The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

her teeth on the way out. She looked around, suddenly frantic, and at the dim edge of the light shaft coming in from the hall, she saw the bathroom’s sinks. She crossed to the nearest in two running steps and reached it just as she vomited. The convulsion came in waves—two, three, four. Then she stood there getting her breath. On instinct she grabbed the faucet handle and turned it. Nothing came out.
    “Fuck,” she whispered.
    She spat into the sink a number of times, and at last stood upright. Paige put an arm around her shoulders.
    “I’m okay,” Bethany said.
    She didn’t sound okay to Travis, but she sounded like she could stay on her feet. She’d have to cope with it later. They all would. And by then they’d have more to cope with alongside it.
    A lot more, Travis saw, as he stepped into the corridor.

Chapter Twenty-Six
    The ground-floor hallway of the hotel was filled with bodies. Cluttered so thick with them that it would require careful footsteps to avoid them. They lay in the positions they’d died in. On their sides and their stomachs and their backs, heads on folded arms or wadded articles of clothing. A few were seated against the wall, their arms crossed on bent knees and their heads bowed onto them. Their spinal columns stood out in sharp relief through the papery skin of their necks.
    They were every age. There were gray-haired seniors. There were couples that might have been college students or even high-school kids, dead in each other’s arms. There were children with their heads resting in parents’ laps. Beside the stairwell door sat a woman who might have been thirty. She held a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. She’d died with her head leaned back against the wall. The dried remnant of her expression looked serene and calm. Travis wanted to believe she’d really felt that way at the end, but he didn’t.
    Here and there, exposed arms and legs bore ragged bite marks where scavengers had been at the bodies. The damage was small in scale: apparently, no animals larger than rats had made their way into the hotel, at least in the early days. Maybe bigger things had come along later, but by then the mummification had made these dead an unappealing food source, and they’d been left alone. It was as close as nature could come to respecting dignity.
    Travis’s gaze fell on a couple that’d probably been in their twenties. They’d piled a few jackets and shirts at the base of the wall and were huddled against them. The woman’s arms were lying flat across the man’s chest, but his were around her, holding her to him. Her forehead rested against his mouth. She’d died first, Travis realized. The man had held her body and kissed her forehead, and stayed in that position until he’d faded away himself.
    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,