Authors: Ben H. Winters
There is sunlight in the room, which means that it is daytime. The Casio says 12:45, so it’s 12:45 in the afternoon but on what day?
I grind my fingertips into my eyes and grit my teeth. I don’t know if I was ever actually unconscious, but I don’t think so. I might have been. I experienced the shock and pain of the Taser, half an amp lighting up my abdomen, and then my arms and legs locked and shook and I was on the floor and my assailant, my friend, he bundled up my body in a tarp, and I was only flickeringly aware, my brain temporarily made into hash. I might have even struggled, might have even tried to lodge some sort of groaning protest—but
at some point the struggle became impossible and I felt him drag me up the stairs and over the lip of the basement, and my mind slipped out from under me.
I breathe the dust of the small gray cell. I’m going to get out of here, of course. I’m locked in here at present but I obviously will not die in here. This bad situation, like all bad situations, will find its resolution.
I check the Casio again and it still says 12:45. It’s broken. I don’t know what time it is. Maia is out there streaking closer, and I’m locked in place. A hot bubble of panic rolls up from my lungs and I swallow it with difficulty, breathe and breathe. New spiderwebs have been knitted between the legs of the bed and the corners of the floor, to replace the ones we scraped away when first we made the room ready for Jean. For Lily, that was her name at the time. Lily—Tapestry—the sleeping girl.
She’s not here. I don’t know where Jean is. Cortez is down there. I’m up here. The ladies’ room is full of corpses, the men’s room has just one. Nico is gone. The dog’s on the farm. I don’t know what time it is—what day—
I lurch up out of the bed and my right foot stumbles into something on the ground that makes a wobbling hollow noise as it falls over. It’s the carafe, from our rickety coffee-production operation. It’s all here, carafe and pencil-sharpener grinder and hot plate and an approximate half share of our dwindling beans. Cortez betrayed me and attacked me and dragged me up here, exiled me and my intentions, and left me here in the jail cell with food and water and coffee and beans. He is way down there rubbing his hands together,
flitting among his treasures, a dragon on his pile.
I stare at the beans, halfway up and halfway still lying down. Didn’t I have a feeling that I would end up in here? Didn’t I? I can’t remember, but I think I did, I think I recall staring at poor sick Jean and imagining myself, unwell and declining in the same spot, poor sick me. Like it’s all a loop, like time is just this bending, folded-over strip, eating its own tail.
I try to stand up again—I succeed—I’m up—I try the door, the door is locked.
Nico, I’m just—I’m trying to do it. I’m trying. Okay? I’m doing my best
.
I bring my hands up to my face, the stubbled surfaces of my cheeks. I hate my face right now, this ungainly disorder, like an overgrown garden. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s plenty of time left. I’ve lost track of it. I’ll rot in here. I’ll piss in the corner. I’ll get hungrier and hungrier. I’ll count the hours. Man in a box.
I can see it on the wall opposite the cell: the hook just inside the door where the key ring used to hang.
This is a death that is worse than death, buried alive in a country jail cell, knowing a lot but not enough—what I have is the dark circle of the story like a rock and I need to keep it rolling forward and accreting mass like a snowball, I need for it to
grow
. What time is it, what day—maybe it’s about to happen right now, right now: the boom, the flash in the sky, the rattling of the ground and then everything to come after, and in the chaos and fire the crime scene will be burned away and this police station will collapse in on itself and I’ll be dead and no one will ever know what happened.
I scream full-throated and launch myself at the bars and grip them and shake them and still screaming I slam my hands open-palmed against them, again and again, because I have to get down there, I have to know, I have to see.
And then footsteps, coming down the hall. I shout and bang on the bars.
“Cortez? Cortez!”
“Who the fuck is Cortez?”
“What?”
The back wall of the cell explodes, showering dust down all around me. Then the dust is clearing slowly and Jordan is on the other side of the bars, holding a black semiautomatic pistol in one hand, holding the keys to the cell in the other hand, and he’s staring at me and his eyes are burning and fierce. No sunglasses, no jaunty ball cap, no smug smile.
