World of Trouble (27 page)

“Nico told you she disagreed with the decision to go underground, Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “She left. She posed no further threat to you, she was going to take no share of your space or your water or narcotics.”

“Or pasta sauce,” he says, giggling. “Don’t forget about my pasta sauce.”

“Mr. DeCarlo, why did you kill her?”

“Shit, man, it’s a question for the philosophers,” he says.

“Why does anyone kill anyone, right? Isn’t that right, little sister?”

Jean’s hand goes back to her scar, and there is some slippery truth in Astronaut’s malevolent leer, in the terror on Jean’s small face, and I am trying to knit it all together when Kessler behind me says “Enough” and pushes past me into the room, and Astronaut’s eyes sharpen with recognition.

“Hey—” he says. “Jordan?”

“It’s Agent Kessler, actually, you prick.”

“Agent? Huh,” and he moves to one knee and fires his pistol straight into Kessler’s chest, and Kessler’s whole body flies back into the wall, and I shout “damn it” and then “no” because Jean has opened fire, she jerks the trigger of her handgun and misses Astronaut by a mile—but a spark flies off the wall and catches the flammable atmosphere and explodes.

*  *  *

For a long minute the world is just fire. The sound of exploding bottles and the smell of burning, and the air is on fire and Kessler is and I am, blue and yellow fire is all around us, and I am batting at our bodies, slapping down the flames, while across the tiny room Astronaut’s whole chemical-smoked body catches and bursts, and before he can react or move he becomes a pillar of fire, spiraling and falling. I get Kessler out of there with a few big heaves, cover his body with my body until we’re both extinguished.

It’s mostly our clothes, after all, Kessler’s clothing is badly
burned, as mine is—the real problem is the hole in his chest, a golf-ball-sized gunshot entrance wound geysering blood, and so with the heat still pouring out of the small room, the stench of burn and death, I am hunched over Kessler panting in the hallway, covering his chest with two flat hands, blood from his heart and chest flooding out around my fingers.

“Don’t do that,” he says, bleary, peering up. “No, please.”

Blood bubbles up out of his mouth with the words, and in the glow of the fire behind me the blood looks black.

“Try not to talk,” I say. “I’m putting pressure on the wound.” I lean forward, flattening one hand over the other hand, flattening both hands over his gaping chest.

“Don’t put pressure on the wound.” He reaches up with surprising strength, pushes my hands off him. “Don’t do that.”

“Please remain quiet and still,” I say, “until I can staunch the bleeding.”

“I am going to bleed out and die.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I
want
to bleed out and die. Palace! This is so much better than a—fucking—I don’t know
—tsunami
or something.” He laughs, coughing, blood spraying out. “This is the best-case scenario.”

I don’t like it. I shake my head. The idea of just
leaving
him here. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. God, yes. Did we get the monster?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, go get him.”

“Her,” I say.

“What?”

The door to the room behind us is open, and Astronaut I can see in there, melted and smoldering, but it doesn’t matter—it’s Jean, it’s Jean who rushes past in the corner of my vision, hoping I don’t see her, but I do—I do.

I don’t know why it matters, but I know that it does. Getting the rest of the story, hearing a confession, checking off the final details.

Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.

But society is dead. Civilization is burning cities, its terrified animals clustered around grain silos, stabbing each other at burned-down convenience stores for the last can of Pringles.

Nevertheless—even so—here I go, I go charging through the darkness toward the stairs, following Jean’s frantic small form.

I don’t yell for her to stop, because she won’t stop. I don’t yell
“Police!” because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now. I hear her thin feet clanging up the stairs, hear the narrow metal stairwell rattling as she bolts for daylight. I charge across the floor and I follow her, hurling myself up the thin steps for the last time, putting the last of the pieces together, following Jean as she rattles up the stairway toward the clustered shadows at the top.

