Run: A Novel

An unidentified forensic anthropologist arrives by twin-engine plane at a long-abandoned airstrip in the American West, with a collapsed hangar and wrecked aircraft nearby. She walks across the grass toward a forensic excavation and asks Matt, a graduate student who recognizes her published work and wants to talk, to leave her alone at the edge of the grave. The pit is roughly thirty-five by twenty meters and contains exposed human remains marked by red flags. Nine workers excavate skeletons, while another specialist reassembles a small skeleton for photography. The visitor begins to cry at the scale of the site, then forces herself to recover the professional detachment she needs to work among the dead.

Sam, the Australian team leader, tells her that twenty-nine bodies have been recovered and the mapping suggests approximately 175 remain buried. The victims include children as well as adults. Investigators have found .223 Remington cartridge cases consistent with high-velocity shooting, and many bones have been splintered by subsequent dismemberment. Sam suspects the executioners shot the victims with rifles and then used chainsaws to prevent anyone from surviving beneath the bodies, but this is his working interpretation, not an established forensic conclusion. He mentions a comparable grave in Denver. Although she has previously worked at mass-casualty sites in New York City, the woman is shaken by this grave. She declines Sam's offer of a day to acclimate to the altitude and immediately joins the excavation.

Three days into the spread of extraordinary violence across the country, Dee Colclough watches the news from a ninth-floor hotel room near her Albuquerque home. The president has just addressed the nation, and reports include a church shooting in Columbia, South Carolina, that killed forty-five people. Dee is with Kiernan, her lover of six months, whom she met when he deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical-malpractice case. Kiernan says his National Guard unit has been activated and he must report the next morning. Instead of reassuring Dee, he says that an internal change has been growing within him for days.

Dee is upset because they had planned to disclose their affair and change their lives. She mentions Kiernan's wife, Myra, while he urges her to go home to her children. He tries to explain that he and Dee are no longer the same in a way that has nothing to do with their relationship. Outside, gunfire and sirens continue as blocks of the city lose electricity. When the hotel room suddenly goes dark, Kiernan tells Dee to flee because an increasingly powerful impulse inside him wants to hurt her. She approaches him, hoping to understand. He trembles, tells her to remember that he loved her, and violently throws her against a dresser. Dee lies injured as he orders her to leave while she still can. The chapter establishes his changing behavior without identifying a confirmed cause.

After a second night without power in Albuquerque, UNM philosophy professor Jack Colclough and his wife Dee, a physician, prepare to flee with fourteen-year-old Naomi and seven-year-old Cole. Jack finds the family's unused camping supplies and packs eight gallons of water while Dee collects food. A woman on the emergency radio recites names and addresses, including colleagues from the university. When she broadcasts Jack's full name, profession, and address, Jack grabs a Mossberg shotgun and a Glock that neither parent knows how to use well. In the garage they confront Kiernan, Dee's lover, who approaches with bloody clothing and a butcher knife. Dee points the unloaded pistol at him, and he announces the affair to Jack before retreating. The family drives into a city of darkened streets, burning homes, and apparent executions. Low on fuel, Jack finally turns on the headlights.

Armed men block a road near the university with pickup trucks and a felled tree. Jack notices bodies near a van, and the leader demands that everyone except Cole get out of the Land Rover. When Jack gives the signal for his family to get down, he reverses into the truck behind them and accelerates through a vacant lot and fences. A shotgun blast near his head damages his left ear and burns his hand as he grabs the barrel; other shots shatter windows and embed glass in his face. The family escapes without an immediate casualty, but Jack's hearing is impaired. At Dee's insistence, they stop beside a confused hospital patient who has awakened to find medical staff gone. Jack explains the escalating nationwide killings and the collapse of communication; Dee offers medical help, but the patient leaves to find his own family. They refuel at a nearly abandoned station, avoid gridlocked Interstate 25 and another illuminated roadblock, and leave the city by back roads.

On the Zia Reservation, a state police officer briefly stops them, observes the bullet-riddled car and children, warns of rumors about dead officers and hostile highway traffic, and advises them to hide for the night. Jack drives off the road into the desert behind boulders, recalls a family sandcastle on a trip to Baja, and deliberately breaks the vehicle's remaining exterior lights so it can travel unseen. Dee removes glass from his face and dresses his burned hand. As the children sleep in the car, the parents lie outside under the stars. Dee mourns the man Kiernan used to be. Jack, who knew of her affair and has slept in a guest room for two months while they planned to separate, accepts that they are once again sharing a crisis. They choose to keep traveling north, hoping Colorado is safer.

At dawn the Colcloughs leave their desert hiding place, continuing north through quiet high-desert towns into Colorado. A remaining radio station also broadcasts names and addresses. In Durango, a resort town the family once visited, they find burned and burning buildings, scattered bodies, and blindfolded dead children floating down a river. Jack wants to replenish their food but stops when a blood-covered woman begs them for help. She describes an attack by neighbors she once trusted, including a man named Mike, and confesses that she left Katie wounded and crying in the house during their escape. Jack twice offers to take the woman along; she refuses to respond or expresses a wish to die. Hearing a baby cry nearby, Jack starts to investigate, but Dee insists they must protect Naomi and Cole rather than expose the family to additional danger. She acknowledges that her earlier decision to stop for the hospital patient reflected a professional instinct they can no longer afford.

Climbing into the San Juan Mountains, the family reaches a roadblock near Silverton. Unlike the attackers in Albuquerque, these armed local men are attempting to defend their community. They explain that many residents have retreated into the mountains and warn of a convoy approaching from the north. Cinnamon Pass toward Lake City is the remaining exit. Jack fills the tank and spare gas cans and buys a road map, plastic sheeting, duct tape, and motor oil, while the family finds only a little food. In a sporting-goods shop, a proprietor refuses to sell ammunition but gives Jack a large hunting knife. The sound of engines and gunfire signals the convoy's arrival, and the family flees uphill.

Several trucks pursue their damaged Land Rover onto the steep, rocky track toward Cinnamon Pass. A shooter on the lower road fires at them; another side window shatters and a bullet passes near Jack. Heavy snowfall and fog eventually obscure the vehicles as they cross the exposed pass at 12,640 feet. On the descent they drive off the trail, ford a stream, and hide among fir trees while trucks continue past. Jack laboriously pitches their unused tent, tapes plastic over the broken windows, and fails to start a proper fire in falling snow. Dee cooks their scant rice, tomatoes, and jerky. When they later notice their footprints might give away the camp, Dee demands that Jack provide meaningful practical and emotional care for their family, something she feels he had neglected before the crisis. Jack admits he has no workable long-term survival plan.

That night Cole has nightmares about the bodies he saw in Durango. Jack regrets telling him that looking at the dead would forfeit comfort and holds him in his sleeping bag. Cole then confides that he believes the killers act because of strange lights he saw while spending the night at his friend Alex's house. Jack does not understand what the boy means, but the revelation troubles him.

