Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  As I watch I see a third one, another speck on the far edge of the horizon, almost to the lighthouse on the harbor’s southern lip. I have a sudden vivid picture of the earth as flat, a tray, covered in marbles, and someone is tilting it, and the marbles are rolling, cascading, from east to west.

  “It is hard to imagine the conditions onboard those ships.”

  A voice deep and calm, and then there’s the scrape of a boot heel behind me, and I take a breath and turn around and there he is at last.

  “The countries of origin, many of them, were impoverished to begin with,” says Brett Cavatone, his voice soft, even, scholarly. “More so since Maia. The ships are packed with travelers. They live in darkness, below decks in miserable dank holds, crawling with rats and bugs.” His beard has grown in more, thickened into a dense black jungle. His eyes are deep set and black as a well. “It is hard to conceive of what they eat, on those ships, or how they drink. Still they come.”

  “Officer Cavatone, my name is Henry Palace. I’m from Concord.” He doesn’t respond. I keep talking. “Martha asked me to find you. She wants you to come home.”

  Brett’s face betrays no surprise or confusion at this announcement. He doesn’t ask, as I have anticipated, how I found him or why. He just nods his head, once—message received.

  “And has Martha found Mr. Cortez?”

  “Yes.”

  He nods again. “And is Mr. Cortez honoring our bargain?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

  “Good. Then Martha is safe? And healthy?”

  “She’s devastated. Heartbroken.”

  “She is safe and healthy?”

  “Yes.”

  Brett nods a third time, nods deeply and closes his eyes, almost bows. “Thank you for coming.”

  I hold up my hands. “Wait. Wait.”

  It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem real, somehow, that at the end of this journey I should find a thirty-second conversation, a quick fair hearing and then goodbye, thank you for coming.

  “Do you have a message for me to bring back to her?”

  Brett closes his eyes and steeples his fingers. He’s in camouflage pants but a plain white T-shirt, sandals on his feet. “You may tell her that the asteroid has forced some hard decisions in me, as it has in many of us. Martha will understand what I mean.”

  “No.” I shake my head.

  “No?”

  “Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It’s just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.”

  A smile flits across his lips, down in the thickness of facial hair. “You asked me to provide a message, and now you disapprove of it?” His voice is deep, hushed, rhythmic, like an Old Testament prophet. “You have discharged your obligation, friend. Your work is done, and now I must return to my own.”

  “You are a married man,” I say. I’m pressing my luck. He stares back at me in silence, impassive as a mountainside. “Your wife is confused. You’ve left her terrified and alone. You can’t just abandon your promises because the world is over.”

  I’m aware, even as I am talking, that these arguments are doomed to be unavailing. It is clear that Brett Cavatone is as rooted in his purpose as the fort’s stone walls, planted for centuries in this craggy soil, and my suggestion that he return to Martha and Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl is not only impossible but ridiculous, juvenile somehow. Oh, why should he do what I say? Why, again? Because he promised?

  “I am not coming home.” He looks steadily at me, black eyes under furrowed brows. “Tell her that. Tell her our contract has been abrogated. She will understand.”

  I can see her, Martha Milano at her kitchen table, aghast with grief, hand trembling on her teacup, stalking back and forth to the cigarettes she will not allow herself. “No,” I say to Brett. “I don’t think she will understand.”

  “You said your name was Henry?”

  “Henry Palace. I used to be a policeman. Like you.”

  “There are things you don’t understand, Officer Palace. Things you cannot understand.”

  He takes a step toward me, compact and powerful as a tank, and my mind flies to the little gun tucked in the inside pocket of my blazer. But I have no doubt that Brett, if he wanted to, could be on top of me before I drew, hammering me with his fists. Condensation drips from the ceiling of the room, sweats down the walls. I have to say one more thing, though. I have to try.

  “Martha says your salvation depends on it.”

