over his own panting and he closed his eyes and buried his face in the leaves until the pounding in his chest decelerated.

When he looked up again, four figures stood behind the shed where his family had hid just moments ago. Three others joined them.

Someone said, “Where’s Frank?”

“In the field. He caught some pellets in his neck.”

A woman walked over, the helve of an ax resting on her shoulder.

She said, “I saw someone run into the woods a minute ago.”

A beam of light struck the ground. “Let’s head in. Only four. And two of them children.”

Another light.

Another.

Someone shot their beam through the woods. Jack ducked behind the log, the light slanting past him, firing the fringes of the bark. They were still talking, but he’d lost their voices with his face jammed up under the log and straining to fish the twelve gauge shells out of his pocket. Jack was on the brink of shifting to another position but the footfalls stopped him.

They approached him now-must have been all eight of them-filling the woods with the dry rasp of crushing leaves. Someone stepped over the log and the heel of a boot came down inches from Jack’s left arm. He caught the scent of rancid body odor. He watched them move by, eight distinct fields of light sweeping the woods. He wondered how far in his family had made it, if Dee had any concept of what was coming her way.

After a while, he rolled out from under the log and sat up. Glanced back toward the shed. Into the woods again. He could hear the footfalls growing softer, indistinguishable and collective like steady rain, glimpsed the bulbs of distant light and occasionally a full beam where it swung through mist.

Jack dug into his pocket for the shells, fed in the last four.

Six rounds. Eight people.

He stood up and got his pack on.

Jacked a shell, started toward the lights.

After forty yards, the stream-murmur filtered in, and soon there was nothing but the sound of it and the cool, sweet smell of the water.

He eased down onto the bank. The lights had moved on. Blackness everywhere. Thinking he’d told Dee to get to the stream, but she may have seen the group of flashlights coming, been forced to go elsewhere. The urge to call out for her overwhelmed him.

He got up, started hiking again.

Sometimes the starlight would find a way down through the trees and he would catch a glimpse of the stream like black glass, warped and fissured, but mainly it was impossible to see anything. He didn’t dare use the Mag-Lite.

Fifteen minutes of blind groping brought him a quarter mile uphill.

He collapsed in a patch of cold, damp sand and stared back the way he’d come. He tried to catch his breath, but the longer he sat there the panic festered inside of him. Finally he rose to his feet, running uphill now, running until his heart felt like it was going to swell out of his chest. He went on like this for he didn’t know how long, and every time he stopped it was still just him alone in the woods and the dark.

THE violence of his own shivering woke him.

Jack lifted his head out of the leaves. Dawn. A moment before. Frail blue light upon everything in the brutal cold. He had dreamed but they were too sweet and vivid to linger on.

Worked his way up the mountain for thirty minutes before stopping streamside by a boulder covered in frosted moss. He looked around. Wiped his eyes. Considered all the ways they could have fucked this up-he might have gone upstream when he should’ve hiked down, or Dee and the kids had pushed hard all night and gotten too far ahead of him, or he’d unknowingly passed them in the dark, or maybe they hadn’t even stayed with the stream and become lost elsewhere on this endless mountain.

Another two hundred yards and he came around a large boulder, saw three people lying huddled together in the leaves on the opposite bank.

He stopped. Looked down at his shoes. Looked up again. Still there, and he didn’t quite believe it, even as he rock-hopped to the other side of the stream.

Dee stirred at the sound of his footsteps, then bolted upright with the Glock trained on his chest. He smiled and his eyes burned and then he was holding her as she shook with sobs.

“Do you know how easy it would’ve been for you to pass us by in the dark?” she whispered.

“But that didn’t happen,” he said.

“I heard all those gunshots. I thought you had-”

“That didn’t happen. I found you.”

“I didn’t know if we should wait or keep going, and then I saw all those lights in the woods, and we just-”

“You did exactly what you should have.”

Naomi sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked at her father, scowling.

“Hey,” she said.

“Morning, Sunshine.”

“We can’t go back,” Jack said. He was staring down at the bag of soupcans Dee had brought and the contents of his backpack, which he’d spread out in the leaves. A tent. Two sleeping bags. Water filter. Camp stove. Map. Not much else.

“But what if they leave?”

“Why would they? I saw their cars, Dee. They have no provisions, haven’t fallen in with a big group, so they’re facing the same problems we were-no gas, no water, no food. And they just stumbled across all those things at the cabin, plus shelter, plus two hundred pounds of meat in the freezer.”

“Jack, that place is perfect. We could have-”

“There’s eight of them. Eight armed adults. We’d be slaughtered.”

“Well, I don’t much feel like wandering aimlessly through the wilderness.”

“Not aimlessly, Dee.” He knelt down and opened the Wyoming roadmap. “We’re here,” he said, “northern edge of the Wind Rivers. We’re actually not that far from the east side of the mountains.” He traced a black line north. “Let’s shoot for this highway.”

“How far is it?”

“Fifteen, twenty miles tops.”

“Jesus. And then what, Jack?” He could hear the emotion rising in her voice. “We reach this road in the middle of nowhere, and then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Well, I know. We’ll need a big fucking miracle. Because that’s how we’re going to stay alive from here on out, Jack. Big fucking miracles. That’s how bad a shape we’re in, and you want us to hike across these-” Her voice broke and she turned away and walked off into the woods.

“Mom.” Naomi started after her, but Jack caught his daughter’s arm.

“Let her go, baby. Just give her a minute.”

They were all day hiking the mountainside. The aspen giving way to evergreens the higher they climbed. The stream shrinking toward headwaters, burbling softer and softer, until at last it disappeared into a rocky hole in the mountain, never to be heard from again.

Stopped while there was still plenty of light at a small lake at nine thousand feet. It backed up against a two hundred-foot cliff which had calved a rock glacier into the water-giant boulders half-submerged on the far side.

Jack raised the tent and collected fir cones and browned needles and more wood than they could burn in three nights.

He walked to the edge of the lake as the sun fell. The water looked black. So still as to suggest ice or obsidian, except for the slow concentric circles that eddied out when a trout surfaced. He kept reminding himself what a beautiful place this was, that they could be suffering on the East Coast, or in Albuquerque, or be dead like so many others. But somehow the bright side of things had burned out tonight, and the light draining out of the sky and the lake’s reflection of it just felt tragic.

He glanced back at his family-sitting outside the tent, waiting for him to get the fire going. Got up and started toward them. A day’s worth of walking in his swollen knees and lots more of that to come.

His children looked up at his approach.

He forced himself to smile.

In the middle of the night, Cole said, “What’s that sound?”

Jack lay beside him on the sleeping bag. It had woken him, too, and he whispered, “Just that rockfall across the lake.”

“Is someone throwing rocks?”

“No, they’re shifting.”

“What are those splashes?”

“Fish jumping out of the water.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You want me to go out there and tell them to cut it out?”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay. I promise. Go back to sleep.”

“No one’s coming after us?”

“We’re safe up here, Cole.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We’ll eat something in the morning.”

“First thing?”

“First thing.”

The boy fell back asleep almost instantly but Jack lay awake, trying to ignore the rock jutting up through the bottom of the sleeping bag into his side. The moon was bright through the tent walls. He listened to everyone’s heavy breathing, thinking how, in his lifetime, he’d lain awake at night worrying over so much pointless shit-money, his job, a fight he’d had with Dee-and now that he had real life and death stuff to obsess about, all he wanted to do was sleep.

A film of ice rimmed the lake. Steam lifting off the surface in the early morning sun. Jack was on the grassy bank pumping water through the filter into a stainless steel pot. He boiled the water, added three packets of oatmeal from his emergency kit, and they sat around the smoking remnants of the campfire, passing the pot and trying to wake up.

After breakfast, they broke down the tent and packed up and headed out while there was still frost on the dying grasses.

They followed no trail.

With his compass, Jack marked a cirque of forbidding granite spires ten miles away as their definitive eastern goal.

They climbed all morning through a spruce forest, emerging at midday onto a broad, ascending ridge of meadows.

Herds of unattended cattle grazed the open range.

Mountains in every direction and the warm, adobe glow of desert to the east.

In the early afternoon, Cole began to complain that his legs hurt.

Dee took over Jack’s pack, and Jack put his son on his shoulders.

They’d all drunk plenty of water with breakfast but had since sweated it out under the high-altitude sun. Jack could feel a dehydration headache coming on. They’d all be suffering soon.

They pushed on in silence, everyone too tired, too thirsty to talk.

In the evening they came down into a valley that framed a lake. Naomi crying as she shuffled along on the sides of her blistered feet, telling everyone she was okay, that she could make it to the water.

Jack assembled the filter and pumped while his family drank straight from the plastic tube. Fifteen minutes to satisfy their thirst, and then Dee pumped for him, Jack lying in the cool grass and letting the freezing lake water run down his throat and over his sunburned face.

He felt delirious, his head undergoing a slow implosion, and it was all he could do to construct the tent. A fire was out of the question, and he didn’t want to eat-no one did-but Dee opened a can for each of them and handed out three tablets of maximum strength Tylenol apiece.

“I’ll just throw up,” Jack said.

“No, you won’t. You’ll keep it down. We’re all severely dehydrated and suffering from altitude sickness.” She handed him a can of pork and beans. “Get it in you, and drink some more water, and go to bed.”

His family slept but the agony in Jack’s head would not relent. He crawled outside a little after midnight and staggered to the edge of the lake. Bitter cold. Moon shadows everywhere. He lowered himself onto his hands and knees and dipped his head through a crust of ice into the water.

IN the morning the pain had eased. He could hear his family up and about outside. Almost hot inside the tent with the sun beating down. He didn’t remember coming to bed. Couldn’t recall much of the preceding night in fact. His head mushy, like he was coming off a bender.

They were eating down by the lake and he joined them. The sun already higher than he would’ve liked. They’d be getting a late start.

“How we doing?” he asked.

“Aces,” Naomi said.

He sat beside his daughter and she passed him her can.

He sipped the cold corn chowder. “How are your feet, angel?”

“They don’t look too pretty anymore. Mom wrapped them up.”

“We need to start sleeping with our food,” Dee said. “There’s ice crystals in my cream of mushroom.”

“I personally like ice in my soup,” Jack said.

Cole laughed.

“I wouldn’t exactly call this rationing,” Jack said, handing the can back to Naomi.

“We have to eat, Jack. We’re expending so much energy in these mountains.”

“What are we down to?”

“Eight cans.”

“Jesus.”

The climb up the east slope of the valley took them into the early afternoon, and then they finally broke out above the timberline onto the top of a knoll. Those granite spires loomed several miles to the east, their summits puncturing the low cloud deck. Not a tree in sight and rock everywhere. Four lakes visible from where they stood. The water blue-gray under the clouds.

They hiked east as the clouds lowered.

It grew dark early and a fine, cold mist began to fall, but they pushed on to the farthest lake at the foot of the cirque, everyone wet and shivering as they raised the tent on one of the few patches of level grass.

Stripped out of their wet clothes. Climbed in and Jack zipped them up. They huddled under the sleeping bags and listened to rain patter on the tent and watched the light fade out.

“Can I say something?” Naomi said. “Something not very nice, but it’ll make me feel better?”

“Baby, you can say whatever you want.”

“This. Fucking. Sucks.”

They ate supper and Jack dressed in dry clothes. He dug the water filter and pot out of his pack.

“Back in a bit,” he said.

Slipped on his wet trail shoes and crawled outside.

Down to the lakeshore, crouched by the water. His breath pluming in the blue dusk. He strained to pick out the voices of his family, wanted to hear them talking, but nothing broke the awesome silence.

Across the lake, he made out the faintest impression of the cirque. No texture, no detail. Just a charcoal silhouette of a jagged ridgeline several thousand feet above. The ghost of a mountain.

He filled the pot and carried it to the tent.

“This one’s for Naomi.” he said.

Watched his daughter gulp it down in two long, ravenous sips.

He pumped a pot for Cole, then another for Dee, and went back outside one last time to drink his fill.

The cirque had vanished, the dusk deepened, and flakes of snow mixed in with the rain. He stopped halfway through filling the pot. His hands were trembling.

Get it over with. If you have to lose it, lose it here.

He buried his face in the bend of his arm and cried into it until there was nothing left.

They nestled together in the cold and the dark, Jack and Dee on the outside, the kids between them. No one had spoken in a long time and Jack finally said, “Everyone all right?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess.”

“Yes.”

“Wow, that was so convincing.”

“This the worst trouble you ever been through, Dad?”

“Yeah, Na. Far and away.”

Cole said, “Are we going to die?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that isn’t going to happen to our family. I’m not going to let it happen. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Goodnight, all.”

“Night.”

“Night.”

“Night.”

“You know I love you all, right? Do I say it enough?”

“Yes, Dad, you do.”

For a split second, a flash of the Naomi of old-sassy, sarcastic, acerbic.

It elicited his sole smile of the day.

A fragile inch of snow clung to the tent and glazed the rocks. Jack stared at the sky and the lake which reflected the sky-deep cobalt. He was hungry. Starving actually. But the purity of the morning light moved him with a fleeting weightlessness that broke his heart to see it go.

The cirque loomed. Simply no avoiding it. He stood there in the cold trying to see a route, but it all looked steep as hell. Like a stupid fucking thing to even consider, fact aside that he needed to get his seven-year-old son up and over it.

He woke his family, and while Naomi and Cole launched snowballs at each other, Dee pulled the stitches out of Jack’s shoulder. Then they packed up, re-bandaged their blistered feet, drank as much water as their stomachs could hold, and struck out before the sun had cleared the ridge.

They walked around the perimeter of the lake and into a field of car-size boulders. Didn’t even begin to climb until after lunchtime, which passed unacknowledged. By mid-afternoon the snow had vanished except for in the shadows and they were a thousand feet above the lake which shone like a diamond in the valley’s hand.

Cole had already arrived at the threshold of his endurance with Naomi not far behind, but they kept climbing, even as they cried, the rocks getting smaller and the slope steeper and the sun plunging toward night.

They would climb in increments of fifty feet and then stop while Cole fell apart and Dee and Jack calmed him and primed him to go just a little farther. Big, bold lies that they were almost there.

At four-thirty, Jack gave his pack to Dee and lifted his son onto his shoulders. Climbed another hundred feet and when he stopped this time, the sun perched on the western horizon and it hit him that they’d gone as far as they were going to make it today, that they’d be spending the night on the side of this mountain. He looked up, head swimming. The rock pink, summit spires glowing in the late sun.

“Let’s stop,” he said.

“Stop?”

“We should find a place to hunker down.”

“For the night?” Naomi said.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the tent going to go?”

“No tent tonight, sweetie.”

Naomi eased down onto the loose rock and the sound of his daughter crying swept down into the basin.

Jack let Cole off his shoulders and crawled over to her.

“I’m sorry, Na. I’m so sorry. I know this is hard.”

“I hate it.”

“Me, too, but we’re going to find the best spot on this mountain. Think about the view we’ll have.”

“I don’t give a shit about the view.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“I hate this fucking mountain.”

“I know, sweetie, I know.”

Jack collapsed in the dirt on the downslope side of the largest stable boulder he could find, his hands raw from eight hours of climbing, eyes irritated with dust. They reclined back against the mountain using their spare clothes for pillows and blanketed under the two sleeping bags. Not a cloud in the sky and everything still and Jack praying it would stay that way.

Already it was freezing. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and Jack could see seven lakes on that treeless tableland below. Each oilblack in the dusk.

Somewhere below, a band of coyotes yapped.

Jack cracked open the last four cans of food and they ate in silence watching the last bit of sun drain away.

The planets faded in and then the stars and soon the sky swarmed with pinpricks of ancient light and they slept, dug into the side of the mountain.

JACK woke cold and stiff and thirsty. His family slept, Cole burrowed into his side completely under the sleeping bag, and Jack let them sleep, a temporary escape from the diamond-cut hardness of this place. The panic was certainly there. Felt it lingering in his blindspot, trying to break in. He’d gotten them into a terrible bind, it whispered-out of food, out of water, twelve thousand feet up a mountain they had no business climbing. He’d utterly failed them, and now they were going to die.

Naomi said, “A box of Fruit Loops, and I don’t mean one of those little ones.”

“Family size.”

“Exactly. I’d pour the whole thing into one of our glass mixing bowls and open a carton of cold whole milk. Oh my God, I can almost taste it.”

“Lucky Charms,” Cole said. “Except just the marshmallows and chocolate milk.”

“I would kill for one of those southwest breakfast burritos from that place near campus,” Dee said. “Filled with scrambled eggs and chorizo sausage and green chiles. Couple fried cinnamon rolls. Steaming cup of dark roast. Jack?”

“Bacon, short stack, two eggs over easy, biscuits smothered in sausage gravy. Everything, and I mean everything, drowned in maple syrup and hot sauce.”

“No coffee?”

“Of course coffee. Goes without saying. Might even splash some bourbon in it. Start the day off right.”

They got underway, climbing in shadow, the rock still freezing. Logged another two hundred feet and then emerged from the loose talus onto solid granite, the steepest pitch they’d seen, Dee leading now and Jack climbing under his kids, all four appendages on the mountain.

He was reaching for the next handhold when Dee said, “Holy shit, Jack.”

“What?”

“Have you looked down?”

He looked down. The sweep of the mountain falling away beneath them nothing short of a total mindfuck.

