Run

He walked a long corridor, cots on either side and open suitcases-barely enough room him to make his way down the middle without trampling someone’s filthy laundry.

Five minutes of negotiating the crowded hallways brought him to the entrance of a gymnasium, where a woman sat at a folding table reading by candlelight a library-bound edition of Treasure Island. She looked up at Jack with what he imagined to be the no-bullshit demeanor of a mathematics teacher, or worse, a principal.

“You’re new,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You from Great Falls?”

“Albuquerque. I’m looking for my family. My wife is Dee. She’s short, brown hair, beautiful. Forty years old. My son is Cole, and he’s…” As he said Cole’s name, he thought about Benny and the roadblocks at the edge of town.

“Sir?”

“He’s seven. My daughter is Naomi and she’s fourteen, looks a lot like her mother.”

“And you think they’re here?”

“I don’t know. We were separated, but I think they might have come to Great Falls-”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, but we’ve got over two thousand people here. Look, I wish I could offer you a cot, but we’re maxed out and I don’t know when more food is coming. The Air Force base had been trucking in MRE rations, but we haven’t seen them in five days.” She sounded tired and emotionless. Jack thinking, You haven’t seen anything.

He glanced through the open doors into the gymnasium-a mass of sleeping bodies.

“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this morning who didn’t make it.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in a little bit of chaos here.”

“If you see my family, tell them I was here looking for them.”

Jack drove to a nearby park that took up a single city block. Unbuckled Donald’s seatbelt, pulled him out of the front passenger seat, dragged him away from the car. He made it as far as a boulder surrounded by flower boxes whose contents lay in ruin, but could take him no further. He laid Donald down in the grass beside the rock and folded the man’s hands across his chest.

Sat with him for a long time in the dark, mostly because he didn’t feel right just leaving Donald here alone. Thinking there was something more to be done, though he had no idea what. The breeze was pushing those empty swings, one of them making an awful creaking noise that set Jack’s nerves even more on edge.

After a while, he said, “This is the best I can do, Don. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.”

And he got up and walked back to the van.

Drove fifteen blocks toward the river, the engine sputtering, cylinders misfiring. He’d wanted to make it to the water, but that wasn’t going to happen.

The feeble moonlight was shining off the columns of the civic center several blocks ahead. When he saw them, he realized where he was and brought the minivan to a stop in the middle of the street. He sat staring in disbelief toward the square, little to see in the powerless dark but the five-story block of the Davidson Building. Wondered how it had not occurred to him until this moment to come here.

He put the van back into gear and cranked the steering wheel. Drove over the lip of the sidewalk into the middle of the square between two rows of potted evergreen trees.

Jack turned off the van. Sat in the dark and the quiet, listening to the engine cool. He was in a dark plaza, buildings on either side of him, joined by a skywalk. The fountain nearby, dormant.

So much as he had imagined it, even after all this time.

He opened his door and stepped down onto the concrete. It was cold. There were clouds scudding through the light of the moon. Silence like this was one thing in the wilderness, a completely different matter in the city. No cars out, no people, not even the hum of streetlamps or powerlines. Too dark. Too quiet. Everything wrong.

It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of the day. Felt the call of sleep, and the idea of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.

The minivan still smelled like death.

He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.

WHEN his eyes opened he was staring through the windshield at the windows of an office building thirty feet above him. A sheet of clouds reflected in the dark glass. He sat up. Hungry. Cold. Opened the door and stepped down onto the plaza. Eighteen years ago, there had been a coffeehouse a block from here, and he could almost smell the memory of their French roast, feel how the heat of it had steamed into his face on mornings just like this.

He walked toward Central Avenue. Strange not to know the day, but he was certain it was November now. The sky certainly looked it, and the steel chill in the air felt it. Clouds soft and pregnant, debating whether to snow or drop cold rain.

Up and down the avenue, not a single car on the street. A few of the stores had been looted, broken glass on the sidewalk. Nothing moved but some dead leaves scraping across the road.

Jack went back at the minivan and looked inside. Don’s youngest daughter had been sitting in the third row from what Jack could tell. It looked to him like she’d made the space her own-iPod, magazines, books, a stuffed penguin that had been dragged around forever.

He lifted a drawing pad out of the floorboard, stared at a half-finished sketch of countryside that looked remarkably similar to the Montana waste where he’d stumbled upon this van. She had talent. All she’d used was a black Magic Marker to suggest a sharpened mountain range, miles of sagebrush, and the road that shot a lonely trajectory through that country. He wondered if she’d been drawing when her family was ridden down. A line stopped abruptly at the summit of a mountain, the downslope never finished. The black marker she’d used still lay uncapped on the carpet.

Jack picked a cigar box off the floor, raised the lid.

Markers, pastel pencils, miniature bottles of acrylic paint, charcoal, brushes, erasers, and a sterling silver-etched heart locket that only ten-year-old boys give to ten-year-old girls.

Couldn’t bring himself to open it.

He was all morning writing her name. Big, block letters on the sliding door, the black Sharpies showing up well on the minivan’s white paint. He used up three markers coloring in the letters, then took a bottle of white acrylic paint and brushed her name onto the dark plateglass windows of the surrounding buildings.

Walked out into the street to test the visibility.

Dee’s name couldn’t be missed, even from fifty yards away.

By early afternoon a light mist was falling, and he sat in the front seat behind the wheel, watching the beads of water populate the glass.

Drifted off and when he woke again it was dark and a harder rain falling. He crawled into the very back and stretched out across the young girl’s seat. Wrapped himself in a blanket that still carried her smell. Hungry but he thought he should start rationing his bag of junk food, which contained only twelve packages when he’d taken inventory this morning.

The rainfall on the minivan roof was a good sound. He thought about his family until it hurt too much, and then he went to sleep.

THUNDER is what it sounded like in his half-conscious state, and it made the windows tremble. Jack tugged the blanket away from his face, lay there listening to see if it would come again, thinking he might’ve dreamed it.

It came again. Not thunder.

This was a deeper, focused sound, and it didn’t roll across the sky.

He crawled out of the backseat and pulled open the side door.

Walked through the plaza into the street.

Late morning. A low cloud deck. The pavement wet.

He heard it again. Far off. Perhaps beyond the city. He’d never heard it before, not in real life, but he knew it was the sound of bombs exploding.

The plateglass on the first floor of the Wells Fargo bank had been smashed out some time ago. Jack stepped through into the lobby. Dark, silent. He looked at the vacant bank teller stations. The velvet rope lines. Signs for commercial and residential mortgage departments. A water fountain stood against the wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms. He walked over and turned the knob. Nothing. He went into the women’s restroom and tried the faucet. Dry. There was water in the toilets, but he wasn’t at that point just yet. Comforting to know it was here, though.

He crossed the plaza to the Davidson Building. The entrance doors were locked. The glass intact. He uprooted a baby fir tree from a concrete planter which must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. When he’d finally hoisted it up, he ran toward the doors and heaved the planter at the glass like an oversize shot put.

Straight through. Shattered across the marble floor.

He took his time stripping branches from the fir tree, relieved just to have something to occupy his mind. When he’d finished, he unbuttoned his outer shirt and tore it into long strips. Raised the hood of the minivan, unscrewed the cap to the oil tank, dipped the pieces of his shirt inside. He tied the oil-coated cloth around the end of the stick, no idea if this would even work. He’d seen some version of it on a TV survival show several years ago, but he kept thinking he was missing a step.

He held the glowing orange coils of the van’s cigarette lighter to a dry corner of the fabric.

A flame appeared, crept across the cloth, and then the end of Jack’s torch ignited.

It burned beautifully.

He laughed out loud.

Jack arrived on the fourth-floor landing, firelight flickering off the concrete walls of the stairwell. He opened the door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Moved down the corridor, brass nameplates catching torchlight. Stopped at a window with the words financial advisors stenciled across the glass. In the firelight, he could see a waiting area, several chairs, a small table stacked with magazines. Jack tried the door, then set the torch on the fire-retardant carpet, lifted the metal trashcan standing beside an elevator, and hurled it at the glass.

