World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  I stand up on a chair and I carefully unhook the bag and switch it out, and that’s all she wrote for my saline-solution supply. Whatever else is going on with this girl, I have reached the limits of my ability to affect medical intervention. At this point her condition has become binary; she will either die or not.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I tell her. “You’re going to be fine.”

  And that’s it, I’m ready to go, except for a sharp jag of memory, a flash from last night’s dream: Nico, scowling and untrusting, whispering urgently, keep an eye on your goon.

  Disturbed, uneasy, I look back down the hallway at the garage, where he is sitting, smoking, waiting. It’s not fair; it was a dream; Nico doesn’t even know the man. But then neither do I, exactly. He is good company, and I have taken advantage of his various competencies, but I suddenly feel how far I am from really knowing him—certainly from knowing him enough to trust him.

  And meanwhile, the girl: asleep, vulnerable, alone. I picture Cortez’s crooked smile, his eyes dancing along Lily’s recumbent figure, admiring her like a bowl of fruit.

  It’s an old-fashioned jailer’s key they’ve got here, hanging on an old-fashioned hook. I push closed the door of the cell area, give it a good shake to make sure it’s closed and locked. Then I take the key off the hook and toss it through the bars, where it lands and skitters to the back wall of the cell.

  I’ve got Abigail calmed down now, I’ve got a conversation going, I’ve got lucidity flickering in and out of her eyes.

  I showed her my badge and my gun, explained that I am a retired Concord police officer working on a case, not an alien trailing a veil of cosmic dust, not someone from NASA here to inject her with antimatter. We’re at a small, rickety table in the back of the store, in the same back room where I once sat behind Jordan and watched him access the Internet, access the NCIC database, subjected myself to his taunting contempt to gain his help on my case.

  We’re sitting at the table and Abigail is telling me haltingly, tiredly, that Jordan is not here and she does not know where he is.

  “He is supposed to be here. We were supposed to be here together. Those were our instructions.”

  “Instructions from who?”

  She shrugs. Her body movements are jerky, pained. “Jordan talked to them.”

  “To who?”

  She shrugs again. She is staring at the table, pushing a torn corner of a piece of paper around with her finger, first this way and then another, like she is moving it on an invisible game board.

  “What were the instructions?”

  “Stay—stay here.”

  “In Concord?”

  “Yeah. Here. Resolution had been found. At a base. Gary, Indiana.”

  “Resolution. That’s the scientist? Hans-Michael Parry.”

  “Yeah. And the others were going to find him, go to the last phase, but we were to stay.” She looks up, sticks out her bottom lip. “Me and him. But then Jordan went away. Gone, gone. I was alone. And then the dust started to float in.” She stammers. “It—it—it just floated in.”

  It’s like she reminds herself of it, of her invisible torment—she starts looking this way and then that, scowling into the corners of the room, rubbing at her skin where it’s coated with the cosmic dust.

  “And when was this? Abigail? When did he leave?”

  “Not that long. A week ago? Two weeks? It’s hard because then the dust started coming. Coming on in.”

  “I know it’s hard,” I say, and I’m thinking, stay with me, sister, just a bit further. We’re almost there. “So the group, when they left, they were traveling to Gary, Indiana?”

  She scowls, bites at her lower lip. “No, no. That’s where they found Resolution. But the recon spot was in Ohio. A police station in Ohio.”

  Ohio. Ohio. As soon as she says it I know that’s where I’m going, as soon as she says the word—that is the target. The last known location of the missing individual. Nico is in Ohio.

  I move forward in my seat, nearly toppling the table with my eagerness.

  “Where in Ohio? What town?”

  I wait for her to answer, holding my breath, teetering on the edge of discovery, like a drop of water on the side of a glass.

  “Abigail?”

  “I can feel the planet spinning. That’s also happening. It makes me dizzy and nauseous. But I can’t stop feeling it. Can you—do you understand that?”