“That looks way worse than it is,” Jack said, though he felt like he was going to be sick. He shut his eyes and leaned into the mountain, clutching it, his chest heaving against the rock. “Just keep climbing,” he said. “Don’t look down if it bothers you.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Cole said.

“Good, but you be as careful as can be,” Jack said. “Na?”

“I’m fucking freaked.”

“I know it’s scary, but a little less profanity, angel.”

“I can’t do this, Jack. There’s no way.”

“Dee, you want to know something?”

“What?”

“We’re kicking ass. Think of all we’ve been through since-”

“This is the worst.”

“Worse than getting shot at? Than some of the things we’ve seen?”

“For me it is. I’ve had nightmares about this before. Being stuck on a cliff.”

“Well, we aren’t stuck, and we have to get over this mountain. That’s all there is to it.”

“My legs are shaking, Jack.”

“You can do this. You have to do this.”

They started to climb again, Jack hanging back, watching their progression, monitoring how comfortable Naomi and Cole looked on the rock, telling them how good they were doing and struggling to hide his own fear.

It was almost worse looking up the mountain. He couldn’t see the spires anymore, had no idea how close or far they were from the summit ridge. It was just cold, fissured rock and the deep blue sky above it all and a blinding cornice of sunshine.

He worked his way up a series of ledges in a wide dihedral, and it occurred to him as he climbed that even if they wanted to, going back down now would be an impossibility.

“We taking a rest?” he asked.

His family stood just above him on a grassy ledge and he climbed the last few feet to them.

“This is bad, Jack.”

“What?”

“This.” She patted the vertical rock. “It just got steeper.”

“There’s another way up,” he said. “Has to be.” He stepped around Naomi and followed the ledge along the rockface, which slimmed down after twenty feet to a lip barely sufficient to support the toes of his shoes.

He sidestepped back over to them. “That way’s no good,” he said, staring up the rock that Dee leaned against. Certainly steeper than anything they’d been on thus far, but the handholds and footholds were prominent, and twelve feet above, a wide crack opened.

“I think we can climb this,” he said.

“Are you crazy?”

“Watch.”

He reached up, slid his fingers into a crack, and pulled himself up. Jammed his foot into a ledge.

“There’s no way, Jack.”

“This really isn’t bad,” he said, though he could feel the threat of a tremor in his right leg, which at the moment, held all of his weight. He lifted his left foot onto a bulging rock and went for another handhold. Seven feet above the grassy ledge now and the world tilting, an ocean of open air underneath him.

Nothing to do but keep climbing.

The next move brought him to the crack and he squeezed into a space no larger than a coffin.

“Send the kids up,” he said.

“Jack, come on.”

“Just do it, Dee. Cole, can you climb to me, buddy?”

“If they fall-”

“No one’s going to fall. Don’t even put that thought in their head.”

“I can do it, Mom.”

Cole reached up, pulled himself onto the rock. “Spot him, Dee.”

“No, Cole.”

“You have to let him go.”

She cried as she raised her arms, said, “Move out of the way, Na, in case he slips. I don’t want him knocking you off the mountain. Cole, you be so careful, baby.”

The boy moved up the rock as if he had no concept of the price for falling. Jack on his knees in the nook, stretching his right arm down as the boy came within range.

“Cole, grab my hand, and I’ll pull you up.”

Cole reached.

Jack got a solid grasp on his wrist, heaved his boy up the rest of the way.

With the cumbersome pack and the shotgun tied to it, the two of them took up every square inch of the recess.

“Dee, you still have the Glock, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I have to get rid of this pack.”

“Jack, no, it has our tent, our sleeping bags, our-”

“I know, believe me. Last thing I want to do, but I can’t move in this crack with the pack on, and I’ve almost fallen twice because of it getting caught up.”

He unhooked the hip belt.

“Jack, please. Think about this.”

“I have.”

“We have to have a tent.”

He unclipped the chest strap.

“We’ll make do.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Look out, both of you.” He slid out of the shoulder straps and slung the pack hard enough to clear the ledge.

It fell uninterrupted for a hundred and fifty feet, then struck rock, then bounced through a series of echoing ricochets for another four hundred feet until it vanished in the upper realm of the boulder field, the delayed sound of its ongoing fall still audible.

“All right, Naomi,” Jack said, “it’s all you.”

She began to climb, either more careful or less sure of herself than Cole.

Halfway to the crack, she froze.

“I’m stuck,” she said.

“You’re not stuck. There’s a great handhold a couple feet up.”

“I can’t hold on much longer. My fingers are-”

“Listen to me, Na. Reach above you and pull yourself up. If you get to that point, I can grab you.”

She looked up at him, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes and so much fear, her entire body trembling, knuckles blanching from the sheer strain of clutching the rock.

“I’m slipping, Daddy.”

“Naomi. Reach up right now or you’re going to fall.”

She lunged for the handhold, and Jack saw her miss it, fingers dancing across smooth rock. He reached so far down he nearly fell out of the nook, catching her wrist as she came off the mountain, her feet dangling over the ledge, one hundred and five pounds slowly tugging Jack’s shoulder out of socket and dragging him off the nook.

“Oh my God, Jack.”

“I’ve got her. Get your feet on the rock, Na.”

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t try. Do it.” She found purchase and Jack pulled with everything he had, walking her up the rock and then over the ledge, all three of them crammed into the nook and Naomi crying hysterically.

“Have a nice life, guys,” Dee said, “because there is no fucking way.”

“Come on, sweetheart. Get up here. It’s cake from here on out.”

“Honestly?”

“Maybe cake is too strong a word. It’s shortbread. How’s that?”

“I hate you so much.”

But she started to climb.

Moving up the crack proved easier, if only because of the illusion of safety-boxed in on three sides and plenty of handholds. They climbed all morning, blisters forming on Jack’s fingertips, and he kept wondering how close it was to midday, the adrenaline rush having skewed his perception of time. Doubted their morale could withstand another night on this mountain.

Thirty feet above, Cole hollered.

Jack’s heart stopped. He looked up, the sun burning down, couldn’t see a thing through its cutting-torch glare.

He shouted, “Everyone okay?”

Dee yelled back, “We’re at the top.”

Jack stood on the ridge, bracing against the wind and staring east. The mountain fell away beneath them toward pine-covered foothills that downsloped into high desert. Several miles out and one vertical mile below, a highway ran north.

“There it is,” Jack said. “I don’t see any cars on it.”

“Backside of this mountain doesn’t look too awful,” Dee said.

“No, just long as hell.”

Dee lowered herself off the ridge.

“Ready to get off this rock, huh?”

“Like you can’t even imagine.”

They descended the east slope-a steep boulder field streaked with last year’s snow that was hard as asphalt-and evening was coming on by the time they stumbled out of it into the spruce. After two full days on nothing but rock, the moist dirt floor felt like sponge under Jack’s feet. He was too tired and sore to register hunger, but his thirst verged on desperation.

“Should we stop?” Dee asked as they hiked through the darkening woods. “I mean, it’s not like we need to find the perfect spot for our tent or anything. Any old piece of ground will do.”

“A stream would be nice,” he said.

Jack stopped four times so they could hush and listen for the sound of running water, but they never heard it, and exhaustion finally won out.

Jack climbed under a huge spruce tree and broke off as many lower limbs as his strength would allow. His family joined him under the overhanging branches, and they all lay huddled together on the forest floor.

Dee reached over, held Jack’s hand.

Cole already asleep.

Hardly any light left in the sky, and what little there was struggled to pass through the spiderweb of branches. Jack wanted to say something to Dee and Naomi before they drifted off, something about how proud he was of them, but he made the mistake of closing his eyes while he tried to think of what he should say.

He woke once in the middle of the night. Pitch black and the patter of rainfall all around them. The branches thick enough over where they slept to keep them dry. Jack’s body was cold but he could still feel the glow of the sunburn in his face. Brightness when he shut his eyes. Thinking, water is falling out there. Water. But thirsty as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to move.

THE woods smelled of last night’s rainfall and everything still dripped. They could’ve laid there all day under the tree watching the light spill through the branches, but he made them get up. Two full days since their last sip of water at that high lake on the other side of the mountain, and he fought a raging headache.

They left while it was still early. No trail to follow but the path of least resistance, slowly winding their way down through the spruce. Cole couldn’t walk, so Jack carried him on his shoulders. He felt dizzy, his legs cramping, thinking he should have dragged them all out from under the tree last night and made a catch for the rain. They were dying of thirst, and he’d let a shot at water pass them by.

Midafternoon and stumbling through the woods like zombies. Back down into pine trees, descending toward desert and the heat of it and the tang of dry sage in the upslope wind.

They would’ve missed it but for Cole.

The boy said, “Look.” Pointed toward a boulder a little ways off in the trees with a dark streak running down its face that glimmered where the sun struck it.

Jack lifted his son off his shoulders and set him down and ran for it, hurdling two logs and sliding to a stop on his knees in the wet mud at the base.

A steady trickle the width of a string ran off the lip of the rock. He bent down and took a sip, just one to make sure it tasted safe, the water down his throat so cold and sweet he had to physically tear himself away from it.

“How is it?” Dee said. “Safe to drink?”

“Like nothing you ever tasted.” Jack stood, traced the stream to where it disappeared into rock. “It’s a spring,” he said. “Come here, Cole.” He helped his son down onto the wet mud and held his mouth under the stream for thirty seconds.

“All right, buddy, let’s give sister a shot.”

They each got a half minute under the trickle, and then, beginning with Cole, took turns, each as long as they wanted, drinking their fill.

It was torture watching his children gulp down mouthful after mouthful, so Jack wandered away from the boulder to look for a place for them to sleep. Came upon it almost instantly-a stretch of dirt underneath an overhang that would probably keep them dry unless a wild storm blew in. He picked out all of the rocks from the dirt and found some patches of moss nearby which he peeled off the ground and spread out like plush moist carpeting. He sat down on the moss in the shade of the overhang and stared at the sky through the tops of the trees. Didn’t have his watch but he bet it was four or five in the afternoon. The light getting long and the clouds dissipating. The chill coming.

While his family slept, Jack lay under the trickle of water. It took fourteen seconds for his mouth to fill, and then he’d swallow and open again. Laid there forty minutes watching the sky darken, drinking until his stomach bloated and sloshed.

Their wet clothes froze during the night and they lay shivering under the overhang while the moon lifted above the desert. Jack got up and wandered out into the woods and broke off as many limbs as he could find. All pine-the needles densely clustered. Carried an armful back to their pitiful camp and laid the branches over the tangle of bodies that comprised his family.

He stood watching them.

Looked back toward the west, the mountain they’d scaled looming in the dark.

Broken granite shining in the moonlight.

And he felt something like a drug enter his bloodstream-several heartbeats of pride coursing through him, only it wasn’t really pride. Just knowledge. Clarity. A brief window passing through his field of vision. He saw himself objectively, what he’d done, how with his hands and his brain and his handling of fear, he’d kept his family alive this far, a realization surfacing, and it was this: a part of him needed this, loved this, loved being strong for them, going hungry and thirsty for them, even killing for them. He knew he would do it again and without a moment’s hesitation. Hell, a part of him might even welcome it. There was simply nothing in his experience that even compared with the thrill of killing to protect his family. In this moment, it was the purpose of his existence.

He felt, possibly for the first time in his life, like a fucking man.

At last, he crawled under the branches and wrapped his arms around his son.

Cole’s teeth chattered. “I’m cold,” the boy said.

“You’ll warm up.”

“When?”

“In a minute.”

“Can you die of cold?”

“Yeah, but that’s not going to happen to you.”

“I’m still not warm.”

“Be patient. It’s coming.”

JACK woke at dawn and laid his hands upon his children.

“They’re breathing,” Dee whispered.

“You sleep?”

“Not much.”

“We stink,” he said.

“Speak for yourself.”

“No, I think I can safely speak for you, too.”

He looked at his wife just to look at her. First time he’d done that in days.

Her cheeks smeared with dirt. Lips cracked. Sunburned all to hell.

“You’ve got a few dreadlocks starting there,” he said.

“I’m hideous, aren’t I?”

“Maybe a tad.”

“You smoothtalker.” She reached across the kids, touched his hand. “We can’t keep doing this,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“We’re almost out of these mountains, Dee. It’s going to get better then.”

“Or worse.”

“Do you believe we’re headed for someplace safe, where we can survive? Maybe get back what we lost?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“I think you need to believe that’s what’s going to happen.”

“It’s just so hard. I’m so tired. I’m hungry. And then I look at them and know they’re suffering even more.”

“We could be dead, Dee. All of us or some of us. But we’re not. We’re together. You have to hold onto that. Let it carry you.”

They came out of the woods in the late morning onto a bare hill that sloped down to a river, and several hundred yards past, a paved road. Beyond it all to the east lay miles of badlands-pale, dry country, rippled and treeless.

They worked their way down through the sage to the riverbank and stopped for a drink.

Jack lifted Cole onto his shoulders and waded across, Dee and Naomi following behind, his daughter gasping at the icy shock of the water, which was low in advance of winter, coming only to their knees at the deepest point.

On the other side, at the top of a small rise, they rested in the weeds and watched the road.

Nothing passed. No sound but the river and the wind blowing through the grass.

Early afternoon and low gray clouds streaming across the sky from the west.

Jack stepped into the road. Saw a quarter mile of it from where he stood.

Looking back, that rampart of mountains they’d crossed two days ago soared above everything, powdered with snow.

“What if a car comes?” Dee said. “There’s no way to know if they’re affected.”

“We’ll have to make a split-second decision,” Jack said. “If it’s only one car, with one or two people inside, maybe we chance it. Otherwise, we hide.”

They walked north along the shoulder.

“Let me have the gun, Dee.”

She handed him the Glock and he ejected the magazine, thumbed out the rounds-nine-and loaded them back.

“Do you know what road this is?” Dee asked.

“I think it’s Highway 287.”

“Where does it go?”

“To the Tetons, then north up to Yellowstone and into Montana.”

“We want to go to Montana?” Naomi asked.

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Because after Montana comes Canada, and we might be safe there.”

They walked for several hours. No cars passed. The road seemed to be some kind of geographic dividing line-badlands to the east, foothills rising toward mountains in the west.

The clouds thickened and by late afternoon the first raindrops had begun to splatter on the pavement. They had walked about two miles, Jack figured, and hadn’t seen a glimmer of civilization beyond the telephone poles that ran alongside the west shoulder of the road.

“We have to get out of this rain,” Jack said.

They went across the road and up into the trees-tall, straight pines that offered little in the way of shelter.

It was getting dark and the sound of the rainfall filled the woods with a steady hiss.

They sat down against one of the pines, and Jack could instantly feel the difference in his legs from just a few hours of walking on pavement. His knees swollen. Shins riddled with pain like a million tiny fractures. He grimaced as he stood back up.

“I’m going to look for something to keep us dry.”

“Please don’t go far, Jack.”

He wandered away from them up the hillside through the old-growth forest.

After a quarter mile, he came out of the trees.

Stopped, chuckled.

He led them up through the woods into the clearing, gestured proudly toward their accommodations for the evening-the ruins of a stable.

“It ain’t the Hilton,” he said. “But it’ll keep us dry.”

The logs were so weathered and sun-bleached they looked albino. The tin roof, deep brown with rust, only covered half of the shelter, and they filed into the far right corner on the only patch of dry dirt.

The rain drummed on the tin roof.

“We’re lucky to be out of the mountains,” Jack said. “Probably snowing up there.”

Through the doorway, they could see the rain falling and watch the world getting dark-a grayness deepening toward blue.

Cole crawled into Jack’s lap, said, “My stomach hurts.”

“I know, buddy, we’re all hungry.”

“When can we eat?”

“We’ll find something tomorrow.”

“You promise?”

“He can’t promise, Cole,” Naomi said. “He doesn’t know for sure if we’ll find anything to eat tomorrow. All we can do is try.”

Cole began to cry.

Jack kissed his head, Cole’s hair still wet, said, “Hush, baby boy.”

It was still raining. They hadn’t moved from their corner and they weren’t going to be moving anytime soon with it so black out there they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.

“I wish we could have a fire,” Naomi said.

“That would be nice.”

“I know how,” Cole said suddenly, just a voice in the dark.

“How to have a fire?” Dee said.

“How we can tell if they’re good or bad.”

“Who are you talking about, honey?”

“If we hear a car coming down the road.”

“You’ve been thinking about that?”

“If they have the light around them, we’ll know they’re bad.”

Jack said, “What light, buddy?”

“The light around their head.”

“What’s he talking about, Jack?”

“I have no idea. Cole, what light do you mean? Do we have it around any of us? Me or your mother or sister?”

“No.”

“Do you have it around you?”

The boy was quiet for a moment. “Yes.”

“What does it look like?”

“Like white light around my head and my shoulders.”

“Why is it around you and not us?”

“Because you didn’t see the lights. They didn’t fall on you.”

“Remember when I asked you if you felt different after the aurora?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any bad feelings toward any of us right now?”

“No, Daddy.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t want to sleep in here with him.”

“Stop it, Naomi. He’s your brother.”

“He’s affected. He saw the lights like the rest of those crazy-”

“He’s a child.”

“So what?”

“Has he tried to hurt you or any of us?”

“No.”

“So maybe it doesn’t affect children the same way.”

