Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  She visualized a child poking fingers under a paper cutter and then bringing the long blade down.

  “You can’t do anything about that now,” she said, and shuddered.

  Vic turned, taking in her surroundings for the first time. She was behind a single-story log house, light glowing in a kitchen window. Beyond it, on the other side of the cabin, was a long gravel lane leading back to a road. She had never seen the place before, but she thought she knew where she was, and in another moment she was sure. As she stood astraddle her bike, the back door opened and a small, thin man appeared behind the screen, looking up the hill at her. He had a cup of coffee in one hand. She could not see his face but recognized him by shape alone, by the tilt of his head, even though she had not seen him in more than ten years.

  She was at her father’s house at last. She had given the cops the slip and made it back to Chris McQueen.

  Dover, New Hampshire

  A LOUD CLAP, LIKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DOOR SLAMMING SHUT. An electronic squeal. A deafening roar of static.

  Tabitha Hutter shouted and flung her headphones down.

  Daltry, sitting on her right, flinched but kept his own headphones on for a moment longer, his face screwed up in pain.

  “What just happened?” Hutter asked Cundy.

  Five of them were packed in the rear of a panel truck that said KING BOAR DELI on the side—fitting, considering they were jammed in like sausages. The truck was parked next to a CITGO station, across the road and a hundred feet south of the drive that led up to Christopher McQueen’s house.

  They had teams in the woods, closer in to McQueen’s cabin, shooting video and using parabolic microphones to listen in. The footage and sound were being broadcast back to the truck. Until a moment ago, Hutter had been able to see the driveway on a pair of monitors, rendered in the supernatural emerald of night vision. Now, though, they showed only a blizzard of green snow.

  The picture had gone out at the same time they lost their sound. One moment Hutter had been listening to Chris McQueen and Louis Carmody speaking in low voices in the kitchen. McQueen had been asking Lou if he wanted coffee. In the next instant, they were gone, replaced by a furious blast of radio hiss.

  “Don’t know,” Cundy said. “Everything just went down.” He jabbed at the keyboard of his little laptop, but the screen was a smooth face of black glass. “It’s like we got hit with a motherfucking EMP.” Cundy was funny when he swore: a dainty little black man with a piping voice and the trace of a British accent, pretending he was street instead of MIT.

  Daltry tugged his own headphones off. He peeked down at his watch and laughed: a dry, startled sound that had nothing to do with amusement.

  “What?” Hutter asked.

  Daltry turned his wrist so she could see the face of his watch. It looked almost as old as he was, a watch with a clock face and a tarnished silver band that had probably been tinted to look like gold once upon a time. The second hand rolled around and around, moving backward. The hour and minute hands had both frozen perfectly still.

  “It killed my watch,” he said. He laughed again, this time looking toward Cundy. “Did all this shit do that? All your electronics? Did all this shit just blow up and wipe out my watch?”

  “I don’t know what did it,” Cundy said. “Maybe we was touched by lightning.”

  “What fucking lightning? You hear any thunder?”

  “I did hear a loud clap,” Hutter said. “Just as everything cut out.”

  Daltry put a hand in the pocket of his coat, tugged out his cigarettes, then seemed to remember that Hutter was sitting beside him and gave her a sidelong glance of wry disappointment. He let the pack slip back into his pocket.

  “How long will it take to get video and sound restored?” Hutter asked.

  “It could’ve been a sunspot,” Cundy said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve heard the sun is kicking up with a solar storm.”

  “Sunspot,” Daltry said. He placed his palms together, as in prayer. “You think sunspot, huh? You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic fuck.”

  “Cundy,” Hutter said, before Cundy could come around in his chair and start some kind of male dick-measuring contest. “How long before we’re back online?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Five minutes? Ten? To reboot the system? Unless there’s a nuclear war going on out there. In which case it’ll probably take longer.”

  “I’ll go look for a mushroom cloud,” Tabitha Hutter said, getting up off the bench and doing a shuffling sideways walk toward the rear doors.

  “Yeah,” Daltry said. “Me, too. If the missiles are flying, I want a smoke before we get wiped out.”

  Hutter turned the latch, opened the heavy metal door to the damp night, and jumped down. Mist hung beneath the streetlights. The night throbbed with insect song. Across the street, fireflies lit the ferns and weeds in gassy green flashes.

  Daltry lowered himself down beside her. His knees cracked.

  “Christ,” he said. “I thought for sure I’d be dead of something at this age.”

  His company did not cheer her but only made her more conscious of her own aloneness. Hutter had believed she would have more friends by now. The last man she’d dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: “I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, but I never really feel like you’re there when we’re out to dinner. You live in your head. I can’t. No room for me in there. I don’t know, maybe you’d be more interested in me if I were a book.”

  She had hated him at the time, and hated herself a little, but later, looking back, Hutter had decided that even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would’ve been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would’ve passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy.

