Ghost Country

Chapter Twenty-Two

The satellite was called COMTEL-3," Paige said. "In our present time it's positioned over the Atlantic as a relay for news-wire services, bouncing article text between ground stations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. On the other side of the opening, we picked it up over the Pacific, moving east toward Ecuador, two hundred miles below its intended orbit. It answered the ping with a status screen full of critical error messages. It also had the date and time, based on its own onboard clock, which is probably accurate to within a few seconds over a thousand years. Adjusting for local time, at that moment in the other desert it was 6:31 in the evening, October 14, 2084."

A relative silence came, beyond the ambient whine of a jet powering up somewhere across the airport.

"Christ," Bethany said.

Travis felt something like a chill. They'd already known the kind of timeline they were dealing with, but to hear it specified to the minute made it real in a way he hadn't expected. He did the math. Seventy-three years and not quite two months.

"Having a known position for COMTEL-3 did a lot for us," Paige said. "After that we could rotate the dish to follow it, and stay in contact. Which was good, because Pilar believed some of the satellite's final transmissions-news stories-might still be stored in its memory buffer. She worked on it for a while, but she wasn't optimistic about actually retrieving the information. The bird was in pretty bad shape. It'd gone into some kind of safe mode after enough time passed without contact from its human controllers. Its orientation was off; its solar panels weren't angled to grab as much sunlight as it needed. It's a wonder it still worked at all. But after about half an hour, she managed to pull a number of articles from the buffer. They were corrupted all to hell. They were like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, with more blanks than words. We sat out there the rest of the day and most of the night trying to make sense of them, while we kept pinging for more satellites. We didn't find any more, but from the COMTEL-3 information we eventually narrowed down a few basic details of the event that ends the world."

She looked down at the table.

"The media gives it a name," she said. "They call it Bleak December. Whatever it is, it starts on December fourth of this year, and unfolds over the following weeks. We know that Yuma, Arizona, plays a key role in the event. Even a central role. But we don't know why. The city was mentioned in every article, numerous times, but the context was never intact. We also know that in the weeks before the event there's a major buildup of petroleum supplies in large metro areas. Gas stations with three or four tanker trucks parked outside as reserve stores. So whatever the event is, apparently people see it coming. Or at least those in power see it coming, and make preparations for some potential crisis. If that sounds vague, it is. There was just so little text to go on. We assumed they wanted the gas for electric generators, if power grids failed, but that was only a guess."

Bethany turned to Travis. "The cars," she said.

He nodded. There had to be a connection.

"What cars?" Paige said.

"All the cars in D.C. were gone," Travis said. "Everyone left at the end, but not in any kind of panic. There was no gridlock, as far as we could see. They left with cool heads."

Paige stared at the runway and tried to tie that fact in with everything else she knew. Travis watched her eyes. He saw only an echo of his own bafflement. Finally she shook her head.

"Doesn't make the image any sharper," she said. "Maybe they wanted the gas to evacuate the cities, but there was nothing in the articles to suggest why they'd need to do that."

"What did the articles suggest?" Bethany said. "I mean… beyond what you were sure of, was there anything in them that offered even a hint of what the hell happened?"

Paige thought about it for a long moment. On the far side of the airport, a 737 accelerated and lifted off.

"We had the sense that it wasn't a natural phenomenon," she said at last. "A sense that it was… a failure of something. Like a plan. Like a very big, very secret plan, that went very fucking wrong in every possible way. We couldn't pin down any one passage of text that said so… but it was there in general. It was sort of everywhere. And toward the end, the articles were fewer and farther between, and very short, leaving almost no text to go on. And then they just ended. The last thing anyone ever bounced through that satellite was dated December 28. Whatever the hell Bleak December is… was… will be… it takes about twenty-four days from start to finish. And then people stop writing newspaper articles, and correcting satellite orbits. And at some point, apparently, they stop doing everything."

She stared off. Shook her head. "That's why we went to the president first. If there was anyone to talk to about secret, dangerous shit that might get out of hand in the next few months, we figured it'd be him. I half expected him to just have the answer for us, once we'd shown him the cylinder and told him what we knew. Like there'd be some high-risk, black-budget program in the Defense Department, just about to go live, and he'd connect the dots just like that. And then he'd shut it down. Simple."

"Sounds like he did connect the dots," Travis said. "It's just the next part that didn't work out."

"But why wouldn't he shut it down?" Bethany said. "Why the hell would he want the world to end?"

"He probably thinks the danger can still be avoided, without stopping whatever this thing is," Paige said. "I overheard a conversation to that effect last night, tied up in that building in D.C. The project, or whatever it is, is called Umbra. But beyond the name, I still don't know a damn thing about it."

For almost a minute nobody spoke. Another airliner rumbled down out of the sky and landed.

"So our best move is to get to Yuma," Travis said, "and use the cylinder to investigate the ruins there. See what we can learn from it, if it's such an important place at the end."

"We were on our way to do that last night," Paige said, "after we left the White House. Obviously, President Currey didn't want us to get there."

"I don't imagine he's had a change of heart since then," Bethany said. "And as of an hour ago, these people know we have our own cylinder."

Paige nodded. "And since they don't have to sneak around and take out-of-the-way flights-hell, they could take military flights-they may already be in Yuma with their cylinder by the time we arrive. Even if they burn some time keeping their resources here on the East Coast, waiting for us to make a mistake, we should expect them to be no more than a few hours behind us."

"And we can assume they outnumber and outgun us by a wide margin," Travis said.

"Probably wider than we want to think about."

Travis leaned back in his chair. Stared at the heat shimmers rising from the runway. Breathed a laugh. "What the hell. We've gone up against worse."

He didn't mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the worse they'd gone up against had won.