“Why would that be?” Dee asked.

“I don’t know. Because they’re innocent?”

Cole began to cry. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“I know you don’t,” Jack said, and he pulled the boy into his arms.

Jack woke several hours later to Cole moaning.

“Dee?”

“What is it?”

Still couldn’t see a thing in the dark.

“Something’s wrong with Cole. He’s shivering.”

Dee’s hand slid over his and onto the boy’s face.

“Oh, Jesus, he’s burning up.”

“Why’s he shaking?”

“He has the chills. Let me have him.”

She took Cole into her arms and rocked him and hushed him and Jack lay in the dirt as the sound of rain striking the tin roof tried to carry him off.

COLE looked pale in the gray dawnlight that filtered into the ruins of the stable.

Jack said, “What is it do you think?”

“I can’t tell if it’s viral or bacterial, but it’s getting worse.”

“We’ll stay here for the day. Let him rest.”

“A fever is very dehydrating. He needs water.”

“You want to keep moving?”

“I think we have to.”

“What else can we do for him?”

Tears welling, she shook her head. “Let’s try to find some water, then get him someplace warm and dry. That’s all we can do.”

Dark swollen clouds.

Cold.

Everything wet and dripping.

Jack carried Cole in his arms.

The boy had woken but his eyes were milky and unfocused. Not present.

They went down through the pine forest to the road.

The first mile was a straight and steady climb. Then the road curved through a series of switchbacks, and when Jack looked down again, Cole was sleeping.

In the bend of the next turn, he stopped and squatted down in the road, keeping Cole’s head supported so he wouldn’t wake.

“There’s no way,” Jack said. “I could carry him on my shoulders for a little while longer, but not like this.”

“We can rest,” Dee said.

“Resting isn’t going to make my arms stronger. He weighs fifty-four pounds. I just can’t physically hold him.”

He looked around. They had hiked up into snow-a sloppy inch of it upon everything except the asphalt, the evergreen branches dipping and bouncing back as the snow sloughed off.

“Jack, what do you-”

“Just let me rest for a minute. He’s sleeping, and I don’t want to wake him.”

They sat in the road. Everything still except the melting snow. The wind in the spruce trees. Cole shivered in his sleep and Jack wrapped his jacket around him. Every five minutes, Dee would lay her hand against the boy’s forehead.

Naomi asked, “Is he going to die?”

“Of course not,” Jack said.

They ate enough snow to quench their thirst and make them all much colder, and Jack fed Cole pieces of slush. After an hour, they struggled onto their feet and went on. The road kept climbing. Soon there was slush on the pavement, then snow. Instead of cradling him, Jack found he could manage the weight better by carrying Cole draped over his left shoulder. They would walk a ways and then stop and start up again, the periods of walking getting shorter, the rests longer.

It snowed off and on through the day, the road leading them back up into high country. Toward late afternoon, they came across a deserted construction site, Jack’s heart lifting at the prospect of finding a pickup truck or even a forklift, but the only motorized equipment left behind had been a small crane, its snow-dusted framework looming over stockpiles of corrugated steel drainage pipe.

They spent the night inside one of the sixty-foot lengths of pipe, Jack sitting by the opening watching the snow come down until the light was gone. Listening to Dee whisper to Cole, the boy crying, mumbling gibberish, delirious with fever. Considering the state of their distressed little nation, he had no intention of falling asleep, but he shut his eyes just for a moment and

WHEN he opened them again, it was light out and the sky bright blue through the spruce trees and a half foot of fresh snow on the ground.

Naomi’s snoring echoed through the pipe.

He looked over at Dee who was awake and still holding Cole.

She said, “His fever broke about an hour ago.”

Had he been standing, the relief would have knocked Jack over.

“Did you even sleep?” he asked.

She shook her head. “But I can feel it coming now.”

Jack looked outside, snow glittering in the early sunlight. “I’m going to have a look around.”

“Food today,” she said.

“What?”

“One way or another, we have to find some food. Today. It’ll have been five days tonight since we last ate, and at some point in the not too distant, we won’t have the strength to keep moving. Our bodies just cannot continue to perform like this.”

He looked past Dee toward his daughter, sleeping in the shadows. “Na’s okay?”

“She’s okay.”

“You?”

Dee broke a smile. “I’ve lost probably twenty, twenty-five pounds these last three weeks. I can’t stop thinking how hot I’d look in a little bikini.”

Jack crossed the construction site, climbed up onto the track of the crane. The door had been left unlocked and he scoured the cab. Found three balled-up potato chip bags and a paper cup filled a quarter of the way with what appeared to be frozen cola.

He set the cup in the sun and moved back between the rows of stacked pipe.

The road was covered in snow.

He went up the hill, inhaling deep shots of freezing, snow-cleansed air. His stomach groaned. It felt good to be up early and walking in the woods with the sun streaming through the trees.

Someone shouted.

Jack stopped in the road, glanced back, but the sound hadn’t come from the construction site.

More voices spilled down through the trees.

He deliberated for three seconds, then started up the road, fighting for traction as he sprinted through powder.

The voices getting louder.

When he came around the next curve, there was a green sign that read “Togwotee Pass, ELEV 9658.”

In the distance, a lodge. Gas station. Tiny cabins off in the spruce trees.

The parking lot was crowded with an array of vehicles-dozen civilian cars and SUVs, three Humvees, two armored personnel carriers, one Stryker, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and a big rig with two Red Cross insignias emblazoned on the trailer that framed the words, “Refugee Relief.”

Jack headed toward a group of men in woodland camo BDUs standing by the gas pumps. One of them spotted him, and without a word to the others, shouldered his M16 which had been fitted with a nightscope. The rest of the men saw his reaction, drew their own weapons, and turned to face Jack.

He stopped, staring at five men pointing a variety of firearms in his direction, and the first thing to cross his mind was that it had been nine days since they’d fled the cabin, and how strange it felt to see people who weren’t his family again.

“Where’d you come from?”

Jack bent over to catch his breath, pointed back down the road. The man closest to him was the one who’d spoken. A redhead. Very pale. Freckled. Looked to be his age, his height, but with thirty added pounds of muscle and only a two-day beard. He pointed a Sig Sauer at Jack’s face.

Said, “You’re on foot?”

“Yes.”

“Carrying any weapons?” Jack had to think, realized he’d left the Glock back at the pipe with Dee, and considering the firepower on hand, figured that was probably a good thing.

“No, nothing.”

The man waved a hand toward the others and they lowered their machineguns.

“Where you from?”

Jack straightened. “Albuquerque. Been hiking through the mountains last week and a half. Haven’t had food in five days.”

The man holstered his pistol and smiled, said, “Well, by God, somebody get this man an MRE,” but no one moved.

He had blue eyes the color of a washed-out summer sky and he was squinting a little in the sun. “Good thing you caught us. We were on the verge of moving out.”

“I’m Jack Colclough.” Jack stepped forward and extended his hand, which the man accepted.

“Good to meet you, Jack. My name…” The elbow caught Jack on the chin. He sat down in the snow as the reinforced steel toe of a black leather combat boot slammed into his face. “…is not really important.” Jack opened his eyes. He lay on his back, the redhead’s face inches from his own and the blue sky distorted by tears that streamed out of his eyes from his crushed nose. “Who else is with you?”

“No one.”

The man’s hand wrapped around his ring finger and twisted until Jack felt the bone snap and he howled as the man stood on his arm and unsheathed a knife.

When Jack came to, the man was holding his ring finger in front of his face and sliding the gold wedding band up and down the free-range digit.

“Where is the person who put this ring on your finger?”

The pain reached up through Jack’s entire left arm like a molten rod he couldn’t shake free.

The man unholstered his Sig Sauer, pushed the barrel into Jack’s left eye. “Sir, I will put a bullet through your cornea.”

“They’re dead,” Jack said. “You crazy fuckers killed them.”

Dee opened her eyes, the sound of cranking engines having stirred her from sleep. She eased Cole down onto the floor of the pipe and crawled outside.

The sun-glare blinding off the snow.

She called for Jack.

Scanned the construction site but didn’t see him.

Hurried through the snow into the road as other engines roared to life.

They weren’t far-just a short distance through the trees-and she was running up the road now toward a clearing.

She rounded a turn. There was an oasis at the top of the pass. Military vehicles rumbled in the parking lot, and for a moment her heart lightened and she thought they were saved until her eyes fell upon two soldiers a hundred feet away, dragging a bloody-faced man by his arms toward the open doors of an eighteen-wheeler.

Jack.

She started toward him, got three steps before the mother inside her screamed louder than the wife. Out in the open now. The noise of two dozen engines was deafening and the air was filling with exhaust. The men were pulling her husband up the ramp into the back of the truck while two other soldiers aimed their weapons into the darkness of the semitrailer. She held the Glock, but in the face of all this, it felt like a bad joke. That voice inside her begging to run. Someone was going to see her and chase her into the woods, kill her or take her away, and then her children would be alone out here and she couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.

She backpedaled off the road into the woods and crouched down in a thicket of spruce saplings as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle lurched out of the parking lot into the road, leading the convoy down the west side of the pass. Other cars and SUVs fell in behind as Jack’s legs disappeared into the trailer. Soon after, the two soldiers emerged and lowered the rear door. Latched it, hopped down onto the pavement, lifted the metal ramp, walked it underneath the bed of the truck. They ran to the Stryker and one of them ducked into the back while the other climbed up onto the roof and manned the 50-cal.

The big rig lumbered out of the parking lot, tailed by the Stryker, and it felt like her heart was being ripped from her chest as she watched the convoy begin to slip away, rolling down the other side of the mountain.

In an instant, it was gone. All she could hear was the transfer truck downshifting on a steep grade. Then the top of the pass stood silent. No wind. No birds cheeping. Just the sun pouring down onto the snow.

Dee leaned over into the ice and came apart.

She staggered back into the road and followed it down the east side of the pass. Her throat raw from crying and she still held clumps of her hair that she’d ripped out. Desperate to do something to fix this but she couldn’t. That helplessness felt like loose electricity under her skin-wild and frantic but with no outlet. The urge to put the gun to her own head bordered on irresistible.

She reached the construction site and walked over to the pipe. Her children still slept. She crawled inside and sat with her knees drawn into her chest, trying not to cry again so they might sleep a little longer. Jack was slipping farther and farther away with every passing second, and she could feel the expanding distance and it tore her guts out.

Naomi was stirring. Dee turned and stared into the shadow of the pipe, watched her daughter sit up and rub her eyes.

She looked around.

“Where’s Dad?”

Dee whispered, “Come outside. I don’t want to wake Cole.”

“What’s wrong?”

The tears were starting up in her eyes again. “Just come on.”

When Dee told her daughter what had happened, Naomi cupped her hand to her mouth and ran to a far stack of pipes and crawled into one on the bottom row. Dee stood in the snow with her eyes welling up again, listening to the pipe distort Naomi’s sobbing like some tragic flute.

Cole stared at her, grave as she’d ever seen him, but he didn’t cry. They were sitting on a patch of dry pavement in the road in the warmth of high-altitude sunlight.

“Where did they take him?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Why did they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they going to kill him?”

The questions came like little stabs of reinforcement, shoring up the horrific reality of it all.

“I don’t know.”

Cole looked back toward the construction site. “When is Naomi going to come out?”

“In a little while. She’s really upset.”

“Are you upset?”

“Yeah, I’m upset.”

“When can we see Daddy again?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cole.”

The boy stared at a trickle of snowmelt gliding down the pavement. “This is one of the worst things that ever happened, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She could tell he was mulling something over, sorting out the ramifications.

“If we don’t find Daddy, does that mean you’re my wife and I get to be in charge of Naomi?”

Dee wiped her face.

“No, sweetheart, it doesn’t mean that.”

In the afternoon, Dee walked over to the pipe where Naomi had holed herself up for hours and crouched down by the opening. Inside, her daughter lay unmoving, and she reached out, touched her ankle.

“Na? You asleep?”

Naomi’s head shook.

“There are some buildings just up the road. I thought we could check them out, see if there’s food. Warm beds to sleep in.”

No movement. No answer.

“You can’t lay here indefinitely, wishing things aren’t the way they are.”

“I know that, Mom. I know that. Can you just give me thirty minutes, please?”

“Okay. But then we have to leave.”

The shadows stretched as they walked through slush to the top of the pass.

The lodge had been vandalized.

The restaurant raided.

Refrigerators contained nothing but rotting vegetables and fruit. Spoiled jars of condiments that she almost considered eating.

Dee had to break glass to gain entry to one of the tiny cabins. They climbed through the windowframe. Just as cold on the inside, but at least there were two bunk beds along the wall.

The kids crawled into bed and Dee unlocked the door and went back outside. Walked down to the road and stood at the crest of the pass. Thirty-five miles away, Grand Teton punctured the bottom curve of the sun and the nearer peaks were catching alpenglow. The snow and the rock the color of peach skin.

Watched the sun drop, wondering where Jack was in all that darkness.

She closed her eyes, spoke aloud.

“Jack, do you hear me? Wherever you are, whatever’s happening to you in this moment, know that I love you. And I’m with you. Always.”

She’d never said anything with such desperation. Closest she’d ever come to prayer. Wondered if the intensity of what raged inside her could carry the words to him on some secret frequency.

Beneath the stars, she started back toward her children, the snow crunching under her footsteps. A part of her still thinking that when she walked into that little cabin, Jack would be there, her sensory memory still operating on the default of his proximity.

In the total darkness of the cabin, she could hear Cole and Naomi breathing deeply. She pulled off her crumbling shoes and took a bottom bunk-sheeted mattress, no blanket. Hoped her children dreamed of something other than what their life had become.

IN the morning, Naomi had barely the strength to rise out of bed, and the prodding it took rivaled the difficulty Dee had experienced trying to rouse her two months ago on the first school day of the year.

They wandered outside, having slept through most of the morning, and now it was almost warm and the sun was high and there were only patches of snow in the shadows and the forest. They ate as much of it as they could get down.

The pavement was dry. They started down the other side of the pass, Dee cold and more lightheaded than when she donated blood. The spruce trees and the sky seemed to have lost their vibrancy, almost sepia-toned, and the sounds of the forest and their footsteps on the road came muffled.

She wondered if they were dying.

In the midafternoon, Dee glanced up and saw that Naomi was sitting in the road, swaying over the double yellow like windblown sawgrass.

Dee eased down beside her.

“Are we stopping?” Cole asked.

“Yeah, for a minute.”

The boy walked over to the shoulder to investigate a brown sign riddled with buckshot that warned, You Are Now in Grizzly Bear Country.

“I think a rest is a good idea,” Dee said.

“I’m not resting.”

“Then what is this?”

“I’m so hungry and tired and Dad’s probably dead. I just want to die now, too.”

“Don’t say that.”

Naomi turned slowly and stared at her mother. “Don’t you? Be honest.”

“We have to keep going, Na.”

“Why do you say that? We don’t have to do anything. We can stay right here and waste away or you can put us all out of our miseries right now.”

Her eyes flickered at the Glock tucked into Dee’s waistline.

It surprised Dee as much as it did Naomi when she slapped her daughter hard across the face.

Whispered, “You get the fuck up right now, young lady, or I will drag your little ass down this mountain so help me God. I didn’t raise you to quit.”

Dee struggled back onto her feet as Naomi slumped across the road and wept with what little energy she still had.

Dee crying, too. “Come on, Cole, let’s go.”

“What’s wrong with Naomi?”

“She’ll be okay. Just needs a minute.”

“Are we leaving her?”

“No, she’ll be right along.”

They had covered barely a mile by evening when they left the road for a boulder-strewn meadow. No snow or running water anywhere. As the thirst stalked them, all Dee could think about was all the snow they’d passed up earlier in the day, how she should have taken a container from the restaurant at the pass, packed it with ice for later.

The ground was soft and moist from the recent snowfall, and they curled up on the far side of a boulder, hidden from the road, everyone asleep before the stars came out.

DEE woke with the sun in her face and a dehydration headache. Her children slept and she let them go on sleeping. Lethargic and hopeless. Nothing more unappealing than rising from the cool soft grass to trudge on down that road.

She lay there, gliding in and out of consciousness, always returning to the question-where are you? And-are you? It seemed impossible that he could be gone and she not know. Not feel it in the pit of her soul.

She lay facing her daughter, Naomi’s eyes half open, blades of dead-yellow grass trembling between them that Dee had been giving serious thought to eating.

“I hurt everywhere,” Naomi said.

“I know.”

“Are we dying, Mom?”

How to answer such a question.

“We’re in rough shape, baby.”

“Is it going to hurt a lot worse than this? Toward the end, I mean.”

“I don’t know.”

“How much longer?”

“Naomi. I don’t know.”

Dee had completely lost time, and whether the sun’s position in the sky indicated late morning or early afternoon, she couldn’t tell. She reached over and put her hand to Cole’s back. Confirmed the rise and the fall. The boy slept against the boulder and she could feel the cold radiating from the rock.

When Dee rolled back over toward her daughter, Naomi was sitting up in the grass. Dee thinking her zygomatic bones seemed extraordinarily pronounced, the bones like crescent moons forming the lower range of her hollowed-out eye sockets.

“You hear that?” Naomi said.

Dee did. A sound like sustained thunder. She looked up, said, “It’s above us, Na.”

