by Patrick Lee
That was why he’d left Border Town and consigned himself to a life at minimum wage. It was the one way he could be sure to avoid whatever was coming. If he spent the next forty years stocking shelves, he could never cause the kind of disaster the Whisper had described. He’d be in no position to influence events on that scale, for good or bad.
And that answered the question: this was not about him. This was something else entirely. This was 6 or 7 billion deaths, not 20 million, and they’d happened without his help. Simple as that.
He and Bethany reached the junction where Vermont met the traffic circle. They halted for a moment at the cafe on the northeast quadrant, where they’d sat earlier. The patio’s marble tiles lay canted and broken around the trunks of pines and sugar maples that’d punched up through them. Travis recalled the smell of sausage and the jumble of conversation as they’d studied the green building across the circle. That memory was barely an hour old, but in this place that moment was decades and decades gone.
Just off the patio, a few feet in from what remained of the curb, stood a row of corroded husks that’d once been newspaper boxes. Their tops were rusted to Swiss cheese and their doors had all fallen off. If any newspapers had been left in these containers at the end, they were long gone now. Paper wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years against humidity and mildew, even when the doors had been intact.
“Wonder what the headlines were,” Bethany said. “I wonder what was on the front page of the last USA Today.”
Travis had no answer.
They stared at the scene only a few seconds longer, then turned and moved across the circle, toward the standing ruin of the sixteen-story office building.
Chapter Twelve
The plan was straightforward enough: all Bethany needed was a name. The name of someone who worked inside this building in the present day. A loose thread to start pulling on, and they might have the FBI involved within the hour.
Among these ruins, paper files and computer drives would be long lost, but an office building had other storage media that should have survived the intervening years just fine. Specifically, Travis was thinking of office door nameplates. They tended to be made of either plastic or bronze, and the names and job titles on them were usually deeply engraved—sometimes they were cut fully through the plate. A plastic nameplate could probably sit out in the elements for a million years and still be legible, and even bronze should be good for a long while. Longer than most other metals. Corrosion resistance was one of the advantages that had made bronze such a big deal, way back in the day.
A single name. It was all they needed.
They rounded the cluster of birches and got a full view of the high-rise. It’d borne the years better than most of the other structures they’d seen. Its frame, though heavily rusted, was still standing whole and straight. A good portion of the concrete flooring at each level remained intact—maybe a third of it in all. Travis could see even the remnant of a stairwell near the building’s core, thick metal risers and treads still in place. It wasn’t hard to guess why the building had fared better than its neighbors along the street. It was newer. Built in 2006, it probably had a few decades on any other structure within a couple blocks. That meant it was not only younger, but that its steel had probably been of higher quality to begin with. It’d benefited from all the advances in refinement and impurity removal in the years leading up to its construction. For all that, it was still another relic waiting to fall. Its superior attributes would buy it an extra five years on its feet, at best.
They reached the building’s concrete foundation wall. It stood three feet above street level and was four feet thick. They peered over the edge. The foundation was only a single story deep, but a third of that depth was filled with a compost layer of leaves and branches and probably a few dozen tons of gypsum plaster that had once made up the building’s drywall. Travis stared at the layer and felt his optimism fade. He thought of looking for an eight-by-two-inch nameplate among half an acre of chest-deep biomass. He thought of needles and haystacks. Then he saw something that turned his optimism all the way off.
It was a blackened, fibrous slab of wood maybe two inches thick. A corner of it was just peeking from the mire ten feet away. There was a rusted hinge attached to it. A single, inch-long steel screw clung to the free-swinging half of the hinge. Both the screw and the hinge were deformed. They hadn’t just corroded to rust and flaked away. They’d sagged and bent. They’d half melted.
Fire had ravaged the foundation pit at some point in the past. It hadn’t burned hot enough, or long enough, to affect the massive footings of the girder structure, but everything else had suffered in the heat. The heavy wooden door had probably been solid oak. It looked like the carbonized remnant of a campfire log now. Travis thought of bronze again. He thought of the other thing it was celebrated for: the ease with which it could be heat-softened and reshaped. Plastic and bronze nameplates might last for millennia against rain and snow and mildew, but they wouldn’t last five minutes in a fire hot enough to warp steel screws.
They walked the building’s perimeter. They searched for any scraps that had fallen outside the foundation. They found a few shards of green glass and chunks of concrete from the missing floor sections above, but nothing useful. Nothing with anyone’s name on it. Decades of rain and wind had scoured the exposed street of anything small enough to be carried away. Travis imagined meter-wide storm drains beneath the city clotted with every kind of refuse.