  Hutter and Daltry stood together in the almost empty parking lot. She could see into the CITGO, through the big plate-glass windows. The Pakistani behind the cash register kept flashing them nervous looks. Hutter had told him he wasn’t under surveillance, that the federal government thanked him for his cooperation, but he almost certainly believed that his phone was tapped and they were eyeing him as a potential terrorist.

  “You think you should’ve gone to Pennsylvania?” Daltry asked.

  “Depending on how this turns out, I might go tomorrow.”

  “Fuckin’ horror show,” Daltry said.

  Hutter had been getting voice mails and e-mails all night about the house on Bloch Lane in Sugarcreek. They had the place covered in a tent and you had to wear a rubber suit and a gasmask to get through the door. They were treating the joint like it was contaminated with Ebola. A dozen forensics experts were in there, state and federal, pulling the place apart. They had been excavating bones from one wall of a root cellar all afternoon. The guy who had lived there, Bing Partridge, had melted most of the remains with lye; what he couldn’t destroy he stored, much the way a bee stores honey, in little cells, lightly mudded over.

  He had not gotten around to dissolving his most recent kill, a guy named Nathan Demeter from Kentucky—the corpse that Vic McQueen had mentioned on the phone. He had vanished a little more than two months ago, along with his vintage Rolls-Royce Wraith. Demeter had picked up the car in a federal auction, more than a decade before.

  Its prior owner was one Charles Talent Manx, former resident at FCI Englewood in Colorado.

  Demeter had mentioned Manx in the note he’d written shortly before his death by strangulation; he had misspelled the name, but it was pretty clear whom he was talking about. Hutter had seen a scan of the note, had read it herself a dozen times.

  Tabitha Hutter had learned the Dewey decimal system and then organized the books in her Boston apartment according to it. She had a plastic box filled with carefully handwritten recipes, ordered by region and food type (main course, appetizers, desserts, and one
category labeled “p.c.s.,” for postcoital snacks). She took private, almost guilty pleasure in defragmenting her hard drive.

  She sometimes imagined her own mind as a futuristic apartment with a clear glass floor, clear glass stairs, furniture made out of clear plastic, everything seeming to float: clean, dustless, ordered.

  But it wasn’t like that now, and when she tried to think about what had happened in the last seventy-two hours, she felt overwhelmed and confused. She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

  Hutter inhaled the mossy-smelling night, shut her eyes, and cataloged the flies:

  Victoria McQueen had been abducted at age seventeen by Charles Manx, a man who had almost certainly kidnapped others. He was at that time driving a Rolls-Royce Wraith, the 1938 model. Vic got away from him, and Manx was jailed for transporting her across state lines and murdering an active-duty soldier. In another sense Vic had not escaped him at all. Like so many survivors of trauma and probable sexual assault, she was made a prisoner again and again—of her addictions, of madness. She stole things, did drugs, bore a child out of wedlock, and burned through a string of failed relationships. What Charlie Manx had not been able to do she had been trying to do for him ever since.

  Manx had spent close to twenty years locked up in the FCI Englewood Supermax. After drifting in and out of a coma for most of a decade, he had died this past spring. The coroner had estimated his age at ninety—no one knew the exact number, and while he was still cogent, Manx had claimed to be a hundred sixteen years old. The body had been snatched from the morgue by vandals, creating a minor scandal, but there was no question of his death. His heart had weighed 10.2 ounces, a bit light for a man of his size. Hutter had seen a photograph of it.

  McQueen claimed she’d been assaulted again, just three days ago, by Charlie Manx and a man in a gasmask, and that these men had driven off with her twelve-year-old son in the back of a vintage Rolls-Royce.

  It had been reasonable to doubt her story. She’d been badly beaten—but her injuries might’ve been inflicted by a twelve-year-old struggling for his life. There were tire tracks on the lawn, but they could’ve been made by her motorcycle as easily as by a car—the soft, wet earth held no usable prints. She claimed she’d been shot at, but forensics had failed to recover a single bullet.

  Also, more damningly: McQueen had secretly contacted a woman, Margaret Leigh, a heartland hooker and drug addict who seemed to have information about the missing child. When McQueen was confronted about Leigh, she fled on a motorcycle, taking nothing. And had disappeared as if she’d dropped down a mine shaft.

  Ms. Leigh had been impossible to locate. She had drifted through a series of shelters and halfway houses in Iowa and Illinois, had not paid taxes or held a job since 2008. Her life had an unmistakably tragic arc: Once she had been a librarian and a beloved if eccentric local Scrabble competitor. Leigh also once held a reputation as something of an amateur psychic, of occasional use to law enforcement. What did that mean?

  Then there was the hammer. The hammer had been on Hutter’s mind for days. The more she learned, the heavier that hammer weighed in her thoughts. If Vic were going to make up a story about being attacked, why not say Manx had come at her with a baseball bat, a shovel, a crowbar? Instead McQueen described a weapon that had to be a bone mallet, just like the one that had gone missing with Manx’s body—a detail that had never appeared in any news report.

