Free Run by Blake Crouch Page A

hour, had come upon the town. Everywhere, houses burned, and the dead lay in the road and the sidestreets and the front yards. Jack made himself stop counting.
    “Don’t look out the windows,” he warned, and this time, his children listened.
    The town had lost power.
    Jack punched on the headlights.
    “Don’t.”
    “I can’t see.”
    Smoke streamed through the lightbeams and filled the car.
    The highway became Main Street. They passed between old buildings and a couple of restaurants and a dark marquee advertising a pair of films that had been released months ago.
    A few blocks past the downtown, he turned off the highway into the parking lot of a grocery store and stopped the Rover in the fire lane by the entrance.
    “Jack, please, let’s just get the hell out of here.”
    “We’re out of food. Almost out of water. I have to look.”
    He turned off the car and reached under his seat, grabbed the Glock. “Dee, you have the flashlight?”
    She set it in his lap.
    “Don’t leave, Daddy.”
    “I’ll be right back, buddy.” He touched Dee’s leg. “Anything happens, you lay on this horn and I’ll be here in five seconds.”
     
    The automatic doors stood a foot apart. He squeezed through, hesitating. Every part of him protesting against this. He flicked on the Mag-Lite and made himself go on, thinking how it didn’t smell anything like a grocery store should. A tinge of rust and rot hanging in the air. He dislodged a cart from the brood of buggies and set the gun in the child’s seat. Started forward, the wheels rattling, one squeaking, his light playing off the registers. He passed through the self-checkout aisle. No sound but the distant voltage in his left ear which hummed like a substation.
    He pushed the buggy toward produce. The shelves bare but still carrying the smell of vegetables and fruit. Ten feet ahead, a man lay beside empty wooden crates. The blood around him shimmering off the linoleum like black ice under the lightbeam. Jack stopped the cart. There were others behind this man and though he wouldn’t put his light directly on them, he stared at what the shadows didn’t hide. The closest: a woman facing him with her eyes still open, long yellow hair matted to the gore that had been bludgeoned out of her head.
    He picked a cluster of overripe bananas off the floor, the only offering of produce, and pushed the cart between the dead. The wheels went quiet, greased with blood. Dark shoeprints tracked through double doors into the back of the store. He took the gun and left the cart and pushed through them, swinging his light across pallets of stock that had already been scavenged of anything resembling food. Only packages of toilet paper remaining. He shined the light on the concrete floor and followed the bloody tracks to where they ended. There were over a hundred brass casings and spent shotgun shells in the vicinity of the freezer’s big silver door, and massive quantities of blood had leaked out from underneath it. He started to pull it open. Stopped himself.
    He walked back out into the store and put his hands on the cart. The rear of the supermarket stunk of spoiled meat. As he rounded a corner into the first aisle, the cart bumped into a young child who had been hacked to pieces, a single neck tendon shy of a full decapitation. Jack turned and vomited into a naked shelf, stood spitting until his mouth quit watering. He’d seen a few frames of horror since Thursday night, but nothing like this. He tried to shove it into the back of his unconscious, but its shape wouldn’t fit anywhere. Beyond all comprehension.
    He went on. Searching the shelves for anything, finding nothing but a gallon of water and more bodies to steer around. He rolled past empty glass cases that had held frozen meals, and then turned into the last aisle of the store, the beam of his Mag-Lite illuminating someone sitting up against a shelf lined with cartons of room-temperature milk. The teenage boy’s eyes opened,