The family sleeps late at its snowy mountain campsite, then descends into lower country. Jack drives past a luxury SUV whose murdered occupants include parents and three children. He is relieved when Dee and their children fail to see it. In a burned mountain settlement, he notices that a heap on a soccer field consists of charred human bodies. After dark the family stops at a reservoir, warms canned chicken-noodle soup on its camping stove, and briefly enjoys splashing water and talking together. Dee approves when Jack forms a tentative plan to travel at night toward sparsely populated northwestern Colorado. Jack continues to be haunted by the crying baby he left in Durango. As the tank runs low, they approach a small town whose power is still functioning; Dee suggests using their spare fuel instead of stopping, but Jack wants to preserve the reserve.

Jack uses a working filling station around three in the morning, finding that the pump runs dry after about eleven gallons. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle and two pursuing vehicles race toward the family. Jack flees, kills the lights to remain unseen, and reaches extreme speed on the moonlit road. Dee retrieves the shotgun. While she briefly steers, Jack fires backward through the damaged hatch, apparently losing sight of the motorcycle. Shots from behind strike the Land Rover and smash glass. The rider catches up and apparently collides with the Rover's rear when Jack brakes. His motorcycle tumbles off the road; the rider lands on the pavement, gravely injured and partly mutilated. Jack then drives over the exposed man at approximately fifty-five miles per hour, a distinct action from the crash of the motorcycle itself. He accelerates away and hides the vehicle below the road while Dee comforts a terrified Cole, who begs to go home. Jack watches the highway from the embankment as the remaining two cars pass almost directly beside him. The family remains concealed, but Jack has crossed another moral and psychological threshold in its struggle to survive.

Exhausted after the motorcycle pursuit, Jack drives into empty desert country and hides the Land Rover behind an abandoned motel, more than 550 miles from Albuquerque. The family sleeps in filthy rooms until Jack and Dee wake to the tremor of a vast organized convoy passing the highway. It includes armed people in trucks, buses, fuel vehicles, and prisoners packed into a metal cage. The family avoids detection because their own car is concealed; Dee fears how easily they might have encountered it on the road. Unable to reach loved ones by telephone, she worries about her sister, while Jack remembers an ordinary recent call with his father that he may never be able to repeat. He also realizes how distant he has become from Naomi and comforts her when she cries about her grandfather. With food and water nearly exhausted, they resume traveling at night.

They enter a devastated town where Jack searches a grocery store alone. He finds victims scattered among nearly empty aisles, signs of heavy gunfire and blood by a closed freezer, and a dismembered child whose body makes him vomit. He obtains a few soft bananas and a gallon of water. A dying teenage boy begs him for water, then asks Jack to shoot him rather than leave him suffering. Jack refuses and departs, haunted by the boy's pleas and accusations. Dee senses that something terrible happened in the store, but he refuses to describe it because he does not want the images in her mind. Later, he spots the convoy's lights in the distance and waits to ensure that it is moving away before proceeding.

When the fuel-warning light comes on, Jack and Dee disagree again about using their reserve gasoline. They find a remote ranch house with power and running water, and Jack breaks a window to enter. He siphons six gallons of gasoline from the owners' old pickup and the family fills its water jugs. Inside, Jack discovers an elderly couple dead in bed, the wife with a head wound and the husband beside a fallen revolver. The scene suggests that he shot her and himself, but does not establish her consent. Their wall displays decades of anniversary photographs. The home contains a ham-radio station licensed to Ronald Schirard. After repeated attempts, Jack reaches Paul Hewson, a radio acquaintance of Schirard's who is speaking from Belfast. Paul reports, based on information available abroad, that the catastrophe chiefly affects the contiguous United States and northern Mexico, with devastated eastern cities. He repeats unconfirmed theories linking the violence to an extraordinary aurora seen weeks earlier and tells Jack that refugee camps are being established in southern Canada. Jack says his family slept through the lights, while the reader knows Cole reported seeing them elsewhere. Paul promises to light candles for the four travelers and mourns his radio friend. Naomi finds the dead couple and questions her father about their apparent deaths. The family leaves with replenished supplies, crosses into Wyoming and approaches Rock Springs as the Land Rover begins overheating and losing oil.

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, Jack stops to confirm that the Land Rover is leaking oil. North of town, the family sees the gigantic convoy approaching on the desert highway. With fuel already low, Jack drives cautiously off the road to hide behind a butte, but two vehicles leave the convoy and follow their tracks. Jack orders Naomi to shelter with Cole behind a boulder and, when the hungry, frightened boy refuses, slaps him for the first time in his life. The family separates defensively, with Jack carrying the shotgun and Dee the Glock. Jack ambushes a Jeep carrying three men, then is shot in his left shoulder as a Ford pickup approaches. He and Dee exchange weapons, Dee drawing attackers out into the open while Jack tries to protect the children. An axe-wielding woman is about to reach Naomi and Cole when Jack tackles her and beats her head with a rock. He confronts another attacker, Dave, with his now-empty pistol.

Dave, a former credit-union financial adviser from Minnesota, says he and Heather watched extraordinary lights while camping near Solitude Lake in the Bighorn Mountains. He understood the spectacle as a vision of God and says the killers despise those who did not see the light. He implies that he and Heather murdered fellow campers Brad and Jen, who slept through it. This establishes Dave's religious explanation for his conduct, not a verified supernatural origin for the violence. After Dave suddenly runs at Jack, Dee shoots him in the chest and he bleeds out. Jack has sustained heavy blood loss. They hope to take gasoline from the Ford, but a radio warning announces that four more convoy vehicles are coming to investigate, including a plea for help from a surviving Jeep driver. Dee abandons the siphoning attempt and drives the family away.

They speed north through burned-out Pinedale with very little fuel while the four pursuers close in. To escape the exposed highway, Jack directs Dee onto Highway 352 into the Wind River Mountains, despite its dead end. She finally steers off the mountain road into pine trees just before the Land Rover runs out of gas. The convoy vehicles pass but stop farther up the canyon, so the family withdraws deeper into the woods. Jack, feverish and intermittently unconscious, must depend on Dee and the children. By late afternoon Dee has stopped his external bleeding but concludes she must remove the lodged bullet. Using makeshift sterilization, plastic tweezers and Jack's Swiss Army knife, she cuts into his shoulder while he is conscious; he eventually faints, and she extracts the bullet, closes the wound with stitches and estimates that he lost two or three pints of blood. He suffers fever, pain and nightmares through the night, while Naomi comforts him and brings water.

Jack awakens after Dee's improvised surgery in their hiding place in the Wind River Mountains. The feverish heat in his wounded shoulder has subsided, but his blood loss leaves him weak and in urgent need of water and nutritious food. Naomi has been caring for Cole, though both children are hungry. The Land Rover might have less than a gallon of gasoline remaining, but staying in the woods without supplies is untenable. Dee starts it, and they drive farther up the canyon rather than return toward their pursuers. The engine finally runs dry at 2:49 p.m. on a lonely mountain road. Jack, wearing a sling fashioned from a T-shirt, insists they must walk until they find help, even as Dee warns that they are too far from civilization and he cannot physically tolerate a long hike.

