World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  When I’ve completed the grid I stand for a long time under the flags with my hands on my hips, rain in my eyes like tears, rain dribbling down my nose and chin. There is a level of tiredness where your body feels tender, like a bruise. Your throat hurts; your eyes sting. The hunger intensifies it—you feel shriveled, sort of, bent, burnt, hardened. Like the crust of something, the rind.

  Budgeted for today I’ve got three little bags of the honey-roasted peanuts, plus a green apple from a basket we took from a Residence Inn in Penfield. I eat one of the apples rapidly, like a horse. I almost eat one of the bags of peanuts and then I decide to save it for later.

  Two overlapping trails of blood; two passages down the corridor; one going out and one coming back.

  Lily is attacked inside the kitchenette. She runs, blood singing out of her neck, perpetrator chasing after, and manages to lose him in the woods. Collapses in the clearing where we found her. Assailant goes back inside, blood still dripping off his three knives. Hangs them up and disappears.

  Disappears, though, what does that mean? It means he goes underground. Through the hole in the floor of the garage.

  Right? Detective Palace, isn’t that right?

  Right, except how does the determined and murderous perpetrator fail to track down a defenseless, hundred-pound girl, stumbling through the woods and bleeding from the neck?

  Right—except why, and how, is he juggling three knives?

  I stare up at the sky and clench my teeth and fight back a fresh wave of panic and guilt and desperation because I will probably never know. This mystery, along with my sister’s, will remain unsolved forever. It is the right place, the police station in Rotary, Ohio, it’s the right place but now it’s the wrong time, we’re too late, we didn’t get here in time to stop this girl from being attacked and we didn’t get here in time to stop my sister from slipping down through the earth and away. My fault. All my fault.

  I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.

  * * *

  It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really was now trapped by a tiger. This was in early September, about two weeks ago, sixteen days maybe, halfway through our tortuous journey. Seneca Falls was a gray town, uneasy calm, people out in the streets, some armed, some not armed, some in groups and some alone, everybody grave and on edge. Ten miles out of town is where we spotted the girl waving her arms, and we put her in the golf cart and drove at top speed, shivering and jolting over back roads to this tiny zoo and there he was, tank top, jean shorts, barely sixteen and scared out of his head, quavering out on a top branch, his fidgeting weight bending the branch low to where the animal was snarling up at him. Mangy coat stretched thin over the rickety ribs.

  “What are we going to do?” said the girl, and I said, “Well—” and Cortez brought down the animal with one shotgun blast in the center of the nearer flank. The boy yelped and dropped out of the tree into the dirt, beside the dead animal. Gore and steam rising out of its exploded orange side. Cortez jammed his gun away and looked at me and said, “Can we go now?”

  “Wait, wait,” the sister said, rushing after us as we clambered into the golf cart. “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “If I were you,” said Cortez, “I would eat that tiger.”

  * * *

  “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED … DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

  Cortez is in the dispatch room, standing mesmerized in front of the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND, a solid black piece of dispatch-specific communications equipment, relaying the same emergency-band warning message over and over. It’s a calm voice, the kind of dull affectless tone you used to hear waiting for tech support: press one if you’re calling for help setting up your device …

  “Check this baby out,” says Cortez. “Still kicking.”

  “Oh, sure,” I say, feeling a rich wash of nostalgia. “These machines are indestructible. And it would have been installed with multiple battery backups.” I’m remembering the same console at Concord PD. It was rendered obsolete by the digital laptop systems that were installed a couple years before I took the oath, but somehow no one ever wheeled it out of Dispatch, and it sat there in the corner, black and shiny and immovable, a monument to traditional police work.

  The message coming out of the Rotary RadioCOMMAND shifts: “FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES … FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES …” and then the lady starts to list them, good old-fashioned Norman Rockwell town names: “CONESVILLE … ZANESVILLE … DEVOLA …”

  I run my finger along the dusty top of the machine. It’s a beautiful piece of police equipment, the RadioCOMMAND console, it really is.

