Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II

by Ben H. Winters

  “Four hours,” I say, and Nico heaves her duffel bag onto her shoulder, and we’re ready to go.

  2.

  Once, in high school, as part of a short-lived and ill-fated campaign to gain the attention of a “cool” girl named Alessandra Loomis, I accompanied some friends to a day-long popular-music festival hosted by the Manchester radio station Rock 101. This is like that, what I’m looking at now, standing at the rear exit of Thompson Hall gazing down the long slope toward the main quad. It’s like the rock-fest but to a factor of ten: brightly colored tents and sleeping bags stretch out in all directions, studded by what look like giant shipping cartons, overturned and transformed into baroquely decorated forts. Long snaking lines of drummers move through the crowds, dancing in rhythmic interlocking circles. At the center of the quad is a towering junk-shop sculpture painted in neons and pastels, built of car doors and computer monitors and children’s toys and aquarium parts. Puffs of cigarette and marijuana smoke float up, drifting over the crowds like smoke signals. It’s like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that’s all audience.

  Nico was right. I should have worn shorts.

  “So great,” murmurs my sister. She leans back, throws her arms open and closes her eyes, breathing it in—the marijuana smoke, certainly, but all of it, the whole thing. And I am surprised to be feeling how I do, confronted with the massive and chaotic scene—not at all how I felt driving the long hour back to Concord after a day at the Rock 101 festival, my ears ringing alternately with Alessandra Loomis’s kind but unequivocal demurrals and Soundgarden’s egregious cover of “Buckets of Rain.”

  We make our way down the slope and into the crowd. I unknot my tie and take it off. Nico laughs. “There you go, Starsky,” she says. “Deep cover.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “Where are we going?”

  “We gotta find my man Jordan,” says Nico. “He’s got this place wired.”

  “Okay,” I say. “And where’s Jordan?”

  “In Dimond,” she says. “The library. If his committee is sitting. Follow me.”

  I follow her down into the wonderland, trotting a few paces behind as she picks a route through the crowded tents and revelers. Nico pauses here and there to say hello to people she knows, ducking into one tent to hug a fine-boned girl in a miniskirt, jog bra, and elaborate Native American headdress.

  At the far end of the main quad the crowd thins and we pick up a narrow winding path and follow it into and out of a stand of thin sapling elms. After a few minutes of walking, the noises of the drums and the singing have faded, and we are wandering through the campus, passing nondescript low-slung brick academic buildings—Geology department, Kinesiology, Mathematics. After ten minutes or so we come out onto a plaza where there’s just a single drummer, tapping away all on his own, wearing sweatpants and a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. The chiseled brick cornerstone says PERFORMING ARTS, and a sandwich board is propped up at the base of the wide steps, between the columns, advertising a lecture: “The Asteroid as Metaphor: Collision, Chaos, and Perceptions of Doom.”

  Nico peers at the sign.

  “Is this where we’re going?” I ask.

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Yup,” she says, and we keep walking. I’m picturing Brett Cavatone making his way through the campus in his heavy policeman boots, looking for Julia Stone just as I am now. How did he circumvent the perimeter guards, I wonder? If I had to guess, his stratagem was more tactile than mine, more direct. He would have cased the campus, selected the least-defended of the various checkpoints, and employed overwhelming but nonlethal force to get past one of these skinny twenty-somethings playing tough guy.

  I keep following Nico, who is still lugging her heavy duffel bag, deeper and deeper into the bewildering campus. The paths roll back on themselves, the woods grow thick, then thin out again. On a volleyball court outside the athletic complex is a row of young people clutching Civil War–style bayonets, practicing their form: someone yells “Charge!” and they charge, sprinting full bore, lunging with bayonets extended, stopping on a line, laughing, retreating.

  I’m growing more and more concerned about Nico’s sense of direction every time she pauses at a forking path and chews on her lip for a moment before plunging forward.

