World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  “Don’t do that,” he says, bleary, peering up. “No, please.”

  Blood bubbles up out of his mouth with the words, and in the glow of the fire behind me the blood looks black.

  “Try not to talk,” I say. “I’m putting pressure on the wound.” I lean forward, flattening one hand over the other hand, flattening both hands over his gaping chest.

  “Don’t put pressure on the wound.” He reaches up with surprising strength, pushes my hands off him. “Don’t do that.”

  “Please remain quiet and still,” I say, “until I can staunch the bleeding.”

  “I am going to bleed out and die.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I want to bleed out and die. Palace! This is so much better than a—fucking—I don’t know—tsunami or something.” He laughs, coughing, blood spraying out. “This is the best-case scenario.”

  I don’t like it. I shake my head. The idea of just leaving him here. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. God, yes. Did we get the monster?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, go get him.”

  “Her,” I say.

  “What?”

  The door to the room behind us is open, and Astronaut I can see in there, melted and smoldering, but it doesn’t matter—it’s Jean, it’s Jean who rushes past in the corner of my vision, hoping I don’t see her, but I do—I do.

  4.

  I don’t know why it matters, but I know that it does. Getting the rest of the story, hearing a confession, checking off the final details.

  Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.

  But society is dead. Civilization is burning cities, its terrified animals clustered around grain silos, stabbing each other at burned-down convenience stores for the last can of Pringles.

  Nevertheless—even so—here I go, I go charging through the darkness toward the stairs, following Jean’s frantic small form.

  I don’t yell for her to stop, because she won’t stop. I don’t yell “Police!” because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now. I hear her thin feet clanging up the stairs, hear the narrow metal stairwell rattling as she bolts for daylight. I charge across the floor and I follow her, hurling myself up the thin steps for the last time, putting the last of the pieces together, following Jean as she rattles up the stairway toward the clustered shadows at the top.

  Look what you made me—

  I sidestep small mounds of rubble still on the top step and into the garage and even among the horror of all that’s happening, the desperation to catch up to Jean and get the rest of the story, still I feel a rush of gladness from being done with that bunker, that crypt. I burst up into the aboveground, drinking air and daylight like a surfacing diver.

  I stumble across the three-car indoor garage, navigating the craters and piles, and then I’m in the hallway and I can see Jean, racing hopelessly a few paces ahead of me down the hallway, down the long corridor where I started my search, the corridor marked by my sister’s blood and her blood, one trail in and one trail out.

  I had to stop her, see—I had to—

  I’m much faster than Jean. She’s fast and desperate, but I’m tall and my legs are very long and I’m desperate too, and I do it—just as the glass front door of the police station is swinging shut behind her I push it back open and launch myself and catch her legs and get her down into the mud, and then I push myself back up so that by the time she turns over there I am, looming, full height with weapons drawn, the knife and the gun.

  “Please,” she says, her body trembling and her hands clasped together. “Please.”

  I glare down at her. We’re surrounded by the overgrown bushes, blinking green in the daylight. The autumn wind riffles my hair, tickling up my shirtsleeves.

  “Please,” she says softly. “Do it quickly.”

  She is assuming my intention is to kill her. This is not my intention but I don’t tell her that. I have no interest in her in any way. But I don’t say that and I’m standing here with the butcher’s knife and the SIG and I see that she sees those things, I see that she sees the flat look in my eyes. “Tell me,” I say. My voice is flat also, flat and cold.

  The flags ripple in the breeze, making a tinny tink-tink-tink as the ropes dance against the poles.

  “I killed her.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know that,” I say again, and what I mean is “I don’t care.” Her sorrow is beside the point. I want answers, my chest is swollen with the wanting, my weapons are shaking in my hands. She thinks I am going to slay her where she lays, she thinks that I am vengeance-mad and bent on slaughter. But she’s got it wrong, I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.

  “He made you do it.”

  The word “yes” comes out softly and sharply, a little agonized rush of air.

  “How did he make you do it? Jean?”

  “I—” Eyes closed; breathing hard. “I can’t.”

  “Jean.” She’s suffered enough. I am aware of that. Everybody has, though. Everybody has. “How? When?”

  “As soon as—” Her whole body spasms, and she turns her face away. I crouch down and seize her chin and turn her face back to me.

  “As soon as you went underground?” Nod. Yes. “Between four thirty and five thirty last Wednesday. Let’s call it five. Five o’clock on September 26. What happened then?”

  “He said we were going to have a party. To celebrate our new lives. We can’t be gloomy, he said. A new life. New time. We didn’t even, you know. Didn’t unpack. Or look around. It was just—as soon as we got downstairs we sat down.”

  “In the room marked LADIES.”

  “Yes.”

  Nodding, nodding. I won’t let her become like she was in the jail cell, withdrawing, floating away like a space capsule drifting from the mother ship. I stay close, keep my eyes boring into hers.

