Run: A Novel

Run begins at an abandoned airstrip in the American West, where a woman trained in forensic anthropology joins an excavation of a mass grave. The workers have already uncovered twenty-nine bodies and estimate that many more remain. The victims include children, .223-caliber cartridge cases have been recovered, and the bones show damage consistent with dismemberment. Sam, the Australian team leader, suspects that armed executioners used rifles and then chainsaws to kill anyone still alive. The woman's identity and the connection between the grave and the larger story are initially withheld. The narrative then moves back to the first days of a national catastrophe, revealing how the grave came to exist.

In Albuquerque, physician Dee Colclough is staying at a hotel with Kiernan, a National Guard member with whom she has been having an affair. As reports of mass killings, gunfire and collapsing infrastructure accumulate, Kiernan admits that he feels an escalating compulsion to harm her. He has been ordered to report for duty but is frightened of what he is becoming. The power fails, and he violently throws Dee into a dresser, warning her to leave. At home, Dee's husband Jack, a university philosophy professor, hears their names and address announced on an emergency broadcast along with those of other people being singled out. The marriage is already strained: Jack knows about Dee's affair, the spouses have been living apart within their house and they had been considering separation. Nevertheless, Jack and Dee gather supplies and poorly understood weapons and flee with fourteen-year-old Naomi and seven-year-old Cole. The family knows only that extraordinary numbers of apparently ordinary people are committing murders. An unusual aurora observed weeks earlier is later discussed as a possible explanation, but its nature and effects have not been independently established.

The Colcloughs escape Albuquerque through darkened streets and a hostile roadblock where armed men demand that everyone except Cole leave the vehicle. Jack reverses into a pursuing truck and drives through barriers under fire, suffering an ear injury, burns and cuts. Dee stops to help a confused hospital patient who has awakened to find his medical staff missing, but the man insists on looking for his family. A comparatively helpful state police officer on the Zia Reservation advises them to hide overnight. They drive north, hoping Colorado will offer refuge, but pass more bodies and burned settlements. In Durango, they see murdered adults and children; a traumatized woman describes neighbors killing one another, and Dee dissuades Jack from investigating the sound of a crying infant because it could cost their own children their lives. Armed residents defending Silverton warn of a hostile convoy and direct the family over Cinnamon Pass. Pursuers shoot at their Land Rover on the exposed mountain track before snow helps them hide. Dee and Jack try to repair their relationship while acknowledging that neither has the resources or survival skills to keep the children safe indefinitely.

Further north, the family is pursued by a motorcycle and two vehicles after stopping for scarce gasoline. During the flight, the rider crashes behind their Land Rover, and Jack deliberately drives over the severely wounded man to prevent further danger. Later, the family conceals itself as an immense armed convoy carries vehicles, supplies and people imprisoned in a cage. Searching a looted grocery store, Jack finds massacre victims and refuses a dying boy's request to shoot him. He finds provisions and fuel in a remote ranch house whose elderly occupants appear to have died in a murder-suicide. Using the dead man's ham radio, Jack reaches Paul Hewson in Belfast. Paul reports that the violence appears concentrated in the contiguous United States and northern Mexico and that refugee camps may be operating across the Canadian border. He relays unverified claims connecting the catastrophe to a spectacular aurora. Jack and Dee realize that they themselves slept through the lights, although Cole watched them from a friend's home.

In Wyoming, the convoy discovers the family's disabled and nearly fuel-starved vehicle near Rock Springs. Jack sends Naomi and Cole to shelter and fights the attackers, striking Cole in a moment of desperate anger when the child hesitates. Jack is shot in his left shoulder. The attackers include Dave and Heather, who describe seeing extraordinary lights in the Bighorn Mountains and interpret the experience as a religious revelation. Dave implies that he and Heather killed companions who slept through the display. His account suggests a connection between the aurora and the killers' hostility, but remains one participant's belief. Dee shoots Dave after he charges Jack, and the family escapes approaching reinforcements. Their Land Rover finally runs out of fuel on a remote road in the Wind River Mountains. Dee performs improvised surgery, removing the lodged bullet from Jack's shoulder, and the family struggles uphill on foot until Naomi notices an overgrown track leading to an unoccupied, well-provisioned cabin.

The cabin offers water, solar power, food and temporary protection, but its stores are not sufficient for winter. Jack hides the approach by felling a tree and removing the mailbox, learns to catch trout and eventually kills and butchers an elk that supplies substantial meat. The family shares a rare peaceful day playing wiffle ball and eating together. Jack admits that he concealed an affair of his own from Dee, complicating their tentative reconciliation, but the emergency also shows them how much they still value one another. Cole says the aurora was beautiful and later reports seeing white light around the heads of people who witnessed it, including himself. Naomi fears this means he will become violent. Jack and Dee cannot determine whether the perception is accurate or whether Cole is affected, and they refuse to treat him as a killer when he has threatened no one. Their sanctuary collapses when strangers cut through the felled tree and approach the cabin. Jack shoots an intruder armed with a chainsaw and two pursuing dogs, then loses contact with his family during the escape. At dawn he finds Dee and the children alive by a mountain stream, but their stored food, fuel and winter shelter are now effectively lost.