Naomi notices an almost-hidden, overgrown track on the mountainside and a black unmarked mailbox, evidence that a dwelling might lie above. The family abandons the car and climbs the steep switchbacks through changing forest and autumn aspen. They have brought their weapons but no sleeping bags or water, making failure especially dangerous. Jack grows breathless and dizzy and struggles to keep going. Near sunset, he reaches a meadow and sees an isolated large cabin with solar panels and stacked firewood. He tells his family to remain concealed, finds the building apparently unoccupied, breaks a window and enters. In the kitchen, the pantry contains plentiful canned food and other provisions.

Jack brings the family inside, and Dee cries with relief. They eat canned chili, soups and ravioli along with pretzels and soda, then put the exhausted children to bed. The cabin offers immediate food and shelter, although Jack cannot yet promise that it will remain safe over time. As he and Dee rest downstairs, their physical intimacy resumes for the first time in months. Their rapprochement follows the preceding days of shared caregiving and danger, but does not itself resolve the wider catastrophe or all of their marital problems.

The next morning, Jack finds gasoline in the cabin's shed, restarts the disabled Land Rover and drives it partway up the mountain access road. He then uses a chainsaw to fell a spruce across the road, creating an obstruction intended to keep approaching vehicles from reaching the cabin without warning. The effort strains his recently sutured shoulder. Dee has inventoried the stored food: even with severe rationing it will feed their family for only thirteen days. She encourages Jack to try the stream with a fly rod left by the cabin owners. Although he once took a class, he has little practical experience and repeatedly tangles his line before catching a tiny fish, which he releases. That evening the family eats only navy beans and a few pretzels each. Cole asks to accompany his father the following day, and Jack agrees.

Unable to sleep, Jack remembers that the black mailbox beside the highway still betrays the presence of the cabin's access road. Around four in the morning, he takes the chainsaw back down and cuts down the mailbox, disposing of it on the mountainside. Climbing home, he unexpectedly comes within twenty feet of a huge bull elk. He has left his shotgun behind because his wounded arm is not yet strong enough to carry it. As the elk disappears into the trees, he wonders how many meals it could have supplied. Their shelter is better concealed, but the family has not solved its food problem.

Jack restores the cabin's solar-powered electrical system, underground cistern supply and water heater. The family fills bags with water for freezing, attempts to ration its remaining provisions and skips lunch. Dee and Naomi search a cookbook for bread they can make with available ingredients. Jack brings Cole fishing, improvising a small pole for the boy from an aspen sapling, nylon string and a screw hook. His own technique improves enough to land two little fish and a twelve-inch rainbow trout. Their shared excitement briefly restores an ordinary father-son relationship. When they return, Dee and Naomi are covering windows to conserve heat and conceal light and have made the cabin smell of baking bread; they also stack firewood for the stove. Jack is pleased with his fishing progress but worries that the fuel and wood must last through the coming cold season.

That evening, Jack reveals to Dee that Dave and Heather saw the aurora and apparently killed friends who slept through it. Their own household slept through the lights, except Cole, who was watching them at Alex's house. Jack has noticed Cole staring at himself in a mirror and wonders whether the strange light can eventually produce violence in their son. Dee correctly points out that the link to the aurora remains unproven and resists treating Cole as a threat. When Jack presses the question of what they would do if he became dangerous, Dee says she would rather die than kill him. Jack agrees, and together they resolve to remain with their son and preserve the family whatever happens.

At dawn Jack leaves the cabin with a shotgun and sits watching the meadow for elk. He reflects briefly on memories of his father and his former academic life but tries to direct his attention entirely toward providing for his family. During the day he cuts firewood and fishes successfully, catching four trout. At the stream he asks Cole whether watching the aurora at Alex's changed the way he felt toward his family. The boy says only that he felt a little different, cannot explain the sensation, and wishes his parents and sister had witnessed the extraordinary beauty of the lights as well. Jack receives no clear indication that Cole has violent intentions, but his uncertainty continues.

Jack and Dee drink beer together on the cabin porch while smoke rises from what Jack believes to be Jackson Hole, far to the northwest. After they put the children to bed, he confesses to having had a month-long affair two years earlier. He says he ended it and has been withdrawn from family life partly through guilt. His stated motive for revealing the betrayal now is to begin their tentative renewed marriage without secrecy. Dee is devastated by both the infidelity and his decision to tell her during one of their rare peaceful moments; she had been open with him about Kiernan, whereas he concealed his own affair. She walks out into the meadow crying. Jack remains on the porch watching the distant blaze, understanding that his attempt at disclosure has seriously injured their fragile reconciliation.

At 5:15 a.m., Jack takes his shotgun into the frosted meadow and shoots the enormous elk he encountered days earlier, firing twice to bring it down. Hunting with his father more than twenty years before gives him a rudimentary memory of field dressing, but processing the animal is arduous. Naomi and Cole watch with horror and curiosity as Jack opens the carcass and removes its organs. Over thirteen hours he skins and butchers the elk with the large knife obtained in Silverton, making mistakes as he works through the shoulders, ribs and hindquarters. He estimates the final yield at about two hundred pounds of meat and carries it to the cabin in five trips, storing it in the freezer with the previously frozen bags of water. Several stitches in his gunshot wound have torn by the time he finishes. Dee, still affected by the previous night's confession, has slept throughout the day.

Jack showers and goes to sleep alone in an upstairs bedroom, giving Dee space. She comes to find him, tells him that the hunt has transformed their children's view of his competence and that Naomi has spoken of him with unusual admiration. Dee asks why he is not in their bed. He says he thought she still wanted time apart, but she kisses him and invites him to join her. The moment suggests a tentative willingness to reconnect without erasing the betrayal or the danger still surrounding the family.

On the morning after Jack secures the elk meat, a light snowfall quickly melts. Dee repairs the stitches in his wounded shoulder, and he cuts elk steaks and seasons them with the kitchen's available spices. The family finds a wiffle ball set and plays a boys-against-girls series in the meadow, using empty milk jugs as bases. Cole's line drive in the seventh game brings Jack home for the winning run. Jack spends the afternoon on the porch watching Dee and the children in the autumn sunlight, deliberately concentrating on the present rather than the horrors behind them or the dangers ahead.

That evening he grills elk steaks and a rainbow trout and opens a bottle of 1994 Silver Oak wine found in the cabin. The family gathers at the kitchen table by candlelight. Jack raises a glass to Dee, Naomi and Cole, even giving the boy a small serving of wine, and declares through emotion that this has been the finest day of his life. This respite shows the extent of the comfort and reconnection made possible by the mountain cabin, shortly before its security fails.

While fishing alone near the cabin, Jack rests among the trees and thinks about enduring an entire winter in this mountain sanctuary. He catches four trout before returning to find Dee, Naomi and Cole enjoying a Monopoly game. A receipt tucked into clothes belonging to the cabin's absent owner identifies a Douglas Walker, but offers no explanation of his whereabouts. Over a meal of bread, soup and fish, Dee casually remarks that she heard Jack cutting firewood with a chainsaw in the late afternoon. Jack has not used the saw that day. Naomi also heard it. Jack concludes that strangers may have cut through the tree he felled across the driveway and could be watching the family through an uncovered kitchen window. Rather than panic visibly, he asks everyone to finish their tea and act as though the evening is normal while they prepare to escape with a small quantity of canned food, weapons and outdoor gear.

