Run (27 page)

“Anybody hit?”

“No.”

“No.”

“There’s a hole just ahead. Crawl into it. Go. Now.”

They scrabbled the last few feet through the leaves and then rolled down an embankment. With starlight barely straggling through the crowns of the trees, it was almost pitch-black in their hole, which was really more of a depression, two feet below the forest floor and just spacious enough to accommodate the three of them. Dee sweated under her clothes from the exertion, but as her heart began to slow, she knew the chill would come. She pulled her children into her and shoveled as many leaves as she could on top of them.

“We have to be quiet now,” she said.

“For how long?” Cole asked.

“Until the shooting stops.”

It went on all night, broken occasionally by spates of silence. Sometimes, there were footfalls in the leaves nearby, and once Dee glimpsed two shadows run past the edge of their depression.

Just before dawn, the shooting stopped. After a while, a chorus of weeping and pleading started up, rising toward a crescendo that was promptly smothered under twenty-five shots that rang out in tandem from what sounded like a pair of small-caliber handguns.

* * * * *

BY dawn, an eerie silence had settled over the clearing and the woods. The sky was lightening through the trees, and though her children snored quietly, Dee hadn’t slept all night. Carefully, she withdrew her arms from under Cole’s and Naomi’s necks and turned over in the frosted leaves and crawled up to the lip of the embankment.

Gunsmoke hovered over the clearing like a dirty mist. From ten yards back in the trees, she had a decent view of the soldiers. Counted at least twenty of them milling around in the grass, sometimes squatting down to confirm the dead were really dead.

There were bodies everywhere in the clearing, and over by the mess hall, two dozen or more lay toppled in a row—women and children.

She backed down into the hole.

Naomi stirred. Her eyes opened. Dee brought her finger to her lips.

They didn’t venture out of the hole. Kept hidden instead down in the leaves, listening and sometimes watching the soldiers in the clearing. At midday, a commotion pulled Dee back up to the forest floor. She saw Mathias running through the field, chased by a group of soldiers, one of whom stopped, drew a sidearm, and sighted him up.

Mathias fell concurrently with the pistol report, cried out, and amid the fading echoes of the gunshot, Dee could hear the soldiers laughing.

Someone said, “Nice shot, Jed.”

She watched them approach, others coming over now. Surrounding Mathias at the back of a little cabin, fifty or sixty yards away.

“What hole did this rat crawl out of?”

“There’s a trapdoor in the ground back there, camouflaged with grass.”

“Anyone else in there?”

“Just big enough for him.”

Mathias was still crying, and someone said, “You’re only shot in the ass. Shut the fuck up until we give you something to cry about.”

And they did. All afternoon and into the evening, they did. The screams of Mathias blaring through the woods in between bouts of what Dee could only hope was unconsciousness. She didn’t trust Cole’s curiosity, so she held the boy to her chest and covered his ears herself, part of her dying to know what was happening out there, figuring her imagination had invented something infinitely worse than the truth. The other part trying to force her thoughts elsewhere—to a memory or a fantasy—but when the raw and blistering screech of human agony filled the clearing, there was no way to avert her mind from it or to keep from attempting to picture what they must be doing to him.

As darkness fell, light flickered off the trees above them and streamers of sweet smoke drifted into the woods. For three minutes, Mathias screamed louder than he had all day, and then at last, went silent.

Cole and Naomi became still, and soon they were both murmuring softly in their sleep. Dee turned over onto her stomach, the stiffness in her joints excruciating after nearly twenty hours in this hole.

She crawled up the embankment and peered out past the trees.

A bonfire raged in the middle of the clearing and some of the men had gathered around it, their faces aglow, while others carried the pieces of the cabin they were using for firewood over to what she now realized was a pyre.

Mathias had been hoisted up in the middle of the blaze. Even from sixty yards away, she could see that the crossbeams which held him were still standing and that in fact her imagination had failed to concoct anything as remotely evil as what they had actually done to the man.

The soldiers’ laughter sounded alcohol-infused.

Somewhere out there, a woman wept.

Dee eased back down into the depression and roused her children.

They crept all the way back to the razorwire, which no longer hummed, and followed it through the trees. The fire was roaring now, shooting flames thirty feet high. From Dee’s vantage, she could see one of the soldiers running naked through the grass carrying a burning branch, which he delivered onto the front porch of a cabin.

The soldiers hooted their approval, assembling to watch as the flames licked out along the sides and the roof like molten fingers. Then the voices started up from inside.

“Keep running, guys,” Dee said, “and don’t listen.”

She could hear the people beating on the inside of the door and pleading to be let out, the soldiers talking back, taunting them. What welled up inside of Dee nearly drove her out into that clearing. Maybe she’d only kill one or two of them before they stopped her, but God, in this moment, nothing would feel so right.

“Mom, look.”

Naomi had stopped just ahead at a break in the fence where the soldiers had come through the night before, the razorwire severed and pushed back.

“Be careful, Na,” Dee said, and she lifted Cole in her arms and followed her daughter between the coils of wire.

When they were through, she set Cole down and they all jogged away from the screaming in the clearing.

Naomi was breathless and crying. She stopped, said, “We have to help them.”

“Baby, if there was even a slim chance, we would, but there isn’t. We’d end up dead, just like them.”

“Are they hurting?” Cole asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t stand hearing it,” Naomi said.

