Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  “Good boy,” I say again. “Good dog.”

  * * *

  It is some time later. If I check my watch I will know what time it is, see how many hours have elapsed with most of my arm cut off from my circulating bloodstream like it’s downriver from a dam, and discover thereby how close I am either to dying or to losing my right arm forever.

  There is an ache up and down the length of my body. In olden days they would strap you, hands and feet, to a machine, turn a wheel to make you talk. Or even not to, just to watch you experience it. Or because there was someone visiting the court who had never gotten a chance to see the machine in action. Another one of those things that makes you think, well, okay, the end of the human race, what are you gonna do?

  I read it again, the pink page, Martha’s slightly slanted all-block-letter handwriting, just like the quote from St. Catherine above her sink. But different in tone, so different:

  HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD

  I’LL NEVER SEE HIS FACE AGAIN OR KISS HIM AGAIN

  WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES THERE HE IS THE GOLD-CAPPED SMILE THE HAND-ROLLED SMOKES THE SILLY TATTOOS

  BUT THEN I OPEN THEM AND HE’S GONE AGAIN

  OK SO LET THE WORLD DIE NOW IT’S DEAD ALREADY WITHOUT HIM BUT

  It ends like that, in the middle of a thought, to be continued on the next page. There’s a date at the top, July fifth, just a couple weeks ago.

  He’s dead, she wrote, N.’s dead he’s really dead.

  Who, Martha? Who is N.?

  I still don’t check my watch, but I can feel it getting later. The day is wearing itself down, the sunbeams appearing and disappearing in the slitted windows. I wish I could send out my thoughts like medieval telegraph crows to gather clues and bring them back to me, up here in my doomed chamber.

  Who was N., Martha? With gold teeth and hand-rolled cigarettes and funny tattoos?

  How many guns are left in that storehouse by the power station, Julia Stone? Would you run and check for me? Do you even need to look, or is it you who’s spirited one away?

  Officer Nils Ryan—Brett’s buddy from the trooper days—Nils starts with N. But there’s another one, another N., and I can’t remember it. The world spins. This case was like a straight line, simple and clean: A man is missing. Find the man. And now it’s like the wilderness is crowding in along the road, turning the world into a thicket, a maze, a tangle.

  I squeeze up and down along the edges of my arm and feel nothing and meanwhile my breath is ragged and uneven. At a certain point I will cross a threshold where it won’t matter either way; “loss of limb and/or death,” the double-conjunction pivot point resolving decisively on “and.”

  The kids are going to be okay. Alyssa and Micah Rose at Quincy Elementary. I gave that over to Culverson, and Detective Culverson will stay on top of it. I smile at the thought of Culverson—at the Somerset right now, dining alone, asking Ruth-Ann politely what he owes her.

  The sun is losing its luster. It’s late afternoon. Next will be nighttime.

  The only thing is that it’s too bad about Nico. Because I did, I promised her I would protect her until one or both of us were dead. She was drunk and I was fifteen, but I promised her and I meant what I said. I tell her I’m sorry, in my mind somewhere. If there is anyone that I can send a telepathic message to, it’s my sister, and I let my mind go blank and launch it into the air, Nico, my dear, I am sorry.

  * * *

  I open my eyes and see my watch without meaning to. It’s 5:13. Approximately six and a half hours since impact, since the bullet tore the hole into my biceps.

  I haven’t heard from Houdini in a long time. Perhaps he decided to abrogate our contract, escaped into the woods, evolved into a sea dog or a wolf. Good for him. I reach up to my face as if to make sure it’s still there. It’s dirty. Cragged. Lined in a way I don’t remember. The edges of my mustache are growing in weird, all fuzzy and uneven like a disintegrating coastline. I hate that.

  I read Martha’s journal page again. HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD.

  * * *

  When the shooting begins it begins all at once, not one or two but a hundred guns firing all at the same time, and of course I can’t move, can’t go down there to the water’s edge; all I can do is look from the narrow windows of the blockhouse and watch the horror unfold.

