Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II

by Ben H. Winters

  * * *

  Jeremy’s body I leave in the bathtub. There is no other option that makes sense. I happen to know that the Willard Street Funeral Parlor is home now to a clutch of doomsday prophets, just as I happen to know that the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital is abandoned, Dr. Fenton now upstairs doing furious triage along with whoever else is around.

  There is nowhere to report this death or deliver this corpse, because suddenly the streets are on fire and ours is a savage land. I lay the man out more neatly in his claw-footed bathtub, push his eyelids shut with my forefingers, and go.

  6.

  My house is gone.

  When at last the dog and I get back to my address on Clinton Street, we find just the bones of a house, just the beams, leaning precariously in the summer darkness among the shadowy silver maples. It was stripped for the metal and the siding and the bricks and then burned; or possibly it burned first, and then the looters came and carried away the remains. Grim drifting heaps of ash and stray pieces of furniture. My hoard of goods, my jars of peanut butter and my gas mask and my jugs of water, these were beneath the floorboards under the sofa in the back end of the living room. The hoard is gone. The floorboards are gone. The sofa is gone. The living room is gone.

  Houdini and I wander slowly through the ruins like we’re walking on the moon. The cement foundation is still in place, and I can trace the rough outlines of where the rooms used to be: the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. Disintegrating plasterboard piles that used to be walls. Houdini noses at the wreckage and comes up with a table leg, clutched in his jaws like a shankbone. I find my copy of Farley and Leonard’s Criminal Investigation, charred, recognizable by the pattern of colors on the cover. Piano keys like teeth. A scattering of old Polaroids: my parents mugging at a holiday party, Dad in a mistletoe cap, Mom’s lips brushing his cheek.

  I am aware, in an abstract way, that this is a catastrophe. The countdown has begun, and all the haphazard arrangements—the rummages and the ersatz restaurants and the bartering and the residents associations—all of the vestigial institutions are crumbling into the past, and it’s every man for himself from now on, and here I am with no house, no gun, no possessions of any kind. I’m down one arm. I’m wearing a borrowed shirt and torn suit pants.

  But what I feel is nothing. Numbness and cold. I’m a house full of burned-out rooms.

  I told Martha I would make every effort to find her husband and bring him home. I told her I could do it. I promised.

  The man she longed for is dead. And now she, too, is dead, or somewhere dying, somewhere alone, and the only person who knows her whereabouts is yet another dead man. The world collapsing, turning into death, disappearing before my eyes.

  I sat at her kitchen table, smiled to see her again after all these years, looked into her worried eyes, and made a promise.

  Houdini hunts around me in a circle, nose down, lifting and then dropping bits of plaster with his sharp teeth.

  There is a bright and beautiful glow in the direction of downtown, a radiant bulb, pulsing with light. I stare at it until I understand that this is the capitol dome of the statehouse of New Hampshire, and that it is on fire.

  The practicalities of my situation are hard to grasp. I will need help, but from whom? Dr. Fenton? Culverson?

  I sink down cross-legged in the dirt and Houdini takes a position next to me, erect and watchful, panting. I lift a photograph from the mud, Nico and me with arms wrapped around each other at her high-school graduation. My expression is adult, serious, self-congratulatory, quietly proud for having seen to it that she made it to that day. Nico for her part is grinning, ear to ear, because she was high as a satellite.

  I could have stayed on that helicopter. Could be in Idaho or Illinois right now, reconning with the team. Saving the world.

  The thought of Nico is suddenly devastating, and I can’t pretend to be cynical about it, not even to myself—the idea that I’m sitting here, and she is there. What have I done? What have I done? I should have stayed on that helicopter. I never should have let her go. I lie in the rutted crater that was my home and consider my choices: calling my sister a fool for pursuing a one-in-a-million chance at survival while I’m the one who’s accepted a hundred percent chance of death.

  A screech of tires and the slam of a car door, ancient and familiar sounds, and I sit upright and jerk my head around and Houdini takes a stance and barks. Parked diagonally across my yard is a Chevrolet Impala, the standard Concord Police Department vehicle, a glimmer of moonlight dancing across the hood.

