Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Then she stood up, holding the thing firmly in one hand and gripping the roll bar with the other. She leaned forward against the bar, braced herself, and leveled the cylinder straight ahead. She pressed the on button.

The projection cone flared. The iris opened a few feet above and beyond the Jeep's hood. From Travis's position, looking upward at it, he could see only sky on the other side, the same washed-out blue as it was in the present. It made the iris nearly invisible. He wondered for a second if Bethany could feel the air rushing through it, then realized she wouldn't: the airflow through the iris would be no different from the air already surging over the Jeep.

He turned to ask her if she could see anything, but stopped himself before speaking. Bethany's expression had gone blank, and the color had faded from her face. She stared unblinking at whatever she was seeing through the iris. Then she slowly pivoted, swinging the opening clockwise like a searchlight, gazing through at the landscape beyond. Whatever she was looking at, it was there in every direction.

"What is it?" Travis said.

"Stop the Jeep," Bethany said. "Pull over."

"Why?"

"Because I found the cars."

Travis pulled over. The highway was empty in both directions for all the miles they could see.

Bethany was still standing in the back. She turned around, leaned over and rested the cylinder on the Jeep's compressed soft top behind the backseat. The beam pointed sideways to the Jeep's right. The iris hung fixed in the air at chest level, just beyond the freeway's shoulder.

Travis got out at the same time as Paige. He was already looking past the Jeep at the iris. Could already see through it. Could already feel his own thoughts going as vacant as Bethany's had. A moment later all three of them were crowded at the opening, looking through. They stared for half a minute without speaking. Then Travis returned to the Jeep, shut it off, and pocketed the keys.

He took the shotgun from where Paige had left it on the passenger side. He picked up Bethany's backpack, hanging open with the SIG and all the shotgun shells inside it. Then he went to the cylinder and pushed the delayed shutoff button. He waited for the light cone to cut out, and then he secured the cylinder inside the pack. By the time he had it shouldered with the Remington, Paige and Bethany were already through the opening. He followed them. T he desert on the other side looked like a shopping-center parking lot the day after Thanksgiving, except that it had no boundaries. The cars stretched as far as Travis could see in every direction. The visible horizon was five miles out, any way that he faced. The cars extended at least that far.

They were parked grill-to-grill in double rows, each of which was separated by a lane of space just wide enough to drive down. The lanes branched out from the freeway, which itself remained clear.

The cars were in perfect condition except for their tires and window seals, which had baked to crumbs over the decades and settled in a thick layer on the desert floor. The wind had leveled the crumbs out but hadn't scattered them. Travis saw why: most of the cars were no more than an inch or two off the ground, sitting on their rims. All of them together would make a hell of a barrier against air currents at the surface.

The cars' paint jobs were faded and pitted, but not so much that the original colors couldn't be discerned.

Every kind of personal vehicle was there. Compact cars to SUVs. And they'd come from everywhere. California plates made up at least a third of them-understandably, given the state's population and short distance from Yuma-but within the first fifty cars he looked at, Travis saw two that were from New York State. He saw Texas and Florida and Pennsylvania, and a dozen others.

The cars were all empty. No bodies. No belongings. Just cracked and worn and bleached upholsteries that hadn't been sat on in seventy-three years.

Bethany climbed onto the hood of a Ford Expedition, then onto its roof. She put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, and turned a slow circle. She dropped her hand to her side. Looked down at Travis and Paige. Shook her head. Climbed back down.

"They came here?" she said. "From as far away as D.C. and New York, people emptied out of the big cities and came to Yuma? Why would they do that?"

Travis felt too thrown to even shrug. He had nothing approaching an answer. He stared over the sea of chrome and faded paint and tried to get a grasp of the numbers involved.

"A little over three hundred million people in America," he said. "Subtract the ones too young to drive a car, or that live in big cities and don't need one. How many cars would there be, ballpark? Couple hundred million?"

"Something like that," Paige said.

"How much space would they take up, arranged like this?" Travis said. "A parking space is about ten by twenty. So two hundred square feet. A square mile should have, what, a little over twenty-five million square feet in it?"

Bethany took out her phone, switched it on, and opened a calculator function. She pressed the buttons with both thumbs and had the answer in a few seconds.

"Just under twenty-eight million square feet in a mile," she said. She did another calculation. "Divided by two hundred, that's one hundred forty thousand parking spaces. Cut that by a third to figure in the access lanes, you've got a little over ninety thousand cars every square mile."

"Call it a hundred thousand to make the math easier," Travis said. "Two hundred million cars would take up two thousand square miles."

Bethany's thumbs moved again. Then her eyebrows went up briefly. "Wow. Believe it or not, that's a square of only forty-four miles by forty-four. If Yuma was at the center of it, the edges would be just twenty-two miles from town. We're further out than that right now-more like thirty miles."

Travis thought about it. It made sense, in its own way. "You'd expect more of a rectangle than a square. It would grow east and west from towns along the freeway as people arrived. It would thicken north and south from there. Hard to say how far. But the point is that they could fit. Every car in the United States could park within a couple days' walk of Yuma. And that's assuming every car made it here, which they wouldn't. A good percentage would run out of gas along the way."

"A lot would be left behind to begin with," Paige said. "You didn't see any cars in D.C., but think of suburban families with two or three of them in the garage. They wouldn't take them all. They'd take one-whichever got the best mileage-and leave the others."

Travis nodded. The math worked, even if the reality it described was impossible to come to terms with.

"Yuma," Paige said. She stared east toward it, though the city-or its ruins, at least-lay well out of sight. Travis saw her eyes narrow. She was imagining three hundred million people gathering in one place.

"It's not possible," she said. "Not even close. The entire population of the United States bunched into Yuma, Arizona? Picture the Woodstock crowd. That was half a million people. The American population is six hundred times that amount. Think you could hold six hundred Woodstocks in Yuma at the same time?" She stared over the desert again. Shook her head. "This would be more than just a bad idea. This would be a lunatic idea."

"But it was the idea," Travis said. He swept an arm at the cars. "Somehow, this was the official response to whatever went wrong with Umbra. Everyone in the country wouldn't just spontaneously decide to come here. They'd have to be told. They will be told. In our own time… Jesus, all of this happens just a few months from now."

"But why?" Paige said. " Why would the government tell them that, and why would anyone listen? Whatever the hell was going wrong in the rest of the country, sending everyone here couldn't possibly help them. It would be mass suicide. There wouldn't even be housing space to get them all in out of the sun. And there'd be no food, either. They'd be dead in a week."