The ground was soft and moist from the recent snowfall, and they curled up on the far side of a boulder, hidden from the road, everyone asleep before the stars came out.
* * * * *
DEE woke with the sun in her face and a dehydration headache. Her children slept and she let them go on sleeping. Lethargic and hopeless. Nothing more unappealing than rising from the cool soft grass to trudge on down that road.
She lay there, gliding in and out of consciousness, always returning to the question—where are you? And—are you? It seemed impossible that he could be gone and she not know. Not feel it in the pit of her soul.
She lay facing her daughter, Naomi’s eyes half open, blades of dead-yellow grass trembling between them that Dee had been giving serious thought to eating.
“I hurt everywhere,” Naomi said.
“I know.”
“Are we dying, Mom?”
How to answer such a question.
“We’re in rough shape, baby.”
“Is it going to hurt a lot worse than this? Toward the end, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“How much longer?”
“Naomi. I don’t know.”
Dee had completely lost time, and whether the sun’s position in the sky indicated late morning or early afternoon, she couldn’t tell. She reached over and put her hand to Cole’s back. Confirmed the rise and the fall. The boy slept against the boulder and she could feel the cold radiating from the rock.
When Dee rolled back over toward her daughter, Naomi was sitting up in the grass. Dee thinking her zygomatic bones seemed extraordinarily pronounced, the bones like crescent moons forming the lower range of her hollowed-out eye sockets.
“You hear that?” Naomi said.
Dee did. A sound like sustained thunder. She looked up, said, “It’s above us, Na.”
A jet, too distant to discern the type, streaked across the sky, its contrail iridescent in the brilliant blue.
Night and freezing cold. Dee lying with her back against the boulder, Cole shivering in her arms. The children slept, but she’d been awake for an hour, fighting black thoughts. She hadn’t intended to lie in this meadow all day. Between the weakness and exhaustion, it had just happened. But tomorrow would involve a choice, and knowing they’d only be more exhausted, thirstier, and in greater agony, she was already making excuses for why they shouldn’t push on. Basking in the increasingly soothing presence of what lay two feet away in the grass, just within arm’s reach.
Naomi shook her awake.
“Mom, get up.”
Dee opened her eyes to her daughter silhouetted against the sweep of stars and leaning over her.
“What’s wrong, Na?” It hurt to speak, her throat swollen.
“Someone’s coming.”
“Give me a hand.”
She extricated herself from Cole’s embrace and grabbed onto Naomi’s arm and tugged herself upright.
Sat listening.
At first, nothing. Then she discerned the sound of an engine still a long ways off, had to strain to tell if it was fading away or approaching.
“It’s coming toward us, Mom.”
Dee used the boulder to pull herself onto her feet. She picked up the Glock, the metal glazed with frost. They walked through the alpine meadow to the shoulder of the road. The double yellow glowing in the starlight, and the noise of the approaching car getting louder, like a wave coming ashore.
Dee’s leg muscles burned. The warmth of her hand had melted some of the frost off the Glock, and she used her shirt to wipe the condensation and ice from the steel.
“Go back to the boulder, Na.”
“What are you going to do?”
Dee slipped the Glock into a side pocket of her rain jacket. “When you hear me call out, wake Cole and bring him over, but not until. And if it doesn’t go right, something happens, you hide, and take care of your brother.”
“Mom—”
“We don’t have time. Go.”
Naomi ran back into the meadow and Dee stepped out into the road, searching for the glint of headlights through the trees, but there was nothing save for the noise of the approaching engine.
A shadow blitzed around the corner.
She had intended to lay down on the pavement, but she didn’t have the guts for that now facing a car with no headlights barreling toward her in the dark of night, so she just stood straddling the double yellow line and waving her arms like a madwoman.
Inside of a hundred yards, the RPMs fell off and the glow of brakelights fired the asphalt red and the tires screeched against the pavement, Dee shielding her eyes from the imminent collision but not yielding an inch.
Then the engine idled two feet away from her and the smell of scorched rubber filled the air. She lowered her arm from her face as the driver’s door squeaked open. It was a Jeep Cherokee, dark green or brown—impossible to tell in this light—with four fuel containers strapped to the roof.
“You trying to commit suicide?” the man growled.
Dee took out the Glock, lined it up in the center of his chest. By the glow that emanated from the Jeep’s interior lights, she could see that he was older—short brown hair on top, a great white beard, salt and pepper mustache that struggled to merge the two. He held something in his left hand.
“Drop it,” she said.
When he hesitated, she sighted up his face, and something in her eyes must have persuaded him, because a gun clattered onto the pavement.
“You’re ambushing me?”
Dee shouted for the kids, heard them come running in the dark.
“Grab the top of the door,” Dee said.
He complied as Naomi and Cole hustled across the road.
On the door below the window, Dee noticed a National Park Service emblem.
“Do you see him, Cole?” Dee said as he sidled up beside her.
“Yes.”
She wouldn’t take her eyes off the man.
“Does he have any light around his head?”
“Lady, what are you—”
“Be quiet.”
“No, Mom.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
Still, she didn’t lower the gun. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Ed.”
“Ed what?”
“Abernathy.”
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Abernathy?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Girl with the gun gets the answers.”
“I’m trying to survive.”
“We aren’t affected,” she said.
“Neither am I.”