Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

She was plunging blindly toward it.

And catching up.

That was all that mattered.

Very close now-it couldn't be more than a foot or two ahead.

And then the sound simply vanished.

Like someone had neatly lifted the needle from a record.

Paige understood. Panic flared across her nervous system. Her hands grabbed for purchase on the grid-anywhere they could-to arrest her forward motion.

The hand that was further ahead came down onto nothing-it plunged into vacant space beyond the building's edge, five stories above the ground.

Her breath rushed out and for a second she was aware of nothing but her body's momentum, unstoppable, taking her over the drop-off.

Then her trailing hand closed around a bar of the gridwork, and she gripped it tightly, and her shoulder damn near came out of her socket as she wrenched to a stop. Her legs kicked out from behind her, sliding around and forward on the wet steel.

And then she was still. Her hand gripping the bar. Her body lying sideways along the edge. She could feel the girder's outer margin pressed firmly against the center of her chest.

A second later the cylinder exploded, fifty feet below.

A burst of blue-white light. Like a collapsing star. Blinding, painful to her dark-adapted eyes. It lit up the pines and hardwoods that crowded the base of the building, and the broken and canted slabs of Central Park West lying across exposed roots. She saw the cylinder's casing shatter. Saw its internal structure burst, fragile wafers of alien technology scattering over the wet ground. Strange, spherical pockets of light flickered and popped from a few components. In the larger spheres Paige saw a fish-eye view of the present-day street. Warped, distorted police cruisers with their flashers on. The intact front of the building, blazing with internal light from dozens of windows. The images lingered for less than a second and then vanished. A moment later there was nothing to see but the fragments of the cylinder's casing, their concave inner surfaces glowing deep blue in the night, haloed by the rainfall. And then they went dark too. T ravis saw it. Saw the eruption of light thirty stories below, with his face pressed to the grid, and understood. It was the last thing he saw before the toe of someone's boot connected with his head and shut everything off.

He faded in and out. More out than in. His head hurt like hell.

He was lying on thin, bristled carpeting. There was something rumbling beneath it. His thinking cleared a bit, and he understood that the rumbling came from a spinning axle.

He opened his eyes. He was lying bound on the floor of an SUV. He was in the back. The rear seat had been removed to make a flat storage bay. The vehicle was still in the city. The high steel and stone and brick faces of buildings slid by overhead.

He heard Finn and at least two other men talking up front. He heard a wash of static and then he heard Finn tell someone in another vehicle-or a number of vehicles-to take 495. A minute later the roof of a tunnel drew across the view, and the city was gone. The hum of the tires echoed in the enclosed space.

Travis took in fragments of the conversation between Finn and the others. Pieced together what'd happened. They'd hauled his unconscious body down through the ruin of Garner's building and carried it two blocks to where it was safe for them to come back through the iris-inside a private garage. They didn't have Paige and Bethany. The two of them had been long gone by the time Finn's men had reached the bottom of Garner's building.

The procession of SUVs traveled for a long time on the freeway. Travis didn't bother keeping track.

Finn made a phone call. It wasn't on speaker, but over the drone of the vehicle's engine, Travis heard it ring four times before voice mail answered.

"Audra, it's me," Finn said. "Everything's tied off here, at least as well as it can be. I should be on-site about eight hours from now. I'll call you again from the air."

He hung up.

Travis considered what he'd heard. Audra. Alive. It wasn't all that surprising. He might have guessed it if he'd thought about it, given what he'd realized at Garner's place.

A few minutes later the motorcade pulled off the freeway. It took a series of turns and short jogs, and finally stopped. One of the front doors of the vehicle Travis was in opened and shut. The driver kept the engine running. Footsteps came around the back of the vehicle and then the rear window popped open. Travis heard the whine of jet engines powering up nearby.

Finn leaned in and stared down on him. He had the surviving cylinder tucked under his arm. In the dome light, the man's eyes looked deeply troubled.

"What's going to happen to you about an hour from now," Finn said, "I despise more than anything there is. I wish to hell it could be avoided. But it can't be, this time. There's too much at stake. I need to know what you know, and who else you've spoken to. So please just cooperate with the interrogators. They'll know if you're being truthful. And it'll be over sooner."

His eyes stayed on Travis a moment longer.

"I'm sorry," Finn said. He looked like he meant it. Then he closed the window again, pounded twice on the roof, and walked away.

Travis saw the glow of headlights swing through the side windows as two other vehicles backed out of nearby spaces and took the lead. His own pulled out and followed, and a few minutes later they were on the freeway again.

Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Travis was thinking about Paige and Bethany. They were all he'd thought of for the past hour. He imagined them trying to find shelter in the unbroken darkness of the ruins. Imagined their uncertainty and confusion when they hadn't heard any shooting from the top of the building. Imagined their fear now, all this time later, the reality of their situation sinking in as deeply as the cold and the dampness of the October night.

The vehicle slowed and came to a stop. The procession had left the freeway a while earlier. It was traveling through dark countryside now, halting occasionally at what Travis guessed were stop signs at remote intersections. There was no sky glow to indicate a populated area nearby.

The vehicle accelerated again.

Travis thought of Paige touching his face, feeling it. Worried for him. He wondered what she thought of him right now.

Half a minute later-no doubt precisely a half mile on the regimented grid of roads out here-the vehicle slowed again. Travis imagined they were getting close to their destination.

The moment the SUV came to a complete stop, Travis heard something, somewhere ahead in the dark.

It sounded like a playing card in bicycle spokes. G arner watched it unfold. It took fifteen seconds from start to finish, by which time he was convinced that every man on his Secret Service detail would've done just fine in the SEALs.

The six of them advanced on the vehicles, silenced M4 carbines trained on the shattered windows up front. The lead SUV, suddenly absent its driver's foot on the brake, had coasted across the intersection and veered off the corner into a shallow ditch.

The team took another fifteen seconds to confirm that every hostile was dead-with the help of an extra bullet or two, in some cases.

One of the men, Dyer, called out to Garner. "Clear, sir."

Garner came forward from the tree cover edging the road. He had his own silenced M4 in hand-a precaution in case things had gone badly, though his men had been adamant that he stay out of the initial attack. Given all he'd asked of them, he'd felt the point was worth conceding.

Two of the men had the big rear door of the last SUV open. They waved Garner over. He arrived to find Travis Chase lying bound on the floor. At the same time he heard the others calling out to report no captives in the remaining vehicles.