* * * * *
HE registered the sun on his eyelids. Pulled the sleeping bag over his head, let his right hand graze his left arm.
The sickening heat had gone out of it.
Cole’s laughter erupted some distance away in the forest.
Jack opened his eyes and pushed away the sleeping bag and slowly sat up.
Midday light.
The smell of sun-warmed pine needles everywhere.
Wind rushing through the tops of the trees.
Dee inspected his left shoulder. “Looking good.”
“What about all that blood I lost?”
“Your body’s making it back, but you need to be drinking constantly. More water than we have. And you need food. Particularly iron so you can remake those red blood cells.”
“How are the kids?”
“Hungry. Na’s been amazing with Cole, but I’m not sure how much longer she can keep it up.”
“How are you?”
She looked back at the Rover. “Think it’ll start?”
“Even if it does, we might have a gallon of gas left. Maybe a cup. No way to know.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait.”
“We could head back toward the highway, or keep going up the canyon. See how far we get.”
“Jack, we’re not going to find anything, and you know it.”
“That’s a real possibility.”
“We need more gas.”
“We need a new car.”
“If we don’t find something, Jack, if we’re still in these mountains tonight and we have no way to travel anywhere except on foot, which you don’t have the strength for, it’s going to get very bad very fast.”
“You want to pray?”
“Pray?”
“Yeah, pray.”
“That’s really pathetic, Jack.”
The engine cranked on the first attempt, though when Dee shifted into reverse an awful racket jangled to life under the hood. She backed them out of the grove and took it slow through the trees toward the road.
“Which way, Jack?”
“Up the canyon.”
“You sure?”
“Well, we know what’s back toward the highway—nothing.”
She turned onto the road and eased through a gentle acceleration. They’d torn the plastic windows out and the noise of the engine precluded any communication softer than shouting. Jack glanced into the backseat, saw Naomi and Cole sharing the jar of beets. Winked at his son, thinking he looked thinner in the face, his cheekbones more pronounced.
“We’re completely below the empty slash,” Dee said.
They did forty up the road, Jack constantly looking back through the glassless hatch for anything in pursuit.
After four miles, the pavement went to gravel.
They came out of the canyon.
The road had been cut into a mountainside and the pines exchanged for hardier, more alpine-looking evergreens and aspen in full color. At 2:48 p.m., the engine sputtered, and at 2:49, on a level stretch of road on the side of a mountain, died.
They rolled to a stop and Jack looked over at Dee and back at his children.
“That’s all, folks.”
“We’re out of gas?” Cole asked.
“Bone dry.”
Dee set the parking brake.
Jack opened his door, stepped down onto the road. “Come on.”
“Jack.” Dee climbed out and slammed her door. “What are you doing?”
He adjusted the sling which Dee had fashioned out of a spare tee-shirt for his left arm, said, “I’m going to walk up this road until I find something to help us or until I can’t walk anymore. You coming?”
“There’s not going to be anything up this road, Jack. We’re in the middle of a fucking wilderness.”
“Should we just lay down in the road right here then? Wait to die? Or maybe I should get the Glock and put us all—”
“Don’t you ever—”
“Hey, guys?” Naomi got out and walked around to the front of the Rover and stood between her parents. “Look.”
She pointed toward the side of the mountain, perhaps fifty feet up from where they’d stopped, at an overgrown, one-lane road that climbed into the trees.
Jack said, “It’s probably just some old wagon trail. There used to be mining around here I think.”
“You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“There’s a mailbox.”
The mailbox was black and unmarked, and the Colcloughs walked past it up the narrow road into the trees. Jack was winded before the first hairpin turn, but keeping far enough ahead of Dee and the kids that he could gasp for air in private.
At four-thirty in the afternoon, he stopped at an overlook—dizzy, heartbeat rattling his entire body, pounding through his left shoulder. He collapsed breathless on the rock, still sucking down gulps of air when the rest of his family arrived.
“This is too much for you,” Dee said, out of breath herself.
They could see a slice of the road several hundred feet below where it briefly emerged from the forest. A square-topped dome of a mountain loomed ten miles away, the summit dusted with snow. Even bigger peaks beyond.
Jack struggled to his feet and went on.
The road wound through an aspen grove that was peaking—pale yellows and deep yellows and the occasional orange—and when the wind blew through the trees, the leaves fluttered like weightless coins.
The sun was falling through the western sky. Already a cool edge to the air in advance of another clear and freezing night. They hadn’t brought their sleeping bags from the car. Hadn’t brought water. Nothing but the shotgun and the Glock and it occurred to Jack that they might very well be sleeping under the stars on the side of this mountain tonight.
Several switchbacks later, the road curved and Jack walked out of the aspen into a meadow.
He stopped.
Took the Glock out of his waistband and tugged back the slide.
Dee gasped.
Cole said, “What, Mama?”
Jack turned around and shushed them and led them back into the woods.
“Is anyone there?” Dee whispered.
“I couldn’t tell. Let me go check things out.”
“I should go, Jack. You’re too weak.”
“Don’t move from this spot, any of you, until I come back.”
He jogged into the meadow. You could see the desert in the west, the sun bleeding out across it and the distant gray thread of Highway 191. It was getting cold. He slowed to a walk, his shoulder pulsing again. The wind had died away and the trees stood motionless. Somewhere, the murmur of a stream.
A covered porch ran the length of it, loaded with firewood. Solar panels clung to the steep pitch of the roof. Dormers on the second floor. A chimney rising up through the center. The windows were dark, reflecting the sunset off the glass so he couldn’t see inside, even as he walked up the steps.
The wooden porch bowed and creaked under his weight. He leaned in toward a window, touched his nose to the glass, framed his face in his hands to block the natural light.
Darkness inside. The shape of furniture. High ceilings. No movement.
He tried the front door. Locked. Turned away, shielded his eyes, and swung the Glock through the window.
Dee shouted something from the woods.
“I’m okay,” he yelled. “Just breaking in.”
He straddled the windowframe and stepped down into the cabin. Through the skylight above the entrance, a column of late sun slanted through the glass and struck the stone of the freestanding fireplace with a medallion of orange light. It didn’t smell like anyone had been here in some time. The mustiness of infrequent habitation.
From what he could see in the fading light, the floorplan was spacious and open. A staircase corkscrewed up to the second level where the banistered hallway and three open doors were visible from Jack’s vantage.