Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Travis studied the nearest edge of town. On this side of the airport there were only a few outbuildings, all of them tucked in close to the fence line. The zigzagging had put the three of them well beyond the bounds of the city, in what should be empty desert in the present day. There would be little risk of any bystander seeing them appear through the iris.

"Let's do it," Paige said.

Travis nodded.

Bethany was still carrying the cylinder. She settled onto one knee and aimed it at almost ground level between the rows of cars. She switched it on.

The iris opened to vacant land under the same kind of long sunlight they were crouching in now, maybe half an hour before dusk. For a second, that seemed wrong to Travis: the present was shifted an hour ahead of this side. It should already be dark over there. Then he remembered. The present was an hour later in the day, but two months earlier in the year. August instead of October. The sunset would be a lot later in August, about enough to offset the difference. It occurred to him that rival armies using this technology against each other would have a lot of abstract thinking to do.

He crawled to the iris and looked through at the broad sweep of present-day Yuma.

He felt the back of his neck go cold.

"Shit," he whispered.

Paige was beside him a second later. Bethany remained ten feet away, holding the cylinder.

"What is it?" Bethany said.

For a few seconds neither Travis nor Paige answered. They just stared through the iris at the living version of the city-which was filled with police and federal and even military vehicles. Flashers stabbed at the evening air from a hundred places, and at a glance Travis saw at least three helicopters circling high above.

"I had it wrong," Travis said. "They did set a trap for us in the present. They just waited until we were on this side to spring it."

Bethany closed the iris.

They lay there on the hard ground, silent.

The breeze played over the tops of the cars. It dipped among them in weakened breaths, noticeably cooler than it'd been even ten minutes ago.

"It's probably a Homeland response," Bethany said. "The president can initiate one without anyone's approval. They'll have every road into the city blocked off. The residents will be locked down under curfew. Anyone moving around in the open within ten or fifteen miles of town will be stopped and questioned. Our chances of escape are better on this side."

"Our chances of escape are near zero on this side," Paige said.

"I know," Bethany said.

Travis got up into a crouch, and looked through the truck's cab again at the rising mast. It was impossible to accurately judge its height, but it was a lot taller than the six-story hotel a few blocks from it. It wouldn't be long before it was completed, and in fact the cameras on top were probably already functional, even if the desert was still blinding them. And that protection might only last another twenty or thirty minutes.

"What's working in our favor?" Paige said. "What can be made to work in our favor?"

Travis thought about it, but for at least a minute nothing came to him.

Then he smiled. F inn watched the mast take shape. Lambert and the other specialist, Miller, were quick and efficient in their moves. The tech, Grayling, had the camera feeds already routed to a line of eight laptops, arrayed on the pavement of Fourth Avenue in the lengthening storefront shadows.

So far the cameras could resolve nothing. The laptop screens were fully white, overwhelmed by the desert's background heat. But that would change very soon.

Finn had brought fifteen men through the opening. Three were assembling and configuring the mast, four were holding the guywires, and eight were just standing there, HK MP5s in hand, ready to run. Ready to make the kills.

If the condition of the ruins had affected any of the men, they weren't showing it. Finn wished they would, at least to some small degree. Wished he could see some human reaction in them-a respect for the suffering that'd happened in this place. He was sure they felt it, deep inside-maybe not even so deep inside. It was only human for them to stifle their empathy in the presence of others, but Finn had to believe that any one of them, walking these ruins alone, would have been brought to his knees. It helped to think so anyway.

"We're not going to make it painful for them," he said. He turned his eyes on the eight who were armed. "Miss Campbell and her friends aren't bad people. From their point of view they're in the right. There's no call to make them suffer. We make it fast, as soon as we're on them." T ravis, Paige, and Bethany covered distance among the cars as quickly as possible, moving straight west from their earlier position, from one lower corner of the town toward the other.

The wide driving lanes between the cars ran north and south, but the going was just as easy from east to west. The cars had the same natural channels between them that existed in any parking lot: the spaces their drivers had needed in which to open their doors that final time, long ago.

They slipped through the channels, every few seconds crossing the wider lanes. They were acting on a risky assumption: that Finn's people weren't standing lookout at all, but were just waiting for the cameras to do it for them. The assumption was as necessary as it was dangerous: they needed to move quickly in order for Travis's plan to work, and they couldn't do that while staying low among the vehicles.

They moved upright at half the speed of a sprint. They'd have gone faster, but the plan required stopping at vehicles every few hundred feet-among other things.

For Travis there were two other reasons to slow up. Two specific items he was looking for, that he hoped to find in glove boxes along the way. He found the first within minutes. The second took longer, but only a little. He pocketed both things and continued along at a quicker pace.

If they were lucky they might cover two miles before the cameras could see them. Maybe even three. But either way it was going to be close. The plan would succeed or fail by minutes. Seconds, even.

If it worked at all. T he first thing that showed on the laptops were the broad lanes between the cars, stretching away to a vanishing point like rows of corn. Finn had expected that. The ground between the cars had lain in shadow for at least an hour now.

Humans still wouldn't be discernible in the lanes: the lanes were reading a hundred degrees, while the tops of the cars were reading five degrees higher. But it was progress.

It crossed Finn's mind that Paige Campbell and her associates, however many she had with her, might be hiding in one of the structures within the city. That would be problematic, short term. Every building's interior had been superheated all day long by the greenhouse effect. It was probably a hundred twenty or higher in each of them, and that heat would take time to bleed out through closed windows and plaster walls.

But long term it was no problem at all. How long could Campbell and the others stay hidden in those conditions? It was unlikely they'd brought much food and water of their own, if any, and they sure as hell weren't going to find any left sitting around in Yuma.

If it came to simply waiting them out, that would be fine. They weren't going anywhere on the present side, and they weren't going anywhere on this side either. It was going to end here, sometime in the next twenty-four hours.

But every instinct told Finn that they were out among the cars, making whatever run for it they could, and that this would be over very, very soon.

He stared at the laptops again. Watched the contrast of the lanes deepen. Some portions of them were taking on a new shade now. Ninety-nine degrees. M oving quickly. Not quite running. Stopping at intervals. They were dead south of town now, two miles west of where they'd begun their sideways move.