Run

He closed his eyes, kept telling himself he should get up, keep walking, crawling, roll down this fucking mountain if he had to, because stopping was death, and death meant never seeing them again.

Saying her name aloud tied a hot wire of pain around his throat, which felt full of glass shards. So dry and swollen. He said the name of his daughter. The name of his son. He pushed himself up. Sat there dry-heaving for a minute. Then he got onto his feet and started down the mountain.

Jack was a dead man walking two hours later, a thousand feet lower, when he arrived at the foot of the dark lodge. He had to crawl up the steps and pull himself upright again by the wooden door handles. They were locked. He went back down the steps and pried one of the rocks lining the sidewalk out of the ground.

So weak, it took him four swings to even put a crack through the big square window beside the doors. The fifth swing broke through and the glass fell out of the frame. He scrambled over into a cafeteria, perfectly dark except for where moonlight streamed through the tall windows. So strange to be indoors again. It had been days. The grill in back was still shuttered for the season. He limped over to the drink fountain, mouth begi

He made his way between the tables toward a common area that accessed a bar and a gift shop, both locked up. He moved out of the long panels of moonlight into darkness.

Straight ahead, he could just make out a pair of doors. As he moved toward them, they vanished in the black, but he kept on, hands outstretched, until he ran into a wall.

He pushed and the door swung back.

Couldn’t see a thing, but he knew he was in a bathroom. Smelled the water in the toilets.

He ran his hand along the wall, found the switch, hit the lights.

Nothing.

Heard the door ease shut. He moved forward to where he thought the sinks might be, and stepped into a wall. Turned around, becoming disoriented as he moved in a different direction. He touched a counter, his hands frantically searching for the faucet. Cranked open the tap, but nothing happened.

Took him several minutes to get his trembling hands on the stall door. He pulled it open and dropped to his knees, hands grazing the cold porcelain of the toilet. Inside the bowl, his fingers slid into chilly water.

He didn’t think about where this water had been or all the people who’d sat on this toilet and pissed and shit and vomited here, or the industrial strength chemicals that had been used to clean the bowl. He lowered his face to the surface of the water and drank and thought only of how sweet it tasted ru

* * * * *

A razor line of light. For a long time, Jack just stared at it. His face against a tiled floor. Cold but not freezing. Piecing together where he was, how he’d arrived here, begi

He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.

He wandered toward the paper towel dispenser.

Cranked out a length of paper, tore it off.

Through the dark, and then he pulled open the door, the light like a railroad spike through his temples.

He limped out into the lobby, which looked almost like civilization in the daylight, sat down and went to work making a bandage for what was left of his ring finger.

He was already pushing open the front doors when he realized what he’d just walked past. Stepped back inside, half-expecting it to have vanished, like a mirage, but there it stood.

He rushed back into the cafeteria to the broken window. Lifted the rock off the floor and brought it into the lobby, where he hurled it through the glass.

He reached through and pulled out everything he could get his hands on—bags of potato chips, candy bars, crackers, cookies—until the vending machine was emptied and its contents spread across the floor.

He ripped into a bag of Doritos.

The chips were stale, leftovers from last season, but the intensity of the flavor made his mouth ache. He sat in the warm sunlight pouring through all the glass around the front entrance. Finished the bag and opened another filled with processed onion rings he would never have ingested in his former life. They were gone in a moment.

He drank his fill of water from the toilet and urinated for the first time in days.

Then grabbed the plastic garbage bag from the trashcan under the sink.

Back in the lobby, he put the two dozen packages of snacks into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.

There was a giant mirror on the wall across from the vending machine. He’d noticed it a little while ago, and now it called to him. The reflection unlike anybody he knew, his face thin as an ax-blade, beard coming in full. He was the color of rust, covered in dried blood, like a zombie-vagrant.

Outside the entrance to the resort, he came across a bicycle rack and a single, abandoned mountain bike standing up between the bars. The tires were low and there was bird shit all over the seat, but it looked otherwise in working order. He climbed aboard and tied his bag of food to the handlebars. He coasted down the sidewalk through the empty parking lot, turned out onto a country road, and then he was speeding along at thirty-five miles per hour down the winding, faded pavement and the cool, piney air blasting his face. The hum of the tires so otherworldly in the face of everything that had come before, like he was out for a bike ride on holiday.

Ten miles on and several thousand feet lower, Jack braked and brought the bike to a stop. Up ahead, a herd of range cattle was crossing the road, and he watched them pass. He’d ridden down out of the alpine forest and now the foothills of the mountains were bare and the air had become warm and redolent of sage.

He rode on, still cruising east and dropping. The foothills lay a mile behind him now, and the mountains fifteen, and the land was barren and open and the sky immense.

The riding turned strenuous when the grade of the road leveled out, but nothing compared to walking on blistered feet or crawling up a mountain.

In the evening he was twenty miles out from the mountains and turning north onto Highway 89, his quads burning and his face glowing with wind- and sunburn.

A mile and a half up the road, he caught the scent of water on the breeze, thinking he’d grown hypersensitive to the smell as of late, some recent adaptation borne out of nearly dying of thirst.

He crested a small rise and there lay the reservoir, the water like ink under the evening sky and the sun just a chevron of brilliance on the ridgeline of those mountains he’d ridden out of.

Abandoned the bike on the grassy shoulder and climbed down the slope to the water’s edge. Fell to his knees. Drank. It was cold and faintly sweet, none of that metallic, sterilized tang of toilet water.

He ate a supper consisting of a Butterfinger candy bar, two packages of Lays barbeque potato chips, and a Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookie.

Curled up in the grass by the water, already cold, but at least he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He watched the sun go behind the mountains and the stars begin to burn through the growing dark. Reeking of the dried, rotting gore that covered every square inch of his person.