  He repeats the single word, “salvation,” lets it hang in the gloomy air between us for a moment and then says, “I’ll need you to leave the grounds of this fort within ten minutes.”

  He turns on the steps, presenting me with his broad back, and takes the first step out of the darkness of the caponier.

  “Brett? Officer Cavatone?”

  He stops, speaks quietly over his shoulder, without turning around. “Yes, Henry?”

  I pause, gut rolling. Seconds pass. Yes, Henry?

  My investigation is over. Case closed. But I hear Julia’s voice in my head, tense and taut with anxiety: Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…

  I find that I cannot leave. I don’t know anything, but I know too much to leave. Brett is still waiting. Yes, Henry?

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I met Julia Stone, and she told me. She explained your intentions.”

  “Oh,” he says calmly. “Well.” He is incapable of being surprised.

  “And I—I’d like to help.”

  Brett comes back down off the stairs and toward me, holding up his big hands like he’s warming them over a fire. I get the feeling he’s getting a sense off me, interpreting me like a crystal ball.

  “Are you armed?” he says.

  “Yes.” I take out the Ruger and hold it up. He takes it, weighs it in his hands, drops it in the mud.

  “We can do better than that.”

  * * *

  Together we walk up the slippery and mossed steps of the caponier, and then together, silently, we cross the patched mud and seagrass of the fort to the blockhouse. Using a long stick with a curved hook on the end, Brett releases a rope ladder coiled at the elevated doorway, tumbles it down to where we can reach it to climb up. Brett goes first, swift and sure-footed, and I follow, heaving my ungainly body up the rungs, one at a time, all knees and elbows, like some kind of invading mantis.

  I’m not sure what happens now.

  * * *

  “There’s the Portsmouth naval base, there’s a base at Cape Cod, and there’s what used to be the coast guard station at Portland, Maine. That is all. Three stations and by my count eight or nine cutter ships. There was a nuclear submarine called the Virginia assisting them, but no one seems to have seen it in months. AWOL, maybe, or else they’ve run it south to help in Florida.”

  I nod mutely, my stomach a tight ball of astonishment and unease, as Brett tells me his plan. Our plan.

  “I have renderings from all of these facilities. We can’t know precisely what the state of readiness is, but we can presume it is lower than we might have found pre-Maia, due to desertions and technical limitations related to resource depletion.”

  While he talks Brett runs his fingers delicately over the maps and blueprints he has taped all around the walls of the blockhouse. He’s papered over the historical displays and the park-service timelines, but they peek through, the glowering faces of old soldiers from old wars, staring sternly at the portraitist or daguerrotype man. I think that Brett is wrong about our likelihood of success. I think we may find these naval and coast guard bases, like the Concord police department, better defended than in the past, not worse. I would predict multiple checkpoints, added layers offence-line security, skittish base patrolmen operating under strict shoot-first orders.

  It is clear though that Brett’s calculation of these dangers is purely abstract. One does not contemplate failure, or eve
n death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade. Brett’s intention is to commit murder in the name of a greater good.

  Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…

  “This strikes me,” I say quietly, “as more than a two-person job.”

  “Well, it was a one-person job until ten minutes ago,” says Brett. “Our obligation is to do what we can with what we have. That is all we can do, and the results are up to God.”

  I nod again.

  We are going to break into the naval and coast guard stations—shoot guards if necessary—shoot seamen—set fire to the ships. Whatever means necessary to prevent further missions by those vessels. A one-man crusade to stop the interdiction and internment of catastrophe immigrants along the northern Atlantic coast. A two-man crusade, I correct myself. We are going to the Portsmouth naval base first, and if our efforts are successful there, then we will come back here, to Fort Riley, resupply, and make the longer trip to Portland later in the week.

  “I believe, Officer Palace, that you were sent for a reason,” says Brett, turning away from his wall of Scotch-taped plans and barracks blueprints. “To ensure the success of this work.”