  At some point during this long hot strenuous expanse of a day, one of those tiny dots I saw out on the horizon this morning has made its way into the harbor and dropped anchor out by the lighthouse; a cargo ship with long iron sides, anchored and massive, maybe half a mile offshore, with dozens of tiny crafts bobbling at its sides like suckling children. Six or seven of these little boats have been let down and are on their way in, maneuvering for shore, crowded with passengers, their small motors puttering. And now—as I’m watching—those boats are coming under withering fire.

  “No,” I whisper.

  But it’s just as Brett said, it’s a Coast Guard cutter, the sleek lines and the iron prow, the bristling masts and antennae, the noble shape of it parked in the water perpendicular to shore, offering not a lifeline to the incoming boats but a cannonade.

  The small boats perform useless evasive maneuvers, rowboats and rafts wheeling unevenly this way and that while the cutter strafes the water, kicking up mountains of churning foam.

  Seabirds dart overhead, flying fast, away from the pop of the guns.

  “No,” I say, way the hell up here from my tower window, uselessly, ridiculously. “No.”

  The rafts begin to capsize, tipping their inhabitants into the water, where they paddle and scream and grab for one another—children, old women, young men—and me just watching, helpless, trapped inside the blockhouse, inside my injury, coughing and lightheaded, watching them drown, watching them swim, watching the cutter send out speedboats to gather up those who remain.

  “Stop,” I whisper, my eyes rolling up into my head. “Police.”

  Children clutching at one another, little bodies boiling up in the breakers, lashed by the wake of the ships, opening their mouths to scream even as they are pulled under by the waves.

  * * *

  In the silence when it’s over I slip into sleep, and in my fever dream Brett is alive and squats beside me with his M140 pointed out the slit window of the blockhouse. He does not say “I told you so.” That is not his style. What he does say though is, “It was abrogated. Our contract was abrogated.” I want to warn him that the barrel of his rifle is poking back into the blockhouse at the next window over, a cartoon image, like it loops around out there and comes back in, pointing right at his own face.

  Don’t do it, I say, don’t shoot. But my mouth moves and the words don’t come and he fires and an instant later topples over backward, somersaults and rolls till he’s still.

  In the next dream, the next scene, he’s got a skeet gun and we’re up on the roof, me and him, and this time he smiles and when he smiles his mouth glows and he leans back and shoots up, up, up and the asteroid tumbles out of the sky, and Houdini goes and retrieves it, a burning planet of rock and metal clutched in his teeth like a fetched duck.

  * * *

  I wake up, because of a distant unfamiliar noise, and the first thing I think is that he wanted to leave.

  He was not unfaithful to her; she was to him.

  Oh, Martha—

  She had taken a lover, the man she identified as N., and then that lover was killed in the riots on Independence Day.

  And Brett had not left Martha, but he had been yearning in his heart to leave. He had information, he had a plan, he knew the good he wanted to do in the world. He even knew where he could go to get the guns that he needed to do it. But he could not and would not go, because he had made promises before his wife and before God and he would not release himself from those promises.

  There’s a thrumming out there. What is the noise? The ship must be back, or a new one is coming, a fresh engagement threatening on the horizon line. The ima
ge of the dead and dying from the boats returns, as clear and detailed as a photograph. I try to lift my head but cannot. I stay inside the hole I’m in, close my eyes to what I’ve seen and instead return to considering my case, piecing it together.

  When Brett found his wife’s diary page he reacted not with anger but with fierce and secret joy. He tore out that page and took it like a ticket, because this was permission to go and do what he wanted to. He made arrangements with the thief Cortez and off he went; by the grace of God his wife had been unfaithful, their contract had been abrogated, and he felt himself released and he left. He ripped out that page and held it to his heart and ran off to his seaside tower and his righteous crusade.

  The thrumming is getting louder. I raise my arm and it lifts slow, dense, like it’s made of bundled sticks. Please don’t be another ship. Please. I don’t want to witness any more.

  It’s a beating of wings, out there. Close by, much closer than the water. A motor.

  I have to move then, I have to drag myself, and I do. I use my legs but not to walk, to launch myself forward like a worm across the small room and into the doorway and stick out my head and there it is—there she is—the great green-sided helicopter hovering in the sky above the blockhouse, rotors beating, the noise a great thundering rush.

