Run (6 page)

They rode down from the pass out of the high country and back into the forest and then out of it again. The road had been gashed out of a cliff and the drop off the right shoulder was a thousand feet down to a river that snaked through a canyon. The valley from which it flowed contained a small town dotted with brightly-painted buildings and a railroad yard and a gold-domed courthouse at the north end.

“Well, it isn’t on fire,” Jack said. He glanced over, saw Dee massaging the back of her neck. “Headache?”

“Yeah, and it’s getting worse.”

“You know what it is, don’t you?”

“The elevation?”

“Nope. I’ve got one, too.”

“Oh my God, you’re right. We’ve missed our morning coffee.”

They rounded a hairpin turn: three trucks parked across the road, six men sprinting toward the Land Rover, guns pointed, screaming at them to stop the car.

“Jack, turn around.”

“They’re too close. They’ll open fire.”

“Won’t they anyway?”

“What’s happening?”

“Naomi, stay quiet, keep your headphones in, and don’t wake Cole.”

Jack still searched for a way out as the men closed in—a steep drop through trees over the right shoulder, an impossible climb up the mountainside off the left, and not enough room in this fast-diminishing increment of time to execute a three-point-turn and haul ass back the way they’d come.

Jack shifted into park. “Put your hands up, Dee.”

“Jack—”

“Just do it.”

The first man arrived training a bolt-action Remington on Jack’s head through the glass as the others surrounded the car.

“Roll it down,” he said. Jack lowered the window. “Where the fuck are you going?”

“Just north.”

“North?”

“Yeah.”

The man was bearded but young. Not even twenty-five, Jack thought. He wore a camouflage hunting jacket. A braided goatee tied off with a dangling row of black beads.

Someone standing behind the Rover said, “New Mexico tag.”

“Why are you up here? Who are you with?”

“No one, it’s just us.”

Another man walked over and stood by Jack’s window. A patchier beard. Long black hair flowing out of his corduroy bomber hat.

He said, “There’s a kid sleeping in the backseat. Their car’s been shot to hell, Matt. They got supplies and shit in the back.”

“We had to leave our home in Albuquerque last night,” Jack said. “Barely made it out.”

The man named Matt lowered his .30-.30. “You come through Durango this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“We heard it got pretty fucked up.”

“They burned it. Bodies everywhere.” Jack watched the fear take up residence in the man’s face. A sudden paling that made him look even younger than Jack had first suspected.

“It’s bad, huh?”

“Biblical.”

The others gathered around Jack’s window.

Cole sat up. “Are they mean, Daddy?”

“No, buddy, we’re okay.”

“Yeah, we’re cool, little man.”

The assembled men looked less like sentries than armed ski bums. Their weapons better suited to elk hunting than warfare—all toting high-powered rifles slung over their shoulders but not a pistol or shotgun to be seen.

“So you’re guarding the road into town?” Jack asked.

“Yep, and there’s another group stationed below Red Mountain Pass, trying to destroy the road.”

“Why?”

“There’ve been reports of a convoy of trucks and cars heading south from Ridgeway.”

“How many vehicles?”

“Don’t know. Most of Silverton’s already gone up into the mountains. Glad to see you driving a Land Rover, ’cause that’s really the only route left.”

“What route is that?”

“Cinnamon Pass to Lake City. And you should probably get going. It’s a bitch of a road.”

They rolled into the old mining town at midday and Jack pulled into a small grocery with several gas pumps out front. He sent Dee and the kids inside to scrounge for food while he flipped the lever and prayed there was something left. There was. He topped off the Rover’s tank, walked into the grocery. The cash register stood unmanned, the shelves stripped bare, the store pillaged.

He called out, “You finding anything?”

Dee from the back: “Slim pickings, although I did get a road map. Any gas left?”

“I filled us up.” Jack grabbed two five-gallon gasoline cans off a shelf in the barebones automotive aisle and went outside to the pump and filled them up. He cleared out a spot amid the camping gear and lifted the red plastic cans one at a time through the open window of the back hatch. Inside the store again, it took him several minutes to find the plastic sheeting. He carried two boxes of it, a roll of duct tape, and the single remaining quart of 10w-30 motor oil back outside with him. Dee and the kids were already in the car when he climbed in.

“How’d we do?” he said.

“Three strips of jerky. A can of diced tomatoes. Box of white rice. Bottle of seasoning.”

“Sounds like a meal.”

Up Greene Street for several blocks. Most of the shops closed. No one out. The sky sheeted over with uniform gray clouds which had moved in so suddenly that just a wedge of autumn blue lingered to the south, all the brighter for its dwindling existence. Jack turned into a parking space.

“I won’t be long.”

He left the car running and stepped into the sporting goods store. It smelled of waterproofing grease and gunpowder. Everywhere, racks of bibs and jackets patterned in every conceivable design of camouflage and mounted deer and elk heads with their impossible racks and a stuffed brown bear standing on its hind legs looking back toward an aisle of nets and fly-rods and hip waders. A burly-looking man with the girth of a drink machine stood watching him from behind the counter. He wore a flannel shirt, a vest flecked with renegade feathers of down, and he was pushing rounds into a revolver.

“What are you lookin for?”

“Shells for a twelve gauge and a—”

“Sorry.”

“You’re out?”

“I ain’t sellin any more ammo.”

The gun cases behind the counter had been emptied.

“Tell you what.” The man reached under the counter, brought out a sheathed hunting knife, and set it on the glass. “Take that. Best I can do. On the house.”

