Ghost Country tc-2

by Patrick Lee

  It was a lot to ask for, and they didn't get any of it.

  By the second hour, still making their way south, both she and Bethany had stopped saying anything hopeful or encouraging. Then they stopped talking altogether. Neither knew what the hell to say.

  Occasionally they passed by places in the darkness where the rainfall seemed to be splashing down into deep water. They had no idea what the places might be, but the thought of accidentally stepping into one was terrifying. They were wet enough from the rain, though at least the trees kept them from being completely soaked. To fall into standing water and be drenched to the skin, with no means of drying off or getting warm, would be serious trouble.

  Finally they just stopped. They had no idea how far south they'd gone, or even if they'd held to their intended path. They felt out the lower branches of a thick pine, made their way up ten or twelve feet, and found a raft of boughs spaced tightly enough to serve as a platform.

  They lay in the darkness a long time, trying to fall asleep. They heard animals moving through the forest below, sometimes passing directly beneath where they lay. Maybe just deer. There was no way to tell.

  Paige slept. She woke sometime later, the city still pitch-black, the rain still coming down. She heard Bethany crying, trying not to make any noise, but failing. Her breath was hitching and her body was shaking hard enough to move the branches. It was as terrified and lonely a sound as Paige had ever heard. She pulled Bethany against herself and held on tightly. It seemed to help.

  When they woke again it was morning. The rain had stopped but the overcast and the chill were still there, pressing down on the ruins.

  They climbed to the ground. Paige saw at once where they were. The southwest corner of the park. She also saw what the pockets of deep water were. Subway stairs. The access to Columbus Circle Station was flooded to within a few feet below street level. Not from the rain, Paige was sure. It was only the natural water table of the island, in the absence of pumps to keep the tunnels clear.

  With daylight they found dry wood: a dead sapling in the partial shelter of an intact stone entryway. They broke it into kindling and piled it on the dry concrete below the entry. Paige used a sharp-edged rock to carefully deform and take apart one of the SIG's.45 ACP bullet cartridges. She spread the powder in a fine layer beneath one edge of the kindling, and set the cartridge's primer at its center. Then she slammed the rock down onto the primer. The powder flashed, and a few of the twigs' ends smoked and glowed for a second, but nothing else happened.

  The third cartridge-out of four that'd remained in the weapon-did the job. After that it was only a matter of finding dry enough wood to keep the fire burning. They tended it all morning and into the afternoon. They still hardly spoke. T ravis watched New York rise out of the afternoon haze far ahead. The aircraft-an F-15D this time instead of an F-15E, the distinction making no difference to its top speed-began to descend, and for the moment its speed actually ticked up a bit, from 1,650 miles per hour to 1,665.

  The fighter had originated from Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami. It'd left there for Arica within five minutes of Travis's return through the iris, into the smoke of the burning private jet. Miami was only marginally closer to Arica than New York was. About three thousand miles instead of four thousand. But it was the closest place available that had two-seater F-15s.

  Travis and Garner had done what they could to speed up the process: they'd secured the use of a Piper Cheyenne, the fastest thing based at Arica, to fly Travis north and shorten the F-15's trip. In theory, the Piper could've flown about six hundred miles while the fighter flew twenty-four hundred, saving the F-15 a round-trip distance of twelve hundred miles and putting Travis in Manhattan about forty minutes sooner than originally planned. In practice, that wasn't possible. Six hundred miles north of Arica there was nothing but the biggest jungle on the planet, and no airport in sight. The only viable option had been Alejandro Velasco Astete International, in Cusco, Peru-three hundred fifty miles from Arica. Travis had landed there and waited for the F-15-the move had bought him maybe twenty extra minutes to reach Paige and Bethany. Every second of them would count.

