Run (9 page)

“How far we’ve come from home.”

The room had two double beds. A dresser. An old television with a busted screen. Graffitied walls. Tied-off and shriveled condoms on the carpet and a bathtub full of shattered beer bottles. Jack carefully turned back the rotting covers so as not to disturb the dust, and they lay their sleeping bags on the old sheets—Jack and Cole on one bed, the girls on the other—and fell asleep as the sun rose.

He sat up suddenly. His wife stood over him. Dust trembling off the ceiling. A glass ashtray rattling across the bedside table.

“Jack, something’s happening.”

They parted the curtains and climbed over the rusted AC wall unit through the open windowframe. Midday light beat down on the desert and the ground vibrated beneath their feet, the inconceivable noise shaking jags of glass out of other windows, doors quivering in their frames. They walked over to the motel office and Jack ventured a glance around the corner of the building.

On the road, a convoy rolled by—SUVs, luxury sedans, beater trucks with armed men riding in the beds, jeeps, fuel trucks, school buses, all moving by at a modest speed and raising a substantial cloud of dust in their collective passing.

Jack turned back to Dee, said into her ear, “I don’t think they can see our car from the road.”

Another five minutes crept by, Jack and Dee standing against the crumbling concrete of the motel until the last car in the convoy had passed, the drone of several hundred engines fading more slowly than Jack would have thought.

Dee said, “What if we’d been traveling south on this road?”

“We’d have seen them from miles away.”

“With the binoculars?”

“Yeah.”

“What if the kids and I were sleeping and you weren’t looking through the—”

“Don’t do this, Dee. They didn’t see us. We weren’t on the road.”

“But we could have been.” She bit her bottom lip and stared east toward a rise of low brown hills. “We have to be more careful,” she said. “We have to always be thinking the worst. I can’t watch my children—”

“Stop it.”

Dee walked along the brick and peered around the corner.

“Still see them?” Jack asked.

“Yeah. Sun’s reflecting off all that chrome.”

Jack didn’t hear the engines anymore.

Dee said, “They’re getting organized, aren’t they?”

“Seems that way.”

He stepped forward and looked with her. The convoy miles away now, like the long and shining trail of a snail.

Naomi and Cole slept in the motel room. Jack and Dee sat outside on the concrete walkway, watching the light slant across the desert.

Dee held her BlackBerry in her hand, said, “Still no signal.”

“Who you trying to call, your sister?”

She started to cry, and he didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just put his arm around her for the first time in months. He thought about the last time he’d spoken to his father. A week ago. Sunday morning on the telephone. Sitting on the screened back porch and watching the lawn sprinklers water the fescue. Sipping on a mug of black coffee. They’d talked about the coming election and a movie they’d both seen and the World Series. When the time had come to hang up, he’d said, “I’ll talk to you next weekend, Pop,” and his father had said, “Well, all right then. You take care, son.” Same way they always ended their phone calls. What killed him was that it hadn’t, in any way, felt like the last time they would ever speak.

They changed out of their three-day-old clothes, and Dee lit the campstove and brought the last two cans of old vegetable soup to a simmer. Sat in the darkening motel room passing the cooling pot and the last jug of water.

At dusk, he stood in the middle of the road with a pair of binoculars, glassing the high desert.

South: nothing.

North: no movement save a handful of pumpjacks that dotted the landscape and ominous lines of black smoke ascending out of the far horizon.

He turned at the sound of approaching footfalls. Naomi stepped into the road and pushed her chin-length yellow hair out of her face. The dark eyeliner she always wore had faded, she’d taken the silver studs out of her ears, and he thought how she looked like his little girl again yet older, her features sharpening into the Germanic, Midwestern prettiness that had begun to desert Dee. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d let him hold her, or if he was honest, the last time he’d wanted to. He’d lost sight of his daughter amid the angst and the Goth façade, and he saw, not for the first time, but for the first time with clarity, how in the last two years he’d become a stranger to the two most important women in his life.

“What’s going on?” Naomi asked.

“Just having a look around.”

She stood beside him, dragged the soles of her black Chuck Taylors across the pavement.

“What do you think about all this?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“You worried about your friends?”

“I guess. You think Grandpa’s okay?”

“No way to know. I hope he is.” He wanted to put his arms around her. Restrained himself. “I’m really proud of how you’re taking care of your brother, Na. As proud as I’ve ever been of you. Your being brave is helping Cole to be brave.”

She nodded, but he could see tears shivering in her eyes. He drew her suddenly into him and she wrapped her arms around his waist and cried hard into his chest.

With the Rover packed, they climbed in and took their seats and Jack started the engine. The desert deepening from blue into purple as they pulled out of the motel parking lot and into the highway, the stars fading in and the moon rising over the hills.

They went north without headlights, and within a half hour, had come upon the town. Everywhere, houses burned, and the dead lay in the road and the sidestreets and the front yards. Jack made himself stop counting.

“Don’t look out the windows,” he warned, and this time, his children listened.

The town had lost power.

Jack punched on the headlights.

“Don’t.”

“I can’t see.”

Smoke streamed through the lightbeams and filled the car.

The highway became Main Street. They passed between old buildings and a couple of restaurants and a dark marquee advertising a pair of films that had been released months ago.

A few blocks past the downtown, he turned off the highway into the parking lot of a grocery store and stopped the Rover in the fire lane by the entrance.

“Jack, please, let’s just get the hell out of here.”

