“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.

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.