A jet, too distant to discern the type, streaked across the sky, its contrail iridescent in the brilliant blue.

Night and freezing cold. Dee lying with her back against the boulder, Cole shivering in her arms. The children slept, but she’d been awake for an hour, fighting black thoughts. She hadn’t intended to lie in this meadow all day. Between the weakness and exhaustion, it had just happened. But tomorrow would involve a choice, and knowing they’d only be more exhausted, thirstier, and in greater agony, she was already making excuses for why they shouldn’t push on. Basking in the increasingly soothing presence of what lay two feet away in the grass, just within arm’s reach.

Naomi shook her awake.

“Mom, get up.”

Dee opened her eyes to her daughter silhouetted against the sweep of stars and leaning over her.

“What’s wrong, Na?” It hurt to speak, her throat swollen.

“Someone’s coming.”

“Give me a hand.”

She extricated herself from Cole’s embrace and grabbed onto Naomi’s arm and tugged herself upright.

Sat listening.

At first, nothing. Then she discerned the sound of an engine still a long ways off, had to strain to tell if it was fading away or approaching.

“It’s coming toward us, Mom.”

Dee used the boulder to pull herself onto her feet. She picked up the Glock, the metal glazed with frost. They walked through the alpine meadow to the shoulder of the road. The double yellow glowing in the starlight, and the noise of the approaching car getting louder, like a wave coming ashore.

Dee’s leg muscles burned. The warmth of her hand had melted some of the frost off the Glock, and she used her shirt to wipe the condensation and ice from the steel.

“Go back to the boulder, Na.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dee slipped the Glock into a side pocket of her rain jacket. “When you hear me call out, wake Cole and bring him over, but not until. And if it doesn’t go right, something happens, you hide, and take care of your brother.”

“Mom-”

“We don’t have time. Go.”

Naomi ran back into the meadow and Dee stepped out into the road, searching for the glint of headlights through the trees, but there was nothing save for the noise of the approaching engine.

A shadow blitzed around the corner.

She had intended to lay down on the pavement, but she didn’t have the guts for that now facing a car with no headlights barreling toward her in the dark of night, so she just stood straddling the double yellow line and waving her arms like a madwoman.

Inside of a hundred yards, the RPMs fell off and the glow of brakelights fired the asphalt red and the tires screeched against the pavement, Dee shielding her eyes from the imminent collision but not yielding an inch.

Then the engine idled two feet away from her and the smell of scorched rubber filled the air. She lowered her arm from her face as the driver’s door squeaked open. It was a Jeep Cherokee, dark green or brown-impossible to tell in this light-with four fuel containers strapped to the roof.

“You trying to commit suicide?” the man growled.

Dee took out the Glock, lined it up in the center of his chest. By the glow that emanated from the Jeep’s interior lights, she could see that he was older-short brown hair on top, a great white beard, salt and pepper mustache that struggled to merge the two. He held something in his left hand.

“Drop it,” she said.

When he hesitated, she sighted up his face, and something in her eyes must have persuaded him, because a gun clattered onto the pavement.

“You’re ambushing me?”

Dee shouted for the kids, heard them come running in the dark.

“Grab the top of the door,” Dee said.

He complied as Naomi and Cole hustled across the road.

On the door below the window, Dee noticed a National Park Service emblem.

“Do you see him, Cole?” Dee said as he sidled up beside her.

“Yes.”

She wouldn’t take her eyes off the man.

“Does he have any light around his head?”

“Lady, what are you-”

“Be quiet.”

“No, Mom.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

Still, she didn’t lower the gun. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Ed.”

“Ed what?”

“Abernathy.”

“What are you doing out here, Mr. Abernathy?”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Girl with the gun gets the answers.”

“I’m trying to survive.”

“We aren’t affected,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

“I know.”

“How exactly do you know?”

“You have water and food?”

He nodded, and it was just a flash of a thought-considering their present state, what the world had become, Dee should kill him right now and take his Jeep and whatever provisions it contained. Not fuck around for one more second, because there was too much at stake. Pulling the trigger, though, was another thing. Maybe he was a good guy, maybe not, but she couldn’t shoot him in cold blood, not even for her children, and maybe because of them.

“There were four of us.” Tears coming. “My husband was taken two days ago by some sort of military unit. Do you know where he might be?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“We haven’t eaten in a week.” Dee felt unstable, eased her right leg back to brace herself against falling. “I don’t want to keep aiming this gun at your face.”

“That’d be all right with me, too.”

She lowered the Glock, slid it into the back of her waistband.

Ed started to bend down. Stopped midway. “I’m picking up my gun, but there’s no threat intended.”

“Okay.”

He ducked behind the door, lifted the revolver off the pavement, and came toward them. Squatted down to Cole’s eye-level.

“I’m Ed,” he said. “What’s your name?”

Cole didn’t reply.

“Tell him your name, buddy.”

“Cole.”

“Do you like Snickers candy bars?”

Dee’s stomach fluttered with a new pang of hunger.

“Yes sir.”

“Well, you’re in luck.”

“Are you a nice person?”

“I am. Are you?”

Cole nodded and Ed pushed against his knees and stood to face Naomi.

“I’m Naomi,” she said.

“Glad to meet you, Naomi.”

Dee extended her hand. “Ed, I’m Dee.”

“Dee, very nice to meet you.”

The upwelling came so fast and unexpectedly that she fell toward Ed and wrapped her arms around his neck. Sobbing. Felt him patting her back, couldn’t pick out the words, but the deep tone of his voice which seemed to move through her like thunder was the closest she’d come to comfort in days.

Ed pulled the Cherokee into the meadow and got out and popped the hatch. Dee and the kids gathered around as he rifled through a banker’s box of packaged food. Three more plastic gas containers crowded the backseats, numerous jugs of water on the floorboards.

Dee sat in the back with Naomi and Cole, her fingers over-anxious and shaking as she ripped open Cole’s wrapper. At the smell of chocolate and peanuts, her hunger swelled into an ache.

They had two candy bars each and several apples, shared a gallon of water from a glass jug. So ravenous it felt less like eating and drinking, more like finally breathing again after being held underwater. When they’d finished, it was all Dee could do not to beg for more, but from the look of things, Ed was light on provisions.

“Where you coming from?” she asked.

He sat in the grass near the rear bumper, just inside the field of illumination thrown from the Jeep’s rear dome light. “Arches in Utah.”

“You a park ranger?”

“Yep.”

“We left Albuquerque…I don’t know, three weeks ago, I guess? What day it is.”

“Friday. Well, early Saturday now.”

“We were trying to get to Canada. Heard there were refugee camps across the border.”

“I heard the same.”

“Have you run into much trouble?”

He shook his head. “I left three days ago. Been traveling mainly at night, and in fact, I actually need to keep moving.”

He rose to his feet. Dee noticed he wore green pants and a long-sleeved, gray button-up, wondered if this was his ranger uniform.

She said, “Would you let us come with you?”

“I can’t fit you all inside.”

“Then take my children.”

“Mom, no.”

“Shut up, Na. Would you? Please?”

Ed took out his revolver.

“I need you out of my Jeep right now. I’ve given you some of my food, my water. I’ll even leave a jug with you, but I cannot take you.”

Dee stared down at her filthy, stinking shoes.

“We’ll die out here.”

“And we may all die if you come with me. Now get out of there. I have to go.”

Dee stood watching the Jeep move across the meadow and into the road, heard the engine rev, saw its taillights wink out, listening as it sped away from them into the darkness.

Naomi was crying. “You should’ve shot him, Mom. You had him back there with his gun on the ground and you just let him-”

“He’s not a bad man, Na.”

“We’re going to die now.”

“He wasn’t trying to hurt us. You want to live in a world where we have to kill innocent people to survive? I won’t do that. Not even for you and Cole. There’s things worse than dying, and for me, that’s one of them.”

Cole said, “Listen.”

An engine was approaching. The shadow of that Jeep reappeared and shot out a triangle of light as it entered the meadow.

The engine cut off.

Ed climbed out.

“I’m not happy about this,” he said, walking around to the back, popping the hatch. “Not one goddamn bit. So don’t say anything, for God’s sake don’t thank me. Just get over here and help me make some room.”

Ed loaded what would fit into the cargo area and made just enough room for Naomi and Cole in the backseat. Dee climbed in up front, buckled herself in, and Ed cranked the engine. Heat rushed out of the vents. The digital clock read 2:59 a.m. Ed put the car into gear and eased across the meadow, over the shoulder, back onto the road.

Turned on the stereo as he accelerated.

Dirty blues blasting from the speakers: “She’s a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time/She’s a kindhearted woman, she studies evil all the time/You well’s to kill me, as to have it on your mind.”

Dee leaned against the window, watched the trees rush by. Felt so strange to be moving this fast again, the pavement streaming under the tires. The road snaked down through the spruce forest on a steep descent from the pass and her ears kept popping and clogging, the world loud, then muffled, then loud again when she swallowed. With the moon full and high, it struck the road like sunlight and made shadows of the trees. The view to the west was long, and through the windshield she could see the massive skyline of the Tetons.

Dee glanced back between the front seats-Cole and Naomi sleeping sprawled across each other. She reached over, touched Ed’s shoulder.

“You saved our lives.”

“What’d I say about thanking me?”

“I’m not thanking you, just stating a fact.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to, that’s the thing. I’m a supremely selfish fuck.”

Dee tilted her seat back. “Let me know if you want me to drive.”

He grunted, his hands tapping time to the blues, Dee wondering if he’d have sung along if they weren’t in the car with him.

“You can sing if you want,” she said. “Won’t bother us.”

“Might want to be more careful about what you offer in the future,” he said, and started to sing.

His voice was awful.

She dozed against the window, dipping in and out of dream fragments that she couldn’t quite commit herself to before settling finally into a hard and dreamless sleep.

Next time she woke, it was 5:02 a.m.

Still dark out the windows except where the faintest purple had begun to tint the eastern sky. Naomi and Cole slept. The music had stopped.

“Want me to drive for a bit so you can sleep?”

“No, I was going to stop a few miles ahead anyway. Get us off the road for the daylight hours.”

THE lodge towered like a mountain against the predawn sky. They pulled under the front portico. The kids were stirring, woken by the cessation of movement. Ed turned off the engine and stepped out and opened the back hatch. Took a flashlight from one of the supply boxes.

The red double doors stood ajar and they pushed through them.

Ed flicked on the flashlight.

“Anybody here?” His voice echoed through the immense lobby as the beam of his light passed across the hearth and moved up seven stories of framework supported by a forest of burnished tree trunks.

No response.

“Ever been here?” Ed asked.

“Once,” Dee said.

They climbed the stairs to a row of rooms that overlooked the upper porch. Dee and the kids took one with two queen beds. The walls were cedar-paneled. A cast-iron radiator occupied the space beneath the window, and they didn’t need a flashlight anymore with dawn fading up through the dormer.

Ed said, “I sort of feel like one of us should keep watch. Case someone comes.”

“You drove all night,” Dee said. “I’ll do it.”

“Five or six hours, I’ll be good as new. Wake me at noon.”

Dee strolled the corridors in near darkness. The silence of the place imposing. She’d been here before with Jack. Sixteen years ago. A summer day, the lobby bustling and filled with light. They were passing through on a move from Montana to New Mexico, Jack having just been hired by UNM, Dee en route to begin a residency at the university hospital. They’d only stopped for a few hours to have lunch in the dining room, but she still recalled the feel of that day, had never lost it-a lightness in her being and with the two of them married just four months, the sense that they were really beginning a life, that everything lay open and accessible before them.

She walked down to the lobby and went outside, following the paved path to the observation point. The day had dawned clear. Across the basin, a herd of elk grazed the edge of a lodgepole pine forest still recovering from a recent fire and interspersed with dead gray trees.

After a while, a column of water launched out of the earth, steaming in the cold. There had been five hundred tourists here the last time Dee had watched it blow. She listened to the superheated water rain down on the mineralized field, a light wind in her face, the mist lukewarm by the time it reached her.

In the early afternoon, she and Ed made the climb to the widow’s walk, stood on top of the lodge looking out over the basin and the hills, no sound but the flags flapping on the grounds below. Seemed like if she stared hard and long and far enough, she might catch a glimpse of him somewhere out there.

“You’re missing your husband.”

Wiped her eyes. “Did you leave anyone behind when you left Arches?”

Ed shook his head.

“That must make things a little easier. Only having to worry about yourself, I mean.”

“I was married once. I’ve been thinking about her. You know, wondering.”

“Any kids?”

“Haven’t been in touch with them in a long time.” He looked at her as if he might offer some further explanation, then moved on to something else instead. “I’m concerned the Canadian border is going to be tough to cross. I’ve been considering other possibilities.”

“Like what?”

“We’re only a few hours south of Bozeman. That’s the nearest airport. Maybe we get our hands on a plane.”

“You’re a pilot?”

“Used to fly commercial jets.”

“How long since you’ve been in a cockpit?”

“You really want to know?”

“Can you still fly? I mean, doesn’t the technology change?”

“We’d just be looking for a twin-prop. Nothing too complicated. We could be in Canada in under two hours.”

Dee slept through the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening, she took Naomi and Cole down to the observation point. When it finally blew, the sunlight shot horizontally through the scalding mist and turned the water into fire.

Ed gassed up the Jeep and added a few quarts of oil, employed Cole to clean the dust and grime off the windows. They set out with the moon high enough to obviate the need for headlights, speeding north through the park to the blues of Muddy Waters.

An hour and a half brought them to the Montana border. They roared across and up through the isolated, nothing towns of Gardiner, Miner, and Emigrant, all vacated, all long-since and so thoroughly burned there wasn’t even the temptation to stop and search for food.

A little before midnight, Ed pulled over onto the shoulder.

“We’re close to Bozeman,” he said, “but if we stay on this road, we’re going to have to get on the interstate.” He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a map, and unfolded it across the steering wheel.

Dee leaned over and touched a light gray line that branched off from the bold one denoting the highway they’d been driving all night.

“Here?” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the one we need to find. See how it cuts right across? Once we hit it, we’re only twenty miles from the Bozeman airfield.”

Dee spotted it as they raced past and Ed turned around in the empty highway and headed back. It was an unmarked dirt road that exploited the Jeep’s decrepit shocks, rocking them along for several miles on a gentle climb through pine forest. Just dark enough when passing through the corridors of trees to persuade Ed to punch on the headlights.

“Could we actually fly out tonight?” Dee said.

“Assuming we find a plane with sufficient fuel, I’ll probably want to wait until first light. Really don’t want my first flight in over two decades to be by instrumentation.”

“Can I help fly?” Cole asked.

“Absolutely, copilot.”

Dee stared out the window at the open field they moved across, thinking how flying out of all this madness, of finally getting her kids someplace safe, felt so far beyond the realm of possibility she couldn’t even imagine it happening.

Ed slammed the brake.

She shot forward, painfully restrained by the seatbelt.

Looked up when she’d recoiled back into the leather seat, her first thought her children who were picking themselves up out of the backseat floorboards, and her second the numerous points of light that were moving toward the Jeep.

“Back up, Ed. Back up right-”

The windshield splintered and something warm sprayed the side of Dee’s face as Ed fell into the steering wheel, the horn blaring, other rounds piercing the glass, the night filling with gunshots. Dee unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved the gearshift into park and crawled over the console into the backseat. Sprawled herself on top of Naomi and Cole as bullets struck the car.

“Is he dead?” Naomi asked.

“Yes.”

The firing stopped.

“Either of you hit?”

“No.”

“Make it stop,” Cole cried.

“Are you hit, Cole?”

He shook his head.

Footsteps approached the Jeep, and in the illumination of an oncoming flashlight, Dee could see clear liquid sheeting down the glass of the rear passenger window.

“We have to get out of the car,” she whispered.

Already her eyes were burning, the fumes getting stronger.

“They’ll shoot us if we get out,” Naomi said.

“They’ll burn us alive if we stay in. They’ve shot some of the plastic gas cans on top of the Jeep.”

Dee opened the door and tumbled out. The glare of the flashlights maxed her retinas and she could see little of who was there nor determine their number amid the afterimages that pulsed purple in the dark.

“Stop right there.” A man’s voice. Dee stood and raised her hands.

“Please. I have two children with me. Naomi, Cole, get out.” She felt one of them, probably Cole, glom onto her right arm.

“They’re like me,” Cole said.

“What are you talking about?”

“They have light around their head. All of them.”

“Get back in your car,” the man said, close enough now for Dee to get a decent look-three-day beard, dark navy trousers and parka, aiming an automatic weapon at her face.

He motioned toward the car with the machinegun as others emerged out of the dark behind him.

Dee considered the Glock pushed down the back of her pants. Suicide.

“Bill, check the driver.”

A short, stocky soldier put a light through Ed’s window.

“Gone to be with the Lord, boss.”

“Got your Zippo on you, you chain-smoking motherfucker?”

“Yeah.”

“Particularly attached to it?”

“It was my older brother’s.”

“Cough that shit up.”

“Fuck, Max.”

The lightbeam glimmered off the steel as the soldier chucked his lighter to the man who held Dee and her children at gunpoint, Max catching it with his left hand, never letting the AR-15 waver in his right.

“What are you doing with them, little man?”

“Do not speak to my son.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“What do you mean?” Cole asked.

“You know exactly what I mean. Don’t you want to come with us?”

