She looked unreal, moving among the dead like a ghost toward the fountain, emaciated, tears riding down her cheeks.
Kiernan must have seen the glitch in Jack’s attention, because he glanced back just as Dee raised an old revolver.
“What are you doing here, Kiernan?” she asked.
“Waiting for you, love.”
The gunshot reverberated between the buildings.
Kiernan stumbled back and sat down beside Jack.
He was still holding the knife, and Jack grabbed it and stood facing him.
Blood ran down the man’s face out of a hole through his left eye.
The blade of the Ka-Bar passed through his chestplate with no effort and Jack buried it to the hilt. Kiernan toppled back into the icy pool, a cloud of murky red surrounding him, the weight of his boots and fatigues pulling him under as the one good eye blinked frantically.
Jack turned around and Dee was there. He pulled her down into the snow and he was on top of her, kissing her, like drinking water again, like breathing, and they came apart only to breathe, both crying like babies. He held her face in his hands and wouldn’t let go for fear she would vanish or he’d wake up and realize it was him dying in the fountain and these were his last thoughts.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” he said, and he kept saying it, and she kept telling him that she was, and that she was real. He couldn’t take his hands off her, and he couldn’t believe this was happening.
“You didn’t have any problems getting Cole into the city?” Jack asked. They were walking up 3
rd
Street North toward the library, each holding two machineguns taken off the dead men in the square like a pair of bad action-flick heroes. “It was on lockdown when I got here several days ago. They weren’t letting any of the affected in, but I told them you might be passing through with a boy who was.”
“We drove in last night,” Dee said. “The barricade had been destroyed. We almost didn’t make it, Jack. Bombs going off everywhere. Gunfights on almost every block. A couple of really close calls. It’s a full-scale war on the east side of town. Thousands dead. Easily.”
They passed a law office that had been hit with a mortar shell. Wet pleadings plastered all over the sidewalk.
“How did you know to come to the square?”
Dee smiled. “How did you?”
“I’d gone to the shelter looking for you. Nobody had seen you or the kids. I drove downtown, out of gas, desperate, and then the headlights shone on the Davidson Building. Today was my third in the square. I didn’t know if you’d try to come here or just get the kids across the border. For all I knew, you were dead.”
“When I saw the mileage sign for Great Falls, I knew if you were alive, if you had any strength left in your body, you’d come to this place.”
“So you have a car?”
“Yeah.”
“You should’ve tried to cross the border without me.”
“Don’t say that. You wouldn’t have.”
Machineguns chattered a dozen blocks away.
“I came here this morning,” Dee said, “but it was crawling with soldiers.”
“You saw what I wrote on the side of the car?”
“I started crying when I saw it. Lost it. I hid until the soldiers left, but then Kiernan came back to kill you. I watched him chase you into the bank. I thought. . . . . .” She shook off the wave of emotion. “You were in there so long.”
“I can’t believe you came here, Dee.”
She stopped and kissed him.
Half a mile away, a bomb exploded.
“Come on,” she said. “We better run.”
Jack knelt down beside the sofa in the historical archive room of the Great Falls Public Library. Dee shined a flashlight on the ceiling, and in the refracted light Jack looked down at his children, sleeping head-to-toe. Touched his hand to Cole’s back.
“Hey, buddy. Daddy’s here.”
Cole stirred, eyes fluttering. They opened, got so wide Jack knew the boy had given him up for dead.
“Is it you?” the boy said.
“It’s me.”
Cole seemed to think things over for a minute.
“I dream about you every night and you talk to me just like this, but every time I wake up, you’re gone.”
“You’re awake, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be gone again.”
He drew the boy into his arms.
“Why are you crying?” Cole said.
“Because I’m holding you, and I didn’t think I ever would again.”
Naomi sat up at the other end of the couch. “Oh my God.” She burst into tears and lunged toward Jack, and he grabbed her, too, now holding his children in his arms, and he could not think of a time in his life when he’d been more overloaded with joy.
Dee wouldn’t take his word for it that he was okay. She made him strip and examined every square inch of his body with the flashlight, starting with the recent gunshot wound to his right shoulder.
“How’s it feel?”
“Pretty sore these last few days.”
“It’s infected. Come with me.”
She took him into the bathroom and cleaned the wound as well as she could with a few paper towels and antiseptic hand soap.
“You have to try and keep it clean until we find some bandages.”
She held up his left arm.
“What’s this?”
He slowly unwound the filthy bandage covering his ring finger.
Dee gasped when she saw it.
“Forgot to mention this,” he said. “Soldier at the top of Togwotee Pass cut it off.”
She grabbed the flashlight off the sink and shined the light on the jagged phalange and the scab trying to form across it.
Tears in her eyes again. “Your ring finger,” she said. “Your ring.”
Later, while the kids slept, he and Dee crashed on a sofa, and they talked as night fell. Soon it was pitch black except when light flickered through the tall windows in the archive room. Like watching a rainless thunderstorm, except even the most distant detonations shook the building’s foundation and made dust rain down from the ceiling into their eyes.
Jack drifted off and when he woke again, he was still holding Dee on the couch.
Her ear against his mouth. Didn’t know if she was sleeping. Whispered anyway. Told her how his heart was so full, how if they ever got someplace safe, he would spend every waking moment making her happy, loving her, loving Cole and Na. Fuck the life they’d walled themselves in with. He didn’t care if they lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. Let them be poor. Let them scrape by. He just wanted to be with her, every second of every hour of every day. Wanted to see her old and slow and gray. Watch her hold their granddaughters, their grandsons.