  “Did it seem strange to you? To be having a party at such a time?”

  “No. Not at all. I felt relieved. I was tired of waiting. Parry wasn’t coming. ‘Resolution.’ It wasn’t happening. We all knew that by then. It was time for plan B. I was glad. Astronaut was glad, too. He poured drinks for everyone. Proposed a toast.” A flicker of a smile rushes across her face, a vestigial fondness for the charismatic leader, but it dies fast. “But then he—he starts this speech. About our loyalty. About how we’ve lost discipline. How the hard part hasn’t even started yet. He said our behavior outside, all the hanging out, while we had been waiting, it was bullshit. He told us we were weak. He spray-painted on the wall.”

  I listen. I am down there with her, watching his face contort with anger, watching the words appear on the wall: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

  “And then he started talking about Nico. He said, look who’s not here. Look who abandoned us. Look who betrayed us.”

  Kessler was right about DeCarlo. He had him nailed. Suicide didn’t fit the profile, but this: in group/out group dynamics. Cruel games. Tests of loyalty. And drugs, of course, Big Pharma and his clever hand with a concoction. He had resolved to kill all of his erstwhile coconspirators—he was doing it even then, merrily topping off everybody’s tea—but first he was going to have some fun.

  “Go on, please.”

  Jean looks at me helplessly, piteously. She is desperate to stop this line of conversation, desperate not to get to the end. To just lie in peace like Agent Kessler, waiting for the end.

  I can see myself, a form of myself, floating up out of my body and running to get her a blanket, lift her gently, get her water, protect her. Young girl—recent trauma—curled in fear on the forest
floor. But what I’m doing is nothing, what I’m doing is standing here clutching my weapons waiting for her to continue.

  “The rest. Tell me the rest.”

  “He, um—he looked at me. At me. And he told me I was the worst. The weakest. And he told me what I—what I had to do. To earn my place.” Her lip curls, her face tightens. The words are dull stones, she chokes them out one by one. “I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘Goodbye then, good luck. We are happy to drink your share of the water, little sister. To eat your share of the food.’ ”

  She closes her eyes and I watch tears roll out from under the lids.

  “I looked at the rest of them for help—or for, for pity, or—”

  She looks down at the dirt. She got no help and she got no pity. They were as afraid as she was, all the rest of them, Tick and Valentine and Little Man and her old pals Sailor and Delighted, all as scared and confused, all just as firmly under the thumb of their leader. A week from impact and sharply aware of how isolated they had become, as the world narrowed to a pinpoint like the circle of darkness at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. As their leader and protector peeled off his layers, showing them the cruelty at his core.

  So Astronaut tells Jean to go on now, he says get up, and she does, she gets up, she goes—and as she is telling me this story she is dissolving. She is seeing the memory complete itself out of the fog of forgetfulness, and it is killing her, I can see it. Every sentence is killing her. Every word. “I loved Nico. She was my friend. But as I was walking up those stairs my mind got—I don’t know. Hollow. There was all this shouting, these weird voices shouting, and—like—giggling?”

  “You were hallucinating,” I say. “He drugged you.”

  She nods. She knows this already, I think. Weird voices and dark streaks from the cruel courage in her tea. Whatever secret ingredient he put in to add to his private fun. His game, his apocalyptic April Fool’s Day joke. Given her overdose and the subsequent patchy spots in her memory, we’re probably talking about a hallucinogen, some sort of dissociative anesthetic; PCP, maybe, or ketamine. But I can’t say with certainty, it’s not my area of expertise, and if it would do any good I would take blood, I would stick her with a needle and catch any lingering molecules still swimming in her veins. Send it to the lab, boys!

  The rest of them got much worse, of course. This was Astronaut’s real plan B. Food and water were limited, everything was limited, and he wasn’t going to share any of it, not for a second.

  So here comes Jean up the rickety stairs with Astronaut’s sawtooth buck knife, shoved out of the hatch and told the price of her future. Surfing darkly, wild chemical horrors churning in her gut along with the terror. Looking for Nico.

  “You know what?” She looks up at me with hope in her eyes, a small spark of joy. “You know what I remember? I remember thinking she’s probably gone. Because she told me she was going to leave, on the stairs she told me. And then with the party, and the speech, I mean, we’d been down there for—I don’t know, half an hour? He sat us down, he gave the speech, it had been time. If she was leaving she’d be gone already. I remember thinking that.”

  I’ve thought of it too. It’s in the timeline I’ve got, up in my head.

  “But there she was. She was still there,” says Jean. “Why was she still there?”

  “Candy,” I say.

  “What?”

  “It was going to be a hard trip. She took what food she could find.”

  She took the time to empty that machine, to prop it with the fork and run a coat hanger or her skinny arms up there and empty it out, she took that time and it cost her her life.