“Come on. We have to keep moving.”

In a little while, they came out of the woods onto the road about a hundred yards up from the checkpoint. Dee took the Glock out of her parka and they moved toward the vehicles up ahead.

No light. No movement.

The sound of voices in agony coming through the trees with the distant glow of flames.

A pair of hummers still sat in the road and the dead soldiers, too.

They arrived at Ed’s Jeep.

“Tires are still inflated,” she said.

Out of the gas cans fastened to the luggage rack, only one had survived the gunfight to hold its contents.

“We taking the Jeep?” Naomi asked.

“If the engine isn’t damaged. Why?”

“Ed’s still in the driver seat, and he doesn’t smell good.”

Dee went around the back of the Jeep and stood beside Naomi.

“No, Cole, stay there.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to see this.”

“What is it?”

“Ed’s dead, Cole. It’s nothing good to see. Just stay right there, please.”

She held her arm over her nose and mouth, could only imagine what the potency might have been in warm temperatures.

Ed had swollen up against the steering column, his head resting on the wheel. Dee grabbed hold of his left arm. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and it bent easily as she heaved Ed out of the car. Finally got him free and he tumbled out of the driver seat onto the dirt road, his legs still caught up in the floorboard.

“Give me a hand here, Na, but don’t look at his face.”

They dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and off the side of the road into the trees. Dee found a couple of extra shirts in the cargo area and she spread them across the driver seat to cover the sticky, rotting blood.

There was no more screaming in the woods.

“It still smells bad,” Naomi said.

“We’ll keep the windows down. This cold air will scour it out.”

They grabbed a few candy bars and packages of crackers from the banker’s box. Cole sat in the front passenger seat so Naomi could stretch out across the back, and Dee climbed in and worked the driver seat forward until her feet reached the pedals. Right away, she could see that driving was going to be impossible. Five bullets had come through the windshield into Ed, and around the puncture holes, each of them had made a circle of fractured glass that destroyed the translucence.

Dee got out and climbed up onto the hood and stomped on the windshield. All she managed to do was punch out a hole in front of the steering wheel where the cracks had weakened the glass.

The engine cranked on the first try. She shifted into gear and turned on the parking lights and eased onto the gas. They crept forward, Dee listening to the engine which rumbled smoothly, no audible sign of damage. The oil and temperature gauges offered no indications of malfunction.

She steered between the hummers and dead soldiers and accelerated down the dirt road, wind blasting through the windshield in a freezing stream. The car reeked of gasoline and decay and the bits of glass she sat upon cutting through her jeans, but at least they were on their own and moving away from the clearing. In this moment, safe.

Fifteen miles on, the dirt road intersected with an interstate. All lanes, east- and westbound, empty under the stars. She accelerated down the exit ramp, hit eighty after a half mile. At this speed, the rush of air coming through the windshield dried her eyes to the brink of blindness, so she braked down to forty.

Her children slept.

In every direction, no glimmer of habitation.

The milemarkers streaking past every couple of minutes.

The long vistas and the straight trajectory of the interstate gave a sense of safety, the security blanket of seeing what was coming long before you reached it, no hairpin turns, but it didn’t last.

Just shy of midnight, she turned north onto Highway 89.

Got twenty miles up the road and through a ghost town of charred houses before exhaustion forced her off the highway at a reservoir.

Killed the engine, left the kids to sleep—Cole curled up in the front passenger seat, Naomi in back. She popped the cargo hatch and dug out Ed’s sleeping bag and the roadmap, leaving the hatch open to air out the interior.

Dee walked down to the water and unrolled the sleeping bag across the dirt beside the remnants of another camp—candy bar and potato chip wrappers in the grass.

Kicked off her boots, zipped herself in.

She studied the map. By highway, they were roughly two hundred and seventy-five miles from the Canadian border, with one major city to deal with—Great Falls—but she could cut around and actually save time.

She closed the map.

No trees in this open, arid country. Sagebrush everywhere and she could see forever. A range of mountains to the north, the top thousand feet glazed with snow that glowed under the stars and the moon.

Soundless. Windless. The water so still she could see the stars in it.

She eased back into the sleeping bag, said her husband’s name. Tears burned down her face. It had been five days without him. She lay there trying to feel if he was gone. From a purely logical standpoint, it seemed impossible that he wasn’t, and she certainly felt apart from him. But, for whatever it was worth (and she had to acknowledge maybe nothing and the probability of self-delusion), she didn’t feel his absence. She felt that Jack was still alive, somehow, under the same night sky.

* * * * *

THE semitrailer reeked of shit, urine, vomit, body odor, blood, and something even more malignant. Jack leaned back against the metal wall, his left hand throbbing with such intensity he prayed to lose consciousness again. With the rear door closed, it was pitch black inside and Jack could feel his shoulders grazing the shoulders of the people he sat between as the rocking of the trailer jostled them together. The noise was bewildering—the distant big-rig growl of the V12 Detroit Diesel, the closer rumble of the tires underneath him, a baby wailing, a woman crying, a half dozen voices in whispered conversation.

A man sitting across from him against the other side of the trailer, said, “This is for the guy who just got put in here. Where are we?”

“A mountain pass in Wyoming. Not far from Jackson. Do you know where they’re taking us?”

“Nobody knows anything.”

“How’d you get here?”