“How’s the left ear?”
“What?”
“How’s the—”
He smiled.
“Fuck you. Let’s dress that hand.”
They inflated the Therm-a-Rests and crawled into their sleeping bags and lay on the desert floor under the stars.
Jack heard Dee crying.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“Kiernan.” Jack had known about Dee’s lover almost from the inception of their affair—she’d been honest with him from the beginning, and on some level he respected her for that—but this was the first time he’d spoken the man’s name.
“That wasn’t him,” she said. “He’s a decent man.”
“You loved him.”
She nodded, a sob slipping out.
“I’m sorry, Dee.”
The wind kicked up. They faced each other to escape the clouds of dust.
“I’m scared, Jack.”
“We’ll keep heading north. Maybe it’s better in Colorado.”
In the intermittent moments of stillness when the wind died away, Jack stared up into the sky and watched the stars fall and the imperceptible migration of the Milky Way. He kept thinking how strange it felt to be lying beside his wife again. He’d been sleeping in the guestroom the last two months. They’d lied to the kids, told them it was because of his snoring, having promised each other they’d handle the dissolution of their family with grace and discretion.
Dee finally slept. He tried to close his eyes but his mind wouldn’t stop. His ear throbbed and the scorched nerve endings flared under the barrel-shaped blister across the fingers of his left hand.
* * * * *
COYOTES woke him, a pack trotting across the desert half a mile away. Dee’s head rested in the crook of his arm, and he managed to extricate himself without rousing her. He sat up. His sleeping bag was glazed with dew. The desert the color of blued steel in the predawn. He wondered how long he’d slept—an hour? Three? His hand no longer burned but he still couldn’t hear a thing out of his left ear except a lonely, hollow sound like wind blowing across an open bottle top. He unzipped his bag and got up. He slipped his socked feet into unlaced trail shoes and walked over to the Land Rover. Stood at the glassless back hatch watching his children sleep as the light strengthened all around him.
They were packed and on the road before the sun came up, pressing north, the morning air whipping through the broken windows. For breakfast, they passed around a bag of stale tortilla chips and a jug of water that had chilled almost to freezing in the night. Eighty miles through Indian country—sagebrush and pinion and long vistas and deserted trading posts and buttes that flushed when first struck by sunlight and a ridiculous casino at seven thousand feet in the middle of nothing on the Apache res. The two towns they blazed through on the northwest plateau stood perhaps too quiet for eight-thirty on a Friday morning, like Christmas and everyone indoors, but nothing else seemed wrong.
Jack said, “Give me your BlackBerry, Na.”
“Why? There’s no signal.”
“I want it fully charged in case we get one.”
She handed it up between the seats.
“I’m really worried about you, Na,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t been able to send a text in two days. I can’t imagine the withdrawal you’re going through.”
Jack saw Dee smile.
“You’re such a retard, Dad.”
They climbed through high desert as the road followed the course of a river. Dee turned on the radio, let it seek the AM dial—nothing but static—and FM landed just one station, an NPR affiliate out of southwest Colorado that had diverged markedly from its standard programming. A young man read names and addresses over the airwaves.
Jack slammed the palm of his hand into the radio.
The volume spiked, the station changed, the car filled with blaring static.
Twenty miles ahead, out of a valley tucked into the juniper-covered foothills, reams of smoke lifted into the blue October sky.
When the kids were younger, they had vacationed in this tourist town—ski trips after Christmas, autumn driving tours to see the aspen leaves, the long holiday weekends that framed their summers.
“Let’s not go through there,” Dee said.
A few miles ahead, everything appeared to be burning.
“I think we should try to get through,” he said. “This is a good route. Not too many people live in these mountains.”
Powerlines had been cut down to block the business route, forcing Jack to detour up Main Avenue, and when they turned into the historic district, Dee said, “Jesus.” Everything smoking, getting ready to burn or burning or burned already. Broken glass on the street. Fire hydrants launching arcs of white spray. Tendrils of black smoke seething through the door- and window-frames of the hotel where they used to stay—a redbrick relic from the mining era. Two blocks down the smoke thickened enough to blot out the sky. Orange fire raged through the exploded third-floor windows of an apartment building, and the canopies of the red oaks that lined the sidewalks flamed like torches.
“Unbelievable,” Dee said.
The kids stared out their windows, speechless.
Jack’s eyes burned.
He said, “We’re getting a lot of smoke in here.”
The windows blew out of a luxury Hummer on the next block. Flames engulfed it.
“Go faster, Jack.”
Cole started coughing.
Dee looked back between the front seats. “Pull your shirt over your mouth and breathe through it. Both of you.”
“Are you doing it too, Mama?”
“Yes.”
“What about Daddy?”
“He will if he can. He needs his hands to drive right now.”
They passed through a wall of smoke, the world outside the windows grayish white, all things obscured. They rolled through an intersection under dark traffic signals.
“Look out, Jack.”
“I see it.”
He steered around a FedEx truck that had been abandoned in the middle of the street, its left turn signal still blinking, though at half-speed, like a heart with barely any beat left in it. Cole coughed again.
They emerged from the smoke.
Jack slowed the car, said, “Close your eyes, kids.”
Cole through his shirt: “Why?”
“Because I told you to.”
“What is it?”
Jack brought the Land Rover to a full stop. An ember blew in through Dee’s window and alighted upon the dash. Smoldering into the plastic. Ash fell on the windshield like charcoal snow. He looked back at his children.
“I don’t want you to see what’s up ahead.”
“Is it something bad?” Cole said.
“Yes, it’s something very bad.”
“But you’re going to see it.”
“I have to see it because I’m driving. If I shut my eyes, we’ll wreck. But I don’t want to see it. Mama’s going to close her eyes, too.”
“Just say what it is.”
Jack could see Naomi already straining to peer around her mother’s seat.
“Is it dead people?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to see them.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It won’t bother me. I promise.”
“I can’t make you shut your eyes, but I can give you fair warning. This is the kind of thing you’ll dream about, so when you wake up tonight crying and scared, don’t call out for me to comfort you, because I warned you not to look.”
Thinking, Will there be a tonight to wake from?
Jack drove on. They had been shot down, ten or fifteen of them, some killed outright, brainmatter slung into quivering gray-pink globules on the street. Others had managed to cover some ground before dying, the distance of their final crawl measured by swaths of purple-stained pavement and in one instance a long gray rope of gut like the woman had been tethered to the street. Jack glanced back, saw Naomi and Cole staring through the window, their faces pressed to the glass. His eyes filled up.