They reached the south corner and rounded it. They stopped and stood hunched over catching their breath. For the first time since leaving the hotel they were visually shielded. The entire bulk of the town lay north and west of the airport. Their position on the south side of the terminal building, even a few feet in from the corner, hid them completely.
Travis walked off the pain in his legs. Took a last deep breath and felt his heart rate begin to fall off. As it did, he finally heard the message in all its clarity—which wasn’t a lot.
The woman’s voice sounded like it was coming through a cardboard tube with wax paper over the end. It took some concentration to piece the words together. Travis looked up and saw the speakers, tucked far under the ten-foot overhang of the building’s roof. They had to be wired to solar panels up top. The recording itself must be stored on some kind of solid-state media—a flash drive, probably. The whole system might have no moving parts except the electrons passing through the wires, and the vibrating diaphragms of the speakers themselves. For all that, it was amazing that it still worked, even in a place like Yuma.
Travis saw Paige and Bethany straining to catch the words along with him. He realized the message was repeating every twenty seconds or so. By the fourth pass all three of them had deciphered it:
PLEASE BE PATIENT. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THE YUMA GATHERING SITE. ALL ERICA FLIGHTS WILL RESUME SHORTLY. BE SURE TO HAVE YOUR TICKET AND PHOTO I.D. WITH YOU FOR BOARDING. INBOUND FLIGHTS WILL BRING FOOD AND EXTRA WATER PURIFIERS FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE TO WAIT. PLEASE BE PATIENT . . .
They listened to it one more time. Travis was certain he hadn’t misheard any part of it.
“Erica flights,” Paige said. She looked at Bethany. “I wonder if those are anything like the Janet flights out of Vegas.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Bethany said.
Travis looked from one of them to the other. “Pretend I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“The Janet flights are something like a private airline,” Paige said. “They’re run by one of the big defense contractors. I forget which.”
“EG&G,” Bethany said.
Paige nodded. “They fly out of McCarran Airport in Vegas to airstrips in the Nevada Test Site. Mostly Groom Lake, I’m sure. They’re basically commuter flights for military and civilian personnel who work out there.” She gazed out over the empty airfield in the searing light. “Maybe the similar naming convention tells us something. Maybe the Erica flights were military, or close to it.”
Overhead, the message finished another iteration and began again.
“We know they were departures from here,” Travis said. “Which means Yuma wasn’t really the final stop. At least not for some.”
“Tickets,” Bethany said. “That’s what the kid meant, in the notebook. People came to Yuma hoping to get aboard one of these flights, wherever they were going.”
Travis stared at the southern face of the terminal rising above them. The lowest portion of the wall, from the ground to a height of fifteen feet, was white metal like the other sides of the building. Above that it was all glass. Jetways extended from boarding gates every hundred feet or so. Like everything else in Yuma they were in nearly mint condition. All they’d lost were the heavy-duty tires that’d once given their free ends mobility. Not even rubber crumbs remained around the bare rims. The unimpeded wind at this location had long-since taken them away.
Travis focused on the windows. From below all he could see was the terminal’s ceiling. No way to see anything at floor-level inside, though he imagined the space was full of bodies, each with a ticket and ID in its pocket. He turned and looked at the far end of the runway. He could see the rough shape of the words painted there, illegible at this angle but easy to recall.
Come back.
He listened to the recording blaring its neverending promise, and wondered what it’d been like to sit here dying, waiting for it to come true.
“The message says the flights will resume,” Travis said. “They must have actually been taking place at some point, when everyone was first coming to Yuma. And then they stopped.”
He thought of the bodies in the hotel. In the houses they’d passed. He thought of the bone drifts.
He shook his head. “We don’t need a calculator to see that the math doesn’t work on this one. How many people could they have possibly airlifted out of here, even if they were cycling the planes through with pit-crew efficiency? Say the Erica flights were 747s departing every ten minutes with five hundred people aboard. Probably impossible, but let’s be generous. That’s three thousand people an hour. It’d take a thousand hours to move three million people. A hundred thousand hours to move three hundred million.”
He saw Bethany and Paige doing the math in their heads.
“About eight thousand hours in a year,” Bethany said. “To fly everyone out would take more than a decade, even running at peak efficiency, day and night.”
“The people who came to Yuma would’ve known that,” Travis said. “They’d have had all the time in the world to figure it out. They’d know that this place couldn’t keep them alive, and that their only chance to survive was to get picked for one of those flights in the first week or so. And what would be the chances of that? Close to zero. Coming to Yuma would be Russian roulette meets the SuperLotto. But knowing all that, they still came. They played the odds. What could have made them desperate enough to do that?”
They stared at one another. Thought about it from every angle. Came no closer to making sense of it.
There were ground-level doors under each jetway, leading into the terminal. Travis tried the knob of the first one. It turned easily, but the door wouldn’t open. The white paint coating the door and the frame had fused together over the decades. Travis braced a foot against the frame and pulled with both hands. The seam gave with a dry crackle, and then they were in.