After extinguishing the cabin's candles, the family dresses warmly and slips out through a bedroom window. Jack guides them to the shed, then investigates the driveway and finds a Suburban and a pickup blocking it, with no keys in their ignitions. At the shed, he discovers an intruder hiding with a chainsaw. The man starts the motor and charges him, and Jack shoots him at close range with the shotgun. Jack sends Dee and the children toward the stream as originally planned, grabs his own backpack and tries to question the mortally wounded intruder. Several other armed attackers rush across the meadow and fire when he shoots toward them. Two dogs, a pit bull and a rottweiler, pursue him around the shed; Jack shoots both. He hides in the woods as a group of eight pursuers searches past him, their flashlights almost finding him. He loads his remaining shotgun shells, leaving only six rounds to confront eight people, and follows their lights toward the stream. Unable to locate his family without revealing himself by using the flashlight or calling out, he wanders and then runs uphill into the night. The chapter ends with Jack separated from Dee, Naomi and Cole, their safety unknown.

At daybreak Jack wakes alone on the freezing mountainside, unsure whether Dee and the children survived the nighttime assault on their cabin. He follows the stream uphill, searches for roughly half an hour, and finally finds the three huddled together beneath a boulder across the water. Dee wakes with her pistol drawn, then embraces him in relief. Their meager recovered provisions include one tent, two sleeping bags, a water filter, camp stove, map and a bag of canned soup. Jack refuses to return to the cabin. He saw eight armed attackers and their vehicles, and argues that the plentiful food, fresh elk meat, water and shelter will keep the intruders there. Using a road map, he proposes hiking east through the Wind River Mountains to a highway perhaps fifteen or twenty miles away. Dee is overwhelmed by the absence of any plan for transport or refuge afterward, but the family has little alternative.

They spend the day climbing through aspen and evergreen forest as the stream dwindles into its headwaters. At a small mountain lake around nine thousand feet above sea level, Jack sets up a tent and gathers firewood. The setting is beautiful, but the family is physically exhausted and their future uncertain. When Cole wakes at night frightened by falling rock and leaping trout, Jack reassures him that the noises are natural and that no pursuer has appeared. He promises breakfast when the boy complains of hunger. Jack lies awake thinking how trivial his old worries about his marriage, work and finances now seem, even though he is too exhausted to fully confront the immediate dangers.

The family leaves its mountain lake campsite after sharing a small pot of oatmeal made with filtered and boiled water. Jack has no marked trail, so he uses a compass to aim for a distant cirque of granite peaks to the east. They climb through spruce woods, then cross exposed alpine meadows occupied by unattended cattle. The high-altitude sun and exertion exhaust their water supply. Cole's legs ache, so Dee carries Jack's backpack and Jack places the boy on his shoulders; Naomi struggles with blisters but keeps walking.

By evening the family reaches another lake almost incapacitated by thirst and fatigue. Jack filters water for the others and then lies on the grass while Dee pumps it for him. He becomes delirious and struggles to assemble the tent; no one wants to eat, but Dee insists on canned food, further hydration and pain medication. She identifies severe dehydration and altitude sickness. Jack's crushing headache prevents sleep. After midnight he crawls from the tent and plunges his head through the thin ice at the lake's edge in an attempt to find relief. The family's progress across the mountains is taking a growing medical and physical toll.

Jack wakes at the lake with his altitude headache somewhat relieved, although he remembers little of the previous night. Naomi's feet are wrapped to protect their worsening blisters, and Dee admits that the family has only eight cans of food left. The four begin another difficult climb toward a cirque of granite peaks above the timberline. Rain and cold mist close in, and by evening they are soaked and shivering beside a high lake with little level ground for a tent. Naomi asks permission to acknowledge how miserable the trip is; Dee answers with an even stronger profanity, briefly making her daughter smile. The family huddles under two sleeping bags while the temperature falls.

Jack returns to the freezing lakeshore repeatedly with their filter and pot, providing water for Naomi, Cole and Dee before drinking himself. Alone by the lake in the deepening snow, he lets himself cry in fear and despair where the others cannot see him. Back in the tent, Cole asks whether they will die. Jack promises that he will not let that happen, although he cannot know it for certain. He tells his family that he loves them, and Naomi's familiar sarcastic response briefly reminds him of their life before the catastrophe.

After a snow-dusted night beside the cirque lake, Jack assesses a steep route over the granite ridge. Dee removes the stitches from his recovering shoulder, and the family drinks all the water it can hold before setting off without a marked trail. They spend hours navigating massive boulders before the real climb begins. By midafternoon they are about a thousand feet above the lake, and Cole and Naomi are repeatedly brought to tears by exhaustion and fear. Jack and Dee encourage them in short increments, even claiming they are almost finished when they do not know how far remains.

At 4:30 p.m. Jack gives his backpack to Dee, carries Cole another hundred feet and realizes they cannot reach the summit before nightfall. There is no flat ground for their tent. He chooses a stable boulder for protection, and the family uses spare clothes for pillows while sheltering against the slope beneath its two sleeping bags. They share their last four cans of food and watch the stars appear in the freezing sky. This exposed night leaves the family without food and with no easy return route.

Jack awakens on the steep mountainside, convinced he has led his family into danger: they are out of food and water at roughly twelve thousand feet, with the summit still ahead. They distract themselves by naming elaborate breakfasts they wish they could have. The final climb leads from unstable rock onto exposed granite. Dee, frightened of heights, doubts that she can continue. Jack tries to encourage her while disguising his own fear. A narrow ledge leads nowhere, so he climbs a steep section to a small crevice where he can help the others. Cole climbs up and Jack pulls him into the opening. There is not enough room for his backpack and the children, so Jack drops the pack down the mountainside despite its containing their tent, sleeping bags and other equipment. Dee still carries the Glock.

Naomi attempts the exposed climb but slips when reaching for a handhold. Jack lunges out, catches her wrist as she falls away from the rock, and helps her regain purchase with her feet before pulling her into the crevice. Dee initially refuses to follow but finally makes the climb. They continue upward and eventually reach the summit ridge. From there, Jack sees a north-south highway several miles away and about a vertical mile below them. The family descends the steep eastern slope, reaching pine forest at dusk. Desperate for water and lacking shelter equipment, they search unsuccessfully for a stream and finally lie together beneath the lower boughs of a large spruce tree. A nighttime rain falls around them, but the branches offer some protection. Though thirsty, Jack cannot summon the energy to collect the water.

After an exhausted and unsheltered night in the woods below the summit, the family is critically dehydrated. Jack regrets not collecting rainwater when he had the opportunity. Cole refuses to walk, and Jack carries him down through the trees toward the eastern desert. In midafternoon Cole notices a dark streak on a nearby boulder. Jack discovers a tiny spring flowing from the rock, tastes it and allows the others to drink in repeated turns. Their extreme thirst slowly eases as they consume as much of the cold water as possible.