  “Here, wait,” I say. “Here’s a map.”

  “I don’t need it,” she says. “I know where I’m going.”

  “You sure?”

  “Stop asking me that.”

  It doesn’t matter; the map, when I look closer, has been imaginatively graffitied, the place names all crossed out and replaced: “Perdition.” “Deathtown.” “Dragons Here There Be.”

  “We’re fine,” says Nico, taking a seemingly arbitrary left turn onto a narrower path with a light handrail. “Come on.”

  We cross over a brown, bubbling creek and pass one more building, a dorm, with loud insistent music pouring out along with a series of modulated groans. There’s a man on the roof, naked, waving to passers-by as if from a parade float.

  “Holy moly,” I say. “What are they doing in there?”

  “Oh, you know,” says Nico, looking down, blushing, uncharacteristically. “Fucking.”

  “Ah,” I say, “right.”

  And then, thank God, we get to where we’re going.

  * * *

  In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over the desk in a carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mass. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags, and beside that a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There’s a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages until, with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can’t consume the words fast enough.

  “Come on,” says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet intent occupant—earnestly, frantically reading.

  * * *

  In the basement, Nico slips in through a pair of green double doors marked BOOK REPAIR and I wait outside, until a moment later she emerges with a friend behind her. Jordan, presumably. In the few seconds before the door swings closed I glimpse a big workshop with the tables pushed to the sides, people sitting cross-legged on the floor in loose concentric rings. As the door opens, someone is saying “Agreed, with reservations …,” and the rest are raising their hands in the air—two hands up, palms out—and then the door closes all the way.

  “So this is the brother, huh?” says Jordan, sticking his hand out. “I seriously don’t think I’ve ever met a real cop before.”

  “Well,” I say, shaking his hand, and I’m going to say that I’m not a cop anymore, actually, but then he says, “What’s it like to shove a nightstick up someone’s ass?”

  I let go of his hand.

  “I’m totally serious,” he says. And Nico says, “Jordan, don’t be a moron.”

  He looks at her, all innocence. “What?”

  I just want to find my missing person. That’s all I want. Jordan and Nico lean against a wall in the hallway, and I stand across from them. He’s short, baby faced, fatuous, with a pair of Ray-Bans pushed back high on his head. Nico pulls out a cigarette and Jordan gives her an expectant expression, and she lights one for him, too, on the same match.

  “How’s Ars Republica?” she asks.

  “Boring. Stupid. Ridiculous. As usual.” Jordan looks over his shoulder at the BOOK REPAIR door. “Today it’s immigrant policy: take ’em or leave ’em, basically.” He talks fast, taking quick little puffs of the cigarette between choppy sentences. “Crowd mood is definitely take ’em, especially now with this quarantine jazz. How’d you
get him in, by the way?”

  “We told a story.”

  “Nice.” Then, to me, “Like that outfit, by the way. You look like a funeral director.” He keeps chattering, hyper and self-important. “Not that many of ’em are making it up here. The CI’s I mean. Coasties must be doing a bang-up job of rounding ’em up and taking ’em camping. Oh, wait, not camping. Internment camp. My bad.”

  He smirks, then leans his neck one way till it cracks, and then the other way. “Okay, what do we need?”

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “Someone specific, jackass,” says Nico, and sticks out her tongue at him.

  If it turns out that my sister is romantically involved with this man, I might actually have to murder him.

  “A former student here,” I say. “Would have been a senior last year, when all of this started up. Whatever this is.”

  “ ‘Whatever this is’?” Jordan’s face becomes serious. “I’ll tell you what this is, asshole, this is the apex of civilization. Okay? This is what democracy looks like, real democracy, you fucking Nazi cop asshole.”

  Jordan stares at me and I grope for some sort of placating language, wishing more than anything in the world that I didn’t need help from this particular person—and then he drops the stone face and giggles like a hyena.

