The road began to climb. Pressure building in Jack’s ears. The sky verging toward purple, and the air that rushed in through Dee’s window growing cooler and redolent of spruce trees. On the mountainsides, the conifers were laced with acres of aspen. The summits stood treeless, all gray and broken rock patched with old snow. They passed a deserted ski resort. A livery for tourists to purchase horseback rides. The road steepened. They climbed past ten thousand feet through a stand of spruce and crested the pass.
A few miles up the road, they came to a second, higher pass through the mountains. Jack pulled over into the empty parking lot and turned off the engine. He and Dee got out and took a look around. Late morning. You could see for miles. The wind blew. Clouds amassing to the north. He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. Powered it up. No service.
He opened his fly and urinated into the grass.
“Jack, there’s a restroom right there.”
“See anybody around?”
“Just because you can, huh?”
He zipped up, said, “Silverton’s down in that valley over there.”
Dee went to the car and came back with a pair of binoculars. She glassed the road from the pass to where it disappeared into the forest several miles north and a few hundred feet below.
“Anything?” Jack said.
“Nothing.”
They rode down from the pass out of the high country and back into the forest and then out of it again. The road had been gashed out of a cliff and the drop off the right shoulder was a thousand feet down to a river that snaked through a canyon. The valley from which it flowed contained a small town dotted with brightly-painted buildings and a railroad yard and a gold-domed courthouse at the north end.
“Well, it isn’t on fire,” Jack said. He glanced over, saw Dee massaging the back of her neck. “Headache?”
“Yeah, and it’s getting worse.”
“You know what it is, don’t you?”
“The elevation?”
“Nope. I’ve got one, too.”
“Oh my God, you’re right. We’ve missed our morning coffee.”
They rounded a hairpin turn: three trucks parked across the road, six men sprinting toward the Land Rover, guns pointed, screaming at them to stop the car.
“Jack, turn around.”
“They’re too close. They’ll open fire.”
“Won’t they anyway?”
“What’s happening?”
“Naomi, stay quiet, keep your headphones in, and don’t wake Cole.”
Jack still searched for a way out as the men closed in—a steep drop through trees over the right shoulder, an impossible climb up the mountainside off the left, and not enough room in this fast-diminishing increment of time to execute a three-point-turn and haul ass back the way they’d come.
Jack shifted into park. “Put your hands up, Dee.”
“Jack—”
“Just do it.”
The first man arrived training a bolt-action Remington on Jack’s head through the glass as the others surrounded the car.
“Roll it down,” he said. Jack lowered the window. “Where the f**k are you going?”
“Just north.”
“North?”
“Yeah.”
The man was bearded but young. Not even twenty-five, Jack thought. He wore a camouflage hunting jacket. A braided goatee tied off with a dangling row of black beads.
Someone standing behind the Rover said, “New Mexico tag.”
“Why are you up here? Who are you with?”
“No one, it’s just us.”
Another man walked over and stood by Jack’s window. A patchier beard. Long black hair flowing out of his corduroy bomber hat.
He said, “There’s a kid sleeping in the backseat. Their car’s been shot to hell, Matt. They got supplies and shit in the back.”
“We had to leave our home in Albuquerque last night,” Jack said. “Barely made it out.”
The man named Matt lowered his .30-.30. “You come through Durango this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“We heard it got pretty f**ked up.”
“They burned it. Bodies everywhere.” Jack watched the fear take up residence in the man’s face. A sudden paling that made him look even younger than Jack had first suspected.
“It’s bad, huh?”
“Biblical.”
The others gathered around Jack’s window.
Cole sat up. “Are they mean, Daddy?”
“No, buddy, we’re okay.”
“Yeah, we’re cool, little man.”
The assembled men looked less like sentries than armed ski bums. Their weapons better suited to elk hunting than warfare—all toting high-powered rifles slung over their shoulders but not a pistol or shotgun to be seen.
“So you’re guarding the road into town?” Jack asked.
“Yep, and there’s another group stationed below Red Mountain Pass, trying to destroy the road.”
“Why?”
“There’ve been reports of a convoy of trucks and cars heading south from Ridgeway.”
“How many vehicles?”
“Don’t know. Most of Silverton’s already gone up into the mountains. Glad to see you driving a Land Rover, ’cause that’s really the only route left.”
“What route is that?”
“Cinnamon Pass to Lake City. And you should probably get going. It’s a bitch of a road.”
They rolled into the old mining town at midday and Jack pulled into a small grocery with several gas pumps out front. He sent Dee and the kids inside to scrounge for food while he flipped the lever and prayed there was something left. There was. He topped off the Rover’s tank, walked into the grocery. The cash register stood unmanned, the shelves stripped bare, the store pillaged.
He called out, “You finding anything?”
Dee from the back: “Slim pickings, although I did get a road map. Any gas left?”
“I filled us up.” Jack grabbed two five-gallon gasoline cans off a shelf in the barebones automotive aisle and went outside to the pump and filled them up. He cleared out a spot amid the camping gear and lifted the red plastic cans one at a time through the open window of the back hatch. Inside the store again, it took him several minutes to find the plastic sheeting. He carried two boxes of it, a roll of duct tape, and the single remaining quart of 10w-30 motor oil back outside with him. Dee and the kids were already in the car when he climbed in.
“How’d we do?” he said.