Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee

  Though they were everywhere—from almost any point in the expanse of cars it was possible to see one or two—in most cases they were children’s. Or they were adult bikes with leather seats that’d long since baked off in the sun, leaving only exposed springs and foam.

  The three they settled on—two on a car’s trunk-rack and another in a pickup bed twenty yards away—were adult mountain bikes with fabric seats that hadn’t been worn off.

  The bikes’ tires were long gone, but the desert’s surface was essentially one big tire now, so Travis hoped the going would be about the same, or close enough.

  He took from his pocket the second thing he’d searched for among the glove boxes earlier: a narrow canister of WD-40.

  The desert air had preserved the bikes just fine, but the sun would have burned away any trace of their lubrication. They spent a minute thoroughly dousing the chains and gears and bearings with the oil. Then Travis lifted one of the bikes’ back ends and gave its pedal a turn. It creaked for two seconds and then everything spun silently, smoothly.

  Yuma was an uncannily good place to store things for a long time. Travis found himself wondering if that figured in somehow—the place’s capacity to keep metals and other things unchanged. If it was part of the puzzle, he couldn’t see how it fit. But nothing else fit either, so far.

  They mounted the bikes, then stared back at the city. The fire was gargantuan now. A hurricane of flame. No sense of the original line remained. It was simply a massive, misshapen oval, broadly curved along the three miles of its southern sweep, and radically extended northward, in branches and separate blazing islands that now reached well into the downtown area. In the deepest parts of the firestorm the flames towered three hundred feet up, and above them rose a column of smoke that looked like something from the last pages of the New Testament. The inferno churned upward into the smoke, merged with it, lit it from inside and out. The firelight shone out over the vast plain of cars. Millions of windshields caught it and reflected it upward, lighting the column of smoke to a height of three or four miles above the desert.

  The edges of the fire zone were still growing quickly. Without the bikes, the three of them would probably be in trouble.

  “I’m relatively new to Tangent,” Bethany said. “Do you guys do stuff like this a lot?”

  “Not so much,” Paige said.

  “It mostly seems to happen when I’m around,” Travis said.

  They watched for another thirty seconds. Then they turned, put up their kickstands and rode like hell.

  Long before he reached the southern edge of town, Finn understood that the math was against him. Not linear math, either. Exponential math.

  Flaming pieces of vehicle upholstery, some of them as big as handkerchiefs, were raining into the desert on every side, and far ahead of him.

  He ran. His surviving men, Reyes and Hunt, ran with him. They were going north along one of the broad driving lanes. Ahead, just visible above the obstacle course of spot fires, the camera mast was still standing. Its aluminum framework glinted in the yellow light.

  Grayling and the other four might still be there. If they weren’t, he didn’t know where the hell to find them. He wished he’d brought along one of the fucking two-ways. But even if he’d thought to do so, he probably would’ve elected not to, out of fear the static would tip off Paige Campbell and the others. Nowhere on his list of what-ifs had the present situation appeared.

  Straight ahead, two broad patches of flame crept toward each other, closing the gap between them. To go around the far end of either one would cost half a minute. The way through the middle, right up the lane he and the others were running in, was the shortest. But the gap was shrinking. Rapidly.

  Finn tried to pick up his speed. He found it nearly impossible. It was all he could do to keep his breathing under control as fumes from the burning rubber drenched the air. He could feel it covering his skin in a film. Could feel it in his eyes and his hair, too. No question the stuff was flammable as hell, and saturating his clothes by the second.

  Thirty yards from the gap now. It was only the width of the lane itself. The cars that defined it on both sides were fully engulfed.

  Twenty yards.

  Ten.

