Ghost Country tc-2 Page 15

  Travis took a few steps forward into the space. In the giant sunbeam that filled it he saw hundreds of padded seats, most of them facing out toward the runways and the open ground. On the chairs and on the floor and on the flat benches here and there, bodies lay as densely packed as they had in the hotel corridors.

  In this place they were all children.

  None looked older than twelve.

  They stretched to the end of the concourse, at least a third of a mile away. Thousands and thousands of them.

  Everywhere among them were discarded food containers. Foil chip bags, cracker boxes, candy-bar wrappers, pickle jars, bread bags. All of them lay empty among the bodies, which were as gaunt as any Travis had seen elsewhere in the city.

  It was clear enough what'd happened. In the end, when the survivors in the town had dwindled to thousands, the adults had made a decision. Maybe the last big decision any humans ever made. They'd put all the kids here and consolidated the remaining food with them. The grownups had sacrificed themselves to give the kids a few extra days, in the guttering hope that the planes might come back in time for them.

  Nothing Travis had seen in Yuma had brought him close to losing control. His eyes had moistened in the hotel, but his breathing hadn't so much as hitched.

  It didn't hitch now, either.

  He didn't get even that much warning.

  He simply found himself sitting down hard in the middle of the floor, his hands pressed to his eyes as they flooded, his chest heaving beyond his ability to stop it. T ime went by. Ten or fifteen minutes. The emotions passed and left a kind of vacuum in their wake.

  They stood.

  They glanced around.

  They had no desire to search the concourse. It was hard to imagine what it could show them except more suffering.

  Travis tried to think of what part of the city they might investigate next. He was thinking about that when they heard the exterior door open downstairs.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The concourse offered very few hiding places. Even fewer that could be reached within seconds.

  The wall opposite the windows was lined with shops that'd once sold tourist items and sandwiches and sunglasses. The shops didn't have doorways-they simply lacked front walls. They offered concealment from only one sight line-that of someone approaching along the row.

  They were also the only option.

  Travis waited for Paige and Bethany to move past him. They went forward along the row of shops, avoiding the bodies. He followed, keeping an ear toward the door atop the stairs. The metal treads would give away the newcomer's approach easily enough, but the monotone recording-much louder inside the terminal-would make it tough to listen for it.

  He heard it when they were four shops along. Heavy thuds coming up, echoing in the space beyond the door.

  Paige ducked into the fifth shop, which seemed to be a bookstore with all its shelves empty. Bethany and Travis followed. They heard the door open a second later.

  Five seconds passed.

  The door clicked shut.

  A man exhaled.

  Then, footsteps. Slow and careful. Coming toward them. Distinct, individual steps. The man was alone.

  Travis clicked off the Remington's safety. He had a shell in the chamber already. He had his back to the shop's wall on the side the footsteps were coming from. He was two feet in from the edge. He leveled the shotgun and pulled the stock against his shoulder.

  The footsteps halted. It was hard to say where. Maybe ten feet short of where the man would've come into view. Not much further away than that, Travis was sure. Part of him wanted the guy to continue forward. Wanted a reason to start shooting, even if the sound might draw more trouble onto them.

  Then he heard a crackle of static. A walkie-talkie. The only form of long-range communication that would work on this side of the iris.

  The static cut out and the man spoke. "Lambert here. Inside the terminal. Copy?"

  The static came back. Then a man's voice spoke through it, just clear enough to be discerned.

  "This is Finn. Go ahead Lambert."

  "They were here. There's paint flakes outside an exterior door. Gotta be recent, or else the wind would've blown them away."

  Travis clenched his teeth. Fuck. Careless.

  "Any sign they're still inside?" Finn said.

  "No way to tell. I just came in."

  The static hissed for a long time. Then Finn spoke again. "All right. Get out of there. You've already found out what we need to know. Come back and help with the camera mast."

  "Copy."

  The static flared again and then clicked off for good. Travis waited for the footsteps to retreat, but for a moment they didn't. Lambert was just standing there, no doubt gazing around at the spectacle of the concourse. Whatever the man felt about it, it didn't reduce him to tears. After a few seconds he retreated to the door, and then he was gone.

  Travis relaxed his grip on the shotgun. He turned to look at Paige. She was looking in his direction, but past him. Staring at the big windows, thinking about something.

  "It's probably about five o'clock here," she said. "I don't know when the sun sets in Arizona during October, but eyeballing it I'd say we've got an hour."

  Travis followed her stare. He looked at the angle of sunlight coming into the terminal. It shone as harshly as it would have at midday, but it fell at a long slant. An hour was probably about right.

  "We need to get out of here right now," Paige said. She sounded on edge. "We need to get out into the desert and go back through the iris to the present. We can walk to the Jeep from there."

  Travis had an idea of what was spooking her.

  "This camera mast they were talking about-"

  Paige cut him off. "Yes. We need to be scared shitless of it. And we need to get moving. I'll explain on the way."