  I raise my working hand in the threshold of the blockhouse and wave it, feebly, and I’m trying to scream but there is no noise escaping my throat. It’s not necessary, though, because she’s already seen me. Nico leaning from the doorway of the helicopter, clutching the frame, laughing, shouting: “Hank! Hank!”

  I can’t really hear her, I can just see her lips moving, just make out the words—“I told you so!”

  PART FIVE

  Savage Land

  1.

  Martha, oh Martha, you hid your heart from me.

  Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

  So here I am, I’m crouched with Martha Milano and the door of the Easy-Bake oven is slightly ajar, and together we’re feeling the warmth of the one little bulb on our faces. I’m lying in the shadow of the blockhouse staring at Brett’s blasted skull. I’m slouched slack-jawed in a helicopter and my sister is slapping me, trying to keep me awake. I’m awake. Strange smells are drifting out of the Easy-Bake oven. There are low murmurs somewhere in the back of my brain, people talking in another part of the house.

  I open my eyes. The strange white room is dim and candlelit, but my corneas burn with the brightness. I shut my eyes.

  Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

  She lied. A sin of omission, at the very least.

  Where am I? What happened to Nico? The helicopter—the fort—the dog, where’s the dog?

  She had a lover—Martha did. His name was N. Who was N.? She was untrue. She was the one who broke her marriage vow, who abrogated the contract, who risked her own salvation. There was a man who came into Rock ’n’ Bowl just as I was leaving. Norman. Wasn’t it? “Mr. Norman is here.” “No kidding? Already?”

  I’m floating through textured air, bobbing and dipping. The smell is bad now, strong and acrid, like disinfectant, like maybe Martha and I are baking a mop head. Where am I? My God, and how?

  Is there anything else you need to tell me, Martha—didn’t I say that? Didn’t I ask her? Anything else about your husband, your marriage? I try to peer from this distance into Martha’s secret heart: She must have felt that it didn’t matter, whatever she had done and with whom. She must have thought it irrelevant to the task at hand: her husband had gone, it didn’t matter why, and she just wanted him back.

  But Martha, oh Martha, he’s not coming back.

  I see Brett’s face again, the empty cratered space and the sharp sickly clean odor is all around me now. I sniff gingerly, my eyes still closed, like a newborn bunny rabbit, tasting air with the dew of the womb still drying on my nose. Bleach? Cleaning fluid?

  More murmuring, more quiet voices.

  And then suddenly a giant has got hold of my right side and is squeezing, huge brutal fingers digging into my flesh, trying to yank my arm off my torso like a flower petal. I writhe, remembering my injury. I feel like a broken toy, like I’ve been hurled from a height down onto cobblestones.

  “Hank.” One of the voices, clear and loud. “Hank.”

  I’ve never noticed before how sharp and clinical that name sounds, HANK, how curt and cold, HANK, onomatopoetic for the clink of a metal chain on a metal desk. My mind is moving, fast and strange. “Hank,” says the voice again, and it’s real; there’s a voice in the room. I’m in a room and there’s a voice in it, a person in it, standing close by me, saying my name.

  I decide to go one eye at a time. I crack the right eye, and the light floods in. Silhouetted in the glare is a face I recognize. Two eyes, each encased in a glass circle, peering down at me like an amoeba on a slide. Above the pair of glasses a slash of bangs, a skeptical irritated face.

  “Dr. Fenton?” I whisper. I open the other eye.

  “What happened to you?” asks Alice Fenton.

  “I was shot.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “That’s literally the only part of the story I already know.”

  “You’re upstairs,” I tell her.

  “Yes. I quit the morgue,” she says. “Not enough doctors. Too many people who need help. Plenty of idiots getting themselves shot.”

  I try to banter back at her but our conversation thus far has already exhausted me. I let my eyes drift closed again. Alice Fenton is a legend. She is or was the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire, and for a long time I idolized her from afar, her technical mastery and perspicacity. A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with her for the first time, and her forensic skill helped me figure out who it was that killed some people. Naomi Eddes, for example, whom I loved. She is—Fenton is a legend.

