* * * * *
TWO miles into his day, coasting down a long, gentle grade in the dawnlight, Jack braked and came to a stop in the road. He squinted, trying to sharpen his nearsightedness into focus. Couldn’t tell how far. A mile. Maybe two. The calculation of distance impossible in this country.
A vehicle parked in the road. One of its doors open.
For ten minutes, Jack didn’t move and he didn’t take his eyes off the car.
He pedaled up the road, stopping every few hundred yards to view things from a closer vantage.
It was a late model minivan. White. Covered in dust and pockmarked with bulletholes. Some of the windows had been shot out, and there was glass and blood on the pavement. All four tires low but intact. Utah license plate.
Jack stopped ten feet from the rear bumper and got off the bike.
Smell of death everywhere.
Somehow, he had missed the girl in the sagebrush. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and it looked as though she’d been gunned down running, her long blond hair caught up in the branches. He wasn’t going to get close enough to see how old she was, but she looked small from where he stood. Ten years old maybe.
A woman sat in the front passenger seat and her brains covered the window at her head. Twin teenage boys lay slumped against each other in the backseat. The driver seat was empty.
Jack climbed in behind the wheel. The keys dangled out of the ignition. Fuel gauge at a quarter.
He turned the key.
The engine cranked.
He pulled the boys out of the back and their mother out of the front and lined them all up in the desert. Didn’t want to, but he couldn’t just leave the girl face up, naked and entangled in the sage.
He stood for a long time staring down at them.
Midday and the flies already feasting.
Jack started to say something. Stopped himself. It would’ve meant nothing, changed nothing, been solely for his benefit. No words to put this right.
He loaded the bicycle into the back.
He drove north, keeping his speed at a steady fifty. A CD in the stereo had been playing the Beach Boys, and Jack let it go on playing until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He passed through a small, burned town, and fifteen miles north, on the outskirts of another, had to swerve to miss someone walking alone down the middle of the highway.
He stopped the car, watched a man staggering toward him in the rearview mirror, his defective gait unfazed, as if he hadn’t even noticed the car that had nearly hit him. He didn’t carry a gun or a backpack, nothing in his hands which he held like arthritic claws, his fingers bent and seemingly frozen that way.
Jack shifted into park.
The closer the man got, the more wrecked he looked—sunburned a deep purple, his dirty white oxford shirt streaked in blood and missing one of the arms entirely, his leather clogs disintegrating off his feet.
He walked right past Jack’s window and kept on going, straight down the double yellow.
Jack opened the door.
“Hey.”
The man didn’t look back.
Jack got out and walked after him. “Sir, do you need help?”
No response.
Jack drew even with him, tried to make eye contact, then finally stepped in front of the man, who stopped, his gray eyes staring off at a horizon beyond even the scope of this infinite country.
In another world completely.
“Are you hurt?” Jack said.
His voice must have made some impact, because the man met his eyes, but he didn’t speak.
“I have food in the car,” Jack said. “I don’t have water, but this road will take us through the Little Belt Mountains. We’ll find some in the high country for sure.”
The man just stood there. His entire body trembling slightly. Like there was a cataclysm underway deep in his core.
Jack touched the man’s bare arm where the shirt sleeve had been torn away, felt the sun’s accumulation of heat radiating from it.
“You should come with me. You’ll die out here.”
He escorted the man to the passenger side and installed him in the front seat.
“Sorry about the smell,” Jack said. “It ain’t pretty, but it beats walking.”
The man seemed not to notice.
Jack buckled him in and closed the door.
They sped down the abbreviated main street of another slaughtered town. Mountains to the north, and the road climbed into them. Jack glanced over at the man, saw him touching the matter on his window, running his finger through it, smearing it across the glass. A bag of potato chips and a candy bar sat in his lap, unopened, unacknowledged.
“I’m Jack, by the way,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The man looked at him as if he either didn’t know or couldn’t bring himself to say. His wallet bulged out of the side pocket of his slacks, and Jack reached over, tugged it out, flipped it open.
“Donald Massey, of Provo, Utah. Good to meet you, Donald. I’m from Albuquerque.”
Donald made no response.
“Aren’t you hungry? Here.” Jack reached over and took the candy bar out of Donald’s lap, ripped open the packaging. He slid the bar into Donald’s grasp, but the man just stared at it.
“Do you want to listen to some music?”
Jack turned on the Beach Boys.
They rode up into the mountains, Jack hating to be on a winding road again. With all these blind corners, you could roll up on a roadblock before you knew what hit you.
In the early afternoon, they passed through a mountain village that was probably very much a ghost town before anyone had bothered to burn it. A few dozen houses. Couple buildings on the main strip. Evergreen trees in the fields and on the hills, the smell of them coming through the dashboard vents, a welcome change.
On the north side of town, Jack pulled over and turned off the engine. When he opened the door, he could hear the running water in the trees and smell its sweetness.
“You need to drink something, Donald,” Jack said.
The man just stared through the windshield.
Jack lifted a travel mug out of the center console.
Jack rinsed the residue of ancient coffee out of the mug and filled it with water from the creek.
Headed back to the van, opened Donald’s door.
“It’s really good,” Jack said.
He held the mug to Donald’s sunblasted lips and tilted. Most of the water ran down the man’s chest under his shirt, but he inadvertently swallowed some of it.
Jack tried to give him a little more, but the man was disinterested.
“We’ll reach Great Falls in the afternoon,” Jack said. “It’s a big city. I used to live there.”