Run (10 page)

“I saw something.”

“What?”

“Lights. Everyone just sit still and don’t open your doors.”

“Why?”

“Because the interior lights will come on, and I don’t want anyone to see where we are.”

“What if they see us? What will happen?”

“Nothing good, Cole.”

Dee handed him the binoculars and he brought the eyecups to his eyes. At first, nothing but black, and he thought maybe the focus had been jarred, but then he picked them up again, stretched along the road like a stateless strand of Christmas lights.

“You just sighed. What is it, Jack?”

He moved the knob, pulled everything into focus. “The convoy.”

“Oh, God.”

“I think they’re moving away from us.”

“Can you tell how far?”

“Maybe ten miles. I don’t know.”

“And you’re sure they’re not coming toward us?”

He lowered the binoculars. “Let’s wait here awhile. Track their movement. Make absolutely certain.”

Jack glassed the convoy through the windshield, watching its slow progression away from them while the kids played Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Within the hour, the lights had vanished.

Heat blasted out of the vents to check the frigid air that streamed through rips in the plastic windows, Naomi and Cole bundled in their sleeping bags and huddled miserably together.

Just before midnight, Jack turned off the highway onto a dirt road and punched on the headlights.

They’d gone several miles when Dee leaned across the center console, and then back into her seat, pushing a discreet exhalation through her teeth that no one but her husband would have caught. The opening move in a battle they’d fought before.

“What?”

“You see the light?” she said.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Do you think there’s going to be a gas station out here?” She gestured toward the windshield and the expanse of empty country beyond the glass, devoid of even a spore of manmade light.

“It just came on a minute ago.”

“It means we’re out of gas, darling-heart.”

“No, it means we can still go for twenty-five miles. It’s called a reserve tank.”

He could feel the heat of her stare even in the dark.

She said, “We have ten gallons of gas sloshing around back there, and I don’t understand why you won’t—”

“Dee, it’s—”

“Oh my God, if you say it’s for emergencies one more. . .” She turned away from him. Stared into the plastic of her window. Jack on the brink of just pulling over, an act of appeasement he would never have considered under any other circumstance, when the headlights grazed a dark house.

He turned into the gravel drive and parked beside a powder-blue Chevy pickup truck from another time, headlights firing across a brick ranch with white columns on the porch.

“Let’s not stop here, Jack.”

“We have to take a look.”

Jack and Dee followed the stone path to the house and stepped up onto the front porch and knocked on the door. They waited. Heard nothing on the other side.

“Nobody’s home,” Jack said.

“Or maybe they saw a man walking up to their house with a shotgun and they’re waiting on the other side with a fucking arsenal.”

“Always the pessimist.” He knocked again and tried the door.

Jack pried a large, flat piece of sandstone out of the walkway and lobbed it through the dining room window. They crouched in the cedar chips and listened. A stalactite of glass fell out of the framing. Silence followed.

“I’ll go in,” Jack said, “make sure it’s safe.”

“What if it’s not?”

He reached into his pocket, handed her the keys. “Then you get the hell out of here.”

Standing in the dining room, the first thing to strike him was the warmth. He walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator humming. He opened it. Jars of mayonnaise and other storebought condiments and a mason jar of pickled beets and something wrapped in tinfoil. He went to the sink and turned on the tap. Water flowed.

Dee sat in the Rover in the driver seat, her hands on the steering wheel. He opened the door, said, “It’s empty and they have power.”

“Food?”

“There’s some stuff in the cabinets.” He looked into the backseat. “Na and Cole, I want you to bring all the empty jugs inside.”

Jack went around to the side of the house. He unsheathed his bowie and sawed off the nozzle to the garden hose. He unwound it and cut a six-foot length of green tubing. The opening to the Chevy’s gas tank was next to the driver-side door, a silver cap speckled with rust that took some hard cranking to unscrew. He’d already poured the five-gallon cans into the Rover, and they sat open on the gravel drive while he threaded the hose through the hole. It touched the bottom of the tank, the smell already wafting out of the end of the tube as he brought it to his lips.

The gas was oily in his mouth—sharp, pungent, and dirty. He spit it out and jammed the hose into the first gas can, his eyes watering, throat burning from the fumes.

Jack walked past the eight jugs of water lined up on the kitchen island. He leaned down into the sink and held his mouth under the open tap for a long time but there was no flushing of the gasoline which lingered in the back of his throat like persistent fog.

“How’d we do?” Dee asked.

He stood up, lightheaded. “Six gallons.”

“You all right?”

“I just need about fifty breath mints.”

Naomi said, “Come look what we found, Dad.”

He followed them across the wood laminate floor to a sliding glass door behind the breakfast nook. The vertical blinds had been swept back and he looked through the glass into a square of domesticated yard, moonlit and bordered by desert. He saw a dilapidated swingset, a pair of lawn chairs shaded by an umbrella, and closer to the house, a thirty-foot steel antenna mast.

Naomi flipped through the channels on a mammoth television set that looked like it had occupied the same patch of shag carpeting for thirty years. Every station drowned in static.

Jack lifted a telephone, held the receiver to his ear. Silence.

They walked down the hallway, the hardwood groaning under their footsteps.

“Can’t we turn some lights on? I don’t like it dark.”

