“We’re running really hot,” Jack said. Kept searching for the road in his side mirror, kept forgetting the mirror had been shot out two nights ago.
“Where are they?” Naomi asked.
“We can’t see them from here,” Dee said. “Hopefully, they can’t see us.”
They rode into the shadow of the butte, Jack skirting the circumference until they reached the back side which had been fired into pink by the early sun.
He slammed the Rover into park, turned off the engine.
“Binoculars.”
Dee handed them over and he threw open the door and hopped down onto the hardpan. Ran up the lower slope of the butte, his quads burning after ten steps, perspiration beading on his forehead after twenty.
Where the slope went vertical for the last fifty feet, he traversed along the edge of the cliff band and had just caught his breath when the highway came into view.
His knees hit the dirt. Jack lowered himself and propped his elbows on the ground, still cold from the previous night. Brought the binoculars’ eyecups to his eyes, pulled the highway into focus, and slowly traced it north.
Footfalls behind him.
He inhaled a severely faded waft of Dee’s shampoo as she collapsed panting in the dirt.
“You see them?” she asked.
He did. An eighteen-wheeler led the convoy, puffing gouts of black smoke into the air and followed by a train of cars and trucks that might have been a mile long. Five hundred engines sounded otherworldly carrying across the desert.
“Jack?”
“Yeah, I see them.”
“What about our trail?”
He lowered the binoculars and looked to where he thought they’d cut across the desert and lifted them to his eyes again. First thing he fixed upon were a pair of antelope standing motionless with their heads raised, staring toward the noise of what was coming.
He adjusted the focus knob, spotted their tire tracks.
“I see our path. I don’t see any dust.”
The convoy had begun to pass the point on the highway where they’d turned off.
Jack said, “They’re not stopping.”
He lowered the binoculars.
“What are we going to do, Jack, when the gas runs out?”
“We’ll find some before that happens.”
“You said there aren’t any other cities for a—”
“We’ll have to get lucky.”
“What if we don’t—”
“Dee, what do you want me to say? I don’t know what’s going to—”
“Look.” She grabbed the binoculars from him and turned his head toward the ribbons of dust that were unspooling across the desert behind two trucks.
Jack descended the butte at a sprint, Dee calling after him, but he didn’t stop until he reached the Rover.
Popped the cargo hatch, grabbed the shotgun, felt confident he’d replaced the spent shell yesterday afternoon at the motel. Wondered if that meant he had eight rounds, though he couldn’t be sure.
“Dad?” Naomi said.
“Cole awake?”
“No.”
“Wake him.”
“Are people coming?”
“Yes.”
Dee arrived breathless as he opened his door and took the Glock from underneath the driver seat and a handful of twelve-gauge shells from the center console.
“Jack, let’s just get in the car and go. Make them catch us.”
He jammed the shells into his pocket.
Cole whined, “I’m hungry.”
Jack thinking this was one of those choices where if you took the wrong road, there’d be no chance to undo it. They’d be dead. His son and his daughter and his wife and him too if he was so lucky.
“Jack.”
He looked over Dee’s head to where the desert sloped up to the base of the butte.
“Naomi, you see that large boulder fifty yards up the hill?”
“Where?”
Jack punched through the plastic window and tore it off the door. “There.”
“Jack, no.”
“Take your brother up there and hide behind the rock. No matter what happens, what you see or hear, don’t move, don’t make a sound, until we come get you.”
“What if you don’t?”
“We will.”
“I’m hungry,” Cole cried, eyes still half-closed, not fully awake.
“Go with your sister, buddy. We’ll eat something when you come back.”
“No, now.”
“Get him up that hill, Na, and keep him with you.” He faced Dee, her eyes welling.
“You sure about this, Jack?”
“Yes.” What a lie.
Naomi dragged Cole out of the car, but the boy fell crying to the ground, and he wouldn’t get up.
Jack squatted down in the dirt.
“Look at me, son.” He held the boy’s face in his hands.
“I’m hungry.”
He slapped Cole.
The boy went clear-eyed and hushed, stared at his father, tears running down his face.
“Shut up, and go with your sister right now, or you’re going to get us all fucking killed.” He’d never sworn at his son, never laid a hand on him before.
Cole nodded.
Naomi helped her brother to his feet and Jack watched as they jogged up the slope together, hand-in-hand. Jack looked at his wife. “Come on.”
They ran south for sixty or seventy yards, and then Jack pulled Dee down behind a piece of rock the size of a minivan that had calved off from the butte in another epoch.
Already Jack could hear the growl of an approaching engine.
Dee visibly trembling.
A Jeep appeared around the corner of the butte, kicking streamers of dust in its wake as the driver downshifted.
“Where’s the other truck, Jack?” He glanced back toward the Rover, didn’t see it coming.
“Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
The Jeep sped toward them on a trajectory that would bring it past the boulder by twenty or thirty feet.
He stood. “Here.” Handed her the Glock. “Don’t move from this spot.”
Jack racked the slide and stepped out from behind the boulder and ran. Three men in the Jeep, and the one in back standing on the seat and holding onto the roll bar and a rifle, his long black hair blowing back. Jack slid to a stop in the dirt and pulled the stock into his shoulder and fired before they ever saw him. The driver started bleeding from several holes in his face and the long-haired man fell backward out of the Jeep into a sagebrush. Jack pumped the shotgun and got off another round as the Jeep drew even with him, registered a muzzleflash from the front passenger seat at the same instant the buckshot punched the third man out of the doorless Jeep, which veered sharply away and accelerated into the desert, the driver’s head bobbling off the steering wheel.
Dee shouted his name, and as he turned, fire blossomed in his left shoulder, coupled with a wave of nausea. A Ford F-150, beat to hell and coated in dust, rounded the north side of the butte. Jack sprinted back up the slope to Dee and crouched down beside her.
“How in the world did you just do that?” she asked.
“No idea.”
He dug two cartridges out of his pocket and fed them into the magazine tube and jacked a shell into the chamber.
The F-150 skidded to a stop beside the Rover. Two women jumped down out of the bed. Two men climbed out of the cab.
“Take this.” He gave her the shotgun, took back the Glock.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know, I’m—”
“No, I mean you’re really bleeding.”
“Run like hell toward those mountains. When they follow, lay down in the dirt and let them get close and then open fire. Shoot, pump, shoot. Pump it hard. You won’t break it.”
“Jack.” She was crying now.
“They are going to kill our children.”
She stood and started down the slope into the desert.
He looked down at the Glock in his hand which felt so small and held not a fraction of that devastating twelve-gauge reassurance.
Then he was running across the slope, couldn’t feel his legs or the bullet in his shoulder, nothing but the shudder of his heart banging against his chest plate. He saw Dee being chased by two people into the desert and a man with a large revolver following a woman uphill toward the boulder where his children hid.