The place was noticeably warmer inside than outside—120 degrees instead of 105. It had the greenhouse effect in play because of the big southern windows, and no breeze to transfer the heat away.
They’d entered some kind of maintenance space one level below the concourse. It was close to pitch-black inside once they’d shut the door behind themselves, but they’d already seen the stairs ahead of them. Travis found the bottom tread and the handrail and started up. Fifteen steps later he touched the handle of the upper door. He opened it, stepped through, and held it for Paige and Bethany.
Five seconds earlier Travis had been sure—without even thinking of it—that he’d already seen the worst Yuma could show him. That he was sufficiently hardened to face whatever they might find here.
He wasn’t.
The three of them stood there, staring at the cavernous and brightly lit interior of the concourse.
The door fell shut behind them with a soft click.
Bethany inhaled slowly—Travis heard her throat constricting as she did. She put a hand to the wall beside the door, and then her knees gave and she sat down on the spot. She made no attempt to hold back the sobs now. Paige sat beside her and held on to her.
Travis took a few steps forward into the space. In the giant sunbeam that filled it he saw hundreds of padded seats, most of them facing out toward the runways and the open ground. On the chairs and on the floor and on the flat benches here and there, bodies lay as densely packed as they had in the hotel corridors.
In this place they were all children.
None looked older than twelve.
They stretched to the end of the concourse, at least a third of a mile away. Thousands and thousands of them.
Everywhere among them were discarded food containers. Foil chip bags, cracker boxes, candy-bar wrappers, pickle jars, bread bags. All of them lay empty among the bodies, which were as gaunt as any Travis had seen elsewhere in the city.
It was clear enough what’d happened. In the end, when the survivors in the town had dwindled to thousands, the adults had made a decision. M
aybe the last big decision any humans ever made. They’d put all the kids here and consolidated the remaining food with them. The grownups had sacrificed themselves to give the kids a few extra days, in the guttering hope that the planes might come back in time for them.
Nothing Travis had seen in Yuma had brought him close to losing control. His eyes had moistened in the hotel, but his breathing hadn’t so much as hitched.
It didn’t hitch now, either.
He didn’t get even that much warning.
He simply found himself sitting down hard in the middle of the floor, his hands pressed to his eyes as they flooded, his chest heaving beyond his ability to stop it.
Time went by. Ten or fifteen minutes. The emotions passed and left a kind of vacuum in their wake.
They stood.
They glanced around.
They had no desire to search the concourse. It was hard to imagine what it could show them except more suffering.
Travis tried to think of what part of the city they might investigate next. He was thinking about that when they heard the exterior door open downstairs.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The concourse offered very few hiding places. Even fewer that could be reached within seconds.
The wall opposite the windows was lined with shops that’d once sold tourist items and sandwiches and sunglasses. The shops didn’t have doorways—they simply lacked front walls. They offered concealment from only one sight line—that of someone approaching along the row.
They were also the only option.
Travis waited for Paige and Bethany to move past him. They went forward along the row of shops, avoiding the bodies. He followed, keeping an ear toward the door atop the stairs. The metal treads would give away the newcomer’s approach easily enough, but the monotone recording—much louder inside the terminal—would make it tough to listen for it.
He heard it when they were four shops along. Heavy thuds coming up, echoing in the space beyond the door.
Paige ducked into the fifth shop, which seemed to be a bookstore with all its shelves empty. Bethany and Travis followed. They heard the door open a second later.
Five seconds passed.
The door clicked shut.
A man exhaled.
Then, footsteps. Slow and careful. Coming toward them. Distinct, individual steps. The man was alone.
Travis clicked off the Remington’s safety. He had a shell in the chamber already. He had his back to the shop’s wall on the side the footsteps were coming from. He was two feet in from the edge. He leveled the shotgun and pulled the stock against his shoulder.
The footsteps halted. It was hard to say where. Maybe ten feet short of where the man would’ve come into view. Not much further away than that, Travis was sure. Part of him wanted the guy to continue forward. Wanted a reason to start shooting, even if the sound might draw more trouble onto them.
Then he heard a crackle of static. A walkie-talkie. The only form of long-range communication that would work on this side of the iris.
The static cut out and the man spoke. “Lambert here. Inside the terminal. Copy?”
The static came back. Then a man’s voice spoke through it, just clear enough to be discerned.
“This is Finn. Go ahead Lambert.”
“They were here. There’s paint flakes outside an exterior door. Gotta be recent, or else the wind would’ve blown them away.”
Travis clenched his teeth. Fuck. Careless.
“Any sign they’re still inside?” Finn said.
“No way to tell. I just came in.”
The static hissed for a long time. Then Finn spoke again. “All right. Get out of there. You’ve already found out what we need to know. Come back and help with the camera mast.”