  “FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES …”

  We stand there side by side, Cortez and I, listening to the charmless recital of town names. It is creating this low wistful feeling in my heart, the woman’s voice, the drone of the machine, and I think it may simply be that I miss information. For most of my life the world was awash with news, with reports of things happening; and then in the last year they blipped off the radar, one by one, the Concord Monitor and the New York Times and then television, the whole concept of television, and the Internet with its ceaseless froth and churn, all of it just gone. For a while back in Concord, before my house burned down and I left, I had a ham radio tuned to someone named Dan Dan the Radio Man, and I listened to him all through the Mayfair Commission hearings. Dan Dan reported out the last round of IPSS legislation, hurriedly passed by the rump Congress, nationalizing grain silos and redesignating all national parks as camps for the internally displaced.

  On the road you could get only the swirl of gossip and unconfirmed reports, the nervous trading of rumors, speculation, and fantasy. Someone says that the Hoover Dam has been dynamited by downstream Nevadans desperate for fresh water. Someone waves a paper, supposedly a copy of one signed by the president, declaring the United States to be “a sovereign and enduring nation, retaining in perpetuity its privileges over all territory currently encompassed.” Someone says that the city of Savannah has been “taken” by catastrophe immigrants from Laos, who have turned the town into a fortress and are shooting white people on sight; someone else says no way, it’s Roanoke where that happened, it’s totally Roanoke, and the CIs are from Ethiopia.

  And now here we are, this is what’s left of the outside world: packaged sandwiches and Band-Aids are being handed out under a tent somewhere in Apple Grove, Ohio.

  “THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND,” says the RadioCOMMAND. “THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND.”

  I turn to head back outside, and a great rush of sparkles and stars paint the inside of my eyelids, and I stumble and catch the doorjamb and hold myself steady.

  “You okay?” say Cortez, and I wave over my shoulder, I’m fine, here I go. But when I let go of the doorjamb and try to walk again I get another fireworks head rush, and this time I’m seeing bloody splatter patterns burned across my retinas. A girl facedown in a field. A door in the floor. A rack of red knives behind a red sink. A candy machine emptied of its candy like a gutted animal.

  “Palace?”

  I take a step—I’m very tired. I fall down.

  6.

  “Henry. Hey. Get up.”

  That voice. I wake up and that’s it—mystery solved. Nico is simply present, her eyes flashing in the darkness like a cat’s. She is kneeling at my side where I’m lying on the ground, waking me up like she used to wake me up to make her breakfast, poking at
my chest with two fingers, sticking her face right up close into my face. “Henry. Henry. Hen. Hen. Henry. Hey. Hen.”

  She jabs a thumb over her shoulder, at Lily, the unconscious girl next to me on the thin jail-cell mattress. Cortez must have hauled me from the dispatch room and laid me down beside her in the bed.

  “Who’s your friend?” says Nico.

  I start to talk, to say oh, Nico, I thought you were dead but she puts one finger over her lips to hush me, and I obey, I hush, I stare at her in silence. The smell of Cortez’s cigarette lingers in the room.

  “So, listen,” says Nico, and just the sound of her voice is forming the heat of tears in my eyes. “It’s happening. It’s a go.” She looks exactly as she did the day of the yearbook photo, the picture in my jacket pocket: she’s grown her hair back out and she’s wearing her glasses again, her old ones, from when she was in high school. I can’t believe she even still has them. I want to leap up and hug her. I’ll put her on the handlebars of the bike, I’ll put Houdini in the wagon to ride behind us. I’ll take her back home.

  “Everything went exactly as planned,” she’s saying. “They brought him down here. That scientist, the one I told you about? We’ve got him. We’re going to England in the morning, and he and the team he knows there will initiate the standoff burst. Show that asteroid who’s boss.” I mouth the words back to her, astonished: “Show that asteroid who’s boss.” She smiles. Her teeth glow white. “It’s all going to be fine,” she says.

