Ghost Country (12 page)

Paige’s voice came back in, louder and more intense than before. “
You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!
”

Then it was over.

In the silence Travis looked at Bethany.

They both looked at the black cylinder, still lying in the armchair, still switched on. The iris stood open to the forest and the overcast sky above it. The manila rope lay in tangles on the carpet where they’d left it after pulling it up.

“Take it through,” Bethany said, turning the phrase over like a found artifact. “Does she mean the cylinder? Take the cylinder through the iris?”

Travis stared at the thing. It was hard to imagine what else Paige could have meant.

“It would be easy to do,” he said. “Switch it off with the delay, and then carry the cylinder through the iris during the minute and a half it stays open.”

“You’d have to be out of your mind,” Bethany said. “What happens when the iris shuts behind you? Now you’re stuck seventy years in the future, with a machine that can only take you seventy years
further
into the future. You’d never get home.”

“What if it doesn’t work like that? What if turning it on in the future just opens the iris back to the present time? Like a toggle. Back and forth.”

“How would it know to do that?” Bethany said. “How would it
know
it was in the future?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s something simple. Maybe it senses when it’s taken through the iris, and switches itself into reverse. We’ll never know
how
it works, but think of what we just heard. Paige said you can take it through and come back. She knew a lot more about this thing than we do.”

He watched Bethany mull it over. Watched her warm to it.

“The logic adds up,” she said. “Someone built this thing for a purpose. I can’t see the use of something that just leapfrogs you further and further ahead in time, and never lets you come back. Forward and back makes more sense.”

“It also explains why the cylinders came as a pair,” Travis said. “Think about it. Who knows what this kind of machine was meant for, but we can imagine any number of things. It could be some military scouting tool. Use it to survey the aftermath of a war you haven’t even fought yet. Hell, it could be farm equipment. Say there’s some high-value crop that takes seven decades to mature. Sow the seeds, step through the iris and reap the rewards right away. But whatever the use, its makers had a reason to allow the delayed shutoff. That way you can take the cylinder with you when you go through the iris. Not hard to imagine why they’d want to. Leaving it behind, switched on, is a major vulnerability. Look at the precautions
we
had to take, setting it up so nothing could get at it from the other side. But here’s the thing: taking it with you would be risky too. Extremely risky, in fact. Picture yourself putting this thing to casual use. Like it’s a socket wrench or a screwdriver. You’re using it all day long, going back and forth between two points in time, hauling food supplies or weapons or whatever. Can you think of the mistake you might make? It would be the easiest thing to do, and if you did it you’d be in a world of trouble.”

Bethany’s eyes narrowed. She thought about it. “You could accidentally leave the cylinder behind. Leave it on the other side of the iris when it closed.”

Travis nodded. “It would happen one of two ways. Either you leave it in the future, in which case there’s no way to retrieve it except to sit on your ass and wait several decades, or else you leave it in the past and trap
yourself
in the future, in which case you’re absolutely screwed.”

Bethany walked over to the armchair. Stared down at the cylinder.

“You’d want a backup copy,” she said.

“You’d
need
a backup copy. Like a skydiver needs a reserve chute. Because some mistakes you can’t afford to make even once. You’d have a duplicate cylinder, and you’d strap it to your back and never take it off, at least not while you were using the first one.”

Bethany met his eyes. “It makes sense that Paige and the others would’ve figured this out. In the desert they had
both
cylinders. They could have tested this idea without any risk of getting stranded. Just leave one of them switched on, and use the other one to find out whether or not the iris brings you back to the present time.”

Travis nodded. It all added up.

A silence drew out.

“We could be wrong about this,” Bethany said.

“We could be very wrong.”

“Just plain old wrong would be bad enough. If we try this and it doesn’t work, we’re stuck over there.”

“If we try it and it
does
work,” Travis said, “then we can take the cylinder into the future, carry it up to the ninth floor of that ruin on M Street, and step back into the present time right inside the room where they’re holding Paige.”

The idea seemed to wash over Bethany like a breeze on a spring day.

“Nice,” she said.

Chapter Seventeen

T
hey repositioned the cylinder so that it projected the iris to a different part of the hotel room—closer to the building’s interior, and away from the part that’d collapsed in the future. They found a spot that would allow them to step through onto a solid girder in the ruins. There was a sturdy oak limb hanging over it, which would offer easy transit to the ground.

Travis stepped through onto the beam. Bethany stood in the room, next to the cylinder. She put her finger over the third button and looked at him.

“Say when,” she said.

Travis looked at his watch. The second hand was ten clicks from the top of the dial. When it was three clicks shy he said, “Now.”

Bethany pressed the button. The cone of light flared and then died. The iris stayed open. Bethany lifted the cylinder and carried it to the opening. She passed it through to Travis and he cradled it tightly against himself.

Then Bethany reached through, grabbed the oak branch, and pulled herself onto the girder.

“What are you doing?” Travis said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to be over here too. We don’t both have to risk this. If we’re wrong, and there’s no way back, you might as well be in the present.”

“Why?” she said. “I’d be stuck there without the cylinder. What would I do?”

