Ghost Country

Chapter Twenty-Four

Travis pulled over. The highway was empty in both directions for all the miles they could see.

Bethany was still standing in the back. She turned around, leaned over and rested the cylinder on the Jeep's compressed soft top behind the backseat. The beam pointed sideways to the Jeep's right. The iris hung fixed in the air at chest level, just beyond the freeway's shoulder.

Travis got out at the same time as Paige. He was already looking past the Jeep at the iris. Could already see through it. Could already feel his own thoughts going as vacant as Bethany's had. A moment later all three of them were crowded at the opening, looking through. They stared for half a minute without speaking. Then Travis returned to the Jeep, shut it off, and pocketed the keys.

He took the shotgun from where Paige had left it on the passenger side. He picked up Bethany's backpack, hanging open with the SIG and all the shotgun shells inside it. Then he went to the cylinder and pushed the delayed shutoff button. He waited for the light cone to cut out, and then he secured the cylinder inside the pack. By the time he had it shouldered with the Remington, Paige and Bethany were already through the opening. He followed them. T he desert on the other side looked like a shopping-center parking lot the day after Thanksgiving, except that it had no boundaries. The cars stretched as far as Travis could see in every direction. The visible horizon was five miles out, any way that he faced. The cars extended at least that far.

They were parked grill-to-grill in double rows, each of which was separated by a lane of space just wide enough to drive down. The lanes branched out from the freeway, which itself remained clear.

The cars were in perfect condition except for their tires and window seals, which had baked to crumbs over the decades and settled in a thick layer on the desert floor. The wind had leveled the crumbs out but hadn't scattered them. Travis saw why: most of the cars were no more than an inch or two off the ground, sitting on their rims. All of them together would make a hell of a barrier against air currents at the surface.

The cars' paint jobs were faded and pitted, but not so much that the original colors couldn't be discerned.

Every kind of personal vehicle was there. Compact cars to SUVs. And they'd come from everywhere. California plates made up at least a third of them-understandably, given the state's population and short distance from Yuma-but within the first fifty cars he looked at, Travis saw two that were from New York State. He saw Texas and Florida and Pennsylvania, and a dozen others.

The cars were all empty. No bodies. No belongings. Just cracked and worn and bleached upholsteries that hadn't been sat on in seventy-three years.

Bethany climbed onto the hood of a Ford Expedition, then onto its roof. She put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, and turned a slow circle. She dropped her hand to her side. Looked down at Travis and Paige. Shook her head. Climbed back down.

"They came here?" she said. "From as far away as D.C. and New York, people emptied out of the big cities and came to Yuma? Why would they do that?"

Travis felt too thrown to even shrug. He had nothing approaching an answer. He stared over the sea of chrome and faded paint and tried to get a grasp of the numbers involved.

"A little over three hundred million people in America," he said. "Subtract the ones too young to drive a car, or that live in big cities and don't need one. How many cars would there be, ballpark? Couple hundred million?"

"Something like that," Paige said.

"How much space would they take up, arranged like this?" Travis said. "A parking space is about ten by twenty. So two hundred square feet. A square mile should have, what, a little over twenty-five million square feet in it?"

Bethany took out her phone, switched it on, and opened a calculator function. She pressed the buttons with both thumbs and had the answer in a few seconds.

"Just under twenty-eight million square feet in a mile," she said. She did another calculation. "Divided by two hundred, that's one hundred forty thousand parking spaces. Cut that by a third to figure in the access lanes, you've got a little over ninety thousand cars every square mile."

"Call it a hundred thousand to make the math easier," Travis said. "Two hundred million cars would take up two thousand square miles."

Bethany's thumbs moved again. Then her eyebrows went up briefly. "Wow. Believe it or not, that's a square of only forty-four miles by forty-four. If Yuma was at the center of it, the edges would be just twenty-two miles from town. We're further out than that right now-more like thirty miles."

Travis thought about it. It made sense, in its own way. "You'd expect more of a rectangle than a square. It would grow east and west from towns along the freeway as people arrived. It would thicken north and south from there. Hard to say how far. But the point is that they could fit. Every car in the United States could park within a couple days' walk of Yuma. And that's assuming every car made it here, which they wouldn't. A good percentage would run out of gas along the way."

"A lot would be left behind to begin with," Paige said. "You didn't see any cars in D.C., but think of suburban families with two or three of them in the garage. They wouldn't take them all. They'd take one-whichever got the best mileage-and leave the others."

Travis nodded. The math worked, even if the reality it described was impossible to come to terms with.

"Yuma," Paige said. She stared east toward it, though the city-or its ruins, at least-lay well out of sight. Travis saw her eyes narrow. She was imagining three hundred million people gathering in one place.

"It's not possible," she said. "Not even close. The entire population of the United States bunched into Yuma, Arizona? Picture the Woodstock crowd. That was half a million people. The American population is six hundred times that amount. Think you could hold six hundred Woodstocks in Yuma at the same time?" She stared over the desert again. Shook her head. "This would be more than just a bad idea. This would be a lunatic idea."

