They rode north without headlights, cold desert air streaming in through the jagged windowglass. Jack’s eyes were adjusting to the starlight, so that he could just discern the white wisps of reflective paint that framed the highway. Their city fell away behind them, a mosaic of darkness and light and four distinct fires that burned visibly from a distance of twenty miles.
An hour north, on the Zia Reservation, they met with a car heading south, its taillights instantly firing, Jack watching in the rearview mirror as it spun around in the highway and started after them. He accelerated, but the car quickly closed on their bumper. Its lightbar throwing shivers of blue and red through the fractured glass of the Discovery’s windows.
The officer’s boots scraped the pavement as he approached the Land Rover, his sidearm drawn and paired with a Mag-Lite. He sidled up to Jack’s lowered window and pointed a revolver at his head.
“You armed, sir?”
Jack had to turn his right ear to the man so he could hear, blinking against the sharp light. “I have a Forty-five in my lap.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just keep your hands on the steering wheel.” The state police officer shined his light into the backseat, said, “Jesus.” He holstered his gun. “You folks all right?”
“Not especially,” Jack said.
“Somebody shot your car up pretty good.”
“Yes sir.”
“You coming from Albuquerque?”
“We are.”
“How are things there?”
“Terrible. What do you hear? We’ve been checking our car radio, but it’s all static.”
“I hear I’ve lost officers up on the northwest plateau, but I don’t know that for certain. I been told of roadblocks, widespread home invasions. A National Guard unit getting slaughtered, but it’s all rumors. Things came apart so fast, you know?” The officer pulled off his wool hat. He scratched his bald dome, tugged at the tufts of gray that flared out above his ears and ringed his skull. “Where you headed?”
“We don’t know yet,” Jack said.
“Well, I’d get off the highway. Least for the night. I been chased and shot at by several vehicles. They couldn’t catch my Crown Vic, but they’d probably run you down no problem.”
“We’ll do that.”
“You say you have a Forty-five?”
“Yes sir.”
“Comfortable with it?”
“I used to deer hunt with my father, but it’s been years since I’ve even shot a gun.”
The officer’s eyes cut to the backseat, his face brightening. He waved and Jack glanced back, saw Cole sit up and look through the glass. He lowered Cole’s window.
“How you doing there, buddy? You look like a real brave boy to me. Is that right?”
Cole just stared.
“What’s your name?”
Jack couldn’t hear his son answer, but the officer reached his gloved hand through the window.
“Good to meet you, Cole.” He turned back to Jack. “Hunker down someplace safe for the night. You ain’t a pretty sight.”
“My wife’s a doctor. She’ll patch me up.”
The officer lingered at his window, staring off into the emptiness all around them—starlit desert and the scabrous profile of a distant mountain range, pitch black against the navy sky. “What do you make of it?” he said.
“Of what?”
“Whatever this is that’s happening. What we’re doing to ourselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“You think this is the end?”
“Sort of feels that way tonight, doesn’t it?”
The officer rapped his knuckles on the Discovery’s roof. “Stay safe, folks.”
Ten miles on, Jack left the highway. He crossed a cattle guard, and drove 2.8 miles over a washboarded, runoff-rutted wreck of a road until the outcropping of house-size rocks loomed straight ahead in the windshield. He pulled behind a boulder, so that even with the lights on, their Land Rover would be completely hidden from the highway. Shifted into park. Killed the engine. Dead quiet in this high desert. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around in his seat so he could see his children.
“You know what we’re going to do?” he said. “When this is all over?”
“What?” Cole asked.
“I’m taking you kids back to Los Barriles.”
“Where?”
“You remember, buddy. That little town on the Sea of Cortez, where we stayed over Christmas a couple years ago? Well, when this is over, we’re going back for a month. Maybe two.”
He looked at Dee, at Naomi and Cole.
Exhaustion. Fear.
The overhead dome light cut out. Jack could feel the car listing in the wind, bits of dust and dirt and sand slamming into the metal like microscopic ball bearings.
Cole said, “Remember that sandcastle we built?”
Jack smiled in the darkness. They’d opened presents and gone out to the white-sand beach and spent all day, the four of them, building a castle with three-foot walls and a deep moat, wet sand dribbled over the towers and spires to resemble rotten and eroded stone.
“That sucked,” Naomi said. “Remember what happened?”
A storm had blown in that afternoon over Baja as the tide was coming in. When a rod of lightning touched the sea a quarter mile out, the Colcloughs had screamed and raced back to their bungalow as the rain poured down and the black clouds detonated. Jack had glanced back as they scrambled over the dunes, glimpsed their sandcastle rebuffing its first decent wave, the moat filling with saltwater.
“Do you think the waves knocked it down?” Cole said.
“No, it’s still standing.”
“Don’t speak to your brother that way. No, Cole, it wouldn’t have lasted the night.”
“But it was a big castle.”
“I know, but the tide’s a powerful force.”
“We walked out there the next morning, Cole,” Dee said. “Remember what we saw?”
“Smooth sand.”
“Like we hadn’t even been there,” Naomi said.
“We were there,” Jack said, and he pulled the key out of the ignition. “That was a great day.”
“That was a stupid day,” Naomi said. “What’s the point of building a sandcastle if you can’t watch it get destroyed?”
Jack could hear in her voice that she didn’t mean it. Just trying to push whatever button she thought he’d left unguarded. Under different circumstances, it would’ve pissed him off, but not tonight.
He said, “Well, it wasn’t stupid to me, Na. That was one of my favorite days. One of the best of my life.”
Jack unlocked the shotgun. He found a good-size rock and smashed out the tail- and brake- and reverse lights. Unloaded everything from the cargo area and picked the glass slivers out of the carpet and knocked the remaining glass out of the back window, the rear right panel, the front passenger window. The army-green paint of the front passenger door and the back hatch bore several bulletholes. A round had even punctured the leather of Jack’s headrest, a white puff of stuffing mushroomed out of the exit hole.
Jack had folded the backseat down. Naomi and Cole slept in their down bags in the car. It was after 1:00 a.m., and he sat against a boulder. Dee’s headlamp was shining in his eyes as she wiped the right side of his face with an iodine prep pad. She used plastic tweezers from the first aid kit to dig the glass shrapnel out of his face.
“Here comes a big one,” she said.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
The shard clinked into the small aluminum tray, and when she’d removed all the glass she could see, she dabbed away the blood with a fresh iodine pad.
“Does this need stitches?” he asked.
“No. How’s the left ear?”
“What?”