  “Abigail, what is the name of the town in Ohio?”

  “First you have to help me,” she says, and reaches out her hands in their latex gloves and covers my hands. “I can’t do it. I’m too scared to do it.”

  “Do what?” I say, but I already know, I can feel it pouring out of her eyes. She pushes one of her semiautomatics across the table to me.

  “I know the name of the town. I have a map. But then you do it and do it fast.”

  1.

  Here is how I know that she’s not dead: because she’s never dead. Like that time I found her in White Park, tucked fairylike in the shade beneath the slide, after Dad’s funeral. You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? And she was right, I had thought so, and she’s given me periodic occasion to think so ever since. Since the year that our parents died I have carried this foretaste of her doom like a sourness in my stomach, this cold certainty that one day she too would slip away: one of her dimwitted underachieving boyfriends would involve her in a drug deal gone wrong, or the junk-shop motorcycle she drove around her sophomore year would catch a patch of ice and flip, or she would simply be the kid who drinks too much at the party and is carried off in a stretcher while the others stand like cows, staring and swaying in the red flash of the emergency lights.

  And yet again and again she has managed to swim successfully through the tides of her life, a fish flashing through the dark foam, even in these last terrible months. It was not her, but her deadbeat husband, Derek, who disappeared, sacrificed to the murky goals of her crackpot organization. And it was not her but me who nearly died in a fort in southeastern Maine, shot in the arm on the hunt for a missing man. It was Nico, that time, who rescued me, coming up over the horizon in that shocking, impossible helicopter.

  Still, though. Nevertheless. Now she’s gone again, and the fear grows in my gut like illness, the knowledge that she is dead somewhere or dying, and I have to remind myself that always, always she has been okay. Not a scratch on her. She’s somewhere. She’s fine.

  * * *

  Only one road leads from the police station down into the town proper, and, this being the heart of the American Midwest, that road is called Police Station Road: a pastoral quarter mile of gentle downhill pavement, snaking past horse fencing and a country-red barn. A windmill is off to the right, back from the road a ways, listing rightward as if someone tried to push it over and then got bored. Houdini lies coughing in the basket on the handlebars. The empty wagon rattles along behind us, waiting for its load.

  It’s sunrise, drizzling still, and with the muted rain-wet golds and scarlets of the trees, with the crickets calling to one another, the crows doing their plaintive cawing, I find myself imagining for a minute what a peaceful world this’ll be when the people are gone, when the paved expanses are reclaimed by wildflowers and the birds have the full use of the sky.

  I know, of course, that this is just another dream, another piece of widely held wishful thinking: the virginal and pastoral postapocalyptic world, wiped free of mankind’s dirty cities and loud machines. Because these auburn Midwestern trees are going to burst into flames in the first burning moments. Trees around the world will go up like dry tinder. In a short time the clouds of ash will block the sun, put a hard stop to photosynthesis, snuff out all lushness. The squirrels will burn up, the butterflies and the flowers, the ladybugs crawling in the tall grass. Possums will drown in their holes. What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity’s arrogant ill stewardship.

  N
othing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.

  * * *

  “Rats,” I say, spiraling down the exit ramp, as the massive parking lot comes into view below me. “Rats, rats, rats.”

  The SuperTarget has been taken. I see people with machine guns wandering around on the roof of the store and I instinctively start counting them—one, two, three, four,…—although even one person with a machine gun on the roof of a big-box store is plenty. Five metal staircases, those wheeled stair sets that move up and down the aisles to help customers access high shelves, have been rolled out of the store and pushed to the parking lot entrances, stationed like guard towers. There’s someone at the top of each staircase. Closest to me is a trim middle-aged woman in a red softball jersey, a red bandana holding back a tumble of black hair, a machine gun of her own.