Through the office windows, daylight filtered in. Down the length of the wall, he studied a photographic series of grinning salesmen. He carried his torch into a breakroom and opened the refrigerator. A dozen cups of undoubtedly-spoiled yogurt. Something wrapped in tinfoil. A Styrofoam box of leftovers that smelled like a rotting corpse.

A water cooler stood nearby.

He lodged the torch in the sink and knelt down on the floor. Held his mouth under the tap and drank until his stomach ached.

He entered a corner office and sat in the leather chair behind the desk. Propped his feet up and stared at framed photographs-a soccer team of boys in green uniforms, a family-sunglassed and screaming-on a raft in the midst of whitewater, three beer-flushed men, arm-in-arm, in the fairway of a golf course. He swiveled around in the chair and rolled toward the window. A half mile to the west, he could see the Missouri. The water gray-green under the clouds. Plains beyond. Down in the plaza, the minivan stood glazed in rainwater.

A plastic inbox tray rattled on the glasstop.

The building shook.

Two seconds later, he heard the blast.

Miles away, south of town, black smoke lifted off the prairie.

He carried the half-filled canister of water down the stairwell and through the lobby.

Outside, a light rain fell, the air cold enough to cloud his breath.

He climbed into the minivan and curled up in the backseat under the little girl’s blanket. Shut his eyes. Rain hammering the metal roof.

My day, he thought. Fire and water.

Black of night, he shot awake.

Not only explosions but gunfire now. Inside the city limits.

He climbed into the front seat and peered through the windshield.

The sky lit up-cushions of cloud overhead and snow falling out of them.

Darkness.

The delayed boom of whatever artillery shell had just exploded.

A brighter flash toward the horizon.

Then black.

No way he was going back to sleep.

JACK watched the sky lighten through the glass, his fists still clenching the steering wheel, as they had for the last two hours. Like listening to a hurricane come ashore and the intensifying terror of the eye wall creeping closer. The sound of war coming.

He straightened up in the seat, pushed open the door, stepped outside. Snow clung to everything, and he brushed it off the minivan’s sliding door to uncover Dee’s name.

Realized he was crying. What if the guards hadn’t allowed Cole into the city? Would Dee have even risked an entry this close to the border? No. She’d have gone around, tried to rush the kids across. They might even be in Canada by now. They might be dead in Wyoming. Might be anywhere. But not here. Not with him.

He sat down in the snow.

They weren’t coming.

They weren’t coming.

They weren’t-

The jackhammer pounding of a machinegun broke out what couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away.

He pulled himself up by the door handle and staggered out into the street which was lined with mostly two- and three-story buildings and trees with a few orange leaves left dangling.

Three blocks down, muzzleflashes blossomed from a top floor window.

The firing went on for a full minute.

When it stopped, silence fell upon the city.

Specks of snow seemed to hang weightless in the air.

Jack stood in the street for a long time, but the shooting was over.

He walked back to the minivan, suddenly hungry, but even more tired, and he was asleep seconds after his head hit the seat cushion. He slept so hard it seemed like barely a minute had passed, and then he was awake again, his eyes burning with strain and disorientation and a noise like Armageddon right on top of him.

He peered over the back of the seat, saw people running through the square, twenty feet beyond the front bumper of the van. Dressed like civilians, he thought, in shabby clothes so tattered they all appeared to be molting. The three men bringing up the rear held shotguns at waist-level. They were backpedaling and firing and Jack could see the abject fear in their faces laced with the mad rush of adrenaline, something screaming at him to get the fuck down, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The shotguns thundered and one of the men collapsed and then the small platoon streamed into the Davidson building.

For fifteen seconds, nothing. No sound. No movement.

Then a company of black-clad men swarmed the square, some of them taking position behind the planters, a handful charging into the building.

Jack got down into the floorboard and flattened himself against the carpet, pulling the blanket on top of him as machineguns erupted all around him, men yelling over the mayhem, the shotguns booming down out of the building several floors above, pellets and rounds chinking into the side of the minivan, and then a window exploded, glass everywhere, and the van sank to one side, a tire punctured.

A man began to scream nearby, and Jack covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut and he was saying her name. He could feel his lips moving, though he couldn’t hear the words, not even inside his head, over the terrible noise.

An explosion blew out every window in the van and then came a lull.

Numerous footsteps pounded the concrete. Someone shouted, and the next time Jack heard gunshots, they sounded distant, muffled.

He waited for another minute, then slowly sat up. Brighter in the van with the tinted windowglass shot out. A half-dozen men lay scattered across the plaza, one of them still crawling.

On the fourth floor of the Davidson building a black crater smoked, ragged flames cutting through.

Jack made his way up into the driver seat and eased the door open.

Gunshots inside the Davidson building.

He stared at the bank. Twenty yards tops. Get inside. Find an office, crawl under a desk. Wait for silence.

He glanced back toward the Davidson building. A man stepped out of the lobby and walked into the square. He was looking at the minivan. Jack ducked as far as he could under the steering wheel. More voices. Orders being shouted. Fading away now. He eased up into the seat again and peered through the shattered windshield. The black-clad men had lined the civilian platoon up in the middle of the street. They were making them get down on their knees at gunpoint.

A man in a red bandana stood in front of the POWs. Jack could just hear his voice from the front seat of the van, telling them he would be pleased to shoot them each in the head, felt sure they would in turn be pleased with this outcome. However, if even one of them resisted, his unit would spend the rest of the day torturing them to death.

A handful of the civilians wept. He could see their shoulders bobbing. But no one moved.

The man in the red bandana went to the first civilian, pulled a handgun from his holster, and shot him between the eyes.

He went on down the line, stopping midway to reload, Jack watching the heads of the condemned snapping back, bodies toppling, found himself drawn to study the unimaginable bracing of the next one to die.

Ultimate tension, then emptiness, then ten people lay dead on the snow-dusted street where ten had knelt living thirty seconds before. The soldiers left them there, drifting on down Central Avenue toward the river, in a formation that made Jack certain they were military.

When the last man had slipped out of view, Jack breathed again, leaning forward, his forehead touching the steering wheel.

Staying here, in this plaza, wasn’t going to work. Not with the city under siege.

Meant pushing on.

As he lifted his head, the man in the red bandana reappeared around the corner of the Davidson building. He was walking back into the square, straight toward the van. Jack’s heart jumped from zero to afterburn, a hot spike of panic flooding in.

He slammed his shoulder into the door and barreled out of the minivan at a dead sprint toward the bank, waiting for the gunshots, waiting, the shattered windows rushing toward him, waiting. Just as he reached them, he heard three shots squeezed off faster than he could have imagined, and he was inside, untouched he thought, turning left now, bolting up a set of stairs into the mortgage department, dark save for where crumbs of daylight filtered in through the offices that overlooked the plaza.

Jack stopped.

He could hear the man’s footfalls in the lobby down below.

Now running up the stairs.

Jack moved into a large, open maze of cubicles and desks, his world getting darker every step he took away from those windows.

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled under a desk. Couldn’t see a thing. Panting. The noise deafening. He shut his eyes, tried to calm himself, and when his heart finally slowed, he heard the footsteps-soft as mice-moving into the mortgage department toward him.

He took long, slow inhalations through his nose, and even in the dark chill of the bank, lines of sweat were running down out of his hair into his eyes.

The man let out a sharp breath. Couldn’t have been more than four or five feet away.

His footsteps trailed off into the black, only audible when the boot tread caught on the carpet-an imperceptible scratch.

Jack’s legs burned. He’d crammed himself up underneath a desk, the wood digging into his backbone.

Five minutes passed without a sound.

Ten minutes.

Twenty.

Then an hour was gone, maybe longer. Impossible to know.

He leaned forward, rocking slowly back onto his hands and knees, his feet tingling with an excruciating numbness. Crawled several feet into the dark and stood, knees popping.

He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the barest thread of light sliding around a corner. Wondering, should I crawl back under the desk and wait a few more hours? Maybe the man with the red bandana had gone to get a flashlight. Maybe he’d left with no intention of returning. Maybe he was waiting out there just around the corner.

Jack moved forward between the cubicles, back into the light.

He stepped into the hallway.