  There'd been plenty of time to do the math, between the flying and the waiting. Travis had watched the line of blue lights continue to disappear, measuring the interval with his watch timer. Each light winked out twenty-eight minutes and eleven seconds after the one before it. Once he had that locked down, he was able to determine the exact time when the cylinder would stop working-assuming Finn's guess had been right, which it damn near certainly had. Speaking over the aircraft's radio with both Garner and his brother, Travis rehearsed every step of the process they'd lined up. The hastily planned scramble that would begin the moment the F-15's wheels touched down at LaGuardia.

  On paper, it worked. Could work, anyway. If everything went just right. Especially at the end.

  New York rose into detail ahead.

  Exactly six minutes left on the cylinder.

  Too goddamned close. Travis felt his hands sweating on the thing.

  Manhattan gradually slid to the left of center as the plane made for the airport. The deceleration pulled Travis forward against his seat harness-he was pretty sure this wasn't the normal rate at which the plane slowed for a landing. LaGuardia's crossed runways resolved. Travis drew an imaginary line from there to the bottom of Central Park, and tried to guess the distance. Five or six miles, he thought. By road it would be twice that, and there was no telling how long the drive would take. He didn't know New York well enough to even guess, but he knew it would take a hell of a lot more than six minutes.

  Which was why he wasn't driving.

  By the time the F-15 lined up on its approach and settled into the glide path, half a mile out, Travis could already see the helicopter waiting. Not even parked on an apron-just sitting there beside the runway, right where the F-15 was going to come to rest. It was a big, hulking son of a bitch. A Sea Stallion, Garner's brother had called it. Eighty feet long, twenty-five feet high and wide. A massive six-blade rotor assembly on top. It could fly at about two hundred miles per hour once it was up to speed. It would cover the distance from LaGuardia to Central Park in a little over two minutes.

  The F-15 descended through the last dozen yards of its altitude and hit the runway.

  "Gonna roll fast and brake hard at the end," the pilot said. "Buy you some seconds."

  "I'll need them," Travis said.

  The cylinder had four minutes and fifteen seconds left.

  "Hang on."

  There wasn't much to hang on to. Travis saw two metal struts along the sides of the seatback in front of him. They looked sturdy enough. He braced his hands against them, and a second later he heard the airflow over the jet's body change radically, and his chest was pressed harder than before against the harness straps.

  He saw the Sea Stallion just ahead. It had a tail ramp like a cargo jet, lowered and facing the runway. There was a crewman standing at the foot of the ramp. Overhead, the giant rotor was already spinning. Travis could see the mammoth aircraft rising on its wheel shocks, like it was just a few hundred pounds shy of lifting off.

  The F-15 stopped twenty yards away from it. The plane's engines powered down immediately, their pitch dropping through several octaves per second-again Travis had the sense that normal procedures were out the window here. The pilot punched the canopy release and shoved it up and open. Travis stood up in his seat and bent at the waist to clear the angled canopy. He tucked the cylinder under his left arm and held it there as tightly as he could. Then he leaned forward, right out of the cockpit on the left side, grabbed the edge with his free hand and let his body swing down and out. It was over ten feet from cockpit to ground. His shoes were three feet above the tarmac when he let go; he landed hard, straightened up and sprinted for the chopper. He glanced at his watch as he ran. Three minutes and fifty seconds. T hey sat at the fire, eating apples from a tree Bethany had found at the southern edge of the park. Something had e
aten everything below about eight feet, but the rest had been untouched.

  Paige watched the long needles of a white pine bough curl in the flames.

  "It's mid-October," she said. "Any night from now on could freeze. We need to go south if we want to survive."

  "Do we want to survive?" Bethany said.

  Paige looked at her.

  "I'm sorry," Bethany said. "I'm not trying to be a quaalude, but… what's the point? Unless I seriously, seriously misunderstood high-school biology, we're the end of the line, right? You want to live to be a hundred here?"

  Paige lowered her gaze to the flames again and tried to think of an answer to the question. It was essentially the same one she'd been asking herself since the middle of the night. T he Sea Stallion crossed the East River at a height of two hundred feet, just north of a long, narrow island that paralleled the Manhattan shoreline. A second later the aircraft was screaming over the rooftops of the Upper East Side, banking in long, gentle arcs to avoid the taller structures.

