The Keepers of the Library

by Glenn Cooper

  “Yeah, but you’re the reason we know about all this! I’m sorry to press you, but I can’t believe I’m actually sitting here with Will Piper! I’d kick myself later if I didn’t take advantage of it.”

  “I’ve been out of the loop for over fifteen years. I’m more than out of the loop, I’m persona non grata with the government.” He had another mouthful. “If I didn’t have a trump card, I’m sure they would have bumped me off years ago.”

  “The database.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re BTH, right?”

  Beyond the Horizon. “Yeah, I’m BTH.”

  “I guess at this point, I am, too,” she said. “Still, could you look me up?”

  “Believe me, I don’t have access to the database.”

  “I guess I really wouldn’t have ever wanted to know.”

  “I hear you.”

  “But it’s awful to think that everything’s going to end in something like four hundred days, whatever the number is—you know people have countdown clocks on their screens! The world’s totally obsessing and stressing.”

  “I don’t think about it very much,” Will said. “I just live.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got a son.”

  He held out his glass for a refill. “That, young lady, is the hardest part. Plus a daughter probably older than you from a previous marriage.”

  “Any grandkids?”

  “One. Laura’s got a son, Nick. A very good kid.”

  “So you do think the world’s going to end.”

  “Yes, no, maybe, maybe not, probably, probably not. Depends on the day you ask.”

  “Today?”

  He wet his finger and held it up to the air. “Today? Yeah, we’re toast.”

  “Then why are you on the scotch wagon?”

  He waved his glass. “I think we’ve established I’ve fallen off.”

  “I mean in general. Most people I know are heavily into eat, drink, and be merry.”

  “If it were just me, I’d probably be a world-class hedonist. Nancy—that’s my wife—wouldn’t stand for it. There’re certain things worse than death. You don’t want to see her when she’s pissed off.”

  Meagan clucked at that. “Where is she?”

  “In DC. She’s got a big job with the feds. My son lives up there with her.”

  “Separated?”

  “Nope. She hates seeing me mope around our place in Virginia. It’s the way we’ve worked things out. I’m from down here, always liked it. In a year or so, when we get close to the Horizon, we’ll see where we park ourselves.”

  She put her glass down and ran a finger down his shirt from neck to navel, her fingernail against cotton making a rough, unzipping sound.

  He knew what was happening, but he asked innocently, “What’s this all about?”

  “My sauce tastes best when it’s simmered a long time.”

  “I like a good red sauce.”

  “Then come along to my bunk or berth or whatever you call a bed on a boat.”

  “Margie’s right there.”

  “She’s a really heavy napper.” She placed one of his big hands on her left breast. “I think we should have some fun, don’t you? I liked you right away.”

  He struggled with a response. His thinking wasn’t crisp anymore, and her breast felt lovely and soft. “You’re some kind of bikini-clad devil, aren’t you?”

  She inched closer and kissed him on the lips.

  After half a minute he pulled back, and said, “You know, I think I’m going to have to decline your awfully kind invitation.”

  “Your wife?”

  He nodded. “I’ve made promises. To her. To myself.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you find me attractive?” She slid a hand over his crotch.

  His head was swimming. “I certainly do.”

  “The world’s going to end. Shouldn’t we just enjoy ourselves?”

  He admired her legs. “That’s a commonly held point of view. But . . .” He took a deep breath and when he exhaled, something happened.

  He felt like the air wasn’t expelling, like it was building up, pressurizing his chest. He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I . . .”

  The pressure overwhelmed him, and he struggled for air. There was a sound in his ears like a train passing very close. He’d been in some tight jams in his life, he’d been in firefights with men intent on killing him, but he’d never felt the kind of panic washing over him now.

  He was dimly aware of Meagan’s fingers on his carotid, and a faraway voice saying, “My God, I think you’re having a heart attack.”

  Through the salon window the sky was still blue but darkening. He didn’t want to stop looking at it but he lost sight when he slumped onto the carpet.

  I’m BTH, he thought. I’m not supposed to die today.

  Chapter 2

  What February 9, 2027 Means To Me

  An Essay by Phillip Piper

  As of today there are 394 days left until the “Big Day,” the “Horizon,” the “Last Day of School” as a lot of kids are calling it. Everyone is wondering what will happen, and people are going different shades of mental. Are we going to be blasted out of existence by an asteroid the size of Rhode Island? Swallowed up by a black hole? Fried by gamma rays from the sun? Or is February 10 going to be just another day?

  I’m no different from everyone else who’s been thinking about mankind’s fate except for one thing. My father is Will Piper, the man who told the world about February 9, 2027.

  This essay is a little hard for me to finish because my dad is really sick. He had a heart attack, and he’s in the hospital. I know he’s BTH, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be all right. No one knows if he’s going to walk or talk again or be able to respond to us. He’s on a breathing machine in intensive care. They’re giving him a new medicine, and we’ll see if it helps. But I know if he was conscious, he’d be all over me to turn this essay in by the deadline, so that is what I’m going to do.