  “I’m jerking your chain, man.” He points back over his shoulder at the committee meeting. “These dingleberries are in there for forty-five minutes arguing about toilet paper rationing, even though the world is about to explode. It’s fucking retarded.”

  “I see,” I say, speaking slowly to control the anger in my voice. “If that’s how you feel, why are you here?”

  “Resources. Recruitment. And because I happen to know that the world is not about to explode. Right Nico?”

  “Damn right,” she says.

  “The woman that I’m looking for is named Julia Stone.” I give him the campus address that I have from the file: Hunter Hall 415.

  “She won’t be there,” he says. “Nobody’s stayed put.”

  “I figured. I need to know where she is.”

  “You got a picture?”

  “I do not.”

  He whistles, jogs his head back and forth, blows out a plume of smoke.

  “Well, Nico’s brother the cop, it shan’t be easy. Everything is scrambled like an egg around here. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Okay,” I say. I’m thinking of Brett slipping away, further and further into the future—thinking, too, of the four hours I’ve been given by my new friends at the entrance to Thompson Hall. That dog has suffered enough already. “How long?”

  “How long?” Jordan turns to Nico. “Is that how policemen say thank you?”

  “God,” she says, laughing, shoving him lightly in the chest. “You’re such a prick.”

  “Meet me in the grub tent in an hour and a half,” Jordan tells me. “If I don’t have something by then, I never will.”

  * * *

  Around the corner from Dimond Library is a cluster of residence halls, each shaped like a parenthesis and arranged around a shared courtyard, where, at present, there’s a dozen or so young people playing a game. A kid in some sort of Victorian derby hat shakes a Styrofoam cup to spill dice out onto the sidewalk with a loud clatter, and the other players cheer and then start racing around the courtyard. A chalk sign says ANTIPODAL VOLCANISM WORKING GROUP.

  “Do you know what that means?” I ask Nico, and she shrugs, lights a cigarette, disinterested.

  The players aren’t just running, they’re drawing, stopping to make marks on a massive game board that’s been drawn out on the pavement. The kid with the hat gathers up the dice, puts them back in the cup, and hands it to the next player, a homely girl in a flowing skirt and Dr. Who T-shirt. These kids remind me of certain people in high school I was never friends with but always liked, the ones who played D&D and worked backstage: scruffy, unstylish, ill-fitting clothes and glasses, deeply uncomfortable outside their small group. The girl tosses the dice, and this time everyone yells “ka-boom!” I take a step closer, and now I can see that it’s a map of the world they’ve drawn, laid out on the hot unshaded pavement of the courtyard, a big blown-up Mercator projection of the earth. Now they’re unspooling long loops of ribbon along the map, tracing trajectories somehow keyed to the numbers that came up on the roll of the dice. The ribbons go off in various directions, out from the impact site: one wave of destruction rolling over southern Europe; another through Tokyo and on across the Pacific. A dark-haired young man is squatting over cities, one after another, joyfully marking them with big red X’s.

  “No! Not San Francisco!” says another, a girl with an awkward pixie haircut, snorting laughter. “That’s my old apartment!”

  At last I let Nico lead me away, follow her back through the paths of what used to be UNH. Again I find myself imagining O. Cavatone, if he really was here, picturing him navigating these tortuous paths. What did he make of it, the tents, the kids, the antipodal volcanism working group? The tough and righteous state trooper in the land of the permanent asteroid party? Then I stop myself, shake my head. What do you think, Henry? You think that if you imagine him hard enough, you can make him appear?

  * * *

  All the food in the grub tent is free and hot and delicious. There is a no-nonsense woman in a stained yellow apron, serving tea and miso soup and gooey chocolate desserts from a long table. Dinner rolls and cups of tea are help-yourself. I look down the buffet line, daring to hope—it’s a different world, a different infrastructure, you never know—but there is no coffee. People drift in and out of the tent, pushing back the flap and saying “hey” to the cook and grabbing food and trays; most of the citizens of the Free Republic are of college age or even younger, although there are a handful of grown-ups. In fact, there’s a middle-aged man with a long gray beard and a potbelly seated next to Nico and me at our picnic table, wearing a loud-print bowling shirt and shooting what I presume to be heroin into the veins of his forearm, having tied off above the elbow with an extension cord.

