“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.”