The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

him.
    Relaxing, he sank into his bag again, and rubbed his eyes. Silent lightning flashed, brighter on the west face of the tent than elsewhere. He measured the seconds on his watch and counted thirty-five before the accompanying thunder reached him; the storm was seven miles away.
    Sleep began to draw him down again, even as the storm intensified. He found a strange comfort in the sound of it, a lullaby suited to this hard and unforgiving place. Within minutes the lightning and thunder were much closer, and almost continuous.
    Just before he slipped over the edge of consciousness, he heard something in the storm that made him open his eyes again. He turned an ear to the west. What had it been? It really hadn’t sounded like thunder at all. It’d been more like a scream, though not human or even animal. More than anything, it’d reminded him of the rending of sheet metal in the prison drill shop. Well, that was it, then. Just his own ghosts troubling him at the brink of sleep. They were persistent, but he’d learned to ignore them.
    He closed his eyes again and drifted off.
    Three nights later, Travis set up camp thirty-six miles from Coldfoot, though the wandering route he’d taken, displayed on his GPS unit, added up to just over forty-nine. He ate his heated pouch of enchilada soup—all these freeze-dried meals tasted more like the pouches they came in than what was written on them—on the rim of a steep-walled valley some six hundred feet deep. Its floor, broad and flat, extended relatively straight toward the northwest for what had to be three miles.
    A cloud bank churned through the valley like a smoky river, swirling around outcroppings of rock and pooling in the deepest places. Directly beneath Travis, the valley floor was completely obscured, though for a few moments when the sun’s lateral rays shone straight along its length, he saw the sparkle of something underneath the fog. Water, or maybe ice.
    He slept easily, waking only twice, not to thunder but to the howling of wolves. He had no idea how far away they might be, though at times they seemed no more distant than a quarter of a mile. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too.
    At six in the morning he woke, opened the tent flap and sat up into crisp air, colder than it’d been the night before. The visible horizon extended farther than it had at any time during the trip.
    Alaska or Minnesota?
    He’d come here to answer that question. He’d failed, so far.
    The pros and cons of each place cycled through his mind of their own accord. Home was family, friends. For all the judgment they could never hide, they would always be more accepting of his past than strangers would. Home was his brother, Jeff, offering to let him in on the software business he was starting out of his house, and show him the ropes from the beginning.
    Home was also a place full of ghosts, every street in the old neighborhood sagging under the weight of troubled memories.
    Alaska was this. This perfect emptiness that made no claim to understand his character one way or the other, and no effort to push him back into old grooves. In his move to Fairbanks he’d brought along nothing. Not even himself, it sometimes seemed. He wouldn’t have believed it even a year before, in his first days of freedom, but up here he sometimes went a whole day without thinking about prison, or what he’d done to put himself there. Up here, sometimes, he just wasn’t that guy anymore. And damned if that sensation wasn’t getting stronger by the month.
    All of that would end, the hour he set foot in his old world again.
    For that reason, if for no other, he thought he knew which way he was leaning.
    He unzipped his bag, pulled on his pants and boots, and swung his feet out onto the ground. The grass, soft the night before, now crunched beneath his treads. He stood and stretched, then knelt and took from his backpack his propane burner and metal cup. A moment later the blue flame was hissing beneath the water for his coffee. Waiting for it, he wandered to the drop-off overlooking the valley, its depths now revealed in the crystal air.
    He stopped.
    For a moment he could only stare, too disoriented even to blink.
    On the valley floor lay the wreck of a Boeing 747.

CHAPTER TWO
    Travis packed everything within ninety seconds, including the tent. He set off along the valley’s