  I try to ignore him. I break my roll and open a small foil packet of margarine.

  “So,” I say to Nico. “Jordan. Is he your boyfriend?”

  She grins. “Yes, Dad. He’s my boyfriend. And I’m thinking about going all the way. Don’t tell Jesus, okay?”

  “That’s hilarious.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, just for the record …” I dab on the margarine with a plastic knife. “I don’t like him.”

  “For the record, I do not care.” Nico laughs again. “But, to tell you the truth, I don’t like him much, either. Okay? He’s part of my thing, that’s all. He’s a teammate.”

  I lean back and bite into the roll. This whole time Nico has been lugging around her mysterious duffel bag, large and ungainly, and now it is slung on the bench beside her. The potbellied heroin addict at the end of the table makes a low grunt and depresses his plunger, grits his teeth, and throws back his head. There is something horrifying and mesmerizing about him doing this in front of us, almost as if he were performing a sexual act or a murder. I look away, back to Nico.

  We chat. We catch up. We tell each other stories from the old days: stories about Grandfather, about our mom and dad, about Nico and her screw-up friends from high school, stealing cars, drinking beer in homeroom, shoplifting. I remind her of our mother’s zealous and misplaced encouragement of Nico’s early-life interest in gymnastics. My comically uncoordinated little sister would do some poorly executed somersault, land painfully on her tiny butt, and my mother would clap wildly, cup her hands into a megaphone: “Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen! Nico Palace!”

  We finish our soup. I check my watch. Jordan said an hour and a half. It’s been fifty-five minutes. The heroin addict babbles to himself, murmuring his way through his private ecstasies.

  “So, Henry,” says Nico, in that same tone of voice that Culverson always us
ed, fake casual, innocent, to ask if I’d been in touch with her. “How are you?”

  “In what sense?”

  “The girl,” she says. I look up. The roof of the grub tent is not properly joined; there’s a diagonal slash of open air, blue sky. “The one who died.”

  “Naomi,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nico sighs and pats me on the back of the hand, a sweet simple gesture glowing faintly with the ghost light of our dead mother. I can imagine my sister and me in some future that never will exist, some alternate dimension, Nico appearing on my doorstep on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve, whatever dipshit husband she ended up with still parking the car, my beautiful sarcastic nieces and nephews tearing through the house, demanding their presents.

  “Random question,” I say. “Do you know the name Canliss?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not someone we went to school with?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “No reason,” I say. “Forget it.”

  She shrugs. The chef in her apron is singing, opera, something from Marriage of Figaro, I think. A new group wanders in, three boys and two girls, all of them in matching bright orange shirts and sneakers, like they’re some sort of athletic team, and they’re arguing, loudly but not angrily, about the future of humanity: “Okay, let’s say that everybody’s dead but ten people,” says one of the men. “And let’s say one of them opens a store …”

  “Capitalist pig!” interrupts one of the women, and they all crack up. The heroin addict’s forehead hits the table with an audible thunk.

  “Hey. You should come back to Concord with me,” I say suddenly to my sister. “After I settle this case. We’ll hole up in Grandfather’s house. On Little Pond Road. We’ll share resources. Wait it out together.”

  “Wish I could, big brother,” says Nico, amused, eyes dancing. “But I gotta save the world.”

  * * *

  Jordan slips through the flap of the grub tent right on time, as good as his word, Ray-Bans and shit-eating grin firmly in place. He’s written Julia Stone’s information on a tiny slip of cigarette paper, which he slides into my palm like a bellhop’s tip.