The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

reached it, then turned and stared north at the flames.
    “Jesus,” Travis said.
    The height of the blaze surprised him the most. A minute earlier, when they’d been right next to it, it’d just cleared the tops of the tallest vehicles.
    It was twice that height now.
    From this angle they could see the entire line, extending three miles to the east. The whole length was burning. Every vehicle that immediately bordered it had thick tongues of flame seething from its windows.
    From this position it was impossible to see the fire’s northward progress. The three of them began moving to the west for a better perspective. Travis was hesitant to go too far—they might step out from behind the fire’s thermal curtain and become visible to anyone watching the camera mast’s feeds. Assuming whoever was up there didn’t have bigger concerns now, like getting the hell out of the fire’s way.
    They’d gone only a few hundred feet west before they stopped and simply stared again. They had their answer.
    The fire was advancing north faster than any of them could have hoped. The falling embers had triggered spot fires as far as half a mile north of the line. Each of these had already grown to bonfire size, massive cones of flame standing atop a dozen cars each, and blossoming outward through the tire crumbs. The bonfires were venting thousands of their own embers into the darkness toward Yuma.
    The city would be an inferno in another five minutes.
    That was the good news.
    Travis could see the bad news just as easily.
    The fire wasn’t only spreading north.
    He’d expected that problem to an extent—it was unavoidable—but he’d hoped the fire’s progress in the other directions would be nominal.
    It didn’t look nominal.
    The original fire line had spread south by at least four rows of cars, and from its starting point it’d expanded west by several rows as well, even crossing the wide driving lanes that ran north and south. The hotter the fire burned, the more rapidly it spread through the rubber crumbs.
    Suddenly, about fifty feet along the original line, a bright fireball erupted with a heavy concussion sound. A still-sealed gasoline container in someone’s trunk had burst in the heat. The blast sent burning fuel out in a fifty-foot radius.
    It happened again five seconds later, this time at the southern edge of the advance. Just like that, there were half a dozen more vehicles burning.
    “We’d better get the hell out of here,” Paige said.
    They went west. It was as safe as south or east, and it was familiar. They’d seen it on the way into town. They weren’t going to run up against the edge of a canyon or a mountain ridge unexpectedly.
    They ran for only a few minutes before they stopped to get what they needed for the last part of the plan.
    Bikes.
    Though they were everywhere—from almost any point in the expanse of cars it was possible to see one or two—in most cases they were children’s. Or they were adult bikes with leather seats that’d long since baked off in the sun, leaving only exposed springs and foam.
    The three they settled on—two on a car’s trunk-rack and another in a pickup bed twenty yards away—were adult mountain bikes with fabric seats that hadn’t been worn off.
    The bikes’ tires were long gone, but the desert’s surface was essentially one big tire now, so Travis hoped the going would be about the same, or close enough.
    He took from his pocket the second thing he’d searched for among the glove boxes earlier: a narrow canister of WD-40.
    The desert air had preserved the bikes just fine, but the sun would have burned away any trace of their lubrication. They spent a minute thoroughly dousing the chains and gears and bearings with the oil. Then Travis lifted one of the bikes’ back ends and gave its pedal a turn. It creaked for two seconds and then everything spun silently, smoothly.
    Yuma was an uncannily good place to store things for a long time. Travis found himself wondering if that figured in somehow—the place’s capacity to keep metals and other things unchanged. If it was part of the puzzle, he couldn’t see how it fit. But nothing else fit either, so far.
    They mounted the bikes, then stared back at the city. The fire was gargantuan now. A hurricane of flame. No sense of the original line remained. It was simply a massive, misshapen oval, broadly curved along the three miles of its southern sweep, and radically extended northward, in branches and