  I get off the bike and raise my hand to the lady with the gun and she raises a hand back and then she shouts, “hey-yuh,” and from the far side of the parking lot someone on one of the other moving staircases—also in a red jersey, though I can’t tell from here if it’s a man or a woman, young or old—calls back in kind, “hey-yuh,” and then there’s another call and then another, the syllables carried around in a ring, and at last a white Dodge pickup roars around from the back of the store, belching vegetable-oil exhaust and kicking up gravel off the pavement. The truck screeches to a halt a few feet from me, and I step backward and raise both hands.

  “Good morning,” I call out.

  There is a squeal of feedback from a bullhorn mounted on the roof above the driver’s seat. I wince. The woman in the guard tower winces. Then someone starts talking through the bullhorn from inside the truck.

  “Is this your—” The voice is swallowed in a new burst of feedback, and then there’s a muttered “oh, hell” and an adjustment of the volume. “Is this your place?”

  “No.” I shake my head. He means the parking lot—the store—did I, or did I and some band of compatriots, maybe all dressed in sensible blue pants and tan blazers to keep track of each other, like these guys are all in softball jerseys, did we already call shotgun on this SuperTarget? Did we declare it to be our base, our temporary encampment, or were we intending to pick the bones of the shelves for food or entertainment for the last week before impact?

  “No,” I say again. “I’m passing through.” The woman on the moving staircase is watching with mild interest. I’m keeping my hands in the air, just in case.

  “Oh, okay,” says the voice through the bullhorn. “Yeah, us too.”

  The people on the roof of the building have clustered at the edge, watching me. Machine guns, red jerseys. From the corner of my eye I can see around the corner to the backside of the SuperTarget, where there’s a blur of figures busy at the loading dock. They’re cleaning it out. Box loads, full pallets wrapped in clear plastic sheeting. There wasn’t much left in the store when we were there, but what there was is coming out. I feel a flash of desperation. All I need is that sledgehammer.

  “There’s an item in there,” I say. “Something I really need.”

  “Well—” Another squealing tide of feedback. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the man says, and the sound stops abruptly as he shuts off the bullhorn and opens the driver’s side door and leans out. Glasses, mild expression. Red jersey also, with the name ETHAN stitched above the breast pocket. A soft paunch on an athletic build. He looks like somebody’s middle-school basketball coach.

  “Sorry. Stupid thing. What is it that you need?”

  “A sledgehammer. There’s one in there. A Wilton with a fiberglass handle.” I step forward to him, make eye contact, smile and raise a hand, like we’re meeting at a barbecue. “I really need it bad.”

  “Well, huh. Okay, hold on.” He scratches his cheek, uncertain, raises one finger, and leans back into the truck. I hear him talking on a CB or a walkie-talkie. Then he leans back out and peers at me smiling while he waits for an answer from whoever decides. He’d say yes, I can see it. Were it up to just Ethan I’d be good to go. It’s still raining; endless steady mild rain. I run my hands over Houdini’s fur. I take a look at the woman on the moving staircase, and she’s looking off into space, bored, letting her mind wander. A year and a half ago she would have been checking e-mail on her phone.

  The walkie-talkie blares from within the truck, and Ethan leans back in and listens for a moment, nodding. I watch his face through the windshield until he pokes his head back out.

  “Listen, bud. You got anything to trade?”

  I make a rapid internal inventory of my possessions: Jacket and pants, shoes and shirt. Notebook and pen. A loaded SIG Sauer P229 and a box of .40-caliber shells. A tattered high-school yearbook photo of a missing girl.

  “Not really,” I say. “Unfortunately. But that sledgehammer. The truth is, it’s mine.”

  “What do you mean, it’s yours?”

  I don’t know what to say. I saw it first? I need it real bad?

  “One thing,” I say, hearing my voice travel into a pleading, desperate upper register. “It’s just the one thing.”

  Ethan rubs his chin. He feels bad. Everybody feels bad. “What about the wagon?” He looks up at our friend in the guard tower, who looks skeptical. “Maybe you could trade us that wagon.”