  They were passing through the gap, three abreast, when something exploded in one of the vehicles’ trunks. A shower of burning fuel sprayed everywhere. Finn stayed ahead of it. He was sure the others had too. Then he heard Reyes screaming. He stopped hard, his feet sliding on the rubber-coated soil—it’d taken on a greasy feel as the heat intensified—and looked back. Reyes was down, every inch of his clothing on fire. He was rolling, but it was no good. Instead of the ground putting him out, he was igniting the ground wherever he touched it. The tire crumbs, in their half-melted state, were releasing the oils they’d been made from. They were ready to burn on contact.

  At the edge of his vision Finn saw Hunt sprinting back to help Reyes. There wasn’t even time to scream the warning. Half a second later the fire had both of them.

  Finn took a step toward them anyway. An involuntary move. Not even a gesture. A wish, at best.

  He could do nothing. He didn’t even have a gun with which to put them out of their suffering.

  Another trunk exploded. Close by. He couldn’t stay here. Grayling and the others might still be possible to save. He turned and sprinted north again.

  A minute later he rounded another fire and came to the south end of Fourth Avenue. He saw that it was hopeless. The whole city was burning. Every building. Every car in the streets. Far ahead he could see Grayling’s laptops melting in the inferno. He couldn’t see Grayling. Or any of the other four. They’d run for it. They weren’t going to make it. There was no escape in any direction.

  Finn stared at the bone drifts heaped against the buildings. Flames from first-story windows twisted and writhed through them. Blackened them. Flickered between ribs. Darted like snake tongues from the mouths and eyes of skulls.

  He leveled the cylinder and switched it on.

  The rubber surface of the desert didn’t make up for the lack of bike tires, but riding was still a hell of a lot better than walking.

  Travis, Paige, and Bethany circled north to the west side of town, keeping well beyond the outskirts. They found I–8 near the spot where they’d pulled off of it earlier—technically seventy-three years and a couple months earlier—and headed west toward whatever was left of Imperial, California.

  They rode for half the night. They made ten miles an hour, riding on the hardened ground just off the freeway. The freeway itself, cleared of tire crumbs by the wind, was too rough on the bike rims.

  Every time they stopped to rest they stared at the fire. It grew by miles each hour, even as it fell increasingly far behind them. It was the most absorbing thing Travis had ever seen. The central mass of the firestorm had to be well over a thousand feet high now. Like a campfire you could fit a mountain into.

  Ten miles shy of Imperial they found the edge of the mass of parked cars. It ended in a more-or-less straight line, vanishing into the darkness north and south of I–8.

  They rode into the town. The irrigated fields that’d once surrounded it were long gone. There was no way to even tell where the fields had met the desert. It was all desert now.

  Imperial was as well preserved as Yuma, but it was empty. No cars. No bones. No bodies. They rode through its silent streets in the half-light from the distant fire. They scared up a barn owl among the crates of a shipping yard. They caught a glimpse of its pale face and deep black eyes and then it was gone, flapping away into the night.

  They rode out to the middle of what they judged to have been cropland and ditched the bikes. They opened the iris and stepped through into moist rows of cotton plants, thirty yards from a massive wheeled sprinkler line trundling slowly across the field.

  Travis surveyed the surrounding landscape for any sign of police flashers, or the beacon lights of helicopters. He saw nothing. The Homeland Security respons
e must be concentrated on Yuma, fifty miles back east.

  They walked into town and a found a motel just off the freeway that didn’t require ID. They got a room with two queen-sized beds. The nightstand clock showed two thirty in the morning. Paige and Bethany took the first bed and Travis took the second. They collapsed fully dressed atop the bedcovers and were asleep within a minute.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Finn had been on the phone for hours. The entire flight back from Yuma and better than ninety minutes in his office. He was standing on his balcony now, staring across D.C. at all the places that’d been on the other ends of his calls. Dark silhouettes of buildings with a few lights on, half an hour before sunrise.

  He had one call left to make.

  He leaned on the rail. He dialed. Three rings and then a voice answered. “Isaac?”