  I wasn’t even born when all this went down in 2009 and 2010. I found out about it and the part my dad played when I was twelve, I think. He wrote a book which I admit I never read. I saw the movie, Library of the Dead, instead. It was a pretty cool movie, but it was weird watching actors play your father and your mother. My mother always said she wished she was as pretty as the actress who played her, but my father was never interested in speaking about it. He said the movie was silly and filled with inaccuracies and that he wished he’d never let it be made. The truth is, he’s never been someone who wanted to be in the public eye.

  In 2009, my dad was an FBI agent in New York. He got involved in a case involving someone called the Doomsday Killer. A man in Nevada was sending postcards to people in New York City announcing the date they were going to die, and all nine of them wound up dying on the exact date. No one could figure out what was happening since there was nothing to link the victims, and all of the “murders” were completely different. My dad was the lead agent on the case and my mother—she wasn’t my mother at that point—was a junior agent. They were a team, and I guess you could say they still are.

  Nothing was making any sense and they kept hitting dead ends. But my mom and dad were really smart and figured out that the postcards were coming from a computer geek named Mark Shackleton who worked at a top secret government lab at Area 51 in Nevada. Not only that but my dad actually knew the guy from when they were freshmen roommates in college. Back in 2009, everyone thought that Area 51 was some kind of secret weapons facility or maybe a place where UFOs were studied. It turns out the real truth was even more amazing.

  Area 51, as everyone knows now, is the storage vault for the famous Library of Vectis. In the year 777, on the seventh day of the seventh month a baby who was the seventh son of a seventh son was born in England in a place called Vectis (it’s now called the Isle of Wight). The boy grew up to be some kind of a savant who had a preoccupati
on of writing down lists of birth dates and death dates for people from all over the world, people he never met. Some monks in an abbey took him in and realized that what he was able to do was miraculous. They created a secret order to take care of him and recruited women to give birth to his children and his children’s children. Over the centuries, thousands of these savants produced a giant underground library of books, over seven hundred thousand of them, with the birth and death dates of everyone who was going to live through February 9, 2027.

  No one knows how they did it. Some people say they must have had some kind of psychic connection to the universe or to God. I guess we’ll never know. But in the thirteenth century, something happened. All of a sudden, when they were working on their parchment pages for February 9, 2027, they stopped writing names. Instead, they wrote Finis Dierum which is Latin for End of Days. Then all of them killed themselves.

  After that, the Library was sealed up by the monks, and no one knew it existed until British archaeologists found it 1947. Winston Churchill gave the Library to the Americans who realized it could be very valuable. The US government set up Area 51 to hold the Library and spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to mine the data for political and military purposes. For example, if you knew that fifty thousand people with Pakistani names were going to die on one particular day you could do some serious planning on an American response to the crisis. For fifty years, no one outside the government knew about the Library until my dad found out.

  Mark Shackleton had his own ideas what to do with the data. He wanted to make money off it and invented the Doomsday Killer as part of his scheme. My dad discovered the truth about the existence of the Library and shut Shackleton down. He got a hold of a copy of the database for all the births and deaths of everyone in the United States through 2027. If your death wasn’t recorded in the database, you were considered BTH, Beyond the Horizon. He checked out himself, my mom and me, and some of our relatives. We were all BTH. He hid the database in Los Angeles as an insurance policy.

  For a while, my dad kept the secret of Area 51 because of an agreement he made with the government. I don’t think he was too happy about that, but he wanted to protect me and the rest of the family—I was born in 2010—and besides, he always believed that if people knew the dates of their deaths, that could seriously mess with their minds and create a bad situation. He and I never talked about it, but in the movie his character really agonizes over the decision to keep quiet. I think that part was accurate. But when I was only an infant, he was contacted by some men who had retired from Area 51. They were part of a group called the 2027 Club, who were trying to figure out what was going to happen in 2027.

  One of the books from the Library of Vectis dated 1527 wound up at an auction house in London. They wanted my dad to help them get ahold of the book. It was the only book missing from the Area 51 Library, and they thought it might hold some answers about 2027. They were right. There was a sonnet hidden inside written by a very young William Shakespeare. My dad went to England, and in an old house called Cantwell Hall, he followed clues in the sonnet and found out about the End of Days stuff and the savants committing suicide. He also found out that knowledge of the Library of Vectis had an influence on some famous historical figures like John Calvin and Nostradamus, not to mention William Shakespeare.

  There were security people at Area 51, government agents who were called the watchers, who were sent to stop my dad, and they got close. They tried to poison our whole family with carbon monoxide. I almost died, but they killed both my grandparents, whom I never got to know. My mom and I went into hiding, and my dad went to Los Angeles to recover the hidden database. He got shot by the watchers and escaped to the home of the head of the 2027 Club in Las Vegas. He was captured there, but my mom saved him, which was pretty cool.

  My dad gave the database to my half sister’s husband, Greg, who was a journalist with The Washington Post because after thinking about it for a long time, he decided that people had a right to know what the government knew. Greg published a sensational story about the existence of the Library, and my dad became a reluctant celebrity. My mom kept working at the FBI. She’s still there.