“Where is she?” he says, holding his gun straight up in the air. “Where’s Nico?”
I edge backward in the cell. There’s nowhere to hide. Just a bed and a toilet.
“She’s dead,” I tell him. “You know that she’s dead.”
He fires again, and the heat of the bullet rushes past me and the back wall explodes again, closer to my head, and I discover that I have thrown my hands up over my face, ducked and flinched. It won’t end—that dumb animal instinct to live, to keep going. It doesn’t end.
Jordan looks bad. I’ve only known him smiling; smirking; leering; taunting. That’s how he lives in my mind, the punk kid lording it over me, hoarding his secrets in Concord. Now he looks like a composite
photograph where they’ve aged the criminal so you can recognize him after years have passed. His young face is mossy with stubble, and he has a deep gash running down from one ear to the corner of his cheek. There’s some manner of acute infected injury on his right leg, the cuff of his pants rolled up over a haphazardly bandaged wound, dripping around the edges with red and black and pus. He looks grief stricken and desperate. He looks how I feel.
“Where is she, Henry?”
“Stop asking me where she is.”
He did it. He killed her. The clarity is like fire. Jordan steps toward me. I step toward him. It’s like the bars are a mirror, and we’re both the same guy, two images coming together.
“Where is she?”
He raises the gun and aims it at my heart. I feel again the stupid shivering need to live, to turn around and duck, but this time I stay put, I grind my heels into the floor, staring at his wrathful eyes. “She’s dead,” I tell him. “You killed her.”
His face narrows with pretend confusion. “I just got here.”
He points the gun at me, and now I do, I feel like, fine, that’s fine, let me die here, let the bullet collide with my brain and be done with it, but first I need the rest of the story. “Why did you cut her throat?”
“Her—what?” he says.
“
Why?
”
I drop quickly, bring my knee down on the coffee carafe and bust the glass. Jordan is jerking the gun to follow my actions, Jordan is saying “stop that fucking moving—” but now I’ve got an uneven
triangle of glass in my hand and I launch myself forward off the ground in an ungainly leap, find his stomach between the bars and stab him in the gut. “Hey—goddammit—” He looks down, horrified. It’s a superficial wound, the glass dangles at a shallow angle, but there’s blood coming out of him like crazy, a thick fast welling out of blood like oil, and my hand is darting for the key on its ring in his other hand. I’m a beat too slow, he flings the ring and the key out behind him, out the doorway and into the hallway.
I say “Damn it,” and he says “You asshole,” clutches a hand to his stomach and brings it up all bloody.
“Why did you kill her?”
I have to know. That’s all I need is to know. I am dimly aware of the RadioCOMMAND still going, “
DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED
,” and Jordan reaches for my throat between the bars, but his hand is all slick with the blood from his stomach and it slides off me. I move backward and spit at him. “I’m looking for her,” he insists. “I came here to find her.”
I slide a long hand between the bars and grab his leg, worm my forefinger under the bandage and jam it into the wound on his calf and he screeches and I jam it in more. A nasty trick, bad-guy wrestler move. Jordan writhes away from my hand, but I don’t let go—I’ve got both of my hands wriggled through the bars now, one hand clamped onto him at midthigh, the other hand still gouging his infected wound. I’m behaving like a monster. He is screaming. I want answers. I need them.
“Stop screaming,” I tell him, both arms extended as if through
the holes in a puppet theater, holding him fast through the bars. “Talk. Tell me.”
“What?” He says, choking out the word, gasping from pain. “What?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?” Jordan gasps. I ease up slightly on my grip, give him a moment of relief, not wanting him to pass out. The information is more important. I have to know. He’s heaving desperate breaths, clutching at his wound, both of us on the ground in the grime. I give him what I already know, build a bridge of common understanding, Farley and Leonard,
Criminal Investigation
, chapter 14.
“You abandoned your girlfriend in Concord. You and Abigail were supposed to stay but you left anyway. You made sure you were here on the big day, T-minus one week, when the whole group was supposed to go underground. How did you know that was the day?”
“I don’t know anything. I told you.”
