Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  It’s funny because I’m watching it, this fountain of blood, and it’s happening to someone else, like this is some other man’s arm exploded arm, another man’s torn suit coat and pulsing wound. That one sharp instant of terrible pain I felt at impact has completely receded, and the wound, high on my right arm, at the biceps, is something I can see, and register as severe, but not feel.

  This is shock. This absence of feeling is the result of the adrenaline flooding my system, rushing through my veins like seawater crashing the breached holds of a ship. I examine my arm like it’s a joint at the butcher’s counter: a gunshot trauma to the brachial artery, and I’m losing blood quickly, too quickly, precious milliliters gushing out onto the dirt field of Fort Riley. I’ve had general first aid and CPR training and annual continuing education courses per Concord Police Department regulations, and I know what to expect here: blood loss, dizziness, coldness, clamminess, and finally a high risk of fever, high risks all the way around, gunshot wounds in general requiring immediate medical assistance—arterial gunshot wounds in particular. “High risk of loss of limb and/or death.”

  I need to stabilize the wound and get to a hospital.

  Brett is lying three feet away from me, sprawled out in the dirt. The horrible front-face wound, the stillness of his body. “That contract has been abrogated.” Why did he say that? What does that mean?

  Focus, Palace. Tourniquet the wound.

  “Okay,” I tell myself. “Geez.”

  I scrabble in the dirt and come up with a short thick piece of wood. This is not going to work, not long-term, but I need to staunch the bleeding immediately—I needed to have done it thirty seconds ago—to remain on my feet, get to the bicycle and my first aid kit. I can use my necktie to cinch the wound, for now, but I reach up and my necktie is gone. I slipped it off, just yesterday—was it yesterday?—on the quad at UNH and now it’s lying somewhere along those winding paths like a shed snakeskin in the desert. I extend my left hand, trying as hard as I can to move only that side of my body, don’t jostle the wound; I lean forward and slowly pry off one shoe and then one sock. Wincing, I take the tip of the sock between my teeth and tie it off around my arm like a heroin addict, recalling the shabby gentleman I encountered in the grub tent, the old bearded addict. Here’s to you, sir, I think crazily as I jam the stick between the thin fabric and the flesh of my arm above the wound. I twist the sock tight around the stick and feel a radiating tingle as the blood starts to slow. I look down at the ragged hole in my arm and I can see the spurting of the blood begin to slow, to calm, turning into a bare trickle.

  “There we go,” I say to my arm. “There we go.”

  It still doesn’t hurt. The shock will wear off somewhere around a half hour from now, and then the pain will set in and intensify steadily over the following six to eight hours. I can see the words on the sea-green stapled booklet we got at EMT-First Responder training in the break room, black Helvetica lettering against the green background of the leaflet: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. Stabilize the wound rapidly and keep it stable until the victim can be moved to a hospital.

  Hospital, Henry? What hospital?

  The sock begins to loosen as soon as I release the grip of my teeth. It’ll last me maybe ten minutes. I stumble to my feet and limp toward the parking lot, toward my Red Rider Wagon full of supplies.

  * * *

  He’s Brett, is what everybody told me, he’s just Brett. Now I have some understanding of what they meant. A fascinating man, a force of nature. Charismatic, thoughtful, righteous and strange.

  I’ve paused for a moment to rest at about the halfway point between the field where we were shot and the spot at the entrance to the parking lot where I’ve chained up my bike.

  That contract has been abrogated, he said. What an odd word to import into the language of love: abrogated.

  Among my regrets about what has just unfolded is that Brett never did ask me why I had come to find him, why I cared. I had my answer all figured out. Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form.

  I explain all of these things to Brett as I trudge along, tugging my sock-tourniquet tighter and gasping at the first tingling promise of pain. I give him my answer even though he’s dead, and with each passing moment the odds are climbing that I’m going to die out here, too.

