Ghost Country tc-2

by Patrick Lee

  Four men left. Two of them still plowing forward between the cars.

  But not the other two. They were checking their movement. Falling back. Turning their attention on Finn now, defensive. They understood the danger he was in-probably better than he understood it himself.

  Finn was still in her field of fire. Still a target.

  But there were still threats. Immediate threats.

  Paige retargeted from the falling corpse of the first man to the second, five feet behind him. She fired again. Caught him right in front of the ear. The entry wound was small, but in the firelight she saw what had to be the full contents of his head come out the back in a ragged cloud.

  Then things began to change very quickly.

  The two men closest to Finn got ahold of him. Dragged him down and away. Paige saw their heads whip around, their eyes tracking over their surroundings, looking for the best route to safety-to distance and cover.

  At the same time, the third man between the cars was dropping. Dropping faster than the corpses of his friends. Getting down out of her line of fire. He hadn't reached the compact car yet. He was still passing the lowrider. The chasm between it and the next vehicle was shallow, but as Paige lowered the SIG to follow him into it, the compact car's roof slid up into her gunsights, blocking the angle.

  She fired anyway. Three shots, as fast as she could pull the trigger. She saw them hit the car's roof, punching through but deflecting wildly as they did. Past the roof's edges she saw the man still coming on, unhindered.

  She also saw that she was out of time to try again.

  She threw her body sideways in the same quarter second that his return fire cut open the darkness. The windows of the compact car imploded. Paige hit the ground, landing near Bethany again. She hit harder than she wanted to. She'd been forced to put speed before control when she threw herself out of the way, but that was going to cost her now.

  Because she wasn't going to get up in time. Wasn't even going to roll herself over into a firing position in time. That would take her a good second and a half, and by then the man would be rounding the back end of the car.

  She saw it all play out like a nightmare. Still not slowed down. Just clear. Agonizingly clear. She managed to turn her head, her eyes going all the way to their corners.

  The gunman was already there. Clearing the car's rear window and then its trunk. Shouldering the machine gun for the easy kill.

  And then his head came apart.

  It happened so suddenly that Paige almost missed the muzzle burst from the twelve-gauge, in the darkness behind the car's bumper.

  A second later Travis was on his feet, racking another shell into the shotgun's chamber, raising it and sweeping it through an arc above the car. Looking for Finn.

  But Finn was long gone. Paige could see it in Travis's eyes.

  She became aware of screaming voices-realized she'd been hearing them for seconds already, but hadn't focused on them. They hadn't been part of the simple picture.

  She saw Travis turn his eyes to the side of the van, and she realized what the screaming was. The men in the fire. Still alive. Travis swung the Remington their way and emptied its remaining shells into them, its broad pattern allowing for five kills with four shots-two or three shots could've almost done the job.

  The screaming stopped.

  Travis slung the shotgun. He turned, held out his hands to Paige and Bethany, helped them up.

  Paige stared around at the aftermath. The bodies in the flames. The bodies alongside the lowrider. The empty space where Finn and the other two had been.

  She looked at the fire trail. No more than fifteen seconds had passed since Travis had lit it, but already it extended hundreds of yards. Paige could see its far end still racing toward its conclusion: the place where the three of them had first begun dumping fuel containers in a thick line between the cars.

  Already the flames were spreading away from the original trail. The cars flanking it were becoming engulfed. They were well primed to burn. Engines and tanks and fuel lines caked with long-hardened gas and oil sludge. Interiors of parched foam and cloth.

  And then there was the desert floor itself. A thick carpet of crumbled tire rubber, dried and seasoned by seven decades of sun. The blaze was expanding outward through it, mostly north from the fire line in the direction of the breeze, moving at maybe a fourth the speed a person could walk.

  But that was deceptive, Paige knew. The fire was going to spread a lot faster than that, once it got going. She could already see the mechanism that would drive it. From the empty window frames of the compact car, burning scraps of upholstery were being channeled up into the night, riding high on thermals and wind, touching down again hundreds of feet to the north. A single glance along the line of burning vehicles showed her the same thing happening everywhere, as windows buckled in the intense heat.

