Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

Travis took a step and heard his foot kick something tiny and metallic. It skipped away over the pavers before he could get a look at it, but he knew by the sound what it was: a bullet cartridge. He glanced down and saw two more beneath him. He stooped and picked one up. Thirty-eight caliber. He pictured Finn, sometime in the last ninety seconds, fumbling rounds into a revolver on this very spot.

He scanned his surroundings again. Still no sign of Finn, but the smoke was already thinner. The box shapes were resolving. He could see now that they were made of concrete, and were open on top. They were half filled with dirt-planter boxes of some kind, but there was nothing growing in them.

He couldn't stay here in the open any longer. He chose a planter at random and sprinted for it, MP7 leveled in case Finn was already hiding there. He passed the first corner: nothing but open space beyond it. He ducked low and made his way down the box's length, and took the next corner without pause. That side was empty too.

He advanced on the last obscured face. The smoke was thinning by the second. This kind of cat-and-mouse stuff was all luck when it was one-on-one. A team of four people or more could use tactics, cover each other's backs, but between single opponents it was almost purely random. Finn would be around this next corner or he wouldn't. If there, he'd be facing away or he wouldn't.

Travis took the corner.

Finn was there, crouched five feet away, his pistol aimed straight back at Travis.

For three seconds neither made a move.

The cylinder lay at Finn's feet, safely out of the crossfire; Travis saw it without breaking eye contact.

Travis considered the situation. He could pull the trigger on the guy right now and probably resolve the whole thing. The risk was that, even with half the guy's head missing, motor reflex could still fire the.38-and probably hit the target, at this range. Travis thought he'd probably take the risk, if it were just his own life on the line. But it wasn't.

"The two women who were with me in New York," Travis said. "They're still there. They're stuck in the ruins." He indicated the cylinder with his eyes. "I need that to get them back. I'm not leaving here without it."

Finn's gun hand remained steady. "That's not going to happen. If you take this, Garner can still stop me."

"Garner's stopping you as we speak. He knows about Longbow. He knows you're activating the satellites. He's on the phone right now setting up raids at all their corporate properties. I imagine one of them will net Audra."

Each piece of information seemed to rattle the man more deeply, though Travis thought his reaction was missing something. It looked like unwilling acceptance where surprise might have been.

"You had to know it was over," Travis said. "From the moment Paige slapped Garner last night, you were never going to pull it off."

Finn shook his head. He took the cylinder in his free hand and moved back two feet, rising to full height as he did. The.38 stayed level.

Travis stood upright, too. He felt sunlight begin burning his neck through the dissipating smoke. Visibility was better: it was like standing in a thin fog, though the light glared through it everywhere. Travis still couldn't see beyond the nearest forty feet of paver stones and planter boxes. This place seemed to be a plaza of some kind, where the airport had been in the present.

Finn's eyes narrowed. They didn't quite leave Travis, but they moved a little, like the man was reading a list of options in his own head. Looking for some way to salvage his plans. He took another step back. Nine or ten feet away now. Travis saw the risk of getting hit by a reflexive shot begin to drop. He kept the MP7 sighted for a head shot.

"I'm sorry about your friends," Finn said. "I mean that. But I can't just let you take this thing."

He retreated a step further. Maybe he thought he could make a run for it. Put some distance behind him and cross back into the present, somewhere else in Arica. Then try to call Audra and warn her.

The MP7 required four ounces of trigger pressure to fire. Travis applied two.

Finn backed up again.

And then the wind shifted.

Whichever way it'd been blowing before, the boxes in the plaza had spun it in circles. Now it came on dead straight from behind Travis, its speed seeming to double, and in the span of five seconds the smoke drew away like a veil.

Finn took a sharp breath.

Travis felt his own eyes widen involuntarily.

They might as well have been standing in Midtown Manhattan. The Arica they'd seen in the present was long gone, and in its place reared a skyline of concrete and glass and steel, some of its towers standing to a height of seventy stories or more. Broad avenues crisscrossed at their bases, complete with traffic lights and crisp white lines. Along the length of the nearest street, Travis could see the downtown district snaking up the coast for over a mile, and the height and density of the structures held consistent for most of that distance.

None of it lay in ruins. The skyscrapers' glass faces looked like they'd been washed yesterday. The sidewalks were immaculate. Vehicles stood parked at curbsides, 2011 models or earlier as far as Travis could tell. Wooden benches framed the plaza, their green paint gleaming in the desert sun.

Yet nothing moved. Beyond the filled parking spaces, the streets were deserted. Through ground-level windows, every visible lobby sat vacant. The traffic lights were dark. The tires of every vehicle were flat and beginning to crumble. Arica was imposing and beautiful and pristine, but it was also abandoned. For how long, Travis couldn't guess.

"It worked," Finn said. He looked around at the place while keeping the gun on Travis. "The survivors flourished here. They made it."

"For a while. What does it matter? They're dead now."

"We don't know they're dead. We don't know what happened here."

"Couldn't have been good."

Finn looked at him. Some kind of new hope flickered in his eyes. "It's enough that it worked at all. And if I search this place for even a few hours, I can probably find out what happened to it. Find out how to avoid the problem."

"We could've found this place bustling and it still wouldn't be worth killing the world for it," Travis said.

"The world's going to kill itself sooner or later. Why shouldn't at least some of us live?"

"Neither of us is going to convince the other. If you want to stay here, feel free. But I'm taking the cylinder with me. I'm going to New York to get my friends."

"You're not," Finn said. "I really am sorry, but you're not. You don't have time, anyway. Look."

He held the cylinder toward Travis, showing him the side opposite the row of buttons. In the harsh light it took Travis a few seconds to see what the man was talking about.

Along part of the casing's length ran a line of blue lights, pencil-eraser-sized and spaced at centimeter intervals. They shone softly and diffused from just beneath the black surface, and extended to a little over a third of the cylinder's long dimension.

"They appeared last night," Finn said. "Right after your friends broke the other cylinder. At that time the lights covered the whole length, but they've been disappearing steadily since, like a countdown. Whoever built these things must not have wanted anyone using one without the other. My guess is, when the last one of these lights goes out, this thing becomes a paperweight."

Travis's mind was already doing the math. The other cylinder had broken maybe nine hours ago. If that amount of time had burned not-quite-two-thirds of the countdown, he had something like five hours left.

Five hours to reach New York and find Paige and Bethany.

He thought of flight time, and search time, and shit-happens time. Five hours. Was it even close to enough?