  * * *

  By the time I get to my bike, my improvised tourniquet is a dark bloody rag, and as soon as I peel it off the blood bursts forth. I fumble on the black pneumatic tourniquet from my first aid kit, cinch the cuff high on my arm, upstream of the wound, and inflate it as fast as I can, closing my eyes tightly as I squeeze and squeeze the bulb.

  I pause, then. I am not dizzy yet, not yet experiencing severe pain. I can think now, for a moment I can think. From here I can see the road, the elbow bend in Route 3, and I can look up at the towering trees crowding in on the parking lot from all sides.

  What hospital, Hank? I ask myself, dragging the question out of my consciousness and into the light—not meaning, which hospital will you choose? but rather, what operational hospital might be within biking distance of a fatigued man who has already suffered significant loss of blood? As much as a liter, maybe, half a liter easily. Portsmouth is the closest city, and I don’t even know if they have a functioning hospital anymore or if it’s all private duty. What about Durham? There must be a medical tent somewhere on the grounds of the Free Republic of New Hampshire, as there is a grub tent; somewhere in one of those basements some premed is boiling clamps and hypodermic needles in a lobster pot.

  Will it be easier, I wonder, without the wagon? And I’m looking down at it, debating how risky or wise it might be to jettison the water and food and gauze and antiseptic to gain maybe three or four m.p.h. of travel speed. I’m crouching to look through how much water I have left anyway, and wishing it were more.

  There. Now. Pain. There it is.

  “Jesus.” I say the word, and then I scream it: “Jesus!” and throw my head back and scream again, louder. It hurts—it does—it hurts so much, a hot iron pressed against my biceps. I clutch the wounded arm with the other one and immediately let go and scream more.

  I sink down, into a crouch, and close my eyes, and rock on my heels, and take a series of short and shallow breaths. “My God, my God.”

  The pain is circling out from the impact site and burning into my shoulder, my chest, my neck, all the circuits of my upper body. More deep breaths, still down in my crouch, in the parking lot by the roadway. After several long moments the pain recedes, and I open my eyes and see on the ground with hallucinogenic clarity a single bright-orange leaf.

  But it’s not—it’s not a leaf. I stare at it. It’s a fake leaf. I pick it up with my left hand. It’s made of fabric—a synthetic fabric—a synthetic leaf.

  The thought appears in my mind not word by word, but wholly formed, like someone else had the thought and placed it there: This does not make sense.

  Because I know what this is, this artificial leaf. It’s a piece from a ghillie suit, the full-body camouflage worn by professional snipers and police shooters, a costume of shrubbery worn so that they can wait unseen for long periods, buried in the scenery. I know what a ghillie suit is, not from my police training but from my grandfather, who took me hunting exactly three times, trying to cure me of my total disinterest in that pursuit. I remember he pointed out a fellow sportsman, crouched in a blind in a suit of leaves, and scorned the man: “Those are for hunting men, not rabbits.” I remember his caustic expression, and I remember the term, ghillie suit; it seemed such a comical name for something designed for the purpose of killing human beings.

  The pain returns like an inrushing tide and I gasp, sink down farther into the gravel of the parking lot,
still clutching the strange alien leaf. This does not make sense.

  When the pain is gone—not gone, but dampened—I look past the stone wall, up onto the rise, try to pick out the spot where the shooter waited on the woody ridge between the road and the fort. I trace the bullet’s line in my mind, a bright red ribbon leaping from the gun muzzle and across the field. I eyeball it. I estimate. Three hundred yards. It was a sniper shot, no question about it, three hundred yards easy, through the barrier of my outstretched arm and right between Brett’s eyes. What I just witnessed was Brett’s assassination by a military sniper from the Coast Guard or the Navy. A professional killer who tracked him here and waited in his ghillie suit and fired from the woods between the road and the fort. A preemptive strike against his madman’s crusade.

  So what is it? Why doesn’t it make sense?

  I know the answer while I’m still formulating the question: because Brett said no. No one knew about it. He had told no one where he was. Just Julia, and Julia had told me.

  How could the military have sent a sniper to take him out, before he carried out his raids, when no one knew that they were coming?

