World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  When I’m done writing, when I’ve written up to the brick wall at the end of the story, I walk back down the hall to Dispatch so I can sit next to Nico. She would laugh at me for all of this. She would tell me to take a load off, go back and have more beer with the rednecks, eat more chicken.

  I press the power button on the RadioCOMMAND and the room fills with prayer: a gospel choir singing about the promised land in lush layers of harmony, transmitting up to God and out over a 600 MHz band. I picture a church somewhere, barricaded doors, blackout shades over the windows, a hungry happy congregation singing and singing till the day arrives. Till the promised land. I press SCAN and find someone claiming to be the president of the United States of America, proudly announcing that the whole thing was just a test of the resiliency of the American people, and—good news—we passed the test. It’s okay now, though, folks. Everything is fine.

  I change the station. I change it again. Flickering voices, bursts of static, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and then a tipsy ecstatic teenager: “I don’t know where y’all motherfuckers are at, but we all motherfuckers are in the Verizon store at the Crestview Hills Mall in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, bi-zatch! Anyone looking to par-tay get on fucking I-75 …”

  It’s foolish to keep listening to strangers. I should preserve the battery; I should preserve my time. I press the SCAN button just one more time, the last time, and find a quiet and urgent voice, and I have to move right up close to the speaker to hear it.

  “I repeat, I am in my car and I am driving south on Highway 40, if you get this and you still love me, I will be in Norman by five tomorrow, that’s tomorrow … I repeat, I’m in the car, I’m on the highway, and I love you. I, uh …”

  The voice trails off into silence, the rush of highway wind. I wait a moment holding my breath and then I turn it off, just as the jackhammer starts up again at last, steady and sure from Cortez’s end of the hall. He fixed it. He’s got it.

  It remains hard to fathom, hard to believe, that this is what the world has become. That this, of all possible worlds and times in which I could have been born, could have been a policeman, that this is the world and time that I got.

  “We got ripped off, Nic,” I walk back over to my sister, look again at her face, the savaged flesh of her neck. “We got ripped off.”

  I start to pull the tarp up over her head but then I stop, I just hold it there like a blanket.

  It’s the wound. It’s her throat.

  Maybe I didn’t look hard enough out in the woods, maybe I was distracted or maybe it’s that just now I’ve had the experience of sitting and staring at Jean for half an hour, watching her talk, looking at her throat. Out there in the woods, at first glance, it was clear to me that these two wounds were the same: two girls, throats slashed, victim one and victim two, wound one and wound two.

  But it’s not so. Nico’s injury is worse—much worse. Which makes sense, of course, because she’s dead and Jean isn’t. I lean in close, trace the line of the assault with the tip of a finger. Looking closely I see it’s not a cut but a mass of cuts, a cluster of overlapping lacerations, forming a rough V below the victim’s chin, pointing down. With the other wound there was blood, there was the raw pinkness of the exposed muscle, but now here with this second victim it goes deeper than that—below all the blood of the jugular and the shredded layers of throat there is the shell color of bone, the off-white piping of the trachea. The depth of the wound and its messiness suggest that she was struggling, moving the whole time, trying to defend herself, get free from what was happening.

  I blink back to Jean’s wound, the one I was just staring at while she stumbled through her story, a less messy wound—a single slash, suggesting little struggle or no struggle, contrary to the bruising and lacerations on her face.

  So—then—so—I stand up, pace in a tight circle—so she fought back, Jean fights back but is captured and subdued. Let’s say a pill or pills, let’s say the assailant pushes something into her mouth, covers her nose with his hands and forces her to swallow.

  No—stop—I stop, smack the wall with my hand, think faster, Palace, think better. We’re in a fast-moving scenario here, victim two—Nico—is already sprinting off into the woods, I’m the killer and I’ve got to catch her, can’t let her go. I hit her with something. Knock her down. Jean’s in the dirt—unconscious?—gets her with one quick smooth slice to the throat and then I’m off and running after victim two, after Nico Palace tearing breathlessly in her sandals through the woods.

  But I checked Jean’s body, while she was asleep, when she was still Lily, I checked her scalp for blunt force trauma, surely I did.

  She was, though, she was still. Pills or an injection or the blow of a hammer to the side of the head, she wasn’t moving when she was cut and Nico was.

  I find that I’m panting, pacing, horrified. It’s out there, it’s up there, the dark heart of the sky, coming in fast.

  Focus Palace but I can’t but I have to. Keep going.

  Killer catches up to poor Nico in that second clearing, gets on top of her and pins her down, and she’s terrified, she’s awake, she’s writhing, and he grabs her from behind and slashes her throat until it’s open.

  I am trembling, like I’m there, like I’m in the scene, like I’m cutting or being cut.

  There’s something else, too. I turn around, away from the window, look at her one more time, wiping tears out of my eyes, feeling my knife hand clenching and unclenching. There’s something else.

