Run

The stream was freezing. He picked a dozen fist-size rocks out of the water and stretched out his tee-shirt and loaded them all into the pouch it made. Inside the fire ring, he stacked wads of tissue paper and the browned spruce needles and a handful of twigs and enclosed them all in a framework of larger branches. Last fire he’d built had been at their home in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, and he’d cheated, used a brick of firestarter to get things going.

His hands trembled in the cold as he held the lighter to the tissue paper and struck a flame.

Later, he heard the tent unzip. Dee crawled out, stepped into her wet shoes. She walked over and stood beside him.

“I guess it literally takes the end of the world to get a family camping trip.”

“I’m just trying to get a fire going so we can dry some stuff out.”

A wisp of smoke lifted out of the pitiful pile of blackened twigs and half-burnt tissue paper.

“You’re shivering. Come into the tent and get some sleep. I have your sleeping bag ready for you.”

He stood, his legs cramping. He’d been squatting for over an hour.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“Will you let me worry about di

Jack abandoned his wet clothes in a pile in the tent’s vestibule and crawled into his sleeping bag. He could hear Dee moving around outside and he could hear the snow falling down on the rain fly. He didn’t stop shivering for a long time. His children slept. He reached over and held his hand to Cole’s chest. Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Naomi lay on the other side of Cole against the tent wall. He leaned across, his hand searching out her sleeping bag in the darkness, then finally resting on her back. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.

When he woke it was pitch black and he thought he was in his bed in the guestroom in Albuquerque. He sat up and listened. He didn’t hear his children breathing. He didn’t hear anything but the pulsing in his left ear. He reached over in the dark. The sleeping bags empty. He almost called out for them, but then thought better of it. He dressed quickly in his cold, damp clothes and unzipped the vestibule and crawled outside. It had stopped snowing, and his footsteps squeaked in the half foot of powder. Inside the Rover, light flickered through the plastic windows. He went over and opened the driver’s door and got in. Everyone in their respective seats eating out of paper bowls. A candle on the center console. “Smells good,” he said.

Dee lifted a bowl off the dashboard and handed it to him.

“It’s probably cooled off. I didn’t want to waste fuel keeping it warm.”

Tomatoes and rice, heavily seasoned, with pieces of jerky mixed in. He stirred it up and took a bite. He could hear Naomi’s iPod, and he wanted to tell her to turn it off. Ration the damn power so you can play it when you actually need a distraction. She’d forgotten to bring her charger, and when that battery died, the music was finished. But he said nothing. Pick your battles.

He glanced at his watch—a few hours later than he thought.

“This is good,” he said. “Really good.”

“I didn’t like it,” Cole said.

“Sorry, buddy. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we don’t have much food right now, so we have to be thankful for what we do have.”

“I still don’t like it.”

Dee said, “Another truck went by while you were sleeping.”

“Was the light on in here?”

“No, I heard the engine coming in time to blow it out.”

Jack finished off the bowl of rice and tomatoes. He was still hungry, figured everyone else was, too. His head pounding from caffeine deprivation.

“Where’s the water?”

Dee handed him a jug from the floorboard at her feet. He unscrewed the cap, tilted it back.

They put Naomi and Cole to bed and went across the stream together and out into the meadow. The sky had cleared. Stars shone like flecks of ice and the serrated ridge of a distant peak glowed brighter and brighter as the moon came up behind it.

Dee said, “I need to know that you have a plan, Jack.”

“We’re alive, aren’t we?”

“But where are we going? How will we stay alive?”

They walked into the road, the snow tracked through, and it suddenly dawned on Jack what they’d done.

“Shit. We aren’t thinking.” He pointed at the meadow where their footprints led back into the trees, advertising the location of their camp.

Dee pushed him hard enough to make him stumble back. “Tell me how we’re going to survive this. Tell me right now, because I don’t see it. Pure luck we weren’t all murdered today.”

“I don’t know, Dee. I couldn’t start a fucking fire with matches and tissue paper this afternoon.”

“I need to know you have a plan. Some idea of what—”

“Well, I don’t. Not yet. I just know we can’t stay here after tonight. That’s all I know.”

“Because of food.”

“Food and cold.”

“That’s not good enough, Jack.”

“What else do you want from me?”

“I want you to be a fucking man. Do what you don’t do at home. Take care of your family. Be there. Physically. Emotionally—”

“I’m trying.”

“I know. I know you are.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I just can’t believe this is happening.”

Cole woke up crying in the night. Jack unzipped his sleeping bag, let the boy crawl inside with him.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” he whispered.

“I had a dream.”

“You’re okay. It wasn’t real.”

“It felt real.”

“You want to tell me what it was about? Sometimes, when you talk about them, nightmares don’t seem so scary.”

“You’ll be mad at me.”

“Why in the world would I be mad at you?”

“You told me not to look.”

“Did you dream about those people we saw in the street today?” He felt his little boy’s head nodding.

“You said you wouldn’t comfort me because you told me not to look.”

He wrapped his arms around Cole. “You feel that?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I will always comfort you, Cole.”

“Can I stay in your sleeping bag?”

“You promise to go right back to sleep?”

“I promise.”

“Try not to think about all the bad stuff, all right? It’ll only give you more nightmares. Think about a happy time.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. When were you last really happy?”

The boy was quiet for a minute.

“When we went to see Grandpa.”

“You mean last summer?”

“Yeah, and he let me run through the sprinkler.”

“Then think about that, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jack held his son as the pleasing weight of sleep settled back over him, and he was begi

“What’d you say, buddy?”

The boy turned over and put his mouth to Jack’s right ear: “I have to tell you something else.”

“What?”

“I know why the bad people are doing it.”

“Cole, quit thinking about that stuff. Good thoughts, okay?”

“Okay.”

Jack closed his eyes.

Opened them again.

“Why, Cole?”

“What?”

“Why do you think the bad people are doing it?”

“’Cause of the lights.”

“The lights?”

“Yeah.”

“What lights? What are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“Cole, I don’t.”

“The ones I saw that night I stayed at Alex’s house, and we went outside real late with all the people.”

Something like an electrical impulse shuddered through him. Jack shut his eyes and held his palm to the shallow concavity of his son’s chest.

* * * * *

THEY slept long into the following day. They slept like people with no good reason to wake. As if the world to which they went to bed might become reconciled to itself, if they could only sleep a bit longer.