Chapter Thirteen

For a few seconds everything was quiet, except the wind moving through the forest that'd replaced Washington, D.C. Far to the west Travis heard a crow cawing, high above the treetops. The weightless foil lid quivered just noticeably in the breeze, but Travis's eyes stayed fixed on the expiration date.

"Four months from now," Bethany said. "In our time." The words came out as hardly more than a breath.

"I don't eat a lot of yogurt," Travis said. "How far away is the sell-by date, when you buy this stuff?"

"It's like milk. Three or four weeks. Someone would've bought this around the start of December. This coming December, in the present day."

Travis nodded.

"And it's not like people hang on to these lids for posterity," Bethany said. "Figure this thing goes into the trash in early to mid-December… and no one ever takes it back out. Jesus Christ, the world ends four months from now? "

"Janitors quit working four months from now, at least," Travis said. "My guess is, so does everyone else."

He let the lid go and they watched it drift down on the air, like the colored leaves that were settling onto Vermont Avenue before them.

"Four months…" Bethany said again. "Everyone I know. Everyone I love. Four months…"

Travis found himself going back to what he'd thought of earlier: the chance of some connection between all of this and whatever the Whisper had warned him about-the dark potential of his own future.

He remained certain there was no connection, but now something else struck him: the Whisper had spoken of a future in which he belonged to Tangent several years from now. How could that have ever been possible if the world was going to collapse in 2011?

Well, weren't all bets simply off, after everything the Whisper had done? In a roundabout way, the thing had killed Ellen Garner, with the result that President Garner had resigned from office and allowed Currey to take power. That change alone could account for massive differences in how everything played out.

"End of the world plus seventy years, we guessed," Bethany said. "So on this side of the iris, the date is sometime around 2080."

Travis nodded, but said nothing. He looked around. From this position he could see along not only Vermont, but M Street to the east and west, a hundred yards in each direction before the tree cover obscured the way.

Something obvious occurred to him. He couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it already.

"Where are the cars?" he said.

He looked at Bethany. She looked blank for half a second and then made the same oh yeah expression he'd probably just made himself.

"The panels would be rusted to nothing by now," Travis said, "but the frames and the wheel rims should still be in some kind of shape, with windows and all kinds of plastic parts draped over them." He looked around. "They should be everywhere."

But there wasn't one to be seen. They hadn't passed anything that could've once been a vehicle on the walk down from the Ritz. Hadn't seen anything like that along the stretch of Vermont north of the hotel, either, when they'd first roped down. He'd have noticed and remembered.

"People must've had a reason to get out of D.C.," Bethany said, "at the end."

Travis stared at the empty streets and thought about it. He imagined a plague sweeping the world. People fleeing high-population areas in a mass panic.

It didn't work. Not entirely. First of all, not everyone would leave. Some number of people would have nowhere better to go, and would hole up in their homes. The city could still end up vacated of cars, even in that case-in the end, those without transportation would break into and hotwire whatever was available-but there was another problem, and Travis could see no way around it. The dynamics of a mass evacuation in a short period of time would've overwhelmed the city streets. It happened in every coastal metropolis in the days before a big hurricane. Traffic would condense at the primary outlets, like bridges and freeway interchanges. People would sit at the wheel for an hour or two, going nowhere, and then a few would run out of gas while idling, or get frustrated and simply abandon their vehicles, and try to get out on foot. It only took a few of those, and then each way out of the city would be stopped up like a corked bottle. And hurricane warnings matured over three to four days. Travis imagined that news of a major disease outbreak would hit at least that fast. Maybe faster. The gridlock would be absolute. There would be all kinds of cars left rotting on M Street and Vermont Avenue if the world had ended in a plague.

He turned and saw Bethany trying to work it out too.

"Everyone got in their cars and left," Travis said. "But not in a hurry." T hey returned to the stairwell and continued the search of the building, floor by floor. At the ninth level they walked out to the northeast corner, where seventy years earlier Paige had been held. There was nothing special about the construction there. Just more girders, and a concrete flooring section that hadn't yet surrendered to gravity.

Travis stared at the undefined space. Irrational as he knew it was, he couldn't help thinking that Paige was right there somehow, just feet away, but impossible to reach from here. He wondered what she was thinking. Wondered if she knew they were trying to get to her-that she wasn't as alone as she must feel. He thought about it for a few seconds and then forced himself to look away. Losing time here wasn't helping her.

They continued up the stairwell. They found nothing of interest on any of the floors through the fifteenth. Only one floor remained above that point, and it had just three of its concrete pads still in place. Of all the surfaces in the building these were the most exposed to rain and wind and sunlight. Looking up at the slabs, Travis put the chance of finding anything noteworthy on top of them right around zero.

Then they climbed the last flight, and he saw at once that he'd been wrong.

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