Free Ghost Country by Patrick Lee Page A

two feet beneath her as they descended, so that he could stop her fall if she slipped. She didn’t slip.
    They touched down onto the pile of rusted girders, tentatively at first, testing whether it was stable. It turned out to be far more so than Travis had expected. He studied it for a moment and saw why: the pile had spent decades oxidizing and sagging and settling under the weight of tree limbs and snow and ice. The result was a mass of beams rusted together as solidly as the welded geodesics of a jungle gym.
    That didn’t make it safe to walk on. The wreckage filled the Ritz’s two-story-deep foundation to a level just about even with the street. The path across the top of the pile, to the foundation’s outer wall, was like a balance-beam maze above a tangle of serrated blades. What little sunlight reached the forest floor penetrated only a few feet deeper among the beams, leaving a pool of shadow beneath them. It was hard to imagine that nothing lived down there. Travis turned and saw Bethany staring down into the depths, no doubt thinking along the same lines. He offered his hand. She took it.
    They crossed the mass of girders in about thirty seconds. They stepped over a crumbled section of the foundation wall onto Vermont Avenue. Travis stared along its length to the south. Shafts of white light from the overcast were tinted green by their passage through the pine boughs. Here and there a bright red or yellow hardwood leaf spiraled down into the stillness. The street was surprisingly clear of undergrowth. There were plenty of dead weeds creeping from the mesh of cracks in the pavement, but in most places the roadbed was still visible. The pines probably had a lot to do with that. The needles they dropped had some effect on soil quality that usually killed lesser vegetation around them.
    Visibility through the trees extended about as far as the sixteen-story high-rise at M Street, where in the present day Paige was being held. Travis could just see its girder skeleton past a grove of birches choking what’d once been the traffic circle.
    He took the SIG-Sauer from his waistband and handed it to Bethany. He watched her appraise it, her thumb going naturally to the magazine release, getting a feel for it. She raised the weapon quickly to look down the sights, testing its target acquisition.
    “Thanks,” she said.
    Travis handed her the three spare magazines. She pocketed them.
    Then he unslung the Remington from his shoulder and racked a shell into its chamber. He had another dozen shells in his pockets. He took one out and pushed it through the weapon’s loading port to replace the one he’d just chambered. It was good for five shots now.
    He turned and looked at the rope, hanging with its end just touching the pile of girders. He followed it up to the surreal image of the iris hovering twenty-five feet above. Through it, from this low angle, he could see only the hotel room’s ceiling and two blades of the fan above the bed.
    T hey moved south along Vermont at a near run. They watched the forest around them and listened for any disturbance in the trees, or any sudden lull in the birdsong that might mean something big was moving around.
    The standing frames of buildings looked different from ground level than they had from the high vantage point of the presidential suite. Some of them were leaning at angles that looked impossible from below. They looked like they wanted to come down. Many had.
    Travis let the inevitable question into his mind: did the breakdown of the world have anything to do with what he’d learned two summers ago, during his time with Tangent? In the two years since, he’d gotten good at not thinking about that, but there was no dodging it now. The bullet points all but lined themselves up in his head, and he considered them in careful order.
    The summer before last, he’d been drawn into Tangent’s business by what seemed, at the time, like chance. The organization had been in panic