  I have objections, I have a lot of questions, but Nico presses one flat hand over my mouth, shaking her head, flashing impatience.

  “I’m telling you, Hen. I’m telling you. It’s all wrapped up like a beef burrito.” One of the dopey expressions our father used to use, one his favorites. “It’s all squared away. Nothing to worry about.”

  This is incredible. Incredible! They did it. Nico did it. She saved the world.

  “Listen, though. In the meantime, keep an eye on your goon. I don’t trust him.”

  My goon. Cortez.

  They never had the pleasure of meeting, those two. They would have liked each other. But Nico never met him. Never heard of him. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes out into my body like deep-blue blood. It’s not real. I’m dreaming, and as soon as I know that I am dreaming, Nico fades like a Dickens ghost and is replaced by my grandfather, sallow and sunken, hollowed-out cheeks and staring eyes, sitting in his ancient leather armchair sucking on an American Spirit, muttering to himself.

  “Dig a hole,” he says. “Dig a hole.”

  * * *

  The smoke is real. Fresh cigarette smoke, rolling down the real police station hallway through the thin cell bars and into my dream. My grandfather really did smoke American Spirits, the same as Nico. Or, rather, Nico smokes them, the same as him. He would curse after each one, say “stupid goddamn things” even as he drew the next one from the pack, fidgeting it with irritation between two old fingers. A man who did not like to enjoy things.

  It’s not him smoking now; he’s been dead some years. It’s Cortez, somewhere in the building, working on another butt.

  Neither was I really on the thin mattress, tucked in snugly beside our sleeping assault victim; I’m right where I fell down, on the floor in Dispatch, in the shadow of the RadioCOMMAND. I can feel it, still, the warm dream feeling of her hand pressed flat over my mouth, Nico’s hand.

  I stand quickly, then buckle from the pins and needles in my legs, reach out and steady myself on the wall with a flat hand. It’s 5:21. It’s morning. How long did I sleep? I follow the curling stink of the smoke and find Cortez back in the cop-car garage, squatting in the center and examining the ground. Our portable coffee rig is erected on one of the shelves, stray grounds clinging in clusters around the mouth of the urn. There’s a thermos at Cortez’s side with steam rising around its edges, mingling with the cigarette smoke.

  “Oh, good morning,” he says, without looking up.

  “We have to get down there.”

  “No kidding.” He grunts, slides down onto his stomach. “I’m working on it.”

  “Can we get down there?”

  “I’m working on it,” he says again. “Have some coffee.”

  I find my steel thermos on the shelf behind me, the one with my name Sharpied on the side, and I pour myself a cup. My dream was obvious wish fulfillment, a classic: Nico’s alive, the threat of the asteroid is ended, Earth survives, I survive. But what about my grandfather, muttering from his deathbed, “Dig a hole”? His actual last words. He said that. Cortez has his face against the floor, one eye opened, one eye closed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he slowly runs the claw of his hammer along the concrete, squinting at the invisible fracture between the lid and the surrounding floor.

  I sip my coffee; it’s hot and bitter and black. I wait ten seconds. “So what do you think? Can we get down there?”

  “You’re a very focused individual.”

  “I know. So what do you think?”

  He just laughs, and I stop, I wait, I demand patience of myself. Cortez wants the same thing I do, as badly as I do. I want to get into the hole because that’s where my sister is, my sister or individuals possessing information as to her whereabouts; Cortez wants to get into the hole because it is there. He wants in because he is locked out. His hair is a mess, out of its ponytail, rolling in tangled clumps down his back. I’ve never asked him, in so many words, why he came along on this fool’s journey in search of my errant sister, but I think this is the answer: to do things like this, to do what he loves with what time is left. I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.

  “So?” I say. “Can you—”

  “Yes.” He heaves himself to standing and flicks his cigarette away, adding one more butt to our gathered piles.