“Why don’t you leave us alone? We aren’t doing anything to you.”

Max looked up at Dee with unfiltered hatred. “Get back in the car.”

“No.”

“Get in the car or I’ll shoot you and your children in the knees and put you in there myself. You can roast healthy or you can roast with shattered kneecaps. It makes not a fucking bit of difference to me so long as I get to watch you burn.”

Dee said, “What did we ever…”

Max aimed the AR-15 at her left knee.

Split second choice. Reach for the Glock or speak one last time to your children.

“I love you, Naomi. I love you, Cole. No one and nothing can take that away.”

“I can,” Max said.

She drew her kids into her, Naomi quaking and crying, but she didn’t allow herself to avert her eyes from the man who was going to murder them. She stared Max down, wondering would he think of them years from now on his deathbed in a moment of clarity and regret, wondering if her eyes would always haunt him, but she doubted it as he returned the stare, a malevolent smile curling his lips, Dee’s heart in her throat.

The slug mostly decapitated Bill.

A shotgun thundered out of the woods, Max spinning toward the gunfire, several of his men falling, flashlights hitting the ground, muzzleflames spitting out of the machineguns. Dee jerked Naomi and Cole to the ground and dragged them crawling away from the Jeep toward the other side of the road, where they rolled into a ditch.

Smell of moist, rich earth. The gunfire intensifying, bullets striking the trees behind them, Dee pushing Naomi’s and Cole’s heads down, pulling Cole into her chest and speaking into his ear over the shattering noise of the firefight, “I’m right here, I’ve got you.” She couldn’t hear him crying but she could feel his body shaking.

After what seemed ages, the flurry of gunfire dissipated.

They lay in the dark, Dee staring into a wall of dirt.

Someone yelled, “Fall back.”

Footsteps crunched through the leaves-someone retreating into the woods.

A man groaned nearby, begging for help.

Three reports from a handgun.

An AR-15 answered.

The exchange went on for several minutes, and it struck Dee that the gunfire sounded like the communication of terrible birds. She was tempted to climb out of the ditch and have a look, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

After a while, the shooting stopped altogether.

Footfalls echoed through the forest.

The man nearby pleaded to God.

Someone said, “Jim, right there.”

A machinegun ripped up the silence.

Four shotgun blasts roared back.

Footsteps moved closer to the ditch.

“Sure we got all of them?”

A woman answered, “Yeah, there were nine. I count one, two, three, four, five six…” She laughed. “Where do you think you’re going?” A single handgun report rang out. “And this one’s still hanging in there, too.”

“No, Liz.”

“Why?”

“Please, it hurts so bad.”

“You’re breaking my fucking heart. Why can’t I end this piece of shit?”

“Mathias wanted one alive.”

“’Kay. Driver’s dead, but I saw three others get out. Woman, couple of kids.”

“They crawled into the woods when the shooting started. May be gone by now.”

Footsteps moved across the dirt road and stopped at the edge of the ditch.

The woman yelled into the woods, “Woman and two kids? You out there? We’re the good guys, and the bad guys are dead or wishing they were.”

Dee didn’t move, not wanting to startle anyone, just said softly, “We’re right here. Underneath you.”

The woman knelt down. “Anyone hurt?”

“No.” Dee pushed herself out of the dirt and sat up. “Thank you. They were going to burn us.”

“You’re safe now.” The woman reached out, took hold of Dee’s hand. “I’m Liz.”

“Dee.”

“And who’s this?”

“This is Cole, and this is Naomi.”

“Hi, Cole. Hi, Naomi.”

Liz wore a dark, one-piece jumpsuit. Long black hair drawn back into a ponytail under her black beanie. Even squatting down, Dee could see that she was tall and fit, possessing a hard, wiry strength evident in the angular tapering of her jawline.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Liz said. “You want to come with us?”

“Where to?”

Liz smiled. “It’s not far.”

Dee held Cole’s and Naomi’s hands as they followed Liz and the others back through the woods, guided by flashlights. Two of their party lagged behind, dragging the injured soldier who they could hear groaning some distance back through the trees, Dee feeling the ache, despite everything, to attend to him. A deep-rooted hardwiring from her medical training that she wondered if she would ever lose.

A quarter mile into the woods, they stopped.

Someone said, “We’re at the perimeter.”

A voice squeaked back over a radio. “You’re clear.”

“We picked up a woman and two children. I’m going to have Liz put them in number fourteen. Have someone bring some food and water over. New clothes, too.”

“Copy that.”

Dee noticed light glinting off coils of razorwire straight ahead.

One of the men stepped on the wire where it sagged, made an opening for everyone to crawl through. They went on, and after another fifty feet, finally emerged from the woods. Under the moonlight, Dee could see a number of smaller buildings scattered through the clearing, satellites of a large, arched steel building.

Liz fell back and walked with them.

“You must be exhausted,” she said. “We’re going to put you up in a cabin. I want you to know that you’re safe here. See those?” She pointed toward opposing ends of the clearing where twenty-foot log towers stood near the edge of the forest. “There’s a heavily-armed man in each wearing night vision goggles. They’ll be watching over the clearing while you sleep.”

They were moving toward a grouping of small cabins now.

“I don’t understand. What is this place?” Dee asked.

“It’s our home.”

The cabin was clean and smaller than the shacks at the top of Togwotee Pass. There were two beds and a chair pushed under a desk and a chest of drawers. Sink and shower.

“We cut the generators off at night,” Liz said. She opened the top drawer and took out several candles and a box of matches. In a minute, candlelight warmed the room.

She came over to Dee and inspected her face.

“You’re covered in blood. I’ll make sure they bring a basin of water so you can clean up. The showers won’t run hot until morning.”

“Thank you, Liz.”

“I’ll leave you guys now. Food should be here soon.”

Dee stripped to her bra and panties, suddenly aware of how terrible she smelled. She bent down and dipped her face into the basin of water and wiped off the dried blood with a washcloth. Scrubbed her armpits, did a cursory cleaning of her arms and legs, but her hair still felt stringy and greasy.

Cole slept. Dee and Naomi sat on the other bed devouring the food that had been brought for them-a tray of fruit and cheese and crackers that tasted better than anything they’d ever eaten.

Dee stowed the Glock under the mattress. They crawled under the covers and it took some time before their body heat warmed the air between the mattress and the sheet, Dee spooning her daughter, sleep right around the corner.

Naomi whispered, “Do you think Dad’s dead?”

Felt like someone driving a spike through the ulcer in Dee’s stomach.

Tomorrow would be four days without him.

“I don’t know, Na.”

“Well, does it feel to you like he is?”

“I don’t know, baby. I can’t even think about it. Please just let me sleep.”

SHE’D just fallen asleep when the windows filled with dawnlight. Dee rose, pulled the curtains, climbed back into bed. Tried to sleep but her thoughts came frenetic and unstoppable. She got up again and went to the window and peered through the split in the curtain. A few people were out already, the long grass blanched with frost, and in daylight, the meadow appeared cluttered-two dozen one-room cabins like the one they occupied, three larger A-frames, the central steel building, and a number of semi-trailers standing along the edge of the woods, rusted all to hell and cemented with pine needles as if it had been centuries since their abandonment. Distant mountains peeked above the pine trees, and Dee sat on the surface of the desk watching the light color them in, and she was still sitting there two and a half hours later when the woman named Liz walked up the path to their cabin.

The main building was fifty feet wide, twice as long, and windowless. Bare lightbulbs dangled from the trusses and the amalgamation of voices caused a hollow, metallic resonance off the corrugated steel. Cheap folding tables had been pushed against the walls, leaving a wide row down the middle. Just inside the entrance, a chalkboard stand displayed: Hash Browns with Bacon & Cheese Omelet.

Liz led them to an empty table.

“We haven’t been able to get into town for several weeks, so we’ve been dipping into our MRE stash.”

“What’s an MRE?” Cole asked.

“Stands for Meal, Ready-to-Eat. It’s an army ration. We bought two truckloads last year.”

Dee could feel the stares coming from every direction, tried to focus on the blemishes in the plastic tabletop, ignoring that twinge in her gut like the first day of junior high and the minefield of the cafeteria.

A teenage girl appeared at the end of the table holding a basket filled with small, brown packages, plastic silverware, and a stack of tin bowls.

“Welcome,” she said.

The man who spoke after breakfast was slight and smoothshaven with thinning blond hair on the brink of turning white. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt and a black down vest. He stood on a table at the back of the mess hall so everyone could see him.

“No doubt you all heard the gunshots late last night. I’m happy to report that Liz and Mike and their team managed to take out the soldiers’ checkpoint at the road.”

Raucous applause broke out.

Someone yelled, “Freemen.”

Silence returned when he lifted his hand.

“No casualties on our end, and the really good news is that we took one alive. Badly wounded, but alive. Liz and Mike also managed to save three lives during the ambush.” He pointed back toward the entrance. “Dee, would you and your children stand up please.”

Dee took Cole’s hand and poked Naomi and they all rose.

“Thank you,” Dee said. She glanced down at Liz. “To you. To Mike, wherever you are, and all of the others who came. My children and I would be dead right now if it wasn’t for you. There’s not a doubt in my mind.”

“Why don’t you come on up here,” the man said.

Dee stepped around her chair and walked down the aisle. When she arrived at the table the man was standing upon, he reached down and opened his hand and pulled her up with him. Slipped his arm around her waist, put his lips to her ear, whispered, “Dee, I’m Mathias Canner. Introduce yourself. Tell us about your journey.”

She looked out over the crowd-fifty, maybe sixty faces staring back at her.

Managed a weak smile.

“I’m Dee,” she said. “Dee Colclough.”

Someone in the back yelled, “Can’t hear you.”

Later, she walked with Mathias. It was midmorning and the sun had cleared the forest wall. The dewy grass drying out. He showed her the well, the greenhouse and chicken coop, the gardens which had already been winterkilled.

“I bought this ninety-acre parcel twelve years ago,” he said. “Sold my business and moved out with several friends from Boise. Something, isn’t it?”

“What exactly brought you out here?”

“Wanting to live as a free man.”

“You weren’t free before?”

He waved to the bearded man up in the guard tower holding a sniper rifle. “Morning, Roger.”

“Morning.”

“All quiet?”

“All quiet.”

As Mathias led Dee into the trees, his right hand unsnapped the holster for the huge revolver at his side.

“Roger came to me nine years ago. He was an investment banker pulling down three mil a year and utterly miserable. The electrified razorwire starts fifty feet in and runs through the woods around the entire clearing. We’ve installed motion detectors at key points and six men walk the perimeter day and night. If I learn that you’re a spy or that you’ve lied to me in any way, I’ll kill your children in front of you, wait a day, and then kill you.”

He stopped and stared at her.

She could hear the hum of the fence behind them, and standing in a patch of light, see the color in his eyes-brown with sunlit flecks of green. Her kneecaps trembled, and for a moment, she thought she might have to sit down.

“I’m just a doctor from Albuquerque,” she said. “Trying to keep my kids safe. Everything I’ve told you is true.”

They walked again.

“Ten days ago, we sent someone out on reconnaissance.”

“They haven’t come back?”

He shook his head. “What’s it like out there?”

“A nightmare. You can’t tell who’s affected until they try to kill you.”

“They aren’t just military?”

“No. They group together and travel in convoys. They recognize the unaffected on sight. I couldn’t tell you how many towns we passed through that have been burned to the ground.”

“We had to put five of our own down a few weeks ago. They killed three people before we stopped them. Is it a virus? Do you know what’s causing it?”

“No,” she said. “It all imploded so fast.”

They crossed over a road-just the faintest depression of tire tracks in the leaves.

“You have vehicles?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She caught movement up ahead-one of the guards cruising the perimeter.

“Two of our women are pregnant. We don’t have a doctor.”

“I’d be happy to see them.”

They veered back out of the woods into the clearing, moved past a group of children standing in the grass, each with their own easel.

“We’re really proud of our school here,” he said. “Naomi and Cole are welcome to attend, of course.”

In the afternoon, Dee examined two women with child and checked in on a fifteen-year-old boy with a low-grade fever and rackety cough, just relieved to engage her mind in her old life, if only for a short while.

“I don’t like this place,” Naomi said. “These people creep me out.”

Dee lay in bed in their cabin under the covers with Cole and Naomi, the boy already asleep.

“Would you agree it’s an improvement on starving to death?”

“I guess.”

Cold air slipped in through the windowframe, just a hint of color in the sky and the tops of the spruce trees profiled against it.

“We staying?” Naomi asked.

“For a few days at least. Get our strength up.”

“Is this like, a militia?”

“I think it might be.”

“So they probably believe all kinds of crazy shit about the government and black people?”

“I don’t know, haven’t asked them, don’t plan to.”

“I’d rather just go to Canada.”

“Could we take it a day at a time for now? At least while they’re still feeding us?”

The knock came in the middle of the night.

Dee stirred from sleep and sat upright and looked around. Not a single source of manmade light, and because she’d extinguished the candle before settling into bed, the room was absolutely dark. She couldn’t recall the layout of her surroundings or even where she was until Mathias Canner’s voice passed through the door.

“Dee. Get up.”

She climbed over Cole, her bare feet touching the freezing floorboards.

Moved through pure darkness toward Canner’s voice.

No locks on the inside of the door, which she pulled open by the wooden handle.

“Sorry to wake you,” Mathias said through the inch of open space between the doorframe and the door. “But you’re a doctor.” He grinned, and in the starlight, she noticed a dark smear across the left side of his face. “Sometimes you get paged in the wee hours, right?”

“Not often. I have a general practice.”

“Well, terribly sorry to inconvenience you, but we require the services of an MD.”

“What happened?”

“Just get dressed. I’ll be waiting right here.”

She followed him through the field, the stars blazing over them in the moonless dark. Arrived at the edge of the woods at a small concrete building half-buried in the ground, which at first blush, reminded Dee of a storm cellar.

Mathias led her down a set of stairs to a steel door.

She hesitated on the last step. “What are we doing?”

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t like this.”

“Do you think the food and the water and the shelter we’re providing to you and your children have no cost?” He pushed open the door and a waft of blood and shit and scorched tissue washed over Dee and conjured the memory of her ER rotation. She looked away from it and braced herself and looked again.

The man, or what was left of him, lay toppled over on the stone floor, naked and manacled to one of the metal folding chairs from the mess hall. He was unconscious in a puddle of blood that appeared as black as motor oil in the candlelight.

Liz sat in another folding chair looking sweaty and happy. She held an iron rod across her lap, one half-inch wide and wrapped at one end with a bulge of duct tape, the finger-grip indentations clearly visible. A blanket had been spread out on the floor beside Liz and upon it lay knives, a drill, a bucket filled with ice water, and a small blowtorch.

“Why are you doing this to him?” Dee asked and the disgust must have bled through her voice because Liz answered,

“This is the man who was on the verge of burning you and your children before we showed up.”

“I know who he is.”

“We’re collecting information,” Mathias said and closed the door. “Unfortunately, he lost consciousness after Liz hit him a few minutes ago.”

Dee stared at Liz. “Where’d you hit him?”

“Right arm.”

“Would you examine him please, Doctor?” Mathias asked.

Dee approached the man named Max, squatting down at the edge of the pool of his blood which was still creeping, millimeter by millimeter, across the stone. She touched two fingers to his wrist, felt the weak shudder of his radial artery. Inspected the mottled bruise that was expanding imperceptibly over the broken bone beneath his right bicep like a cancerous rainbow-red, yellow, blue, then ringed with black. His abdomen was hot and swollen around a bullethole in his side which she guessed had nicked his liver.

“She didn’t kill him, did she?” Mathias said.

“Not quite, but she did break the humerus of his right arm. He probably lost consciousness from the pain.” She noticed Max’s legs, fighting back the rise of bile in her throat as she said, “If you burn him anymore he’s going to lose so much fluid he’ll go into shock and die. I mean, he’s going to die of sepsis in the next day or so anyway, no doubt, but keep burning him, and you’ll lose him tonight.”

“Good to know.”

“Was there anything else you needed from me?” Dee asked, staring at this man who would’ve murdered her children and yet still cringing for him.

“Max did happen to mention that Cole is affected.”

Dee looked back over her shoulder. “Is that a joke?”

“Max told us that when you pulled up to the checkpoint and got out, he saw a light around Cole’s head.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You think?”

“You were torturing him. He’d say anything to-”

“That’s possible. In fact, I hope it’s the case. But just to be sure, Mike’s talking with Cole right now.”

Dee jumped up and started toward the door. As she reached for the handle, something struck her from behind and shoved her up against the cold wall of concrete.

Liz spoke into her ear, “Just settle down, Dee.”

“I’ll fucking kill you if you touch-”

“They’re only talking,” Mathias said.

“You don’t talk to my son without me.” She was trembling with rage.

“Fair enough. Let’s join them.”

She walked between Liz and Mathias, the woman clutching Dee’s left arm in a solid grip that Dee imagined could be crushing if Liz wanted it to be. There was candlelight glowing in the windows of her cabin now, and if she could have broken free she would have run toward it, her heart bumping harder and harder as they approached.

They followed Mathias up the three steps to the door.

He pushed it open, said, “How we doing?”

Dee jerked her arm out of Liz’s grasp and pushed past Mathias into the cabin.