  I look down at the battered Red Ryder. We brought it from Concord. The wheels are bent.

  “The thing is, if I give you the wagon, I can’t get the hammer back to where I need it.”

  “Well, heck, then.” The man sighs. “You got a, uh—what do you call those again?”

  “Catch-22?” says the woman on the staircase.

  Before I can say something else, someone shouts “hey-yuh” from the loading dock, and then someone else yells it from the roof, and then the man at the next staircase over yells it, too, and Ethan’s gotta run: he pops back into the truck and pulls the door closed and does a rapid three-point turn in the parking lot and heads back the way he came. The woman with the bandana looks at me, tight-lipped, and shrugs, what can ya do?

  “Shit,” I say softly.

  Houdini barks his rattling phlegmy bark, and I bend to scratch his ears.

  * * *

  I don’t know what happens if I go back without the sledgehammer.

  Cortez will have more tricks up his sleeve, or else he won’t, and if he doesn’t we sit on our hands drinking weird bad coffee and making disjointed conversation until Wednesday around lunchtime, when the conversation stops and everything stops.

  The town of Rotary is small, but it’s bigger than Pike, where the SuperTarget was. It’s bigger than anything else around. There’s got to be a hardware store.

  There’s a church spire and another one, there’s the fat onion bulb of a water tower with the word ROTARY painted in mile-high letters in the classical small-town style. Autumn dogwoods along the sidewalk, leaves orange and red, branches drooping with rain. No people, no sign of people.

  It’s got to be here: towns like this one still have hardware stores, or they did until last year, the mom-and-pop operations, beloved by the locals, losing money every year. There will be a sledgehammer at the hardware store, a row of them, a display, and I will take one and strap it in the wagon and mule it back up Police Station Road.

  We go from door to door up Main Street: ice cream store, pizza parlor, pharmacy. A bar with an old-timey saloon theme called the Come On Inn. No one anywhere, no signs of life. “Blue town,” I say to Houdini as we’re poking around an abandoned ice cream shop. He’s nosing into an empty box of sugar cones, trying to get his teeth into something that’s food. There is a utility closet in the basement of the one-story redbrick municipal building, with an acrid reek of ammonia and mop water, a stack of bright orange safety cones, countdown hatch marks scratched in the wall by some bored custodian. No sledgehammer. No tools of any kind.

  * * *

  We
called the towns with color names because of the package of multicolored Post-it Notes that Cortez had; he had them left over from his Office Depot warehouse. When we left a town behind us we would assign it a color, just keeping track, just to keep ourselves amused. All the degrees of dissolution, the differing extents to which each town or city had collapsed under the weight of all this unbearable imminence. Red towns were those seething with active violence: towns on fire, towns beset by marauding bands, daylight shootings, food foragers and food defenders, homes under siege. Only occasionally did we encounter active organized law enforcement: you’d see National Guardsmen patrolling red towns in small clusters, whether officially or unofficially it was hard to say—brave young kids, hollering for order, firing their guns into the air.

  Becket, in the Berkshires, was a red town: ten teenagers tailed us on puttering mopeds, chanting for blood like savages. Stottville, New York, was red. De Lancy, Oneonta. Dunkirk, the town where we saved the small family from the fire but left them defenseless on the firehouse steps—bright red.

  Green towns were just the opposite, communities where it seemed like some sort of agreement had been made, spoken or implied, to plug along. Folks raking leaves, pushing strollers, waving good morning. Dogs on leashes or bounding after Frisbees. In Media, Ohio, we were astonished to hear the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song being sung lustily by three hundred or more people in a public park at dusk. After the sing-along everyone hung around on the village green: there was a knitting circle, a book club, a demonstration on making candles and another on making bullets. A local sport-shooters association had organized a hunt-and-gather system, traversing the local woods and farmland to bring back venison and beef and distribute it by priority: women and children, the old and the infirm.