  “Yes? How? How?”

  “Wait and I’ll tell you.” He smiles and then digs out tobacco for a fresh smoke, pats his pants for papers, rolls the thing slowly, torturing me. And then, at last: “It’s a wedge, not a flat lid, is my guess, which means we couldn’t lift it up even if we weren’t a couple of skeletons.”

  “So?”

  “So we crack it instead. First choice is a gas-powered jackhammer, which we don’t have and won’t get.”

  I’m nodding, nodding like crazy, and my mind is running and gunning, ready to roll. This is what I want. Specifics. Answers. An agenda. I’ve set down my coffee, I’m ready to run out of here and go get what we need.

  “Second choice?” I say.

  “Second choice is a sledgehammer.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette, grins languorously while I wait in desperation. “And I know where to get one.”

  “Where?”

  “Why, at the store, of course.”

  At last—at last—he explains. He clocked the hammer when we rummaged through a SuperTarget two days ago, the last stop we made, three highway exits before Rotary. The SuperTarget was among five other stores, massive and fortresslike, spread out across a vast parking lot: a Hobby Lobby, a Home Depot, a Kroger grocery, a Cheesecake Factory.

  “It was a Wilton,” Cortez says. “Big twelve-pounder. Good grip on it.” He’s leaning against the wall, shaking his head. “And I left it behind. I remember, because I picked it up and I almost took it but then I didn’t. I thought, we won’t use it. It’ll weigh down the wagon and we just don’t need it.” He sighs and exhales wistfully, like a man dreaming of a lost lover. “But I remember it. A big lovely Wilton with a fiberglass handle. Do you remember it?”

  “I—sure.” I’m not sure. I remember the SuperTarget pretty well, rows and rows of empty shelves, scented candles and bath towels scattering the smudged tile floors, plumbing fixtures smashed on the ground like broken toys. The grocery aisle ravaged as if by packs of beasts. A big sign, must have been months old, that said NO MORE AMMUNITION THANK YOU SO MUCH.

  “But what if it’s gone?” I say. “What i
f someone else has taken it?”

  “Well, then we won’t have it,” Cortez says. “Just like now.”

  I chew on the end of my mustache. The point of the sarcasm is that if we go in search of the sledgehammer and don’t find it, we will have lost nothing, but in fact he is wrong, because we will have lost time. Time is what we will have lost. How long to get down there on the bike, how many hours to find the hammer, to secure it to the wagon, to bike it back?

  Cortez knows exactly where it is. He remembers the aisle and the shelf: aisle 9, shelf 14. That’s how his mind operates. It’s in the rear of the store, past the gardening supplies and the plumbing section. I hear it again in his voice as he describes the route, that deep vein of regret, for having left the hammer behind, for having been caught for once in his life without the necessary tool for the job.

  “You stay here,” I tell him. “You watch the hole.”

  “Okay,” he says, saluting me, settling cross-legged in the center of the garage. “I’ll watch the hole.”

  * * *

  On my way out I stop in the holding room, gratified to see that the 1.5-liter bag of saline solution is empty, sagging and curling at the top like a flattened balloon. The area around the needlestick in Lily’s extended right arm seems just fine also, no purple radius of traumatized tissue around the entry point. Lily, or whatever her name is. Poor girl. Somebody’s something. I step into the cell with her and run my finger gently along the length of her lips; they’re dry still but not nearly so dry, not deathly dry. She’s taking fluid.

  “Good job, kid,” I say to her. “Good for you.”

  Except for the not inconsiderable problem that if Lily is taking fluid she should be passing it, and she is not. There’s no urine, which is warning me of something but what exactly I don’t know, because my medical training is limited and specific, first responder material, crime scene material: administering rescue breaths and patching wounds and minimizing blood loss. Piecing together bedside medical clues is uncharted territory. It’s a crossword puzzle in a language I don’t know.