“What’s going on?” he said, and it came out naturally enough, like he’d been pulled over for a blown taillight, just some annoying traffic stop in the flow of an otherwise normal day.
The man said, “Turn the interior lights on.”
“Why?”
“Right now.”
Jack hit the lights.
The man leaned forward, the sharp tang of rusted metal wafting into the car, Jack watching the eyes behind the square, silver frames, the glasses of an engineer, he thought—large, utilitarian. Those eyes took in his wife, his children, before settling back on Jack with a level of indifference, verging on disgust, that prior to this moment was completely alien to his experience.
The man said, “Where you off to so late?”
“What business is that of yours?”
When the man just stared and made no response, Jack said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but we’re going to move on here.”
“I asked you where you’re going.”
Jack tried to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue, but it had gone dry as sandpaper.
“Just up to Santa Fe to see some friends.”
The driver’s door of the truck behind them opened. Someone stepped down onto the pavement and walked over to join the others at the roadblock.
“Why do you have packs and jugs of water in the back of your car?”
“We’re going camping. There’s mountains up that way if you hadn’t heard.”
“I don’t think you’re going to Santa Fe.”
“I don’t give a f**k what you think.”
“Give me your driver’s license.”
“I don’t think so.”
The man racked a fresh shell into the chamber, and the awful noise of the pump action set Jack’s heart racing.
“All right,” he said. He opened the center console, took out his wallet, spent ten seconds trying to slide his license out of the clear plastic sleeve. He handed it through the window, and the man took it and walked over to the trucks and the other men.
Dee whispered through tears, “Jack, look out your window at the other side of the road.”
Where the light from the trucks diffused into the barest strands of illumination, Jack saw a minivan parked in a vacant lot, and just a few feet from it, four pairs of shoes poking up through the tall, bending grass, the feet motionless and spread at forty-five degree angles, toes pointing toward the sky.
“They’re going to kill us, Jack.”
He reached under his seat, lifted the .45 into his lap.
The man coming back toward the Discovery now.
“Dee, kids,” Jack said as he shifted into reverse, “unbuckle your seatbelts right now and when I clear my throat, get down as low as you can into the floorboards and cover your heads.”
The man reached his window.
“Get out of the car. All of you except the boy.”
“Why?”
The shotgun barrel passed over the lip of the windowglass, stopping six inches from Jack’s left ear. So close he could feel the heat from recent use radiating off the steel.
“This is not the way you want to handle this, Mr. Colclough. Turn off the engine.”
The other men walked over.
Jack cleared his throat and jammed his foot into the gas pedal, the Land Rover lurching back, a winch punching through the rear window, glass spraying everywhere. He grabbed the smoldering barrel with one hand and shifted into drive with the other. The shotgun blast ruptured his eardrum and blew the glass out of a window, the recoil ripping the barrel out of his hand along with several layers of cauterized skin. He could hear only a distant ringing, like a symphony of old telephones buried deep underground. Muzzleflashes and the front passenger window exploded, shards of glass embedding themselves in the right side of his face as he pushed the gas pedal into the floor again and cranked the steering wheel to miss the branches of the downed oak tree.
The Discovery tore through the grass and weeds of the vacant lot, the jarring so violent at this speed, Jack could barely keep his grip on the steering wheel. He turned up a grassy slope and took the Land Rover through a six-foot fence at thirty miles per hour into the backyard of a brick ranch. Plowed over a rose garden and a birdbath, then broke through the fence again near the house and raced down the empty driveway and onto a quiet street.
He hit seventy-five within four blocks, blowing through two-way stops, four-way stops, and one dark traffic signal until he saw lights in the distance—the fast-approaching intersection with Lomas Boulevard.
He let the Discovery begin to slow, finally brought it to a full stop on the curb, and shifted into park. Darkness in the rearview mirror, no incoming headlights. He tried to listen for the sound of tailing cars, but he heard only those muffled telephones and the painful bass throbbing of his left eardrum. He was shaking all over.
He said, “Is anybody hurt?”
Dee climbed out of the floorboard and said something.
“I can’t hear you,” he said. In the backseat, he saw Naomi sitting up. “Where’s Cole?” Dee squirmed around and leaned into the backseat, reaching down into the floorboard where Cole had taken cover. “Is Cole okay?” The murmur of voices grew louder. “Would someone please tell me if my son is okay?”
Dee leaned back into the front seat, put her hands on her husband’s face, and pulled his right ear to her lips.
“Stop shouting. Cole’s fine, Jack. He’s just scared and balled up on the floor.”
He drove six blocks to Lomas Boulevard. This part of the city still had power. The road luminous with streetlights, traffic lights, the glow of fast-food restaurant signs that stretched for a quarter mile in either direction like a glowing mirage of civilization. Jack pulled through a red light and into the empty westbound lanes. The orange reserve tank light clicked on.
As they passed through the university’s medical campus, someone stepped out into the road, and Jack had to swerve to miss them.
Dee said something.
“What?”
“Go back,” she shouted.
“Are you crazy?”
“That was a patient.”
He turned around in the empty boulevard and drove back toward the hospital and pulled over to the curb. The patient already halfway across the road and staggering barefoot like he might topple—tall and gaunt, his head shaved, a scythe-shaped scar curving from just above his left ear across the top of his scalp, the kind of damage it would have taken a couple hundred stitches to close. The wind rode the gown up his toothpick legs.