by Patrick Lee
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?”
They 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.
Chapter Twenty-Five
They opened the iris two hundred yards from the highway, in case someone happened to be driving by at that moment in 2011. Travis looked through. No cars in sight. The Jeep was just as they’d left it.
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 a
n 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.
They 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 mâché 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.
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 re
specting 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.