Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

"Could things have just been that desperate?" Bethany said. "What if, somehow, Yuma offers temporary relief from whatever's happening in the rest of the country? Why that would be, I don't know… but suppose it is. Suppose the effect of Umbra is so bad that it's worth it to come here, just to get away from it, even if it still means dying."

The notion chilled Travis, even in the baking sunlight. He watched it affect Paige and Bethany in the same way.

"Why Yuma?" he said. "What would it offer?" He thought of what he'd considered on the plane: that Yuma's climate might have a lot to do with its significance. "What if Umbra is worse in some places than others? What if it's worse where there's moisture, for whatever reason? Then a place like Yuma would be a kind of-" But he already saw why that thinking didn't work. He shook his head. "No. In that case there'd be lots of places people could go. Yuma might be the driest city, but there are tons of them that are almost as dry. Vegas is probably about the same, and it's a hell of a lot bigger. Christ, even Los Angeles would work, and you could fit all kinds of extra people there. Still no idea what they'd do for food, but it would beat the shit out of lumping everyone together here."

"Then they didn't come here for the climate," Bethany said. "So what did they come for?" T hey walked among the cars for twenty minutes. Nearly all of them were unlocked. Either the owners hadn't expected anyone to steal them, or hadn't expected to ever use them again.

They opened doors, felt under seats, inspected glove boxes, popped trunks. They found several portable gasoline containers in almost every trunk or truck bed. In many cases there were one or more still full, especially in cars that'd come from neighboring states. The sealed plastic had kept the contents from evaporating.

They found random small things here and there. Fast-food wrappers. Pencils. Assorted change. There were guns in many of the trunks, alongside the leftover fuel. People had chosen to bring weapons along when they'd left their homes-or at least hadn't wanted to leave them behind-but by the time they'd reached Yuma they hadn't seen the need to hang on to them.

Many of them had left something else behind with the cars: bicycles. Not many had brought them, but those who had had left them here, bolted to trunk-mounted racks or lying in truck beds. For a moment Travis could make no sense of that. Why would anyone leave their bikes behind when they had a thirty-mile-plus walk in the desert ahead of them? Then he looked at the wide-open freeway again and thought he understood. There'd been some kind of shuttle system running here when everyone arrived. Buses or flatbeds or even pickup trucks making endless circuits along the road, taking on new arrivals wherever they found them, and ferrying them into the city. The whole thing had been massively organized.

"I found something," Bethany said.

She was two cars away, leaning in through the front passenger door of a white minivan. Paige was just raising the trunk lid of a Cadillac parked across the driving lane from it. She and Travis reached Bethany at the same time.

Bethany had found a spiral notebook inside the van's console compartment. Its cover was bright yellow, unfaded, and it had a child's stick-figure drawings all over it in blue ink. The figures were frowning and weeping teardrops half the size of their heads. Bethany opened the book. There were more drawings inside. More sad people. Some of the drawings showed specific settings. One looked like a grocery store, with oranges and apples colored in with crayon. Another might have been a school hallway. Most had simply doorways or trees for backgrounds. But in all of them the human figures were despondent, in some cases covering their faces with their hands while the tears spilled from under them. What the pictures lacked was any explanation for the tears. Any indication at all of what the hell was going on to make people feel that way.

Bleak December.

That's what the media called it.

But why?

After a dozen pages of drawings there was a final image showing the van itself. The child and an adult with long hair-presumably the child's mother-were seated in front. Still frowning, but not crying. The rest of the van was shown heaped with crudely drawn, out-of-scale household items. A toaster. A vacuum cleaner. A computer. Silverware and dishes and pots and pans. Bags crammed full of clothing.

None of that stuff was still in the van. Travis could see past the front seats to the vast cavity of space where the rear benches had been folded down into the floor. There was nothing back there.

The next page of the notebook didn't feature a drawing. It bore only a block of handwritten text-the oversized script of a child that somehow spoke of great effort, even in its sloppiness. It read: I hope we get a tickit when we get to Yuma, but we will be happy enough just to get there. I hope Aunt Liz is there. Mom says we will probaly be there tonite.

All the remaining pages were blank. Bethany rifled through them, then came back to the written page.

"Ticket?" she said. "For what? A ride into town?"

They stared at the handwriting for another few seconds. Then Bethany let the book fall shut. She leaned back into the van and looked into the console compartment the book had come from. She gathered up the only other things inside it and held them up. A blue pen and two crayons, red and orange. The crayons had both melted to flattened shapes held together by just the paper around them.

"We might find a lot more questions out here," Travis said, "but I think the answers are going to be in the city."

Paige and Bethany looked like they agreed.

Travis unslung the backpack from his shoulder, unzipped it, and took out the cylinder.

Twenty-five minutes later they reached the western outskirts of the city. It was larger than Travis had imagined, sprawled out over a patch of desert at least four miles by four. He exited the freeway and a moment later they were passing through a residential neighborhood full of low-slung homes, palm trees not quite as tall as the streetlights, and shallow front yards that were either gravel or irrigated grass.

They came to Fourth Avenue and turned south onto it. It seemed to be the main drag through town. It could've been any Main Street in America except for the arid terrain. There were gas stations and grocery stores and banks and jewelers. There was a Burger King. There was a movie theater with five screens.

If there was an army waiting for them, it wasn't showing itself. Which made sense, in a way.

"If we run into trouble," Travis said, "I think it'll be on the other side, in the ruins. On this side they don't know what we're driving, or even who we are except for you, Paige. But over there we'll be the only things moving around on two feet. It's a better place for them to set a watch."

Paige nodded. Weighed the possibilities. "It could be wishful thinking," she said, "but we might have a few things working in our favor. On the one hand we're up against the president of the United States, who has the military and every police force in the country at his disposal. He can make it rain brimstone on us if he wants to. On the other hand he and Finn, and whoever else they're working with, have already demonstrated a pretty severe preference for keeping their secrets intact. It's hard to imagine them grabbing a hundred soldiers or federal agents and sending them through the opening to lie in wait for us. That's a lot of people to let in on the game. My guess is Finn will stick with his own security personnel from the highrise, whatever number of them he trusts enough. No telling what that number is. A dozen if we're lucky. More if we're not."

Travis looked down a cross street going by. Considered the broad layout of the town. Imagined how it would look in moderately well-preserved ruins, with most of its structures still standing. It was a lot of area for a dozen people to watch. A lot for even several dozen.