Run

Jacked a shell, started toward the lights.

After forty yards, the stream-murmur filtered in, and soon there was nothing but the sound of it and the cool, sweet smell of the water.

He eased down onto the bank. The lights had moved on. Blackness everywhere. Thinking he’d told Dee to get to the stream, but she may have seen the group of flashlights coming, been forced to go elsewhere. The urge to call out for her overwhelmed him.

He got up, started hiking again.

Sometimes the starlight would find a way down through the trees and he would catch a glimpse of the stream like black glass, warped and fissured, but mainly it was impossible to see anything. He didn’t dare use the Mag-Lite.

Fifteen minutes of blind groping brought him a quarter mile uphill.

He collapsed in a patch of cold, damp sand and stared back the way he’d come. He tried to catch his breath, but the longer he sat there the panic festered inside of him. Finally he rose to his feet, ru

* * * * *

THE violence of his own shivering woke him.

Jack lifted his head out of the leaves. Dawn. A moment before. Frail blue light upon everything in the brutal cold. He had dreamed but they were too sweet and vivid to linger on.

Worked his way up the mountain for thirty minutes before stopping streamside by a boulder covered in frosted moss. He looked around. Wiped his eyes. Considered all the ways they could have fucked this up—he might have gone upstream when he should’ve hiked down, or Dee and the kids had pushed hard all night and gotten too far ahead of him, or he’d unknowingly passed them in the dark, or maybe they hadn’t even stayed with the stream and become lost elsewhere on this endless mountain.

Another two hundred yards and he came around a large boulder, saw three people lying huddled together in the leaves on the opposite bank.

He stopped. Looked down at his shoes. Looked up again. Still there, and he didn’t quite believe it, even as he rock-hopped to the other side of the stream.

Dee stirred at the sound of his footsteps, then bolted upright with the Glock trained on his chest. He smiled and his eyes burned and then he was holding her as she shook with sobs.

“Do you know how easy it would’ve been for you to pass us by in the dark?” she whispered.

“But that didn’t happen,” he said.

“I heard all those gunshots. I thought you had—”

“That didn’t happen. I found you.”

“I didn’t know if we should wait or keep going, and then I saw all those lights in the woods, and we just—”

“You did exactly what you should have.”

Naomi sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked at her father, scowling.

“Hey,” she said.

“Morning, Sunshine.”

“We can’t go back,” Jack said. He was staring down at the bag of soupcans Dee had brought and the contents of his backpack, which he’d spread out in the leaves. A tent. Two sleeping bags. Water filter. Camp stove. Map. Not much else.

“But what if they leave?”

“Why would they? I saw their cars, Dee. They have no provisions, haven’t fallen in with a big group, so they’re facing the same problems we were—no gas, no water, no food. And they just stumbled across all those things at the cabin, plus shelter, plus two hundred pounds of meat in the freezer.”

“Jack, that place is perfect. We could have—”

“There’s eight of them. Eight armed adults. We’d be slaughtered.”

“Well, I don’t much feel like wandering aimlessly through the wilderness.”

“Not aimlessly, Dee.” He knelt down and opened the Wyoming roadmap. “We’re here,” he said, “northern edge of the Wind Rivers. We’re actually not that far from the east side of the mountains.” He traced a black line north. “Let’s shoot for this highway.”

“How far is it?”

“Fifteen, twenty miles tops.”

“Jesus. And then what, Jack?” He could hear the emotion rising in her voice. “We reach this road in the middle of nowhere, and then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Well, I know. We’ll need a big fucking miracle. Because that’s how we’re going to stay alive from here on out, Jack. Big fucking miracles. That’s how bad a shape we’re in, and you want us to hike across these—” Her voice broke and she turned away and walked off into the woods.

“Mom.” Naomi started after her, but Jack caught his daughter’s arm.

“Let her go, baby. Just give her a minute.”

They were all day hiking the mountainside. The aspen giving way to evergreens the higher they climbed. The stream shrinking toward headwaters, burbling softer and softer, until at last it disappeared into a rocky hole in the mountain, never to be heard from again.

Stopped while there was still plenty of light at a small lake at nine thousand feet. It backed up against a two hundred-foot cliff which had calved a rock glacier into the water—giant boulders half-submerged on the far side.

Jack raised the tent and collected fir cones and browned needles and more wood than they could burn in three nights.

He walked to the edge of the lake as the sun fell. The water looked black. So still as to suggest ice or obsidian, except for the slow concentric circles that eddied out when a trout surfaced. He kept reminding himself what a beautiful place this was, that they could be suffering on the East Coast, or in Albuquerque, or be dead like so many others. But somehow the bright side of things had burned out tonight, and the light draining out of the sky and the lake’s reflection of it just felt tragic.

He glanced back at his family—sitting outside the tent, waiting for him to get the fire going. Got up and started toward them. A day’s worth of walking in his swollen knees and lots more of that to come.

His children looked up at his approach.

He forced himself to smile.

In the middle of the night, Cole said, “What’s that sound?”

Jack lay beside him on the sleeping bag. It had woken him, too, and he whispered, “Just that rockfall across the lake.”

“Is someone throwing rocks?”

“No, they’re shifting.”

“What are those splashes?”

“Fish jumping out of the water.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You want me to go out there and tell them to cut it out?”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay. I promise. Go back to sleep.”

“No one’s coming after us?”

“We’re safe up here, Cole.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We’ll eat something in the morning.”

“First thing?”

“First thing.”

The boy fell back asleep almost instantly but Jack lay awake, trying to ignore the rock jutting up through the bottom of the sleeping bag into his side. The moon was bright through the tent walls. He listened to everyone’s heavy breathing, thinking how, in his lifetime, he’d lain awake at night worrying over so much pointless shit—money, his job, a fight he’d had with Dee—and now that he had real life and death stuff to obsess about, all he wanted to do was sleep.

* * * * *

A film of ice rimmed the lake. Steam lifting off the surface in the early morning sun. Jack was on the grassy bank pumping water through the filter into a stainless steel pot. He boiled the water, added three packets of oatmeal from his emergency kit, and they sat around the smoking remnants of the campfire, passing the pot and trying to wake up.

After breakfast, they broke down the tent and packed up and headed out while there was still frost on the dying grasses.