Look what you made me—

I sidestep small mounds of rubble still on the top step and into the garage and even among the horror of all that’s happening, the desperation to catch up to Jean and get the rest of the story, still I feel a rush of gladness from being done with that bunker, that crypt. I burst up into the aboveground, drinking air and daylight like a surfacing diver.

I stumble across the three-car indoor garage, navigating the craters and piles, and then I’m in the hallway and I can see Jean, racing hopelessly a few paces ahead of me down the hallway, down the long corridor where I started my search, the corridor marked by my sister’s blood and her blood, one trail in and one trail out.

I had to stop her, see—I had to—

I’m much faster than Jean. She’s fast and desperate, but I’m tall and my legs are very long and I’m desperate too, and I do it—just as the glass front door of the police station is swinging shut behind her I push it back open and launch myself and catch her legs and get her down into the mud, and then I push myself back up so that by the time she turns over there I am, looming, full height with weapons drawn, the knife and the gun.

“Please,” she says, her body trembling and her hands clasped together. “Please.”

I glare down at her. We’re surrounded by the overgrown bushes, blinking green in the daylight. The autumn wind riffles my hair, tickling up my shirtsleeves.

“Please,” she says softly. “Do it quickly.”

She is assuming my intention is to kill her. This is not my intention but I don’t tell her that. I have no interest in her in any way. But I don’t say that and I’m standing here with the butcher’s knife and the SIG and I see that she sees those things, I see that she sees the flat look in my eyes. “Tell me,” I say. My voice is flat also, flat and cold.

The flags ripple in the breeze, making a tinny
tink-tink-tink
as the ropes dance against the poles.

“I killed her.”

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know that,” I say again, and what I mean is “I don’t care.” Her sorrow is beside the point. I want answers, my chest is swollen with the wanting, my weapons are shaking in my hands. She thinks I am going to slay her where she lays, she thinks that I am vengeance-mad and bent on slaughter. But she’s got it wrong, I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.

“He made you do it.”

The word “yes” comes out softly and sharply, a little agonized rush of air.

“How did he make you do it? Jean?”

“I—” Eyes closed; breathing hard. “I can’t.”

“
Jean
.” She’s suffered enough. I am aware of that. Everybody has, though. Everybody has. “How? When?”

“As soon as—” Her whole body spasms, and she turns her face away. I crouch down and seize her chin and turn her face back to me.

“As soon as you went underground?” Nod. Yes. “Between four thirty and five thirty last Wednesday. Let’s call it five. Five o’clock on September 26. What happened then?”

“He said we were going to have a party. To celebrate our new lives. We can’t be gloomy, he said. A new life. New time. We didn’t even, you know. Didn’t unpack. Or look around. It was just—as soon as we got downstairs we sat down.”

“In the room marked
LADIES
.”

“Yes.”

Nodding, nodding. I won’t let her become like she was in the jail cell, withdrawing, floating away like a space capsule drifting from the mother ship. I stay close, keep my eyes boring into hers.

“Did it seem strange to you? To be having a party at such a time?”

“No. Not at all. I felt relieved. I was tired of waiting. Parry wasn’t coming. ‘Resolution.’ It wasn’t happening. We all knew that by then. It was time for plan B. I was glad. Astronaut was glad, too. He poured drinks for everyone. Proposed a toast.” A flicker of a smile rushes across her face, a vestigial fondness for the charismatic leader, but it dies fast. “But then he—he starts this
speech. About our loyalty. About how we’ve lost discipline. How the hard part hasn’t even started yet. He said our behavior outside, all the hanging out, while we had been waiting, it was bullshit. He told us we were weak. He spray-painted on the wall.”

I listen. I am down there with her, watching his face contort with anger, watching the words appear on the wall:
ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT
.

“And then he started talking about Nico. He said, look who’s not here. Look who abandoned us. Look who
betrayed
us.”

Kessler was right about DeCarlo. He had him nailed. Suicide didn’t fit the profile, but this: in group/out group dynamics. Cruel games. Tests of loyalty. And drugs, of course, Big Pharma and his clever hand with a concoction. He had resolved to kill all of his erstwhile coconspirators—he was doing it even then, merrily topping off everybody’s tea—but first he was going to have some fun.