  Footsteps, getting closer. I struggle to my feet. Houdini barks louder.

  “Let’s go, Henry.”

  Trish McConnell. I gape at her, and she grins like a naughty kid.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your life, Skinny.” Officer McConnell somehow looks more like a cop when she’s out of uniform: short and tough in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. “What happened to your arm?”

  “Oh—” I wiggle the thick limb. It hurts. “It’s fine. What’s happening?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car. Come on.”

  I look at Trish and then toward downtown, toward the fires and the wildness. The city smells like smoke. “Shouldn’t you be on patrol?”

  “No one’s on patrol. Our orders were to stand down, let this shit burn itself out. Risk no department resources. The rest of the force is at School Street, drinking beer and looking at dirty magazines.”

  “So, why aren’t you there?

  “I don’t like dirty magazines.” She laughs. McConnell is all fired up, that much is clear, this is her play, she’s ready to roll. “I am away without leave, Officer Palace, and I ain’t going back. I borrowed the Chevy from the Justice Department and I am taking off, right now, very quickly, and you’re coming, too.”

  “Why me?”

  She smiles cryptically. “Come on, you dummy.”

  The vehicle is on and purring, the exhaust from some real genuine DOJ regular unleaded gasoline pouring out of the tailpipe. It’s a beautiful thing, a Chevrolet Impala, it really is, clean lines, efficient: a pure police car. Houdini is over there, peering up at its tinted windows. I’m trying to think quickly and smartly, trying to process everything. The statehouse is blazing ferociously in the distance, a Roman candle burning down in the heart of our little skyline.

  “Come on, Palace,” says McConnell, standing at the driver’s side door. “The worst of the chaos is up by the reservoir, but we’re going exactly the other way.” She pounds on the hood of the car. “You ready to rock?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let me just …” I look around. I have no suitcase. No clothes to pack. Someone took my house. I tug Culverson’s dress shirt closer around me and walk toward the car. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  The shotgun seat is stuffed with suitcases and cardboard cartons of food and bottles of Gatorade. So I slide into the backseat next to McConnell’s children, and Houdini takes a position between us.

  “Hi,” I say to Kelli and Robbie, as McConnell guns it and screeches out onto Clinton Street. Robbie has his thumb in his mouth, a ragged blue teddy bear tucked against his chin. Kelli looks solemn and scared.

  “What kind of dog is that?” she asks me.

  “A bichon frisé,” I say. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  “Really?” says Kelli. “He actually looks pretty tough.”

  * * *

  McConnell takes the Chevy down Clinton Street, away from downtown, toward the highway, and while Houdini consents for Robbie to tickle his neck scruff, I lean forward into the mesh grate and ask McConnell where we’re going.

  “The mansion.”

  “What mansion?

  “I told you, Palace.” She laughs. “Me and some of the others, the old-timers—Michelson, Capshaw, Rodriguez—we blocked this all out months ago.

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Oh right.”

  “It’s in Western Mass., a little town called Fu
rman, near the New York border. We got the place all set up. Plenty of water, plenty of food. Cooking oil. Necessary precautions.” She raises her voice, glances in the rearview mirror. “And there are even some kids there, other kids. Officer Rogers has twin boys.”

  “Those guys are assholes,” says Kelli, and McConnell says, “Language, honey,” and leans on the gas, hits ninety miles an hour, sure and straight, barreling over back roads on the way out of town.

  “I thought you were kidding about all that. The mansion in the country. The whole thing.”

  “I never kid.”

  McConnell smiles, sly, elusive, proud, the Impala whooshing along Highway 1, the Merrimack a brown ribbon to our left. Holy moly, I think, holy cow, easing back into my seat. Western Mass. Kelli asks for a bottle of water so Houdini can have a drink, and McConnell pushes two bottles through the seat-grate opening, not without a small wince of anxiety—nothing as precious as a bottle of water. I say thanks on the dog’s behalf, and McConnell says, “Sure,” says “Drink one yourself, you damn scarecrow.”