  There’s a rusting piece of artillery in the center of this room, a cannon with its nose thrust out the centermost window toward the sea. Beside it Brett has a heavy trunk, and now he kneels and pops it open and starts to sift through the supplies inside, jugs of water and rolls of gauze and iodine capsules and plastic grocery bags full of jerky and cheese; as he’s sifting through, something catches my eye, a flash of bright color, out of place. Then he shuts the trunk and hands me my gun, exactly the gun I was expecting: the second of the M140s that Julia Stone boosted for him from her stash at UNH. He presses the gun into my hands. I feel my simple missing-person case crumbling under my feet, melting beneath me.

  “When do we go?” I ask.

  “Now,” says Brett. “Right now.”

  We throw the weapons down from the top of the blockhouse, and they land with two overlapping thuds in the dirt and then we begin to climb down, hand over hand, Brett first again and me behind. And when he’s just touched down and I am two rungs from the bottom I lose my grip on the ladder and tumble down, landing squarely on Brett’s back and knocking him over, and he goes, “Hey,” while I roll off and land on one of the rifles and come up pointing it at his back.

  “Don’t move,” I say. “Stop.”

  “Oh, no, Henry,” says Brett. “Don’t do this.”

  “I am sorry to have been duplicitous, I really am.” I am speaking quickly. “But I can’t allow you to proceed with a plan calculated to result in the death of servicemen and -women.”

  He is kneeling in the mud, head slightly down and turned away from me, like a praying monk. “There is a higher law, Henry. A higher law.”

  I knew he was going to say that—something like that.

  “Murder is murder.”

  “No,” he says, “it isn’t.”

  “I am sorry, Officer Cavatone,” I say, my eyes watering, readjusting to the summer brightness. “I really am.”

  “Don’t be,” he says. “Each man in his own heart takes the measure of his actions.”

  The M140 is a bigger weapon than I’m used to handling, and I was unprepared for the weight of it. There are no iron sights on it, just the scope, long and thin like a flashlight bolted to the top of the gun. I’m trembling a little as I hold the thing steady, and I focus on controlling my hands. I will them to be still.

  Brett is still on his knees, his back to me, his head slightly tilted upward, toward the sun.

  “I understand,” I say, “that you disagree with the interdiction and internment policy being carried out by the Coast Guard.”

  “No, Henry. You don’t understand,” he says softly. Mournfully, almost. “There is no such policy.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you understood, Henry. I thought that’s why God sent you.”

  The idea of that, that God or some other force of the universe sent me here, renews my sense of unease and distress. I adjust my hold on the big weapon.

  “It’s not interdiction. It’s slaughter. Those cutters open fire on the cargo ships, they sink them when they can. They shoot the survivors, too. They don’t want anyone to land.”

  I blink in the sunlight, my rifle trembling in my hands.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  After a moment Brett speaks again, calm and ardent. “What do you think is easier for the Coast Guard—what remains of the Coast Guard? A massive and resource-intensive interdiction effort, or the simple and efficient operation that I’ve described? They could stand down, of course, stop their sorties entirely, but then the immigrants get through. Then they arrive in our towns, then they are so bold as to want to share resources, share space. Then they want to be given their own chance at survival in the aftermath. And we are determined, God forgive us, we are determined that not be allowed.”

  He is crying. His head is bent toward the green of the fort, and his voice comes out choked with lamentation.

  “I thought you understood that, Henry, I thought that’s why you came.”

  My rifle is trembling now, and I force myself to steady it, trying to figure out what happens next, while Brett gathers his voice, keeps talking. “But perhaps God has given you eyes that cannot see that deeper kind of darkness. And that is a blessing in you. But I beg of you, Henry, to let me be to carry out my mission. I beg that of you today, Henry, because if I can save even one boatload of those people, even one child or one woman or one man, then I will have done God’s work today. We will have done God’s work.”

  I think of those dots on the horizon, the tiny ships I saw from the slitted window of the caponier, steaming closer, even now.