Cole sat on the bed and Mike straddled a chair which he’d spun around in front of the door. Naomi was up, too, sitting against the window, and Dee could see in her daughter’s face a measure of real fear.

She climbed onto the bed, pulled her son into her arms.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yes.”

“Naomi?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Everybody’s fine, Mom,” Mike said, and something in his tone-a note of rehearsed steadiness and authority-and his cleanshaven face and buzzed blond hair reminded her of everything she hated about lawmen.

“You don’t speak to my son without me.”

Mike seemed to disregard this jurisdictional instruction, glancing instead at Mathias.

“Ask the boy about the lights.”

Mathias looked at Cole. “Go ahead, tell me about-”

“Don’t answer him, Cole. You don’t have to say a word to that man.”

“That’s not exactly true, Dee,” Mathias said. “Do you think I’m incapable of arranging a private conversation with your son? You can answer me, Cole. Cole, no, Jesus…it’s okay, don’t get upset. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Cole had turned into Dee’s chest, and she could feel his little body shaking, Cole trying not to cry in front of these strange people.

Mike said, “From what the boy told me, there was some feature in the sky several weeks ago.”

“So he’s confirmed what Max said.”

“Yeah, and apparently the people who witnessed this event became affected shortly thereafter.”

“Did you see the lights, Cole?”

Cole wouldn’t look at him.

“Did the boy see it?”

“Says he did, but that his parents and sister didn’t.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Dee said. “He’s no threat to anyone.”

Mathias stared at Dee. “We stay intentionally out of the loop here. We don’t monitor the news or even the weather. Tell me exactly what this event was.”

Dee kissed the top of Cole’s head and rubbed his back while she spoke. “A massive aurora visible to all of the lower forty-eight, northern Mexico-”

“And you didn’t see it?”

“It wasn’t like the news was going too crazy over it. No more coverage than a large meteor shower. We had wanted to stay up for it, but it happened so late, Jack and I just didn’t manage to drag ourselves out of bed.”

“But your son saw it.”

Her eyes filled up with tears. “Cole slept at a friend’s house and they set their alarm and woke up at three in the morning and watched it.”

Mathias smiled. “You lied to me.”

“I was afraid you’d-”

“You’ve brought someone who’s affected into our community.”

“My son is not affected.”

“So you say. But Cole has admitted to seeing the lights. Max saw the light around his head yesterday night. How exactly is he not affected?”

“I’m his mother. I know my son. He hasn’t changed at all. He isn’t hostile.”

“You’ll understand, me being responsible for the safety of the sixty-seven souls who live in this field, if I don’t just take your word on that.”

“Then we’ll leave,” she said.

“I wish it were that easy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know the location of our compound. You’ve had a tour of our security measures. Do you honestly believe I would allow you to go back out into that war zone with this information?”

“You can’t stop us from leaving if we want to.”

“Dee.” Mathias moved forward, eased down onto the bed. Ran his hand along her shinbone until his fingers closed gently around her ankle. “I wrote the constitution we abide by. I invented our civil and criminal codes of law. I am God here.”

He released her leg and glanced over his shoulder at Mike.

Back to Dee.

“I think at this point, it would benefit all concerned for you and I to step outside and have a private conversation.”

“You go to hell.”

He lowered his voice. “Think about your children, Dee.” Whispering now: “If you get upset, it’s only going to make them more afraid.”

Mike’s radio squeaked.

“Mike, come back.”

Mike unclipped the radio from his belt and lifted the receiver to his mouth.

“Can this wait, Bruce? Little tied up at the moment.”

“The sensors are returning multiple echoes.”

“Look, I don’t mean to be critical, since I know this is a new assignment for you, but sometimes a herd of elk or deer will pass through.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“How do you know?”

“We’ve had a current interruption in the razorwire.”

“You’re telling me someone’s cut through?”

“I think so, because now…” His voice trailed off.

Mike said, “Bruce, repeat. You broke up.”

“I’m wearing night vision goggles and staring south toward the woods…definitely picking up a lot of movement in the trees.”

“How many?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Soldiers?”

“I don’t know. They’re crawling along the ground.”

Mathias stood and grabbed the radio from Mike. “Bruce, we’re coming. Put the word out on channel eight and get people into position right now. Just like we’ve drilled. If you get a shot, start taking them out.”

“Copy that.”

Mathias handed the radio back to Mike and started for the door. “Liz, stand guard outside. If they try to leave, shoot them.”

Dee brought the lit candle over from the dresser and down with her and Cole onto the floor.

“Come on Naomi, I don’t want you near the window.”

Her daughter climbed off the bed, said, “We’re going to be killed if we stay in here.”

Dee crawled over to Naomi’s bed and lifted the mattress.

“Still there?” Naomi whispered.

“Yeah.”

Dee took the gun and eased the mattress back down. She ejected the magazine-still fully loaded-then coughed to cover the metallic clatter as she popped the magazine home and jacked a round.

“Both of you, get dressed quickly,” she whispered. “Put on every piece of clothing they gave you.” Dee went to the closet and tugged the three black parkas off the hangers, handed Naomi and Cole theirs, slid into hers.

Then she knelt between them, Cole struggling with the laces of the hiking boots they’d given him which were a size too big.

“Take Cole over there and crouch down with him behind the mattress until I come back for you.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Two minutes tops.”

Dee approached the door, tried to steady the Glock in her hand.

Glanced back at her children hiding behind the bed, could see only a bit of Naomi’s hair.

She spoke through the door, “Liz? You out there?”

No answer.

Dee slid the Glock into the front pocket of her parka and pulled the door open.

Whispered, “Liz?”

The woman squatted ten feet away, watching the far woods with her back to the door. Dee would have shot her then but she had no faith in her aim.

“Liz?”

The woman looked back. “He told you to stay inside.”

“I need to talk to you.”

Liz stood and started back toward the cabin. A machinepistol dangled from a strap around her neck. Her right hand held it trained on Dee. She drew in deep lungfuls of air though it wasn’t sufficient oxygen to fuel the raging pump of her heart.

Liz stopped at the foot of the steps, two feet below her. “What?”

Dee breathless, lightheaded.

“Isn’t there a safer place you can put us?”

“Mathias wants you here, so you stay here. Now go back inside or I’ll fuck you up a little.”

Dee wasn’t sure if Liz would even notice in the starlight, but she suddenly diverted her eyes toward the woods, let her brow scrunch into a subtle furrow. In the time it took Liz to glance back at whatever she thought Dee had seen, Dee drew the Glock from the parka pocket, had it waiting when Liz looked back, aimed down at her face.

Liz’s eyes went wide and she said, “Cunt.”

Dee pulled the trigger.

Liz dropped like she’d been poured out of a glass. Dee stood frozen, staring down at her, awestruck. How short the distance from life and thought to a sprawled shell in the grass. Knew she could have stood there all night trying to wrap her head around it and been no closer at sunrise. No closer forty years from now, or whenever the end of her days might come.

A spark flared across the field in the trees, the report right on its heels. Other muzzleflashes erupting in the forest like lightning bugs and the night filling with gunshots and men yelling.

She hurried back into the cabin, found her children still hiding behind the bed just like she’d told them.

“Time to leave, guys.”

Movement everywhere-shadows running through the dark and voices broken by sporadic shots. As she led her children around the side of the cabin, a distant burst of machinegun fire shredded the front door.

“Stay with me,” she said, grabbing Cole’s hand and pulling him toward the woods. Naomi ran alongside them. Fifty yards to cover and they were passing people in pajamas who’d just stumbled groggy-eyed out of their shacks, some loading rifles or shotguns.

They reached the woods and Dee dragged Naomi and Cole down into the leaves.

From where she lay, it looked like chaos.

Clusters of gunfire blazing back and forth.

Muzzleflashes in the guard towers.

No apparent order.

Just people trying to kill each other and not be killed themselves.

“You guys ready?”

“Where are we going?” Naomi asked.

Dee stood. “Just come on.” She put the Glock in her parka. “Give me your hands.”

They jogged through the woods.

Somewhere in the clearing, a woman screamed.

“Why did they just yell like that?” Cole asked.

“It doesn’t matter. We have to keep running.”

They worked their way through the trees and around the clearing as the firefight intensified.

A hail of bullets eviscerated a spruce tree three steps ahead.

Dee forced her children to the ground and lay on top of them.

“Anybody hit?”

“No.”

“No.”

“There’s a hole just ahead. Crawl into it. Go. Now.”

They scrabbled the last few feet through the leaves and then rolled down an embankment. With starlight barely straggling through the crowns of the trees, it was almost pitch-black in their hole, which was really more of a depression, two feet below the forest floor and just spacious enough to accommodate the three of them. Dee sweated under her clothes from the exertion, but as her heart began to slow, she knew the chill would come. She pulled her children into her and shoveled as many leaves as she could on top of them.

“We have to be quiet now,” she said.

“For how long?” Cole asked.

“Until the shooting stops.”

It went on all night, broken occasionally by spates of silence. Sometimes, there were footfalls in the leaves nearby, and once Dee glimpsed two shadows run past the edge of their depression.

Just before dawn, the shooting stopped. After a while, a chorus of weeping and pleading started up, rising toward a crescendo that was promptly smothered under twenty-five shots that rang out in tandem from what sounded like a pair of small-caliber handguns.

BY dawn, an eerie silence had settled over the clearing and the woods. The sky was lightening through the trees, and though her children snored quietly, Dee hadn’t slept all night. Carefully, she withdrew her arms from under Cole’s and Naomi’s necks and turned over in the frosted leaves and crawled up to the lip of the embankment.

Gunsmoke hovered over the clearing like a dirty mist. From ten yards back in the trees, she had a decent view of the soldiers. Counted at least twenty of them milling around in the grass, sometimes squatting down to confirm the dead were really dead.

There were bodies everywhere in the clearing, and over by the mess hall, two dozen or more lay toppled in a row-women and children.

She backed down into the hole.

Naomi stirred. Her eyes opened. Dee brought her finger to her lips.

They didn’t venture out of the hole. Kept hidden instead down in the leaves, listening and sometimes watching the soldiers in the clearing. At midday, a commotion pulled Dee back up to the forest floor. She saw Mathias running through the field, chased by a group of soldiers, one of whom stopped, drew a sidearm, and sighted him up.

Mathias fell concurrently with the pistol report, cried out, and amid the fading echoes of the gunshot, Dee could hear the soldiers laughing.

Someone said, “Nice shot, Jed.”

She watched them approach, others coming over now. Surrounding Mathias at the back of a little cabin, fifty or sixty yards away.

“What hole did this rat crawl out of?”

“There’s a trapdoor in the ground back there, camouflaged with grass.”

“Anyone else in there?”

“Just big enough for him.”

Mathias was still crying, and someone said, “You’re only shot in the ass. Shut the fuck up until we give you something to cry about.”

And they did. All afternoon and into the evening, they did. The screams of Mathias blaring through the woods in between bouts of what Dee could only hope was unconsciousness. She didn’t trust Cole’s curiosity, so she held the boy to her chest and covered his ears herself, part of her dying to know what was happening out there, figuring her imagination had invented something infinitely worse than the truth. The other part trying to force her thoughts elsewhere-to a memory or a fantasy-but when the raw and blistering screech of human agony filled the clearing, there was no way to avert her mind from it or to keep from attempting to picture what they must be doing to him.

As darkness fell, light flickered off the trees above them and streamers of sweet smoke drifted into the woods. For three minutes, Mathias screamed louder than he had all day, and then at last, went silent.

Cole and Naomi became still, and soon they were both murmuring softly in their sleep. Dee turned over onto her stomach, the stiffness in her joints excruciating after nearly twenty hours in this hole.

She crawled up the embankment and peered out past the trees.

A bonfire raged in the middle of the clearing and some of the men had gathered around it, their faces aglow, while others carried the pieces of the cabin they were using for firewood over to what she now realized was a pyre.

Mathias had been hoisted up in the middle of the blaze. Even from sixty yards away, she could see that the crossbeams which held him were still standing and that in fact her imagination had failed to concoct anything as remotely evil as what they had actually done to the man.

The soldiers’ laughter sounded alcohol-infused.

Somewhere out there, a woman wept.

Dee eased back down into the depression and roused her children.

They crept all the way back to the razorwire, which no longer hummed, and followed it through the trees. The fire was roaring now, shooting flames thirty feet high. From Dee’s vantage, she could see one of the soldiers running naked through the grass carrying a burning branch, which he delivered onto the front porch of a cabin.

The soldiers hooted their approval, assembling to watch as the flames licked out along the sides and the roof like molten fingers. Then the voices started up from inside.

“Keep running, guys,” Dee said, “and don’t listen.”

She could hear the people beating on the inside of the door and pleading to be let out, the soldiers talking back, taunting them. What welled up inside of Dee nearly drove her out into that clearing. Maybe she’d only kill one or two of them before they stopped her, but God, in this moment, nothing would feel so right.

“Mom, look.”

Naomi had stopped just ahead at a break in the fence where the soldiers had come through the night before, the razorwire severed and pushed back.

“Be careful, Na,” Dee said, and she lifted Cole in her arms and followed her daughter between the coils of wire.

When they were through, she set Cole down and they all jogged away from the screaming in the clearing.

Naomi was breathless and crying. She stopped, said, “We have to help them.”

“Baby, if there was even a slim chance, we would, but there isn’t. We’d end up dead, just like them.”

“Are they hurting?” Cole asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t stand hearing it,” Naomi said.

“Come on. We have to keep moving.”

In a little while, they came out of the woods onto the road about a hundred yards up from the checkpoint. Dee took the Glock out of her parka and they moved toward the vehicles up ahead.

No light. No movement.

The sound of voices in agony coming through the trees with the distant glow of flames.

A pair of hummers still sat in the road and the dead soldiers, too.

They arrived at Ed’s Jeep.

“Tires are still inflated,” she said.

Out of the gas cans fastened to the luggage rack, only one had survived the gunfight to hold its contents.

“We taking the Jeep?” Naomi asked.

“If the engine isn’t damaged. Why?”

“Ed’s still in the driver seat, and he doesn’t smell good.”

Dee went around the back of the Jeep and stood beside Naomi.

“No, Cole, stay there.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to see this.”

“What is it?”

“Ed’s dead, Cole. It’s nothing good to see. Just stay right there, please.”

She held her arm over her nose and mouth, could only imagine what the potency might have been in warm temperatures.

Ed had swollen up against the steering column, his head resting on the wheel. Dee grabbed hold of his left arm. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and it bent easily as she heaved Ed out of the car. Finally got him free and he tumbled out of the driver seat onto the dirt road, his legs still caught up in the floorboard.

“Give me a hand here, Na, but don’t look at his face.”

They dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and off the side of the road into the trees. Dee found a couple of extra shirts in the cargo area and she spread them across the driver seat to cover the sticky, rotting blood.

There was no more screaming in the woods.

“It still smells bad,” Naomi said.

“We’ll keep the windows down. This cold air will scour it out.”

They grabbed a few candy bars and packages of crackers from the banker’s box. Cole sat in the front passenger seat so Naomi could stretch out across the back, and Dee climbed in and worked the driver seat forward until her feet reached the pedals. Right away, she could see that driving was going to be impossible. Five bullets had come through the windshield into Ed, and around the puncture holes, each of them had made a circle of fractured glass that destroyed the translucence.

Dee got out and climbed up onto the hood and stomped on the windshield. All she managed to do was punch out a hole in front of the steering wheel where the cracks had weakened the glass.

The engine cranked on the first try. She shifted into gear and turned on the parking lights and eased onto the gas. They crept forward, Dee listening to the engine which rumbled smoothly, no audible sign of damage. The oil and temperature gauges offered no indications of malfunction.

She steered between the hummers and dead soldiers and accelerated down the dirt road, wind blasting through the windshield in a freezing stream. The car reeked of gasoline and decay and the bits of glass she sat upon cutting through her jeans, but at least they were on their own and moving away from the clearing. In this moment, safe.

Fifteen miles on, the dirt road intersected with an interstate. All lanes, east- and westbound, empty under the stars. She accelerated down the exit ramp, hit eighty after a half mile. At this speed, the rush of air coming through the windshield dried her eyes to the brink of blindness, so she braked down to forty.

Her children slept.

In every direction, no glimmer of habitation.

The milemarkers streaking past every couple of minutes.

The long vistas and the straight trajectory of the interstate gave a sense of safety, the security blanket of seeing what was coming long before you reached it, no hairpin turns, but it didn’t last.

Just shy of midnight, she turned north onto Highway 89.

Got twenty miles up the road and through a ghost town of charred houses before exhaustion forced her off the highway at a reservoir.

Killed the engine, left the kids to sleep-Cole curled up in the front passenger seat, Naomi in back. She popped the cargo hatch and dug out Ed’s sleeping bag and the roadmap, leaving the hatch open to air out the interior.

Dee walked down to the water and unrolled the sleeping bag across the dirt beside the remnants of another camp-candy bar and potato chip wrappers in the grass.

Kicked off her boots, zipped herself in.

She studied the map. By highway, they were roughly two hundred and seventy-five miles from the Canadian border, with one major city to deal with-Great Falls-but she could cut around and actually save time.

She closed the map.

No trees in this open, arid country. Sagebrush everywhere and she could see forever. A range of mountains to the north, the top thousand feet glazed with snow that glowed under the stars and the moon.

Soundless. Windless. The water so still she could see the stars in it.

