The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

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.
    Travis heard something.
    He grabbed Paige and Bethany and pulled them almost off their feet, into a narrow channel between houses. They flinched and stared at him. He put a finger to his lips.
    They stood in silence.
    The breeze moaned under the eaves of the houses.
    Then it faded again, and all three of them heard the sound.
    It came from somewhere south of them, maybe within the airport grounds.
    It was a woman’s voice, speaking calmly, saying something they couldn’t quite make out.
    It took them only a few seconds to realize what they were hearing. The woman’s voice was pleasant and monotone and had a distinct reverb to it. It was a recording, playing over some kind of PA system on the airport grounds.
    They cocked their heads but couldn’t discern any of the words.
    Then the breeze picked up again and they lost the sound altogether.
    They stepped out from between the houses and continued south. They stopped at the corner of the last home before