Run

The motor sounded harsh and clattery as they sped north, and Jack kept fighting the impulse to lean over to see the fuel gauge since the concept of unnecessary movement ran a bolt of nausea through him.

“What’s the gas situation?” he finally asked.

“Little under a quarter.”

“How fast you going?”

“Eighty-five.”

Jack opened his eyes and stared through the windshield—empty desert to the west, jagged mountains to the east. Overcome with the thought, the truth, that they’d reached the end of their five days of running. They were going to use up the last of their gas on this highway in the middle of nowhere and then those four trucks would show up and that would be the end of his family. His eyes filled up with tears and he turned away from Dee so she wouldn’t see.

The smell of smoke roused Jack off the door.

“Where are we?”

“Pinedale.”

The tiny western community had been cremated, the honky-tonk Main Street littered with burned-out trucks and debris from looted stores. Near the center of town, a line of corpses in cowboy hats sitting along the sidewalk like gargoyles, charred black and still smoking.

“Fuel light came on a minute ago,” Dee said.

“That was bound to happen.”

“How you holding up?”

“I’m holding.”

“You need to keep pressure on your shoulder, Jack, or it’s going to keep bleeding.”

They broke out of the fading smoke and Dee accelerated. The morning sky burned blue overhead, oblivious to it all.

Jack straightened and glanced back between the seats—nothing to see through the plastic sheeting that hyperventilated over the back hatch.

“I don’t like how we can’t see the road behind us,” he said. “Pull over.”

Three miles out of Pinedale, Dee veered onto the shoulder and Jack stumbled out of the Rover. Heard the incoming engines before he’d even raised the binoculars to his face—a dive-bomber wail like they were being pushed to the limits of their performance capabilities.

He jumped back into the front seat, said, “Go,” and Dee shifted into drive, hit forty before Jack had managed to shut his door.

“How far?”

“I didn’t even look. Where’d you put the shotgun?”

“Backseat floorboard.”

“Hand it to Daddy, Na.”

Jack took the Mossberg from his daughter, had to yell over the straining engine. “How many times did you shoot it, Dee?”

“I don’t know. Four or five. I wasn’t keeping count.”

Jack flipped open the center console, grabbed a few shells, started feeding them in, the pain brilliant with every twitch of the deltoid in his left shoulder.

“Na, climb into the way back and peek through those holes. See if you can spot whatever’s coming.”

He reached under his seat, grabbed the roadmap. Opened it across his lap to the Wyoming page and traced their route north out of Rock Springs through Pinedale.

“There’s a turnoff coming up, Dee. Highway 352. Take it.”

“Where’s it go?”

“Into the Wind Rivers. Dead-ends after twenty miles or so.”

“Oh my God, I see the trucks.”

“How far, Na?”

“I don’t know. They’re small, but I can see them. Getting closer for sure.”

“Why would we take a dead-end road, Jack?”

“Because they can see us and run us down on these long, open stretches. Go faster.”

“We’re doing ninety.”

“Well, do a hundred. If they catch us before the turnoff, it’s over.”

“I think I see it.”

They screamed toward a road sign.

“You’re about to miss it,” Jack said.

She stepped on the brake and made the turn at thirty-five, swinging wide into the oncoming lane, the Rover briefly on two wheels.

“Nice,” Jack said.

Through the fist-size hole in his plastic window, he stared back down the highway, saw four vehicles streaking toward them. Inside of half a mile, he would’ve guessed.

“You see them?” Dee asked.

“Yeah. Get us up in those mountains as fast as you can.”

The highway shot through the last bit of desert before the mountains, and Jack could smell the heat of the engine and the sagebrush screaming by.

At a hundred miles per hour, they ripped through a ghost town—three buildings, two of them listing, a derelict post office.

The foothills lifted out of the desert less than a mile away, and already they were climbing.

“How’s the fuel gauge, Dee?”

“We’re on the empty slash.”

The road cut a gentle turn away from the foothills and passed through a grove of cottonwoods. They sped alongside a river and into a canyon, the colder, pine-sweetened air streaming through the plastic windows.

Jack said, “Start looking for a place to pull over.”

“Trees are too tight here.”

“Na, would you climb into the back again? When we make our move, we need to be certain they can’t see us.”

The sun blinked through the trees in shards of blinding light.

Jack leaned against the door again, felt Dee take hold of his hand.

“Talk to me, Jack.”

“I don’t feel like talking.”

“Because of the pain?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see them yet,” Naomi yelled.

“Cole all right?” he asked.

“Sleeping if you can believe it.”

Into a meadow, the frosted grasses sparkling under the sun, the road straight for a quarter mile.

As they reentered the woods on the other side, Naomi said, “They’re just now coming into the meadow.”

“How many, sweetie?”

“Four.”

“You feel that, Jack?”

“What?”

“Engine just sputtered.”

He struggled to sit up.

Leaned back over.

Vomited into the floorboard.

“Jack, is there blood in it?”

“I don’t know.”

He sat up, focused on the passing trees instead of the acid burn in the back of his throat.

When they rounded the next hairpin curve, Jack saw a corridor through the pines—not a road or a path, just a little space between the trees.

“There, Dee. See it?”

“Where?”

“There. Slow down. Just left of that boulder. Drive off the road right there.”

Dee steered into the trees.