“Come on,” Jack said, pulling his arm, “we aren’t stopping.”
“We have to.”
Cole wouldn’t move.
Jack let go of Naomi’s hand and scooped the boy up in his arms and started jogging again.
Cole screamed, his arms flailing.
“Goddamnit, Cole—”
The boy grabbed his hair and tried to bite Jack’s face.
He dropped Cole into the grass.
“He’s turning into one of them,” Naomi screamed.
“Look at me, Cole.”
“We have to go back.” The boy was crying now.
“Why?”
“To get Mom.”
“Cole, we can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.”
“But it’s over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“The lights. They aren’t here anymore.” Jack knelt down in the grass, his boy just a shadow in the dark.
“Cole, this is not the time to screw around.”
“I’m not, Daddy. I don’t feel it anymore.”
“When did it go away?”
“Just now, while we were running. I can still feel it going out of me.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Cole.”
“You have to go get Mom. It’s okay now. The bad people won’t hurt you.”
Jack looked at his daughter.
“Go,” she said.
“Really?”
“If there’s even a chance, right?”
“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Do not move from this spot. It might be tomorrow morning before I come back, because I don’t think I’ll be able to find you in the dark.”
“What if you don’t come back?” she said.
“If I’m not back by mid-morning, you keep going north until you cross the border and find help. Cole, look at me.”
He held the boy’s hands. “If you’re wrong about this, you might never see me again. Do you understand that?”
The boy nodded. “But I’m not wrong.”
Jack ran across the prairie, tearing through the dark, his crumbling shoes flapping with every footfall, already gasping, no idea if he was headed in the right direction, and nothing to see but gaping blackness.
After five minutes, he stopped and bent over, his heart banging in his chest.
When he looked up again, he saw a cluster of red lights far across the plain. A further set of headlights. Over the rocketing of his pulse, he thought he heard the engines.
He was still gasping, realized he wasn’t going to get his wind back, so he started running again, working up to as much of a sprint as he could manage. He was terrified the taillights would vanish, but they stayed put, didn’t even seem to be moving away from him now.
Sweat ran into his eyes, and when he wiped the sting away, the lights had disappeared.
He stopped.
Didn’t hear the engines anymore.
Just an ocean of soundless dark.
Seven flashes exploded through the black. For a fraction of a second, he saw Dee’s Jeep and the three trucks surrounding it. Much closer than he thought, just a few hundred yards out. He was running again as the seven gunshots reached him and ripped his guts out, the last four hundred yards blazing past in a rush of terror, pain, and self-doubt, thinking he should have stayed with his children. He was going to see his wife dead and get himself killed, never see any of them again. And so close to safety, too.
He stopped twenty yards out from the vehicles, so far beyond the boundary of his endurance.
It sounded like sirens ringing inside his head, the darkness spinning.
He leaned over and puked into the grass.
Straightened up again, staggered past the trucks toward the Jeep.
The driver side door had been thrown open, the stench of cordite strong in the air, and he was moving through a haze of smoke, waiting for the gunshots, the attack.
He stopped again when he saw them, not understanding what it meant, figuring he must be missing something, his brain failing to process information after he’d pushed himself so hard.
Had to count them twice.
Seven people sprawled in the grass around the Jeep. Each of them dead from a headshot, their guns lying within reach or still in hand.
In the light that spilled out of the Jeep, he saw the eighth member of the party crouched down against the right front wheel, tears streaming down his face, the long barrel of a large-caliber revolver jammed between his teeth. He wore a fleece vest and a cowboy hat, a patchy blond beard struggling to cover an acne-ruined face.
When he saw Jack, he pulled the gun out of his mouth.
“I can’t do it,” the man said. He offered Jack the gun. “Please.”
“What?”
“Kill me.”
Jack was still gasping for air, his legs burning. He reached forward, slowly, as if sudden movement might cause the young man to rethink his offer, then snatched the revolver out of his hand.
The man said, “Where are you going?” as Jack walked around the open door and looked into the Jeep.
“Oh God, baby.”
The driver seat had been reclined and his wife lay stretched back on it, unmoving, her eyes closed, blood still running out of her leg.
“Dee.”
He glanced down at her right leg, saw where the shirt he’d tied around her thigh had been severed.
He set the gun in the floorboard and reached in, taking up both ends of the bloody shirt sleeve and cinching it down even harder than before, until the blood stopped flowing.
“Dee.” He touched her face. “Dee, wake up.”
Outside, the man was crying, begging for Jack to end him.
Jack moved outside and around the door.
“Which of those trucks is yours?” he asked.
“Oh my God,” the man cried. “Oh my God. My daughter. I—”
Jack held the revolver to the man’s knee. “Look at me.”
The man looked up at him.
“My wife needs medical attention. Do you have keys to any of these trucks?”
The man pointed beyond the Jeep. “The Chevy. Here.” He dug a pair of keys out of his jeans, handed them to Jack.
“What happened?” the man said.
“What are you talking about?”
“To me.”
“I have no fucking idea.”
“You have to kill me. I can’t stand knowing what I—”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Please—”
“But I will take your mind off it.”
Jack pulled the trigger and the man screamed, clutching his knee. Jack stood and walked around the car door. He shoved the revolver down the back of his jeans, leaned in, lifted his wife out of the pool of blood.
He was drenched in sweat, his legs trembling with exhaustion. Stumbled away from the Jeep with Dee in his arms and the young man pleading to die. It was all he could do to carry her those fifty feet to the pickup truck.
It was a pristine 1966 Chevy.
Powder blue.
He opened the passenger door and laid Dee across the vinyl, then limped around and hauled himself up into the cab.
The third key he tried started the engine.
He hit the lights, shifted into gear, floored the accelerator.
They raced across the prairie. He held her hand which was growing cold, saying her name over and over, an incantation. He had no idea if she even had a pulse, and still promising things he had no business promising—that they were almost over the border, almost to safety, where a city of tents awaited them, a refuge crawling with doctors who could fix her. She’d lost a lot of blood, but she was strong, had made it this far, she could surely hang on just a little farther, live to see the end of this and whatever new life they made, live to forget the worst of this, to see Na and Cole forget the worst of this, see her children grow up strong and happy, because they had so many more years the four of them, so many experiences to share that didn’t involve running and death and fear, and please God darling, if any part of you can hear me, don’t let this be the end.