  Two minutes, thirty seconds.

  Travis was standing upright, holding onto the doorway in the forward bulkhead just before the flight deck. Other than himself, the only people aboard were the pilot and co-pilot. Behind Travis was the cavernous troop bay. Its long side walls were lined with bench seats made of steel tubing and canvas. The walls themselves were just the structural ribs of the fuselage and the metal outer skin. Hydraulic lines and wiring conduits ran everywhere. Harsh overhead fluorescent panels lit the space.

  The co-pilot turned in his seat and shouted over the thrum of the rotors and the turbines driving them. "Our orders are pretty damn specific. In addition to the phrase haul ass being emphasized about a dozen times, here's how I understand it. We land in the biggest clearing toward the south end. We leave the ramp closed. We face forward and we don't pay any attention to you for the next two minutes."

  "That'll work," Travis said.

  "What the fuck do we do after that?"

  "Whatever you want," Travis said. "I'll be gone by then."

  The guy stared at him a few seconds longer, waiting for the rest of the joke. When it didn't come, he just shook his head and faced forward again. He mouthed something Travis didn't catch.

  They passed over Fifth Avenue at a diagonal, still doing just under two hundred miles per hour. The pilot started cutting the altitude, even as he kept the forward speed maxed. Travis saw the clearing ahead, coming up very fast. They covered most of the remaining distance to it in just a few seconds.

  "All right, hang on tight," the pilot shouted.

  Travis gripped the doorway with his right hand. He held the cylinder tight against himself with his left. He saw the pilot pull back hard on the stick, but for the next half second nothing happened. Then the park and the skyline, visible ahead through the windscreen, dropped away sickeningly as the chopper leaned back into a steep tilt. Nothing through the windows but blue sky. In the same moment its massive tail swung around like a boom, and when Travis saw the park again it was turning like a schoolyard seen from a merry-go-round. He saw people below, running like hell to get clear as the chopper descended fast.

  Just before touchdown Travis looked at his watch. One minute, forty seconds. P aige was still thinking about Bethany's question when the sound started up. A heavy bass vibration through the trees, like a bank of concert amplifiers playing no music, but simply cranked to full volume and humming. There was a rhythm to the sound, as well. A cycling throb. Like helicopter rotors.

  Bethany flinched and turned where she sat, looking for the sound source along with her. It was almost impossible to get a fix on. It was deep and diffused and everywhere.

  Then they heard a man shouting, from very far away.

  Travis.

  Shouting for them to answer.

  And shouting for them to run. T ravis ran to get clear of the iris, not because he knew which direction to go, but just to get away from the turbine sound-he needed to listen for Paige and Bethany. He looked back once, and through the opening he saw the fluorescent-lit interior of the Sea Stallion. On this side, the iris was surrounded by the massive pines and hardwoods that'd long since filled in the clearing.

  He stopped fifty yards south.

  He shouted for Paige and Bethany again.

  He listened.

  Nothing.

  Nothing he could hear over the chopper, anyway. It'd never occurred to him to have the pilots shut the damn thing down. He just hadn't thought of it, against the clamor of everything else he'd been focused on. No time for it now. He looked at his watch.

  Fifty seconds left.

  He shouted again.

  A second later he heard them. Far ahead and to the right. He broke into a sprint, holding the cylinder tight and dodging side to side through the trees. Their voices sounded very far away. Maybe far enough that there was no real chance, even with them closing the distance toward him. He ignored the thought. It didn't serve any purpose. He simply ran.

  An even less welcome thought followed: his math on the timing could be off. Maybe by as much as ten seconds. He'd tried to nail it down as accurately as possible, and where he'd been forced to round off, he'd done so conservatively. It was possible that he had a few more seconds than he thought-but he could just as easily have fewer.

