“KE5UTN? This is EI1465.” Heavy Irish accent.
Jack keyed the mic. “This is KE5UTN. Who am I speaking with please?”
“Ron? Thank God, I thought something had happened.”
“No, this is Jack Colclough.”
“Where’s Ron Schirard? You’re using his callsign.”
“I’m in his house, on his station.”
“Where’s Ron, mate?”
Jack heard the door open behind him. Glanced back, saw Dee walk in. He said, “You a friend of Ron’s?”
“Never met him, but we’ve been talking on the radio going on nine years.”
Jack hesitated.
“Mr. Colclough? Is my modulation off?”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Ron and his wife are dead. Where are you, if I may ask?”
The silence in the headphones went on for a long while, and the voice finally returned much softer.
“Belfast. What are you doing in Ron’s house?”
“We fled our home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, three days ago, and just stopped here to look for supplies. Cell phones don’t work. Or landlines. There’s no internet. Do you have any information about what’s happening? Has it spread worldwide?”
“No, it’s only the lower forty-eight states of America, southern Canada, and northern Mexico. There aren’t too many reports coming out of the affected region, but you’ve heard about New England?”
“We’ve heard nothing.”
“Boston and New York have been devastated. Total chaos. Astronomical death tolls. There’s a handful of videos circulating—movies shot on mobile phones. Streets clogged with bodies. People trying to flee the cities. Real doomsday stuff. Are you and your family okay?”
“We’re alive.”
“You’re lucky to be in a low population-density area.”
Jack glanced up at Dee, said, “You should really be keeping a lookout in case someone comes.”
“Naomi’s on the front porch watching the road.”
Jack keyed the mic. “Has anyone figured out what’s causing this?”
“Well, there have been a lot of crazy theories put out there, but over the last day or so, everyone’s been focusing on this atmospheric phenomenon that happened over America about a month ago.”
“You mean the aurora?”
“Exactly. The talking-heads have been blathering on about mass extinctions, that this is what wiped out the dinosaurs, that it triggered a latent genetic defect in a percentage of the population. Mind you, I’m just regurgitating what I’ve heard on the tele. They’re probably full of shite.”
“Has everyone who witnessed the aurora become affected?”
“I don’t know. Did you see it?”
“No. My family. . .we slept through it.”
“Lucky for you, I guess.”
“Look, where’s the closest safe zone?”
“Southern Canada. They’re setting up refugee camps there. How far away are you?”
Jack felt something in him deflate. “A thousand miles. Anything else you can tell us about what’s going on? We’re blind here.”
“Nothing that would cheer you up.”
“I don’t think I got your name.”
“Matthew Hewson. Matt.”
“I’m sorry about your friend, Matt.”
“Me, too. How many souls in your family, Jack?”
“Four. I have a son and a daughter.”
“When I go to mass tonight, I’ll light a candle for each of you. I know it isn’t much, but maybe it is.”
Jack opened the door and walked out onto the front porch. Naomi sat on the steps, and he eased down beside her. The night cold. A lonely cricket chirping out in the yard and not another sound on the high desert. Not even wind.
“Mom told me we have to leave.”
“Yeah. I just don’t think we’re safe here. This house is the only—”
“No, it’s fine. I don’t want to sleep in a house with dead people in it.”
“Well, there’s that.”
“I went and looked at them.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Why’d they kill themselves you think? ’Cause of what’s happening?”
“Probably.”
“That’s weak.”
“The Schirards had put together a good life for themselves, Na. Been married a lot of years. They were old. Not capable of running. I’m not sure I’d call what they did weak.”
“Would you do it?”
“Of course not. I have you and Cole and—”
“But if something happened to us and it was just you. Or just you and Mom.”
He stared at his daughter in the darkness. “That isn’t something I ever want to think about.”
Dee and the kids loaded water jugs into the Land Rover, and Jack poured the six gallons he’d siphoned out of the Chevy into their gas tank. They were underway a little after three. Traveling north with the highbeams blazing like flamethrowers to ward off the riot of deer and antelope that continually shot across the road. It hadn’t rained here in weeks, possibly a month, and from the gravel, their passage raised a trail of moonlit dust that never quite seemed to settle.
They climbed a series of plateaus and crossed into Wyoming at four. The road went back to pavement and Dee cracked open the pickled beets, fed one to Jack, handed the glass jar into the backseat.
“What is this?” Naomi asked.
“Beets. Try one.”
She sniffed the open jar and winced. “That’s disgusting, Mom.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yeah, but that’s like, haven’t-eaten-in-a-week, on-the-verge-of-death food.”
“Cole?”
“He’s asleep.”
Jack kept watching the eastern sky, and when he saw the first hint of light his stomach released a shimmer of heat.
Dee must have noticed, too, because she said, “Where are we going to stop?”
“Other side of Rock Springs.”
“We have to go through another city?”
“Last one for a long time.” Jack glanced into the backseat, said, “Look.” Cole had slumped over into Naomi’s lap, and his sister leaned against the door, asleep, her fingers tangled up in his hair.