They decide to cross the Wind River Mountains on foot toward a distant highway. The route has no reliable trail. Hunger, blisters, dehydration and altitude sickness wear them down, and Jack struggles to carry Cole. At an exposed cliff, Jack must discard their backpack containing the tent and sleeping bags to help the children through a narrow crevice. He catches Naomi by the wrist when she slips toward a potentially fatal fall. The family survives a freezing night without proper shelter, finally crosses the ridge and descends toward the eastern plains. Cole spots a tiny spring that saves them from severe dehydration. Jack recognizes with unease that he has come to value the responsibility and even the violence involved in protecting his family. They reach what Jack believes is Highway 287, but have no food and only nine cartridges left for their Glock. In an abandoned stable, Cole reports that he can identify people who saw the aurora by a white halo around their heads and shoulders. He says he sees such a halo around himself but not his parents or Naomi, while denying any wish to hurt them. The family has no independent way to validate his perception. That night he develops a high fever.

Desperate for water and shelter, Dee insists they leave the stable rather than rest. Jack carries the feverish boy through snow until they take refuge in a corrugated drainage pipe at an abandoned construction site below Togwotee Pass. Cole's fever breaks, but hunger forces Jack to seek supplies. At the pass, he finds armed men, military vehicles and a truck marked for refugee relief. He approaches in the hope of receiving food and medical help. Instead, a redheaded soldier assaults him, breaks and severs his left ring finger to take his wedding ring, and demands to know where his family is hiding. Jack claims his wife and children are dead. Dee sees soldiers drag him into a semitrailer but cannot rescue him without exposing Naomi and Cole. She hides as the convoy drives away. Her decision to protect the children leaves her anguished, while Naomi becomes despondent and Cole tries to understand why their father has disappeared.

Dee struggles westward with the children until hunger and thirst nearly kill them. Naomi briefly suggests surrendering to death, and Dee refuses. She eventually stops a vehicle at gunpoint and meets Ed Abernathy, a National Park Service ranger from Arches. Cole reports seeing no halo around him. Ed gives the family food and water. Dee momentarily considers killing him to take his supplies but refuses to murder someone who has shown them kindness. Ed initially drives away rather than assume responsibility for the three strangers, then changes his mind and returns for them. He brings them to Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn, where Dee recalls visiting with Jack soon after their marriage. A former commercial pilot, Ed proposes finding a small aircraft near Bozeman as an alternative to trying to cross Canada by road. On a remote approach to the airfield, however, armed men ambush the Jeep and kill him. Their leader Max threatens to burn Dee and her children alive inside the gasoline-soaked vehicle. Cole says the attackers all have halos. A second armed group attacks Max's men and rescues Dee, Naomi and Cole.

The rescuers bring the family into a fortified community governed by Mathias Canner, whose settlement has guarded watchtowers, electrified razor wire, gardens and food stores. Mathias needs Dee's medical skills but threatens to murder her children if he believes she has lied. After torturing Max, the community learns that Cole witnessed the aurora, and Mathias regards him as a potential threat. He forbids the family to leave because they know the compound's location and defenses. While an outside force breaches the perimeter, Mathias orders Liz, the woman who had rescued them, to shoot Dee or the children if they attempt to escape. Dee kills Liz at close range and flees with the children into the woods. From hiding they hear a prolonged firefight and a volley of executions. Soldiers overrun the settlement, massacre residents, torture Mathias and burn him alive, then set fire to a cabin containing people who beg to be released. Dee refuses Naomi's plea to intervene because it would expose all three of them. They escape through the severed fence, remove Ed's decomposing body from his Jeep and recover the damaged vehicle. Dee drives north, still knowing nothing about Jack's fate.

Jack, meanwhile, is imprisoned with other civilians in a dark semitrailer. At an airfield, soldiers unload prisoners from five trucks, approximately two hundred people, and promise food and beds. They instead force everyone to stand at the edge of an excavated grave and fire into the crowd. Jack is shot through his right shoulder and falls into the pit. He survives by covering himself with bodies while soldiers continue firing and chainsaw crews mutilate anyone still moving. Beneath the body of a decapitated woman he avoids detection, then crawls out at night and reaches the trees as a bulldozer refills the grave. The place and method of the massacre explain the grave introduced at the beginning of the novel. Wounded, dehydrated and missing part of his left ring finger, Jack wanders through mountains until he stumbles onto a deserted ski resort. He drinks toilet water in its dark lodge, breaks open a vending machine for food and finds a mountain bike that allows him to reach Highway 89. At a reservoir he speaks into a phone that has been dead for weeks, telling the absent Dee that he intends to continue toward Great Falls and will not willingly leave the country without the family.

