Impossible to know if the man registered a word he was saying.
“I got separated from my family five days ago.” Jack glanced at the man’s left ring finger, saw a gold wedding band. “Were you with your family, Donald?”
No response.
Jack sipped the water, grains of sand from the creekbed deposited on the tip of his tongue.
“Let me guess what you do for a living. My wife and I used to play this game all the time.” Jack studied the man’s leather clogs—nothing much to look at now, but they suggested wealth. Couple hundred dollars off the shelf. Jack inspected the tag on the back of the man’s collar. “Brooks Brothers. All right.” He looked at Donald’s hands. Covered in blood and still clutched like claws, but he could tell they weren’t the hands of a man who earned his living working outdoors. “You strike me as an ad man,” Jack said. “Am I right? You work in an advertising and marketing firm in Provo?”
Nothing.
“I bet you’d never guess my vocation. Tell you what. I’ll give you three. . .”
Jack stopped. Felt the cold premonition of having missed something lifting out of his gut. He almost didn’t want to know, but the fear couldn’t touch his curiosity.
He opened the glove compartment, rifled through a stack of yellow napkins, plastic silverware, bank deposit envelopes, until he came to the automobile liability policy, protected in a plastic sleeve. He opened it, stared down at the small cards that identified the coverage, the policy limits, and the named insureds.
Donald Walter Massey.
Angela Jacobs-Massey.
Jack looked at Donald.
“Jesus Christ.”
They went on through the mountains, Jack trying to pay attention to what was coming in the distance, but all he could think about was Donald, wondering what had happened back down the road. Couldn’t imagine the man fleeing. He wouldn’t have left his family. Had the affected purposely left him alive then? Murdered his family in front of him and then sent him down the highway on foot?
Jack blinked the tears out of his eyes.
He looked over at the man who now leaned against the door. That look in his face like he’d just been hollowed out. Jack wanting to tell him that he’d taken care of their bodies, or at least done what he could, shown them respect. He wanted to say something beautiful and profound and comforting, about how even in all this horror, there were things between people who loved each other that couldn’t be touched, that lived through pain, torture, separation, even death. He thought he still believed that. But he didn’t say anything. Just reached over and laced his fingers through Donald’s, which barely released their incomprehensible store of tension, and Jack held the man’s hand as he drove them down out of the mountains, and he did not let go.
In the early evening the city lay several miles in the distance. The sun low over the plains beyond. Everything bright, golden. The way Jack dreamed of this place.
He disengaged his hand from Donald’s, the man still sleeping against the door.
The gas gauge needle hovered over the empty slash.
He was debating whether to head into town or take the bypass when he saw the first sign—a billboard that had once advertised a casino, now whitewashed and covered in black writing:
YOU ARE NOW UNDER SNIPER SURVEILLANCE
Stop in the next 400 yards
Jack took his foot off the gas.
Another billboard, same side of the road, one hundred yards further down.
300 yards to stop
Comply or you will be shot
Jack looked in the rearview mirror, saw several vehicles trailing him, no idea where they’d come from.
200 YARDS
TURN OFF YOUR VEHICLE AND. . .
He could see a roadblock a quarter mile in the distance, set up at a fork in the highway.
More than twenty cars and trucks. Sand bags. Staunch artillery.
He was passing vehicles now on the shoulder that had been shot to hell and burned.
DO NOT FUCKING MOVE
The cars behind him were close now, one of them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with the roof cut out and two men with machineguns standing on the back seat, ready to unload.
Jack brought the minivan to a full stop, put it in park, and turned off the engine.
The Jeep hung back thirty yards.
Jack looked over at Donald, started to rouse him, then thought, Why wake the man just to be killed?
Six heavily-armed men in body armor strode up the middle of the highway toward the minivan, one of them dragging an emaciated man along by a leash in one hand, the other holding a cattle prod.
They didn’t strike Jack as military, didn’t carry themselves so cocksure.
As if it had been scripted, the greeting party stopped thirty yards out from the front bumper of the minivan, and the tallest of the bunch raised a bullhorn to his mouth.
“Both of you, out of the car.”
Jack grabbed Donald’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out.”
The man wouldn’t move.
“Donald.”
“You have five seconds before we open fire.”
Jack opened his door and stepped out into the highway with his hands raised.
“You in the car, get out or—”
“He doesn’t hear you,” Jack yelled. “His mind is gone.”
“Lay down on your stomach.”
Jack got down onto his knees and then prostrated himself across the rough, sun-warmed pavement. Listened to the sound of their footsteps coming toward him, and he didn’t dare move or even raise his head to watch them approach. Just lay there with his heart throbbing against the road, wondering, from a strangely detached perspective, if this was how and where it would end for him.
The men stopped several feet away.
One of them came forward and Jack felt hands running up and down his sides, his legs.
“Clean.”
“Go check the other guy. You, sit up.”
Jack sat up.
“Where’s Benny?”
One of the guards produced a blindfolded rail of a man, naked, beaten to within an inch of his life, bruises covering his body and face, his hands cuffed and a chain linking his ankles above his bare feet.
The tall, bearded man pointed a large revolver at Jack’s face and asked him his name.
“Jack.”
“Is there a bomb in your van?”
“No.”
The one who’d frisked Jack peered over the front passenger door, said, “This one’s completely checked out.”
The bearded man stared at Jack. “Jack, I want to introduce you to Benny.” Benny’s handler gave a hard tug on the leash, dragging him within a foot of Jack. “Here’s the deal. If Benny likes you, I’m going to blow your brains out all over the road. If he doesn’t, we’ll talk.” He looked at Benny. “Ready, boy? Ready to do some work?”