“We’ll do that.”

“You say you have a Forty-five?”

“Yes sir.”

“Comfortable with it?”

“I used to deer hunt with my father, but it’s been years since I’ve even shot a gun.”

The officer’s eyes cut to the backseat, his face brightening. He waved and Jack glanced back, saw Cole sit up and look through the glass. He lowered Cole’s window.

“How you doing there, buddy? You look like a real brave boy to me. Is that right?”

Cole just stared.

“What’s your name?”

Jack couldn’t hear his son answer, but the officer reached his gloved hand through the window.

“Good to meet you, Cole.” He turned back to Jack. “Hunker down someplace safe for the night. You ain’t a pretty sight.”

“My wife’s a doctor. She’ll patch me up.”

The officer lingered at his window, staring off into the emptiness all around them-starlit desert and the scabrous profile of a distant mountain range, pitch black against the navy sky. “What do you make of it?” he said.

“Of what?”

“Whatever this is that’s happening. What we’re doing to ourselves.”

“I don’t know.”

“You think this is the end?”

“Sort of feels that way tonight, doesn’t it?”

The officer rapped his knuckles on the Discovery’s roof. “Stay safe, folks.”

Ten miles on, Jack left the highway. He crossed a cattle guard, and drove 2.8 miles over a washboarded, runoff-rutted wreck of a road until the outcropping of house-size rocks loomed straight ahead in the windshield. He pulled behind a boulder, so that even with the lights on, their Land Rover would be completely hidden from the highway. Shifted into park. Killed the engine. Dead quiet in this high desert. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around in his seat so he could see his children.