“We’re out of food. Almost out of water. I have to look.”

He turned off the car and reached under his seat, grabbed the Glock. “Dee, you have the flashlight?”

She set it in his lap.

“Don’t leave, Daddy.”

“I’ll be right back, buddy.” He touched Dee’s leg. “Anything happens, you lay on this horn and I’ll be here in five seconds.”

The automatic doors stood a foot apart. He squeezed through, hesitating. Every part of him protesting against this. He flicked on the Mag-Lite and made himself go on, thinking how it didn’t smell anything like a grocery store should. A tinge of rust and rot hanging in the air. He dislodged a cart from the brood of buggies and set the gun in the child’s seat. Started forward, the wheels rattling, one squeaking, his light playing off the registers. He passed through the self-checkout aisle. No sound but the distant voltage in his left ear which hummed like a substation.

He pushed the buggy toward produce. The shelves bare but still carrying the smell of vegetables and fruit. Ten feet ahead, a man lay beside empty wooden crates. The blood around him shimmering off the linoleum like black ice under the lightbeam. Jack stopped the cart. There were others behind this man and though he wouldn’t put his light directly on them, he stared at what the shadows didn’t hide. The closest: a woman facing him with her eyes still open, long yellow hair matted to the gore that had been bludgeoned out of her head.

He picked a cluster of overripe bananas off the floor, the only offering of produce, and pushed the cart between the dead. The wheels went quiet, greased with blood. Dark shoeprints tracked through double doors into the back of the store. He took the gun and left the cart and pushed through them, swinging his light across pallets of stock that had already been scavenged of anything resembling food. Only packages of toilet paper remaining. He shined the light on the concrete floor and followed the bloody tracks to where they ended. There were over a hundred brass casings and spent shotgun shells in the vicinity of the freezer’s big silver door, and massive quantities of blood had leaked out from underneath it. He started to pull it open. Stopped himself.

He walked back out into the store and put his hands on the cart. The rear of the supermarket stunk of spoiled meat. As he rounded a corner into the first aisle, the cart bumped into a young child who had been hacked to pieces, a single neck tendon shy of a full decapitation. Jack turned and vomited into a naked shelf, stood spitting until his mouth quit watering. He’d seen a few frames of horror since Thursday night, but nothing like this. He tried to shove it into the back of his unconscious, but its shape wouldn’t fit anywhere. Beyond all comprehension.

He went on. Searching the shelves for anything, finding nothing but a gallon of water and more bodies to steer around. He rolled past empty glass cases that had held frozen meals, and then turned into the last aisle of the store, the beam of his Mag-Lite illuminating someone sitting up against a shelf lined with cartons of room-temperature milk. The teenage boy’s eyes opened, milky and failing to dilate at the onslaught of light. He held his belly as if trying to keep something in.

Jack left the cart and walked over to the boundary of where the blood had pooled. He squatted down. The boy’s respirations coming labored and sodden. He ran his tongue across his dried and cracking lips and said, “Water.”

Jack went to the buggy and rolled it back over and set the flashlight beside the gun. He broke the seal and twisted off the cap and held the mouth of the jug to the boy’s lips. He drank. A skinny, long-legged kid. Black denim jeans and a western shirt. He turned away from the water and drew a breath.

“You got to take me to Junction. I ain’t going to make it through tonight.” The boy looked off into the darkness. “Where’s Mama?”

“I don’t know.”

Jack got up.

“Where you going?”

“I have my family waiting outside.”

“Don’t leave me, mister.”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do for you.”

“You got a gun?”

“What?”

“A gun.”

“Yeah.”

“You can shoot me.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“I can’t just sit here in the dark. Please shoot me in the head. You can do that for me. I’d be so grateful. You got no concept how this hurts.”

Jack lifted the jug of water.

“Don’t leave me, mister.”

He took the gun from the cart and jammed it down the back of his waistband. He tucked the bananas under his right arm and grabbed the flashlight and started walking up the aisle toward the front of the store.

“You son of a bitch,” the boy called after him, crying now.

They stopped at a filling station on the outskirts but the pumps were dry. Jack checked the oil and washed the filthy windshield and they headed north out of town into the high desert. The night clear and cold and nothing else on the road save the occasional mule deer. They ate the bananas—too soft and reeking of that oversweet candy stench of fruit that has just begun to turn—and Jack let them split his share. The two hamlets they passed through barely warranted the black specks they’d been assigned on the map—tiny ranching communities, burned and vacated. The most substantive structure for miles was a grain mill, looming above the desert like some improbable skyline.

Jack pulled off onto the side of the road to let Cole and Naomi have a bathroom break, and when the kids were out of the car, Dee said, “What’s wrong, Jack?”

He looked at her, glad when the overhead light cut off.

“Nothing. I mean, you know, besides everything.”

“What’d you see in that grocery store?”

He shook his head.

“Jack. We together in this?”

“Of course. That doesn’t mean you need to have me putting things in your head that you can’t get rid of.” As his eyes readjusted to the darkness, he looked through the windshield at a range of hills in the east. Heard a sudden shriek of laughter from Cole that almost made him smile.

Dee said, “Don’t push me away. I need to share this experience with you. I want to know what you know, Jack. Every single thing, because there’s comfort in it. I need that.”

“Not this, you don’t.”

Five miles on, Jack pulled off the road again, said, “Give me the binoculars.”

“What’s wrong, Dad?”