A tremor shook the Rover.
Jack studied the dash.
“We’re losing oil,” he said. “Engine’s running hot.”
“How many quarts do we have?”
“Two, but I don’t want to use them yet.”
Dawn crept over a bleak waste of countryside. They could see for seventy miles to the east—a treeless, waterless, uninhabitable piece of ground.
Jack punched off the headlights.
* * * * *
THEY rolled through Rock Springs. The city had lost power. Streets empty. No one out. Jack eased to a stop at a vacant intersection, purely out of habit, and stared for a moment at the dark traffic signals. He lowered his window, listened to the harsh idle of the V8. Killed the engine.
Silence flooded in, and not just the dawn-quiet of a waking town.
“Everyone left,” he said.
Across the street, the automated doors of a City Market grocery store had been leveled, like a truck had driven through. Jack opened his door, stepped down onto the road, dropped to his knees, stared up into the Rover’s undercarriage.
Nothing to see in the poor light but a tiny pond of oil on the asphalt whose reflection of the morning sky shook with each new drop.
The highway north out of Rock Springs was a straight shot into high desert. There were mountains to the northeast that after seventy miles became mountains to the east. The sun appeared behind them and made the quartz in the pavement glimmer.
“We should find a place to stop,” Dee said. “It’s almost seven.”
“Minute you see a tree, speak up.”
They drove on, Jack thinking this was such a quintessential highway of the American West. Long vistas. Emptiness. Desert in the foreground, mountains
beyond. Both sagebrush and snow within eyeshot.
When Dee drew a sudden breath, Jack felt his stomach fall, on the verge of asking for the binoculars, but he didn’t even need them now as the sun cleared that thirteen thousand-foot wall of granite twenty miles to the east and struck the oncoming procession of chrome and glass.
Dee took the binoculars out of the glove box, glassed the desert.
“How far?”
“Five, ten miles, I don’t know.”
Jack stepped on the brake, brought the Rover almost to a stop, and veered off the highway into the desert.
“What the fuck, Jack?”
“See what we’re heading for?”
Several miles east, a butte rose two hundred feet above the desert floor.
“Are you crazy?”
“We’d never make it back to Rock Springs on less than a quarter of a tank, which is where we’re at.”
“So you’re going to take us behind that butte.”
“Exactly.”
“Then go faster.”
“Christ, you’re bossy. I’m going as slow as I can so we don’t raise a trail of dust they can follow.”
Naomi lifted her head off the door. “Why’s it so bumpy?”
“We’re taking a detour, angel.”
“Why?”
“Cars coming.” Jack swerved to miss a sagebrush. “We making a dust cloud?”
Dee opened her door, leaned out, glanced back. “Little one.”
The butte grew bigger in the windshield—sunburnt strata of rock that rose to a flat-topped summit. The desert running like warped and shattered concrete under the tires and shaking the Rover all to hell.
“We’re running really hot,” Jack said. Kept searching for the road in his side mirror, kept forgetting the mirror had been shot out two nights ago.
“Where are they?” Naomi asked.
“We can’t see them from here,” Dee said. “Hopefully, they can’t see us.”
They rode into the shadow of the butte, Jack skirting the circumference until they reached the back side which had been fired into pink by the early sun.
He slammed the Rover into park, turned off the engine.
“Binoculars.”
Dee handed them over and he threw open the door and hopped down onto the hardpan. Ran up the lower slope of the butte, his quads burning after ten steps, perspiration beading on his forehead after twenty.
Where the slope went vertical for the last fifty feet, he traversed along the edge of the cliff band and had just caught his breath when the highway came into view.
His knees hit the dirt. Jack lowered himself and propped his elbows on the ground, still cold from the previous night. Brought the binoculars’ eyecups to his eyes, pulled the highway into focus, and slowly traced it north.
Footfalls behind him.
He inhaled a severely faded waft of Dee’s shampoo as she collapsed panting in the dirt.
“You see them?” she asked.
He did. An eighteen-wheeler led the convoy, puffing gouts of black smoke into the air and followed by a train of cars and trucks that might have been a mile long. Five hundred engines sounded otherworldly carrying across the desert.
“Jack?”
“Yeah, I see them.”
“What about our trail?”
He lowered the binoculars and looked to where he thought they’d cut across the desert and lifted them to his eyes again. First thing he fixed upon were a pair of antelope standing motionless with their heads raised, staring toward the noise of what was coming.
He adjusted the focus knob, spotted their tire tracks.
“I see our path. I don’t see any dust.”
The convoy had begun to pass the point on the highway where they’d turned off.
Jack said, “They’re not stopping.”
He lowered the binoculars.
“What are we going to do, Jack, when the gas runs out?”
“We’ll find some before that happens.”
“You said there aren’t any other cities for a—”
“We’ll have to get lucky.”