“Go on, please.”

Jean looks at me helplessly, piteously. She is desperate to stop this line of conversation, desperate not to get to the end. To just lie in peace like Agent Kessler, waiting for the end.

I can see myself, a form of myself, floating up out of my body and running to get her a blanket, lift her gently, get her water, protect her. Young girl—recent trauma—curled in fear on the forest floor. But what I’m doing is nothing, what I’m doing is standing here clutching my weapons waiting for her to continue.

“The rest. Tell me the rest.”

“He, um—he looked at me. At
me
. And he told me I was the worst. The weakest. And he told me what I—what I had to do. To
earn my place
.” Her lip curls, her face tightens. The words are dull stones, she chokes them out one by one. “I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘Goodbye then, good luck. We are happy to drink your share of the water, little sister. To eat your share of the food.’ ”

She closes her eyes and I watch tears roll out from under the lids.

“I looked at the rest of them for help—or for, for pity, or—”

She looks down at the dirt. She got no help and she got no pity. They were as afraid as she was, all the rest of them, Tick and Valentine and Little Man and her old pals Sailor and Delighted, all as scared and confused, all just as firmly under the thumb of their leader. A week from impact and sharply aware of how isolated they had become, as the world narrowed to a pinpoint like the circle of darkness at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. As their leader and protector peeled off his layers, showing them the cruelty at his core.

So Astronaut tells Jean to go on now, he says get up, and she does, she gets up, she goes—and as she is telling me this story she is dissolving. She is seeing the memory complete itself out of the fog of forgetfulness, and it is
killing
her, I can see it. Every sentence is killing her. Every word. “I loved Nico. She was my friend. But as I was walking up those stairs my mind got—I don’t know. Hollow. There was all this shouting, these weird voices shouting, and—like—giggling?”

“You were hallucinating,” I say. “He drugged you.”

She nods. She knows this already, I think. Weird voices and dark streaks from the cruel courage in her tea. Whatever secret
ingredient he put in to add to his private fun. His game, his apocalyptic April Fool’s Day joke. Given her overdose and the subsequent patchy spots in her memory, we’re probably talking about a hallucinogen, some sort of dissociative anesthetic; PCP, maybe, or ketamine. But I can’t say with certainty, it’s not my area of expertise, and if it would do any good I would take blood, I would stick her with a needle and catch any lingering molecules still swimming in her veins.
Send it to the lab, boys!

The rest of them got much worse, of course. This was Astronaut’s real plan B. Food and water were limited, everything was limited, and he wasn’t going to share any of it, not for a second.

So here comes Jean up the rickety stairs with Astronaut’s sawtooth buck knife, shoved out of the hatch and told the price of her future. Surfing darkly, wild chemical horrors churning in her gut along with the terror. Looking for Nico.

“You know what?” She looks up at me with hope in her eyes, a small spark of joy. “You know what I remember? I remember thinking she’s probably gone. Because she told me she was going to leave, on the stairs she told me. And then with the party, and the speech, I mean, we’d been down there for—I don’t know, half an hour? He sat us down, he gave the speech, it had been time. If she was leaving she’d be gone already. I remember thinking that.”

I’ve thought of it too. It’s in the timeline I’ve got, up in my head.

“But there she was. She was still there,” says Jean. “Why was she still there?”

“Candy,” I say.

“What?”

“It was going to be a hard trip. She took what food she could find.”

She took the time to empty that machine, to prop it with the fork and run a coat hanger or her skinny arms up there and empty it out, she took that time and it cost her her life.

“So you fought her.”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember fighting her? And her fighting you?”

Her hand flies up to her face, her scratches and bruises, and then down again.

“No.”

“You don’t remember the woods?”

She trembles. “No.”

I lean over her, the gun and the knife in my two hands. “What do you remember, Jean?”