Back down the stairs, through the lobby. He stood in that glassless window frame looking out across the plaza.

Snowing again. Nothing moving. The minivan riddled with bulletholes. Some of the dead lay beside their weapons, and he felt a subtle charge at the prospect of getting his hands on a gun again.

Ten steps into the plaza, Jack bent down to unwind the strap of a machinegun that had tangled around the arm of a dead man.

Froze as his finger touched the strap. An icy prickle down the center of his back. A door to the minivan was creaking open.

Jack let go and stood up, turning slowly.

The man in the red bandana sat in the front passenger seat, lighting a cigarette. “Finally.” Took a deep drag. “Didn’t want you to see the smoke.”

He started toward Jack, motioning him away from the dead man with his automatic pistol.

“The fountain,” he said.

Jack crossed the plaza, never taking his eyes off the man, as if that somehow kept the balance of control in his favor.

The fountain was a circle of old concrete, fifteen feet across, with a stone feature rising out of the middle that had once rained water. Most of it had long since evaporated, and what remained was stagnant and filled with discs of ice.

The men sat five feet apart.

Jack saw that the man’s hands were covered in dried blood that was cracking on his skin like old asphalt. He looked out at the plaza-the minivan, the dead, the blood on the melting snow.

In proximity, the soldier looked nothing like Jack had imagined. A kinder face. Three-day beard. Thoughtful eyes. Curls of black hair that slipped out from under the bandana. His fatigues weren’t black as Jack had first thought, but some pattern of night camouflage comprised of dark blues.

Might have been Jack’s age, perhaps a year or two younger.

He stared at Jack while he smoked, handgun resting on his leg, trained on Jack’s stomach.

“Is Dee alive?”

Jack didn’t respond.

“Where’s your family, Jack?”

A twinge of curiosity cut through the fear.

“How do you know my name?”

The man smiled, Jack feeling the eerie prickling of recognition.

He said, “Kiernan.”

“I saw her name all over this square, and it didn’t even click with me until I was walking away.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Me and some Guard unit buddies from Albuquerque defected. We’ve been heading north, just like you, killing and fucking and ravaging and just causing all sorts of mayhem. Time of my life. Are you expecting Dee and the family? Because we can wait. I’d be totally up for that.”

“I haven’t seen them in days.”

“You got separated?”

Jack nodded.

“Where?”

“Wyoming. Where’s your family, Kiernan? I seem to remember Dee telling me you had children.”

Kiernan took another drag. “Rotting in our backyard back in New Mexico.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I killed them.”

Jack could feel, even in the light of everything he’d seen, a new horror at the registration of this.

Kiernan smiled. “Smoke?”

“Not in years.”

He tugged a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds out of an inner pocket, offered it to Jack. “Treat yourself. I don’t think it really matters anymore. Do you, Jack?”

Jack’s hands shook. He plucked a crooked cigarette from the pack along with the lighter. Four attempts to fire the tobacco sprigs hanging out of the end. Kiernan got another cigarette for himself.

“So why are you here, Jack?” he asked. “In this square out of all the places in the wild wild west?”

Jack said nothing, just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was sweet and it burned.

“You think Dee’s going to find you here. That it?”

Jack exhaled, felt the nicotine hit and drag him a few steps deeper into himself, like sliding a filter between this moment and his perception of it. A dulling of the fear.

“Can I ask you something?” Jack said.

“As long as your cigarette’s still burning.”

“When you’re trying to fall asleep at night, do you see the faces of your wife and children?”

“Sometimes.”

“How do you not kill yourself?”

“That you could even ask that is a perfect demonstration of why you’re all being slaughtered. Now answer my question. Why are you here?”

The idea of lunging at Kiernan occurred to Jack, and with it a monster dose of weakness and fear that slashed through his nicotine rush.

Kiernan smirked. “You’d never pull it off. Not on your best day and my worst. Answer my fucking question.”

“I’m here because this is where I ran out of gas.”

“Why do you want to make me angry?”

Jack smoked.

“In all my travels north,” Kiernan said, “I was always looking for your green Land Rover. Always chasing you and Dee, even though I never expected to actually find you.”

“What is it like?” Jack said.

“What is what like?”

“To have become…whatever you are now.”

“All our life, Jack, we spend wondering, you know? Now, it’s all about knowing.”

“You were blind but now you see?”

“Something like that.”

“What do you know now that you didn’t before?”

“You taught philosophy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you know…words just fuck up true meaning. Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“You didn’t see the lights. Just so I’m clear…you have no way to contact Dee, but you think she’s going to show up here. Why? Was it prearranged in the event you two were-”

“I’ve been here three days. She’s not coming.”

“She could be dead.”

“It’s all I think about. How many children did you have?”

“Three.”

Jack flicked off the ash.

“Did you look in their eyes while you murdered them?”

“I was crying. They were crying, asking what they’d done. My wife screaming. Horrible day. I need to know why you’re here before your cigarette’s gone. The curiosity will eat at me.”

“I told you. I ran out of gas.”

Kiernan shook his head. “You’re going to make me threaten you. Aren’t you?”

“Fuck your lights and fuck you.”

Kiernan let his cigarette slip out of his hand, hiss out in the snow. He stood, lifting his shirt so Jack could see the sheathed Ka-Bar combat knife.

“When I open you up and start pulling stuff out and feeding it to you, you will talk. You will tell me everything I want to know and more. You’ll curse Naomi and Cole with your last breath and beg me to do the same to them.”

Still had an inch of tobacco to go, but Jack threw his cigarette into the pool.

“You can’t touch it, and you know it, and it kills you, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

Kiernan unsnapped the sheath, holstered his pistol, and drew the Ka-Bar.

“One last thing,” Jack said. “You and your batshit-crazy friends have fucked up our world, but you’ve also made me a better father, and you made me love my wife again, and for that I thank you.”

Jack stared down into the pool.

The ice melted and the water turned clear and the fountain began to rain. He looked up. The sky now a bright, almost painful blue. Midday in the square. A dozen people eating lunch in the blinding fall sunshine.

Jack sat with an iced coffee, ten minutes left on his lunch break.

She sat at that same table fifteen feet away, engrossed in a textbook, a tray of half-eaten salad pushed aside. Third day in a row she’d eaten lunch in the plaza. Third day in a row he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He’d walked up to strange women before and asked for a date. No big deal. He was good-looking and tall. Confident. But something about this girl put him off his game. She was gorgeous, sure, but it was more than that-maybe the white lab coat fucking with him (already fantasized about that), maybe the intensity with which she read-never moving except to turn the page or brush away a strand of loose, auburn hair that contained honest-to-God strands of gold.

Yesterday, he’d spent the whole hour building up the nerve. Finally he stood with five minutes left, shaky, his mouth completely dry as he approached, caught a whiff of something-shampoo or body wash-and he knew he’d only make a fool of himself. Walked right on past into the Wells Fargo bank and just stood watching her through the tinted glass until she finally packed her book into a tattered Eastpak and went on her way.

Now there were five minutes left in this hour. A repeat of yesterday. He’d fucked around and put himself in the same position.

He stood quickly and started toward her table, trying to get there before he had the chance to talk himself out of it. He was three feet away from her, wholly uncommitted to any of this, when the tip of his sneaker caught on the lip of a concrete slap.

Jack went down hard and fast, and when he looked up from the ground he was staring at the rivulets of his iced coffee running down her leg and dripping off the hem of her lab coat.

“Oh my God,” he said, picking himself up. “Oh my God.” As he got back onto his feet, he saw that he’d somehow managed to dump his entire coffee on her book, her white coat, skirt, even in her hair-maximum damage inflicted with half a cup of iced coffee.

She glared up at him, possibly more shocked than he was, Jack mumbling, trying to string together a coherent sentence that finally came together as, “I’m a total idiot.”

The anger in her eyes melted away. She wiped the coffee from her face and looked down at her coat, and all Jack could think was that she was even more beautiful at point blank range.

“Let me pay for the book and the coat and-”

She waved him off.

“It’s okay. You all right? That looked bad.”

“Yeah.” He’d have a black bruise on his elbow by nightfall, but in this moment, he felt no pain. “I’ll live once I get passed the devastating humiliation.”

