Run

“That you could even ask that is a perfect demonstration of why you’re all being slaughtered. Now answer my question. Why are you here?”

The idea of lunging at Kiernan occurred to Jack, and with it a monster dose of weakness and fear that slashed through his nicotine rush.

Kiernan smirked. “You’d never pull it off. Not on your best day and my worst. Answer my fucking question.”

“I’m here because this is where I ran out of gas.”

“Why do you want to make me angry?”

Jack smoked.

“In all my travels north,” Kiernan said, “I was always looking for your green Land Rover. Always chasing you and Dee, even though I never expected to actually find you.”

“What is it like?” Jack said.

“What is what like?”

“To have become. . .whatever you are now.”

“All our life, Jack, we spend wondering, you know? Now, it’s all about knowing.”

“You were blind but now you see?”

“Something like that.”

“What do you know now that you didn’t before?”

“You taught philosophy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you know. . .words just fuck up true meaning. Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“You didn’t see the lights. Just so I’m clear. . .you have no way to contact Dee, but you think she’s going to show up here. Why? Was it prearranged in the event you two were—”

“I’ve been here three days. She’s not coming.”

“She could be dead.”

“It’s all I think about. How many children did you have?”

“Three.”

Jack flicked off the ash.

“Did you look in their eyes while you murdered them?”

“I was crying. They were crying, asking what they’d done. My wife screaming. Horrible day. I need to know why you’re here before your cigarette’s gone. The curiosity will eat at me.”

“I told you. I ran out of gas.”

Kiernan shook his head. “You’re going to make me threaten you. Aren’t you?”

“Fuck your lights and fuck you.”

Kiernan let his cigarette slip out of his hand, hiss out in the snow. He stood, lifting his shirt so Jack could see the sheathed Ka-Bar combat knife.

“When I open you up and start pulling stuff out and feeding it to you, you will talk. You will tell me everything I want to know and more. You’ll curse Naomi and Cole with your last breath and beg me to do the same to them.”

Still had an inch of tobacco to go, but Jack threw his cigarette into the pool.

“You can’t touch it, and you know it, and it kills you, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”

Kiernan unsnapped the sheath, holstered his pistol, and drew the Ka-Bar.

“One last thing,” Jack said. “You and your batshit-crazy friends have fucked up our world, but you’ve also made me a better father, and you made me love my wife again, and for that I thank you.”

Jack stared down into the pool.

The ice melted and the water turned clear and the fountain began to rain. He looked up. The sky now a bright, almost painful blue. Midday in the square. A dozen people eating lunch in the blinding fall sunshine.

Jack sat with an iced coffee, ten minutes left on his lunch break.

She sat at that same table fifteen feet away, engrossed in a textbook, a tray of half-eaten salad pushed aside. Third day in a row she’d eaten lunch in the plaza. Third day in a row he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He’d walked up to strange women before and asked for a date. No big deal. He was good-looking and tall. Confident. But something about this girl put him off his game. She was gorgeous, sure, but it was more than that—maybe the white lab coat fucking with him (already fantasized about that), maybe the intensity with which she read—never moving except to turn the page or brush away a strand of loose, auburn hair that contained honest-to-God strands of gold.

Yesterday, he’d spent the whole hour building up the nerve. Finally he stood with five minutes left, shaky, his mouth completely dry as he approached, caught a whiff of something—shampoo or body wash—and he knew he’d only make a fool of himself. Walked right on past into the Wells Fargo bank and just stood watching her through the tinted glass until she finally packed her book into a tattered Eastpak and went on her way.

Now there were five minutes left in this hour. A repeat of yesterday. He’d fucked around and put himself in the same position.

He stood quickly and started toward her table, trying to get there before he had the chance to talk himself out of it. He was three feet away from her, wholly uncommitted to any of this, when the tip of his sneaker caught on the lip of a concrete slap.

Jack went down hard and fast, and when he looked up from the ground he was staring at the rivulets of his iced coffee ru

“Oh my God,” he said, picking himself up. “Oh my God.” As he got back onto his feet, he saw that he’d somehow managed to dump his entire coffee on her book, her white coat, skirt, even in her hair—maximum damage inflicted with half a cup of iced coffee.

She glared up at him, possibly more shocked than he was, Jack mumbling, trying to string together a coherent sentence that finally came together as, “I’m a total idiot.”

The anger in her eyes melted away. She wiped the coffee from her face and looked down at her coat, and all Jack could think was that she was even more beautiful at point blank range.

“Let me pay for the book and the coat and—”

She waved him off.

“It’s okay. You all right? That looked bad.”

“Yeah.” He’d have a black bruise on his elbow by nightfall, but in this moment, he felt no pain. “I’ll live once I get passed the devastating humiliation.”

She laughed. Like nothing he’d ever heard. “Oh, come on, wasn’t that bad.”

“Actually, it was.”

“No, it—”

“I was coming over to ask you out.”

Her face went blank.

Longest moment of his life.

“Bullshit,” she finally said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re just having fun with me.”

Jack smiled. “Would you give me a do-over?”

“A what?”

“A do-over. Let me have another shot at this.”

He couldn’t tell for sure in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, but she might have blushed.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll be right back. It’ll go better, I promise.”

Jack walked to the fountain. His heart beating so fast he could barely breathe. He sat down and looked over at the table. She was watching him now and she’d taken her sunglasses off. He started toward her again, stopping at her table with his back to the sun, so she sat in his shadow.

“I’m Jack,” he said.

“Hi, Jack, I’m Dea

And she smiled, and he looked into her eyes for the first time. Had never felt anything like it. Up until this moment, he thought he’d experienced pure attraction, but all those other times, other women, had been lust—he saw that now—and this wasn’t that. Not just that. There was an energy present, something combustive between them that hit him in the solar plexus. She had eyes that were dark blue but also luminescent, and later, when he thought about them, their color and clarity would remind him of a lake where he’d often camped with his father in Glacier, so deep but so clear the sunlight shot all the way down to the stones at the bottom and made the water glow.

But he barely noticed the intensity of her eyes in the moment. It was all electricity, a terrible current, like looking into the future, everything prefigured—a life together, a daughter, a mortgage, a son born two months premature, the death of Jack’s mother, an automobile wreck that would take Dea