Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee

  Bethany’s eyes narrowed. She thought about it. “You could accidentally leave the cylinder behind. Leave it on the other side of the iris when it closed.”

  Travis nodded. “It would happen one of two ways. Either you leave it in the future, in which case there’s no way to retrieve it except to sit on your ass and wait several decades, or else you leave it in the past and trap yourself in the future, in which case you’re absolutely screwed.”

  Bethany walked over to the armchair. Stared down at the cylinder.

  “You’d want a backup copy,” she said.

  “You’d need a backup copy. Like a skydiver needs a reserve chute. Because some mistakes you can’t afford to make even once. You’d have a duplicate cylinder, and you’d strap it to your back and never take it off, at least not while you were using the first one.”

  Bethany met his eyes. “It makes sense that Paige and the others would’ve figured this out. In the desert they had both cylinders. They could have tested this idea without any risk of getting stranded. Just leave one of them switched on, and use the other one to find out whether or not the iris brings you back to the present time.”

  Travis nodded. It all added up.

  A silence drew out.

  “We could be wrong about this,” Bethany said.

  “We could be very wrong.”

  “Just plain old wrong would be bad enough. If we try this and it doesn’t work, we’re stuck over there.”

  “If we try it and it does work,” Travis said, “then we can take the cylinder into the future, carry it up to the ninth floor of that ruin on M Street, and step back into the present time right inside the room where they’re holding Paige.”

  The idea seemed to wash over Bethany like a breeze on a spring day.

  “Nice,” she said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They repositioned the cylinder so that it projected the iris to a different part of the hotel room—closer to the building’s interior, and away from the part that’d collapsed in the future. They found a spot that would allow them to step through onto a solid girder in the ruins. There was a sturdy oak limb hanging over it, which would offer easy transit to the ground.

  Travis stepped through onto the beam. Bethany stood in the room, next to the cylinder. She put her finger over the third button and looked at him.

  “Say when,” she said.

  Travis looked at his watch. The second hand was ten clicks from the top of the dial. When it was three clicks shy he said, “Now.”

  Bethany pressed the button. The cone of light flared and then died. The iris stayed open. Bethany lifted the cylinder and carried it to the opening. She passed it through to Travis and he cradled it tightly against himself.

  Then Bethany reached through, grabbed the oak branch, and pulled herself onto the girder.

  “What are you doing?” Travis said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have to be over here too. We don’t both have to risk this. If we’re wrong, and there’s no way back, you might as well be in the present.”

  “Why?” she said. “I’d be stuck there without the cylinder. What would I do?”

  “Live the life of Renee Turner. Party like hell. Anything you want.”

  “Yeah. For four months. Knowing the whole time that the world’s going to end.”

  “It’s probably longer than we’d make it on this side.” He looked at his watch. Sixty seconds left. “This is stupid. You should wait in the room.”

  “It’s the broken concrete all over again.”

  “Yeah, it is, and you don’t have to be on it.”

  She turned to face him, leaning on the branch between them. The overcast had thinned, and in the brighter light he saw her eyes more clearly than he had before now. He’d thought they were brown. Really they were green, but so dark they were almost black.

  “You’re willing to risk being left alone in the whole world, for the sake of someone you care about,” she said. “And I think someone willing to do that shouldn’t have to. If we get stuck here, we’ll find ways to pass the time.”

  He held her gaze. It occurred to him that what she was doing was about as kind a gesture as a human could make to another. For a long moment he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Then he said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Thirty seconds.”

  She nodded. Swallowed hard.

  They both turned and stared through the iris. Through the windows on the far side of the hotel room they could see the city in the present day. The orderly buildings and the gleam of sunlight on glass. The traffic flowing smoothly through the circle down the block. People on the sidewalks in shorts and T-shirts. Parents walking with kids in the light of a summer morning.

  “For all that’s wrong with the world,” Travis said, “it really is something.”

  In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany nod.

  And then the iris slipped shut in front of them, and left them staring at precisely the same angle on the ruined city. A perfect superimposition from one image to the other. From solid buildings to their leaning skeletons. From the bustling street to the decaying one. The effect was more powerful than Travis had expected. He heard Bethany exhale softly beside him and knew it’d been the same for her.

  Travis moved ten feet along a girder that T-boned into the one they’d first stepped onto. He found a position from which the cylinder would project the iris to more or less the same spot it’d just vanished from. Bethany, on the first girder, stood clear.

  Travis wondered what it would look like if they were wrong, and the iris opened onto a Washington, D.C. seven decades even further on. The frames of the buildings would be long gone. The roads, too. It might be hard to tell there’d been a city there at all.

  He leveled the cylinder like a weapon.

  He pressed the on button.

  The light cone flared.

  The iris appeared.