They climbed a maple growing against the girders on the west side of the building and got onto the second floor. They made their way across the level toward the intact stairwell at the center of the structure. They avoided walking on the huge pads of concrete that still held in some places among the steel framing. All of the pads showed cracks, and some were sagging. It was impossible to know the amount of weight they could hold. Sooner or later each one’s capacity would reach zero and it would collapse. A day or a week or a month before that point, the capacity was probably just a few pounds. Given that most of them had already fallen, it seemed prudent to stay the hell off of them.
They reached the stairwell and found it to be solid. The treads and risers were at least an inch thick. None of the flights they could see above had collapsed or even decoupled from the structural members they were welded to.
They made their way up.
They stopped and studied each floor. A few very heavy objects from the building’s interior remained atop the concrete pads here and there. One was a squat granite bookend, like a little pyramid cut in half. Travis lifted it and saw traces of carpet fiber and foam beneath it. The thing had sat there, a little too dense to be blown away, while everything had rotted around it—even out from under it. They found a pair of hexagonal iron dumbbells, twenty pounds each. Travis imagined them sitting in someone’s office and not seeing much use. They’d seen even less lately.
They saw a few steel door frames still held in place against the sturdiest uprights, but there were no doors left in any of them. No doors lying flat on any of the concrete pads, either. They’d have long since rotted to fragments light enough that a once-in-a-decade storm could push them over the edge. At least half a dozen such storms would’ve happened over the years. No doors. No nameplates.
They saw something shiny at the north edge of the fifth floor. They crossed to it along the girders. It was the foil lid of a yogurt container, its edge pinned beneath the rim of a tipped-over trash basket—a stylish, heavy little thing carved from a cubic foot of limestone.
Travis pulled the yogurt lid free and held it up to the light. Whatever writing had once been on it had long ago faded to almost nothing in the sun.
But there was a line of text along the edge that remained legible—tiny letters and numbers that’d been stamped into the foil.
They read: exp. dec 23 2011.
Chapter Thirteen
For a few seconds everything was quiet, except the wind moving through the forest that’
d replaced Washington, D.C. Far to the west Travis heard a crow cawing, high above the treetops. The weightless foil lid quivered just noticeably in the breeze, but Travis’s eyes stayed fixed on the expiration date.
“Four months from now,” Bethany said. “In our time.” The words came out as hardly more than a breath.
“I don’t eat a lot of yogurt,” Travis said. “How far away is the sell-by date, when you buy this stuff?”
“It’s like milk. Three or four weeks. Someone would’ve bought this around the start of December. This coming December, in the present day.”
Travis nodded.
“And it’s not like people hang on to these lids for posterity,” Bethany said. “Figure this thing goes into the trash in early to mid-December . . . and no one ever takes it back out. Jesus Christ, the world ends four months from now?”
“Janitors quit working four months from now, at least,” Travis said. “My guess is, so does everyone else.”
He let the lid go and they watched it drift down on the air, like the colored leaves that were settling onto Vermont Avenue before them.
“Four months . . .” Bethany said again. “Everyone I know. Everyone I love. Four months . . .”
Travis found himself going back to what he’d thought of earlier: the chance of some connection between all of this and whatever the Whisper had warned him about—the dark potential of his own future.
He remained certain there was no connection, but now something else struck him: the Whisper had spoken of a future in which he belonged to Tangent several years from now. How could that have ever been possible if the world was going to collapse in 2011?
Well, weren’t all bets simply off, after everything the Whisper had done? In a roundabout way, the thing had killed Ellen Garner, with the result that President Garner had resigned from office and allowed Currey to take power. That change alone could account for massive differences in how everything played out.
“End of the world plus seventy years, we guessed,” Bethany said. “So on this side of the iris, the date is sometime around 2080.”
Travis nodded, but said nothing. He looked around. From this position he could see along not only Vermont, but M Street to the east and west, a hundred yards in each direction before the tree cover obscured the way.
Something obvious occurred to him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it already.
“Where are the cars?” he said.
He looked at Bethany. She looked blank for half a second and then made the same oh yeah expression he’d probably just made himself.
“The panels would be rusted to nothing by now,” Travis said, “but the frames and the wheel rims should still be in some kind of shape, with windows and all kinds of plastic parts draped over them.” He looked around. “They should be everywhere.”
But there wasn’t one to be seen. They hadn’t passed anything that could’ve once been a vehicle on the walk down from the Ritz. Hadn’t seen anything like that along the stretch of Vermont north of the hotel, either, when they’d first roped down. He’d have noticed and remembered.
“People must’ve had a reason to get out of D.C.,” Bethany said, “at the end.”
Travis stared at the empty streets and thought about it. He imagined a plague sweeping the world. People fleeing high-population areas in a mass panic.