  Among the messiness and the gore of the wound there is something—I crouch—lean forward, take out my measuring tape, and murmuring apologies to Nico, after all that she has suffered, murmuring “holy moly” and then “holy shit,” I peel back small portions of her lacerated skin, one-tenth of a centimeter at a time, and I keep discovering them—smaller cuts within the larger, lines as small as insect legs. I move my magnifying glass across the neck and confirm that these smaller cuts are regularly spaced at quarter-inch increments along the whole line of the wound.

  Parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound. Dr. Fenton would say that nothing is certain, that certainty is for schoolchildren and magicians, but that parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound strongly indicate that the weapon used was a serrated blade.

  I burst out of the dispatch room and run down the hallway, hands spread out to either side like an animal wingspan, fly down the corridor to the kitchen to confirm my snapshot memory of the knives on the rack behind the kitchen. Butcher’s blade; paring knife; cleaver. Nonserrated.

  Back in Dispatch I run it down for Nico, explain to her about her wound, the parallel superficial incisions and what they mean. I remind her, furthermore, that the only serrated blade I am aware of, in the context of this investigation, is the sawtooth buck knife noticed by Atlee Miller, hanging from Astronaut’s belt.

  “Policeman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Cortez. Tentative expression, narrowed eyes. Looking at me like I’m not actually okay.

  I clear my throat. “I’m fine. Did you crack it?”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I am. Did you get us down?”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the tarp.

  “Palace,” he says. “Is that her?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s her.”

  I give it to him fast, the thumbnail sketch only. “The sleeping girl, whose name is Jean Wong, originally of Lansing, Michigan—her memory of the incident in question is very uneven, essentially empty, but she was able to lead me directly to a field in the woods where I located the body. Cause of death is a deep wound to the throat with a serrated blade. That’s about—that’s about what we’ve got. So.”

  I stop abruptly. I know exactly what I’m doing by talking this way, very rapidly in crisp and distinct policeman diction, I’m stringing words out around my
grief like a perimeter, like caution tape.

  Cortez nods, solemn, adjusts his ponytail. I wait for him to ask again if I’m okay, so I can tell him I am and we can move on.

  “Death,” he says instead. “It’s the fucking worst.”

  “Did you get us down there?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “Okay. Okay, great.”

  He backs out of the room rather than turning, and as I stand up I see that for some reason I took one of the knives with me, the blood-stained butcher’s knife from the kitchenette. I’m holding the handle tight in my fist. I look at it for a second and then I slide it into my belt, on the inside, close to my thigh, like a huntsman.

  3.

  So the group goes underground but then Nico pulls a runner and Jean runs after her and Astronaut chases them both, catches them, kills them one by one.

  This is last Wednesday, sometime after four thirty p.m., probably closer to five. Me and my dog and my goon rolled in about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Hours. A margin of hours. I can’t forget that. I won’t.

  It’s Astronaut, or it’s Jordan and he’s using Astronaut’s knife.

  Or it’s Tick, or it’s Valentine. Or it’s none of the above.

  Nine times out of ten, in the usual run of things, a person is murdered not by a stranger but by a friend or family member, a husband or wife. There are exceptions—my mother was one—and neither is this the normal run of things. We live now in a world of wolves, blue towns, red towns, people roaming the countryside in search of safety or love or cheap thrills. Nico and Jean may well have emerged from their society of rogues unharmed, only to be set upon by some monster roaming the landscape, someone who had always wanted to slash the throats of two girls and took his opportunity before disappearing, laughing, into the woods. Plenty of people wear sunglasses. Plenty of people carry serrated knives.

  “Ready, Policeman?”

  “Yeah,” I say to Cortez. “I am.”

  We are standing beside each other, hands on our hips, staring down the metal stairwell that descends, as predicted, from the middle of the police station garage. The infamous wedge of concrete that had hidden it has been reduced to a pile of rubble, which Cortez has arranged on a tarp beside the resulting hole, a pyramid of uneven stones. He’s sweating like crazy from his exertions, his T-shirt is soaked, his ponytail unkempt and sweat-matted, rolling down his back. Peering down into the darkness, licking his lips.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, okay. We get down there, first challenge will be getting through the blast door.”

  “Blast door?”

  “People build bunkers, this is what they do: they put in a toilet, a generator, and a blast door.” He’s fitting on a Rayovac headlamp, tightening the straps. “Plus, of course, I’ve been up here jackhammering for the better part of an hour.”

  “And nobody came up.”

  “Because they didn’t hear.”

  “Through the blast door.”

  “Gold star for you, Policeman.”

  He hands me a second headlamp, and I loop the straps over my ears and across my scalp, wincing as the Velcro of the fastener brushes the gash on my forehead. “You can’t shoot through a blast door unless you’ve got a shoulder-mounted nuclear bomb, but you sure can pick the locks.” His headlamp winks on. “Well. I can.”