  Bethany didn’t look through it. She looked at him instead.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Part II

  Umbra

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paige lay bound, waiting for it to happen.

  Waiting for the end.

  Every few minutes she heard footsteps approach in the corridor, only to pass by and fade away. She waited for the footsteps that would approach but not fade, and the click of the latch that would tell her it was all over with.

  She rolled onto her side and faced the windows. She could see up Vermont Avenue. Lots of people out. She saw a red convertible pull into the Ritz-Carlton. Saw a young couple get out. Impossible to see their expressions at this distance, but they had to be smiling. They left the car to a valet and disappeared into the building.

  Beautiful day.

  Beautiful world to be alive in.

  She wished she could know that it would stay this way a lot longer than four months—even if she wouldn’t be around to see it.

  The street blurred a little. She blinked away the film of tears. She took a sharp breath and rolled onto her back again.

  Another set of footsteps came and went. She closed her eyes and waited.

  Travis sprinted full-out down the broken surface of the avenue, south toward the traffic circle. Bethany kept up with him. They weren’t listening for heavy movement in the forest now. Travis had the shotgun cradled as he ran. If a lion stepped into his path it was going to get a long overdue reminder that meaner predators had once walked these streets.

  He mapped out the plan as he sprinted. Visualized the ninth floor of the ruin, and the northeast corner there. They’d looked at it earlier. The concrete pad had been pretty solid, with just a few hairline fractures.

  No way to know the room’s layout in the present day. Not even its size. It didn’t have to match the concrete. The safest place to open the iris would be near the room’s outside corner. That would at least get them inside the space, wha
tever its size.

  He pictured how the action would play out. In present time he would come through the iris facing the corner, with his back to the room. He’d lose maybe half a second turning and getting a sense of his surroundings. There was no reason to expect an armed presence in the room itself. Paige would be restrained, and the building was secured at ground level. Nobody would expect intruders to step through a hole in the air on the ninth floor.

  But armed or not, anyone in the room other than Paige would have to be dealt with.

  He considered the Remington. Imagined going through the iris with it. It would be bulky and slow to maneuver in the confined space of the corner. It would need to be cycled between shots, and he’d get only five of them. Anyone he hit would be dead all over the place, but if there were multiple targets, and if they did happen to be armed, the limited shot capacity could get him in trouble.

  They reached the traffic circle. Crossed it in about twenty seconds. In another twenty they were at the base of the maple that offered access to the second floor. They climbed to the girders and headed across them toward the stairwell.

  “Trade with me,” Travis said. He held the shotgun out to Bethany. She took it and handed him the SIG-Sauer. It held nine .45 caliber rounds, including the one in the chamber. They wouldn’t hit like twelve-gauge slugs, but they would do the job. And he could aim and fire the pistol a hell of a lot faster than a three-foot-long shotgun. Bethany handed him the three spare magazines from her pocket. He put two in his own pocket and kept the other one in his free hand. If need be, he could drop the current magazine out of the pistol and reload it in about a second.

  They were on the ninth floor a minute later, moving as fast as caution allowed across the open beams. They came to the concrete pad at the corner. Travis gave it only a second’s assessment and then walked onto it. Strong as hell. An intact pad directly above it had blocked at least some of the snow and ice that would’ve stressed it over the years.

  Bethany followed him onto the pad. She shrugged off her backpack, opened it and took out the cylinder. The rest of the shotgun shells—one hundred minus those in the gun and in Travis’s pockets—settled into the bottom of the pack.

  She set the cylinder on the concrete and used the backpack to prop up the front end. The iris would open just above waist level, two feet in from the corner of the room.

  She knelt over the cylinder, ready to switch it on.

  Travis stood next to where the beam would project the iris. He gripped the SIG. Took a breath. Looked at Bethany.

  “Do it,” he said.

  She pressed the button.

  The iris appeared, and through it Travis saw tinted glass and flowing traffic far below and he ducked through and spun as he stood upright, the SIG coming up and sweeping the room for targets.

  The room was empty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was one door out of the room. It was closed. There was a narrow strip of glass set into it. Travis crossed the room and looked through it. The corridor stretched away in two directions from the corner. He could see all the way down one stretch, and not far at all down the other. Just a few feet before the angle got in the way.

  The corridor was tiled with either stone or ceramic. Travis heard footsteps clicking along on it, approaching from the hidden direction. Distinct clicks, one after the next. Someone alone. Travis turned the doorknob and pulled the door toward himself a quarter inch, just enough to clear the latch from the plate.

  He waited. The tile amplified the footsteps and made it hard to judge their distance. He let them get louder than instinct advised, and then he yanked the door open and stepped through, bringing the SIG up to level.

  A guy in his forties, short, wiry, came to a stop with the gun’s barrel six inches from his face.