  “So you fought her.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember fighting her? And her fighting you?”

  Her hand flies up to her face, her scratches and bruises, and then down again.

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember the woods?”

  She trembles. “No.”

  I lean over her, the gun and the knife in my two hands. “What do you remember, Jean?”

  She remembers afterward, she says. She remembers running back to the garage, and finding that it was sealed. And understanding, even in her dark and addled desperation, understanding what it meant. The whole thing had been a joke, he had known all along she wouldn’t make it down there. Because Atlee Miller had already come and sealed up the hole, as Astronaut knew that he would.

  And then there was just the sink. Just the sink and the knife and knowing what she had done and that she had done it for nothing—for nothing—and then cutting herself open like she had cut Nico open. Pressing the knife in as far as she could stand it, until the blood was pouring out of her and she was shrieking, and running, running from the blood, running out into the woods.

  That’s the story. That’s the whole story, she says, and she’s trembling on the ground, her face is streaked with grief, but I’m pacing back and forth above her, that’s the whole story, she says, but there must be more, I have to have more. There are pieces missing. There has to be a reason, for example, that a slitting of the throat presented itself as the logical method—was that directed by Astronaut or was that an improvisation, the most effective means in the moment? And surely she was directed to bring back something. If she was supposedly earning her place in the bunker by killing Nico, there must have been a token to prove it.

  I throw myself down in the mud and drop the weapons and grab her shoulders.

  “I have more questions,” I tell Jean. Snarling; shouting.

  “No,” she says. “Please.”

  “Yes.”

  Because I can’t solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can’t end with the crime unsolved, that’s all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.

  “We need to go back to the woods, Jean. Back to the part in the woods.”

  “No,” she says. “Please—”

  “Yes, Jean. Ms. Wong. You find her outside the building. Is she surprised to see you?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t remember.”

  “Please try to remember. Is she surprised?”

  She nods. “Yes. Please, stop.”

  “Do you have the knife out at this point—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You chase her—”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t guess. Did you chase her through the woods? Over that creek?”

  “Please … please stop.”

  Jean’s terrified eyes meet mine and it’s working, I can see her seeing it again, being there, I’m doing it, I’m going to get the information I need, she’s back there now at the scene with the knife handle wrapped in her palm, Nico’s struggling weight beneath her. And where was I, I was on the way but I wasn’t here yet, it took me too long, I should have been here to save her but I wasn’t and it’s burning, my blood is burning. I need more, I need all of it.

  “Did she beg you for her life?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she, Jean?”

  She can’t speak. She nods, nods weeping, thrashes in my grip.

  “Was she screaming?”

  Nodding and nodding, helpless.

  “She begged you to stop? But you didn’t stop?”

  “Please—”

  “There are more things I need to know.”

  “No,” she says, “no, you don’t—right? You don’t, right? You don’t really, right?”

  Her voice is altered, high and pleading, like a little kid, like a toddler, pleading to be told that something unpleasant isn’t really so. I don’t really have to go to the doctor, right? I don’t really have to take a bath. Jean and I hold our pose for a minute, down in the mud, me clutching her shoulders tightly, and I feel it, suddenly, where we’ve gotten to, here, what’s happening. What the asteroid did to her is done, and what Astronaut did to her is done, and now here
I am, her last and worst terror, forcing her to stare into this blackness, wade through it like every detail matters, like it can possibly matter.

  I let her go and she rolls her head back away from me, emitting low terrified moans like an animal on the slaughterhouse floor.

  “Jean,” I say. “Jean. Jean. Jean.”

  I say her name until she stops moaning. I say it softly, softer and softer, until it becomes a whisper, “Jean, Jean, Jean,” a soothing small little whisper, just the word, “Jean.”

  I am sunk now into the ground beside her.

  “When did your parents give you that bracelet?”

  “The—what?”

  Her right hand moves to the left wrist and she brushes her fingers over the cheap piece of jewelry.

  “You told me when we first talked that it was your parents who gave you the charm bracelet. Was it on your birthday?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “It was my first communion.”

  “Is that right?” I smile. I lean backward, balance myself with my fingers laced across my knees. “So you’re how old for that?”

  “Seven,” she says. “I was seven. They were so proud of me.”

  “Oh, boy, I’ll bet they were.”

  We sit there for a while in the mud of the lawn and she gives it all to me, painting the picture: the soaring nave of St. Mary’s in Lansing, Michigan, the dancing lights of the votive candles, the warm harmonies of the choir. She remembers quite a lot of it, considering how young she was, how much has happened to her since. After a while I tell her a couple of my own stories, from when I was a kid: my parents taking us up to the old Dairy Queen on Saturday evenings for shakes; going to the 7-Eleven after school to buy Batman comics; biking with Nico all around White Park, when she first learned to ride and never wanted to get off the darn thing, around and around and around and around.