  Cortez is talking fast, grinning like the devil, eyes flashing with excitement, ready to rock. There is a new intensity about the man, a thrill of having cracked the floor and a twitchy excitement about heading downstairs—almost as if this is his case and I’m the one tagging along to lend him a hand. He can’t wait to see what’s down there, what comes next. I’m feeling what he’s feeling, too, I need to know, I have to, and when I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell, beyond the edge of my headlamp’s halo I see Nico’s face, eyes closed, the dark red savaged mess of her throat.

  Cortez steps down first, heavy boot heel clanging on the top metal step, me coming one step behind. The narrow metal stairwell shivers under our heels.

  “Hi.”

  A timid voice, from back the way we came. Jean is standing in the doorway that leads out of the garage back into the hallway. Cortez and I both stop at the same time and turn our heads, and our headlamps crisscross like prison-break spotlights on her small worried face.

  “You’re going down?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We are.”

  “You must be Jean,” says Cortez. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  She shifts from one foot to the other in the doorway, shivering, holding herself tightly. She is wearing black pants and a red T-shirt I gave her out of Nico’s abandoned backpack, and over that one of my extra jackets, which hangs on her like a monk’s robe. She hovers there, uneasy, like she wants to leave but can’t. As if she is a ghost, captured in the gloomy corner of the garage, tethered by her curse to a given radius.

  “Can I come?” she says.

  “Why?”

  “I just—I want to.”

  I step back up, out of the hole. “Do you remember something, Jean? Something you can tell us?”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. I don’t.” She crosses her arms, sniffs the thick gray air of the garage. “I just want to come.”

  “Well,” I start, but at the same time Cortez says: “No.” I look at him, and he shakes his head. “No way.” Before I can marshal an argument, which I am not sure I have, Cortez is talking fast, stage-whispering his objections: “A, this girl is, tops, a hundred pounds; B, she’s unarmed; and C, she’s clearly not in a healthy place. If you gather my meaning. We don’t need her.”

  “She’s been down there. She can guide us.”

  “It’s a hole in the ground,” says Cortez. “I think we’ll figure it out.”

  I look at Jean, who looks back at me pleadingly, wavering on her feet. She doesn’t want to be alone, that’s all. She’s so pale standing there in the dim light that she is virtually transparent, like I might look away and look back and she’ll be gone, she’ll just slip out of existence.

  “Policeman, listen,” says Cortez, no longer bothering to whisper, his eyes fixed on the thin staircase leading down. “We’re not going in there to play ping-pong in the rec room. This isn’t all the set-up for a surprise party I planned for you.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right.

  “Jean,” I say softly.

  “No, it’s—” She turns away. “Fine. Okay.”

  “We’ll be right back,” I tell her, which probably isn’t true, and “you’ll be fine,” and of course that’s not true either.

  “You can’t save everybody, my boy,” says Cortez, while I watch Jean wander from the garage and maybe back to the holding cell that has somehow become her home, or maybe she’ll be darting off into the woods, taking her chances in the broken world until it’s gone. Or maybe she’s done, maybe she’s had enough and when we come back we’ll find her up here, hanging by a bedsheet, eyes bulging and lips blue like Peter Zell.

  We go down. Down we go.

  Cortez descends first and I follow him into the darkness. He’s whistling, softly, “hi-ho, hi-ho,” and I follow the sound of him whistling and the clang of his boot heels on the metal steps, my headlamp catching half-lit visions of his back and the backs of his shoes, until he reaches the bottom and stops and says, “Huh.”

  There is no blast door. We come off the last step onto a cement floor; cement walls; a long basement hallway. It’s cold, noticeably so, an easy ten degrees colder than upstairs; cold and dark and utterly silent. The smells of old stone, of mold and standing water, and underneath that a more recent scent, an acridness like something burning somewhere nearby. As we look around the empty room our headlamps cut overlapping slices of yellow gloom from the darkness.

  It’s nothing. It’s just plain nothing. It takes a moment or two for me to identify the feeling creeping up into my bones while I’m standing here, staring at this long empty quiet hallway. It’s disappointment is what it
is, a low cold disappointment, because some part of me had wondered. At some point without meaning to I had allowed some faint bubbles of hope to form and rise. Because of all of it—not just the damn helicopter, but all of it: the impressive geographic reach of this group, from New England to the Midwest; the Internet capacity, Jordan nonchalantly hacking an FBI database on a dial-up connection while the rest of the world is in rapid regression toward the Stone Age; those mysterious heavy crates Atlee Miller saw being trucked down here on Wednesday afternoon.

  Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from Star Wars. Something.

  But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.

  Where are the people? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?

  Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.

  “Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”

  My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.