Run by Blake Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

the river and then emerged into a higher valley. They passed ruined mines. Mountains swept up all around them, the craggy summits edging into the falling cloud deck. In the rearview mirror, Jack eyed the dust clouds a mile back, and when he squinted, raised the half dozen trucks contained within them.
    They passed the remnants of another mine, another ghost town.
    The road became rocky and narrow and steep.
    “Jack, you have to go faster.”
    “Any faster, I’ll bounce us off the mountain.”
    Naomi and Cole had unbuckled their seatbelts and they both sat up on their knees, facing the back hatch and watching the pursuing trucks.
    “Get down, kids.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I don’t want you to get shot, Naomi.”
    “Jack, come on.”
    “Are they going to shoot at me, Daddy?”
    “They might, Cole.”
    “Why?”
    Why.
    The road had gone completely to hell, the Rover’s right tires passing inches from a nonexistent shoulder that plunged a hundred and fifty feet into a stream boiling with whitewater.
    “Dad, I’m cold.”
    “I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.”
    Snow starred the windshield. A signpost appeared in the distance. Beside the words, Cinnamon Pass, which had been engraved in the wood, an arrow pointed to a road that could hardly be called a road—just a single lane of broken rocks that switchbacked up the flank of a mountain into the clouds.
    Jack took the turnoff. Snow blew in through the open windows. They climbed several hundred feet above the other road, above timberline, and as Jack negotiated the first tight switchback, that squadron of trucks emerged out of the mist below, cutting triangles of light through the falling snow.
    Dee lifted the binoculars from the floorboard and leaned out the window and glassed the valley. Even without magnification, Jack could see five of the trucks veer onto the turnoff for Cinnamon Pass.
    “Why’s the one stopping?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. Let me see. A man’s getting out.”
    “What’s he—”
    “Everybody get down.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    Something struck the Rover, and for a split second Jack thought the tires had thrown a rock.
    A rifle shot echoed off the mountains.
    “Get down on the floorboards.”
    The Rover shook and pitched as Jack pushed the speedometer to ten miles per hour, maneuvering to avoid the largest, sharpest rocks that jutted out of the trail. The window at Naomi’s seat exploded in a shower of glass and everyone screamed and Jack shouted his daughter’s name and she said that she was okay.
    Another rifle shot. They climbed into the base of a cloud, Jack thinking, He’s aiming for the tires , as a bullet punctured Dee’s door and ripped through his seat, inches from his back.
    The mist thickened. The rocks had just been wet. Now they were frosted. The snow melting and streaking the windshield and pouring into the car through the open windows. Jack thought he heard another shot over the engine, but when he glanced out Dee’s window to where the valley should have been a few hundred feet below, there was only a blue-tinted mist cluttered with snowflakes that swirled and fell in disorienting profusion.
     
    They climbed the mountainside, the road exposed, Dee and the kids still burrowed into the floorboards, Jack constantly checking the rearview mirror for headlights.
    “Can we get up now?” Cole asked.
    “Not yet.”
    “It hurts to stay like this.”
    The road leveled off and the Rover’s headlights passed over another signpost: Cinnamon Pass Elevation 12,640 Feet. Several inches of snow on everything in this tundra world. No trees or shrubs but only rock and nothing visible beyond fifty feet through the fog and pouring snow, the light more like dusk than early afternoon. In some outpost of emotion, divorced from the horror of the moment, Jack found the isolated beauty of this pass heartbreaking. The kind of wild place his father had loved to take him when he was a boy.
    He brought the Rover to a stop and turned off the