  “Brett—” I begin, and suddenly he ducks and rolls into the mud and comes up with the other rifle, all in one swift motion, ends up on his knee facing me, the gun angled up toward me, as mine is angled down toward him.

  I didn’t fire. I couldn’t. How could I?

  I shake my head, trying to shake the sunlight out of my eyes, shake the sweat off my forehead. Figure this out, Palace. Handle this. Then I just start, I start talking:

  “Does anyone know where you are and what you’re doing?”

  “Julia.”

  “Julia thought that someone else knew. She thought someone would try to come and stop you.”

  “That was an assumption on her part. She’s wrong. No one knows.”

  “Where did you get all the—the blueprints and so on? Of the various bases?”

  “From Officer Nils Ryan.”

  “Who—”

  “A former colleague of mine from Troop F. Also a former chief petty officer in the Coast Guard.”

  “But he doesn’t know what you wanted them for?”

  “No.”

  I don’t need to ask why this man, this Officer Ryan, would turn over such documents: because he asked. Because he’s Brett.

  “Okay,” I say. “So no one knows about this. No one knows where you are. Just me and you and Julia.”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s—” I look away from his gun barrel, into his eyes. “Brett, let’s end this right now. I do not want to harm you.”

  “Then don’t. Go.”

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  And then we stand there, my gun pointed at him, his at me.

  “Please, Officer.”

  “These are human beings with no chance left but one.” Brett, with his soft rumble of a voice, slow train rolling. “Who have risked everything, traveled thousands of miles crammed and sweating in shipping containers and overstuffed holds, and maybe it’s a fool’s chance they’re taking, but that is their right, and they do not deserve to be murdered thirty yards from shore.”

  “Yes, but…” But what, Officer Palace? But what? “We were sworn in once, you and I. Right? As officers of the law. We still have an obligation to do what’s lawful and what’s right.”
r />   He shakes his head sadly. “Those two things you said there, friend. Those are two different things.”

  I’m standing on a slight rise, looking down at him in his crouch, feeling very tall indeed. A bird flickers past overhead, and then another, and then there’s a wind, stronger than usual, a summer wind carrying up the scent of fish and a pinch of gunpowder from the churning breakers. We can just hear the rushing of the tide, barely reaching us way up here above the cliff face.

  “On the count of three,” I say, “we will lower our weapons, both together.”

  “Fine,” he says.

  “And then we will figure out what to do next.”

  “Good.”

  “On the count of three.”

  “One,” says Brett, and lowers his gun a little bit off his shoulder, and I lower mine an inch or two, my muscles crying out with relief.

  “Two,” we say, together now, and now both rifles are at forty-five-degree angles, pointed at the ground.

  “Three,” I say, and drop my rifle, and he drops his.

  We remain frozen for about a quarter of a second, and both of us start to smile, just a little, two honorable men on a green field, and then Brett is starting to get up and he’s extending his hand and saying “My friend—” and then as I raise my arm there is a sharp bang, a crack in the sky, and my arm explodes in pain, hot and savage, a roaring pain, and I whirl behind me to find the shooter, and by the time I turn back around Brett is on the ground, flattened in the dirt with arms and legs windmilled out in the grass. I leap to him, screaming his name and clutching my arm. I land beside him and lie there panting for five seconds, ten seconds, waiting for more shots. I’m trying to summon up the protocol for victims of gunshot trauma in the field, trying to recall my training regarding rescue breaths and compressions and so on, but it doesn’t matter: The bullet caught Brett dead between the eyes and half the front of his face has been swallowed by a hole. It’s useless—there’s nothing to be done—he’s dead.

  * * *

  The first thing to do is tourniquet my arm. I know that—that much I remember, and besides it’s obvious, the wound is bleeding like a rushing faucet, great gouts of bright red blood exploding out of my arm, darkening my shirt and coat and puddling between my shoes in the mud and the dirt. Brett’s dead body beside me on the ground.