She laughed. Like nothing he’d ever heard. “Oh, come on, wasn’t that bad.”

“Actually, it was.”

“No, it-”

“I was coming over to ask you out.”

Her face went blank.

Longest moment of his life.

“Bullshit,” she finally said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re just having fun with me.”

Jack smiled. “Would you give me a do-over?”

“A what?”

“A do-over. Let me have another shot at this.”

He couldn’t tell for sure in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, but she might have blushed.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll be right back. It’ll go better, I promise.”

Jack walked to the fountain. His heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. He sat down and looked over at the table. She was watching him now and she’d taken her sunglasses off. He started toward her again, stopping at her table with his back to the sun, so she sat in his shadow.

“I’m Jack,” he said.

“Hi, Jack, I’m Deanna. Sorry about this mess. Some asshole spilled his coffee all over me.”

And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust-he saw that now-and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.

But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured-a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Deanna’s parents on Thanksgiving night eight years from now, moments of indescribable happiness, long winters of depression, a slow drifting, a betrayal, fear, anger, compromise, stasis, but when it all lay stripped to the bone, whatever mysterious alchemy had been present in this moment, would be present always. Untouched by their failures. Everything changed, and nothing.

This is what he saw, what he sensed on some primal frequency, when he looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time on a fall day in the American west that was so perfect it would always break his heart to think of it. What he still felt, eighteen years later in the same city square, when his eyes met Dee’s again.

She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.

Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.

“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.

“Waiting for you, love.”

The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.

Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.

He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.

Blood ran down the man’s face out of a hole through his left eye.

The blade of the Ka-Bar passed through his chestplate with no effort and Jack buried it to the hilt. Kiernan toppled back into the icy pool, a cloud of murky red surrounding him, the weight of his boots and fatigues pulling him under as the one good eye blinked frantically.

Jack turned around and Dee was there. He pulled her down into the snow and he was on top of her, kissing her, like drinking water again, like breathing, and they came apart only to breathe, both crying like babies. He held her face in his hands and wouldn’t let go for fear she would vanish or he’d wake up and realize it was him dying in the fountain and these were his last thoughts.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” he said, and he kept saying it, and she kept telling him that she was, and that she was real. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and he couldn’t believe this was happening.

“You didn’t have any problems getting Cole into the city?” Jack asked. They were walking up 3^rd Street North toward the library, each holding two machineguns taken off the dead men in the square like a pair of bad action-flick heroes. “It was on lockdown when I got here several days ago. They weren’t letting any of the affected in, but I told them you might be passing through with a boy who was.”

“We drove in last night,” Dee said. “The barricade had been destroyed. We almost didn’t make it, Jack. Bombs going off everywhere. Gunfights on almost every block. A couple of really close calls. It’s a full-scale war on the east side of town. Thousands dead. Easily.”

They passed a law office that had been hit with a mortar shell. Wet pleadings plastered all over the sidewalk.

“How did you know to come to the square?”

Dee smiled. “How did you?”

“I’d gone to the shelter looking for you. Nobody had seen you or the kids. I drove downtown, out of gas, desperate, and then the headlights shone on the Davidson Building. Today was my third in the square. I didn’t know if you’d try to come here or just get the kids across the border. For all I knew, you were dead.”

“When I saw the mileage sign for Great Falls, I knew if you were alive, if you had any strength left in your body, you’d come to this place.”

“So you have a car?”

“Yeah.”

“You should’ve tried to cross the border without me.”

“Don’t say that. You wouldn’t have.”

Machineguns chattered a dozen blocks away.

“I came here this morning,” Dee said, “but it was crawling with soldiers.”

“You saw what I wrote on the side of the car?”

“I started crying when I saw it. Lost it. I hid until the soldiers left, but then Kiernan came back to kill you. I watched him chase you into the bank. I thought…” She shook off the wave of emotion. “You were in there so long.”

“I can’t believe you came here, Dee.”

She stopped and kissed him.

Half a mile away, a bomb exploded.

“Come on,” she said. “We better run.”

Jack knelt down beside the sofa in the historical archive room of the Great Falls Public Library. Dee shined a flashlight on the ceiling, and in the refracted light Jack looked down at his children, sleeping head-to-toe. Touched his hand to Cole’s back.

“Hey, buddy. Daddy’s here.”

Cole stirred, eyes fluttering. They opened, got so wide Jack knew the boy had given him up for dead.

“Is it you?” the boy said.

“It’s me.”

Cole seemed to think things over for a minute.

“I dream about you every night and you talk to me just like this, but every time I wake up, you’re gone.”

“You’re awake, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be gone again.”

He drew the boy into his arms.

“Why are you crying?” Cole said.

“Because I’m holding you, and I didn’t think I ever would again.”

Naomi sat up at the other end of the couch. “Oh my God.” She burst into tears and lunged toward Jack, and he grabbed her, too, now holding his children in his arms, and he could not think of a time in his life when he’d been more overloaded with joy.

Dee wouldn’t take his word for it that he was okay. She made him strip and examined every square inch of his body with the flashlight, starting with the recent gunshot wound to his right shoulder.

“How’s it feel?”

“Pretty sore these last few days.”

“It’s infected. Come with me.”

She took him into the bathroom and cleaned the wound as well as she could with a few paper towels and antiseptic hand soap.

“You have to try and keep it clean until we find some bandages.”

She held up his left arm.

“What’s this?”

He slowly unwound the filthy bandage covering his ring finger.

Dee gasped when she saw it.

“Forgot to mention this,” he said. “Soldier at the top of Togwotee Pass cut it off.”

She grabbed the flashlight off the sink and shined the light on the jagged phalange and the scab trying to form across it.

Tears in her eyes again. “Your ring finger,” she said. “Your ring.”

Later, while the kids slept, he and Dee crashed on a sofa, and they talked as night fell. Soon it was pitch black except when light flickered through the tall windows in the archive room. Like watching a rainless thunderstorm, except even the most distant detonations shook the building’s foundation and made dust rain down from the ceiling into their eyes.

Jack drifted off and when he woke again, he was still holding Dee on the couch.

Her ear against his mouth. Didn’t know if she was sleeping. Whispered anyway. Told her how his heart was so full, how if they ever got someplace safe, he would spend every waking moment making her happy, loving her, loving Cole and Na. Fuck the life they’d walled themselves in with. He didn’t care if they lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. Let them be poor. Let them scrape by. He just wanted to be with her, every second of every hour of every day. Wanted to see her old and slow and gray. Watch her hold their granddaughters, their grandsons.

She didn’t respond except to make a sleepy sigh and to nuzzle in a little closer.

Jack sat up. The building shook, books falling off the shelves. His ears ringing. Dee was up too, her lips moving, but he couldn’t hear anything, and then the sound came rushing back-the kids screaming, Dee shouting. He got to his feet, the room brilliantly lit through those tall windows by the flames consuming a building several blocks away, burning with such intensity he could feel the heat through the glass.

He opened his mouth to say something but a fast-building roar stopped him, something approaching, the noise of it getting louder and closer. And then it was right on top of them, like God screaming, and in the flamelight, Jack could see his children covering their ears, mouths dropped open, eyes wide with terror.

Then it was gone, and the room filled with enough silence for the sounds of distant machinegun fire to filter in.

Jack was panting-they all were.

He turned to Dee, said, “We’re-”

A flash of scalding white light. The window blew out and something hit Jack in the chest that was neither force nor sound, but a terrible fusion of the two, and he was lying on his back, his molars jogged loose in their beddings, telling himself to get up, to check on his children, but his legs were slow to respond.

The ringing in his ears had become a jackhammer.

He sat up, eyes still struggling after that blinding detonation.

The building across the street had taken a direct hit, and amid the massive flames, he could see steel girders sagging, melting in the heat.

He was unstable on his feet.

Dee looked all right. She was sitting up, stunned, and he could see that her eyes were open, blinking slowly.

Cole and Naomi lay in fetal positions on the floor, still bracing, covering their heads and trembling. Jack put his hands on them and patted their backs, ran his fingers through their hair, and then Dee was beside him. He tried to say something to her, couldn’t hear his own voice inside his head, but Dee grabbed his face and pulled him close enough to read her lips.

