Several switchbacks later, the road curved and Jack walked out of the aspen into a meadow.
He stopped.
Took the Glock out of his waistband and tugged back the slide.
Dee gasped.
Cole said, “What, Mama?”
Jack turned around and shushed them and led them back into the woods.
“Is anyone there?” Dee whispered.
“I couldn’t tell. Let me go check things out.”
“I should go, Jack. You’re too weak.”
“Don’t move from this spot, any of you, until I come back.”
He jogged into the meadow. You could see the desert in the west, the sun bleeding out across it and the distant gray thread of Highway 191. It was getting cold. He slowed to a walk, his shoulder pulsing again. The wind had died away and the trees stood motionless. Somewhere, the murmur of a stream.
A covered porch ran the length of it, loaded with firewood. Solar panels clung to the steep pitch of the roof. Dormers on the second floor. A chimney rising up through the center. The windows were dark, reflecting the sunset off the glass so he couldn’t see inside, even as he walked up the steps.
The wooden porch bowed and creaked under his weight. He leaned in toward a window, touched his nose to the glass, framed his face in his hands to block the natural light.
Darkness inside. The shape of furniture. High ceilings. No movement.
He tried the front door. Locked. Turned away, shielded his eyes, and swung the Glock through the window.
Dee shouted something from the woods.
“I’m okay,” he yelled. “Just breaking in.”
He straddled the windowframe and stepped down into the cabin. Through the skylight above the entrance, a column of late sun slanted through the glass and struck the stone of the freestanding fireplace with a medallion of orange light. It didn’t smell like anyone had been here in some time. The mustiness of infrequent habitation.
From what he could see in the fading light, the floorplan was spacious and open. A staircase corkscrewed up to the second level where the banistered hallway and three open doors were visible from Jack’s vantage.
He moved across the hardwood floor toward the kitchen.
A deep sink and granite countertops lined the back wall of windows which looked out over the deck into the brilliant aspen.
He walked over to the pantry, pulled open the door.
Jack led Dee and the kids up the front porch steps and into the cabin.
“There’s food here, Jack?”
“Just come on.”
The last trickle of daylight was just sufficient to illuminate the kitchen, where Jack had thrown open every cabinet so they could see the treasure he’d found.
Dee sat down and put her head between her knees and wept.
They spread out on the floor as the world went black out the kitchen windows, each with their own cold can and sharing a big bag of sourdough pretzels torn open and spilled across the floor beside a sixer of warm Sierra Mist.
“Oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” Naomi said, halfway through her clam chowder. Grunts of agreement all around—Jack had gone for the chili, Dee the beef vegetable soup, Cole the Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli.
A half hour later, Naomi slept on a leather couch near the fireplace while Jack covered her with two quilts he’d found in a game closet. He went up the spiral staircase, holding one of the kerosene lamps they’d taken from the coffee table downstairs, Dee in tow, carrying Cole. Into the first bedroom. Jack pulled back the quilt, blanket, sheet, and Dee laid their son on the mattress and kissed his forehead and covered him back up.
“It’ll get cold in here tonight,” she said.
“Not as cold as last night.”
“If he wakes up and no one’s here, he’s going to be scared.”
“You think so? After these last few days? He’s done in, Dee. He won’t wake for hours.”
They lay in bed downstairs in the dark under a pile of blankets. Somewhere, the tick of a second hand. Naomi’s deep respirations in the living room. No other sound.
“Do you think we’re safe here?” Dee whispered.
“Safer than starving and freezing to death on the side of a mountain.”
“But long-term, I mean.”
“I don’t know yet. I can’t think about it right now. I have nothing left.”
Dee snuggled up to him and stretched a leg across his, her skin cool and like fine-grit sandpaper. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest. First time in months she’d put her hands on him, and it felt, in the best kind of way, like a stranger touching him.
“Nothing, Jack?” And she slipped her hand inside the waistband of his boxer shorts. “’Cause this doesn’t feel like nothing.”
“Our daughter is twenty feet away,” he whispered.
Dee climbed out of bed and crept across the floor and closed them in behind the French doors and their panes of opaque glass. He heard the lock push in. She pushed the straps off her shoulders and her undershirt puddled around her feet. Slid her panties down her legs, and Jack watched her come back to him, naked and pale, wishing for some moonlight for her to move through as she crawled across the bed.
“I’m nasty,” he said. “Haven’t had a shower in—”
“I’m nasty, too.”
She stripped him and sat him up against the headboard and eased down onto his lap, and already the pain in his shoulder was subsiding. He could tell this was going to be one of the great f**ks of his life.
* * * * *
IN the morning, Jack hiked down to the road with a gallon of the gasoline he’d found in the shed. There was plenty more where it came from—six five-gallon containers that he figured were meant for the backup generator in case the solar power system failed. The Rover managed to crank, and he put it into four-wheel high.
A hundred yards up the mountain, he stopped and grabbed the chainsaw out of the backseat and came out of his sling. Took him thirty minutes just to hack through the dense lower branches so he could get at the base, going slow so he didn’t rip the stitches in his shoulder. Another twenty to carve a wedge into the trunk, and when the spruce finally fell across the road, it perfumed the air with sap and splintered wood.
Naomi and Cole were still sleeping when Jack returned to find Dee in the kitchen, having already done what he suggested—pull down all the food from the cabinets and the pantry to see what they had to work with.
“Doesn’t look like much,” he said by way of greeting.
Dee looked up from where she sat on the kitchen floor, surrounded by cans and glass jars and packages. “How’d the car do?”