She eased back into the sleeping bag, said her husband’s name. Tears burned down her face. It had been five days without him. She lay there trying to feel if he was gone. From a purely logical standpoint, it seemed impossible that he wasn’t, and she certainly felt apart from him. But, for whatever it was worth (and she had to acknowledge maybe nothing and the probability of self-delusion), she didn’t feel his absence. She felt that Jack was still alive, somehow, under the same night sky.

THE semitrailer reeked of shit, urine, vomit, body odor, blood, and something even more malignant. Jack leaned back against the metal wall, his left hand throbbing with such intensity he prayed to lose consciousness again. With the rear door closed, it was pitch black inside and Jack could feel his shoulders grazing the shoulders of the people he sat between as the rocking of the trailer jostled them together. The noise was bewildering-the distant big-rig growl of the V12 Detroit Diesel, the closer rumble of the tires underneath him, a baby wailing, a woman crying, a half dozen voices in whispered conversation.

A man sitting across from him against the other side of the trailer, said, “This is for the guy who just got put in here. Where are we?”

“A mountain pass in Wyoming. Not far from Jackson. Do you know where they’re taking us?”

“Nobody knows anything.”

“How’d you get here?”

“They picked me up two days ago in Denver.”

“Did someone die in here?”

“Yeah, that’s what the smell is. They’re toward the front.”

The pressure in Jack’s ears released as they descended the pass. What was left of his ring finger dripped on his pants, and he tucked his hand under his jacket and tried to wrap his undershirt around the open wound, felt a surge of whitehot pain that nearly made him vomit when he touched the jagged phalange of his ring finger.

The baby went on crying for what he guessed was thirty minutes.

He said finally, “Is someone holding that baby?”

“I’m sorry.” A woman’s voice. “I’m trying to calm her-”

“No, I’m not complaining, I just…I can’t see anything, and I wanted to make sure someone’s holding her.”

“Someone is.”

No light slipped in anywhere.

They rolled down what felt like a winding road, and after a while the sharp turns diminished.

Someone shoved a plastic jug of water into his hands, said, “One sip,” and Jack didn’t even hesitate to lift it to his mouth and take a swallow.

He passed it on to the person beside him.

“Thank you.” Voice of an older woman.

Every passing moment, he was moving farther away from his family, and the thought of them alone out there, every bit as hungry and thirsty and scared as he was, simply made him want to be back with them or die right now. He tried but he couldn’t stop himself from picturing Dee and the kids inside the pipe, beginning to wonder where he was. After a while, when he didn’t return, they’d search the construction site, and soon after, start calling his name, their voices traveling into the forest. Calm at first. He could almost hear them and it broke his heart. He hadn’t told them where he was going. Hadn’t known himself. Maybe they’d walk up to the pass, but there’d be nothing there, certainly not him, and by then, Dee would be getting frantic and Naomi crying. Possibly Cole as well if he grasped the situation. Would they think he’d abandoned them? Wandered into the woods and somehow gotten injured or killed? How long would they keep looking and what would their state of mind be, when finally, they gave up?

Jack opened his eyes. The diesel engine had gone quiet. The baby had stopped crying. His head rested against the bony shoulder of the old woman to his right and he felt her hand on his face, her whisper in his ear, “This too shall pass. This too shall pass.”

He lifted his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“It’s okay, I don’t mind. You were crying in your sleep.”

Jack wiped his eyes.

The rear door shot up and the light of a sunset flooded the semitrailer with a blast of freezing air. Two soldiers stood on the ramp with automatic weapons, and one of them said, “On your feet everybody.”

The prisoners began to haul themselves up all around him, and Jack struggled onto his feet as well.

He descended the metal ramp into the grass, lightheaded and unstable.

A soldier at the bottom pointed across the open field, said, “You hungry?”

“Yeah.”

“Food’s that way.”

“Why are we being-”

The solider rammed his AR-15 into Jack’s chest. “Get going.”

Jack turned and stumbled along with the crowd, everyone moving through an open field and folding into streams of more people filing out of four other semitrailers-two hundred prisoners by Jack’s estimate. They looked haggard and addled and he searched for the old woman whose shoulder he’d used for a pillow, but he didn’t see anyone who met his mind’s imagining of her.

Over his shoulder, Jack spotted several buildings, and though impossible to be certain in the lowlight, they appeared to be surrounded by small airplanes and a handful of private jets.

Everywhere, soldiers were directing the prisoners toward a collection of tents a quarter mile away on the far side of the field.

“Hot food and beds,” someone yelled. “Keep moving.”

Jack looked for the man who’d cut his finger off, but he didn’t see him.

They crossed the asphalt of a runway. The tents closer now, and straight ahead, less than fifty yards away, a mountain of dirt and a bulldozer.

Jack smelled food on the breeze.

On ahead, people were stopping near the pile of dirt and he could hear soldiers yelling. They were lining the prisoners up shoulder to shoulder.

A soldier shoved him forward, said, “Stand right there and don’t fucking move.”

“Why?”

“We have to inspect you.”

“For what?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Jack stood in a line of ragged-looking people, some of whom had begun to cry.

The soldiers were backing away, Jack’s head swimming with the smell of whatever was cooking across the field.

As he glanced back toward the tents, his eyes caught on the several thousand square feet of raw, freshly-turned earth that he and the other prisoners stood at the edge of.

He looked at the bulldozer again.

By the time he understood what was happening, the two dozen soldiers who’d herded them into the middle of the field were raising their AR-15s.

Someone said, “Oh my God.”

Several prisoners took off running, and a soldier squeezed off four controlled bursts. They fell and the prisoners were screaming, others trying to flee, and one of the soldiers yelled and they all opened fire at once.

The noise was tremendous. Slap of bullets into meat. The schizophrenic madness of the machineguns. The screams. All down the line, people were tumbling back into the pit. Maybe two seconds had passed, the muzzleflashes bright in the evening, and the soldiers already edging forward and still firing.

It felt like someone punched him in the shoulder, and then Jack was staring up at the clouds which were catching sunlight on their underbellies, people falling into the pit all around him. Bloodspray everywhere and the smell of shit, urine, and rust becoming prevalent like the sensory embodiment of terror, warm blood leaking all over him, down into his face, appendages writhing all around him. Then the shooting stopped and there came a moment of silence, Jack’s ear drums in shock, recovering from the noise, before the sound of a hundred dying people faded in. If Jack had believed in hell, he couldn’t have imagined it sounding any worse than this chorus of agony-groans, moaning, weeping, screaming, people dying loudly, quietly, some cursing their murderers, some begging them to do what could not be undone, some just asking why. And the realization slowly dawning on Jack amid the horror-I’m still alive, I’m still alive.

A voice lifted out of the open grave, “Oh God, please finish me.”

Jack’s shoulder was burning now.

He could see the soldiers standing at the edge of the pit, Jack thinking only of his children as he pulled several bodies over him, and then the machineguns erupted again with a blaze of fire, and he could feel the bodies that shielded him shaking with the impact of the bullets. Shit himself waiting to be shot, but it never happened.

This time, when the guns went quiet, the groans were half what they had been.

Jack’s entire body trembled.

He willed himself to be still.

The soldiers near him were talking.

“-don’t serve that meatloaf again. Fucking rancid shit.”

“I love the mac and cheese though. Don’t disrespect.”

“Oh, hell yeah. You got a crawler over there.”

Two bursts from the machinegun.

“All right, boys, who drew cleanup?”

The light was abandoning the sky, and there was little in the way of groaning now, just desperate breathing all around him.

“Nathan, Matt, Jones, and Chris.”

“Well fucking get to it, boys, and before you lose your light. We’re going to party tonight. God, this is going to be a pretty green piece of grass next spring.”

Jack could hear the soldiers walking away, the sound of distant voices, still some movement in the pit.

As one of the bodies on top of him began to twitch, a noise rose up at the far end of the pit, followed by another and another, the last one close to where he lay.

He watched as one of the soldiers climbed down into the pit. They held a chainsaw with a three-foot guide bar, wore a white vinyl apron, a helmet with a plexiglass faceplate. He started across the top layer of bodies, slashing at anything that moved.

Jack tried to lay still, ignoring the burn in his shoulder.

The body on top of him sat up, and in the low light, Jack could see her long, black hair falling down her back. She was crying and he reached up to try and pull her down, but the soldier with the chainsaw had already seen her and was wading over through the bodies.

Jack heard her scream just barely and then the soldier swung his giant chainsaw.

She fell back onto Jack and the blood flowed, blinding him, choking him, and he lay there unmoving as the solider passed by, the noise of the chainsaws growing softer.

Someone yelled, “Jones, look at this guy. Untouched. Didn’t even catch a bullet. Keep playing dead, motherfucker.”

The two-stroke wailed and there were seconds of the most horrendous screaming Jack had ever heard, and then the chainsaw motors idled again.

The soldiers wandered through the pit for another ten minutes, and then the chainsaws went quiet and the voices slipped out of range.

Jack didn’t move for a long time. The blood that covered him becoming sticky and cold and not another sound daring to lift out of the open grave.

His shoulder throbbing.

The clouds overhead gone dark and the sky almost void of light.

He pushed the headless body off of him and sat up.

Off in the distance toward the tents, a bonfire raged and there were fifty or sixty men gathered around it, their laughter and voices carrying across the field.

Jack crawled onto the surface of the pit, a few people still barely hanging on, groaning as he moved across them, one man begging for his help. The pain in Jack’s shoulder making it nearly impossible to set his weight on his right arm, but he finally reached the back edge of the pit and climbed out into the grass.

He kept moving on his stomach across the field through that strange and fleeting grayness between twilight and night. A hundred yards out from the pit, exhaustion stopped him. Still had a fifth of a mile to go to the trees, but he couldn’t catch his breath. Lay on his side watching the bonfire and the soldiers in camp, the reflection of the fire bright off the shine of their black leather boots.

Jack crawled again.

Another twenty minutes before he passed through the wall of trees, stopping ten feet inside the forest. Retched his guts out though there was nothing left but the sip of water he’d had hours ago in the back of the tractor trailer.

He crawled to the nearest spruce tree under an overhang of branches.

On the cusp of pitch-black darkness in the shadow of the forest.

He touched his right shoulder-painful and hot, though not as bad as the last bullet he’d stopped. Couldn’t see the wound, but running his hand along the back of his shoulder, he thought he could feel the exit hole-a circular flare of burned skin.

Despite the pain, he felt a detachment from himself so intense it verged on out-of-body, like a filter setting up between what had happened in the field and his emotional connection to it. He felt a beautiful step removed. He watched himself listening to the soldiers. Watched himself lying on his side on the moist ground with his back against the tree trunk. Watched his eyes close as the devastation that was this day sat perched beside his head with the patience of a gargoyle, waiting to crush him.

At some point in the night, a noise from the field woke him, and it took Jack a moment to connect it with the growl of the dozer. Through the branches of the spruce tree, he could just make out the lights on top of its cab blazing down into the pit, the scoop pushing earth back into the open grave.

He shut his eyes but another sound wouldn’t let him sleep-a crunching like the snap of trees during an ice storm, and he’d almost let it go, so tired, so tired, when he realized what it was. It could only be the bones of those inside the pit, breaking under the dozer’s weight.

JACK woke to stomach cramps and the splintering brightness of the sun coming through the branches. He crawled out from under the spruce tree, lightheaded and sore, wondering how much blood he’d lost during the night.

The exposed bone of his left ring finger hurt more than his shoulder.

The meadow was abuzz with soldiers, many of them closer than he would’ve liked, and some of them with dogs.

He struggled to his feet and started into the woods. It was slow-going. He had no sense of direction. Just a dense pine wood that seemed to go on and on.

By midday, he hadn’t crossed a road, a water source, or anything resembling civilization, and as the light started to fail the forest began to climb, until in the twilight, he found himself on a steep, wooded hillside. He sat down. Shivering. Nothing left.

WOKE colder than he’d ever been in his life and covered in frost, curled up on the mountainside and watching the torturously slow progression of sunlight climbing the hill toward the spot where he lay.

When the sun finally washed over him two hours later, he shut his eyes and faced its brightness, let the warmth envelop him. He stopped shivering. The frost had burned off his clothing. He sat up and looked up the hillside and started to climb.

Somehow, he went on. Hands and knees. Mindless hours. Always up. Endless.

Late afternoon, he lay on a hillside covered in aspen trees. If someone had told him he’d been climbing this mountain for a year, he might’ve believed them. He was losing control of his thoughts. The thirst fracturing his mind. It occurred to him that if he didn’t get up and start walking in the next ten seconds, he wasn’t going to get up again. Could feel himself on the edge of not caring.

In the middle of the night, he stumbled out of the forest into a clearing that swept another thousand feet up the mountain to his left, and shot down a narrow chute between the spruce trees to his right. The sky was clear, the moon high, everything bright as day. A golf course, he thought. A steep golf course. Then he noticed the tiny lodge halfway up the hill. The metal terminals that went up the mountain and the cables strung between them. He stared downslope, saw a sign with a black diamond next to the word, “Emigrant.”

Jack’s legs buckled.

Then he lay with the side of his face in the cold, dead grass, staring down the steep headwall. He could see three mountain ranges from his vantage point, the rock and the pockets of snow above timberline glowing under the moon.

He closed his eyes, kept telling himself he should get up, keep walking, crawling, roll down this fucking mountain if he had to, because stopping was death, and death meant never seeing them again.

Saying her name aloud tied a hot wire of pain around his throat, which felt full of glass shards. So dry and swollen. He said the name of his daughter. The name of his son. He pushed himself up. Sat there dry-heaving for a minute. Then he got onto his feet and started down the mountain.

Jack was a dead man walking two hours later, a thousand feet lower, when he arrived at the foot of the dark lodge. He had to crawl up the steps and pull himself upright again by the wooden door handles. They were locked. He went back down the steps and pried one of the rocks lining the sidewalk out of the ground.

So weak, it took him four swings to even put a crack through the big square window beside the doors. The fifth swing broke through and the glass fell out of the frame. He scrambled over into a cafeteria, perfectly dark except for where moonlight streamed through the tall windows. So strange to be indoors again. It had been days. The grill in back was still shuttered for the season. He limped over to the drink fountain, mouth beginning to water. Pressed the buttons for Coca-Cola, Sierra Mist, Orange Fanta, Country Time Lemonade, Barq’s Rootbeer, but the machine stood dormant, empty.

He made his way between the tables toward a common area that accessed a bar and a gift shop, both locked up. He moved out of the long panels of moonlight into darkness.

Straight ahead, he could just make out a pair of doors. As he moved toward them, they vanished in the black, but he kept on, hands outstretched, until he ran into a wall.

He pushed and the door swung back.

Couldn’t see a thing, but he knew he was in a bathroom. Smelled the water in the toilets.

He ran his hand along the wall, found the switch, hit the lights.

Nothing.

Heard the door ease shut. He moved forward to where he thought the sinks might be, and stepped into a wall. Turned around, becoming disoriented as he moved in a different direction. He touched a counter, his hands frantically searching for the faucet. Cranked open the tap, but nothing happened.

Took him several minutes to get his trembling hands on the stall door. He pulled it open and dropped to his knees, hands grazing the cold porcelain of the toilet. Inside the bowl, his fingers slid into chilly water.

He didn’t think about where this water had been or all the people who’d sat on this toilet and pissed and shit and vomited here, or the industrial strength chemicals that had been used to clean the bowl. He lowered his face to the surface of the water and drank and thought only of how sweet it tasted running down his swollen throat.

A razor line of light. For a long time, Jack just stared at it. His face against a tiled floor. Cold but not freezing. Piecing together where he was, how he’d arrived here, beginning to face the fact that he wasn’t dead. At least he was mostly sure he wasn’t.

He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.

He wandered toward the paper towel dispenser.

Cranked out a length of paper, tore it off.

Through the dark, and then he pulled open the door, the light like a railroad spike through his temples.

He limped out into the lobby, which looked almost like civilization in the daylight, sat down and went to work making a bandage for what was left of his ring finger.

He was already pushing open the front doors when he realized what he’d just walked past. Stepped back inside, half-expecting it to have vanished, like a mirage, but there it stood.

He rushed back into the cafeteria to the broken window. Lifted the rock off the floor and brought it into the lobby, where he hurled it through the glass.

He reached through and pulled out everything he could get his hands on-bags of potato chips, candy bars, crackers, cookies-until the vending machine was emptied and its contents spread across the floor.

He ripped into a bag of Doritos.

The chips were stale, leftovers from last season, but the intensity of the flavor made his mouth ache. He sat in the warm sunlight pouring through all the glass around the front entrance. Finished the bag and opened another filled with processed onion rings he would never have ingested in his former life. They were gone in a moment.

He drank his fill of water from the toilet and urinated for the first time in days.

Then grabbed the plastic garbage bag from the trashcan under the sink.

Back in the lobby, he put the two dozen packages of snacks into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.

There was a giant mirror on the wall across from the vending machine. He’d noticed it a little while ago, and now it called to him. The reflection unlike anybody he knew, his face thin as an ax-blade, beard coming in full. He was the color of rust, covered in dried blood, like a zombie-vagrant.