  “Dr. Fenton,” I say. “You’re a legend.”

  “That’s great,” she says. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk later.”

  “Wait. Hold. Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Just one second.”

  I inhale. I get my eyes to open. I prop myself on my elbows and look around. The bedsheets and blankets are yellow-green in the pale light of the room. I’m in a flimsy powder-blue gown. I’m home. There’s an iron arm that once held an in-room television, now angling uselessly out of the wall like a metal tree branch. I need to go to Albin Street. I have to check in with my client. Hey, Martha? I’ve got a couple questions for you.

  Dr. Fenton stands at the side of the bed, a stack of clipboards under one arm, her short compact form quivering with impatience.

  “What?” she says again.

  “I have to get going.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Great.”

  She waits as I shift my legs toward the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves and thickens inside my body. Visions roll across my brainpan, double time: Martha crying; Brett staring; Nico smoking; Rocky in his office with his feet up. Naomi Eddes unmoving in the darkness where they found her. I stop moving my legs and tuck my chin down into my neck and manage not to vomit.

  “Ether,” says Dr. Fenton with the barest trace of merriment. “You’re coming down out of a cloud of ether. My colleagues and I are down to the dregs of our pain meds. The DOJ promised a shipment of morphine and MS Contin by Friday, along with new fuel for the generators. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, ether. Everything that’s old is new again.”

  I nod. I focus on not being sick. My arm feels like one big tender bruise. I try to move it, to see if that would hurt it more or less, and I discover that it won’t move at all.

  “I should say, Hank,” says Dr. Fenton, and I note that there is no remaining amusement in her voice, “it is very much within the realm of possibility that you are going to lose that limb.”

  I listen, numb. Lose the limb. Sure. Of course. My pillow smells like dust, like other men’s blood.

  Fenton is still t
alking. “I repaired the blood vessels in the ruptured brachial artery by excising the injured segment and performing a graft. But I—” She stops, gives a quick shake of her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I was cutting up corpses for the past twenty-five years, and now I’ve been doing general surgeries for approximately two weeks. Plus, you probably haven’t noticed, but it’s fucking dark in here.”

  “Dr. Fenton,” I say. “I’m sure you did your best.” I reach laboriously across the bed with my good hand and pat her on the arm.

  “I’m sure I did, too,” she says. “But you still might lose the limb.”

  I try again to move my legs, and this time I get them a little closer to the edge of the bed. I’m visualizing my swiftest route from here, Concord Hospital at Pleasant Street and Langley Parkway, all the way to Albin Street in North Concord. I’m not cross with you, Martha. I just want to know the truth. The machines around us beep dully, their blinking lights dim and pale, feeble back-up-generator lights. My legs refuse to go any farther for the time being. My arm throbs and my body aches. The world swells up and gently spins around me. I feel myself slipping down, not unpleasantly, back into my cloud of ether. Naomi is standing where Fenton just was, gazing sweetly down at me, and my heart shivers in my chest. Naomi was bald, in life; apparently in the world to come she’s growing out her hair and it looks beautiful, like soft moss on a sea-washed stone.

  I let my head fall back onto the pillow and the helicopter roars into view, Nico hollering from the hatchway, and then I’m in it, on it, feverish and confused, the wind rushing in and around us, Nico’s choppy hair fluttering like a field of black grass. The pilot is nervous and unsure—and young, so terribly young, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing aviator glasses and jerking the levers uncertainly.

  Nico and I fought for the whole trip: forty-five minutes of arguing, voices raised, screaming to be heard over the clatter of the copter blades and the deafening wind, telling each other not to be stupid. I told her she had to get out with me in Concord and stay with me at the farmhouse on Little Pond Road until the end, like we’d discussed. Nico refused, urged me instead to stay with her, went on and on about the asteroid, the bombs, hydrodynamic simulations and necessary changes in velocity. And through all of this we’re jerking back and forth in the skies over New Hampshire and my fever is climbing and then suddenly were descending haphazardly toward the landing pad atop Concord Hospital.