The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky
of them. No doors lying flat on any of the concrete pads, either. They’d have long since rotted to fragments light enough that a once-in-a-decade storm could push them over the edge. At least half a dozen such storms would’ve happened over the years. No doors. No nameplates.
They saw something shiny at the north edge of the fifth floor. They crossed to it along the girders. It was the foil lid of a yogurt container, its edge pinned beneath the rim of a tipped-over trash basket—a stylish, heavy little thing carved from a cubic foot of limestone.
Travis pulled the yogurt lid free and held it up to the light. Whatever writing had once been on it had long ago faded to almost nothing in the sun.
But there was a line of text along the edge that remained legible—tiny letters and numbers that’d been stamped into the foil.
They read: exp. dec 23 2011.
Chapter Thirteen
For a few seconds everything was quiet, except the wind moving through the forest that’d replaced Washington, D.C. Far to the west Travis heard a crow cawing, high above the treetops. The weightless foil lid quivered just noticeably in the breeze, but Travis’s eyes stayed fixed on the expiration date.
“Four months from now,” Bethany said. “In our time.” The words came out as hardly more than a breath.
“I don’t eat a lot of yogurt,” Travis said. “How far away is the sell-by date, when you buy this stuff?”
“It’s like milk. Three or four weeks. Someone would’ve bought this around the start of December. This coming December, in the present day.”
Travis nodded.
“And it’s not like people hang on to these lids for posterity,” Bethany said. “Figure this thing goes into the trash in early to mid-December… and no one ever takes it back out. Jesus Christ, the world ends four months from now?”
“Janitors quit working four months from now, at least,” Travis said. “My guess is, so does everyone else.”
He let the lid go and they watched it drift down on the air, like the colored leaves that were settling onto Vermont Avenue before them.
“Four months…” Bethany said again. “Everyone I know. Everyone I love. Four months…”
Travis found himself going back to what he’d thought of earlier: the chance of some connection between all of this and whatever the Whisper had warned him about—the dark potential of his own future.
He remained certain there was no connection, but now something else struck him: the Whisper had spoken of a future in which he belonged to Tangent several years from now. How could that have ever been possible if the world was going to collapse in 2011?
Well, weren’t all bets simply off, after everything the Whisper had done? In a roundabout way, the thing had killed Ellen Garner, with the result that President Garner had resigned from office and allowed Currey to take power. That change alone could account for massive differences in how everything played out.
“End of the world plus seventy years, we guessed,” Bethany said. “So on this side of the iris, the date is sometime around 2080.”
Travis nodded, but said nothing. He looked around. From this position he could see along not only Vermont, but M Street to the east and west, a hundred yards in each direction before the tree cover obscured the way.
Something obvious occurred to him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it already.
“Where are the cars?” he said.
He looked at Bethany. She looked blank for half a second and then made the same oh yeah expression he’d probably just made himself.
“The panels would be rusted to nothing by now,” Travis said, “but the frames and the wheel rims should still be in some kind of shape, with windows and all kinds of plastic parts draped over them.” He looked around. “They should be everywhere.”
But there wasn’t one to be seen. They hadn’t passed anything that could’ve once been a vehicle on the walk down from the Ritz. Hadn’t seen anything like that along the stretch of Vermont north of the hotel, either, when they’d first roped down. He’d have noticed and remembered.
“People must’ve had a reason to get out of D.C.,” Bethany said, “at the end.”
Travis stared at the empty streets and thought about it. He imagined a plague sweeping the world. People fleeing high-population areas in a mass panic.
It didn’t work. Not entirely. First of all, not everyone would leave. Some number of people would have nowhere better to go, and
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