“Of course. That doesn’t mean you need to have me putting things in your head that you can’t get rid of.” As his eyes readjusted to the darkness, he looked through the windshield at a range of hills in the east. Heard a sudden shriek of laughter from Cole that almost made him smile.
Dee said, “Don’t push me away. I need to share this experience with you. I want to know what you know, Jack. Every single thing, because there’s comfort in it. I need that.”
“Not this, you don’t.”
Five miles on, Jack pulled off the road again, said, “Give me the binoculars.”
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“I saw something.”
“What?”
“Lights. Everyone just sit still and don’t open your doors.”
“Why?”
“Because the interior lights will come on, and I don’t want anyone to see where we are.”
“What if they see us? What will happen?”
“Nothing good, Cole.”
Dee handed him the binoculars and he brought the eyecups to his eyes. At first, nothing but black, and he thought maybe the focus had been jarred, but then he picked them up again, stretched along the road like a stateless strand of Christmas lights.
“You just sighed. What is it, Jack?”
He moved the knob, pulled everything into focus. “The convoy.”
“Oh, God.”
“I think they’re moving away from us.”
“Can you tell how far?”
“Maybe ten miles. I don’t know.”
“And you’re sure they’re not coming toward us?”
He lowered the binoculars. “Let’s wait here awhile. Track their movement. Make absolutely certain.”
Jack glassed the convoy through the windshield, watching its slow progression away from them while the kids played Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Within the hour, the lights had vanished.
Heat blasted out of the vents to check the frigid air that streamed through rips in the plastic windows, Naomi and Cole bundled in their sleeping bags and huddled miserably together.
Just before midnight, Jack turned off the highway onto a dirt road and punched on the headlights.
They’d gone several miles when Dee leaned across the center console, and then back into her seat, pushing a discreet exhalation through her teeth that no one but her husband would have caught. The opening move in a battle they’d fought before.
“What?”
“You see the light?” she said.
“Yes, I see it.”
“Do you think there’s going to be a gas station out here?” She gestured toward the windshield and the expanse of empty country beyond the glass, devoid of even a spore of manmade light.
“It just came on a minute ago.”
“It means we’re out of gas, darling-heart.”
“No, it means we can still go for twenty-five miles. It’s called a reserve tank.”
He could feel the heat of her stare even in the dark.
She said, “We have ten gallons of gas sloshing around back there, and I don’t understand why you won’t—”
“Dee, it’s—”
“Oh my God, if you say it’s for emergencies one more. . .” She turned away from him. Stared into the plastic of her window. Jack on the brink of just pulling over, an act of appeasement he would never have considered under any other circumstance, when the headlights grazed a dark house.
He turned into the gravel drive and parked beside a powder-blue Chevy pickup truck from another time, headlights firing across a brick ranch with white columns on the porch.
“Let’s not stop here, Jack.”
“We have to take a look.”
Jack and Dee followed the stone path to the house and stepped up onto the front porch and knocked on the door. They waited. Heard nothing on the other side.
“Nobody’s home,” Jack said.
“Or maybe they saw a man walking up to their house with a shotgun and they’re waiting on the other side with a f**king arsenal.”
“Always the pessimist.” He knocked again and tried the door.
Jack pried a large, flat piece of sandstone out of the walkway and lobbed it through the dining room window. They crouched in the cedar chips and listened. A stalactite of glass fell out of the framing. Silence followed.
“I’ll go in,” Jack said, “make sure it’s safe.”
“What if it’s not?”
He reached into his pocket, handed her the keys. “Then you get the hell out of here.”
Standing in the dining room, the first thing to strike him was the warmth. He walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator humming. He opened it. Jars of mayonnaise and other storebought condiments and a mason jar of pickled beets and something wrapped in tinfoil. He went to the sink and turned on the tap. Water flowed.
Dee sat in the Rover in the driver seat, her hands on the steering wheel. He opened the door, said, “It’s empty and they have power.”
“Food?”
“There’s some stuff in the cabinets.” He looked into the backseat. “Na and Cole, I want you to bring all the empty jugs inside.”
Jack went around to the side of the house. He unsheathed his bowie and sawed off the nozzle to the garden hose. He unwound it and cut a six-foot length of green tubing. The opening to the Chevy’s gas tank was next to the driver-side door, a silver cap speckled with rust that took some hard cranking to unscrew. He’d already poured the five-gallon cans into the Rover, and they sat open on the gravel drive while he threaded the hose through the hole. It touched the bottom of the tank, the smell already wafting out of the end of the tube as he brought it to his lips.
The gas was oily in his mouth—sharp, pungent, and dirty. He spit it out and jammed the hose into the first gas can, his eyes watering, throat burning from the fumes.
Jack walked past the eight jugs of water lined up on the kitchen island. He leaned down into the sink and held his mouth under the open tap for a long time but there was no flushing of the gasoline which lingered in the back of his throat like persistent fog.
“How’d we do?” Dee asked.
He stood up, lightheaded. “Six gallons.”
“You all right?”
“I just need about fifty breath mints.”
Naomi said, “Come look what we found, Dad.”
He followed them across the wood laminate floor to a sliding glass door behind the breakfast nook. The vertical blinds had been swept back and he looked through the glass into a square of domesticated yard, moonlit and bordered by desert. He saw a dilapidated swingset, a pair of lawn chairs shaded by an umbrella, and closer to the house, a thirty-foot steel antenna mast.