“The lights?”
“Yeah.”
“What lights? What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
“Cole, I don’t.”
“The ones I saw that night I stayed at Alex’s house, and we went outside real late with all the people.”
Something like an electrical impulse shuddered through him. Jack shut his eyes and held his palm to the shallow concavity of his son’s chest.
* * * * *
THEY slept long into the following day. They slept like people with no good reason to wake. As if the world to which they went to bed might become reconciled to itself, if they could only sleep a bit longer.
When Jack drove back across the stream the water came halfway up the tires. It was early afternoon, and except for where the trees threw shade, the snow had disappeared from the meadow and the ground was supple. They turned onto the road. It descended. Muddy and crisscrossed with rivulets of brown water in the sunlight. Still snowpack in the trees. They came down out of the snow and the pure stands of spruce into aspen.
In the late afternoon, the road widened and became smoother and ran along the shore of a large mountain lake. Up ahead, Jack spotted a car on the side of the road—a luxury SUV with all four doors flung open.
He sped past at fifty miles per hour.
A quick glimpse: Parents. The woman naked, her thighs red. Three children. All facedown, unmoving in the grass.
Jack glanced in the rearview mirror. Naomi and Cole hadn’t noticed.
He looked over at Dee—she dozed against the plastic window.
The road went to pavement at dusk and they entered a mountain hamlet. Everything had been burned, the streets lined with the charred skeletons of houses and cars and gift shops, Jack thinking it must have been razed several days ago because nothing smoked. The air that streamed through the vents smelled like old, wet ash. His family slept. There was a field in the center of town near the school, browned and overgrown, with rusted, netless soccer goals at each end. At first, Jack thought someone had torched a mound of tires in the middle of that field until he saw a single black arm sticking up from the top of the heap.
They stabbed north into the night up a twisting, two-lane highway through the foothills of the San Juans, and they did not pass another car.
Jack pulled off the road into a picnic area beside a reservoir. They popped the back hatch of the Rover, and Dee fired up the propane-fueled camp stove and cooked a pot of chicken noodle soup from two old cans. They sat near the shore watching the moonrise and passing the steaming pot. After a night in the mountains, it felt almost warm.
“I like this better than the tomatoes and rice,” Cole said. “I could eat this every day.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Dee said.
Jack waved off his turn with the pot and stood up. He walked down to the edge and dipped his fingers in the water.
“Cold, Dad?” Naomi asked.
“Not too bad.”
“Why don’t you go for a swim then?”
He glanced back, grinning. “Why don’t you?”
She shook her head. He cupped a handful and tossed it back at his daughter, the water like falling glass where the moonlight passed through it.
Her screams echoed off the hills across the reservoir.
They drove west along the water.
“Where are we stopping tonight?” Dee asked.
“I wasn’t planning to. I’m not tired, and I think it might be safer to travel at night.”
It was noisy in the car, the plastic windows flapping. In the backseat, Naomi had her headphones in, eyes closed. Cole played with a pair of Hot Wheels, racing them up the back of Jack’s seat.
Jack said, “I was studying the roadmap you picked up in Silverton. I think we should head into northwest Colorado. It’s sparsely populated. Middle-of-nowhere type of place. What do you think?”
“And then where?”
“Day at a time for now. How you doing?”
She just shook her head, and he knew better than to push it.
The road traversed a dam and climbed. They followed the rim of a deep canyon. Deer everywhere, Jack stopping frequently to let them cross the road.
He pulled over after a while and the slowing of the car roused Dee from sleep.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to pee.”
He left the car running and got out and walked to the overlook. Stood pissing between the slats of a wooden fence, looking across the canyon, which by his reckoning couldn’t have spanned more than a couple thousand feet. Down in the black bottom of the gorge, invisible in shadow, he could hear a river rushing.
The road turned north away from the canyon. They rode through dark country, no points of houselight anywhere, but the moon bright enough on the pavement for Jack to drive the long, open stretches without headlights. Miles to the south, the horizon put forth a deep orange glow. He watched the fuel gauge falling toward a quarter of a tank and thought about the phantom cries of that baby he’d heard the day before. Wondering, if they were real, what had become of it.
Late in the night, Jack reached over and patted Dee’s leg. She stirred from sleep, sat up, rubbed her eyes. He said nothing, not wanting to wake the kids, but he pointed through the windshield.
City lights in the distance.
Dee leaned over and whispered into his ear, her breath soured with sleep, “Can’t we just go around?”
He shook his head.
“Why?”
“We’re on fumes.”
“We have ten gallons in back.”
“That’s for emergencies.”
“Jack, it’s an emergency right now. Our life has become a f**king emergency.”
The town was empty, but then it was almost three in the morning. The air that poured through the vents bore no trace of smoke and the houses seemed untouched, if vacant, a few even boasting porchlights.
At the intersection of highways, Jack pulled into a filling station. He stepped out and swiped his credit card and stood waiting for the machine to authorize the purchase, the night air pleasant at this lower elevation. While the super unleaded gasoline flowed into the tank, he went across the oil-stained concrete into the convenience store. The lights were on, and the empty coolers along the back wall hummed in the silence. He perused the four aisles, all heavily grazed, and emerged with a package of sunflower seeds and another quart of motor oil. The pump had gone quiet, the ticker frozen at a hair past eleven gallons. He squeezed the handle, but the lever was still depressed, the tank run dry.
With the hearing in his left ear still impaired, it took him a few seconds to get a fix on the sound. A mote of light tore up the highway toward the filling station, accompanied by the watery growl of a V-twin, two pair of headlights in tow a quarter mile back, and Dee already shouting inside the car as he yanked out the nozzle and screwed on the gas cap.