“Live the life of Renee Turner. Party like hell. Anything you want.”

“Yeah. For four months. Knowing the whole time that the world’s going to end.”

“It’s probably longer than we’d make it on this side.” He looked at his watch. Sixty seconds left. “This is stupid. You should wait in the room.”

“It’s the broken concrete all over again.”

“Yeah, it is, and you don’t have to be on it.”

She turned to face him, leaning on the branch between them. The overcast had thinned, and in the brighter light he saw her eyes more clearly than he had before now. He’d thought they were brown. Really they were green, but so dark they were almost black.

“You’re willing to risk being left alone in the whole world, for the sake of someone you care about,” she said. “And I think someone willing to do that shouldn’t have to. If we get stuck here, we’ll find ways to pass the time.”

He held her gaze. It occurred to him that what she was doing was about as kind a gesture as a human could make to another. For a long moment he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Then he said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He glanced at his watch. “Thirty seconds.”

She nodded. Swallowed hard.

They both turned and stared through the iris. Through the windows on the far side of the hotel room they could see the city in the present day. The orderly buildings and the gleam of sunlight on glass. The traffic flowing smoothly through the circle down the block. People on the sidewalks in shorts and T-shirts. Parents walking with kids in the light of a summer morning.

“For all that’s wrong with the world,” Travis said, “it really is something.”

In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany nod.

And then the iris slipped shut in front of them, and left them staring at precisely the same angle on the ruined city. A perfect superimposition from one image to the other. From solid buildings to their leaning skeletons. From the bustling street to the decaying one. The effect was more powerful than Travis had expected. He heard Bethany exhale softly beside him and knew it’d been the same for her.

T
ravis moved ten feet along a girder that T-boned into the one they’d first stepped onto. He found a position from which the cylinder would project the iris to more or less the same spot it’d just vanished from. Bethany, on the first girder, stood clear.

Travis wondered what it would look like if they were wrong, and the iris opened onto a Washington, D.C. seven decades even further on. The frames of the buildings would be long gone. The roads, too. It might be hard to tell there’d been a city there at all.

He leveled the cylinder like a weapon.

He pressed the on button.

The light cone flared.

The iris appeared.

Bethany didn’t look through it. She looked at him instead.

“Tell me,” she said.

Part II

Umbra

Chapter Eighteen

P
aige lay bound, waiting for it to happen.

Waiting for the end.

Every few minutes she heard footsteps approach in the corridor, only to pass by and fade away. She waited for the footsteps that would approach but not fade, and the click of the latch that would tell her it was all over with.

She rolled onto her side and faced the windows. She could see up Vermont Avenue. Lots of people out. She saw a red convertible pull into the Ritz-Carlton. Saw a young couple get out. Impossible to see their expressions at this distance, but they had to be smiling. They left the car to a valet and disappeared into the building.

Beautiful day.

Beautiful world to be alive in.

She wished she could know that it would stay this way a lot longer than four months—even if she wouldn’t be around to see it.

The street blurred a little. She blinked away the film of tears. She took a sharp breath and rolled onto her back again.

Another set of footsteps came and went. She closed her eyes and waited.

T
ravis sprinted full-out down the broken surface of the avenue, south toward the traffic circle. Bethany kept up with him. They weren’t listening for heavy movement in the forest now. Travis had the shotgun cradled as he ran. If a lion stepped into his path it was going to get a long overdue reminder that meaner predators had once walked these streets.

He mapped out the plan as he sprinted. Visualized the ninth floor of the ruin, and the northeast corner there. They’d looked at it earlier. The concrete pad had been pretty solid, with just a few hairline fractures.

No way to know the room’s layout in the present day. Not even its size. It didn’t have to match the concrete. The safest place to open the iris would be near the room’s outside corner. That would at least get them inside the space, whatever its size.

He pictured how the action would play out. In present time he would come through the iris facing the corner, with his back to the room. He’d lose maybe half a second turning and getting a sense of his surroundings. There was no reason to expect an armed presence in the room itself. Paige would be restrained, and the building was secured at ground level. Nobody would expect intruders to step through a hole in the air on the ninth floor.

But armed or not, anyone in the room other than Paige would have to be dealt with.

He considered the Remington. Imagined going through the iris with it. It would be bulky and slow to maneuver in the confined space of the corner. It would need to be cycled between shots, and he’d get only five of them. Anyone he hit would be dead all over the place, but if there were multiple targets, and if they
did
happen to be armed, the limited shot capacity could get him in trouble.

They reached the traffic circle. Crossed it in about twenty seconds. In another twenty they were at the base of the maple that offered access to the second floor. They climbed to the girders and headed across them toward the stairwell.

“Trade with me,” Travis said. He held the shotgun out to Bethany. She took it and handed him the SIG-Sauer. It held nine .45 caliber rounds, including the one in the chamber. They wouldn’t hit like twelve-gauge slugs, but they would do the job. And he could aim and fire the pistol a hell of a lot faster than a three-foot-long shotgun. Bethany handed him the three spare magazines from her pocket. He put two in his own pocket and kept the other one in his free hand. If need be, he could drop the current magazine out of the pistol and reload it in about a second.