Ghost Country

Chapter Twenty-Six

The ground-floor hallway of the hotel was filled with bodies. Cluttered so thick with them that it would require careful footsteps to avoid them. They lay in the positions they'd died in. On their sides and their stomachs and their backs, heads on folded arms or wadded articles of clothing. A few were seated against the wall, their arms crossed on bent knees and their heads bowed onto them. Their spinal columns stood out in sharp relief through the papery skin of their necks.

They were every age. There were gray-haired seniors. There were couples that might have been college students or even high-school kids, dead in each other's arms. There were children with their heads resting in parents' laps. Beside the stairwell door sat a woman who might have been thirty. She held a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. She'd died with her head leaned back against the wall. The dried remnant of her expression looked serene and calm. Travis wanted to believe she'd really felt that way at the end, but he didn't.

Here and there, exposed arms and legs bore ragged bite marks where scavengers had been at the bodies. The damage was small in scale: apparently, no animals larger than rats had made their way into the hotel, at least in the early days. Maybe bigger things had come along later, but by then the mummification had made these dead an unappealing food source, and they'd been left alone. It was as close as nature could come to respecting dignity.

Travis's gaze fell on a couple that'd probably been in their twenties. They'd piled a few jackets and shirts at the base of the wall and were huddled against them. The woman's arms were lying flat across the man's chest, but his were around her, holding her to him. Her forehead rested against his mouth. She'd died first, Travis realized. The man had held her body and kissed her forehead, and stayed in that position until he'd faded away himself.

Travis felt moisture rimming his eyes. He blinked it away. He glanced around and saw Paige and Bethany doing the same, just behind him at the open bathroom door.

He found himself taking in the condition of the building. It was almost pristine. The drywall in the corridor looked no different than it had in the present. The high-gloss paint on the crown molding had cracked and flaked, but only in a few places. There weren't even cobwebs. Travis imagined dust would've settled out of the air here after a while, without foot traffic kicking up carpet fibers and pillows being fluffed. He could see none drifting around in the pale sunlight that shone along the hallway.

He turned toward the source of the light: the double doors at the end of the hall, fifty feet away. They were closed but they were mostly glass. The wall around them was also glass. All of it remained intact.

The wedge of parking lot that was visible beyond looked bleached and barren in the hard light. It was full of cars, which wasn't surprising.

Paige let the bathroom door fall shut.

The three of them stood there. They listened. The hotel was as silent as it'd no doubt been for decades.

They watched the space beyond the glass wall for over a minute. Past the parking lot the view was blocked in places by other buildings, but in the gaps between those they could see a long way-hundreds of yards in some cases. Against the bases of distant buildings they could see deep accumulations of wind-piled sand, blinding white in the sun. None of it was blowing around now.

They saw no movement anywhere.

Travis set the cylinder and the large duffel bag on the floor. He took the shotgun from the bag, reassembled it, and slung it on his shoulder. Then he opened the bathroom door again and slid the duffel bag far to the left inside, near the sinks. It was too much to haul around the ruins with them. If they came back this way, they could get it later.

Bethany took the SIG from her backpack, considered it, and then handed it to Paige. "You're probably a better shot than me. I'll carry the cylinder. Better to have it in hand than in the pack. If we need to use it fast, seconds will count."

She zipped and shouldered the backpack again-it held only shotgun shells now-and picked up the cylinder from where Travis had set it.

Travis studied the parking lot another few seconds, then turned and made his way through the bodies to the stairwell door. T here was a vague light shining in the stairwell. It came from somewhere high above. Even on the lowest flights it was enough to reveal the few bodies that lay in this space.

They found the light source on the fourth-floor landing. The husk of a balding man in his forties lay sprawled across the threshold leading to the hallway, the door forever propped open at forty-five degrees. It let in sunlight from the same kind of glass wall that capped the ground floor corridor.

They continued to the sixth floor. The bodies in the hallway there were as densely strewn as downstairs. Some of the guestroom doors they passed stood open. More bodies inside, on beds and in chairs. Travis stared at the shapes of bones beneath drawn skin. All the bodies were shriveled to that degree. He didn't think mummification alone had done that to them. More likely starvation and dehydration had done it before they'd died.

They came to the glass wall at the end, looking out over Yuma from six stories up.

They stared.

"Jesus Christ," Paige said softly.

It was the last thing any of them said for several minutes.

Every building in Yuma looked exactly as it had when they'd driven through it in the present day, except that the colors were baked to pastel versions of themselves. Like soft-drink cans left in the sun for weeks. Every parking lot was filled to capacity with cars and trucks. Every curb space was taken too. The vehicles had endured just as those in the open desert had: faded paint and no tires or window seals. Beyond the edges of the city, the mad but organized sprawl of cars extended out of sight in all directions. From this height it looked dramatically more absurd than it had from the shoulder of I-8, since the horizon was much farther away.

The three of them noticed all of that within seconds, and then disregarded it. Something else had taken their full attention.

The city of Yuma was drifted with human bones.

Seven decades of wind had scurried them into piles against all available obstructions. Cars, buildings, landscaping walls, planter boxes. They were everywhere except for open stretches of flat ground-like the section of parking lot immediately below, which had been visible from the first floor. From down there they'd seen the bones only at a distance, and mistaken them for sand.

Travis let his eyes roam the nearest pile, seventy feet left of the exterior door. The bones had massed there against a different wing of the hotel. He could see them with enough clarity to discern adult skulls from those of children, and large ribs from small ones. The bones were scoured clean and white. Everyone who'd died outdoors had been quickly discovered by coyotes and foxes and desert cats, and whatever they'd left behind, the sun and wind had eventually taken care of.

"It's everyone, isn't it?" Bethany said. "They really did it. They all came here and just… died."

Travis looked at her. Saw her eyes suddenly haunted by a new thought.

"Maybe we were with them," she said. "Maybe our bones are out there somewhere." T hey watched the city for another five minutes, for any sign of movement. If Finn's people were there, they were already hidden in ideal vantage points. Travis considered that. Realized something obvious.

"I think we're here ahead of them," he said.

"How can you know?" Paige said.

"Because if they'd gotten here first, some of them would be standing at this window." T here were three other floor-to-ceiling windows on the sixth floor, at the ends of other wings. They spent a few minutes at each of them, scrutinizing the city. They saw bones everywhere, but no sign of recent disturbance.

They also saw no indication that Yuma had been modified to handle any kind of crowd. No trailers or temporary shelters had been set up. If there'd been tents erected about the place, they were long gone in the wind.

Then they came to the last window, facing southeast, and understood where they needed to go next.

A mile away lay the broad expanse of the airport. The runways were clear, flawless. They probably looked no better even in the present. The terminals stood glittering and vacant. There were no aircraft docked at any of the gates. Travis studied the scene and wondered why it looked odd to him. Then it hit him: there were no parked cars filling the airport's space. It was open ground-the only open ground for miles.

"There's something written there," Bethany said. She pointed to the south end of the longest runway.

Travis saw what she meant. A few hundred feet in from the runway's identification numbers, someone had written a message in huge white letters-probably using the same paint the airport used for the runway lines. Travis had missed it at first; it was hard to read the letters from a long side angle. The message seemed to be intended for someone looking straight down on it from a plane.

Travis put it together one letter at a time, and had it after a few seconds.

It read: come back.