Travis felt too thrown to even shrug. He had nothing approaching an answer. He stared over the sea of chrome and faded paint and tried to get a grasp of the numbers involved.
“A little over three hundred million people in America,” he said. “Subtract the ones too young to drive a car, or that live in big cities and don’t need one. How many cars would there be, ballpark? Couple hundred million?”
“Something like that,” Paige said.
“How much space would they take up, arranged like this?” Travis said. “A parking space is about ten by twenty. So two hundred square feet. A square mile should have, what, a little over twenty-five million square feet in it?”
Bethany took out her phone, switched it on, and opened a calculator function. She pressed the buttons with both thumbs and had the answer in a few seconds.
“Just under twenty-eight million square feet in a mile,” she said. She did another calculation. “Divided by two hundred, that’s one hundred forty thousand parking spaces. Cut that by a third to figure in the access lanes, you’ve got a little over ninety thousand cars every square mile.”
“Call it a hundred thousand to make the math easier,” Travis said. “Two hundred million cars would take up two thousand square miles.”
Bethany’s thumbs moved again. Then her eyebrows went up briefly. “Wow. Believe it or not, that’s a square of only forty-four miles by forty-four. If Yuma was at the center of it, the edges would be just twenty-two miles from town. We’re further out than that right now—more like thirty miles.”
Travis thought about it. It made sense, in its own way. “You’d expect more of a rectangle than a square. It would grow east and west from towns along the freeway as people arrived. It would thicken north and south from there. Hard to say how far. But the point is that they could fit. Every car in the United States could park within a couple days’ walk of Yuma. And that’s assuming every car made it here, which they wouldn’t. A good percentage would run out of gas along the way.”
“A lot would be left behind to begin with,” Paige said. “You didn’t see any cars in D.C., but think of suburban families with two or three of them in the garage. They wouldn’t take them all. They’d take one—whichever got the best mileage—and leave the others.”
Travis nodded. The math worked, even if the reality it described was impossible to come to terms with.
“Yuma,” Paige said. She stared east toward it, though the city—or its ruins, at least—lay well out of sight. Travis saw her eyes narrow. She was imagining three hundred million people gathering in one place.
“It’s not possible,” she said. “Not even close. The entire population of the United States bunched into Yuma, Arizona? Picture the Woodstock crowd. That was half a million people. The American population is six hundred times that amount. Think you could hold six hundred Woodstocks in Yuma at the same time?” She stared over the desert again. Shook her head. “This would be more than just a bad idea. This would be a lunatic idea.”
“But it was the idea,” Travis said. He swept an arm at the cars. “Somehow, this was the official response to whatever went wrong with Umbra. Everyone in the country wouldn’t just spontaneously decide to come here. They’d have to be told. They will be told. In our own time . . . Jesus, all of this happens just a few months from now.”
“But why?” Paige said. “Why would the government tell them that, and why would anyone listen? Whatever the hell was going wrong in the rest of the country, sending everyone here couldn’t possibly help them. It would be mass suicide. There wouldn’t even be housing space to get them all in out of the sun. And there’d be no food, either. They’d be dead in a week.”
“Could things have just been that desperate?” Bethany said. “What if, somehow, Yuma offers temporary relief from whatever’s happening in the rest of the country? Why that would be, I don’t know . . . but suppose it is. Suppose the effect of Umbra is so bad that it’s worth it to come here, just to get away from it, even if it still means dying.”
The notion chilled Travis, even in the baking sunlight. He watched it affect Paige and Bethany in the same way.