Outside the entrance to the resort, he came across a bicycle rack and a single, abandoned mountain bike standing up between the bars. The tires were low and there was bird shit all over the seat, but it looked otherwise in working order. He climbed aboard and tied his bag of food to the handlebars. He coasted down the sidewalk through the empty parking lot, turned out onto a country road, and then he was speeding along at thirty-five miles per hour down the winding, faded pavement and the cool, piney air blasting his face. The hum of the tires so otherworldly in the face of everything that had come before, like he was out for a bike ride on holiday.

Ten miles on and several thousand feet lower, Jack braked and brought the bike to a stop. Up ahead, a herd of range cattle was crossing the road, and he watched them pass. He’d ridden down out of the alpine forest and now the foothills of the mountains were bare and the air had become warm and redolent of sage.

He rode on, still cruising east and dropping. The foothills lay a mile behind him now, and the mountains fifteen, and the land was barren and open and the sky immense.

The riding turned strenuous when the grade of the road leveled out, but nothing compared to walking on blistered feet or crawling up a mountain.

In the evening he was twenty miles out from the mountains and turning north onto Highway 89, his quads burning and his face glowing with wind- and sunburn.

A mile and a half up the road, he caught the scent of water on the breeze, thinking he’d grown hypersensitive to the smell as of late, some recent adaptation borne out of nearly dying of thirst.

He crested a small rise and there lay the reservoir, the water like ink under the evening sky and the sun just a chevron of brilliance on the ridgeline of those mountains he’d ridden out of.

Abandoned the bike on the grassy shoulder and climbed down the slope to the water’s edge. Fell to his knees. Drank. It was cold and faintly sweet, none of that metallic, sterilized tang of toilet water.

He ate a supper consisting of a Butterfinger candy bar, two packages of Lays barbeque potato chips, and a Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie.

Curled up in the grass by the water, already cold, but at least he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He watched the sun go behind the mountains and the stars begin to burn through the growing dark. Reeking of the dried, rotting gore that covered every square inch of his person.

He was crying before he realized it, hot tears running down his face. Alive now, and on track to stay that way for the time being. There were choices to make.

Head south back into Wyoming, maybe meet up with his family on the way. But they’d been separated now almost four days. They might’ve been picked up or found transportation or come upon some fate he couldn’t bring himself to imagine. Would Dee try to find him, or focus on getting Naomi and Cole across the border into Canada?

He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. The battery had been dead for weeks.

He held down the power button and typed in Dee’s number, held the phone to his ear.

“Hey, baby. I’m at this lake in Montana about thirty miles north of Bozeman. It’s beautiful here. So quiet. I’m watching the stars come out. I hope you and the kids are okay. I’ve had a hard few days.”

Out in the middle of the lake, a fish jumped.

“I think I’m going to keep heading north toward Great Falls, our old stomping grounds. I have such sweet memories of that city and you.

“I don’t know how to find you, baby, so please stay open and make smart choices. I’m not leaving this country without you, Dee.”

The ripples from the middle of the lake were just beginning to reach the shore.

He put his BlackBerry back into his pocket.

The water became still again.

He let his eyes close when they were ready.

THE sound of wind in the grass. Sunshine on his eyelids. It didn’t feel cold enough to be first light. He sat up stiff, so sore. An act of willpower just to stand. Late morning, the sun already high. He walked up the grassy slope into the middle of the highway. The vistas north and south were endless. Nothing going. Nothing coming. Just silence and an overload of open space. The horizons so far, the sky so vast, it seemed right on top of him.

He stripped out of his clothes and ran naked and gasping into the freezing water. Ducked under and swam until he had to surface, ten yards out from the shore. He went back and grabbed his stinking clothes and carried them out into waist deep water, rinsed the blood and filth out of everything, and then used one of his shirts to scrub himself down.

Jack rode north up the highway, soaking wet. Rode hours. Until his clothes had dried out and he had nothing left. Stopped in the early evening, no idea how far he’d ridden, but he hadn’t passed a car or a house all day, and the world looked much as it had twenty-four hours prior-empty, big sky country-and he still felt very small in it.

TWO miles into his day, coasting down a long, gentle grade in the dawnlight, Jack braked and came to a stop in the road. He squinted, trying to sharpen his nearsightedness into focus. Couldn’t tell how far. A mile. Maybe two. The calculation of distance impossible in this country.

A vehicle parked in the road. One of its doors open.

For ten minutes, Jack didn’t move and he didn’t take his eyes off the car.

He pedaled up the road, stopping every few hundred yards to view things from a closer vantage.

It was a late model minivan. White. Covered in dust and pockmarked with bulletholes. Some of the windows had been shot out, and there was glass and blood on the pavement. All four tires low but intact. Utah license plate.

Jack stopped ten feet from the rear bumper and got off the bike.

Smell of death everywhere.

Somehow, he had missed the girl in the sagebrush. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and it looked as though she’d been gunned down running, her long blond hair caught up in the branches. He wasn’t going to get close enough to see how old she was, but she looked small from where he stood. Ten years old maybe.

A woman sat in the front passenger seat and her brains covered the window at her head. Twin teenage boys lay slumped against each other in the backseat. The driver seat was empty.

Jack climbed in behind the wheel. The keys dangled out of the ignition. Fuel gauge at a quarter.

He turned the key.

The engine cranked.

He pulled the boys out of the back and their mother out of the front and lined them all up in the desert. Didn’t want to, but he couldn’t just leave the girl face up, naked and entangled in the sage.

He stood for a long time staring down at them.

Midday and the flies already feasting.

Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his benefit. No words to put this right.

He loaded the bicycle into the back.

He drove north, keeping his speed at a steady fifty. A CD in the stereo had been playing the Beach Boys, and Jack let it go on playing until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He passed through a small, burned town, and fifteen miles north, on the outskirts of another, had to swerve to miss someone walking alone down the middle of the highway.

He stopped the car, watched a man staggering toward him in the rearview mirror, his defective gait unfazed, as if he hadn’t even noticed the car that had nearly hit him. He didn’t carry a gun or a backpack, nothing in his hands which he held like arthritic claws, his fingers bent and seemingly frozen that way.

Jack shifted into park.

The closer the man got, the more wrecked he looked-sunburned a deep purple, his dirty white oxford shirt streaked in blood and missing one of the arms entirely, his leather clogs disintegrating off his feet.

He walked right past Jack’s window and kept on going, straight down the double yellow.

Jack opened the door.

“Hey.”

The man didn’t look back.

Jack got out and walked after him. “Sir, do you need help?”

No response.

Jack drew even with him, tried to make eye contact, then finally stepped in front of the man, who stopped, his gray eyes staring off at a horizon beyond even the scope of this infinite country.

In another world completely.

“Are you hurt?” Jack said.

His voice must have made some impact, because the man met his eyes, but he didn’t speak.

“I have food in the car,” Jack said. “I don’t have water, but this road will take us through the Little Belt Mountains. We’ll find some in the high country for sure.”

The man just stood there. His entire body trembling slightly. Like there was a cataclysm underway deep in his core.

Jack touched the man’s bare arm where the shirt sleeve had been torn away, felt the sun’s accumulation of heat radiating from it.

“You should come with me. You’ll die out here.”

He escorted the man to the passenger side and installed him in the front seat.

“Sorry about the smell,” Jack said. “It ain’t pretty, but it beats walking.”

The man seemed not to notice.

Jack buckled him in and closed the door.

They sped down the abbreviated main street of another slaughtered town. Mountains to the north, and the road climbed into them. Jack glanced over at the man, saw him touching the matter on his window, running his finger through it, smearing it across the glass. A bag of potato chips and a candy bar sat in his lap, unopened, unacknowledged.

“I’m Jack, by the way,” he said. “What’s your name?”

The man looked at him as if he either didn’t know or couldn’t bring himself to say. His wallet bulged out of the side pocket of his slacks, and Jack reached over, tugged it out, flipped it open.

“Donald Massey, of Provo, Utah. Good to meet you, Donald. I’m from Albuquerque.”

Donald made no response.

“Aren’t you hungry? Here.” Jack reached over and took the candy bar out of Donald’s lap, ripped open the packaging. He slid the bar into Donald’s grasp, but the man just stared at it.

“Do you want to listen to some music?”

Jack turned on the Beach Boys.

They rode up into the mountains, Jack hating to be on a winding road again. With all these blind corners, you could roll up on a roadblock before you knew what hit you.

In the early afternoon, they passed through a mountain village that was probably very much a ghost town before anyone had bothered to burn it. A few dozen houses. Couple buildings on the main strip. Evergreen trees in the fields and on the hills, the smell of them coming through the dashboard vents, a welcome change.

On the north side of town, Jack pulled over and turned off the engine. When he opened the door, he could hear the running water in the trees and smell its sweetness.

“You need to drink something, Donald,” Jack said.

The man just stared through the windshield.

Jack lifted a travel mug out of the center console.

Jack rinsed the residue of ancient coffee out of the mug and filled it with water from the creek.

Headed back to the van, opened Donald’s door.

“It’s really good,” Jack said.

He held the mug to Donald’s sunblasted lips and tilted. Most of the water ran down the man’s chest under his shirt, but he inadvertently swallowed some of it.

Jack tried to give him a little more, but the man was disinterested.

“We’ll reach Great Falls in the afternoon,” Jack said. “It’s a big city. I used to live there.”

Impossible to know if the man registered a word he was saying.

“I got separated from my family five days ago.” Jack glanced at the man’s left ring finger, saw a gold wedding band. “Were you with your family, Donald?”

No response.

Jack sipped the water, grains of sand from the creekbed deposited on the tip of his tongue.

“Let me guess what you do for a living. My wife and I used to play this game all the time.” Jack studied the man’s leather clogs-nothing much to look at now, but they suggested wealth. Couple hundred dollars off the shelf. Jack inspected the tag on the back of the man’s collar. “Brooks Brothers. All right.” He looked at Donald’s hands. Covered in blood and still clutched like claws, but he could tell they weren’t the hands of a man who earned his living working outdoors. “You strike me as an ad man,” Jack said. “Am I right? You work in an advertising and marketing firm in Provo?”

Nothing.

“I bet you’d never guess my vocation. Tell you what. I’ll give you three…”

Jack stopped. Felt the cold premonition of having missed something lifting out of his gut. He almost didn’t want to know, but the fear couldn’t touch his curiosity.

He opened the glove compartment, rifled through a stack of yellow napkins, plastic silverware, bank deposit envelopes, until he came to the automobile liability policy, protected in a plastic sleeve. He opened it, stared down at the small cards that identified the coverage, the policy limits, and the named insureds.

Donald Walter Massey.

Angela Jacobs-Massey.

Jack looked at Donald.

“Jesus Christ.”

They went on through the mountains, Jack trying to pay attention to what was coming in the distance, but all he could think about was Donald, wondering what had happened back down the road. Couldn’t imagine the man fleeing. He wouldn’t have left his family. Had the affected purposely left him alive then? Murdered his family in front of him and then sent him down the highway on foot?

Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.

He looked over at the man who now leaned against the door. That look in his face like he’d just been hollowed out. Jack wanting to tell him that he’d taken care of their bodies, or at least done what he could, shown them respect. He wanted to say something beautiful and profound and comforting, about how even in all this horror, there were things between people who loved each other that couldn’t be touched, that lived through pain, torture, separation, even death. He thought he still believed that. But he didn’t say anything. Just reached over and laced his fingers through Donald’s, which barely released their incomprehensible store of tension, and Jack held the man’s hand as he drove them down out of the mountains, and he did not let go.

In the early evening the city lay several miles in the distance. The sun low over the plains beyond. Everything bright, golden. The way Jack dreamed of this place.

He disengaged his hand from Donald’s, the man still sleeping against the door.

The gas gauge needle hovered over the empty slash.

He was debating whether to head into town or take the bypass when he saw the first sign-a billboard that had once advertised a casino, now whitewashed and covered in black writing:

YOU ARE NOW UNDER SNIPER SURVEILLANCE

Stop in the next 400 yards

Jack took his foot off the gas.

Another billboard, same side of the road, one hundred yards further down.

300 yards to stop

Comply or you will be shot

Jack looked in the rearview mirror, saw several vehicles trailing him, no idea where they’d come from.

200 YARDS

TURN OFF YOUR VEHICLE AND…

He could see a roadblock a quarter mile in the distance, set up at a fork in the highway.

More than twenty cars and trucks. Sand bags. Staunch artillery.

He was passing vehicles now on the shoulder that had been shot to hell and burned.

DO NOT FUCKING MOVE

The cars behind him were close now, one of them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with the roof cut out and two men with machineguns standing on the back seat, ready to unload.

Jack brought the minivan to a full stop, put it in park, and turned off the engine.

The Jeep hung back thirty yards.

Jack looked over at Donald, started to rouse him, then thought, Why wake the man just to be killed?

Six heavily-armed men in body armor strode up the middle of the highway toward the minivan, one of them dragging an emaciated man along by a leash in one hand, the other holding a cattle prod.

They didn’t strike Jack as military, didn’t carry themselves so cocksure.

As if it had been scripted, the greeting party stopped thirty yards out from the front bumper of the minivan, and the tallest of the bunch raised a bullhorn to his mouth.

“Both of you, out of the car.”

Jack grabbed Donald’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out.”

The man wouldn’t move.

“Donald.”

“You have five seconds before we open fire.”

Jack opened his door and stepped out into the highway with his hands raised.

“You in the car, get out or-”

“He doesn’t hear you,” Jack yelled. “His mind is gone.”

“Lay down on your stomach.”

Jack got down onto his knees and then prostrated himself across the rough, sun-warmed pavement. Listened to the sound of their footsteps coming toward him, and he didn’t dare move or even raise his head to watch them approach. Just lay there with his heart throbbing against the road, wondering, from a strangely detached perspective, if this was how and where it would end for him.

The men stopped several feet away.

One of them came forward and Jack felt hands running up and down his sides, his legs.

“Clean.”

“Go check the other guy. You, sit up.”

Jack sat up.

“Where’s Benny?”

One of the guards produced a blindfolded rail of a man, naked, beaten to within an inch of his life, bruises covering his body and face, his hands cuffed and a chain linking his ankles above his bare feet.

The tall, bearded man pointed a large revolver at Jack’s face and asked him his name.

“Jack.”

“Is there a bomb in your van?”

“No.”

The one who’d frisked Jack peered over the front passenger door, said, “This one’s completely checked out.”

The bearded man stared at Jack. “Jack, I want to introduce you to Benny.” Benny’s handler gave a hard tug on the leash, dragging him within a foot of Jack. “Here’s the deal. If Benny likes you, I’m going to blow your brains out all over the road. If he doesn’t, we’ll talk.” He looked at Benny. “Ready, boy? Ready to do some work?”

Benny nodded. He was salivating.

“Benny, I’m going to take your blindfold off and show you our new friend.”

Benny urinated on the pavement.

“If you do good, I’ll give you some water and a treat. Are you going to do a good job?”

Benny made a sound that wasn’t human, and then the bearded man nodded to his handler, who pulled off the blindfold. The wildman crouched in front of Jack. Eyes ringed with black and yellow bruises but still a deep clarity and intensity in them. He was inches from Jack’s face. Smelled terrible, like he’d been bedding down in his own shit, and he seemed to be staring at something on the back of Jack’s skull.

Jack looked up at the man holding the revolver. “What the fuck is-”

Never saw the thing move, but Benny was suddenly on top of him and trying to tear Jack’s throat out with his teeth. Took three men to drag it away and several jolts from the cattle prod before it finally collapsed in the road and curled up moaning in the fetal position.

Jack scrambled back toward the van, trying to catch his breath, the man with the revolver moving toward him, saying, “It’s all right. This is good news. If Benny had crawled into your lap and started cooing, you wouldn’t be with us anymore.”

“What is that thing?”

“Benny’s our pet. Our affected pet. He checks out everyone who tries to come into the city. I’m Brian, by the way.” He offered a hand, helped Jack onto his feet.

“Is the city safe?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. We figure there’s ten, fifteen thousand people here. Many have left, gone north toward the border, but that’s a rough trip. It’s heavily guarded up there. We’ve got all the roads into town protected.”

“No affected in the city?”

“Nope.”

“How’s that possible?”

“It was cloudy the night of the event over this part of Montana.”

“You haven’t been attacked?”

“Not by any force that stood a chance. We’ve got five thousand armed men ready to fuck shit up on a moment’s notice.”

Jack looked around, the RPMs of his heart falling back toward baseline.

“Has a woman with two children passed through in the last week?”

“I don’t think so. You have a picture?”

“No.”

“Your wife and kids?”

Jack nodded.

“You’re the first person to even come up this road in three days. Are they coming here to meet you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. We were separated in Wyoming.” He looked at the rest of the crew. “Any of you seen them?”

Nothing but headshakes and sorrys.

“My boy is affected,” Jack said. “He isn’t symptomatic or violent, but he saw the lights. He’s seven years old. Would you let him in?”

“How’s it possible he isn’t like the others?”

“I don’t know, but he isn’t. His name is Cole.”

“We’ll keep an eye out for them,” Brian said. “If he isn’t hostile, we’ll let your family through.”

“You swear to me?”

“We don’t kill kids.” Brian pointed through the windshield at Donald. “Friend of yours?”

“I picked him up this morning outside of White Sulphur Springs, just walking down the middle of the road. He needs medical attention.”

“Well, there’s shelters set up at some of the schools. You might find a doctor at one of those.”

“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.