He slung the machinegun straps over his neck and carried Naomi down the staircase, Dee leading with the flashlight, Cole draped over her shoulder.

On the second-floor landing, Jack heard that sound again, muffled now but racing toward a violent climax, and then the building shook with such intensity he couldn’t believe it resisted collapse.

Everywhere on the ground level, shelves had toppled. They waded through books, and the smell of old paper filled the air.

The shock wave had exploded the wall of windows at the entrance. They passed over mounds of shattered glass and outside into a nightmare world. Black smoke poured out of the ruins of whatever had stood across the street and at the pinnacle of the flagpole, the United States and Montana State flags had begun to burn at the fringes.

Dee led Jack over to a green Cherokee parked out of sight between the building and a hedge.

She glanced back, yelled, “You drive,” and tossed him a ring of keys.

Dee opened the rear passenger door and set Cole inside. Jack handed Naomi over, and after Dee had gotten their daughter in and shut the door, he put his lips to his wife’s ear.

“How much gas?”

“Enough to reach the border.”

“You have to be my gunner.” She nodded. “Shoot any fucking thing that moves.”

Jack climbed in behind the wheel and cranked the engine as Dee slammed her door and lowered the window.

His mind ran hot, trying to orient himself in the city.

Essentially two routes north-I-15 to Sweetgrass or Highway 87 to Havre.

He shifted into gear and eased the Jeep down through the steaming grass onto the pavement, the heat from the building across the street so intense it broke him out into a sweat.

He punched the gas, felt the wind and smoke streaming through the windshield into his face. The glass had been shot out, and that was going to make driving at high speed infinitely more difficult.

By the time he rolled up on the next intersection, he’d decided to try the highway north out of town. Jack glanced over at Dee, who already had the machinegun shouldered and aimed out the window. He tapped her leg, mouthed, “You ready?” She nodded. He glanced into the backseat, saw his children down in the floorboards, didn’t know if they could hear him, but he yelled, “Kids, do not lift your heads no matter what happens.”

Jack turned onto 3^rd Avenue North and gunned the engine.

In the distance, tracers streamed into the low cloud deck, giving the eastern sky a radioactive burn.

They were doing eighty down the street, and he could barely see a thing in the absence of headlights and with the wind and smoke rushing into his face.

They shot through several dark blocks where nothing had been touched, Jack driving blind. He had reached to turn on the headlights when muzzleflashes erupted all around them like a swarm of fireflies, bullets striking the Jeep on every side and the windows exploding in fountains of glass, the racket of Dee’s machinegun filling the car as she screamed at him to go faster.

They sped away from the gunfire.

One block of peace.

Jack uncertain whether his hearing was improving or if they were coming up on another battle but the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells became audible over the groaning engine.

At the next junction, he looked down the intersecting street and saw a tank rolling toward them, flanked by a pair of Strykers.

A quarter mile ahead, a succession of ten closely-staggered explosions lit up four city blocks, and Jack could feel the road shuddering underneath him, everything illuminated brighter than midday, as if the sun had gone supernova. He could see people drawn to the windowframes of almost every building they raced past-unarmed, doomed, gaunt faces awash in firelight.

In the rearview mirror, Jack saw that one of the Strykers had launched out ahead of the tank. From it issued several splinters of light and a low-frequency, concussive report, like someone pounding nails. Two 50-caliber rounds punched through the back hatch, one of them obliterating the dash.

They had reached the blast zone, and up ahead, the road vanished into towers of incomprehensible fire.

Jack swung a hard left and drove up a sidestreet parallel to an elementary school, carpet-bombed into molten rubble.

The street teemed with people on fire who had fled the building, fifty of them he would have guessed. Their collective screams as they literally melted onto the pavement made Jack pray for deafness.

He was trying to drive around them, but they kept stumbling in front of the Jeep, and that Stryker was coming, nothing to do but drive through them, over them, Dee screaming, “Oh dear God,” over and over, and then she started shooting.

Two blocks from the school, Jack spotted the sign for the highway, and he veered onto the road and pushed the gas pedal into the floorboard.

The street was empty and they were screaming north, all the fire and death confined to the rearview mirrors.

They shot across a river and through the northern outskirts of the city.

Jack finally turned on the headlights.

They were pushing a hundred now into a vast and welcoming darkness.

North of town, nothing but black, endless prairie. Even forty miles out, they could still see the glow of everything burning and the tracer fire arcing through the sky. Jack had found a pair of sunglasses under the parking brake. He wore them against the wind, driving northeast now, the speedometer pegged and the noise like standing under a waterfall. The kids, and now Dee, crouched in the floorboards to escape it, but he didn’t mind. The rush of wind meant that every passing second that city was falling farther and farther behind, and the Canadian border rushing closer.

Jack had just glanced at the ruined dash, wondering about the time, when he noticed the line of deep blue-just a single shade up from black-lying across the eastern horizon.

DEE woke in the front passenger floorboard, cramped as hell, cold, and staring up at her husband who wore sunglasses, his hair blown back, face ruddy with windburn and the glow of what she guessed was sunrise. It was loud and the Jeep rode rough-either the shocks had given out or they were no longer traveling on a paved road.

She watched him. Even with the heavy beard coming in, he looked so thin, and her heart was swelling. She’d lost him, felt the awful vacuum of their separation, and now she had him back, sitting three feet away. For once, she knew what she had, the kind of man he was, even in the face of all this. Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.

Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, grinning, but then his brow furrowed.

He touched her cheek.

She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.

Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.

Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.

The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.

She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.

Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked.

“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”

Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.

He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.

It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.

Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.

Jack got out, raised the hood.

Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.

He left the hood raised and walked around to Dee’s door.

“That doesn’t look good,” she said.

“It’s not. We’re going to have to wait awhile until it cools again.”

Two hours later, the engine had stopped smoking, and when Jack engaged the ignition, the temperature gauge dropped almost back to baseline.

The kids were awake and thrilled to discover the bag of junk food Jack had scored at the ski area. Cole’s smiling mouth was smeared with chocolate.

Jack shifted into drive and studied their progress in tenth-mile increments on the odometer, the landscape scrolling by so slowly.

At one mile, the needle had almost touched the red again, and smoke was coming out of the engine, the wind driving it up the hood and into the car.

Jack stopped, turned off the engine.

So this became the architecture of their day.

Drive one mile.

Overheat.

Wait two hours.

Drive another mile.

Overheat.

Rinse.

Repeat.

In the late afternoon, they were stopped again at the edge of a gentle depression. The hood raised. No wind. White smoke coiling up into the sky. Dee sat in the front passenger seat, dozing. Jack lay with his children in the cool, soft grass, staring into the sky. Cole was snuggled up against his chest, the boy asleep.

“How far are we?” Naomi asked.

“Two, three miles.”

“You really think there are camps across the border?”

“Won’t know until we get there.”

“What if there aren’t? What if it’s no different on the other side? It’s just an imaginary line, right?”

“Na, somewhere north of here, we’ll come to a place where we don’t have to run anymore, and we’ll drive or walk or crawl until we get there.”

She moved closer, her head against his shoulder.

“We’re almost there, aren’t we, Daddy?”

Behind them, something chinked against the side of the Jeep.

“Almost, angel.”

A shot rang out across the prairie. Long ways off.

Jack sat up.

The echo going on and on.

“Was that a gun?” Naomi asked.

“I think so.”

Jack glanced back at the Jeep. Because of its dark color, he didn’t notice the bullethole right away, but he did see that Dee was awake, sitting up now.

“Mom’s up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He got onto his feet and walked to Dee’s door. The reflection of the sky in the windowglass-a gray sheet of clouds.

He pulled open the front passenger door.

Dee was pale, and she was looking up at him with a brand of fear in her eyes he’d only seen twice before. Both times, she’d been in the throes of childbirth. The look had been pure desperation, like she’d committed herself to something she couldn’t bear to finish.

He still didn’t understand.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“It hurts, Jack.”

She looked down, and he did, too.