  Travis gestured for him to stay quiet. The guy nodded. Eyes wide. Travis stepped clear of the door and waved the man through, and a second later they were back in the room with the door closed behind them.

  “Shut your eyes,” Travis said. “Tight.”

  The man complied.

  Travis grabbed him by the back of the collar and propelled him forward, keeping him off balance. He shoved him to the corner, turned, dragged him downward and pushed him through the iris. His waist caught the bottom of the circle on the way through and he pitched forward, sprawling onto the concrete on the other side.

  The man got himself upright, half sitting, and opened his eyes. Bethany had the shotgun on him. Travis was already through the iris behind him, covering him with the SIG.

  The guy looked around at the forest and the ruins. His expression went dead slack. Disbelief at its most literal. His brain simply did not accept what his eyes were reporting.

  “Wallet,” Travis said.

  The guy stared at him. Blinked. Took out his wallet.

  Travis pointed to the concrete at Bethany’s feet. “Toss it.”

  The guy threw the wallet. It landed, tumbled three feet and stopped.

  Travis gestured for the guy to stand up. The man nodded, and when he was halfway through the move, onto his feet but not yet balanced, Travis grabbed the back of his collar again and shoved him forward onto the girder that bound the north edge of the concrete. He pushed him onto it and then past it. The guy’s feet stayed on the lip of the beam but his upper body ended up two feet beyond, above nine stories of empty space.

  The man’s breath caught in his throat. His body went rigid, his fear overwhelming every instinct to struggle. He took tiny breaths, in and out, as if he thought larger ones might imbalance him and send him over.

  Travis stood with his own weight tilted inward from the edge to counterbalance the guy. His arm was fully extended. The guy was thirty degrees past his own natural tipping point.

  “Where’s the woman?” Travis said.

  It took the guy a second to answer. “Woman?”

  “Don’t fuck with me. They brought her in last night, after they hit the motorcade.”

  Another few seconds passed. The guy cocked his head. He knew the answer. If he didn’t, he’d be saying so already. He’d be screaming it.

  Travis shifted his weight outward. He did it fast, letting his arm go slack and then snap tight again. The effect was that, for half a second, the guy believed he was falling. He didn’t scream—he didn’t have the breath for it—but he made a tight whimpering sound.

  Then his words came out in a high monotone. “They took her to Mr. Finn’s office. Just now. Few minutes ago.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Top floor. Southwest corner.”

  Travis let go of his collar.

  The guy’s arms shot outward, spasming, his hands grabbing for anything. But there wasn’t anything. He sucked in a gasp and screamed like a high-school girl in a slasher flick and then he was gone, out into the emptiness.

  Travis didn’t bother to watch him hit. He turned. Saw Bethany standing there, her hand to her mouth, eyes unblinking. The shotgun hung forgotten at her side.

  “We didn’t ask to be part of this,” Travis said. “These people did.”

  It was all he had.

  He held her eyes a moment longer and then he crossed to the cylinder and shut it off. He picked it up and headed for the stairwell, crossing exposed beams. After a few steps he picked up the pace to a run. He glanced behind him and saw Bethany shouldering the backpack, pocketing the dropped wallet, and following.

  Paige sat waiting for Isaac Finn to arrive. She knew his name only from the brass plate she’d seen on his door when the two large men had carried her through it.

  Finn’s office was huge. Three times the size of the room they’d kept her in. There was a balcony along its southern expanse looking out on a view that could’ve been an educational poster of Washington, D.C. The kind of poster with tags and labels for every building that mattered. It was all there, from the White House to the Capitol to the Supreme Court, and a hundred other buildings that channeled power in ways most people would never
care to know. Paige wondered how many of those buildings this high-rise outranked. Maybe all of them.

  She was sitting on a leather couch. Her wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. The two large men were standing just inside the door, hands folded neatly in front of them. Each had a Beretta holstered under his suit coat—Paige had seen them there when they’d carried her from the other room.

  The door opened and a man in his fifties walked in. He was trim, six feet tall, with dark hair going a little gray. He was far from what Paige had pictured—whatever she’d pictured. He looked wrong for the office. His eyes, in particular, looked wrong. There was no arrogance in them. No presumption. Paige thought of one of her father’s friends, a pediatric surgeon she’d met on several occasions. She’d always been struck by his eyes: weathered by the years of suffering they’d seen, but not beaten. Isaac Finn’s eyes looked almost like that—they missed by some degree Paige couldn’t account for.

  None of which mattered, in any case. Kind-looking eyes could be a trick of genetics or an unconscious mimicry of some long-dead parent. There were better lights by which to judge a person, and Finn didn’t look good in any of them.

  He had a coffee cup in one hand. In the other he held the black cylinder Paige had shown the president last night. He crossed to his desk and set down the coffee. He turned and looked at Paige. He seemed to be appraising her in some way. Coming to a decision.