“Lights might attract someone, Cole.”

“You mean like someone bad?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you think these people went?” Naomi asked.

“No telling. Probably just left their home like we left ours.”

Jack shined his flashlight through the first doorway they passed. A bedroom with two trophy cases and a large photograph above the headboard—a teenage boy riding an enraged bull.

They went on.

Naomi said, “Something smells bad.”

Jack stopped. He smelled it, too. Sharp enough to overpower the gasoline overload in his nasal cavity.

Dee said, “Kids, let’s go back to the kitchen.”

Naomi said, “What’s wrong?”

“Go with your mother.”

“Come on, guys. Jack, be careful.”

“Is it—”

“Na, think about your brother before you say another word.”

“What about me?”

“Come on, Cole, let’s go with Mom.”

Jack watched his family retreat and then turned back toward the closed door at the end of the hall, the smell intensifying with each step. He breathed through his mouth as he turned the doorknob and shined the light inside.

A man and a woman lay in bed. White-haired. Seventy-something. Framed photographs of what he presumed were their grown sons resting on their stomachs. The woman had been shot through the forehead, and the man cradled her to himself, a hole in his right temple, his right arm outstretched and hanging off the bed, a revolver of some caliber on the floor below his hand. The white comforter darkened with blood. Above the bed, Jack put his light on a series of fifty-one photographs that, in the lowlight, looked almost identical. He moved closer. The last photograph of the montage was a recent portrait of the couple on the bed, the man wearing an oversize tuxedo that swallowed him whole, the woman squeezed into a ragged wedding dress many sizes too small, and as Jack ran his light back through the portraits, the couple grew younger and their wedding clothes fit better and their smiles brightened toward something like hope.

Jack walked into the kitchen, found Dee and Naomi standing around the island, drinking from glasses of ice water. In the living room, Cole flipped through channels of static on the television.

“Everything all right?” Dee said.

“They weren’t murdered. He shot her and then himself.”

“Can I see?”

“Why would you want to, Na?”

She shrugged. “You saw it.”

“I had to make sure everything was safe for us. I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

Jack found the radio setup in the den—a low-band rig, microphone, headphones, power meter. The room had no windows, so he turned on the desk lamp and settled into a cracking leather chair. The amateur radio license hanging on the wall above the equipment had been issued to Ronald M. Schirard, callsign KE5UTN.

“What’s all this stuff?” Naomi said.

“It’s a ham radio.”

“What’s it do?”

“Let’s you talk to people all over the world.”

“Isn’t that what cell phones are for?”

Dee said, “You know how to use this?”

“I had a friend in high school whose Dad was a ham. We’d sneak down into the basement at night and use his radio. But this equipment looks way more sophisticated.” He turned on the transreceiver and the microphone and put on the headset. The radio had been tuned to 146.840 megahurtz, and he didn’t tinker with it, just keyed the microphone.

“This is KE5UTN listening on the 146.840 machine.”

Thirty seconds of silence.

He restated the callsign and repeater identification, then glanced up at Dee. “This may take some time.”

Dee came back after a half hour and set a cup of coffee on the desk. Jack didn’t remove the headphones, just said, “Thanks, but I can’t go through caffeine withdrawal again.”

“Anything?”

“Not a word.”

An hour later and still no response, he finally reached for the dial to change the receiver frequency.

A voice crackled over the airwaves.

“KE5UTN? This is EI1465.” Heavy Irish accent.

Jack keyed the mic. “This is KE5UTN. Who am I speaking with please?”

“Ron? Thank God, I thought something had happened.”

“No, this is Jack Colclough.”

“Where’s Ron Schirard? You’re using his callsign.”

“I’m in his house, on his station.”

“Where’s Ron, mate?”

Jack heard the door open behind him. Glanced back, saw Dee walk in. He said, “You a friend of Ron’s?”

“Never met him, but we’ve been talking on the radio going on nine years.”

Jack hesitated.

“Mr. Colclough? Is my modulation off?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Ron and his wife are dead. Where are you, if I may ask?”

The silence in the headphones went on for a long while, and the voice finally returned much softer.

“Belfast. What are you doing in Ron’s house?”

“We fled our home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, three days ago, and just stopped here to look for supplies. Cell phones don’t work. Or landlines. There’s no internet. Do you have any information about what’s happening? Has it spread worldwide?”

“No, it’s only the lower forty-eight states of America, southern Canada, and northern Mexico. There aren’t too many reports coming out of the affected region, but you’ve heard about New England?”

“We’ve heard nothing.”

“Boston and New York have been devastated. Total chaos. Astronomical death tolls. There’s a handful of videos circulating—movies shot on mobile phones. Streets clogged with bodies. People trying to flee the cities. Real doomsday stuff. Are you and your family okay?”

“We’re alive.”

“You’re lucky to be in a low population-density area.”

Jack glanced up at Dee, said, “You should really be keeping a lookout in case someone comes.”

“Naomi’s on the front porch watching the road.”

Jack keyed the mic. “Has anyone figured out what’s causing this?”

“Well, there have been a lot of crazy theories put out there, but over the last day or so, everyone’s been focusing on this atmospheric phenomenon that happened over America about a month ago.”

“You mean the aurora?”