She didn’t respond except to make a sleepy sigh and to nuzzle in a little closer.
Jack sat up. The building shook, books falling off the shelves. His ears ringing. Dee was up too, her lips moving, but he couldn’t hear anything, and then the sound came rushing back—the kids screaming, Dee shouting. He got to his feet, the room brilliantly lit through those tall windows by the flames consuming a building several blocks away, burning with such intensity he could feel the heat through the glass.
He opened his mouth to say something but a fast-building roar stopped him, something approaching, the noise of it getting louder and closer. And then it was right on top of them, like God screaming, and in the flamelight, Jack could see his children covering their ears, mouths dropped open, eyes wide with terror.
Then it was gone, and the room filled with enough silence for the sounds of distant machinegun fire to filter in.
Jack was panting—they all were.
He turned to Dee, said, “We’re—”
A flash of scalding white light. The window blew out and something hit Jack in the chest that was neither force nor sound, but a terrible fusion of the two, and he was lying on his back, his molars jogged loose in their beddings, telling himself to get up, to check on his children, but his legs were slow to respond.
The ringing in his ears had become a jackhammer.
He sat up, eyes still struggling after that blinding detonation.
The building across the street had taken a direct hit, and amid the massive flames, he could see steel girders sagging, melting in the heat.
He was unstable on his feet.
Dee looked all right. She was sitting up, stunned, and he could see that her eyes were open, blinking slowly.
Cole and Naomi lay in fetal positions on the floor, still bracing, covering their heads and trembling. Jack put his hands on them and patted their backs, ran his fingers through their hair, and then Dee was beside him. He tried to say something to her, couldn’t hear his own voice inside his head, but Dee grabbed his face and pulled him close enough to read her lips.
He slung the machinegun straps over his neck and carried Naomi down the staircase, Dee leading with the flashlight, Cole draped over her shoulder.
On the second-floor landing, Jack heard that sound again, muffled now but racing toward a violent climax, and then the building shook with such intensity he couldn’t believe it resisted collapse.
Everywhere on the ground level, shelves had toppled. They waded through books, and the smell of old paper filled the air.
The shock wave had exploded the wall of windows at the entrance. They passed over mounds of shattered glass and outside into a nightmare world. Black smoke poured out of the ruins of whatever had stood across the street and at the pinnacle of the flagpole, the United States and Montana State flags had begun to burn at the fringes.
Dee led Jack over to a green Cherokee parked out of sight between the building and a hedge.
She glanced back, yelled, “You drive,” and tossed him a ring of keys.
Dee opened the rear passenger door and set Cole inside. Jack handed Naomi over, and after Dee had gotten their daughter in and shut the door, he put his lips to his wife’s ear.
“How much gas?”
“Enough to reach the border.”
“You have to be my gunner.” She nodded. “Shoot any fucking thing that moves.”
Jack climbed in behind the wheel and cranked the engine as Dee slammed her door and lowered the window.
His mind ran hot, trying to orient himself in the city.
Essentially two routes north—I-15 to Sweetgrass or Highway 87 to Havre.
He shifted into gear and eased the Jeep down through the steaming grass onto the pavement, the heat from the building across the street so intense it broke him out into a sweat.
He punched the gas, felt the wind and smoke streaming through the windshield into his face. The glass had been shot out, and that was going to make driving at high speed infinitely more difficult.
By the time he rolled up on the next intersection, he’d decided to try the highway north out of town. Jack glanced over at Dee, who already had the machinegun shouldered and aimed out the window. He tapped her leg, mouthed, “You ready?” She nodded. He glanced into the backseat, saw his children down in the floorboards, didn’t know if they could hear him, but he yelled, “Kids, do not lift your heads no matter what happens.”
Jack turned onto 3
rd
Avenue North and gunned the engine.
In the distance, tracers streamed into the low cloud deck, giving the eastern sky a radioactive burn.
They were doing eighty down the street, and he could barely see a thing in the absence of headlights and with the wind and smoke rushing into his face.
They shot through several dark blocks where nothing had been touched, Jack driving blind. He had reached to turn on the headlights when muzzleflashes erupted all around them like a swarm of fireflies, bullets striking the Jeep on every side and the windows exploding in fountains of glass, the racket of Dee’s machinegun filling the car as she screamed at him to go faster.
They sped away from the gunfire.
One block of peace.
Jack uncertain whether his hearing was improving or if they were coming up on another battle but the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells became audible over the groaning engine.
At the next junction, he looked down the intersecting street and saw a tank rolling toward them, flanked by a pair of Strykers.
A quarter mile ahead, a succession of ten closely-staggered explosions lit up four city blocks, and Jack could feel the road shuddering underneath him, everything illuminated brighter than midday, as if the sun had gone supernova. He could see people drawn to the windowframes of almost every building they raced past—unarmed, doomed, gaunt faces awash in firelight.
In the rearview mirror, Jack saw that one of the Strykers had launched out ahead of the tank. From it issued several splinters of light and a low-frequency, concussive report, like someone pounding nails. Two 50-caliber rounds punched through the back hatch, one of them obliterating the dash.
They had reached the blast zone, and up ahead, the road vanished into towers of incomprehensible fire.