Run

The novel opens with an unnamed forensic anthropologist arriving at a mass grave in the American West. She surveys a pit containing over 200 bodies, all killed by gunfire and dismembered with chainsaws. The team leader notes the pattern matches a mass grave in Denver. The woman's identity is not yet revealed.

The narrative jumps back to the events behind these horrors. A mysterious aurora, recently visible across the lower 48 United States, has triggered a wave of escalating violence. Those who witnessed the lights develop an uncontrollable compulsion to kill anyone who did not see them. Within days, the country collapses into chaos.

In Albuquerque, Dee Colclough, a doctor, is with Kiernan, a lawyer and her lover of six months, when he confesses that an urge to hurt her has been building for days. He hurls her across the hotel room and tells her to leave while she can.

At home, Dee's husband, Jack Colclough, a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico, packs the family's Land Rover when a voice on the radio reads his name and address, marking him for death. Jack retrieves a Glock pistol and a shotgun from the house. Kiernan appears in the yard with a bloody butcher knife, taunting Jack about the affair, but retreats when Dee aims the unloaded Glock at him. The family, including their daughter Naomi and seven-year-old son Cole, flees into the night.

At a roadblock, armed men order everyone out. Jack spots dead bodies in a nearby lot, realizes what is about to happen, and slams into reverse. Gunfire shatters the windows and ruptures his left eardrum, but they crash through a fence and escape. That night, camping in the high desert, Cole tells Jack the "bad people" are acting "because of the lights," referring to the aurora he watched at a friend's sleepover. The rest of the family slept through it.

The Colcloughs drive north through Colorado, witnessing constant devastation. Durango has been burned to the ground, its streets littered with bodies, blindfolded children floating in the river. Outside Silverton, armed locals warn of an approaching convoy and direct the family onto Cinnamon Pass, a treacherous mountain trail. A sniper fires on the Rover during the climb, but they escape into fog and snow.

At a ranch house in northern Colorado, Jack finds the elderly owners dead by murder-suicide. Using their ham radio, he contacts Paul Hewson, a man in Belfast, who relays that the crisis is confined to the lower 48 states and northern Mexico. The cause is believed connected to the aurora, and the closest safe zone is southern Canada, nearly a thousand miles away.

In Wyoming, four people from a convoy track the family to a desert butte. Jack and Dee kill all four in a violent confrontation, but Jack is shot in the left shoulder. One attacker, Dave, reveals before dying that witnessing the aurora showed him "God" and "perfection" and drove him to murder friends who had slept through it.

The family flees into the Wind River Mountains on fumes. The engine dies on a mountainside, but Naomi spots a hidden road leading to a remote, solar-powered cabin stocked with food. They settle in. Jack catches fish and kills a bull elk. For one day, life feels almost normal: They play wiffle ball, grill elk steaks, and share a bottle of wine. That evening, Jack confesses to Dee that he had an affair two years earlier. She is furious.

The respite ends when intruders find the cabin. Jack kills one attacker, but eight armed figures rush across the meadow and the family scatters into the woods. Jack finds Dee and the children at dawn by a stream. With almost nothing, they begin a grueling trek across the Wind River Range. On a sheer granite wall, Jack catches Naomi by the wrist when she slips. He throws their pack off the cliff to squeeze through a narrow crack, losing their tent and sleeping bags. After two days without water, Cole spots a trickle from a spring.

They reach Highway 287 and walk north. Cole reveals he can see a "white light" around affected people's heads and that he carries the light himself. He develops a high fever but recovers. After five days without food, the family is near death when Dee stops an approaching vehicle by standing in the road. Ed Abernathy, a National Park Service ranger from Arches National Park and a former commercial pilot, agrees to take them north through Yellowstone toward a Bozeman airfield.

On a dirt road near the airport, soldiers ambush the Jeep and kill Ed. A militia group saves the family and brings them to a fortified compound led by Mathias Canner, a self-proclaimed sovereign authority. When Mathias discovers Cole is affected, he accuses Dee of lying and refuses to let them leave. Dee shoots the guard assigned to watch her and escapes with the children as a full-scale assault overruns the compound. After hiding in the forest overnight, Dee leads the children back to Ed's Jeep and drives north.

Meanwhile, Jack has been captured and transported to an airfield where approximately 200 prisoners are lined up at the edge of a mass grave and shot. Jack survives by pulling bodies over himself as soldiers fire a second volley and wade through the pit with chainsaws. He crawls out at nightfall.

Starving and delirious, Jack wanders for days before finding a ski lodge. He reaches Highway 89, finds a dead family's minivan, and drives to Great Falls, Montana, spared because cloud cover blocked the aurora. Jack drives to the civic center plaza where he and Dee first met 18 years earlier, writes her name on the minivan and surrounding buildings, and waits.

On the third day, as the city comes under full military assault, Kiernan appears, traveling with deserters from his National Guard unit. He admits to murdering his own wife and three children. Dee arrives, having driven into the besieged city and seen Jack's painted messages. She shoots Kiernan through the eye.

At the library, Jack reunites with Cole and Naomi. That night, bombs shake the building. The family races north in Ed's Jeep through streets engulfed in warfare, past fire from a Stryker armored vehicle, and reaches Highway 87.

The Jeep's engine overheats repeatedly. A sniper shoots Dee in the right leg, nicking her femoral artery. Jack ties a tourniquet and kills three approaching attackers with the last rounds in an AR-15 rifle. More trucks close in. Dee, bleeding heavily, insists on driving the Jeep east as a decoy so Jack and the children can run north toward the border in darkness.

After an agonizing goodbye, Dee drives east with taillights blazing. All three trucks follow. Jack takes the children and runs. After three minutes, Cole stops, insisting they go back: The presence that entered him after the aurora is fading, he says, and the affected will no longer want to kill.

Jack sprints back to find seven of the eight attackers dead by their own hands, their violence turned inward. Dee lies unconscious in the Jeep, blood pumping from her leg. Jack re-ties the tourniquet, carries her to one of the attackers' trucks, and drives north, holding her cold hand.

The closing chapter returns to the mass grave. The forensic anthropologist is revealed to be Naomi Colclough, now an adult. Her father, Jack, arrives to visit the site where he nearly died 19 years earlier. Around a bonfire, the team leader theorizes the aurora was a natural-selection event and that people like Cole, who witnessed the lights and resisted the compulsion to kill, were the true evolutionary survivors.

Jack's phone rings. He speaks briefly, confirming plans. Then he leans to his drowsing daughter and whispers: "Naomi. Your mother sends her love." Dee survived.