Jack finds a dirt patch beneath a rock overhang and tries to make it comfortable by clearing stones and laying down moss. The family rests there while he drinks from the spring for an extended period. By night, their damp clothing begins to freeze, and they shiver with little protection beyond gathered pine branches. Looking back at the mountain they crossed, Jack considers how his identity has changed since the crisis began. He recognizes pride in surviving, but also a more unsettling attraction to being indispensable to his family's survival, even to the violence he has committed in its defense. He realizes that he would kill again to protect them. Cole asks whether a person can die from the cold, and Jack promises he will warm up, although their immediate circumstances remain dangerous.

At dawn after their freezing night under a rock overhang, Jack and Dee confirm that their children are alive. They are filthy, sunburned and deeply hungry, but Jack urges Dee to take hope from the fact that they remain together. By late morning they descend out of the woods, cross a river and reach a paved road. Jack believes it is Highway 287, which leads north toward the Tetons, Yellowstone, Montana and ultimately Canada. He counts only nine rounds left for their Glock. Concerned that they cannot distinguish unaffected travelers from killers, Jack tells Dee they might approach a lone car cautiously but will hide from larger groups. After walking several hours through exposed country, they seek shelter from rain in the ruins of a stable with a partly intact metal roof. The family has no food and still lacks dependable warmth.

In the darkness, Cole claims to know a way to recognize dangerous people: he perceives white light around the heads and shoulders of those who witnessed the aurora. He says that he himself has such a halo but that his parents and sister do not. This is Cole's account of what he perceives, not independently verified evidence that the glow can be observed by others or reliably identifies people who will commit violence. Jack asks whether Cole feels hostile toward the family; he denies it and says he does not wish to hurt anyone. Naomi fears that he is affected, while Jack and Dee insist they have no evidence he poses an immediate threat. The parents speculate that children may respond differently, without knowing whether that is true. Later that night Cole begins shivering and develops a dangerously high fever. Dee holds him as they remain trapped in the dark shelter by rain.

By morning, Cole's illness has worsened. Dee cannot establish whether it is viral or bacterial, and because fever can cause dangerous dehydration, she decides they must continue looking for water and warmth instead of resting in the stable. Jack cradles the sick boy as they return to the road, but the weight of the fifty-four-pound child exhausts him on the rising switchbacks. Cole's eyes are cloudy and his awareness impaired. They stop repeatedly as melting snow accumulates on the higher road. Naomi asks if her brother is dying, and Jack insists he is not, though he has no reliable basis for certainty. They eat snow to relieve thirst, making themselves colder, and Dee gives the boy handfuls of slush. Jack eventually manages by draping Cole over his shoulder, but walking intervals grow shorter.

By late afternoon the family discovers an apparently deserted road-construction site. The only motorized machinery left is a crane, not a usable vehicle. They shelter overnight in a long corrugated-steel drainage pipe. Cole remains febrile, crying and speaking incoherently as Dee holds him, while Jack tries to keep watch at the pipe's opening against the threat of discovery. Exhaustion finally causes him to close his eyes.

Jack awakens inside the drainage pipe near Togwotee Pass to learn that Cole's fever has finally broken. Dee has stayed awake nursing their son, but the family has now gone about five days without food and desperately needs supplies. Jack investigates the abandoned construction site and follows distant voices up the snowy highway. At Togwotee Pass, elevation 9,658 feet, he finds a lodge, cabins, civilian cars, military vehicles and a large trailer marked for Red Cross refugee relief. Believing soldiers may help, he approaches and introduces himself. A redheaded armed man initially offers him a meal but then brutally assaults him, shattering his nose, breaking his left ring finger and cutting that finger off to take the wedding ring. He threatens Jack at gunpoint and demands to know where Jack's family is hiding. Jack lies that his wife and children have been killed to protect them from discovery.

Dee wakes to the sound of engines and discovers Jack is gone. She follows the road and sees soldiers dragging her injured husband into the trailer while other military personnel cover the opening with weapons. She is armed only with a Glock. For a moment she considers intervening, but decides that allowing herself to be captured or killed would leave Naomi and Cole unprotected. She hides as the convoy departs west, taking Jack prisoner. She returns to the construction site devastated and tells Naomi, who retreats into a pipe to grieve. Cole, recently recovered from fever, asks a sequence of literal and confused questions about his father's fate and whether a family without Jack would make him his mother's spouse. Dee tells him it would not.

Dee eventually brings the children to the vacant lodge at the pass to look for food, but its restaurant and refrigerators have been looted or spoiled. She breaks into a small cabin with bunk beds, where they can spend the night out of the wind. At sunset she stands on the pass thinking of Jack, who has disappeared with the armed convoy, and tells him aloud that she loves him and remains with him wherever he is. Her devotion does not make his fate certain. She returns to the children and sleeps, still hoping despite the evidence that he might somehow come back.

The morning after the military convoy takes Jack captive, Dee has difficulty persuading Naomi to get out of bed in the small cabin at Togwotee Pass. The three have no food and are weak from hunger. As they descend the road toward the west, their perceptions seem dulled and colors faded. Cole finds a warning about grizzly bears beside the road. By midafternoon, Naomi can no longer go on and sits down on the center line. She says her father is probably dead and suggests the family should stay and die, or that Dee could end their suffering with the Glock at her waist. In shock and anger, Dee slaps her daughter, orders her to stand and refuses to let her surrender. Naomi breaks down crying while Dee continues with Cole, promising not to abandon her.

They cover barely a mile by evening and hide on the far side of a boulder in a meadow. Snow and running water are no longer available. Dee reproaches herself for failing to collect more snow or take a container from the lodge to save meltwater. They fall asleep before dark in a state of severe hunger, thirst and emotional exhaustion, still without knowing what has happened to Jack.

Dee, Naomi and Cole spend another entire day hidden behind a boulder below Togwotee Pass, increasingly incapacitated by thirst, hunger and grief after Jack's capture. Dee and Naomi speak about whether they are dying, and Dee loses her sense of time. A jet passes overhead, evidence of activity beyond their immediate isolation, but it offers no help. That night, Naomi hears an approaching vehicle. Dee goes onto the road alone with her Glock, sending Naomi to shelter Cole. A headlights-off Jeep Cherokee stops only feet from her. Dee forces its driver, an older man with a white beard, to put down his handgun. The vehicle bears a National Park Service emblem. Cole says the driver has no halo of light around his head, consistent with Cole's subjective distinction between affected and unaffected people, but Dee still cannot know for certain whom to trust. The driver identifies himself as Ed Abernathy, a ranger from Arches National Park.

Ed gives the starving family candy bars, apples and drinking water, and Dee is overwhelmed by the first ordinary kindness she has experienced in days. She momentarily considers murdering him for his vehicle and provisions, then rejects the idea of killing an innocent person, even for her children's survival. She explains that military personnel abducted Jack. Ed says he does not know where they went. When she asks to accompany him north, he initially refuses, draws his weapon and drives away, leaving the three alone. Naomi reproaches Dee for having spared him, but Dee insists some acts would be worse than dying. Minutes later Ed returns, reluctantly makes room for the children and Dee, and drives them down the mountain. He refuses to be thanked, describing himself as selfish despite his rescue. They continue through the night to music, with Dee briefly able to sleep while Ed plans to stop off the road before dawn.

