Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Finn stared at the bone drifts heaped against the buildings. Flames from first-story windows twisted and writhed through them. Blackened them. Flickered between ribs. Darted like snake tongues from the mouths and eyes of skulls.

He leveled the cylinder and switched it on. T he rubber surface of the desert didn't make up for the lack of bike tires, but riding was still a hell of a lot better than walking.

Travis, Paige, and Bethany circled north to the west side of town, keeping well beyond the outskirts. They found I-8 near the spot where they'd pulled off of it earlier-technically seventy-three years and a couple months earlier-and headed west toward whatever was left of Imperial, California.

They rode for half the night. They made ten miles an hour, riding on the hardened ground just off the freeway. The freeway itself, cleared of tire crumbs by the wind, was too rough on the bike rims.

Every time they stopped to rest they stared at the fire. It grew by miles each hour, even as it fell increasingly far behind them. It was the most absorbing thing Travis had ever seen. The central mass of the firestorm had to be well over a thousand feet high now. Like a campfire you could fit a mountain into.

Ten miles shy of Imperial they found the edge of the mass of parked cars. It ended in a more-or-less straight line, vanishing into the darkness north and south of I-8.

They rode into the town. The irrigated fields that'd once surrounded it were long gone. There was no way to even tell where the fields had met the desert. It was all desert now.

Imperial was as well preserved as Yuma, but it was empty. No cars. No bones. No bodies. They rode through its silent streets in the half-light from the distant fire. They scared up a barn owl among the crates of a shipping yard. They caught a glimpse of its pale face and deep black eyes and then it was gone, flapping away into the night.

They rode out to the middle of what they judged to have been cropland and ditched the bikes. They opened the iris and stepped through into moist rows of cotton plants, thirty yards from a massive wheeled sprinkler line trundling slowly across the field.

Travis surveyed the surrounding landscape for any sign of police flashers, or the beacon lights of helicopters. He saw nothing. The Homeland Security response must be concentrated on Yuma, fifty miles back east.

They walked into town and a found a motel just off the freeway that didn't require ID. They got a room with two queen-sized beds. The nightstand clock showed two thirty in the morning. Paige and Bethany took the first bed and Travis took the second. They collapsed fully dressed atop the bedcovers and were asleep within a minute.

Finn had been on the phone for hours. The entire flight back from Yuma and better than ninety minutes in his office. He was standing on his balcony now, staring across D.C. at all the places that'd been on the other ends of his calls. Dark silhouettes of buildings with a few lights on, half an hour before sunrise.

He had one call left to make.

He leaned on the rail. He dialed. Three rings and then a voice answered. "Isaac?"

"Yes," Finn said. "I've spoken with President Currey. I've spoken with everyone who matters. We've come to an agreement. We're not happy with it, but there's no other option in play. Paige Campbell and her friends were in Yuma for several hours, and now they're long gone. We don't know what they saw there, and we don't know who they're talking to right now. We have most of the big dogs in our camp, but we don't have everyone, and given time… these people could hurt us. They could pull the whole plan apart."

He took a breath. Let it out slowly. "We can't wait as long as we meant to," he said. "Umbra needs to happen now. Right now."

He heard a sharp inhalation on the line. "But it's not ready. Entire segments of the plan-"

"The fundamentals are ready," Finn said. "In principle it can work. And in one sense we have an advantage now. We have the cylinder. We can go to the final location and see what's there in 2084. Who knows what we can learn from that."

"Are you going there now?"

"I'll stay in D.C. for the next twenty-four hours. I expect Campbell to come back here and try to contact people she hopes she can trust. I doubt she and the others really appreciate the extent of our connections, in which case there's every chance they'll trip a wire somewhere."

There was a long silence on the line. The sound of uncertainty. Reluctance. Acceptance.

"Currey is already getting started on his end," Finn said. "How long will it take on yours? How long to actually set the plan in motion?"

Another silence. Then: "A day or two. Maybe less. Christ, are we really doing this?"

Finn heard as much excitement as anxiety in the voice.

"Yes, we're really doing this. None of us would've chosen to rush it, but if it's that or never do it at all…"

"I agree. I'm scared as hell, but I agree."

"I knew you would. Get started on it right away. I'll talk to you soon."

"I love you."

"I love you too, Audra."

Richard Garner woke to his alarm at five in the morning. He exercised for thirty minutes. He showered, dressed in khakis and a gray cotton tennis shirt, and went to his den. Beyond the windows Central Park lay in amber light and long, early shadows, thirty stories below.

He switched on the computer. While the operating system loaded, he left the room and crossed the broad stone hallway to the kitchen. He toasted two slices of wheat bread and poured a glass of orange juice. He took the plate and glass back to the den, sat at the computer, and clicked open his work in progress. The book was still only an outline. It'd begun as a study of Ulysses S. Grant's time in office, with a focus on the difference between overseeing a war and overseeing a nation, but the research had led elsewhere. Now the book was shaping up into a broader examination of every president who'd held a position of military authority before taking office. An analysis of the pros and cons regarding what that kind of experience brought to a president's perspective. He wasn't sure yet on which side he would ultimately come down-whether generals tended to make good presidents or not. The evidence pointed to a number of conclusions, each conditional to time and place and political climate, and he'd only just begun digging through it. He hoped his own military background-he hadn't made general, but he'd commanded a SEAL team for the bulk of the seventies-would provide him more insight than bias.

It was involving work.

Which he needed right now.

Would almost certainly need for the rest of his life.

He stayed in the den all morning and into the early afternoon. Mostly he sat at the computer, but at times he paced before the windows, looking out over the park and the city.

He took a break at one o'clock. He had a sandwich and a 7UP. He plugged his iPod into the sound system, piped the music through the residence and did some random work around the place. Though he'd been here for two years, some part of him still felt like he hadn't settled in yet. Like he was still getting used to it. Still getting used to living anywhere on his own.

The residence took up an entire floor of the building, though only two thirds of it made up his own living space. The other third comprised the living and working quarters of the Secret Service detail that guarded him. He played poker with them, most nights.

He quit the chores at four o'clock. Turned off the music. Went back to the den. He opened a heavy box of yellowed, sleeve-protected documents that'd come from the archives of the New York Public Library. The pages were by no means a part of the library's lending collection. Even as non-circulating reference material they were pretty hard to gain access to. Garner felt a bit of guilt over the privilege his resume afforded him, but not enough to lose sleep over. It was just much easier for the library to send the stuff to him than to have him and his security footprint dropping in every time he needed to verify a quote. Besides, he was an old friend of the place. He'd worked there in his college years. He'd probably walked past this very box a hundred times.