Run

Then he was lying on the ground, and there was no sound but the wind blowing through the grass. He lifted the shotgun and rose to his feet, started toward the depression. Couldn’t see a thing under the cloud cover. He wouldn’t have seen anything regardless, with the tears streaming down his face. He called out for his children in the darkness, and when they answered, he let their voices guide him.

In the rearview mirror, Dee watched the trio of headlights pursuing her. The temperature gauge was pegged, and in the Jeep’s headlights, she could see streamers of smoke pouring out of the engine, smell things burning. Her leg throbbed, and she kept steady pressure on the gas pedal, trying to maintain her speed at twenty, but the engine had begun to lose power, cylinders misfiring, RPMs erratic, and still those trucks stayed with her, getting closer.

At 1.2 miles, the RPMs fell off and the engine seized, a violent clanging under the hood. Dee finally eased her foot off the accelerator, let the Jeep roll to a stop and die.

She turned the key back in the ignition.

Short of breath, her heart pounding.

The headlights of those trucks getting brighter in the rearview mirror, and the ominous symphony of their engines already audible.

She couldn’t feel her leg, didn’t know whether that was owing to the loss of blood flow or the adrenaline surging through her.

Her hands trembled as she lifted the guns out of her lap.

One of the trucks shot past, a hundred and fifty yards south, and kept going.

She turned around and looked back between the seats.

The other pair of headlights were motionless, a hundred feet back. They intensified, brights blazing into the Jeep for what seemed ages.

At last, she heard a series of distant door slams, and then the lights went dark.

Dee tossed the guns into the passenger seat and opened the center console, fingers probing until they grazed Ed’s pocketknife. Her thumbnail found the indentation in the steel and she pried open the longest blade and sawed through the fabric of the shirt Jack had tied around her leg.

The feeling returned—a flood of needles and heat—and she reached down between her seat and the door until her hand touched the lever. As the seat tilted back, the lights of the third truck appeared a quarter mile out through the windshield, moving in her direction.

She could hear voices now, and she could feel the blood spraying out of her, a warm pooling in her seat, the smell of iron filling the car. Already she was lightheaded and breathing fast and breaking out in a cold sweat.

Her arms slipped down to her sides and she was trying to find that day in Wyoming on the side of the mountain, but her thoughts kept tangling. As the footsteps approached she was so lightheaded she could barely think at all. Didn’t want to go back into the past anyway.

And as flashlight beams swept across the Jeep, she landed upon the image she wanted, clinging to it as the dizziness behind her eyes began to spiral and echoing voices screamed at her to get out of the car.

Sunrise on a prairie.

Three figures—a man, a boy, a young woman.

Tired and cold.

They’ve walked all night, and they’re still walking, just a few steps from the crest of a hill.

They reach the top.

Breathless.

The view goes on forever.

The man pulls his children close and points.

At first, they can’t see what he’s trying to show them, because the sun is exploding out of the horizon in radials of early light.

But as their eyes adjust, they see it—a city of white tents spread across the plain.

Thousands of them.

Numerous trails of smoke rise into the morning sky, and a band of soldiers have already seen them. They’re climbing the hillside toward her family, hailing them, and one of their number carries a blue and white flag flapping in the wind.

She wants to follow them—she’d give anything—but they’ve already started down the hillside without her, slipping away now, and she loses them in the blinding light of the sun.

They’d been ru

“Come on,” Jack said, pulling his arm, “we aren’t stopping.”

“We have to.”

Cole wouldn’t move.

Jack let go of Naomi’s hand and scooped the boy up in his arms and started jogging again.

Cole screamed, his arms flailing.

“Goddamnit, Cole—”

The boy grabbed his hair and tried to bite Jack’s face.

He dropped Cole into the grass.

“He’s turning into one of them,” Naomi screamed.

“Look at me, Cole.”

“We have to go back.” The boy was crying now.

“Why?”

“To get Mom.”

“Cole, we can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.”

“But it’s over.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“The lights. They aren’t here anymore.” Jack knelt down in the grass, his boy just a shadow in the dark.

“Cole, this is not the time to screw around.”

“I’m not, Daddy. I don’t feel it anymore.”

“When did it go away?”

“Just now, while we were ru

“I don’t even know what that means, Cole.”

“You have to go get Mom. It’s okay now. The bad people won’t hurt you.”

Jack looked at his daughter.

“Go,” she said.

“Really?”

“If there’s even a chance, right?”

“Listen to me,” Jack said. “Do not move from this spot. It might be tomorrow morning before I come back, because I don’t think I’ll be able to find you in the dark.”

“What if you don’t come back?” she said.

“If I’m not back by mid-morning, you keep going north until you cross the border and find help. Cole, look at me.”

He held the boy’s hands. “If you’re wrong about this, you might never see me again. Do you understand that?”

The boy nodded. “But I’m not wrong.”

Jack ran across the prairie, tearing through the dark, his crumbling shoes flapping with every footfall, already gasping, no idea if he was headed in the right direction, and nothing to see but gaping blackness.

After five minutes, he stopped and bent over, his heart banging in his chest.

When he looked up again, he saw a cluster of red lights far across the plain. A further set of headlights. Over the rocketing of his pulse, he thought he heard the engines.

He was still gasping, realized he wasn’t going to get his wind back, so he started ru

Sweat ran into his eyes, and when he wiped the sting away, the lights had disappeared.

He stopped.

Didn’t hear the engines anymore.

Just an ocean of soundless dark.

Seven flashes exploded through the black. For a fraction of a second, he saw Dee’s Jeep and the three trucks surrounding it. Much closer than he thought, just a few hundred yards out. He was ru

He stopped twenty yards out from the vehicles, so far beyond the boundary of his endurance.

It sounded like sirens ringing inside his head, the darkness spi

He leaned over and puked into the grass.

Straightened up again, staggered past the trucks toward the Jeep.

The driver side door had been thrown open, the stench of cordite strong in the air, and he was moving through a haze of smoke, waiting for the gunshots, the attack.