Ed brings Dee, Naomi and Cole to the historic Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park shortly before dawn. They rest in an apparently deserted room while Dee keeps watch. The lodge evokes an earlier visit with Jack sixteen years before, soon after their marriage when they were relocating from Montana to Albuquerque for his new academic position and her medical residency. She walks to the geyser and remembers the tourists and possibilities of that happier time. On the hotel's upper walk, Ed admits he was formerly an airline pilot. He is worried that the Canadian border may be guarded or inaccessible and suggests flying a small twin-engine aircraft from Bozeman instead, although he has not flown in more than twenty years. Dee is uncertain but has no better plan.

That night they drive north from Yellowstone through burned-out Montana communities and take an isolated dirt-road shortcut toward the Bozeman airfield. An armed group blocks the Jeep and shoots Ed dead through the windshield. Dee throws herself over her children as gunfire strikes the vehicle. Gasoline from containers on the roof leaks down the windows, making the vehicle an incendiary trap. She brings the children out under threat of death. Cole says every attacker has the white halo he himself sees. A man named Max orders Dee and the children back inside, threatening to shoot their knees and burn them alive with a cigarette lighter. Dee prepares to say goodbye to her children rather than surrender to the cruelty.

Sudden gunfire from the woods kills and scatters many of Max's attackers. Dee hides with the children in a ditch as a different armed group secures the road. A woman named Liz discovers them and says they have been rescued, though she and her allies remain heavily armed and deliberately spare one wounded assailant for questioning. Liz leads the family through a razor-wire perimeter into a defended collection of cabins, watchtowers and a larger steel building, where they are assigned Cabin 14. They receive food, water and the prospect of clean clothes and showers. Dee and Naomi eat fruit, cheese and crackers as Cole sleeps, but the security of their surroundings cannot erase Jack's disappearance. The next day will mark four days without him, and Dee admits she does not know whether he is alive.

Dee and her children awaken at the defended settlement, where they are fed military rations and introduced to its leader, Mathias Canner. Approximately sixty-seven people live behind electrified razor wire, motion sensors and armed guards. Mathias claims to have created the remote community years earlier to escape outside authority. During a tour of its well, gardens, greenhouse and school, he bluntly threatens to kill Dee's children and then her if he discovers she is lying or spying. He nevertheless needs a physician: Dee examines two pregnant residents and a sick teenager. Naomi suspects the group is a militia, but they have little choice except to recover their strength there.

Mathias wakes Dee during the night and takes her to a concrete bunker where Liz has been torturing the surviving gunman, Max, from the attack on Ed's Jeep. Dee examines his badly injured body under duress. Mathias says Max claims to have seen the unusual light around Cole's head, and Mike is already questioning the boy without Dee. She rushes back to their cabin to protect him. Cole admits watching the aurora with a friend's family, whereas his parents and Naomi slept through it. Mathias now considers him potentially affected. Dee insists Cole has shown no hostility. When she offers to leave with her children, Mathias refuses because she knows too much about his compound and security. He claims absolute personal authority there and threatens coercion.

At that moment a perimeter guard reports a broken electrical circuit and many figures crawling through the woods, indicating an armed breach. Mathias orders everyone to fight and Liz to guard Dee and the children, shooting if they try to leave. Dee hides the children in a closet and takes her Glock to the door. By briefly directing Liz's attention toward the woods, she draws her weapon and shoots Liz at close range, killing the woman who had previously rescued them. Dee is stunned by the ease of the killing but immediately leads the children out during the firefight. They flee into the forest, lie down when bullets strike nearby trees, and take cover under leaves in a shallow depression. Gunfire continues throughout the night. Just before dawn it ends, followed by voices pleading and weeping, which fall silent after approximately twenty-five apparently coordinated gunshots. Dee does not yet know the full outcome of the battle.

From a depression in the woods, Dee watches the morning aftermath of the attack on Mathias's compound. At least twenty soldiers occupy the clearing; bodies lie across the field, including women and children near the mess hall. The soldiers eventually discover Mathias trying to escape through a concealed trapdoor, shoot him in the buttock and spend hours torturing him. As night arrives they erect or use a pyre in the compound's central bonfire, where Dee sees Mathias bound on crossbeams and hears his final screams as he burns. The soldiers celebrate. The massacre does not make Mathias's earlier threats to Dee less real, but the brutality of his killers far exceeds any legitimate defensive action.

Dee rouses Naomi and Cole and leads them toward a break in the razor-wire fence. They witness soldiers setting a cabin on fire while people still inside beg to be released, but Dee refuses Naomi's plea to intervene because an attack would only expose them to certain death. Outside the compound, they return to the checkpoint where Ed died. His Jeep remains, although much of the gasoline on the roof has been lost and the windshield is badly shattered by bullets. Dee and Naomi drag Ed's decomposing body out of the driver's seat and conceal the bloodied upholstery beneath spare shirts. Dee forces an opening through the opaque fractured windshield, finds that the engine starts, and drives away with the children despite foul smells, freezing wind and broken glass.

They reach an empty interstate, then turn north onto Highway 89. Dee stops at a reservoir when fatigue overcomes her, leaving the children sleeping in the Jeep while she studies a map. She estimates that the Canadian border is around 275 road miles away, with Great Falls the one large city remaining on her route. It has been six days since Jack was taken. Dee has no evidence that he survives, but she cannot relinquish her sense that he is alive somewhere beneath the same sky.

The narrative returns to Jack after the soldiers at Togwotee Pass severed his left ring finger and loaded him into a dark semitrailer with other civilian captives. He sits in pain among strangers, a crying infant and an elderly woman who comforts him when he breaks down from fear for his family. The convoy descends out of the mountains and finally stops at an airfield. Soldiers order the occupants of five trailers, approximately two hundred prisoners, toward tents with promises of food and beds. At the edge of a freshly excavated pit, Jack realizes that their true purpose is mass execution. The armed guards open fire, driving the victims into the grave. Jack is struck in his right shoulder and falls among the dead and wounded. He pulls bodies over himself as soldiers fire repeated bursts into the pit.

Cleanup crews descend into the grave with chainsaws and mutilate people still moving, including a woman whose headless body falls across Jack and conceals him beneath blood. He lies motionless until darkness, then crawls across the pit, past other wounded people who plead for help, and drags himself into nearby woods. He feels a through-and-through wound in the right shoulder, separate from his earlier left-shoulder injury, and suffers severe emotional dissociation. From beneath a spruce he later hears and sees a bulldozer filling the grave; the sound of crushing bones tells him that the killers are burying their victims. The ordeal explains the scale and methods of the opening forensic excavation, though Jack does not witness that later investigation.

Jack wakes the following morning beneath a tree at the edge of the execution ground, suffering stomach cramps and severe pain in his wounded right shoulder and the exposed bone of his amputated left ring finger. Soldiers are active in the nearby meadow, some accompanied by dogs. He is too weak to confront them and struggles to his feet, heading into dense forest without knowing the direction. He walks through the day and finds no road, water source or other sign of civilization. As daylight fades, the terrain rises into a steep wooded hillside. Chilled, hungry and exhausted, he sits down shivering and feels he has nothing more to give.