“What if we don’t—”
“Dee, what do you want me to say? I don’t know what’s going to—”
“Look.” She grabbed the binoculars from him and turned his head toward the ribbons of dust that were unspooling across the desert behind two trucks.
Jack descended the butte at a sprint, Dee calling after him, but he didn’t stop until he reached the Rover.
Popped the cargo hatch, grabbed the shotgun, felt confident he’d replaced the spent shell yesterday afternoon at the motel. Wondered if that meant he had eight rounds, though he couldn’t be sure.
“Dad?” Naomi said.
“Cole awake?”
“No.”
“Wake him.”
“Are people coming?”
“Yes.”
Dee arrived breathless as he opened his door and took the Glock from underneath the driver seat and a handful of twelve-gauge shells from the center console.
“Jack, let’s just get in the car and go. Make them catch us.”
He jammed the shells into his pocket.
Cole whined, “I’m hungry.”
Jack thinking this was one of those choices where if you took the wrong road, there’d be no chance to undo it. They’d be dead. His son and his daughter and his wife and him too if he was so lucky.
“Jack.”
He looked over Dee’s head to where the desert sloped up to the base of the butte.
“Naomi, you see that large boulder fifty yards up the hill?”
“Where?”
Jack punched through the plastic window and tore it off the door. “There.”
“Jack, no.”
“Take your brother up there and hide behind the rock. No matter what happens, what you see or hear, don’t move, don’t make a sound, until we come get you.”
“What if you don’t?”
“We will.”
“I’m hungry,” Cole cried, eyes still half-closed, not fully awake.
“Go with your sister, buddy. We’ll eat something when you come back.”
“No, now.”
“Get him up that hill, Na, and keep him with you.” He faced Dee, her eyes welling.
“You sure about this, Jack?”
“Yes.” What a lie.
Naomi dragged Cole out of the car, but the boy fell crying to the ground, and he wouldn’t get up.
Jack squatted down in the dirt.
“Look at me, son.” He held the boy’s face in his hands.
“I’m hungry.”
He slapped Cole.
The boy went clear-eyed and hushed, stared at his father, tears running down his face.
“Shut up, and go with your sister right now, or you’re going to get us all fucking killed.” He’d never sworn at his son, never laid a hand on him before.
Cole nodded.
Naomi helped her brother to his feet and Jack watched as they jogged up the slope together, hand-in-hand. Jack looked at his wife. “Come on.”
They ran south for sixty or seventy yards, and then Jack pulled Dee down behind a piece of rock the size of a minivan that had calved off from the butte in another epoch.
Already Jack could hear the growl of an approaching engine.
Dee visibly trembling.
A Jeep appeared around the corner of the butte, kicking streamers of dust in its wake as the driver downshifted.
“Where’s the other truck, Jack?” He glanced back toward the Rover, didn’t see it coming.
“Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
The Jeep sped toward them on a trajectory that would bring it past the boulder by twenty or thirty feet.
He stood. “Here.” Handed her the Glock. “Don’t move from this spot.”
Jack racked the slide and stepped out from behind the boulder and ran. Three men in the Jeep, and the one in back standing on the seat and holding onto the roll
bar and a rifle, his long black hair blowing back. Jack slid to a stop in the dirt and pulled the stock into his shoulder and fired before they ever saw him. The driver started bleeding from several holes in his face and the long-haired man fell backward out of the Jeep into a sagebrush. Jack pumped the shotgun and got off another round as the Jeep drew even with him, registered a muzzleflash from the front passenger seat at the same instant the buckshot punched the third man out of the doorless Jeep, which veered sharply away and accelerated into the desert, the driver’s head bobbling off the steering wheel.
Dee shouted his name, and as he turned, fire blossomed in his left shoulder, coupled with a wave of nausea. A Ford F-150, beat to hell and coated in dust, rounded the north side of the butte. Jack sprinted back up the slope to Dee and crouched down beside her.
“How in the world did you just do that?” she asked.
“No idea.”
He dug two cartridges out of his pocket and fed them into the magazine tube and jacked a shell into the chamber.
The F-150 skidded to a stop beside the Rover. Two women jumped down out of the bed. Two men climbed out of the cab.
“Take this.” He gave her the shotgun, took back the Glock.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know, I’m—”
“No, I mean you’re really bleeding.”
“Run like hell toward those mountains. When they follow, lay down in the dirt and let them get close and then open fire. Shoot, pump, shoot. Pump it hard. You won’t break it.”
“Jack.” She was crying now.
“They are going to kill our children.”
She stood and started down the slope into the desert.
He looked down at the Glock in his hand which felt so small and held not a fraction of that devastating twelve-gauge reassurance.
Then he was running across the slope, couldn’t feel his legs or the bullet in his shoulder, nothing but the shudder of his heart banging against his chest plate. He saw Dee being chased by two people into the desert and a man with a large revolver following a woman uphill toward the boulder where his children hid.
The man stopped and looked at Jack and raised his gun.
Between the two of them, they exchanged a dozen rounds that never came close to hitting anything.