Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

He turned toward the source of the light: the double doors at the end of the hall, fifty feet away. They were closed but they were mostly glass. The wall around them was also glass. All of it remained intact.

The wedge of parking lot that was visible beyond looked bleached and barren in the hard light. It was full of cars, which wasn't surprising.

Paige let the bathroom door fall shut.

The three of them stood there. They listened. The hotel was as silent as it'd no doubt been for decades.

They watched the space beyond the glass wall for over a minute. Past the parking lot the view was blocked in places by other buildings, but in the gaps between those they could see a long way-hundreds of yards in some cases. Against the bases of distant buildings they could see deep accumulations of wind-piled sand, blinding white in the sun. None of it was blowing around now.

They saw no movement anywhere.

Travis set the cylinder and the large duffel bag on the floor. He took the shotgun from the bag, reassembled it, and slung it on his shoulder. Then he opened the bathroom door again and slid the duffel bag far to the left inside, near the sinks. It was too much to haul around the ruins with them. If they came back this way, they could get it later.

Bethany took the SIG from her backpack, considered it, and then handed it to Paige. "You're probably a better shot than me. I'll carry the cylinder. Better to have it in hand than in the pack. If we need to use it fast, seconds will count."

She zipped and shouldered the backpack again-it held only shotgun shells now-and picked up the cylinder from where Travis had set it.

Travis studied the parking lot another few seconds, then turned and made his way through the bodies to the stairwell door. T here was a vague light shining in the stairwell. It came from somewhere high above. Even on the lowest flights it was enough to reveal the few bodies that lay in this space.

They found the light source on the fourth-floor landing. The husk of a balding man in his forties lay sprawled across the threshold leading to the hallway, the door forever propped open at forty-five degrees. It let in sunlight from the same kind of glass wall that capped the ground floor corridor.

They continued to the sixth floor. The bodies in the hallway there were as densely strewn as downstairs. Some of the guestroom doors they passed stood open. More bodies inside, on beds and in chairs. Travis stared at the shapes of bones beneath drawn skin. All the bodies were shriveled to that degree. He didn't think mummification alone had done that to them. More likely starvation and dehydration had done it before they'd died.

They came to the glass wall at the end, looking out over Yuma from six stories up.

They stared.

"Jesus Christ," Paige said softly.

It was the last thing any of them said for several minutes.

Every building in Yuma looked exactly as it had when they'd driven through it in the present day, except that the colors were baked to pastel versions of themselves. Like soft-drink cans left in the sun for weeks. Every parking lot was filled to capacity with cars and trucks. Every curb space was taken too. The vehicles had endured just as those in the open desert had: faded paint and no tires or window seals. Beyond the edges of the city, the mad but organized sprawl of cars extended out of sight in all directions. From this height it looked dramatically more absurd than it had from the shoulder of I-8, since the horizon was much farther away.

The three of them noticed all of that within seconds, and then disregarded it. Something else had taken their full attention.

The city of Yuma was drifted with human bones.

Seven decades of wind had scurried them into piles against all available obstructions. Cars, buildings, landscaping walls, planter boxes. They were everywhere except for open stretches of flat ground-like the section of parking lot immediately below, which had been visible from the first floor. From down there they'd seen the bones only at a distance, and mistaken them for sand.

Travis let his eyes roam the nearest pile, seventy feet left of the exterior door. The bones had massed there against a different wing of the hotel. He could see them with enough clarity to discern adult skulls from those of children, and large ribs from small ones. The bones were scoured clean and white. Everyone who'd died outdoors had been quickly discovered by coyotes and foxes and desert cats, and whatever they'd left behind, the sun and wind had eventually taken care of.

"It's everyone, isn't it?" Bethany said. "They really did it. They all came here and just… died."

Travis looked at her. Saw her eyes suddenly haunted by a new thought.

"Maybe we were with them," she said. "Maybe our bones are out there somewhere." T hey watched the city for another five minutes, for any sign of movement. If Finn's people were there, they were already hidden in ideal vantage points. Travis considered that. Realized something obvious.

"I think we're here ahead of them," he said.

"How can you know?" Paige said.

"Because if they'd gotten here first, some of them would be standing at this window." T here were three other floor-to-ceiling windows on the sixth floor, at the ends of other wings. They spent a few minutes at each of them, scrutinizing the city. They saw bones everywhere, but no sign of recent disturbance.

They also saw no indication that Yuma had been modified to handle any kind of crowd. No trailers or temporary shelters had been set up. If there'd been tents erected about the place, they were long gone in the wind.

Then they came to the last window, facing southeast, and understood where they needed to go next.

A mile away lay the broad expanse of the airport. The runways were clear, flawless. They probably looked no better even in the present. The terminals stood glittering and vacant. There were no aircraft docked at any of the gates. Travis studied the scene and wondered why it looked odd to him. Then it hit him: there were no parked cars filling the airport's space. It was open ground-the only open ground for miles.

"There's something written there," Bethany said. She pointed to the south end of the longest runway.

Travis saw what she meant. A few hundred feet in from the runway's identification numbers, someone had written a message in huge white letters-probably using the same paint the airport used for the runway lines. Travis had missed it at first; it was hard to read the letters from a long side angle. The message seemed to be intended for someone looking straight down on it from a plane.

Travis put it together one letter at a time, and had it after a few seconds.

It read: come back.

They were outside the hotel a minute later. The quiet of the city was unnerving. The bone drifts looked bigger from ground level than they had from the sixth floor.

The air temperature was about the same as it'd been in the present. Somewhere between 105 and 110.

They crossed the parking lot and made their way to a residential district three blocks beyond. Moving among the houses felt safer than crossing the wide-open lots of commercial and industrial zones. They'd seen from the hotel that they could follow the houses all the way to the airport if they went straight east and then south to its perimeter.

They saw leathery bodies in every home they passed. After the first block they stopped looking.

Bones were scattered everywhere outside the houses. In fenced yards where the wind had never picked up momentum, some of the skeletons were partially intact. A tiny skull and ribcage lay half submerged in a sandbox among faded toy tractors and steam shovels.

Travis brought up the rear. He looked back every twenty yards. Whenever they crossed a space that offered a view of the hotel behind them, he studied the big corridor windows on the high floors. Even through the glare of reflected sky, he could see through them well enough to spot a person, if one were standing there. So far, he saw nobody.