Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

It was a blackened, fibrous slab of wood maybe two inches thick. A corner of it was just peeking from the mire ten feet away. There was a rusted hinge attached to it. A single, inch-long steel screw clung to the free-swinging half of the hinge. Both the screw and the hinge were deformed. They hadn't just corroded to rust and flaked away. They'd sagged and bent. They'd half melted.

Fire had ravaged the foundation pit at some point in the past. It hadn't burned hot enough, or long enough, to affect the massive footings of the girder structure, but everything else had suffered in the heat. The heavy wooden door had probably been solid oak. It looked like the carbonized remnant of a campfire log now. Travis thought of bronze again. He thought of the other thing it was celebrated for: the ease with which it could be heat-softened and reshaped. Plastic and bronze nameplates might last for millennia against rain and snow and mildew, but they wouldn't last five minutes in a fire hot enough to warp steel screws. T hey walked the building's perimeter. They searched for any scraps that had fallen outside the foundation. They found a few shards of green glass and chunks of concrete from the missing floor sections above, but nothing useful. Nothing with anyone's name on it. Decades of rain and wind had scoured the exposed street of anything small enough to be carried away. Travis imagined meter-wide storm drains beneath the city clotted with every kind of refuse. T hey climbed a maple growing against the girders on the west side of the building and got onto the second floor. They made their way across the level toward the intact stairwell at the center of the structure. They avoided walking on the huge pads of concrete that still held in some places among the steel framing. All of the pads showed cracks, and some were sagging. It was impossible to know the amount of weight they could hold. Sooner or later each one's capacity would reach zero and it would collapse. A day or a week or a month before that point, the capacity was probably just a few pounds. Given that most of them had already fallen, it seemed prudent to stay the hell off of them.

They reached the stairwell and found it to be solid. The treads and risers were at least an inch thick. None of the flights they could see above had collapsed or even decoupled from the structural members they were welded to.

They made their way up.

They stopped and studied each floor. A few very heavy objects from the building's interior remained atop the concrete pads here and there. One was a squat granite bookend, like a little pyramid cut in half. Travis lifted it and saw traces of carpet fiber and foam beneath it. The thing had sat there, a little too dense to be blown away, while everything had rotted around it-even out from under it. They found a pair of hexagonal iron dumbbells, twenty pounds each. Travis imagined them sitting in someone's office and not seeing much use. They'd seen even less lately.

They saw a few steel door frames still held in place against the sturdiest uprights, but there were no doors left in any of them. No doors lying flat on any of the concrete pads, either. They'd have long since rotted to fragments light enough that a once-in-a-decade storm could push them over the edge. At least half a dozen such storms would've happened over the years. No doors. No nameplates.

They saw something shiny at the north edge of the fifth floor. They crossed to it along the girders. It was the foil lid of a yogurt container, its edge pinned beneath the rim of a tipped-over trash basket-a stylish, heavy little thing carved from a cubic foot of limestone.

Travis pulled the yogurt lid free and held it up to the light. Whatever writing had once been on it had long ago faded to almost nothing in the sun.

But there was a line of text along the edge that remained legible-tiny letters and numbers that'd been stamped into the foil.

They read: exp. dec 23 2011.

For a few seconds everything was quiet, except the wind moving through the forest that'd replaced Washington, D.C. Far to the west Travis heard a crow cawing, high above the treetops. The weightless foil lid quivered just noticeably in the breeze, but Travis's eyes stayed fixed on the expiration date.

"Four months from now," Bethany said. "In our time." The words came out as hardly more than a breath.

"I don't eat a lot of yogurt," Travis said. "How far away is the sell-by date, when you buy this stuff?"

"It's like milk. Three or four weeks. Someone would've bought this around the start of December. This coming December, in the present day."

Travis nodded.

"And it's not like people hang on to these lids for posterity," Bethany said. "Figure this thing goes into the trash in early to mid-December… and no one ever takes it back out. Jesus Christ, the world ends four months from now? "

"Janitors quit working four months from now, at least," Travis said. "My guess is, so does everyone else."

He let the lid go and they watched it drift down on the air, like the colored leaves that were settling onto Vermont Avenue before them.

"Four months…" Bethany said again. "Everyone I know. Everyone I love. Four months…"

Travis found himself going back to what he'd thought of earlier: the chance of some connection between all of this and whatever the Whisper had warned him about-the dark potential of his own future.

He remained certain there was no connection, but now something else struck him: the Whisper had spoken of a future in which he belonged to Tangent several years from now. How could that have ever been possible if the world was going to collapse in 2011?

Well, weren't all bets simply off, after everything the Whisper had done? In a roundabout way, the thing had killed Ellen Garner, with the result that President Garner had resigned from office and allowed Currey to take power. That change alone could account for massive differences in how everything played out.

"End of the world plus seventy years, we guessed," Bethany said. "So on this side of the iris, the date is sometime around 2080."

Travis nodded, but said nothing. He looked around. From this position he could see along not only Vermont, but M Street to the east and west, a hundred yards in each direction before the tree cover obscured the way.

Something obvious occurred to him. He couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it already.

"Where are the cars?" he said.

He looked at Bethany. She looked blank for half a second and then made the same oh yeah expression he'd probably just made himself.

"The panels would be rusted to nothing by now," Travis said, "but the frames and the wheel rims should still be in some kind of shape, with windows and all kinds of plastic parts draped over them." He looked around. "They should be everywhere."

But there wasn't one to be seen. They hadn't passed anything that could've once been a vehicle on the walk down from the Ritz. Hadn't seen anything like that along the stretch of Vermont north of the hotel, either, when they'd first roped down. He'd have noticed and remembered.

"People must've had a reason to get out of D.C.," Bethany said, "at the end."

Travis stared at the empty streets and thought about it. He imagined a plague sweeping the world. People fleeing high-population areas in a mass panic.

It didn't work. Not entirely. First of all, not everyone would leave. Some number of people would have nowhere better to go, and would hole up in their homes. The city could still end up vacated of cars, even in that case-in the end, those without transportation would break into and hotwire whatever was available-but there was another problem, and Travis could see no way around it. The dynamics of a mass evacuation in a short period of time would've overwhelmed the city streets. It happened in every coastal metropolis in the days before a big hurricane. Traffic would condense at the primary outlets, like bridges and freeway interchanges. People would sit at the wheel for an hour or two, going nowhere, and then a few would run out of gas while idling, or get frustrated and simply abandon their vehicles, and try to get out on foot. It only took a few of those, and then each way out of the city would be stopped up like a corked bottle. And hurricane warnings matured over three to four days. Travis imagined that news of a major disease outbreak would hit at least that fast. Maybe faster. The gridlock would be absolute. There would be all kinds of cars left rotting on M Street and Vermont Avenue if the world had ended in a plague.