  He glanced down at the cylinder as he ran. Its final blue light stared back at him impassively.

  He kept shouting.

  He could hear their replies now even over his own running footsteps.

  Closer.

  But only a little.

  Thirty seconds.

  He sprinted faster. Felt his leg muscles burn with acid, and welcomed the pain.

  He listened for Paige and Bethany, and realized he could hear more than their voices. He could hear their bodies crashing through the trees. They were closer than he'd imagined. Much closer. There was still time.

  Then he broke through the interlaced boughs of a pair of pines and saw the real source of the crashing sound.

  Not Paige and Bethany.

  A clutch of white-tailed deer. Thirty or forty of them, streaming through the trees, two or three abreast. Spooked by what they'd never heard before: human voices. The animals crossed his path just ahead at a diagonal, damn near running him down. Two hundred pounds apiece and moving at thirty miles an hour. Blocking his way like a train thundering across a road.

  "Fuck!" he screamed. He saw the nearest of the animals draw hard aside from him, the formation bulging away but not slowing or scattering.

  The instant they'd passed he began to sprint again, but even as he did, he heard Paige calling, and the sound was still agonizingly faint and distant.

  He looked at his watch.

  Ten seconds.

  He stopped running.

  He stared down at the blue light again.

  He'd decided hours earlier, before he'd even left Arica, what he would do if it came to this. If time were almost up, and there were no chance of saving Paige and Bethany. If all he could do was get himself back through the iris.

  It'd been no choice at all. Not then and not now.

  Travis opened his hand and let the cylinder fall to the soft earth at his feet. It rolled a few inches and stopped, with the blue light facing him.

  He sat down and rested his arms across his knees.

  Five seconds. P aige ran as hard as she could. Bethany kept up beside her. They ducked branches, shoved others aside, vaulted deadfalls.

  It hardly entered Paige's mind to wonder what the hurry was. There was no room in her thoughts for anything but exhilaration. A wild, animal joy. She couldn't recall ever experiencing this sudden and steep a reversal of emotions. She ran. She didn't care why. Z ero seconds.

  For the moment, the blue light stayed on.

  Not surprising. Conservative estimates. It would die in the next few seconds.

  Travis heard footsteps and small branches breaking. Paige and Bethany were still far away. Well over a minute out. He heard Paige call for him
again. He didn't answer. Suddenly shouting felt like a lie. They'd find him soon enough. He'd explain.

  At five seconds past zero the idea came to him.

  It hit like a physical thing. He couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it hours earlier, along with all the other preparations.

  He threw himself forward and scooped up the cylinder. He aimed it roughly level with the ground and jammed his finger against the on button. The iris appeared and he saw the sun-drenched leaves of thin forest undergrowth in the present day, and heard the whine of the Sea Stallion again, hundreds of feet away. In the same instant he pressed the delayed shutoff button. He watched the light cone brighten.

  His gaze fell and locked onto the last blue light of the timing line. He was certain of one thing: if the cylinder died before it detached from the iris, the iris would die with it.

  He stared at the light cone, shining intensely as it charged the projected opening.

  The seconds drew out like exposed nerves.

  Then the light cone vanished, and the timing light vanished, and if there was even a hundredth of a second between the two events, Travis couldn't tell.

  He looked for the iris.

  It was still there.

  Still open.

  Central Park waiting on the other side.

  While he was looking at it he heard a hiss and felt the cylinder vibrate in his hands. He looked down and saw wispy tendrils of smoke issuing from inside the casing, coming out around the three buttons. The thing was dead.

  Travis got to his feet and shouted for Paige and Bethany, loud enough that pain flared in his throat. P aige hadn't heard Travis in the past half minute. Now she heard him again, and at this range she caught in the sound what she'd missed earlier: panic.

  He was screaming for them to move as fast as they could.

  Paige had felt like she was moving her fastest, but hearing the tone of his voice, she found she could move a little faster. So could Bethany.