“Copy.”
The static flared again and then clicked off for good. Travis waited for the footsteps to retreat, but for a moment they didn’t. Lambert was just standing there, no doubt gazing around at the spectacle of the concourse. Whatever the man felt about it, it didn’t reduce him to tears. After a few seconds he retreated to the door, and then he was gone.
Travis relaxed his grip on the shotgun. He turned to look at Paige. She was looking in his direction, but past him. Staring at the big windows, thinking about something.
“It’s probably about five o’clock here,” she said. “I don’t know when the sun sets in Arizona during October, but eyeballing it I’d say we’ve got an hour.”
Travis followed her stare. He looked at the angle of sunlight coming into the terminal. It shone as harshly as it would have at midday, but it fell at a long slant. An hour was probably about right.
“We need to get out of here right now,” Paige said. She sounded on edge. “We need to get out into the desert and go back through the iris to the present. We can walk to the Jeep from there.”
Travis had an idea of what was spooking her.
“This camera mast they were talking about—”
Paige cut him off. “Yes. We need to be scared shitless of it. And we need to get moving. I’ll explain on the way.”
She stepped past him, out of the shop. He took a step to follow and then realized Bethany hadn’t moved yet. He stopped, turned back to her. Saw what she was staring at.
In a little wastebasket just visible behind the shop’s counter, there was a scrap of newspaper. Maybe the top third of the front page, torn roughly from left to right. It was stained with ancient blotches of mustard, like it’d been used to clean up the remnants of a sandwich on the counter. Glancing around, Travis saw no sign of the paper it’d been torn from. For that matter, there were no newspapers of any kind in the shop. A tower of wire shelves in the corner had clearly once been stocked with them, but it was empty now, like every bookshelf in the place. Except the scrap in the trash can, not a single piece of paper remained in the store. Travis turned his eyes to the concourse and saw the reason within seconds: the kids had burned the paper to stay warm. Ash piles remained in various stone planters among the bodies. As hot as this place would get during the day, it would cool down fast at night. The big glass wall would bleed away the heat in no time—especially in December.
Bethany stooped and took the piece of newspaper from the trash. Filling most of the space was the paper’s title: The Arizona Republic. Below that was the date: December 15, 2011. And beneath that was the lead headline and the top few rows of the story’s text—a single column beside a giant photo—before the torn bottom edge cut it off.
The photo was impossible to make out. Only the top inch of it showed: a defocused background of a crowd somewhere.
The headline read, former president garner assassinated in new york city.
Paige let her urgency fade for the moment. She stepped back into the shop.
Bethany spread the paper on the counter so all three of them could see it. Despite age yellowing and the mustard stain, the fragment of article text was easily readable:
New York (AP)—Former United States President Richard Garner was shot to death at a gathering in Central Park yesterday evening, Wednesday, December 14. Garner had for several days spoken publicly against the mass relocation to
That was it. It reached the bottom edge and there was no more. Bethany flipped the scrap over, but the other side featured only an advertisement for a local restaurant. She turned it back over to the headline.
Travis stared at it. Read the story text again. Thought about what it implied.
“We think bringing everyone to Yuma was some kind of panic move,” he said. “The official response by those in power—those behind Umbra—even if they knew it couldn’t actually save everyone. And Richard Garner called them on it, at the end. Even opposed it, publicly. Any question that’s why he was killed?”
Paige’s eyes narrowed. She saw where he was going. So did Bethany.
“Garner’s not in on it,” Paige said.
Bethany looked back and forth between them, hope rising in her eyes. “But he probably knows a hell of a
lot about this stuff, right now in the present day. He only resigned the presidency two years ago. Up until that point, he had all the top security clearances. He had to have known about Umbra, whatever the hell it is.”
For a moment none of them spoke. The recording droned over the concourse.
“We should pay him a visit,” Travis said.
Paige nodded again. Then she blinked and looked around. “We need to get the hell out of Yuma first. Come on.”
She turned and led the way out of the shop, back toward the door they’d entered through.
They came out through the exterior door with the SIG and the Remington leveled. There was no one in sight.
Travis looked down and saw the paint chips he’d left earlier. He shook his head.
They moved east across the southern span of the building, out of view of anyone in town. They ran at nearly full speed and reached the southeast corner in a little under a minute.
The donut of open space surrounding the terminal was a quarter mile on every side. They’d first come into the airport from the north, with the city at their backs. They were facing south and east now, with nothing ahead of them but a few pole barns at the edge of town and then a tundra of cars covering miles and miles of flat desert.
Finn and his people were in town. Probably toward the middle. A sprint from this corner of the terminal toward the southeast would be largely hidden by the building itself, at least for the first half of the run. After that they would probably be visible to someone high up in the city, like a watcher on the top floor of the hotel.
Travis saw Paige judging the distance, running through the same logistics.