  She stepped past him, out of the shop. He took a step to follow and then realized Bethany hadn't moved yet. He stopped, turned back to her. Saw what she was staring at.

  In a little wastebasket just visible behind the shop's counter, there was a scrap of newspaper. Maybe the top third of the front page, torn roughly from left to right. It was stained with ancient blotches of mustard, like it'd been used to clean up the remnants of a sandwich on the counter. Glancing around, Travis saw no sign of the paper it'd been torn from. For that matter, there were no newspapers of any kind in the shop. A tower of wire shelves in the corner had clearly once been stocked with them, but it was empty now, like every bookshelf in the place. Except the scrap in the trash can, not a single piece of paper remained in the store. Travis turned his eyes to the concourse and saw the reason within seconds: the kids had burned the paper to stay warm. Ash piles remained in various stone planters among the bodies. As hot as this place would get during the day, it would cool down fast at night. The big glass wall would bleed away the heat in no time-especially in December.

  Bethany stooped and took the piece of newspaper from the trash. Filling most of the space was the paper's title: The Arizona Republic. Below that was the date: December 15, 2011. And beneath that was the lead headline and the top few rows of the story's text-a single column beside a giant photo-before the torn bottom edge cut it off.

  The photo was impossible to make out. Only the top inch of it showed: a defocused background of a crowd somewhere.

  The headline read, former president garner assassinated in new york city. P aige let her urgency fade for the moment. She stepped back into the shop.

  Bethany spread the paper on the counter so all three of them could see it. Despite age yellowing and the mustard stain, the fragment of article text was easily readable: New York (AP)-Former United States President Richard Garner was shot to death at a gathering in Central Park yesterday evening, Wednesday, December 14. Garner had for several days spoken publicly against the mass relocation to

  That was it. It reached the bottom edge and there was no more. Bethany flipped the scrap over, but the other side featu
red only an advertisement for a local restaurant. She turned it back over to the headline.

  Travis stared at it. Read the story text again. Thought about what it implied.

  "We think bringing everyone to Yuma was some kind of panic move," he said. "The official response by those in power-those behind Umbra-even if they knew it couldn't actually save everyone. And Richard Garner called them on it, at the end. Even opposed it, publicly. Any question that's why he was killed?"

  Paige's eyes narrowed. She saw where he was going. So did Bethany.

  "Garner's not in on it," Paige said.

  Bethany looked back and forth between them, hope rising in her eyes. "But he probably knows a hell of a lot about this stuff, right now in the present day. He only resigned the presidency two years ago. Up until that point, he had all the top security clearances. He had to have known about Umbra, whatever the hell it is."

  For a moment none of them spoke. The recording droned over the concourse.

  "We should pay him a visit," Travis said.

  Paige nodded again. Then she blinked and looked around. "We need to get the hell out of Yuma first. Come on."

  She turned and led the way out of the shop, back toward the door they'd entered through. T hey came out through the exterior door with the SIG and the Remington leveled. There was no one in sight.

  Travis looked down and saw the paint chips he'd left earlier. He shook his head.

  They moved east across the southern span of the building, out of view of anyone in town. They ran at nearly full speed and reached the southeast corner in a little under a minute.

  The donut of open space surrounding the terminal was a quarter mile on every side. They'd first come into the airport from the north, with the city at their backs. They were facing south and east now, with nothing ahead of them but a few pole barns at the edge of town and then a tundra of cars covering miles and miles of flat desert.

  Finn and his people were in town. Probably toward the middle. A sprint from this corner of the terminal toward the southeast would be largely hidden by the building itself, at least for the first half of the run. After that they would probably be visible to someone high up in the city, like a watcher on the top floor of the hotel.

  Travis saw Paige judging the distance, running through the same logistics.

  "I don't imagine they'll have a watch posted anymore," she said. "They'll have everyone working on the camera mast. They'll want it raised as soon as possible, and once it's up they won't need a watch at all."

  She looked toward the sun. Couldn't look right at it. The arid sky did nothing to filter its glare, even though it was shining from low in the west. Their guess inside the book shop had been right: it was an hour above the horizon.

  Travis suddenly understood Paige's concern.

  "Thermal cameras," he said.

  She looked at him. Nodded. "Eight FLIR cameras, seventy-five meters up. The kind of mast they'll use is lightweight, guywire stabilized, rapid-deployable. What the military uses for forward operating bases in open country. A skilled team can put one up in an hour."

  Travis looked around at the tarmac. Looked at the scrubland past the perimeter fence, and the sprawl of cars beyond. Every outdoor surface in Yuma was still baking at over one hundred degrees.

  But not for long.

  All of it would cool quickly once the sun set. It might be cooling already. And once the background was cooler than ninety-eight degrees, the three of them would be the warmest things within a hundred miles of Yuma. Even if they got far out among the cars and army-crawled into the desert all night long, the cameras atop the mast might see them. Infrared light from body heat radiated and reflected like any other kind. It could bounce off metal and glass. FLIR cameras watching from a height of seventy-five meters would have an effective horizon dozens of miles out.

