Jack swung a hard left and drove up a sidestreet parallel to an elementary school, carpet-bombed into molten rubble.
The street teemed with people on fire who had fled the building, fifty of them he would have guessed. Their collective screams as they literally melted onto the pavement made Jack pray for deafness.
He was trying to drive around them, but they kept stumbling in front of the Jeep, and that Stryker was coming, nothing to do but drive through them, over them, Dee screaming, “Oh dear God,” over and over, and then she started shooting.
Two blocks from the school, Jack spotted the sign for the highway, and he veered onto the road and pushed the gas pedal into the floorboard.
The street was empty and they were screaming north, all the fire and death confined to the rearview mirrors.
They shot across a river and through the northern outskirts of the city.
Jack finally turned on the headlights.
They were pushing a hundred now into a vast and welcoming darkness.
North of town, nothing but black, endless prairie. Even forty miles out, they could still see the glow of everything burning and the tracer fire arcing through the sky. Jack had found a pair of sunglasses under the parking brake. He wore them against the wind, driving northeast now, the speedometer pegged and the noise like standing under a waterfall. The kids, and now Dee, crouched in the floorboards to escape it, but he didn’t mind. The rush of wind meant that every passing second that city was falling farther and farther behind, and the Canadian border rushing closer.
Jack had just glanced at the ruined dash, wondering about the time, when he noticed the line of deep blue—just a single shade up from black—lying across the eastern horizon.
* * * * *
DEE woke in the front passenger floorboard, cramped as hell, cold, and staring up at her husband who wore sunglasses, his hair blown back, face ruddy with windburn and the glow of what she guessed was sunrise. It was loud and the Jeep rode rough—either the shocks had given out or they were no longer traveling on a paved road.
She watched him. Even with the heavy beard coming in, he looked so thin, and her heart was swelling. She’d lost him, felt the awful vacuum of their separation, and now she had him back, sitting three feet away. For once, she knew what she had, the kind of man he was, even in the face of all this. Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.
Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, grinning, but then his brow furrowed.
He touched her cheek.
She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.
Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.
Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.
The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.
She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.
Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked.
“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”
Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.
He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.
It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.
Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.
Jack got out, raised the hood.
Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.
He left the hood raised and walked around to Dee’s door.
“That doesn’t look good,” she said.
“It’s not. We’re going to have to wait awhile until it cools again.”
Two hours later, the engine had stopped smoking, and when Jack engaged the ignition, the temperature gauge dropped almost back to baseline.
The kids were awake and thrilled to discover the bag of junk food Jack had scored at the ski area. Cole’s smiling mouth was smeared with chocolate.
Jack shifted into drive and studied their progress in tenth-mile increments on the odometer, the landscape scrolling by so slowly.
At one mile, the needle had almost touched the red again, and smoke was coming out of the engine, the wind driving it up the hood and into the car.
Jack stopped, turned off the engine.
So this became the architecture of their day.
Drive one mile.
Overheat.
Wait two hours.
Drive another mile.
Overheat.
Rinse.
Repeat.
In the late afternoon, they were stopped again at the edge of a gentle depression. The hood raised. No wind. White smoke coiling up into the sky. Dee sat in the front passenger seat, dozing. Jack lay with his children in the cool, soft grass, staring into the sky. Cole was snuggled up against his chest, the boy asleep.
“How far are we?” Naomi asked.
“Two, three miles.”
“You really think there are camps across the border?”
“Won’t know until we get there.”
“What if there aren’t? What if it’s no different on the other side? It’s just an imaginary line, right?”
“Na, somewhere north of here, we’ll come to a place where we don’t have to run anymore, and we’ll drive or walk or crawl until we get there.”
She moved closer, her head against his shoulder.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we, Daddy?”
Behind them, something chinked against the side of the Jeep.
“Almost, angel.”
A shot rang out across the prairie. Long ways off.
Jack sat up.
The echo going on and on.
“Was that a gun?” Naomi asked.
“I think so.”
Jack glanced back at the Jeep. Because of its dark color, he didn’t notice the bullethole right away, but he did see that Dee was awake, sitting up now.
“Mom’s up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He got onto his feet and walked to Dee’s door. The reflection of the sky in the windowglass—a gray sheet of clouds.
He pulled open the front passenger door.