  New pain. Worse. The worst. I throw my head back and howl. Nausea is rolling up in churning waves from my stomach and into my throat. The pain leaps out from the wound site in bursts. Spots buzz to life in front of my eyes and I hunch back over, count slowly to ten, dizziness seeping in around the back corners of my brain. Brett told me that nobody else knew. Brett had no reason to lie.

  But what about the friend, from the troopers, the Coast Guard man who provided the blueprints? Did he suspect the full scope of what Brett was up to? Did he sound the alarm? Track him down?

  There’s something else, something—I take a breath, try to remember—something in the blockhouse that didn’t belong there. The pain makes it hard to think. It makes it hard to move—to be, even. I sit down in the gravel of the parking lot, lean against the wall, try not to look at my arm.

  A color.

  A flash of pink from inside that trunk.

  I get up and stumble back down to the gravel, where the killer disappeared onto the highway, on his own ten-speed.

  Or hers, I remind myself, thinking of Julia Stone, thinking of Martha Cavatone—my mind suddenly racing, evaluating motives, performing a quick roll call of everyone I’ve met on my circuitous route to Fort Riley, thinking about all the guns I’ve seen: Julia’s M140s, Rocky’s paintball guns and target range, my little Ruger. Jeremy Canliss had a snub-nose pistol tucked up in his jacket when I met him outside the pizza place. No, no, he didn’t. I imagined that. Didn’t I?

  It doesn’t matter. This is America in countdown time. Everybody has a gun.

  “A hospital.” I find the words in my throat and pronounce them gravely, lecturing myself, stern. “Forget the guns. Forget about Brett. Get to a hospital.”

  I look out at Route 103, where the asphalt is melting in the sun, letting off a blackish gummy steam. I’m swaying on my feet. The green pages of the stapled EMT booklet flutter in the wind before me, the all-caps text informing me that my dizziness will escalate from mild to extreme. In four hours the pain will begin to ease, as my soft tissue runs out of blood and the arm begins to die.

  I’m staring vacantly at the bike and I realize that my decision has been made. It’s already too late. The idea of hopping on a bicycle right now and getting myself to a hospital, to any hospital, is ridiculous. It’s insane. It was already too late half an hour ago. I can’t ride a bike. I can barely walk. I laugh, say the words aloud:

  “Henry, you can’t ride a bike.”

  I look back over my shoulder. Brett’s corpse is still lying out there, facing up toward the sun. The missing-person case must be declared unsuccessful. I know why he left, yes, and even where he went, but he’s dead and I couldn’t protect him from dying.

  I do, however, have some thoughts about who might have shot him, a few stray and feverish ideas on the subject.

  * * *

  It takes forty-five miserable and crawling minutes to retrace my steps—all the way down the length of the parking lot—through the stone archway back into the fort proper—across the spongy terrain to the foot of the blockhouse. The pain only gets worse now, never better, intensifying as it gains in territory, colonizing the farthest reaches of my body. By the time I reach the wavering shadow of the blockhouse I’m breathing unevenly, bent over, deteriorating in speeded-up motion like a man dying of old age in a cartoon. I collapse and land on my wounded right arm and shriek like a child from the electric pain and roll onto my back under the dangling rope ladder and the sheer wooden side of the building.

  I stare up at that ladder. The thick hempen rungs I recently clambered down, just behind Brett, seemed like child’s play an hour ago, like one of the playground structures we used to tear around on in White Park. Now it’s a rock wall, a mountain’s face that I am somehow supposed to drag myself up, exhausted and one-handed.

  I stand, slowly, look upward and squint. The sun is burning the top of my head.

  “One,” I say, and take a deep breath and grunt and haul my entire weight with my one good arm, lift myself just enough to get my footing on the second rung of the ladder.

  Then I wait there, gasping, barely three feet off ground level, with my head tilted up and my eyes closed, sweat pouring off of my scalp and pooling in my collar line. I wait for strength—for—I don’t know—a few minutes? Five minutes?

  And then I say: “Two.”