Her seat was full of bright red arterial blood and she was squeezing her right leg.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jack said.

Naomi said, “What’s wrong.”

Jack yelled, “You and your brother run to the other side of the car.”

“Why? What-”

“Just do what I fucking tell you.”

Something struck the rear passenger door a foot away from Jack. He slid his right arm under Dee’s legs and lifted her out of the seat.

The report broke out as he carried her around the smoking grille, Dee moaning when he set her down in the grass on the other side of the Jeep.

“What happened?” Naomi said.

“She’s shot.”

“Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.

Cole started to cry.

Jack’s hand was slicked with warm blood that was beading and dripping off the ends of his fingers.

A round zipped through one of the back windows.

“Na, Cole, get behind the tires and lay flat against the grass.” He looked at his wife. “You have to tell me what to do.”

“I don’t know if it nicked the femoral artery or what, but you’ve got to stop the bleeding right now or I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock and die.”

“How do I do that?”

“Wrap something around my leg.”

“Like a shirt?”

“Yes. Please hurry.”

Jack ripped open his button-up shirt and tore his arms out of the sleeves as another bullet hit the Jeep.

Dee cried out when he lifted her leg and ran one of the sleeves underneath it.

“How tight?” he asked, tying the first knot.

“Cut my circulation off.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

He slid the loop to the top of her thigh and bore down on the knot, then put his foot on it while he cinched it down again. He kept watching Dee’s right hand which she’d been pressing into the wound, trying to stop the blood that pulsed between her fingers with every heartbeat.

“Is it working?” he asked.

“I can’t tell.” She blinked several times, staring into the fading sky. He thought her eyes looked glassy. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s stopping.”

“Can I leave you for a minute?”

“Why?”

“I need to see if anyone’s coming.”

He opened the rear passenger door-no safe way to do this.

Moved quickly into the backseat and reached into the cargo area, grabbing two AR-15s and a pair of binoculars, then diving back outside as another gunshot resounded across the prairie.

Jack crawled around to the back of the Jeep, lay with his chest heaving against the ground and brought the binoculars to his eyes.

Pulled the prairie into focus.

Distant grass, waving in the wind. A backdrop of clouds going dark as night fell. A jackrabbit standing on its hind legs.

He made a slow scan of the horizon.

A pickup truck scrolled into view-old, beat-to-hell Chevy with equal parts paint and rust. He lowered the binoculars to gauge the true distance-a mile, possibly more-then glassed the truck again.

A woman stood in the bed staring through the scope of a high-powered rifle that she’d braced against the roof. The rifle bucked, soundless. A bullet hit the other side of the Cherokee with a hard ping, like it had struck one of the wheels.

The report was slow in reaching him.

While the woman loaded another long, brass-tipped cartridge, he panned down the prairie, starting when he saw them. The men already so close they took up the entire sphere of magnification-three of them in hunting camouflage, a man perhaps five years his senior and two teenagers who shared a strong resemblance.

The teen boys carried semiautomatic pistols and the man a double-barreled shotgun, their faces flushed from running.

Jack lowered the binoculars. They were less than a hundred yards away. No idea how he’d missed them.

He took up one of the machineguns, wondering how much ammo remained.

Looked over at Dee, the children huddled around her.

“They’re coming, Dee.”

“How many?” she asked.

“Three of them.”

“I can help shoot,” Cole said.

“I need you to stay with Mama.”

Jack crouched behind the rear, right wheel, fingering the trigger.

“Is this it, Jack?”

“No, this is not it.”

He eased up until he could just see through the panels of spiderwebbed glass. The footsteps had become audible, swishing through the grass. The men would be upon them in seconds.

He crouched back down behind the tire.

Shut his eyes, took three deep breaths.

Came suddenly to his feet and swung out around the corner of the Jeep with the AR-15 shouldered. The three men already scrambling to raise their weapons vanished behind the burst of fire, the steady recoil driving into his shoulder, and then the magazine was evacuated, the barrel smoking, the men cut down fifteen feet from the Jeep.

A bullet struck the taillight by Jack’s leg, and he was back around the other side of the Jeep by the time the gunshot reached them.

“Are they dead, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

He lifted the other machinegun out of the grass.

“That one’s empty,” Dee said. “We’re out.”

He couldn’t stand the pain in her voice.

Knelt down behind the tire again and raised the binoculars. The light was going fast. Took him a moment to find the pickup truck again, and when he had, it wasn’t alone. Two other trucks had pulled up alongside it, their doors thrown open, and now he counted eight people, heavily-armed, in heated discussion.

“What?” Dee said. “What do you see? Jack.”

“There’s eight of them now. Three trucks.”

“We have to go.”

“Where, Dee? We’d get a mile, maybe two, before we broke down again.”

“Then what, Jack?”

“We fight.”

The people were climbing back into the trucks now.

“They’re coming,” he said.

Dee was struggling to sit up.

“You shouldn’t be moving,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter. Give me a hand.”

“Dee, you shouldn’t-”

“Give me your fucking hand.” He pulled her onto her feet, her right pant leg dark with blood. She used him for support, groaning as she limped over to the Jeep and opened the driver side door.

She climbed in behind the steering wheel.

“Dee, the car will break down. We are not-”

“I know we’re not.”

He felt something inside of him unhook.

“No.”

Dee looked past him to her daughter. “Naomi, take Cole and gather up the weapons from the dead men.”

“Mom.”

“Right. Now.” When the children were gone, she said, “I can’t walk, Jack. It would be so easy for me to bleed out.”

“We’re going to get you help.”

“We’re all going to be dead in five minutes.”

“Dee-”

“Listen to me. It’s dusk. Soon, it’ll be night. Let me-”

“No, Dee-”

“Let me take the Jeep. Those trucks will follow my lights. Think they’re chasing us all down. By the time they catch up to me, it’ll be dark, and you and the kids-” her voice broke “-you’ll be safe.”

“But we’re almost there, baby.”

“You run all night, Jack. Promise me you won’t stop.”

Over the roof of the Jeep, in the blue dusk across the plain, he could see three points of light.

“No.”

“You ready to watch them die? Are you?”

“I’m not ready for this, Dee.”

“I know.”

Naomi and Cole were coming back over.

He grabbed her face and kissed her. There were tears running down their faces but they wiped them away as the kids arrived.

“There are trucks coming,” Naomi said.

“I know, baby,” Dee said. She looked at Jack. He took the handguns from Naomi and set them in Dee’s lap.

“We’re going due north,” he told her. “You come to us.”

Dee nodded. She looked down at Cole, her eyes glistening again. “Got a hug for Mommy?” The boy handed Jack the shotgun and leaned into the Jeep. Dee pulled Cole into her and kissed the top of his head. She glanced up at her daughter. “Na?”

“What are you doing?”

“Mom’s going to run some interference for us.”

“We’re not staying together?”

Jack grabbed Naomi’s arm and glared at her, his chin trembling. “Hug your mother, Na.”

Naomi looked at Jack. She looked at Dee. She wrapped her arms around her mother, and as she sobbed into her chest, Jack heard the first distant grumble of the approaching trucks.

Already, it was dark and cold.

“Come on, angel.” Jack pulled Naomi away from Dee. “Take your brother into that depression, and you lie down in the grass at the bottom. I’ll be right there.”

“Daddy-”

“I know. Don’t think right now. Just go.”

Naomi gathered herself. “All right, Cole, let’s see what’s over here.”

“Where?” the boy said.

Dee watched her children run off down the hill into the dark.

“Let me take the car,” Jack said.

“I can’t walk,” Dee said. “The kids would have to leave me to find help. They’d be on their own. You want that?”

“Dee-”

“Stop wasting our last moment.”

He nodded.

“Do you know what I’m going to think about?” she said.

“What?”

“That day we had up at the cabin. That perfect day.”

“Wiffle ball in the field.”

She smiled. “Please get our children someplace safe. Make this mean something.”

“I swear to you I will.”

“I have to go now.”

“You have to stop crying so you can drive.”

In the distance, it was too dark to see the trucks, but their headlights were close enough to have separated into six points of light.