Dee was pale, and she was looking up at him with a brand of fear in her eyes he’d only seen twice before. Both times, she’d been in the throes of childbirth. The look had been pure desperation, like she’d committed herself to something she couldn’t bear to finish.
He still didn’t understand.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“It hurts, Jack.”
She looked down, and he did, too.
Her seat was full of bright red arterial blood and she was squeezing her right leg.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jack said.
Naomi said, “What’s wrong.”
Jack yelled, “You and your brother run to the other side of the car.”
“Why? What—”
“Just do what I fucking tell you.”
Something struck the rear passenger door a foot away from Jack. He slid his right arm under Dee’s legs and lifted her out of the seat.
The report broke out as he carried her around the smoking grille, Dee moaning when he set her down in the grass on the other side of the Jeep.
“What happened?” Naomi said.
“She’s shot.”
“Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
Cole started to cry.
Jack’s hand was slicked with warm blood that was beading and dripping off the ends of his fingers.
A round zipped through one of the back windows.
“Na, Cole, get behind the tires and lay flat against the grass.” He looked at his wife. “You have to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know if it nicked the femoral artery or what, but you’ve got to stop the bleeding right now or I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock and die.”
“How do I do that?”
“Wrap something around my leg.”
“Like a shirt?”
“Yes. Please hurry.”
Jack ripped open his button-up shirt and tore his arms out of the sleeves as another bullet hit the Jeep.
Dee cried out when he lifted her leg and ran one of the sleeves underneath it.
“How tight?” he asked, tying the first knot.
“Cut my circulation off.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He slid the loop to the top of her thigh and bore down on the knot, then put his foot on it while he cinched it down again. He kept watching Dee’s right hand which she’d been pressing into the wound, trying to stop the blood that pulsed between her fingers with every heartbeat.
“Is it working?” he asked.
“I can’t tell.” She blinked several times, staring into the fading sky. He thought her eyes looked glassy. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s stopping.”
“Can I leave you for a minute?”
“Why?”
“I need to see if anyone’s coming.”
He opened the rear passenger door—no safe way to do this.
Moved quickly into the backseat and reached into the cargo area, grabbing two AR-15s and a pair of binoculars, then diving back outside as another gunshot resounded across the prairie.
Jack crawled around to the back of the Jeep, lay with his chest heaving against the ground and brought the binoculars to his eyes.
Pulled the prairie into focus.
Distant grass, waving in the wind. A backdrop of clouds going dark as night fell. A jackrabbit standing on its hind legs.
He made a slow scan of the horizon.
A pickup truck scrolled into view—old, beat-to-hell Chevy with equal parts paint and rust. He lowered the binoculars to gauge the true distance—a mile, possibly more—then glassed the truck again.
A woman stood in the bed staring through the scope of a high-powered rifle that she’d braced against the roof. The rifle bucked, soundless. A bullet hit the other side of the Cherokee with a hard ping, like it had struck one of the wheels.
The report was slow in reaching him.
While the woman loaded another long, brass-tipped cartridge, he panned down the prairie, starting when he saw them. The men already so close they took up the entire sphere of magnification—three of them in hunting camouflage, a man perhaps five years his senior and two teenagers who shared a strong resemblance.
The teen boys carried semiautomatic pistols and the man a double-barreled shotgun, their faces flushed from running.
Jack lowered the binoculars. They were less than a hundred yards away. No idea how he’d missed them.
He took up one of the machineguns, wondering how much ammo remained.
Looked over at Dee, the children huddled around her.
“They’re coming, Dee.”
“How many?” she asked.
“Three of them.”
“I can help shoot,” Cole said.
“I need you to stay with Mama.”
Jack crouched behind the rear, right wheel, fingering the trigger.
“Is this it, Jack?”
“No, this is not it.”
He eased up until he could just see through the panels of spiderwebbed glass. The footsteps had become audible, swishing through the grass. The men would be upon them in seconds.
He crouched back down behind the tire.
Shut his eyes, took three deep breaths.
Came suddenly to his feet and swung out around the corner of the Jeep with the AR-15 shouldered. The three men already scrambling to raise their weapons vanished behind the burst of fire, the steady recoil driving into his shoulder, and then the magazine was evacuated, the barrel smoking, the men cut down fifteen feet from the Jeep.