It didn’t work. Not entirely. First of all, not everyone would leave. Some number of people would have nowhere better to go, and would hole up in their homes. The city could still end up vacated of cars, even in that case—in the end, those without transportation would break into and hotwire whatever was available—but there was another problem, and Travis could see no way around it. The dynamics of a mass evacuation in a short period of time would’ve overwhelmed the city streets. It happened in every coastal metropolis in the days before a big hurricane. Traffic would condense at the primary outlets, like bridges and freeway interchanges. People would sit at the wheel for an hour or two, going nowhere, and then a few would run out of gas while idling, or get frustrated and simply abandon their vehicles, and try to get out on foot. It only took a few of those, and then each way out of the city would be stopped up like a corked bottle. And hurricane warnings matured over three to four days. Travis imagined that news of a major disease outbreak would hit at least that fast. Maybe faster. The gridlock would be absolute. There would be all kinds of cars left rotting on M Street and Vermont Avenue if the world had ended in a plague.
He turned and saw Bethany trying to work it out too.
“Everyone got in their cars and left,” Travis said. “But not in a hurry.”
They returned to the stairwell and continued the search of the building, floor by floor. At the ninth level they walked out to the northeast corner, where seventy years earlier Paige had been held. There was nothing special about the construction there. Just more girders, and a concrete flooring section that hadn’t yet surrendered to gravity.
Travis stared at the undefined space. Irrational as he knew it was, he couldn’t help thinking that Paige was right there somehow, just feet away, but impossible to reach from here. He wondered what she was thinking. Wondered if she knew they were trying to get to her—that she wasn’t as alone as she must feel. He thought about it for a few seconds and then forced himself to look away. Losing time here wasn’t helping her.
They continued up the stairwell. They found nothing of interest on any of the floors through the fifteenth. Only one floor remained above that point, and it had just three of its concrete pads still in place. Of all the surfaces in the building these were the most exposed to rain and wind and sunlight. Looking up at the slabs, Travis put the chance of finding anything noteworthy on top of them right around zero.
Then they climbed the last flight, and he saw at once that he’d been wrong.
Chapter Fourteen
Two of the three pads were bare and bleached and scoured smooth by the elements, as expected.
On the third, halfway between the stairwell and the building’s northeast corner, stood an executive office desk.
It was made of rich cherrywood. Its work surface was three feet by six. It was centered perfectly on its slab of concrete. It looked like someone had hauled it out of a showroom five minutes ago and put it there.
For the longest moment Travis could only stare. He and Bethany shared a look. Then they walked across the girders to the desk.
At close range it became plausible. It wasn’t made of cherrywood. It was made of some synthetic material that did a hell of a job of looking like cherrywood. And it was lag bolted to the pad. Ice expansion cracks had grown laterally from the bolt holes in the concrete, wide enough in places that Travis could see the exposed and rusted mesh of rebar inside. Of all the floor sections he’d seen in the building, this one looked the closest to failing. By far. And that was without factoring in the weight of the desk pressing on it. It was a wonder the slab had held this long.
There were four drawers in the desk. Two on either side of where a person would sit. Shallow tray drawers above, deep file drawers below. All four were closed. Their front panels were made of the same synthetic material that had held up so well during the desk’s long reign atop the decaying building. Travis crouched low on the girder at the point nearest the desk, and studied the drawers. They were tightly closed. They would be weighted to stay shut until someone gave them a good tug. The wind had never managed to do so: there was nothing on the drawers’ faces to offer it any purchase. In the early years the drawers had also had the benefit of being locked shut, but that protection was probably nominal by now: Travis saw only rust-choked circular indentations where steel keyholes had once been.
Four drawers. Not sealed shut, but at least shut. No sunlight would’ve gotten into them. Not much ice, either. A trace amount of rain would’ve made it through, and all the humidity and mold and mildew in the world would’ve gone in like there was no barrier at all. Any paper contents would be a distant memory. But people kept other
things in desk drawers. Credit cards. Engraved metal items.
All they needed was a name.
Travis stood upright again. He stared at the concrete pad, sagging in its frame. There was no way to reach the desk drawers without venturing completely onto it, and not just a step or two. Not any short distance from which you could turn and grab for the girder if the concrete gave without warning. To open the drawers would require going all the way to the middle of the pad, eight feet in from the edge.
“How much do you weigh?” Bethany said.
Travis shook his head. “You’re not going out there.”
“I weigh a hundred ten pounds naked. Mind averting your eyes and holding onto my clothes?”
“You’re not going out there. I’m going.”
She looked at him. “Is this really the time for sexism masquerading as chivalry?”
“Yes.”
Travis unslung the shotgun and handed it to her. He stood there a few seconds longer, eyeing the cracks. He turned around and leaned a few inches past the other side of the girder—the open side—and looked down at the fifteenth floor. There was no intact concrete directly below to slow or hinder the fall of this pad, if it collapsed. There was nothing but open space all the way to a pad down on the twelfth floor, which would do about as much good as a big sheet of tissue paper stretched between the girders there. And after that it was smooth plummeting all the way to the foundation. Travis turned and faced the desk again.