  McConnell, I like—I always have.

  The moon glimmers through the tinted backseat windows of the Impala as we rattle over untended roads, out across the bridge, toward the junction with 89 South, the city in flames all around us. Robbie falls asleep. We roar past a long line of people, a block and a half long, lugging backpacks and duffel bags and pulling rolling suitcases, a residents’ association heading together into exile by some prearrangement, headed out of town but God knows to where.

  Despite everything, I lean back and let the exhaustion overtake me, let my eyelids drift and flutter, Houdini safe in Kelli’s lap beside me, and I start to feel that kind of dreamy magic that comes with car rides late at night.

  There’s a word my mind is looking for.

  I said, McConnell, what are you doing here? and she said, Saving your life, Skinny.

  What’s the word I’m looking for?

  I lay in the dirt patch that had been my house, and the Impala came and what did she offer me?

  Tell him he has to come home, Martha said, urgent and imploring. Tell him his salvation depends on it.

  My eyes shoot open.

  Kelli and Houdini are both snoring gently; we’re way on the outskirts of the city by now, coming up on its limits and the westward highway.

  Salvation.

  All these people braving the terrible seas, getting shot or dragged out of the water in nets, casting themselves upon unfamiliar shores in search of what—the same thing my sister is chasing across the country in a stolen helicopter.

  Salvation. And not in some glorious tomorrow, not in the majestic heights of heaven. Salvation here.

  I’ve got no notebook. No pencil. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to do the timeline work, put it together, see if this makes sense.

  Sergeant Thunder got that stupid brochure last week and bartered away his worldly goods last week, but evacuation day was today—Culverson saw him today, out on his porch, waiting and waiting, miserable and forlorn. That was today.

  “McConnell?”

  “Yeah, buddy.”

  Cortez saw her waiting on her porch at let’s call it 8:30 this morning, waiting for someone. Jeremy got there at nine or ten, desperate and excited, ready to make his lovesick plea, but Martha was gone. Long gone.

  “McConnell, I need to make just one quick stop.”

  “What?”

  “Or—it’s okay—you can drop me off.”

  “Palace.”

  “I’ll catch up with you. Leave me the address. I need to get to this pizza place.”

  “A pizza place?”

  “It’s called Rocky’s. Up by Steeplegate Mall.”

  Officer McConnell is not slowing down.

  “One quick stop, Trish.” I lean forward and plead into the mesh, like a criminal, desperate, like a sinner to his confessor. “Please. One stop.”

  7.

  McConnell growls and goes full code, kicks on the lights and screamers and throws the Impala into a fishtailing U-turn, takes us a thousand miles an hour toward Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl up by the mall. She veers onto the sidewalk to get around a thick mob milling about at the intersection of Loudon Road and Herndon Street. Half of them have big flashlights, most of them have handguns, and they’re circled around a cluttered herd of shopping carts. One man in a leather jacket and motorcycle helmet is hanging from the top of a lamppost, shouting at them, instructions or warnings. I squint at the man as we race past—when I was a kid, he was our dentist.

  As we slam to a stop outside Rocky’s, I can see two distinct pyres radiating up from the different wings of the Steeplegate Mall.

  “Minutes,” says McConnell angrily. “This block will be on fire within five minutes.”

  “I know.”

  Kelli is waking, looking around, as I jump out of the car.

  “I’m serious, McConnell,” I call. “Go if you have to.”

  “I will,” she says, shouting after me as I run toward the pizza place. “I’m going to.”

  The doors are closed and looped with chains. I’m wondering if it’s too late, but I don’t think it is. I think they’re still in there, Martha and her father, Rocky. The city is on fire and they’re huddled and waiting like Sergeant Thunder for salvation that is not coming. Huddled together in the center of that giant room, the vast space emptied of its valuables, everything turned over to the con: the wood-burning oven, the paintball guns and targets, the heavy appliances with their yards of copper and coolant and gas tanks.