  Breathe—steady—grunt—heave. And then three—and then four—again and again, finding my footing on each new rung, humping myself laboriously upward and then exhaling—and waiting—panting—the sun baking me against the wall—sweat running down my spinal column and my arms, gathering in my waistband and swamping my armpits.

  Halfway up the ladder, at rung number ten, I conclude that this is, in fact, impossible. I won’t get any farther. This is as good a place as any to die.

  I am too tired and too hot and too thirsty—increasingly it is my thirst that is the main problem, superseding the exhaustion and the dizziness and even the nascent feverishness—superseding even the pain, heretofore the great champion among my tormentors. I have forgotten, at this point, just what I am hoping to find up there in the blockhouse, what if anything.

  Doesn’t matter. I am too tired and too impaired and too thirsty to keep going. I will die here, plastered with sweat and crusted blood against this two-centuries-old wooden building, burned into the side by the afternoon sun. Here Maia will find the empty shell of my body and carry it away to sea.

  The dog barks at the foot of the building. I can’t see him, of course. But I hear him. He barks a second time, loud and sharp.

  “Hey,” I say, the word drifting feebly off in the air like a dead leaf. I clear my throat, lick my lips, and try it again. “Hey, boy.”

  Houdini keeps barking, probably because he’s hungry or scared or maybe just happy to see me, even my long spindly bottom half. He’s probably been lost in the woods, chasing squirrels or being chased for the last two hours. But in my dizziness and fatigue I imagine his frantic yips as encouragement: He is insisting that I continue up, that I assault the next rung and the next.

  My little dog has reappeared at the crucial moment to insist in his rough canine language that salvation waits at the top of the ladder. I keep going. Up I go.

  * * *

  When at last I’m on the floor of the blockhouse I just lie there for a while, coughing. My throat is shutting down, collapsing in on itself like a dusty mineshaft. I roll over when I can and crawl to the trunk under the cannon and manage to open it and find a two-gallon jug and heave the heavy thing to my lips and drink like the lost man in the desert, letting water spill out and soak my face and my chest. I come up for breath like a surfacing dolphin and then drink more.

  I let the empty plastic jug drop from my hands, and it bounces with a hollow sound on the wooden beams of the blockhouse floor.

  Then I go b
ack to the trunk, and a minute later I’ve found it. The pink paper, buried—not even buried—half hidden at best, beneath a change of clothes and a flashlight, a single sheet of pink notebook paper, worried and blackened at the edges where Brett’s fingers, stained with dirt and gunpowder, have picked at its corners. Folded and grimy but still bearing the faint smell of cinnamon.

  I laugh out loud, a nasty dry rasp. I take the page from Martha’s diary and wave it in the air, pump it crumpled in the fist of my working hand. The page is torn and jagged at one edge, ripped out as if with force. I look up at the roof of Brett’s cloister and press the paper to my chest and grin, feeling the grime on my face crack and fall away. I read it and reread it, and its meaning starts to well up around me, and then I’m getting dizzy and cold, so I press the torn-out scrap of notebook paper to my chest and lean back against the old wooden wall and shut my eyes.

  * * *

  He’s barking, down there. Houdini is shouting, beautiful and faithful creature, hollering to keep me awake, or maybe at some interesting clouds, or maybe he’s just giving his little voice box a workout, as dogs are famous for doing.

  I should—I open my eyes, stare at the opposite wall, struggle to form the thought—I should check on him. I roll from sitting down onto my belly and crawl back to the doorway. The arm is starting not to hurt, which though a relief is nevertheless a very bad sign. I peer over the edge, and there he is, barking, purposeful, sending his voice up along the side of the building to where I can hear him, way up here.

  “Good boy,” I whisper, smiling down at him.

  The sun is lower now and not as bright and I can see clearly where, down at the base of the blockhouse, my dog has built a little pyramid of dead birds. And I am not sure whether this is supposed to be a kind of sacrifice in my honor, or a tribute, or some sort of bizarre enticement: Here, master, here! If you survive this situation, you can eat these birds.