Run

Jack must have felt her stare, because he looked down at her, gri

He touched her cheek.

She wiped the tears away and shook her head and climbed up into her seat.

Grassland. Far as she could see. Not a building in sight. Not a road. They were driving across the prairie.

Jack brought the Jeep to a stop in the grass and killed the engine.

The silence was astounding. It threw her into a state of semi-shock, her ears still ringing after last night.

She glanced into the backseat. Naomi and Cole lay curled up in their respective floorboards. She held her hands against their backs, confirmed the rise and the fall.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Her voice sounded muffled inside her head, like it was sourcing from a remote outpost.

Jack’s came back equally distant, “North of Havre. I figure the border’s about ten miles that way.” He pointed through the gaping windshield toward a horizon of grass, everything glazed with frost.

“Why’d you stop?” she asked.

“Engine’s been in the red awhile now. Plus, I have to pee.”

Jack stood pissing the ice off the grass and trying to come to grips with the massive silence. White smoke trickled out of the Jeep’s grille, and he could hear something hissing under the hood. Wondered if he’d toasted the water pump pushing the Jeep as hard as he had. He’d been taking it easy since leaving the paved roads north of Havre and driving onto the prairie, hoping it’d be the slower but safer route.

He walked back to the Jeep, climbed behind the wheel. Dee had set a few bottles of water and a pack of crackers on the center console, and they shared a meager breakfast together and watched the sun lift out of the plains.

It took an hour for the engine to cool, and then Jack cranked the Jeep and they went on. His attention stuck on the temperature gauge, the needle climbing much faster than he would’ve liked, passing the halfway point after only a mile, and edging into the red at two.

Finally shut it down at 2.75 miles. Jack wondered if he’d killed the engine, because smoke was pouring out of the grill now.

Jack got out, raised the hood.

Wafts of smoke and steam billowed out, and it smelled bad, too, like things had cooked that shouldn’t have. He had no idea what he was looking at, didn’t even really know what the fuck a water pump was, or what function it served beyond stopping this from happening.

He left the hood raised and walked around to Dee’s door.

“That doesn’t look good,” she said.

“It’s not. We’re going to have to wait awhile until it cools again.”

Two hours later, the engine had stopped smoking, and when Jack engaged the ignition, the temperature gauge dropped almost back to baseline.

The kids were awake and thrilled to discover the bag of junk food Jack had scored at the ski area. Cole’s smiling mouth was smeared with chocolate.

Jack shifted into drive and studied their progress in tenth-mile increments on the odometer, the landscape scrolling by so slowly.

At one mile, the needle had almost touched the red again, and smoke was coming out of the engine, the wind driving it up the hood and into the car.

Jack stopped, turned off the engine.

So this became the architecture of their day.

Drive one mile.

Overheat.

Wait two hours.

Drive another mile.

Overheat.

Rinse.

Repeat.

In the late afternoon, they were stopped again at the edge of a gentle depression. The hood raised. No wind. White smoke coiling up into the sky. Dee sat in the front passenger seat, dozing. Jack lay with his children in the cool, soft grass, staring into the sky. Cole was snuggled up against his chest, the boy asleep.

“How far are we?” Naomi asked.

“Two, three miles.”

“You really think there are camps across the border?”

“Won’t know until we get there.”

“What if there aren’t? What if it’s no different on the other side? It’s just an imaginary line, right?”

“Na, somewhere north of here, we’ll come to a place where we don’t have to run anymore, and we’ll drive or walk or crawl until we get there.”

She moved closer, her head against his shoulder.

“We’re almost there, aren’t we, Daddy?”

Behind them, something chinked against the side of the Jeep.

“Almost, angel.”

A shot rang out across the prairie. Long ways off.

Jack sat up.

The echo going on and on.

“Was that a gun?” Naomi asked.

“I think so.”

Jack glanced back at the Jeep. Because of its dark color, he didn’t notice the bullethole right away, but he did see that Dee was awake, sitting up now.

“Mom’s up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He got onto his feet and walked to Dee’s door. The reflection of the sky in the windowglass—a gray sheet of clouds.

He pulled open the front passenger door.

Dee was pale, and she was looking up at him with a brand of fear in her eyes he’d only seen twice before. Both times, she’d been in the throes of childbirth. The look had been pure desperation, like she’d committed herself to something she couldn’t bear to finish.

He still didn’t understand.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“It hurts, Jack.”

She looked down, and he did, too.

Her seat was full of bright red arterial blood and she was squeezing her right leg.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jack said.

Naomi said, “What’s wrong.”

Jack yelled, “You and your brother run to the other side of the car.”

“Why? What—”

“Just do what I fucking tell you.”

Something struck the rear passenger door a foot away from Jack. He slid his right arm under Dee’s legs and lifted her out of the seat.

The report broke out as he carried her around the smoking grille, Dee moaning when he set her down in the grass on the other side of the Jeep.

“What happened?” Naomi said.

“She’s shot.”

“Oh God.” She covered her mouth with her hand.

Cole started to cry.

Jack’s hand was slicked with warm blood that was beading and dripping off the ends of his fingers.

A round zipped through one of the back windows.

“Na, Cole, get behind the tires and lay flat against the grass.” He looked at his wife. “You have to tell me what to do.”

“I don’t know if it nicked the femoral artery or what, but you’ve got to stop the bleeding right now or I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock and die.”

“How do I do that?”

“Wrap something around my leg.”

“Like a shirt?”

“Yes. Please hurry.”

Jack ripped open his button-up shirt and tore his arms out of the sleeves as another bullet hit the Jeep.

Dee cried out when he lifted her leg and ran one of the sleeves underneath it.

“How tight?” he asked, tying the first knot.

“Cut my circulation off.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

He slid the loop to the top of her thigh and bore down on the knot, then put his foot on it while he cinched it down again. He kept watching Dee’s right hand which she’d been pressing into the wound, trying to stop the blood that pulsed between her fingers with every heartbeat.

“Is it working?” he asked.

“I can’t tell.” She blinked several times, staring into the fading sky. He thought her eyes looked glassy. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s stopping.”

“Can I leave you for a minute?”

“Why?”

“I need to see if anyone’s coming.”

He opened the rear passenger door—no safe way to do this.

Moved quickly into the backseat and reached into the cargo area, grabbing two AR-15s and a pair of binoculars, then diving back outside as another gunshot resounded across the prairie.

Jack crawled around to the back of the Jeep, lay with his chest heaving against the ground and brought the binoculars to his eyes.