Seven decades of wind had scurried them into piles against all available obstructions. Cars, buildings, landscaping walls, planter boxes. They were everywhere except for open stretches of flat ground—like the section of parking lot immediately below, which had been visible from the first floor. From down there they’d seen the bones only at a distance, and mistaken them for sand.
Travis let his eyes roam the nearest pile, seventy feet left of the exterior door. The bones had massed there against a different wing of the hotel. He could see them with enough clarity to discern adult skulls from those of children, and large ribs from small ones. The bones were scoured clean and white. Everyone who’d died outdoors had been quickly discovered by coyotes and foxes and desert cats, and whatever they’d left behind, the sun and wind had eventually taken care of.
“It’s everyone, isn’t it?” Bethany said. “They really did it. They all came here and just . . . died.”
Travis looked at her. Saw her eyes suddenly haunted by a new thought.
“Maybe we were with them,” she said. “Maybe our bones are out there somewhere.”
They watched the city for another five minutes, for any sign of movement. If Finn’s people were there, they were already hidden in ideal vantage points. Travis considered that. Realized something obvious.
“I think we’re here ahead of them,” he said.
“How can you know?” Paige said.
“Because if they’d gotten here first, some of them would be standing at this window.”
There 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.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They 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.