Run

Dee crawled back into her seat.

“Jesus, Jack. How fast are we going?”

“You don’t want to know.”

A piece of fire bloomed and faded in the side mirror, and the square of glass exploded.

“Get down.”

The gunshot was lost to the flapping windows, but the V-twin wasn’t.

“Give me the gun, Dee.” She hoisted it up from the floorboard, barrel first. “I need you to steer.”

The cycle screamed just a few feet behind their bumper, only visible where its chrome caught glimmers of moonlight.

His foot still on the gas, Jack turned back, vertebrae cracking, and aimed through the back hatch and pumped the twelve gauge. The thunder of its report sent a spike through his left eardrum and filled the Rover with the blinding, split-second brilliance of a muzzleflash. Through the shredded plastic of the back hatch, the cycle had disappeared.

Bullets pierced the left side of the Rover, glass spraying the backseat.

Jack spun back into the driver seat, his right ear ringing, and took the steering wheel and eased off the gas.

The cycle shot forward and then its taillight blipped and it vanished.

Cole screaming in the backseat.

“Naomi, is he hurt?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I think he’s just scared.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Help him.”

“Where’s the motorcycle, Jack?”

“I don’t see it. Steer again.”

She grabbed the wheel and Jack pumped the shotgun. “I still can’t hear too well,” he said. “You have to tell me when you—”

“I hear it now.”

He strained to listen, couldn’t see for shit through the plastic window, but he did hear the cycle’s engine, the throttle winding up, and then the guttural scream was practically inside the car.

“Hold on and stay down.”

He turned back into the driver seat and clutched the wheel and hit the brake pedal and something slammed into the back of the Rover, the sickening clatter of metal striking metal, Jack punching on the headlights just in time to see the cycle turning end over end as it somersaulted off the road into darkness, throwing sparks every time the metal met the pavement, the rider deposited on the double yellow thirty yards ahead, the man sitting dazed and staring at his left arm which dangled fingerless and unhinged from his elbow, his unhelmeted head scalped to the bone.

Jack struck the man at fifty-five. The Rover shook violently for several seconds, as if ru

He killed the lights and pushed the Rover past a hundred, watching Dee’s side mirror for tailing cars. When the road made a sharp turn, he slowed and eased off the shoulder down a gentle embankment and turned off the car.

Cole wept hysterically.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Jack said. “It’s okay. We’re all right now.”

“I want to go home. I want to go home now.”

Dee climbed into the back and swept the broken glass off the leather seat and took Cole up into her arms.

“I know,” she whispered. “I know. I want to go home, too, but we can’t just yet.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not safe.”

“When can we?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Jack glanced back and before the overhead light cut out, saw Naomi’s chin quivering, too.

He opened his door, said, “I’ll be right back.”

He crawled through the grass up the embankment and lay on his stomach in the shadow of an overhanging cottonwood at the shoulder’s edge, his heart beating against the ground, listening. He could still hear Cole crying, Dee hushing him like she had when he was a baby. He wiped his eyes. Hands shaking. Cold. The highway silent.

They came so suddenly he didn’t have time to roll back down the hill—two cars tearing around the corner, no headlights, tires squealing, one of them passing within a foot of his head.

They raced on into darkness, invisible, the groan of their engines slowly fading.

Jack had dust in his eyes and grit between his teeth and the odor of burnt rubber was everywhere.

* * * * *

AT dawn, they entered the largest city they’d seen since Albuquerque. The lights were still on. Gas stations beckoned. They undercut an empty interstate, Jack keeping their speed above sixty, and soon the city dwindled away behind them, him watching the image of it shrink in the only reflection left—the cracked side mirror on Dee’s door.

They crested a pass. A small weather station beside the road. Fragile light on this minor range of green foothills. That city thirty miles back and to the south, its lights glittering in the desert. A distant range to the west with still a few minutes of night left to go. Jack was beyond exhaustion, shoulder aching from the twelve-gauge kick, his children awake, staring into the plastic of their respective windows. Catatonic. Dee snored softly.

They rode down from the pass and out of the pines into empty, arid country. As the sun edged up on the world, Jack saw the building in the distance. He took his foot off the accelerator.

The motel had been long abandoned, its name bleached out of the thirty-foot billboard that stood teetering beside the road. Dee stirred and sat up as Jack veered off the highway onto the fractured pavement.

“Why are you stopping?”

“I have to sleep.”

“Want me to drive some?”

“No, let’s stay off the road today.”

He pulled around to the back of the building and turned off the engine.

Stillness. The cathedral quiet of the high desert.

Jack looked at the gas gauge—between a quarter and a half. He studied the odometer.

“Five hundred and fifty-two miles,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“How far we’ve come from home.”

The room had two double beds. A dresser. An old television with a busted screen. Graffitied walls. Tied-off and shriveled condoms on the carpet and a bathtub full of shattered beer bottles. Jack carefully turned back the rotting covers so as not to disturb the dust, and they lay their sleeping bags on the old sheets—Jack and Cole on one bed, the girls on the other—and fell asleep as the sun rose.

He sat up suddenly. His wife stood over him. Dust trembling off the ceiling. A glass ashtray rattling across the bedside table.

“Jack, something’s happening.”

They parted the curtains and climbed over the rusted AC wall unit through the open windowframe. Midday light beat down on the desert and the ground vibrated beneath their feet, the inconceivable noise shaking jags of glass out of other windows, doors quivering in their frames. They walked over to the motel office and Jack ventured a glance around the corner of the building.

On the road, a convoy rolled by—SUVs, luxury sedans, beater trucks with armed men riding in the beds, jeeps, fuel trucks, school buses, all moving by at a modest speed and raising a substantial cloud of dust in their collective passing.

Jack turned back to Dee, said into her ear, “I don’t think they can see our car from the road.”

Another five minutes crept by, Jack and Dee standing against the crumbling concrete of the motel until the last car in the convoy had passed, the drone of several hundred engines fading more slowly than Jack would have thought.

Dee said, “What if we’d been traveling south on this road?”

“We’d have seen them from miles away.”

“With the binoculars?”

“Yeah.”

“What if the kids and I were sleeping and you weren’t looking through the—”

“Don’t do this, Dee. They didn’t see us. We weren’t on the road.”

“But we could have been.” She bit her bottom lip and stared east toward a rise of low brown hills. “We have to be more careful,” she said. “We have to always be thinking the worst. I can’t watch my children—”