Ghost Country

Chapter Twenty-Five

Twenty-five minutes later they reached the western outskirts of the city. It was larger than Travis had imagined, sprawled out over a patch of desert at least four miles by four. He exited the freeway and a moment later they were passing through a residential neighborhood full of low-slung homes, palm trees not quite as tall as the streetlights, and shallow front yards that were either gravel or irrigated grass.

They came to Fourth Avenue and turned south onto it. It seemed to be the main drag through town. It could've been any Main Street in America except for the arid terrain. There were gas stations and grocery stores and banks and jewelers. There was a Burger King. There was a movie theater with five screens.

If there was an army waiting for them, it wasn't showing itself. Which made sense, in a way.

"If we run into trouble," Travis said, "I think it'll be on the other side, in the ruins. On this side they don't know what we're driving, or even who we are except for you, Paige. But over there we'll be the only things moving around on two feet. It's a better place for them to set a watch."

Paige nodded. Weighed the possibilities. "It could be wishful thinking," she said, "but we might have a few things working in our favor. On the one hand we're up against the president of the United States, who has the military and every police force in the country at his disposal. He can make it rain brimstone on us if he wants to. On the other hand he and Finn, and whoever else they're working with, have already demonstrated a pretty severe preference for keeping their secrets intact. It's hard to imagine them grabbing a hundred soldiers or federal agents and sending them through the opening to lie in wait for us. That's a lot of people to let in on the game. My guess is Finn will stick with his own security personnel from the highrise, whatever number of them he trusts enough. No telling what that number is. A dozen if we're lucky. More if we're not."

Travis looked down a cross street going by. Considered the broad layout of the town. Imagined how it would look in moderately well-preserved ruins, with most of its structures still standing. It was a lot of area for a dozen people to watch. A lot for even several dozen.

Other advantages came to mind. As prey, the three of them had a significant edge on their potential predators: they would carry their own cylinder along with them, while Finn's people, if they were widely spaced throughout the ruins, would obviously be empty-handed in that department. There was no question that Finn himself would keep possession of his own cylinder.

That would give the three of them an easy way out of trouble, when and if they encountered it. In a pursuit, they could switch on their cylinder, hit the delayed shutoff and escape through the iris into the present day. It would stay open another minute and a half, but anyone trying to follow them through it would be committing suicide. It didn't take a West Point grad to see the tactical downside of climbing through a choke point the size of a manhole cover while defenders with a SIG 220 and a twelve-gauge were waiting on the other side. And when the 93 seconds were up, they could just run. It would take Finn a long time to transport the other cylinder across the ruins-on foot-to whatever location his men were calling him to.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice it might play out a lot differently, even if all of their assumptions were right. Which they probably weren't. T hey found a six-story Holiday Inn two blocks off of Fourth Avenue. As far as they could tell, it was the tallest building in town. They didn't check in. They simply walked in with their bags-the Remington once again broken down to fit in the big duffel-and found an empty restroom on the first floor. It had three stalls, including a large, wheelchair-accessible one. Travis held its door wide and Bethany projected the iris into the middle of the broad space beside the toilet. She pressed the delayed shutoff. The beam brightened and vanished. The three of them crowded into the stall, then shut and locked its door.

The iris looked pitch-black, the way it had when Travis and Bethany had first seen it in the Ritz. It couldn't be nighttime in the ruins: it was a quarter past five in the present, and the day on the other side was offset behind by a little over an hour. That should make it just after four in the afternoon, there.

The darkness was only the unlit interior of the hotel, in the future. The building's walls must be fully intact. The place had endured the long neglect better than any of its counterparts in D.C.-or anywhere else, probably.

The air on the other side smelled stale but not rotten. Travis didn't imagine things would rot in Yuma. They would just dry out and harden.

He stepped through the iris, keeping hold of its sides until he felt his foot touch solid ground-no doubt the same ceramic tiles that were there in the present. He brought his other leg through, then turned and took the cylinder and duffel bag from Bethany. He got out of the way and let her and Paige climb through the iris. Then they stood there in a crush against the wall, staring back through the opening, taking in the glow and hum of the fluorescent lights.

Thirty seconds later the iris shut, leaving them in a silence and darkness so complete that they might as well have been blindfolded and wearing earplugs.

Travis felt his way forward. His hand bumped against the stall door, hanging inward a few inches. He found its edge and pulled on it. Its hinges offered only a dry scrape for a protest as it swung clear.

Travis stepped out of the stall. He saw a faint rectangle of light rimming the bathroom door. He moved toward it, slowly, while he heard Paige and Bethany emerge from the stall behind him.

Halfway across the room his foot came up against something lying on the floor. He stopped. Touched his foot to it again and pushed it to test its weight. It yielded to a moderate amount of force. It weighed maybe forty pounds. Travis knew what it was. He stepped over it and found the door handle in the darkness.

"Be ready not to make any noise," he said.

"Why would we?" Bethany said.

"Because you're about to see something terrible."

He pulled open the door. Sunlight from the corridor flooded the room. Centered on the bathroom tiles lay a body. A young woman, maybe twenty, with blond hair and pink-rimmed glasses. She wore a peach-colored T-shirt and jean shorts. Her skin was stretched tight over her bones and had the brittle, matte-finish look of paper mache painted beige. She lay on her side, one forearm cushioning her face on the tiles. Her knees were drawn up, fetal. She'd died alone here and had mummified in the arid heat.

Bethany took a deep breath. It hissed through her teeth on the way out. She looked around, suddenly frantic, and at the dim edge of the light shaft coming in from the hall, she saw the bathroom's sinks. She crossed to the nearest in two running steps and reached it just as she vomited. The convulsion came in waves-two, three, four. Then she stood there getting her breath. On instinct she grabbed the faucet handle and turned it. Nothing came out.

"Fuck," she whispered.

She spat into the sink a number of times, and at last stood upright. Paige put an arm around her shoulders.

"I'm okay," Bethany said.

She didn't sound okay to Travis, but she sounded like she could stay on her feet. She'd have to cope with it later. They all would. And by then they'd have more to cope with alongside it.

A lot more, Travis saw, as he stepped into the corridor.