  The database never got published. The government sued the newspaper and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. So people never got to know about their personal dates but everyone knows about February 9, 2027.

  It’s funny, but I never spent much time thinking about February 9, I mean really thinking about it, until my dad got sick. No one close to me since I’ve been old enough to understand has ever died or even gotten seriously sick. It took my dad’s heart attack to change that. Now I realize how fragile life is and how, just like that, it can be taken away. Now I’m scared about what will happen to him, and I’ll admit it, I’m scared about what will happen to me, my mom, my friends, and everyone on the planet.

  I don’t have any answers. I may be Will Piper’s son but I’m as clueless as the next guy on what’s going to happen to us. But here’s what I think. I think that we should try to make each of these 394 days count. We should try to be extra nice to each another, try not to be jerks, try to smile a lot, and try not to complain and moan about everything or be superdepressed. We ought to live each day to its fullest and enjoy ourselves.

  The way I figure it, we can either have 394 awful days ahead or 394 terrific ones. I’m going to go for terrific ones.

  I think that’s what Will Piper would choose too.

  Chapter 3

  Through the impenetrable fog of illness he’d heard voices, some comforting and recognizable, others not. The foreign voices spoke hard, strange words: troponin, CK, left anterior descending, MCEs, cine MRIs, wedge pressures, dopamine, O2 sats, vent settings, cardiomyoplasty.

  Time was unfathomable. Later, he would liken his perceptions to Dali’s melting clocks. A second. A day. A month—they were all the same. He was mostly aware of the discomfort of a breathing tube in his nose, and it became his nemesis.

  When he was a young FBI agent, a star player in the twisted world of serial killers, he would pursue his target with an all-consuming passion and aggression, invariably to the detriment of whoever shared his bed and his life at the time. Now the tube was his enemy. He wasn’t sure why it was crammed down his throat. Rational thoughts about it drifted away because of the sedatives given to prevent him from yanking it out. And just in case he lightened up between doses, his wrists were nightmarishly bound to the railings of his bed.

  One day the fog lifted and he became gradually aware of his surroundings. He was propped in a half-sitting position. His throat burned but he could no longer feel the stiff plastic in his nostril. He reached up, expecting the tug of restraints, but his hand moved unrestricted to his face, where he felt for the absent tube.

  He looked to one side then the other. He was in a glass-walled room with muted lights. There were softly beeping machines. There was an intravenous line in his hand. He reached down to address an irritation in his crotch. There was a catheter. He gave it a tug and wished he hadn’t. When he yelped, his body snapped forward, and his pillow slipped away.

  A pretty nurse came in. “Hi, Mr. Piper. I’m Jean. Welcome to the land of the living.”

  She leaned over and repositioned his pillow. Her breasts came close to his face. The land of the living is good, he thought. But he demanded a little more specificity. “Where am I?”

  “Miami. This is the Miami Heart Institute.”

  “I hate Miami.”

  She laughed.

  “My throat’s killing me,” he croaked.

  “I’ll get you some lozenges. We only pulled the breathing tube at 2 A.M. It’s 6 A.M. now.”

  He pointed down. “Can you pull this thing out?”

  “It’s coming out real soon.”

  A larger question came to his mind. “What happened to me?”

  “You had a heart attack. A big one.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Five weeks.
You were a week in Panama City before they transferred you here.”

  “Jesus.”

  A phlebotomist came in to draw blood. She smiled at him then poked his sore, black-and-blue arm.

  The nurse hung a bag of medicine, then said, “Your wife’s been notified you’re off the ventilator. She should be here soon. Dr. Rosenberg will be here for rounds in an hour. She’ll fill you in on everything that’s happened.”

  “She?”

  “Yes, she.”

  “I’m surrounded by women.” It didn’t come out as a complaint.

  Dr. Rosenberg had fiercely pulled-back hair. She was all business, not the kind of woman Will instinctively took to, but in this case he had a lot of time for her.

  He’d had a whopper, she explained. A ruptured plaque high up in his left anterior descending artery which, because of poor collateral flow in other vessels had left a fair bit of his left ventricle, the main pump muscle, weak and useless. His heart failure was severe.

  In the old days his options would have been limited to a mechanical pump, a piece of machinery that would have made him ambulatory though permanently tethered to a battery pack, or a heart transplant, with all the attendant risks.

  “Screw the old days,” Will rasped, painfully sucking apple juice through a straw. “What did I get?”

  “Fortunately, there’s been a revolution in the therapy of post MI pump failure,” the doctor said. “We gave you MyoStem, a new FDA-approved preparation of cardiac-muscle stem cells. I injected them directly into the damaged areas through a catheter. They’ve taken beautifully. I liken it to reseeding a barren lawn. You still have a few bare patches, but it should fill in completely.”

  “Will I get back to normal?”

  “Are you a marathon runner?”

  “Not in this life.”

  “Then you should get back to normal.”

  “Sex?”

  “Patients usually ask,” she said amused, “but not in the first minute. Sexual activity shouldn’t be a problem.”

  If I can fish, and I can screw, then I’ll be okay, he thought.