Jack awakens covered in frost on a steep hillside. He endures two hours of terrible cold before sunlight reaches him and begins to warm his clothes. Still suffering thirst and the consequences of his wounds, he forces himself to crawl and climb through hours he can barely distinguish. By late afternoon he is close to surrendering, aware that if he stops he might never rise again. Deep in the following night he emerges onto an open ski slope. A sign identifies the black-diamond run as Emigrant, and the ski lifts and lodge below confirm that he has found a resort. The thought of Dee, Naomi and Cole helps him keep moving instead of dying on the mountain.

Jack descends about a thousand feet to the ski lodge, where he is so weak he must crawl up the steps. Its doors are locked. He breaks a window with a heavy rock and enters an unlit cafeteria. Vending dispensers and taps do not provide water. Desperate, he searches for a restroom in total darkness, opens a stall and drinks from a toilet bowl. He knows neither the water's safety nor what may have contaminated it, but severe dehydration leaves him unable to refuse the only available liquid.

Jack regains consciousness on the restroom floor of the ski lodge. Drinking toilet water has relieved his worst thirst, but his ring-finger stump needs protection, so he wraps it with improvised paper-towel bandaging. He notices a vending machine, breaks its glass using the same rock employed to enter the lodge, and devours stale packaged snacks left from the previous season. He fills a garbage bag with additional food, examines his profoundly changed appearance in a mirror and discovers an abandoned mountain bike outside. Its tires are soft but usable, allowing him to coast down from the mountain more quickly than his injured feet would permit.

He travels into the foothills, eventually reaching northbound Highway 89 and a reservoir where he can drink and rest. In the evening, approximately thirty miles north of Bozeman, he eats more of the packaged food and considers his options. Searching south for Dee and the children might fail because they have been separated for almost five days and he has no information about their whereabouts. He suspects Dee would continue north toward Canada. He takes out his long-dead phone, types her number on its dark screen and speaks to her as though it were working, describing his location and promising that he will not leave the country without her. The call reaches no one, but it expresses his intention to find the family rather than abandon them.

Jack wakes late in the morning by a reservoir in Montana. The highway is empty in both directions, and the surrounding terrain offers no immediate sign of another traveler. He strips off his blood-soaked, filthy clothes, swims in the freezing reservoir and scrubs himself and his clothing as well as he can. Then he returns to his salvaged mountain bike and continues riding north along the deserted road. Hours pass without a house or vehicle. At evening he is exhausted again, alone under the huge high-desert sky, but remains on the route he believes may bring him back to Dee and the children.

Riding his salvaged mountain bike north, Jack reaches an abandoned, bullet-riddled minivan containing a murdered woman, teenage twin boys and a young girl whose body lies nearby in the sagebrush. He moves the victims out of the vehicle with as much dignity as the circumstances permit, then starts its engine and drives away. Farther up Highway 89 he encounters a deeply traumatized man walking alone in the middle of the road. The man is nearly mute and scarcely responds to food, but Jack helps him into the passenger seat. His wallet identifies him as Donald Massey of Provo, Utah. When Jack later discovers an automobile insurance card in the minivan, he realizes the murdered occupants were Donald's wife and children. He cannot bring himself to tell Donald what happened or speculate with certainty how the man survived. Instead, he offers him water from a mountain stream and holds his hand as they continue toward Great Falls.

Near Great Falls, a checkpoint warns travelers that snipers will shoot anyone who fails to obey its instructions. Armed defenders order Jack out of the minivan and examine him with the help of Benny, a captive affected man kept naked, beaten, blindfolded and chained. The guards use Benny's response to distinguish potentially affected people: when the blindfold comes off, Benny attacks Jack viciously, which checkpoint leader Brian considers evidence that Jack is not affected. Brian claims the city is protected by thousands of armed people and has roughly ten to fifteen thousand survivors. He believes that Great Falls was spared because clouds hid the aurora from local residents, but this remains his explanation rather than an established epidemiological result. Brian says he will admit Jack's nonviolent son Cole if the family arrives. Jack travels into town with Donald and searches for a school shelter, where his family has not been identified. An administrator says more than two thousand people are staying there, there is no spare cot, and food deliveries have stopped.

When Jack returns to the minivan, he discovers Donald has died, apparently during their final drive or while Jack sought help. He carries the man's body into a small park, arranges his hands respectfully and apologizes for being unable to do more. With very little fuel left, Jack drives to a plaza near the Davidson Building, a landmark from his former life in Great Falls with Dee. He parks the van and rests, still hoping she and the children will eventually arrive.

Jack wakes in Donald Massey's minivan at a Great Falls downtown plaza that recalls his earlier life with Dee. The powerless city is cold and eerily empty, with some vandalized storefronts. In the van, he finds the youngest Massey child's books, stuffed toy, sketchbook and art supplies. Her last drawing is an unfinished view of the landscape where the minivan was ambushed, and an uncapped marker suggests she was working on it before the violence. He opens a box of colored materials but cannot bear to examine an etched silver locket inside.

Using the child's markers and white acrylic paint, Jack spends the morning writing the name DEE in enormous letters on the minivan's side and the surrounding buildings' glass windows. He hopes the message will be visible if she comes to the plaza. Cold mist turns into rain. Jack sleeps again in the minivan, this time in the deceased girl's usual seat beneath her blanket. He has only twelve packages of salvaged snack food remaining and decides to begin rationing. The physical reminder of the lost family and uncertainty about his own make his grief difficult to bear.

Distant explosions wake Jack while he is sheltering in the minivan in downtown Great Falls. He searches an abandoned bank for drinking water, but its taps and fountain are dry. He then shatters an entrance to the Davidson Building with a heavy planter, improvises a torch from a branch and oil-soaked strips of clothing, and makes his way up four floors. In a financial advisory office he discovers a functioning dispenser with water still stored in its tank. He drinks and carries the remaining water downstairs, briefly studying photographs of people enjoying ordinary family and recreational life.

As Jack returns to the minivan, explosions continue beyond the city and smoke rises from the prairie south of town. At night he wakes to gunfire inside the city limits, flashing light from distant artillery and falling snow. The developments undermine Brian's earlier assurance that Great Falls is securely defended, though Jack does not yet know who is attacking or how the battle will end.

Jack remains in the central Great Falls plaza, where he has painted Dee's name on the minivan and nearby windows, while explosions and gunfire engulf the city. A group of civilians flees into the Davidson Building, pursued by armed men in dark uniforms. Jack hides in the van while gunfire and an explosion break its windows. The attackers force ten captives to their knees and execute them in the street. Their leader, wearing a red bandanna, notices Jack and pursues him into the nearby bank. Jack hides under a desk in darkness for what seems more than an hour, then cautiously returns to the plaza. As he tries to retrieve a weapon from a dead man, the attacker emerges from the minivan and orders him to sit by the dry fountain.

