The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

people feel that way.
    Bleak December.
    That’s what the media called it.
    But why?
    After a dozen pages of drawings there was a final image showing the van itself. The child and an adult with long hair—presumably the child’s mother—were seated in front. Still frowning, but not crying. The rest of the van was shown heaped with crudely drawn, out-of-scale household items. A toaster. A vacuum cleaner. A computer. Silverware and dishes and pots and pans. Bags crammed full of clothing.
    None of that stuff was still in the van. Travis could see past the front seats to the vast cavity of space where the rear benches had been folded down into the floor. There was nothing back there.
    The next page of the notebook didn’t feature a drawing. It bore only a block of handwritten text—the oversized script of a child that somehow spoke of great effort, even in its sloppiness. It read:I hope we get a tickit when we get to Yuma, but we will be happy enough just to get there. I hope Aunt Liz is there. Mom says we will probaly be there tonite.
    All the remaining pages were blank. Bethany rifled through them, then came back to the written page.
    “Ticket?” she said. “For what? A ride into town?”
    They stared at the handwriting for another few seconds. Then Bethany let the book fall shut. She leaned back into the van and looked into the console compartment the book had come from. She gathered up the only other things inside it and held them up. A blue pen and two crayons, red and orange. The crayons had both melted to flattened shapes held together by just the paper around them.
    “We might find a lot more questions out here,” Travis said, “but I think the answers are going to be in the city.”
    Paige and Bethany looked like they agreed.
    Travis unslung the backpack from his shoulder, unzipped it, and took out the cylinder.

Chapter Twenty-Five
    They opened the iris two hundred yards from the highway, in case someone happened to be driving by at that moment in 2011. Travis looked through. No cars in sight. The Jeep was just as they’d left it.
    Twenty-five minutes later they reached the western outskirts of the city. It was larger than Travis had imagined, sprawled out over a patch of desert at least four miles by four. He exited the freeway and a moment later they were passing through a residential neighborhood full of low-slung homes, palm trees not quite as tall as the streetlights, and shallow front yards that were either gravel or irrigated grass.
    They came to Fourth Avenue and turned south onto it. It seemed to be the main drag through town. It could’ve been any Main Street in America except for the arid terrain. There were gas stations and grocery stores and banks and jewelers. There was a Burger King. There was a movie theater with five screens.
    If there was an army waiting for them, it wasn’t showing itself. Which made sense, in a way.
    “If we run into trouble,” Travis said, “I think it’ll be on the other side, in the ruins. On this side they don’t know what we’re driving, or even who we are except for you, Paige. But over there we’ll be the only things moving around on two feet. It’s a better place for them to set a watch.”
    Paige nodded. Weighed the possibilities. “It could be wishful thinking,” she said, “but we might have a few things working in our favor. On the one hand we’re up against the president of the United States, who has the military and every police force in the country at his disposal. He can make it rain brimstone on us if he wants to. On the other hand he and Finn, and whoever else they’re working with, have already demonstrated a pretty severe preference for keeping their secrets intact. It’s hard to imagine them grabbing a hundred soldiers or federal agents and sending them through the opening to lie in wait for us. That’s a lot of people to let in on the game. My guess is Finn will stick with his own security personnel from the highrise, whatever number of them he trusts enough. No telling what that number is. A dozen if we’re lucky. More if we’re not.”
    Travis looked down a cross street going by. Considered the broad layout of the town. Imagined how it would look in moderately well-preserved ruins, with most of its structures still standing. It was a lot of area for a dozen people to watch. A lot for even several dozen.
    Other advantages came to mind. As prey, the three of them had a significant edge on their potential predators: they