Ed said, “I sort of feel like one of us should keep watch. Case someone comes.”
“You drove all night,” Dee said. “I’ll do it.”
“Five or six hours, I’ll be good as new. Wake me at noon.”
Dee strolled the corridors in near darkness. The silence of the place imposing. She’d been here before with Jack. Sixteen years ago. A summer day, the lobby bustling and filled with light. They were passing through on a move from Montana to New Mexico, Jack having just been hired by UNM, Dee en route to begin a residency at the university hospital. They’d only stopped for a few hours to have lunch in the dining room, but she still recalled the feel of that day, had never lost it—a lightness in her being and with the two of them married just four months, the sense that they were really beginning a life, that everything lay open and accessible before them.
She walked down to the lobby and went outside, following the paved path to the observation point. The day had dawned clear. Across the basin, a herd of elk grazed the edge of a lodgepole pine forest still recovering from a recent fire and interspersed with dead gray trees.
After a while, a column of water launched out of the earth, steaming in the cold. There had been five hundred tourists here the last time Dee had watched it blow. She listened to the superheated water rain down on the mineralized field, a light wind in her face, the mist lukewarm by the time it reached her.
In the early afternoon, she and Ed made the climb to the widow’s walk, stood on top of the lodge looking out over the basin and the hills, no sound but the flags flapping on the grounds below. Seemed like if she stared hard and long and far enough, she might catch a glimpse of him somewhere out there.
“You’re missing your husband.”
Wiped her eyes. “Did you leave anyone behind when you left Arches?”
Ed shook his head.
“That must make things a little easier. Only having to worry about yourself, I mean.”
“I was married once. I’ve been thinking about her. You know, wondering.”
“Any kids?”
“Haven’t been in touch with them in a long time.” He looked at her as if he might offer some further explanation, then moved on to something else instead. “I’m concerned the Canadian border is going to be tough to cross. I’ve been considering other possibilities.”
“Like what?”
“We’re only a few hours south of Bozeman. That’s the nearest airport. Maybe we get our hands on a plane.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“Used to fly commercial jets.”
“How long since you’ve been in a cockpit?”
“You really want to know?”
“Can you still fly? I mean, doesn’t the technology change?”
“We’d just be looking for a twin-prop. Nothing too complicated. We could be in Canada in under two hours.”
Dee slept through the rest of the afternoon, and in the evening, she took Naomi and Cole down to the observation point. When it finally blew, the sunlight shot horizontally through the scalding mist and turned the water into fire.
Ed gassed up the Jeep and added a few quarts of oil, employed Cole to clean the dust and grime off the windows. They set out with the moon high enough to obviate the need for headlights, speeding north through the park to the blues of Muddy Waters.
An hour and a half brought them to the Montana border. They roared across and up through the isolated, nothing towns of Gardiner, Miner, and Emigrant, all vacated, all long-since and so thoroughly burned there wasn’t even the temptation to stop and search for food.
A little before midnight, Ed pulled over onto the shoulder.
“We’re close to Bozeman,” he said, “but if we stay on this road, we’re going to have to get on the interstate.” He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a map, and unfolded it across the steering wheel.
Dee leaned over and touched a light gray line that branched off from the bold one denoting the highway they’d been driving all night.
“Here?” she said.
“Yeah, that’s the one we need to find. See how it cuts right across? Once we hit it, we’re only twenty miles from the Bozeman airfield.”
Dee spotted it as they raced past and Ed turned around in the empty highway and headed back. It was an unmarked dirt road that exploited the Jeep’s decrepit shocks, rocking them along for several miles on a gentle climb through pine forest. Just dark enough when passing through the corridors of trees to persuade Ed to punch on the headlights.
“Could we actually fly out tonight?” Dee said.
“Assuming we find a plane with sufficient fuel, I’ll probably want to wait until first light. Really don’t want my first flight in over two decades to be by instrumentation.”
“Can I help fly?” Cole asked.
“Absolutely, copilot.”
Dee stared out the window at the open field they moved across, thinking how flying out of all this madness, of finally getting her kids someplace safe, felt so far beyond the realm of possibility she couldn’t even imagine it happening.
Ed slammed the brake.
She shot forward, painfully restrained by the seatbelt.
Looked up when she’d recoiled back into the leather seat, her first thought her children who were picking themselves up out of the backseat floorboards, and her second the numerous points of light that were moving toward the Jeep.
“Back up, Ed. Back up right—”
The windshield splintered and something warm sprayed the side of Dee’s face as Ed fell into the steering wheel, the horn blaring, other rounds piercing the glass, the night filling with gunshots. Dee unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved the gearshift into park and crawled over the console into the backseat. Sprawled herself on top of Naomi and Cole as bullets struck the car.
“Is he dead?” Naomi asked.
“Yes.”
The firing stopped.
“Either of you hit?”
“No.”
“Make it stop,” Cole cried.
“Are you hit, Cole?”
He shook his head.
Footsteps approached the Jeep, and in the illumination of an oncoming flashlight, Dee could see clear liquid sheeting down the glass of the rear passenger window.
“We have to get out of the car,” she whispered.
Already her eyes were burning, the fumes getting stronger.
“They’ll shoot us if we get out,” Naomi said.
“They’ll burn us alive if we stay in. They’ve shot some of the plastic gas cans on top of the Jeep.”
Dee opened the door and tumbled out. The glare of the flashlights maxed her retinas and she could see little of who was there nor determine their number amid the afterimages that pulsed purple in the dark.
“Stop right there.” A man’s voice. Dee stood and raised her hands.
“Please. I have two children with me. Naomi, Cole, get out.” She felt one of them, probably Cole, glom onto her right arm.
“They’re like me,” Cole said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They have light around their head. All of them.”
“Get back in your car,” the man said, close enough now for Dee to get a decent look—three-day beard, dark navy trousers and parka, aiming an automatic weapon at her face.
He motioned toward the car with the machinegun as others emerged out of the dark behind him.
Dee considered the Glock pushed down the back of her pants. Suicide.
“Bill, check the driver.”
A short, stocky soldier put a light through Ed’s window.
“Gone to be with the Lord, boss.”
“Got your Zippo on you, you chain-smoking motherfucker?”
“Yeah.”
“Particularly attached to it?”
“It was my older brother’s.”