by Patrick Lee
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 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.
There 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.”
They 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.”
There 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.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They were outside the hotel a minute later. The quiet of the city was unnerving. The bone drifts looked bigger from ground level than they had from the sixth floor.
The air temperature was about the same as it’d been in the present. Somewhere between 105 and 110.
They crossed the parking lot and made their way to a residential district three blocks beyond. Moving among the houses felt safer than crossing the wide-open lots of commercial and industrial zones. They’d seen from the hotel that they could follow the houses all the way to the airport if they went straight east and then south to its perimeter.
They saw leathery bodies in every home they passed. After the first block they stopped looking.
Bones were scattered everywhere outside the houses. In fenced yards where the wind had never picked up momentum, some of the skeletons were partially intact. A tiny skull and ribcage lay half submerged in a sandbox among faded toy tractors and steam shovels.
Travis brought up the rear. He looked back every twenty yards. Whenever they crossed a space that offered a view of the hotel behind them, he studied the big corridor windows on the high floors. Even through the glare of reflected sky, he could see through them well enough to spot a person, if one were standing there. So far, he saw nobody.
He heard Bethany taking sharp, quick breaths ahead of him, and realized she was trying not to cry.
Paige gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You don’t have to hold it back. No one who sees this can be unaffected by it.”
“I know,” Bethany said.
But she held it back anyway. After another minute she was breathing normally again.
At the next street they came to, they looked south and saw the northern edge of the airport half a mile away, its chain-link boundary fence still standing.
They crossed into the next block and followed the sheltered path among backyards southward. They were moving against a light breeze now. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to perturb the air around their ears and make it hard to listen for movement. Travis kept turning his head to counter the effect.
They were a hundred feet from the airport fence when the breeze died for a few seconds.
Travis heard something.
He grabbed Paige and Bethany and pulled them almost off their feet, into a narrow channel between houses. They flinched and stared at him. He put a finger to his lips.
They stood in silence.
The breeze moaned under the eaves of the houses.
Then it faded again, and all three of them heard the sound.
It came from somewhere south of them, maybe within the airport grounds.
It was a woman’s voice, speaking calm
ly, saying something they couldn’t quite make out.
It took them only a few seconds to realize what they were hearing. The woman’s voice was pleasant and monotone and had a distinct reverb to it. It was a recording, playing over some kind of PA system on the airport grounds.
They cocked their heads but couldn’t discern any of the words.
Then the breeze picked up again and they lost the sound altogether.
They stepped out from between the houses and continued south. They stopped at the corner of the last home before the fence line, twenty yards farther on. Beyond the fence there was easily a quarter mile of open space before the nearest terminal building. Anyone watching from a high perch in the city would see them. There was no shorter path across the space on any side. There was nothing for it but to run.
The fence was ten feet high. Simple chain-link. No razorwire looped across its top. All it offered as deterrents were signs every dozen yards threatening harsh legal penalties for trespassing.
Travis tried to resolve the recording again. It was no good. It was still too far away, coming from somewhere near or within the terminal.
They traded looks. They nodded.
They ran.
They crossed the fence with no difficulty, and a few seconds later they were sprinting as hard as they could across the vast reach of the airport. Travis wondered if the distance had played with his eyes. Wondered if it was a lot more than a quarter mile to the buildings. It didn’t matter now. He ran. The wind streamed past his ears. It was impossible to hear the recording, even though he was much closer to it now than before. His own pulse against his eardrums became loud enough to match the wind after the first thirty seconds.
He was fifty yards from the terminal, with Paige and Bethany matching his speed, when he began hearing the monotone voice again. He still couldn’t make out what it was saying.
The three of them reached the corner of the building. Its long side planed away to the east, three hundred yards or more. Its short side was maybe fifty yards in length, leading south to another corner. They followed the short side, sprinting along it without stopping. Travis was acutely aware that they were still visible from town. More visible than ever, in fact—against the blazing white metal of the terminal’s outer wall, they’d stand out like ants on china to anyone even glancing this way from downtown.