  If they were still in Yuma an hour from now, they might as well be wearing neon body suits. T hey ran.

  They reached the perimeter, crossed the fence and made their way among the cars.

  They ducked low and zigzagged south and east for over half an hour, until even the terminal building was at least a mile away.

  They stared through the cab of a pickup toward the center of town. They could see the mast going up, rising meter by meter as unseen workers added sections to it at the bottom. The camera assembly was already mounted on top. The mast seemed to hold itself perfectly straight as it rose. Travis pictured four men holding onto guywires-invisible against the sky at this distance-that they would stake into the ground once the mast was complete.

  Travis studied the nearest edge of town. On this side of the airport there were only a few outbuildings, all of them tucked in close to the fence line. The zigzagging had put the three of them well beyond the bounds of the city, in what should be empty desert in the present day. There would be little risk of any bystander seeing them appear through the iris.

  "Let's do it," Paige said.

  Travis nodded.

  Bethany was still carrying the cylinder. She settled onto one knee and aimed it at almost ground level between the rows of cars. She switched it on.

  The iris opened to vacant land under the same kind of long sunlight they were crouching in now, maybe half an hour before dusk. For a second, that seemed wrong to Travis: the present was shifted an hour ahead of this side. It should already be dark over there. Then he remembered. The present was an hour later in the day, but two months earlier in the year. August instead of October. The sunset would be a lot later in August, about enough to offset the difference. It occurred to him that rival armies using this technology against each other would have a lot of abstract thinking to do.

  He crawled to the iris and looked through at the broad sweep of present-day Yuma.

  He felt the back of his neck go cold.

  "Shit," he whispered.

  Paige was beside him a second later. Bethany remained ten feet away, holding the cylinder.

  "What is it?" Bethany said.

  For a few seconds neither Travis nor Paige answered. They just stared through the iris at the living version of the city-which was filled with police and federal and even military vehicles. Flashers stabbed at the evening air from a hundred places, and at a glance Travis saw at least three helicopters circling high above.

  "I had it wrong," Travis said. "They did set a trap for us in the present. They just waited until we were on this side to spring it."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Bethany closed the iris.

  They lay there on the hard ground, silent.

  The breeze played over the tops of the cars. It dipped among them in weakened breaths, noticeably cooler than it'd been even ten minutes ago.

  "It's probably a Homeland response," Bethany said. "The president can initiate one without anyone's approval. They'll have every road into the city blocked off. The residents will be locked down under curfew. Anyone moving around in the open within ten or fifteen miles of town will be stopped and questioned. Our chances of escape are better on this side."

  "Our chances of escape are near zero on this side," Paige said.

  "I know," Bethany said.

  Travis got up into a crouch, and looked through the truck's cab again at the rising mast. It was impossible to accurately judge its height, but it was a lot taller than the six-story hotel a few blocks from it. It wouldn't be long before it was completed, and in fact the cameras on top were probably already functional, even if the desert was still blinding them. And that protection might only last another twenty or thirty minutes.

  "What's working in our favor?" Paige said. "What can be made to work in our favor?"

  Travis thought about it, but for at least a minute nothing came to him.

  Then he smiled. F inn watched the mast take shape. Lambert and the other specialist, Miller, were quick and efficient in their moves. The tech, Grayling, had the camera feeds already routed to a line of eight laptops, arrayed on the pavement of Fourth Avenue in the lengthening storefront shad
ows.

  So far the cameras could resolve nothing. The laptop screens were fully white, overwhelmed by the desert's background heat. But that would change very soon.

  Finn had brought fifteen men through the opening. Three were assembling and configuring the mast, four were holding the guywires, and eight were just standing there, HK MP5s in hand, ready to run. Ready to make the kills.

  If the condition of the ruins had affected any of the men, they weren't showing it. Finn wished they would, at least to some small degree. Wished he could see some human reaction in them-a respect for the suffering that'd happened in this place. He was sure they felt it, deep inside-maybe not even so deep inside. It was only human for them to stifle their empathy in the presence of others, but Finn had to believe that any one of them, walking these ruins alone, would have been brought to his knees. It helped to think so anyway.

  "We're not going to make it painful for them," he said. He turned his eyes on the eight who were armed. "Miss Campbell and her friends aren't bad people. From their point of view they're in the right. There's no call to make them suffer. We make it fast, as soon as we're on them." T ravis, Paige, and Bethany covered distance among the cars as quickly as possible, moving straight west from their earlier position, from one lower corner of the town toward the other.

  The wide driving lanes between the cars ran north and south, but the going was just as easy from east to west. The cars had the same natural channels between them that existed in any parking lot: the spaces their drivers had needed in which to open their doors that final time, long ago.

  They slipped through the channels, every few seconds crossing the wider lanes. They were acting on a risky assumption: that Finn's people weren't standing lookout at all, but were just waiting for the cameras to do it for them. The assumption was as necessary as it was dangerous: they needed to move quickly in order for Travis's plan to work, and they couldn't do that while staying low among the vehicles.