Farther north, Jack finds a working minivan containing the murdered bodies of a woman and three children. He moves the bodies outside and takes the vehicle. He then encounters a nearly unresponsive man walking alone, helps him inside and discovers that he is Donald Massey, whose wife and children were the victims Jack has just moved. Jack cannot bring himself to tell Donald and instead gives him water and holds his hand. They reach Great Falls, a city defended by armed survivors who believe it was spared the worst violence because clouds obscured the aurora. At a checkpoint the defenders keep a tortured, chained affected man named Benny as a means of identifying other affected people; Benny attacks Jack, and the guards accept him as unaffected. A leader promises that Jack's nonviolent son Cole would also be allowed entry if found. Jack searches an overcrowded shelter without locating his family. He then discovers that Donald has died in the van, lays the man's body respectfully in a park and drives to a familiar downtown plaza near the Davidson Building. The plaza is where Jack and Dee first met. Using art supplies left by Donald's murdered daughter, Jack paints Dee's name in huge letters on the minivan and nearby windows so she might find him.

Great Falls is soon bombarded, and armed soldiers enter the downtown area. One group executes ten civilians in the street. Their leader pursues Jack into a bank, then confronts him beside the plaza's fountain and reveals himself as Kiernan. The former National Guard member admits to murdering his own wife and children, describes his murderous activities with defectors from Albuquerque, and demands to know why Jack is waiting in the square. He threatens to torture Jack with a knife. As Jack braces for death, the narration recalls his first meeting with Dee eighteen years earlier: he accidentally spilled iced coffee on her while trying to introduce himself, beginning their relationship. In the present, Dee appears at the fountain and shoots Kiernan through the eye. Jack then takes the wounded man's knife and stabs him in the chest, killing him. The spouses reunite and go to the Great Falls Public Library, where Jack embraces Naomi and Cole for the first time since his capture. Dee cleans his infected shoulder wound and sees the missing ring finger. They briefly imagine a future together, but nearby artillery strikes damage the library. They flee in Ed's Jeep, Jack driving and Dee firing at pursuers. Their escape through burning streets includes driving through fleeing, gravely burned civilians after an elementary school is bombed. They finally reach the open highway north of the city.

Near the Canadian border, the Jeep begins overheating so severely that the family can travel only about a mile before stopping to cool the engine. A sniper shoots Dee in the right thigh, damaging her femoral artery. Following her medical instructions, Jack tightens an improvised tourniquet and kills three men advancing through the grass. When eight more armed people approach in three trucks and the car is nearly disabled, Dee insists on driving away alone as a decoy, drawing the pursuers after the Jeep so Jack can take Naomi and Cole north on foot. The spouses and children say goodbye, recalling their happiest day together at the cabin. Dee's engine seizes after little more than a mile. Believing that she has no chance of survival, she cuts her tourniquet to allow herself to bleed out and imagines Jack and the children arriving at a large United Nations refugee camp. That image is her imagined final hope, not an event confirmed by the narration.

As Jack escapes with the children, Cole abruptly says that the strange light and feelings associated with the aurora have disappeared and that the attackers will no longer hurt them. Jack does not understand, but Naomi urges him to return for Dee. He tells the children to wait and continue north if he is not back by midmorning. Returning alone in darkness, he finds seven of Dee's pursuers dead from gunshots to the head and an eighth man distraught over his actions, asking to be killed. The source does not fully explain why the men's behavior changed or who fired every shot. Jack refuses to kill the survivor but shoots him in the knee while taking the keys to a truck. He finds Dee unconscious and bleeding again, retightens the tourniquet, carries her into the truck and drives toward the border, praying they will reach medical care. The immediate narrative ends before the reader sees how Dee is treated, how Jack returns for Naomi and Cole, or whether or how the family crosses the border.

Nineteen years later, the opening excavation is revealed to be staffed by Naomi, now an adult forensic specialist. Jack arrives by plane, recognizes the grave as the site of the execution he survived and describes to Naomi the prisoners' arrival, the shooting and the chainsaws. He wears a platinum wedding band on the remaining portion of his left ring finger. At a bonfire, Sam argues that the Great Auroral Storm might reflect a harsh kind of natural selection, favoring people such as Cole who saw the lights without becoming killers or who later resisted overwhelming guilt. He also says many affected people killed themselves. Jack recounts a priest's belief that the catastrophe was a divine test. These competing theories are character interpretations, not a scientifically resolved cause or justification for the murders. Jack says he came back because the place represents both an atrocity and the extraordinary fact that he survived it. Finally Dee calls him and they discuss meeting the following evening; he tells Naomi that her mother sends her love. The call confirms that Dee survived her near-fatal wound and that Jack and Naomi have lives beyond the catastrophe, while leaving the intervening rescue and the precise long-term fate of every other survivor largely undescribed.