“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.
There 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.
Five seconds earlier Travis had been sure—without even thinking of it—that he’d already seen the worst Yuma could show him. That he was sufficiently hardened to face whatever they might find here.
He wasn’t.
The three of them stood there, staring at the cavernous and brightly lit interior of the concourse.