  “Yes,” Finn said. “I’ve spoken with President Currey. I’ve spoken with everyone who matters. We’ve come to an agreement. We’re not happy with it, but there’s no other option in play. Paige Campbell and her friends were in Yuma for several hours, and now they’re long gone. We don’t know what they saw there, and we don’t know who they’re talking to right now. We have most of the big dogs in our camp, but we don’t have everyone, and given time . . . these people could hurt us. They could pull the whole plan apart.”

  He took a breath. Let it out slowly. “We can’t wait as long as we meant to,” he said. “Umbra needs to happen now. Right now.”

  He heard a sharp inhalation on the line. “But it’s not ready. Entire segments of the plan—”

  “The fundamentals are ready,” Finn said. “In principle it can work. And in one sense we have an advantage now. We have the cylinder. We can go to the final location and see what’s there in 2084. Who knows what we can learn from that.”

  “Are you going there now?”

  “I’ll stay in D.C. for the next twenty-four hours. I expect Campbell to come back here and try to contact people she hopes she can trust. I doubt she and the others really appreciate the extent of our connections, in which case there’s every chance they’ll trip a wire somewhere.”

  There was a long silence on the line. The sound of uncertainty. Reluctance. Acceptance.

  “Currey is already getting started on his end,” Finn said. “How long will it take on yours? How long to actually set the plan in motion?”

  Another silence. Then: “A day or two. Maybe less. Christ, are we really doing this?”

  Finn heard as much excitement as anxiety in the voice.

  “Yes, we’re really doing this. None of us would’ve chosen to rush it, but if it’s that or never do it at all . . .”

  “I agree. I’m scared as hell, but I agree.”

  “I knew you would. Get started on it right away. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Audra.”

  Part III

  Arica

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Richard Garner woke to his alarm at five in the morning. He exercised for thirty minutes. He showered, dressed in khakis and a gray cotton tennis shirt, and went to his den. Beyond the windows Central Park lay in amber light and long, early shadows, thirty stories below.

  He switched on the computer. While the operating system loaded, he left the room and crossed the broad stone hallway to the kitchen. He toasted two slices of wheat bread and poured a glass of orange juice. He took the plate and glass back to the den, sat at the computer, and clicked open his work in progress. The book was still only an outline. It’d begun as a study of Ulysses S. Grant’s time in office, with a focus on the difference between overseeing a war and overseeing a nation, but the research had led elsewhere. Now the book was shaping up into a broader examination of every president who’d held a position of military authority before taking office. An analysis of the pros and cons regarding what that kind of experience brought to a president’s perspective. He wasn’t sure yet on which side he would ultimately come down—whether generals tended to make good presidents or not. The evidence pointed to a number of conclusions, each conditional to time and place and political climate, and he’d only just begun digging through it. He hoped his own military background—he hadn’t made general, but he’d commanded a SEAL team for the bulk of the seventies—would provide him more insight than bias.

  It was involving work.

  Which he needed right now.

  Would almost certainly need for the rest of his life.

  He stayed in the den all morning and into the early afternoon. Mostly he sat at the computer, but at times he paced before the windows, looking out over the park and the city.

  He took a break at one o’clock. He had a sandwich and a 7UP. He plugged his iPod into the sound system, piped the music through the residence and did some random work around the place. Though he’d been here for two years, some part of him still felt like he hadn’t settled in yet. Like he was still getting used to it. Still getting used to living anywhere on his own.

  The residence took up an entire floor of the building, though only two thirds of it made up his own living space. The other third comprised the living and working quarters of the Secret Service detail that guarded him. He played poker with them, most nights.

  He quit the chores at four o’clock. Turned off the music. Went back to the den. He opened a heavy box of yellowed, sleeve-protected documents that’d come from the archives of the New York Public Library. The pages were by no means a part of the library’s lending collection. Even as non-circulating reference material they were pretty hard to gain access to. Garner felt a bit of guilt over the privilege his resume afforded him, but not enough to lose sleep over. It was just much easier for the library to send the stuff to him than to have him and his security footprint dropping in every time he needed to verify a quote. Besides, he was an old friend of the place. He’d worked there in his college years. He’d probably walked past this very box a hundred times.

