Travis felt moisture rimming his eyes. He blinked it away. He glanced around and saw Paige and Bethany doing the same, just behind him at the open bathroom door.
He found himself taking in the condition of the building. It was almost pristine. The drywall in the corridor looked no different than it had in the present. The high-gloss paint on the crown molding had cracked and flaked, but only in a few places. There weren’t even cobwebs. Travis imagined dust would’ve settled out of the air here after a while, without foot traffic kicking up carpet fibers and pillows being fluffed. He could see none drifting around in the pale sunlight that shone along the hallway.
He turned toward the source of the light: the double doors at the end of the hall, fifty feet away. They were closed but they were mostly glass. The wall around them was also glass. All of it remained intact.
The wedge of parking lot that was visible beyond looked bleached and barren in the hard light. It was full of cars, which wasn’t surprising.
Paige let the bathroom door fall shut.
The three of them stood there. They listened. The hotel was as silent as it’d no doubt been for decades.
They watched the space beyond the glass wall for over a minute. Past the parking lot the view was blocked in places by other buildings, but in the gaps between those they could see a long way—hundreds of yards in some cases. Against the bases of distant buildings they could see deep accumulations of wind-piled sand, blinding white in the sun. None of it was blowing around now.
They saw no movement anywhere.
Travis set the cylinder and the large duffel bag on the floor. He took the shotgun from the bag, reassembled it, and slung it on his shoulder. Then he opened the bathroom door again and slid the duffel bag far to the left inside, near the sinks. It was too much to haul around the ruins with them. If they came back this way, they could get it later.
Bethany took the SIG from her backpack, considered it, and then handed it to Paige. “You’re probably a better shot than me. I’ll carry the cylinder. Better to have it in hand than in the pack. If we need to use it fast, seconds will count.”
She zipped and shouldered the backpack again—it held only shotgun shells now—and picked up the cylinder from where Travis had set it.
Travis studied the parking lot another few seconds, then turned and made his way through the bodies to the stairwell door.
There was a vague light shining in the stairwell. It came from somewhere high above. Even on the lowest flights it was enough to reveal the few bodies that lay in this space.
They found the light source on the fourth-floor landing. The husk of a balding man in his forties lay sprawled across the threshold leading to the hallway, the door forever propped open at forty-five degrees. It let in sunlight from the same kind of glass wall that capped the ground floor corridor.
They continued to the sixth floor. The bodies in the hallway there were as densely strewn as downstairs. Some of the guestroom doors they passed stood open. More bodies inside, on beds and in chairs. Travis stared at the shapes of bones beneath drawn skin. All the bodies were shriveled to that degree. He didn’t think mummification alone had done that to them. More likely starvation and dehydration had done it before they’d died.
They came to the glass wall at the end, looking out over Yuma from six stories up.
They stared.
“Jesus Christ,” Paige said softly.
It was the last thing any of them said for several minutes.
Every building in Yuma looked exactly as it had when they’d driven through it in the present day, except that the colors were baked to pastel versions of themselves. Like soft-drink cans left in the sun for weeks. Every parking lot was filled to capacity with cars and trucks. Every curb space was taken too. The vehicles had endured just as those in the open desert had: faded paint and no tires or window seals. Beyond the edges of the city, the mad but organized sprawl of cars extended out of sight in all directions. From this height it looked dramatically more absurd than it had from the shoulder of I–8, since the horizon was much farther away.
The three of them noticed all of that within seconds, and then disregarded it. Something else had taken their full attention.
The city of Yuma was drifted with human bones.