Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

From this position it was impossible to see the fire's northward progress. The three of them began moving to the west for a better perspective. Travis was hesitant to go too far-they might step out from behind the fire's thermal curtain and become visible to anyone watching the camera mast's feeds. Assuming whoever was up there didn't have bigger concerns now, like getting the hell out of the fire's way.

They'd gone only a few hundred feet west before they stopped and simply stared again. They had their answer.

The fire was advancing north faster than any of them could have hoped. The falling embers had triggered spot fires as far as half a mile north of the line. Each of these had already grown to bonfire size, massive cones of flame standing atop a dozen cars each, and blossoming outward through the tire crumbs. The bonfires were venting thousands of their own embers into the darkness toward Yuma.

The city would be an inferno in another five minutes.

That was the good news.

Travis could see the bad news just as easily.

The fire wasn't only spreading north.

He'd expected that problem to an extent-it was unavoidable-but he'd hoped the fire's progress in the other directions would be nominal.

It didn't look nominal.

The original fire line had spread south by at least four rows of cars, and from its starting point it'd expanded west by several rows as well, even crossing the wide driving lanes that ran north and south. The hotter the fire burned, the more rapidly it spread through the rubber crumbs.

Suddenly, about fifty feet along the original line, a bright fireball erupted with a heavy concussion sound. A still-sealed gasoline container in someone's trunk had burst in the heat. The blast sent burning fuel out in a fifty-foot radius.

It happened again five seconds later, this time at the southern edge of the advance. Just like that, there were half a dozen more vehicles burning.

"We'd better get the hell out of here," Paige said. T hey went west. It was as safe as south or east, and it was familiar. They'd seen it on the way into town. They weren't going to run up against the edge of a canyon or a mountain ridge unexpectedly.

They ran for only a few minutes before they stopped to get what they needed for the last part of the plan.

Bikes.

Though they were everywhere-from almost any point in the expanse of cars it was possible to see one or two-in most cases they were children's. Or they were adult bikes with leather seats that'd long since baked off in the sun, leaving only exposed springs and foam.

The three they settled on-two on a car's trunk-rack and another in a pickup bed twenty yards away-were adult mountain bikes with fabric seats that hadn't been worn off.

The bikes' tires were long gone, but the desert's surface was essentially one big tire now, so Travis hoped the going would be about the same, or close enough.

He took from his pocket the second thing he'd searched for among the glove boxes earlier: a narrow canister of WD-40.

The desert air had preserved the bikes just fine, but the sun would have burned away any trace of their lubrication. They spent a minute thoroughly dousing the chains and gears and bearings with the oil. Then Travis lifted one of the bikes' back ends and gave its pedal a turn. It creaked for two seconds and then everything spun silently, smoothly.

Yuma was an uncannily good place to store things for a long time. Travis found himself wondering if that figured in somehow-the place's capacity to keep metals and other things unchanged. If it was part of the puzzle, he couldn't see how it fit. But nothing else fit either, so far.

They mounted the bikes, then stared back at the city. The fire was gargantuan now. A hurricane of flame. No sense of the original line remained. It was simply a massive, misshapen oval, broadly curved along the three miles of its southern sweep, and radically extended northward, in branches and separate blazing islands that now reached well into the downtown area. In the deepest parts of the firestorm the flames towered three hundred feet up, and above them rose a column of smoke that looked like something from the last pages of the New Testament. The inferno churned upward into the smoke, merged with it, lit it from inside and out. The firelight shone out over the vast plain of cars. Millions of windshields caught it and reflected it upward, lighting the column of smoke to a height of three or four miles above the desert.

The edges of the fire zone were still growing quickly. Without the bikes, the three of them would probably be in trouble.

"I'm relatively new to Tangent," Bethany said. "Do you guys do stuff like this a lot?"

"Not so much," Paige said.

"It mostly seems to happen when I'm around," Travis said.

They watched for another thirty seconds. Then they turned, put up their kickstands and rode like hell. L ong before he reached the southern edge of town, Finn understood that the math was against him. Not linear math, either. Exponential math.

Flaming pieces of vehicle upholstery, some of them as big as handkerchiefs, were raining into the desert on every side, and far ahead of him.

He ran. His surviving men, Reyes and Hunt, ran with him. They were going north along one of the broad driving lanes. Ahead, just visible above the obstacle course of spot fires, the camera mast was still standing. Its aluminum framework glinted in the yellow light.

Grayling and the other four might still be there. If they weren't, he didn't know where the hell to find them. He wished he'd brought along one of the fucking two-ways. But even if he'd thought to do so, he probably would've elected not to, out of fear the static would tip off Paige Campbell and the others. Nowhere on his list of what-ifs had the present situation appeared.

Straight ahead, two broad patches of flame crept toward each other, closing the gap between them. To go around the far end of either one would cost half a minute. The way through the middle, right up the lane he and the others were running in, was the shortest. But the gap was shrinking. Rapidly.

Finn tried to pick up his speed. He found it nearly impossible. It was all he could do to keep his breathing under control as fumes from the burning rubber drenched the air. He could feel it covering his skin in a film. Could feel it in his eyes and his hair, too. No question the stuff was flammable as hell, and saturating his clothes by the second.

Thirty yards from the gap now. It was only the width of the lane itself. The cars that defined it on both sides were fully engulfed.

Twenty yards.

Ten.

They were passing through the gap, three abreast, when something exploded in one of the vehicles' trunks. A shower of burning fuel sprayed everywhere. Finn stayed ahead of it. He was sure the others had too. Then he heard Reyes screaming. He stopped hard, his feet sliding on the rubber-coated soil-it'd taken on a greasy feel as the heat intensified-and looked back. Reyes was down, every inch of his clothing on fire. He was rolling, but it was no good. Instead of the ground putting him out, he was igniting the ground wherever he touched it. The tire crumbs, in their half-melted state, were releasing the oils they'd been made from. They were ready to burn on contact.

At the edge of his vision Finn saw Hunt sprinting back to help Reyes. There wasn't even time to scream the warning. Half a second later the fire had both of them.

Finn took a step toward them anyway. An involuntary move. Not even a gesture. A wish, at best.

He could do nothing. He didn't even have a gun with which to put them out of their suffering.

Another trunk exploded. Close by. He couldn't stay here. Grayling and the others might still be possible to save. He turned and sprinted north again.

A minute later he rounded another fire and came to the south end of Fourth Avenue. He saw that it was hopeless. The whole city was burning. Every building. Every car in the streets. Far ahead he could see Grayling's laptops melting in the inferno. He couldn't see Grayling. Or any of the other four. They'd run for it. They weren't going to make it. There was no escape in any direction.