  The day was clear and bright, but by five o’clock the sunlight in the room had diminished a bit. He turned on the lamp beside his reading chair. George Washington’s handwriting was hard enough to make out as it was.

  At a quarter past five a cool breeze filtered into the room from the hallway. It stirred the papers on the table beside him. It took him two or three seconds to realize that a breeze should be impossible. None of the residence’s windows were open.

  For a moment he only stared at the doorway. Tried to make sense of it. There was an intake for the HVAC system just out in the hall. No reason air should be coming out of it, but maybe some kind of maintenance was going on. It was all he could think of.

  All he could think of that was benign, anyway. In recent years he’d grown used to considering more threatening scenarios for given situations.

  He set aside the page he was reading. He stood, curious but not afraid. He could clap his hands and have six agents with submachine guns coming in through separate access points in quite a bit less than ten seconds. They didn’t normally monitor video feeds of the residence, but any sharp sound above 85 decibels would trip the acoustic alarm and bring them running.

  He crossed the room and stepped into the hallway. The main entry was still closed and locked. The kitchen was empty. He turned toward the living room—and flinched.

  People.

  Three of them.

  Right there.

  Garner was an instant from shouting to trigger the alarm when he realized he recognized one of them. Paige Campbell.

  Tangent.

  He felt his fear turn to anger. He advanced on her and the others. It occurred to him only in passing to wonder why all three of them had damp hair and clothing.

  “We’re sorry to intrude—” Paige said.

  Garner cut her off. “Leave. Right now. However the hell you came—”

  Paige stepped aside, and in the gap between her and the other two, Garner saw where the wind was coming from.

  He stopped. His anger faded. He
didn’t know what to feel, suddenly. All he could do was stare.

  Travis watched Garner’s reaction. The initial anger made sense. The man’s wife had died because of her work with Tangent; he couldn’t have been ecstatic to see them here.

  Now as Garner stared at the iris, Travis stepped aside, along with Bethany, to give him an unbroken view.

  Garner moved toward it. Started to say something. Stopped.

  Then it contracted shut in front of him, and he blinked, confused.

  “Sorry,” Bethany said. “Hang on.”

  She was holding the cylinder. She looked around for a place to set it. Pointed to a narrow table along the nearest wall, and looked at Garner.

  “Is this okay?”

  The guy could barely process what the hell she was asking him. He stared at her for a second and then his eyes went back to the spot where the iris had vanished.

  Bethany took his silence for a yes. She set the cylinder on the table and found a heavy bookend to brace it with.

  Travis glanced at the floor-to-ceiling windows on the south wall, facing down Central Park West toward Midtown. The park itself filled the left half of the view. The right half was full of the varied architecture of the Upper West Side. Travis guessed the buildings ranged in age from a few years to well over a hundred. The day was beautiful, with huge, slow clouds dragging their shadows across the sweep of the city.

  Then Bethany switched on the cylinder and the iris appeared again, and Travis saw the other Manhattan. The one they’d been looking at for the past several minutes as they ascended the ruins of Garner’s building.

  That version of the borough was in the same condition as D.C. for the most part. The entire island was carpeted with dense boreal forest, from which rose the corroded remains of the city skyline.

  What set it apart from D.C.—more so than Travis had imagined until he’d seen it for himself—was simply the scale of the ruins. In D.C. the sixteen-story office building had looked enormous. It would’ve been lost among the ankles of the giants that stood rusting here. The remnants of skyscrapers below Central Park formed a solid visual screen standing eight hundred feet high—higher still in some places. The October wind sighed through it, finding odd angles and rivet holes whichever way it blew. It sounded like a chorus of a million reed flutes, playing soft and low in the dead framework of the city.