Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Travis relaxed his grip on the shotgun. He turned to look at Paige. She was looking in his direction, but past him. Staring at the big windows, thinking about something.

"It's probably about five o'clock here," she said. "I don't know when the sun sets in Arizona during October, but eyeballing it I'd say we've got an hour."

Travis followed her stare. He looked at the angle of sunlight coming into the terminal. It shone as harshly as it would have at midday, but it fell at a long slant. An hour was probably about right.

"We need to get out of here right now," Paige said. She sounded on edge. "We need to get out into the desert and go back through the iris to the present. We can walk to the Jeep from there."

Travis had an idea of what was spooking her.

"This camera mast they were talking about-"

Paige cut him off. "Yes. We need to be scared shitless of it. And we need to get moving. I'll explain on the way."

She stepped past him, out of the shop. He took a step to follow and then realized Bethany hadn't moved yet. He stopped, turned back to her. Saw what she was staring at.

In a little wastebasket just visible behind the shop's counter, there was a scrap of newspaper. Maybe the top third of the front page, torn roughly from left to right. It was stained with ancient blotches of mustard, like it'd been used to clean up the remnants of a sandwich on the counter. Glancing around, Travis saw no sign of the paper it'd been torn from. For that matter, there were no newspapers of any kind in the shop. A tower of wire shelves in the corner had clearly once been stocked with them, but it was empty now, like every bookshelf in the place. Except the scrap in the trash can, not a single piece of paper remained in the store. Travis turned his eyes to the concourse and saw the reason within seconds: the kids had burned the paper to stay warm. Ash piles remained in various stone planters among the bodies. As hot as this place would get during the day, it would cool down fast at night. The big glass wall would bleed away the heat in no time-especially in December.

Bethany stooped and took the piece of newspaper from the trash. Filling most of the space was the paper's title: The Arizona Republic. Below that was the date: December 15, 2011. And beneath that was the lead headline and the top few rows of the story's text-a single column beside a giant photo-before the torn bottom edge cut it off.

The photo was impossible to make out. Only the top inch of it showed: a defocused background of a crowd somewhere.

The headline read, former president garner assassinated in new york city. P aige let her urgency fade for the moment. She stepped back into the shop.

Bethany spread the paper on the counter so all three of them could see it. Despite age yellowing and the mustard stain, the fragment of article text was easily readable: New York (AP)-Former United States President Richard Garner was shot to death at a gathering in Central Park yesterday evening, Wednesday, December 14. Garner had for several days spoken publicly against the mass relocation to

That was it. It reached the bottom edge and there was no more. Bethany flipped the scrap over, but the other side featured only an advertisement for a local restaurant. She turned it back over to the headline.

Travis stared at it. Read the story text again. Thought about what it implied.

"We think bringing everyone to Yuma was some kind of panic move," he said. "The official response by those in power-those behind Umbra-even if they knew it couldn't actually save everyone. And Richard Garner called them on it, at the end. Even opposed it, publicly. Any question that's why he was killed?"

Paige's eyes narrowed. She saw where he was going. So did Bethany.

"Garner's not in on it," Paige said.

Bethany looked back and forth between them, hope rising in her eyes. "But he probably knows a hell of a lot about this stuff, right now in the present day. He only resigned the presidency two years ago. Up until that point, he had all the top security clearances. He had to have known about Umbra, whatever the hell it is."

For a moment none of them spoke. The recording droned over the concourse.

"We should pay him a visit," Travis said.

Paige nodded again. Then she blinked and looked around. "We need to get the hell out of Yuma first. Come on."

She turned and led the way out of the shop, back toward the door they'd entered through. T hey came out through the exterior door with the SIG and the Remington leveled. There was no one in sight.

Travis looked down and saw the paint chips he'd left earlier. He shook his head.

They moved east across the southern span of the building, out of view of anyone in town. They ran at nearly full speed and reached the southeast corner in a little under a minute.

The donut of open space surrounding the terminal was a quarter mile on every side. They'd first come into the airport from the north, with the city at their backs. They were facing south and east now, with nothing ahead of them but a few pole barns at the edge of town and then a tundra of cars covering miles and miles of flat desert.

Finn and his people were in town. Probably toward the middle. A sprint from this corner of the terminal toward the southeast would be largely hidden by the building itself, at least for the first half of the run. After that they would probably be visible to someone high up in the city, like a watcher on the top floor of the hotel.

Travis saw Paige judging the distance, running through the same logistics.

"I don't imagine they'll have a watch posted anymore," she said. "They'll have everyone working on the camera mast. They'll want it raised as soon as possible, and once it's up they won't need a watch at all."

She looked toward the sun. Couldn't look right at it. The arid sky did nothing to filter its glare, even though it was shining from low in the west. Their guess inside the book shop had been right: it was an hour above the horizon.

Travis suddenly understood Paige's concern.

"Thermal cameras," he said.

She looked at him. Nodded. "Eight FLIR cameras, seventy-five meters up. The kind of mast they'll use is lightweight, guywire stabilized, rapid-deployable. What the military uses for forward operating bases in open country. A skilled team can put one up in an hour."

Travis looked around at the tarmac. Looked at the scrubland past the perimeter fence, and the sprawl of cars beyond. Every outdoor surface in Yuma was still baking at over one hundred degrees.

But not for long.

All of it would cool quickly once the sun set. It might be cooling already. And once the background was cooler than ninety-eight degrees, the three of them would be the warmest things within a hundred miles of Yuma. Even if they got far out among the cars and army-crawled into the desert all night long, the cameras atop the mast might see them. Infrared light from body heat radiated and reflected like any other kind. It could bounce off metal and glass. FLIR cameras watching from a height of seventy-five meters would have an effective horizon dozens of miles out.

If they were still in Yuma an hour from now, they might as well be wearing neon body suits. T hey ran.

They reached the perimeter, crossed the fence and made their way among the cars.

They ducked low and zigzagged south and east for over half an hour, until even the terminal building was at least a mile away.

They stared through the cab of a pickup toward the center of town. They could see the mast going up, rising meter by meter as unseen workers added sections to it at the bottom. The camera assembly was already mounted on top. The mast seemed to hold itself perfectly straight as it rose. Travis pictured four men holding onto guywires-invisible against the sky at this distance-that they would stake into the ground once the mast was complete.