Authors: Patrick Lee
T
here were three other floor-to-ceiling windows on the sixth floor, at the ends of other wings. They spent a few minutes at each of them, scrutinizing the city. They saw bones everywhere, but no sign of recent disturbance.
They also saw no indication that Yuma had been modified to handle any kind of crowd. No trailers or temporary shelters had been set up. If there’d been tents erected about the place, they were long gone in the wind.
Then they came to the last window, facing southeast, and understood where they needed to go next.
A mile away lay the broad expanse of the airport. The runways were clear, flawless. They probably looked no better even in the present. The terminals stood glittering and vacant. There were no aircraft docked at any of the gates. Travis studied the scene and wondered why it looked odd to him. Then it hit him: there were no parked cars filling the airport’s space. It was open ground—the only open ground for miles.
“There’s something written there,” Bethany said. She pointed to the south end of the longest runway.
Travis saw what she meant. A few hundred feet in from the runway’s identification numbers, someone had written a message in huge white letters—probably using the same paint the airport used for the runway lines. Travis had missed it at first; it was hard to read the letters from a long side angle. The message seemed to be intended for someone looking straight down on it from a plane.
Travis put it together one letter at a time, and had it after a few seconds.
It read: come back.
T
hey were outside the hotel a minute later. The quiet of the city was unnerving. The bone drifts looked bigger from ground level than they had from the sixth floor.
The air temperature was about the same as it’d been in the present. Somewhere between 105 and 110.
They crossed the parking lot and made their way to a residential district three blocks beyond. Moving among the houses felt safer than crossing the wide-open lots of commercial and industrial zones. They’d seen from the hotel that they could follow the houses all the way to the airport if they went straight east and then south to its perimeter.
They saw leathery bodies in every home they passed. After the first block they stopped looking.
Bones were scattered everywhere outside the houses. In fenced yards where the wind had never picked up momentum, some of the skeletons were partially intact. A tiny skull and ribcage lay half submerged in a sandbox among faded toy tractors and steam shovels.
Travis brought up the rear. He looked back every twenty yards. Whenever they crossed a space that offered a view of the hotel behind them, he studied the big corridor windows on the high floors. Even through the glare of reflected sky, he could see through them well enough to spot a person, if one were standing there. So far, he saw nobody.
He heard Bethany taking sharp, quick breaths ahead of him, and realized she was trying not to cry.
Paige gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You don’t have to hold it back. No one who sees this can be unaffected by it.”
“I know,” Bethany said.
But she held it back anyway. After another minute she was breathing normally again.
At the next street they came to, they looked south and saw the northern edge of the airport half a mile away, its chain-link boundary fence still standing.
They crossed into the next block and followed the sheltered path among backyards southward. They were moving against a light breeze now. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to perturb the air around their ears and make it hard to listen for movement. Travis kept turning his head to counter the effect.
They were a hundred feet from the airport fence when the breeze died for a few seconds.
Travis heard something.
He grabbed Paige and Bethany and pulled them almost off their feet, into a narrow channel between houses. They flinched and stared at him. He put a finger to his lips.
They stood in silence.
The breeze moaned under the eaves of the houses.
Then it faded again, and all three of them heard the sound.
It came from somewhere south of them, maybe within the airport grounds.
It was a woman’s voice, speaking calmly, saying something they couldn’t quite make out.
I
t took them only a few seconds to realize what they were hearing. The woman’s voice was pleasant and monotone and had a distinct reverb to it. It was a recording, playing over some kind of PA system on the airport grounds.
They cocked their heads but couldn’t discern any of the words.
Then the breeze picked up again and they lost the sound altogether.
They stepped out from between the houses and continued south. They stopped at the corner of the last home before the fence line, twenty yards farther on. Beyond the fence there was easily a quarter mile of open space before the nearest terminal building. Anyone watching from a high perch in the city would see them. There was no shorter path across the space on any side. There was nothing for it but to run.
The fence was ten feet high. Simple chain-link. No razorwire looped across its top. All it offered as deterrents were signs every dozen yards threatening harsh legal penalties for trespassing.
Travis tried to resolve the recording again. It was no good. It was still too far away, coming from somewhere near or within the terminal.
They traded looks. They nodded.
They ran.
They crossed the fence with no difficulty, and a few seconds later they were sprinting as hard as they could across the vast reach of the airport. Travis wondered if the distance had played with his eyes. Wondered if it was a lot more than a quarter mile to the buildings. It didn’t matter now. He ran. The wind streamed past his ears. It was impossible to hear the recording, even though he was much closer to it now than before. His own pulse against his eardrums became loud enough to match the wind after the first thirty seconds.
He was fifty yards from the terminal, with Paige and Bethany matching his speed, when he began hearing the monotone voice again. He still couldn’t make out what it was saying.
The three of them reached the corner of the building. Its long side planed away to the east, three hundred yards or more. Its short side was maybe fifty yards in length, leading south to another corner. They followed the short side, sprinting along it without stopping. Travis was acutely aware that they were still visible from town. More visible than ever, in fact—against the blazing white metal of the terminal’s outer wall, they’d stand out like ants on china to anyone even glancing this way from downtown.
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.
T
here 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.