The man recognizes Jack and asks after Dee. Jack then recognizes him as Kiernan, Dee's former lover and a National Guard member. Kiernan boasts that he and fellow defectors from Albuquerque have been murdering their way north, and admits to killing his own wife and children. He demands to know why Jack chose this particular plaza and whether he expects Dee to find him there. Jack refuses to explain its meaning. Kiernan describes the changed perception he claims to have gained from the aurora, though his statements are neither coherent proof of divine knowledge nor a verified explanation of the crisis. After a tense exchange, Kiernan draws a large knife and threatens to torture Jack for information.

As Jack faces Kiernan, the narrative returns in extended memory to the day eighteen years earlier when he first met Dee in the same square. He had admired her from nearby for several lunch hours, then tripped and spilled iced coffee on her. Their encounter led to an awkward introduction and a lasting attraction. The narration looks forward from that meeting through their marriage, children, grief, estrangement, betrayals and love. The memory resolves when, back in the devastated present-day plaza, Jack sees Dee approaching. She shoots Kiernan through his left eye with an old revolver; the wounded man does not immediately die. Jack seizes Kiernan's knife and stabs him in the chest, and the man falls into the fountain and sinks beneath the water. Jack and Dee embrace and weep. Dee explains that she entered the besieged city the preceding night, recognized Jack's message on the minivan, hid during the fighting and watched Kiernan chase him into the bank. She found the square because it was where they first met and believed Jack would come there if he survived.

Together they go to the Great Falls Public Library, where Naomi and Cole have hidden in an archive room. Both children are overwhelmed to see Jack alive, and the family reunites. Dee examines him, cleans the infected right-shoulder gunshot wound and discovers the missing left ring finger where a soldier took their wedding band. They rest together as bombardment intensifies around the library, and Jack privately imagines rebuilding a simple life with Dee and the children if they reach safety. A nearby building takes a direct hit, blowing out the library windows. Dee leads the family to Ed's damaged Jeep, which still has enough fuel to reach the border. Jack drives while Dee fires a captured machine gun at attackers. They race through Great Falls amid gunfire, mortar strikes and armored vehicles. A pursuing Stryker shoots through their vehicle, damaging its interior. To escape Jack drives past a bombed elementary school, through a street filled with severely burned fleeing civilians whom he cannot entirely avoid running over. The family reaches the northern highway and speeds into the dark prairie. Many miles away, Great Falls is still visibly burning. At the chapter's end a gray line on the eastern horizon marks approaching dawn.

The Colcloughs continue north across Montana's prairie toward the Canadian border. Jack has abandoned the paved roads to avoid military forces. Their Jeep overheats and begins failing; each mile of progress requires hours of cooling. He believes the border lies only a few miles away and rests with the children on the grass while Dee dozes in the front passenger seat. A sniper fires from a pickup truck perhaps a mile off. A bullet strikes Dee in the right thigh, nicking her femoral artery and causing rapid blood loss. Dee, who is a physician, directs Jack to improvise a tourniquet using the sleeve of his shirt, while further gunfire forces the family to shelter beside the damaged Jeep. Jack uses binoculars to spot a woman firing a rifle from the distant truck and three men approaching on foot, an older man and two teenagers. He shoots and kills the three men with a machine gun, but discovers that two more trucks have joined the original vehicle and that eight armed attackers remain. There is little usable ammunition, and the Jeep is barely running.

Dee decides to sacrifice herself to protect Jack, Naomi and Cole. She will drive away with the Jeep's lights on so the attackers pursue the vehicle, allowing the rest of the family to run north through the grass in darkness. Jack begs her to reconsider. Before leaving, Dee hugs each child and reminds Jack of their perfect day playing wiffle ball at the mountain cabin. She asks him to make her decision meaningful by getting the children somewhere safe. The three trucks turn after her decoy as Jack and the children escape. Dee's engine seizes after roughly 1.2 miles. With the attackers coming closer, she takes Ed's pocketknife and cuts through the improvised tourniquet, allowing herself to bleed heavily again. She lies back in the Jeep, drifting toward unconsciousness while thinking of Jack and their children reaching a huge Canadian refugee camp marked by a United Nations flag. That scene is her imagined hope, not a verified account of their arrival.

While running with the children, Jack is stopped by Cole, who says that the strange feeling and lights associated with his aurora experience have suddenly gone away. Cole insists that the violent people will no longer harm them. Jack is unsure what the boy means, and Naomi argues they should return for their mother if there is any chance. Jack orders Naomi and Cole to remain in place and continue north for help if he has not returned by midmorning. He runs back alone through the dark, then sees several flashes around Dee's Jeep. There he finds seven attackers dead with gunshot wounds to the head. An eighth man is distraught and asks Jack to kill him, showing anguish over what he has done. The text does not independently establish how every death occurred or why the attacker's mental state changed. Jack refuses the request. When the surviving man provides the keys to a Chevrolet truck, Jack shoots him in the knee so he can take the vehicle while preventing immediate interference.

Dee lies unconscious in the disabled Jeep, bleeding heavily because her tourniquet has been severed. Jack tightens it again, carries her to the Chevrolet and drives toward the border, holding her hand and pleading for her to survive until they can find medical care. Naomi and Cole remain behind at the place Jack ordered them to wait. The immediate outcome for Dee, the children and the family's border crossing is not shown in this chapter.

Nineteen years after the catastrophe, an adult Naomi works on a forensic excavation team investigating the same mass grave described in the opening chapter. At dusk her father Jack arrives by small plane for their first meeting in six months. He immediately recognizes the abandoned airfield and excavation site as the place where soldiers had attempted to execute him. He describes the trucks, tents and false promise of food, indicates where the prisoners stood and estimates that about two hundred people were brought there. Naomi confirms that the excavators have found bones severed by chainsaws, which corresponds with Jack's recollection of the execution and cleanup. Jack is emotional but glad to bear witness, and Naomi holds his hand, touching the platinum wedding band that still fits the shortened remains of his left ring finger.

After supper Naomi sits by the bonfire with Jack and Sam, the Australian leader of the excavation. They discuss the Great Auroral Storm. Sam speculates that similar solar anomalies may have contributed to ancient massacres and extinctions, and claims that those like Cole who saw the aurora but did not kill, or who recovered from violent actions and guilt, may have been favored in some form of natural selection. He also says that many of the affected later killed themselves. These are Sam's theories and claims rather than independent scientific conclusions. Jack mentions a priest friend from the humanities department where he now teaches in Belgium who interprets the event as a divine test of those who witnessed the lights and those who fled. Jack himself expresses doubt about any comforting explanation for violence. He says he returned because the grave represents both great suffering and the unlikely fact of his own survival, which he never wants to forget.

Naomi rests against Jack as he receives a telephone call from Dee. He confirms that they will meet her and a companion the following evening and then tells Naomi that her mother sends her love. Dee's continued life and the existence of an adult Naomi, along with the discussion of Cole, establish that the family's apparent final collapse was not its ultimate fate. The narrative does not show exactly how Dee was treated, how Jack reunited with the children or how they crossed the border; those intervening events should not be invented.