Jack kissed his wife once more and buried his face into the softness of her neck and just breathed her in. Then he looked into her eyes for precious seconds until she pushed him away. She pulled the door closed and cranked the engine.

He got down in the grass and he was crying as the Jeep rolled away, picking up speed. After ten seconds, the cornerlamps cut on-dim, orange light-and the noise of the engine became rackety across the prairie, sputtering and hacking.

Jack watched the approaching trucks, still moving toward him, getting louder as the Jeep dwindled away. No evident course diversion yet.

He glanced back into the depression, couldn’t see his children.

When he looked forward again, the trucks were turning, all of them, and difficult to see now with their headlights blazing east.

He lay there watching the lights move across the plain, the engines becoming quiet, the lights fading.

Their Jeep disappeared.

The trucks vanished.

He had to strain now to even hear the engines.

Then he was lying on the ground, and there was no sound but the wind blowing through the grass. He lifted the shotgun and rose to his feet, started toward the depression. Couldn’t see a thing under the cloud cover. He wouldn’t have seen anything regardless, with the tears streaming down his face. He called out for his children in the darkness, and when they answered, he let their voices guide him.

In the rearview mirror, Dee watched the trio of headlights pursuing her. The temperature gauge was pegged, and in the Jeep’s headlights, she could see streamers of smoke pouring out of the engine, smell things burning. Her leg throbbed, and she kept steady pressure on the gas pedal, trying to maintain her speed at twenty, but the engine had begun to lose power, cylinders misfiring, RPMs erratic, and still those trucks stayed with her, getting closer.

At 1.2 miles, the RPMs fell off and the engine seized, a violent clanging under the hood. Dee finally eased her foot off the accelerator, let the Jeep roll to a stop and die.

She turned the key back in the ignition.

Short of breath, her heart pounding.

The headlights of those trucks getting brighter in the rearview mirror, and the ominous symphony of their engines already audible.

She couldn’t feel her leg, didn’t know whether that was owing to the loss of blood flow or the adrenaline surging through her.

Her hands trembled as she lifted the guns out of her lap.

One of the trucks shot past, a hundred and fifty yards south, and kept going.

She turned around and looked back between the seats.

The other pair of headlights were motionless, a hundred feet back. They intensified, brights blazing into the Jeep for what seemed ages.

At last, she heard a series of distant door slams, and then the lights went dark.

Dee tossed the guns into the passenger seat and opened the center console, fingers probing until they grazed Ed’s pocketknife. Her thumbnail found the indentation in the steel and she pried open the longest blade and sawed through the fabric of the shirt Jack had tied around her leg.

The feeling returned-a flood of needles and heat-and she reached down between her seat and the door until her hand touched the lever. As the seat tilted back, the lights of the third truck appeared a quarter mile out through the windshield, moving in her direction.

She could hear voices now, and she could feel the blood spraying out of her, a warm pooling in her seat, the smell of iron filling the car. Already she was lightheaded and breathing fast and breaking out in a cold sweat.

Her arms slipped down to her sides and she was trying to find that day in Wyoming on the side of the mountain, but her thoughts kept tangling. As the footsteps approached she was so lightheaded she could barely think at all. Didn’t want to go back into the past anyway.

And as flashlight beams swept across the Jeep, she landed upon the image she wanted, clinging to it as the dizziness behind her eyes began to spiral and echoing voices screamed at her to get out of the car.

Sunrise on a prairie.

Three figures-a man, a boy, a young woman.

Tired and cold.

They’ve walked all night, and they’re still walking, just a few steps from the crest of a hill.

They reach the top.

Breathless.

The view goes on forever.

The man pulls his children close and points.

At first, they can’t see what he’s trying to show them, because the sun is exploding out of the horizon in radials of early light.

But as their eyes adjust, they see it-a city of white tents spread across the plain.

Thousands of them.

Numerous trails of smoke rise into the morning sky, and a band of soldiers have already seen them. They’re climbing the hillside toward her family, hailing them, and one of their number carries a blue and white flag flapping in the wind.

She wants to follow them-she’d give anything-but they’ve already started down the hillside without her, slipping away now, and she loses them in the blinding light of the sun.

They’d been running in the dark for three minutes when Cole dug his heels into the ground.

“Come on,” Jack said, pulling his arm, “we aren’t stopping.”

“We have to.”

Cole wouldn’t move.

Jack let go of Naomi’s hand and scooped the boy up in his arms and started jogging again.

Cole screamed, his arms flailing.

“Goddamnit, Cole-”

The boy grabbed his hair and tried to bite Jack’s face.

He dropped Cole into the grass.

“He’s turning into one of them,” Naomi screamed.

“Look at me, Cole.”

“We have to go back.” The boy was crying now.

“Why?”

“To get Mom.”

“Cole, we can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.”

“But it’s over.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“The lights. They aren’t here anymore.” Jack knelt down in the grass, his boy just a shadow in the dark.

“Cole, this is not the time to screw around.”

“I’m not, Daddy. I don’t feel it anymore.”

“When did it go away?”

“Just now, while we were running. I can still feel it going out of me.”

“I don’t even know what that means, Cole.”

“You have to go get Mom. It’s okay now. The bad people won’t hurt you.”

Jack looked at his daughter.

“Go,” she said.

“Really?”

“If there’s even a chance, right?”

“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Do not move from this spot. It might be tomorrow morning before I come back, because I don’t think I’ll be able to find you in the dark.”

“What if you don’t come back?” she said.

“If I’m not back by mid-morning, you keep going north until you cross the border and find help. Cole, look at me.”

He held the boy’s hands. “If you’re wrong about this, you might never see me again. Do you understand that?”

The boy nodded. “But I’m not wrong.”

Jack ran across the prairie, tearing through the dark, his crumbling shoes flapping with every footfall, already gasping, no idea if he was headed in the right direction, and nothing to see but gaping blackness.

After five minutes, he stopped and bent over, his heart banging in his chest.

When he looked up again, he saw a cluster of red lights far across the plain. A further set of headlights. Over the rocketing of his pulse, he thought he heard the engines.

He was still gasping, realized he wasn’t going to get his wind back, so he started running again, working up to as much of a sprint as he could manage. He was terrified the taillights would vanish, but they stayed put, didn’t even seem to be moving away from him now.

Sweat ran into his eyes, and when he wiped the sting away, the lights had disappeared.

He stopped.

Didn’t hear the engines anymore.

Just an ocean of soundless dark.

Seven flashes exploded through the black. For a fraction of a second, he saw Dee’s Jeep and the three trucks surrounding it. Much closer than he thought, just a few hundred yards out. He was running again as the seven gunshots reached him and ripped his guts out, the last four hundred yards blazing past in a rush of terror, pain, and self-doubt, thinking he should have stayed with his children. He was going to see his wife dead and get himself killed, never see any of them again. And so close to safety, too.

He stopped twenty yards out from the vehicles, so far beyond the boundary of his endurance.

It sounded like sirens ringing inside his head, the darkness spinning.

He leaned over and puked into the grass.

Straightened up again, staggered past the trucks toward the Jeep.

The driver side door had been thrown open, the stench of cordite strong in the air, and he was moving through a haze of smoke, waiting for the gunshots, the attack.

He stopped again when he saw them, not understanding what it meant, figuring he must be missing something, his brain failing to process information after he’d pushed himself so hard.

Had to count them twice.

Seven people sprawled in the grass around the Jeep. Each of them dead from a headshot, their guns lying within reach or still in hand.

In the light that spilled out of the Jeep, he saw the eighth member of the party crouched down against the right front wheel, tears streaming down his face, the long barrel of a large-caliber revolver jammed between his teeth. He wore a fleece vest and a cowboy hat, a patchy blond beard struggling to cover an acne-ruined face.

When he saw Jack, he pulled the gun out of his mouth.

“I can’t do it,” the man said. He offered Jack the gun. “Please.”

“What?”

“Kill me.”

Jack was still gasping for air, his legs burning. He reached forward, slowly, as if sudden movement might cause the young man to rethink his offer, then snatched the revolver out of his hand.

The man said, “Where are you going?” as Jack walked around the open door and looked into the Jeep.

“Oh God, baby.”

