Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

She stared off. Shook her head. "That's why we went to the president first. If there was anyone to talk to about secret, dangerous shit that might get out of hand in the next few months, we figured it'd be him. I half expected him to just have the answer for us, once we'd shown him the cylinder and told him what we knew. Like there'd be some high-risk, black-budget program in the Defense Department, just about to go live, and he'd connect the dots just like that. And then he'd shut it down. Simple."

"Sounds like he did connect the dots," Travis said. "It's just the next part that didn't work out."

"But why wouldn't he shut it down?" Bethany said. "Why the hell would he want the world to end?"

"He probably thinks the danger can still be avoided, without stopping whatever this thing is," Paige said. "I overheard a conversation to that effect last night, tied up in that building in D.C. The project, or whatever it is, is called Umbra. But beyond the name, I still don't know a damn thing about it."

For almost a minute nobody spoke. Another airliner rumbled down out of the sky and landed.

"So our best move is to get to Yuma," Travis said, "and use the cylinder to investigate the ruins there. See what we can learn from it, if it's such an important place at the end."

"We were on our way to do that last night," Paige said, "after we left the White House. Obviously, President Currey didn't want us to get there."

"I don't imagine he's had a change of heart since then," Bethany said. "And as of an hour ago, these people know we have our own cylinder."

Paige nodded. "And since they don't have to sneak around and take out-of-the-way flights-hell, they could take military flights-they may already be in Yuma with their cylinder by the time we arrive. Even if they burn some time keeping their resources here on the East Coast, waiting for us to make a mistake, we should expect them to be no more than a few hours behind us."

"And we can assume they outnumber and outgun us by a wide margin," Travis said.

"Probably wider than we want to think about."

Travis leaned back in his chair. Stared at the heat shimmers rising from the runway. Breathed a laugh. "What the hell. We've gone up against worse."

He didn't mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the worse they'd gone up against had won.

The jet was the same type Travis and Bethany had flown in from Atlanta. Its rear four seats faced each other like those of a restaurant booth, without the table. They set their bags in one of them, occupied the other three, and fell asleep within the first five minutes of the flight.

When Travis opened his eyes again, he saw mountains passing below, high and glacier-capped, with vacant desert land to the east and west. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Paige was still asleep, but Bethany was awake, working on her phone. Travis glanced at the display and saw that she was compiling information on the two names they'd gleaned from the building. One was Isaac Finn, the man whose office Paige had been taken to on the sixteenth floor. The other was the man Travis had dropped from the ninth floor, whose wallet had yielded the name Raymond Muller. Bethany appeared to be amassing a good deal of info on each of them.

Travis stared out the window again. He thought of the cylinder. Thought of the future it opened, with all changes locked out. In a very real way, that meant it wasn't their future anymore. If they figured out how to stop Umbra, then the world would live on, but the place on the other side of the iris wouldn't change to reflect that fact. It would never be anything but ghost country, the long echo of some terrible and all-too-human mistake.

He looked at Paige again. Watched her bangs playing on her forehead in the airstream from an A/C nozzle above.

"She'd find you, you know," Bethany said. She spoke softly, just above the drone of the jet engines.

Travis glanced at her. Waited for her to go on.

"If the world was ending, however it happens," she said, "if people were evacuating cities, if Tangent was scared enough to seal the Breach… if everything was coming undone… Paige would find you. She'd do it just to be with you at the end."

Travis returned his eyes to Paige. He didn't bother nodding agreement to Bethany; she'd already gone back to work on her phone.

Up front one of the pilots was talking to the tower at Imperial, asking for approach vectors. A few seconds later the engines began to cycle down, and Travis felt the familiar physical illusion of the aircraft coming to a dead stop at altitude.

Paige stirred. She opened her eyes and sat upright, blinking away the sleep.

"What's special about Yuma?" Travis said. "In our time, I mean. Any military presence? Any classified research going on?"

"We looked into it," Paige said. "No research labs, as far as we could tell. There are two military sites. One's a Marine Corps air station. They fly a few Harrier squadrons out of there, run lots of joint exercises, things like that. The other's the Yuma Proving Ground, out in the Sonoran northeast of the city. The Army tests every kind of ground combat system there. No doubt most of it's classified stuff, non-line-of-sight cannons, precision-guided artillery, all types of land vehicles and helicopters. But nothing you'd call an existential threat to the world." She rubbed her eyes. "That's about it."

Travis nodded.

"It's dry as hell," Bethany said. She looked up from her phone. "Friend of mine lived there for two years after college. Yuma's the driest city in the United States. Couple inches of rain a year, if that."

"Should work in our favor," Travis said. "There won't be nearly as much corrosion of materials as we saw in D.C. We might even find paper that's still intact, if it's shut away from the wind and the sun."

Bethany managed a smile. "Hey, we had to get lucky with something."

Travis wondered about that. Wondered if it was really luck, or if Yuma's climate was part of why the place had mattered when the world shut down. T wenty minutes later they touched down in Imperial, a neat arrangement of neighborhood grids surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland and then more miles of open desert.

They walked out of the terminal into baked air-107 degrees, according to a digital sign over the parking lot.

They rented a Jeep Wrangler with an open top, picked up Interstate 8 at the south end of town, and headed east toward Yuma. Five minutes later they passed the last of the irrigated fields and came into the emptiest landscape Travis had ever seen. At even a glance it was more desolate than the scrublands around Border Town, which was saying something. The highway bore straight ahead through it, just south of dead east. Far ahead were low hills and a line of mountains-some southern range of the Rockies-that lay probably just north of Yuma, forty-some miles away.

Travis was driving. Paige sat in the passenger seat, reassembling the twelve-gauge.

Bethany leaned forward from the backseat, her hair going crazy in the wind. "Want to hear the bios on our two friends in the green building?"

Paige glanced back at her and nodded.

Bethany looked at her phone's display as she began. "Raymond Muller. Guy on the ninth floor. Forty-two years old. Got his masters in political science from Brown, and in the next two decades he worked for half the power players in D.C."

"Doing what?" Travis said.

"Connecting them all to one another would be my guess," Bethany said. "I used to run into people like that in my field. Professional networkers. Matchmakers for senators and representatives and every kind of mega-corporation. A little closer to the vest than lobbyists. Muller worked for an Appropriations Committee chairman, two Ways and Means chairmen, Raytheon, General Dynamics, GE, Intel, FedEx, and Pfizer at one time or another."