Jack walked to the counter. “I already have a knife.”

“What kind?”

“Swiss Army.”

“Good luck killin some son of a bitch with it.”

Jack lifted the large bowie. “Thanks.”

The storeowner flipped the cylinder closed and set to work loading a magazine.

“Are you staying?” Jack asked.

“You think I look like the type of hombre to let some motherfuckers run me out of my own town?”

“You should think about leaving. They wiped Durango off the map.”

“Under advisement.”

Someone pounded the storefront glass, and Jack turned, saw Dee frantically waving him outside.

When he pushed the door to the sporting goods store open, Jack heard a distant growl, a symphony of engines growing louder with each passing second, like the opening mayhem of a speedway race.

Dee said, “They’re here.”

As he reached to open his door, gunshots broke out in the south end of town and men were yelling and he glimpsed the lead trucks of the convoy already turning onto Greene Street. He jumped in behind the wheel and reversed out of the parking space and shifted into drive. Fed the engine gas, the hotels and restaurants and gift shops racing by, Jack running stop signs, doing seventy by the time he passed the courthouse at the north end of town.

The road turned sharply.

Jack braked, tires squealing.

Dee said, “You know where you’re going?”

“Sort of.”

The road left town and went to dirt, still smooth and wide enough for Jack to keep their speed above sixty. It ran for a couple of miles above the river and then emerged into a higher valley. They passed ruined mines. Mountains swept up all around them, the craggy summits edging into the falling cloud deck. In the rearview mirror, Jack eyed the dust clouds a mile back, and when he squinted, raised the half dozen trucks contained within them.

They passed the remnants of another mine, another ghost town.

The road became rocky and narrow and steep.

“Jack, you have to go faster.”

“Any faster, I’ll bounce us off the mountain.”

Naomi and Cole had unbuckled their seatbelts and they both sat up on their knees, facing the back hatch and watching the pursuing trucks.

“Get down, kids.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to get shot, Naomi.”

“Jack, come on.”

“Are they going to shoot at me, Daddy?”

“They might, Cole.”

“Why?”

Why.

The road had gone completely to hell, the Rover’s right tires passing inches from a nonexistent shoulder that plunged a hundred and fifty feet into a stream boiling with whitewater.

“Dad, I’m cold.”

“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

Snow starred the windshield. A signpost appeared in the distance. Beside the words, Cinnamon Pass, which had been engraved in the wood, an arrow pointed to a road that could hardly be called a road—just a single lane of broken rocks that switchbacked up the flank of a mountain into the clouds.

Jack took the turnoff. Snow blew in through the open windows. They climbed several hundred feet above the other road, above timberline, and as Jack negotiated the first tight switchback, that squadron of trucks emerged out of the mist below, cutting triangles of light through the falling snow.

Dee lifted the binoculars from the floorboard and leaned out the window and glassed the valley. Even without magnification, Jack could see five of the trucks veer onto the turnoff for Cinnamon Pass.

“Why’s the one stopping?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Let me see. A man’s getting out.”

“What’s he—”

“Everybody get down.”

“What’s wrong?”

Something struck the Rover, and for a split second Jack thought the tires had thrown a rock.

A rifle shot echoed off the mountains.

“Get down on the floorboards.”

The Rover shook and pitched as Jack pushed the speedometer to ten miles per hour, maneuvering to avoid the largest, sharpest rocks that jutted out of the trail. The window at Naomi’s seat exploded in a shower of glass and everyone screamed and Jack shouted his daughter’s name and she said that she was okay.

Another rifle shot. They climbed into the base of a cloud, Jack thinking,
He’s aiming for the tires
, as a bullet punctured Dee’s door and ripped through his seat, inches from his back.

The mist thickened. The rocks had just been wet. Now they were frosted. The snow melting and streaking the windshield and pouring into the car through the open windows. Jack thought he heard another shot over the engine, but when he glanced out Dee’s window to where the valley should have been a few hundred feet below, there was only a blue-tinted mist cluttered with snowflakes that swirled and fell in disorienting profusion.

They climbed the mountainside, the road exposed, Dee and the kids still burrowed into the floorboards, Jack constantly checking the rearview mirror for headlights.

“Can we get up now?” Cole asked.

“Not yet.”

“It hurts to stay like this.”

The road leveled off and the Rover’s headlights passed over another signpost: Cinnamon Pass Elevation 12,640 Feet. Several inches of snow on everything in this tundra world. No trees or shrubs but only rock and nothing visible beyond fifty feet through the fog and pouring snow, the light more like dusk than early afternoon. In some outpost of emotion, divorced from the horror of the moment, Jack found the isolated beauty of this pass heartbreaking. The kind of wild place his father had loved to take him when he was a boy.

He brought the Rover to a stop and turned off the car and threw open his door.

“What are you doing, Jack?”

“Just checking things out. You guys can sit up now.”

He stepped down into the snow and shut his door. He strained to listen. At first, just the infinitesimal pattering of snowflakes falling on his shoulders, the ticking of the cooling engine, the wind, the invisible shifting of rocks on some obscured peak. Then he heard them—impossible to tell how far away, but the distant groan of engines became audible in the gloom below the pass, muffled by the snow. He got back into the car and cranked the engine and they went on. Jack shifted into four-wheel low. The road descending, the tires sliding on ice down the steeper grades. After two miles, shrubs appeared again. Then tiny, crooked fir trees. They dropped into a forest and a stream fell in beside the road. Still snowing here, but the snow had only begun to collect.