"But it was the idea," Travis said. He swept an arm at the cars. "Somehow, this was the official response to whatever went wrong with Umbra. Everyone in the country wouldn't just spontaneously decide to come here. They'd have to be told. They will be told. In our own time… Jesus, all of this happens just a few months from now."

"But why?" Paige said. " Why would the government tell them that, and why would anyone listen? Whatever the hell was going wrong in the rest of the country, sending everyone here couldn't possibly help them. It would be mass suicide. There wouldn't even be housing space to get them all in out of the sun. And there'd be no food, either. They'd be dead in a week."

"Could things have just been that desperate?" Bethany said. "What if, somehow, Yuma offers temporary relief from whatever's happening in the rest of the country? Why that would be, I don't know… but suppose it is. Suppose the effect of Umbra is so bad that it's worth it to come here, just to get away from it, even if it still means dying."

The notion chilled Travis, even in the baking sunlight. He watched it affect Paige and Bethany in the same way.

"Why Yuma?" he said. "What would it offer?" He thought of what he'd considered on the plane: that Yuma's climate might have a lot to do with its significance. "What if Umbra is worse in some places than others? What if it's worse where there's moisture, for whatever reason? Then a place like Yuma would be a kind of-" But he already saw why that thinking didn't work. He shook his head. "No. In that case there'd be lots of places people could go. Yuma might be the driest city, but there are tons of them that are almost as dry. Vegas is probably about the same, and it's a hell of a lot bigger. Christ, even Los Angeles would work, and you could fit all kinds of extra people there. Still no idea what they'd do for food, but it would beat the shit out of lumping everyone together here."

"Then they didn't come here for the climate," Bethany said. "So what did they come for?" T hey walked among the cars for twenty minutes. Nearly all of them were unlocked. Either the owners hadn't expected anyone to steal them, or hadn't expected to ever use them again.

They opened doors, felt under seats, inspected glove boxes, popped trunks. They found several portable gasoline containers in almost every trunk or truck bed. In many cases there were one or more still full, especially in cars that'd come from neighboring states. The sealed plastic had kept the contents from evaporating.

They found random small things here and there. Fast-food wrappers. Pencils. Assorted change. There were guns in many of the trunks, alongside the leftover fuel. People had chosen to bring weapons along when they'd left their homes-or at least hadn't wanted to leave them behind-but by the time they'd reached Yuma they hadn't seen the need to hang on to them.

Many of them had left something else behind with the cars: bicycles. Not many had brought them, but those who had had left them here, bolted to trunk-mounted racks or lying in truck beds. For a moment Travis could make no sense of that. Why would anyone leave their bikes behind when they had a thirty-mile-plus walk in the desert ahead of them? Then he looked at the wide-open freeway again and thought he understood. There'd been some kind of shuttle system running here when everyone arrived. Buses or flatbeds or even pickup trucks making endless circuits along the road, taking on new arrivals wherever they found them, and ferrying them into the city. The whole thing had been massively organized.

"I found something," Bethany said.

She was two cars away, leaning in through the front passenger door of a white minivan. Paige was just raising the trunk lid of a Cadillac parked across the driving lane from it. She and Travis reached Bethany at the same time.

Bethany had found a spiral notebook inside the van's console compartment. Its cover was bright yellow, unfaded, and it had a child's stick-figure drawings all over it in blue ink. The figures were frowning and weeping teardrops half the size of their heads. Bethany opened the book. There were more drawings inside. More sad people. Some of the drawings showed specific settings. One looked like a grocery store, with oranges and apples colored in with crayon. Another might have been a school hallway. Most had simply doorways or trees for backgrounds. But in all of them the human figures were despondent, in some cases covering their faces with their hands while the tears spilled from under them. What the pictures lacked was any explanation for the tears. Any indication at all of what the hell was going on to make people feel that way.

Bleak December.

That's what the media called it.

But why?

After a dozen pages of drawings there was a final image showing the van itself. The child and an adult with long hair-presumably the child's mother-were seated in front. Still frowning, but not crying. The rest of the van was shown heaped with crudely drawn, out-of-scale household items. A toaster. A vacuum cleaner. A computer. Silverware and dishes and pots and pans. Bags crammed full of clothing.

None of that stuff was still in the van. Travis could see past the front seats to the vast cavity of space where the rear benches had been folded down into the floor. There was nothing back there.

The next page of the notebook didn't feature a drawing. It bore only a block of handwritten text-the oversized script of a child that somehow spoke of great effort, even in its sloppiness. It read: I hope we get a tickit when we get to Yuma, but we will be happy enough just to get there. I hope Aunt Liz is there. Mom says we will probaly be there tonite.

All the remaining pages were blank. Bethany rifled through them, then came back to the written page.

"Ticket?" she said. "For what? A ride into town?"

They stared at the handwriting for another few seconds. Then Bethany let the book fall shut. She leaned back into the van and looked into the console compartment the book had come from. She gathered up the only other things inside it and held them up. A blue pen and two crayons, red and orange. The crayons had both melted to flattened shapes held together by just the paper around them.

"We might find a lot more questions out here," Travis said, "but I think the answers are going to be in the city."

Paige and Bethany looked like they agreed.

Travis unslung the backpack from his shoulder, unzipped it, and took out the cylinder.