  Finally there was Louis Carmody, Vic McQueen’s occasional lover, father of their child, the man who had driven her away from Charlie Manx all those years ago. Carmody’s stenosis was not a put-on; Hutter had spoken to the doctor who treated him, and she had confirmed he had suffered from one, possibly two, “prestroke” events in the space of a week.

  “He should not have left the hospital,” the doctor said to Hutter, as if Hutter herself were to blame for his departure. In a sense she was. “Without an angioplasty, any strain on his heart could initiate an ischemic cascade. Do you understand? An avalanche in the brain. A major infarction.”

  “You’re saying he could stroke out,” Hutter said.

  “At any minute. Every minute he’s out there, he’s like a guy lying down in the middle of a road. Sooner or later he will be run over.”

  And still Carmody had walked out of the hospital, grabbed a cab to the train station half a mile away. There he’d bought a ticket for Boston, presumably in some half-assed attempt to throw law enforcement off, but then walked down the street to a CVS where he made a call to Dover, New Hampshire. Forty-five minutes later Christopher McQueen arrived in a pickup, and Carmody got into the passenger seat. And here they were.

  “So. What do you think Vic McQueen was into?” Daltry asked.

  The tip of his cigarette flared in the dark, casting an infernal light on his seamed, ugly face.

  “Into?”

  “She made a beeline for this guy Bing Partridge. She hunted him down to get information about her son. Which she did. She said so, didn’t she? She was obviously involved with some reprehensible shitbuckets. That’s why the kid was grabbed, don’t you think? She was being taught a lesson by her business partners.”

  “I don’t know,” Hutter said. “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

  Daltry lifted his head, blew smoke into the pale mist. “I bet human trafficking. Or child pornography. Hey, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” Hutter said, and began to walk.

  At first she was just stretching her legs out, restless to move. Walking helped her think. She put her hands in the pockets of her FBI windbreaker and took herself around the deli truck, down to the edge of the highway. When she looked across the road, she could see a few lights from Christopher McQueen’s house through the pines.

  The doctor said that Carmody was lying in the road, waiting to get run down, but that wasn’t quite right. It was worse than that. He was strolling up the middle of the street, willfully walking right into oncoming traffic. Because there was something at this house that he needed. No, correction: that Wayne needed. It was important enough that all other considerations, including Lou’s own continued survival, could be set aside. It was there in that house. It was two hundred feet away.

  Daltry caught up to her as she was crossing the road. “So what are we doing now?”

  “I want to sit with one of the surveillance crews,” Hutter said. “If you’re coming, you’ll have to put out that cigarette.”

  Daltry dropped it in the road and stepped on it.

  When they were across the highway, they walked along the gravel margin. They were forty feet from the drive to Christopher McQueen’s cabin when a voice called.

  “Ma’am?” someone said softly.

  A small, stout woman in a midnight blue rain jacket stepped from under the boughs of a spruce. It was the Indian woman, Chitra. She held a long stainless-steel flashlight in one hand, but she didn’t switch it on.

  “It’s me. Hutter. Who’s here?”

  “Myself and Paul Hoover and Gibran Peltier.” They were one of two teams positioned in the trees, watching the house. “Something’s wrong with the equipment. The bionic dish quit. The camera won’t turn on.”

  “We know,” Daltry said.

  “What happened?” Chitra asked.

  “Sunspot,” Daltry said.

  Christopher McQueen’s House

  VIC LEFT THE TRIUMPH BY THE TREES, ON A SLIGHT RISE ABOVE HER father’s house. When she stood up from the bike, the world lurched. She had a sensation of being a small figure in a glass snow globe, being tilted this way and that by an insensitive toddler.

  She started down the slope and was surprised to find she could not walk in a straight line. If a cop pulled her over, she doubted she could pass a basic sobriety test, never mind that
she had not had a drop to drink. Then it occurred to her that if a cop pulled her over, he would probably cuff her and give her a couple of swats with the nightstick while he was at it.

  Her father’s shape was joined at the back door by that of a big, broad-chested man with an immense stomach and a neck thicker than his shaved head. Lou. She could’ve picked him out of a crowd from five hundred feet away. Two of the three guys who had loved her in her life, watching her make her unsteady way down the hill; the only one missing was Wayne.

  Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done—cook an omelet, change lightbulbs, make with hugging—sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

  She wished she were not so aware of the vast gulf between what the men in her life thought she was worth and her actual value. She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

  Her left eye felt like a great screw, slowly turning, twisting tighter and tighter in her eyesocket.

  For a dozen steps, her left knee refused to bend. Then, halfway across the backyard, it folded without warning and she dropped down onto it. It felt as if Manx were smashing it with his hammer.

  Her father and Lou came spilling out the door, hurrying toward her. She waved a hand in a gesture that seemed to mean, Don’t worry about it, I’m cool. She found, however, that she could not stand back up. Now that she was down on one knee, the leg would not unfold.

  Her father looped one arm around her waist. He pressed his other hand against her cheek.

  “You’re burning up,” he said. “Jesus, woman. Let’s get you inside.”