“Liar. Killer. You were here at five on Wednesday the twenty-sixth because you knew that that’s when they’d be going underground and you knew that Nico would leave. Maybe you told her—maybe you told her to leave, to meet you outside the station. And there she was. She had a backpack on. She was happy to see you.”
I twist my finger, work it into the wound, and he writhes away, tries to, but I’ve got him tight, I’m clutching him to the bars, holding him in place.
“The other girl was an unwelcome surprise though, right?”
“What other girl?”
“So you had to kill her first, quick, knock her out and slash her
throat and then chase Nico—”
“What the fuck—no—I came here to save her.”
“Save her? To
save
her?”
Now I’m just twisting at his leg, now I’m trying to inflict as much pain on him as I can. I don’t care if we both die here, locked in our improbable clench for however long is left. He can tell the truth or both of us can die.
“You slashed her throat, and you slashed that other girl’s throat, and you left them. Why, Jordan? Why did you do that?”
“Is that what happened? Is that what happened to her?”
And then he throws his head back and slumps over on his side of the bars. I don’t care, I keep at it, I have to hear him confirm it. I need that, and Nico does.
“Why did you kill her? Why? How does killing my sister fit into your stupid plan to save the world?”
There is a long pause. “
DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED
,” the radio says, and then again. Jordan starts laughing. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he gives off this weird cold laugh, a gurgling throaty chuckle.
“What?”
Nothing. Dead, dry laughter.
“What?”
“The plan. The plan, Stan. There’s no plan. We made it up. It’s not real. We made the whole thing up.”
Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.
A massive asteroid really is coming and it will kill us all. That is a true fact, hard and cold and irreducible, a fact that can be neither diverted nor destroyed.
I was right, all along, in my pedantic obnoxious small-minded insistence that the truth was true—the simple brutal fact that I kept explaining to Nico, that I kept trying to use to corral her or cudgel her. I was always right and she was always wrong.
Jordan is explaining it all to me, running down the whole story,
laying out the inside scoop on the great underground asteroid-diversion conspiracy, explaining in intricate detail how I was right and Nico was wrong, and I am experiencing no joy in having been proved right. It’s actually the opposite, what I’m feeling, it’s actually the black and bitter opposite of joy: this awful opportunity to say “I told you so” to someone who is already dead, to say “you were wrong” to my sister, who has already been sacrificed on the altar of what she was wrong about. I am wishing in retrospect that I
hadn’t
told her so, that I had just let her alone, maybe even allowed her the pleasure of thinking for half a second that her brother and only living relative believed her. That I believed
in
her.
It wasn’t just that the plan would never work, the standoff burst, the precisely orchestrated atomic recalibration of Maia’s deadly course. The plan never existed. Its author, the rogue nuclear scientist Hans-Michael Parry, never existed either. They were pure suckers, the lot of them, Astronaut and Tick and Valentine and Sailor, Tapestry—even Isis. Suckers and saps. They were huddled together out here at the police station waiting for the arrival of a man who never was.
Now she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter. They came all this way for nothing, and now she’s dead.
We’re outside, between the flagpoles. It’s a beautiful afternoon, cool and crisp and sunny. The first pleasant day since I got to Ohio. Jordan is running down the whole story and while he does I am clutching my face and tears are spilling out around my fingers.
* * *
Astronaut’s real name is Anthony Wayne DeCarlo and he has no scientific training, no special understanding of astrophysics, no military background of any kind. He is, or was, a bank robber, a retailer and manufacturer of controlled substances, and a conman. At age nineteen DeCarlo drew a ten-year prison sentence in Colorado for boosting an SUV as a getaway vehicle when his older brother robbed an Aurora-area Bank of America. He was paroled after four years and three months, and six months after that he was arrested in a rented apartment in Arizona that he had turned into a laboratory/dispensary of designer narcotics. Five-year bid, out in two on good behavior. And so on, and so on. By the time he turned forty, which was the year before last, he was known to law enforcement in an impressive range of jurisdictions as a good-looking and silver-tongued bad guy, skilled in the manufacture of a variety of illicit substances—so much so that one of his aliases, the one he prided himself on, was “Big Pharma.”