The driver seat had been reclined and his wife lay stretched back on it, unmoving, her eyes closed, blood still running out of her leg.

“Dee.”

He glanced down at her right leg, saw where the shirt he’d tied around her thigh had been severed.

He set the gun in the floorboard and reached in, taking up both ends of the bloody shirt sleeve and cinching it down even harder than before, until the blood stopped flowing.

“Dee.” He touched her face. “Dee, wake up.”

Outside, the man was crying, begging for Jack to end him.

Jack moved outside and around the door.

“Which of those trucks is yours?” he asked.

“Oh my God,” the man cried. “Oh my God. My daughter. I-”

Jack held the revolver to the man’s knee. “Look at me.”

The man looked up at him.

“My wife needs medical attention. Do you have keys to any of these trucks?”

The man pointed beyond the Jeep. “The Chevy. Here.” He dug a pair of keys out of his jeans, handed them to Jack.

“What happened?” the man said.

“What are you talking about?”

“To me.”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“You have to kill me. I can’t stand knowing what I-”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Please-”

“But I will take your mind off it.”

Jack pulled the trigger and the man screamed, clutching his knee. Jack stood and walked around the car door. He shoved the revolver down the back of his jeans, leaned in, lifted his wife out of the pool of blood.

He was drenched in sweat, his legs trembling with exhaustion. Stumbled away from the Jeep with Dee in his arms and the young man pleading to die. It was all he could do to carry her those fifty feet to the pickup truck.

It was a pristine 1966 Chevy.

Powder blue.

He opened the passenger door and laid Dee across the vinyl, then limped around and hauled himself up into the cab.

The third key he tried started the engine.

He hit the lights, shifted into gear, floored the accelerator.

They raced across the prairie. He held her hand which was growing cold, saying her name over and over, an incantation. He had no idea if she even had a pulse, and still promising things he had no business promising-that they were almost over the border, almost to safety, where a city of tents awaited them, a refuge crawling with doctors who could fix her. She’d lost a lot of blood, but she was strong, had made it this far, she could surely hang on just a little farther, live to see the end of this and whatever new life they made, live to forget the worst of this, to see Na and Cole forget the worst of this, see her children grow up strong and happy, because they had so many more years the four of them, so many experiences to share that didn’t involve running and death and fear, and please God darling, if any part of you can hear me, don’t let this be the end.

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

Revelations

THE team disbands as the light begins to fail. But she lingers in the pit, gently brushing the dirt from the ribcage of a skeleton she’s just uncovered in the last hour, lost in her work. The distant hum of an airplane breaks her concentration, and she looks up into the sky-easy to see the twin-engine turboprop catching sunlight on its descent.

She climbs out of the pit and walks over to the showers. Pulls the curtain. Strips out of her boots, elbow-length rubber gloves, her clothes, and stands under the heavy spray of water, letting it pound away the reek of decomp.

In fresh, clean clothes, she starts across the field.

The airplane is parked in the distance, the cabin door beginning to open.

She breaks into a run.

The old man comes down the stairs of the plane already smiling, must have seen her as they taxied up. Drops his bag as she runs into his arms, and they embrace for the first time in six months on the broken pavement of the runway.

“My angel,” he whispers. “My angel.”

When they come apart, she stares up at him, thinking, God, was his hair this white last Christmas? But he isn’t looking at her. He’s staring across the field, an intensity coalescing in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Daddy?”

He can barely speak, eyes shimmering with tears, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“This is the place.”

They cross the field, moving toward the pit.

“They pulled the trucks up to here,” he says. “A half dozen tractor trailers. There were tents set up over there,” he points, “right about where yours are. They told us there was hot food and beds waiting.” He stops. “Is that smell…?”

“Yeah.”

“Right about this time of day, too. Dusk. A beautiful sunset.” He continues walking, the stench growing worse with every step, until they stand at the edge of the grave.

She watches his face. He’s somewhere else-nineteen years in the past.

“They lined us up right here,” he says. “They’d already dug the grave.”

“How many people do you think?”

“Maybe two hundred of us.” He closes his eyes, and she wonders what he sees, what he hears.

“Do you remember where you stood?”

He shakes his head. “I just remember the sounds and what the sky looked like, staring up at it through the bodies that had fallen on top of me.”

“Did they use chainsaws?”

He looks down at her, startled by the question.

“Yeah. How did you-”

“We were curious about how some of the bones had been bisected.”

The man eases himself down into the grass and she sits beside him.

“You’ve been down in the grave?” he asks.

“I worked in it all day. That’s what I do, Daddy.”

He chuckles. “You know I’m proud to death of you, angel, but Jesus do you have a fucked-up job.”

She leans her head against his shoulder, laces her fingers through his, twiddling the platinum band he now wears on the nub of his left ring finger.

The team builds a bonfire after supper.

Someone strums a guitar.

Someone rolls a joint.

A bottle makes the rounds.

She sits between the old man and Sam, the Australian team leader, feeling contemplative off two swigs of whiskey and staring into the flames. The cold of the night a wonderful contrast to the eddies of heat sliding up her bare legs.

Usually, those thirty days in hell are as unreachable as if they had happened to another family. But sometimes, like tonight, she feels plugged in to the raw emotion of it all, a closed circuit, and if she doesn’t keep it at arm’s length, it still has the power to break her.

Her father is a little drunk, Sam more so, and she tunes back in to their conversation as Sam loosens his tie and says, “…learning more about the Great Auroral Storm.”

“Yeah, I’ve read some wild theories,” her father says.

“You talking about mine?”

“Entirely possible. You really believe these auroras contributed to the epic massacres and extinctions in history?”

“I think there’s some compelling solar abnormality data on that. But something of the magnitude that happened here? Keep in mind recorded human history is just the blink of an eye since life crawled out of the oceans. This was a hundred-thousand-year occurrence. Maybe a five-hundred. Natural selection at its darkest.”

“So who got selected?” her father asks. “Who won? Us?”

Sam laughs. “No.”

“The affected?”

“Most of them selected themselves out when they committed mass suicide.”

“Then who?”

“Your son,” Sam says.

“Excuse me?”

“People like Cole. Those who witnessed that terrible light show on October Fourth, and either didn’t kill, or did, and resisted the crushing guilt. That’s who won.”

“I have a close friend back home in Belgium in the humanities department where I teach. A priest. He thinks the aurora was just God testing us.”

“Those who saw the aurora, or those who ran?”

“Both, Sam.”

“Well, it all comes down to purification in the end, right?”

“You say it like that’s a good thing.”

“On a human level, no, but in terms of our DNA, it’s a different ball game. Remember, the barbarians finally took Rome. That was horrible, but Rome had become a corrupt, ineffectual, soft culture. Genetically speaking, it was a positive thing.”

“Or,” the old man says, “maybe we just need to kill each other. Maybe that’s our perfect state of being.”

Sam pauses to have a smoke, and when he finally exhales, says, “It surprises me that you would want to see this place again.”

“Why?”

“Because of what you saw and experienced here.”

“You should be examining my bones in that hole,” the old man says.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“This was an awful place, no question, but a miracle happened here. I never want to forget that.”

She’s buzzed and getting tired. Stretches her bare feet toward the fire, lays her head in her father’s lap. Soon he’s running his fingers through her hair, still debating with Sam. She’s almost asleep when something vibrates against the back of her head.

“Excuse me, Sam,” her father says.

The old man reaches into his pocket and retrieves his mobile phone, answers, “I forgot, didn’t I?… I’m sorry… Yes, here safe and sound, sitting by a fire… Difficult but good… Yes, I’m glad I came… That’s still the plan. We’ll meet you both in Calgary tomorrow evening… Oh, I know. It’ll be so good to all be together again… Yes, she’s right here, but she’s sleeping… Okay, I’ll tell her… No, I won’t forget. I’ll do it as soon as we get off… Goodnight, darling.”

The old man slides his phone back into his pocket.

She’s almost asleep now, in that cushioned bliss between consciousness and all that lies beneath. Feels her father’s hand on her shoulder, and his breath, still after all these years, familiar against her ear.

“Naomi,” he whispers, “your mother sends her love.”