  Travis scanned the darkness to the north one last time, cupping his eyes against the glare of the flames.

  No sign of Finn or his men.

  The crumb-scattered ground around the compact car was beginning to ignite. It was time to get moving.

  The three of them shared a look, and a few seconds later they were running south, with the growing fire to light their way.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The plan had been meant to have a much simpler execution. Certainly the idea had been straightforward enough: create a long line of flame south of town and let the wind carry it north, hopefully with enough speed to disrupt Finn's makeshift base of operations-especially the camera mast.

  A very long fire trail had been necessary for two reasons. First, to maximize the chances of setting the entire city ablaze, and second, to give the three of them a broad curtain of heat behind which to hide, once Finn's people came after them.

  That was how Travis had imagined it, anyway, even assuming Finn and his men were already moving toward them. Had the wall of flame gone up when the pursuers were still a quarter mile north, they'd have spotted the ignition source immediately and sprinted toward it to make the kill. Someone back at the camera mast would've guided them over their radios-would've tried to, anyway. But the sheet of flame would've made that impossible. The cameras couldn't have seen a thing to the south of it.

  The three of them could've simply run like hell for any random place south of the fire line, then dug in and waited for the fire to consume the town. After that they'd be free to make their escape.

  It probably would've worked well enough.

  But Travis was much happier with how it'd actually played out.

  Finn was down eight men, while their own casualties amounted to a sore spot on Travis's back where he'd landed on the Remington. All told, the face-off had shaken out pretty well in their favor.

  They still picked out a spot south of the fire line to dig in, two hundred yards down from where the shooting had happened. They reached it, then turned and stared north at the flames.

  "Jesus," Travis said.

  The height of the blaze surprised him the most. A minute earlier, when they'd been right next to it, it'd just cleared the tops of the tallest vehicles.

  It was twice that height now.

  From this angle they could see the entire line, extending three miles to the east. The whole length was burning. Every vehicle that immediately bordered it had thick tongues of flame seething from its windows.

  From this position it was impossible to see the fire's northward progress. The three of them began moving to the west for a better perspective. Travis was hesitant to go too far-they might step out from behind the fire's thermal curtain and become visible to anyone watching the camera mast's feeds. Assuming whoever was up there didn't have bigger concerns now, like getting the hell out of the fire's way.

  They'd gone only a few hundred feet west before they stopped and simply stared again. They had their answer.

  The fire was advancing north faster than any of them could have hoped. The falling embers had triggered spot fires as far as
half a mile north of the line. Each of these had already grown to bonfire size, massive cones of flame standing atop a dozen cars each, and blossoming outward through the tire crumbs. The bonfires were venting thousands of their own embers into the darkness toward Yuma.

  The city would be an inferno in another five minutes.

  That was the good news.

  Travis could see the bad news just as easily.

  The fire wasn't only spreading north.

  He'd expected that problem to an extent-it was unavoidable-but he'd hoped the fire's progress in the other directions would be nominal.

  It didn't look nominal.

  The original fire line had spread south by at least four rows of cars, and from its starting point it'd expanded west by several rows as well, even crossing the wide driving lanes that ran north and south. The hotter the fire burned, the more rapidly it spread through the rubber crumbs.

  Suddenly, about fifty feet along the original line, a bright fireball erupted with a heavy concussion sound. A still-sealed gasoline container in someone's trunk had burst in the heat. The blast sent burning fuel out in a fifty-foot radius.

  It happened again five seconds later, this time at the southern edge of the advance. Just like that, there were half a dozen more vehicles burning.

  "We'd better get the hell out of here," Paige said. T hey went west. It was as safe as south or east, and it was familiar. They'd seen it on the way into town. They weren't going to run up against the edge of a canyon or a mountain ridge unexpectedly.

  They ran for only a few minutes before they stopped to get what they needed for the last part of the plan.

  Bikes.

  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. L ong 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. T he 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 response 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.