  I bang again, kick at the glass. Rocky and Martha in there, sitting, going crazy. They’ve been in there since this morning, since Rocky showed up to get her, today’s the day, no more waiting around for your stupid runaway husband. Bad luck for Cortez that he happened to be there when Rocky arrived, time ticking away, in no mood to discuss a damn thing with anyone. He just needed his daughter, and he needed her now. Today was the big day—not a moment to waste.

  I move to the left, along the wall of the building, occasionally pounding on one of the windows with the heel of my good hand. No chance of kicking open this door; it’s thick Plexiglas. If Jeremy stopped by here after Martha’s house, and I bet he did, he would have found another dead end, another place his true love had disappeared from. No wonder he went home and ate poison.

  But they’re in there. Waiting. I know they are. The world collapsing all around them and still waiting for the men who promised they would come.

  “Hey?” I shout, slamming against the window. “Hey!”

  I shield my eyes and try to peer through the tinted glass, but I can’t see anything, and maybe they’re not in here, maybe I’ve got it wrong. Martha’s not here to be rescued and I’m risking my life and McConnell’s and the kids’, too, for nothing. I glance back over my shoulder and I can see Trish glaring from the driver’s seat. I hope she does, I hope she goes, takes her children and my dog and abandons me for safety.

  It’s hot, it’s so hot, even in the middle of the night, the black summer night tinted by the crazy oranges and yellows of the fires.

  I yell their names again—Rocky! Martha!—but there must be one more code word, a shibboleth they memorized at the behest of the smooth-talking salesmen from the World Beyond, something they’re expecting to hear when the nice men from the rescue convoy roll up in their black cars and jumpsuits. I turn around. McConnell is still sitting there. I jab one finger in the air and I whirl it around, a little piece of police sign language, and in case she can’t see me or doesn’t understand, I yell it: “Lights, McConnell,” I holler. “Turn on the lights.”

  McConnell turns on the lights. They spin on the top of the car, the classic cop-show colors, blue reflecting on black. It’s a cruel trick, but I need Martha out here. I need her to come out and you can’t tell a trooper car from a CPD Impala, not from inside a dark restaurant. And it works. She sees what she wants to see, just like she did in her dream. The door slams open and she races out, flies toward the car.r />
  “Martha.”

  But she doesn’t wait; she races past me to the police car, stares into the windows. I see McConnell up front and Kelli in the backseat, jerking backward, away from the desperate phantom at the window. He’s not in there and she spins around as Rocky Milano comes lumbering out to retrieve her. He’s out of his apron, in a sweat suit, his bald forehead red and dripping with sweat.

  Martha runs back toward me, whipping her head one way and another, her cheeks flushed. Her pale eyes are wide with need. “Where is—where is he?”

  “Martha—”

  “Where is he?” cries Martha, lunging at me across the lot.

  I don’t know what to say, how much of the story is worth telling. A kid was obsessed with you. He tricked your husband into leaving. Your husband went on a madman’s crusade. He was shot and he died in a field by a beach.

  “Where is he?”

  “Martha, get inside,” says Rocky. “It’s dangerous out here.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Time to go.”

  Rocky peers at me like a stranger. Barely recognizes me. He’s focused on the next step of his life, on cashing in the promise of escape he’s been given—for himself and his daughter and for his son-in-law, too, until Brett’s mysterious disappearance. I wonder if he asked the World Beyond people for that special: “Hey can this guy get in there, too? My daughter won’t come without him.” I wonder if the hucksters hemmed and hawed and finally agreed, no skin off their backs, peddling one more nonexistent spot in their nonexistent underground compound.

  “Where’s Brett, Henry?” says poor Martha, and I just tell her, I say, “He’s dead,” and she collapses to the ground on her knees, buries her face in her hands and wails, one long keening senseless syllable. That’s the end of the world right there for Martha Milano.

  “Sweetheart?” Rocky is all business, heaving her up by the armpits and clasping her with his big hands. “It’s okay. We’re going to mourn him, but we’re going to move on. Come on. We’re moving on.”

  He’s dragging her back toward the building, which will be on fire any minute now. McConnell honks the horn. But I can’t leave. I can’t leave her here. I can’t let her die.