Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “Do you mind?”

  She shrugs. “He was your friend.”

  I lift the small envelope and shake out what’s inside: a microcassette tape, the kind that was once used for answering-machine messages, the kind on which senior executives would make their dictations.

  “Do you know what’s on it?”

  “Nope.”

  I stand there looking at the tape. It might take me some effort to find something that could play this tape, is what I’m thinking, but I could definitely make it happen. At the station house, in one of the storerooms, there were a couple of old answering machines. They might still be there, and Officer McConnell could maybe dig one out for me. Or I’m sure I could find a pawn shop, or maybe at one of the big outdoor markets they’re having down in Manchester now, every week, big public-space flea markets—I could find one, play the tape. Be interesting, if nothing else, just to hear his voice—be interesting—

  Mrs. Talley is waiting, watching me with her head at an angle, like a bird. The little tape rests in my palm like my hand belongs to a giant.

  “Okay, ma’am,” I say, slipping the tape back into the envelope, laying it back in the capsule. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Okay.”

  She walks me to the door and waves goodbye. “Watch yourself on the steps, there. Your friend slipped on the way out, banged up his face pretty bad.”

  * * *

  I unchain my bike from the green central square of New Castle, now crowded with merrymakers, and start out for home, the joyful clamor of the parade fading behind me until it sounds like a music box, and then is gone.

  I ride along the shoulder of highway 90, feeling the breeze in my pant legs and up the sleeves of my coat, wavering in the wake of the occasional delivery truck or state vehicle. They suspended mail delivery last Friday, with a rather elaborate ceremony at the White House, but private companies are still delivering packages, the FedEx drivers with armed heavies riding shotgun. I have accepted an early retirement from the Concord Police Department, with a pension equal to eighty-five percent of my full salary at the time of retirement. In total, I served as a patrol officer for one year, three months, and ten days, and as a detective in the Criminal Investigations Unit for three months and twenty days.

  I go ahead and take my bike right down the middle of I-90, ride it right along the double yellow lines.

  You can’t think too much about what happens next, you really can’t.

  * * *

  I don’t get home until the middle of the night and there she is waiting for me, sitting on one of the overturned milk crates I keep on the porch for chairs: my baby sister in a long skirt and a light jean jacket, the strong bitter smell of her American Spirits. Houdini is giving her the evil eye from behind the other milk crate, teeth bared, trembling, thinking somehow that he’s invisible.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, and I rush up toward her, leaving the bike in the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, and then we’re hugging, laughing, I’m pressing her head into the bones of my chest.

  “You total jerk,” I say, when we pull apart, and she says, “I’m sorry, Hen. I’m really sorry.”

  She doesn’t need to say any more, that’s all I need to hear, in terms of a confession. She knew all along what she was doing, when she begged me, in tears, to help spring her husband.

  “It’s okay. To be honest, I guess I’m rather impressed, retrospectively, with your cleverness. You played me like a—how did dad used to say it? Like an oboe? Something?”

  “I don’t know, Henry.”

  “Sure you do. Something about an oboe, with a bonobo, and—”

  “I was only six, Henry. I don’t know any of the sayings.”

  She flicks the butt of her cigarette off the porch and pulls out another one. Reflexively I scowl at her chain-smoking, and reflexively she rolls her eyes at my paternalism—old habits. Houdini gives a little tentative woof and pokes his snout out from under the milk crate. Officer McConnell has informed me that the dog is a bichon frisé, but I still like to think of him a poodle.

  “So all right, but now you need to tell me. What did you need to know? What information did I unwittingly provide for you by worming my way into the New Hampshire National Guard?”

  “Somewhere in this country there is a secret project under construction,” Nico begins, slowly, her face turned away from mine. “And it’s not going to be somewhere obvious. We’ve narrowed it down, and now our goal is to find the seemingly innocuous facility where this project is taking place.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Can’t tell you. But we have information—”

  “Where’d you get the information?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Come on, Nico.”

  I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. I’m arguing with my little sister, like we used to over the last Popsicle, or over her boosting my grandfather’s car, except this time we’re fighting about some preposterous geopolitical conspiracy.

  “There is a certain level of security in place to protect this project.”

  “And, just so I’m clear, you don’t really believe that it’s a shuttle to take people to the Moon.”

  “Well,” she says, draws on her cigarette. “Well. Some of us do believe that.”

  My mouth drops open, the full ramifications of this thing—what she’s done, what she’s doing here, why she’s apologizing—all of it only now sinking in. I look at her again, my sister, and she even looks different, a lot less like my mother than she used to. She is thinner than before, and her eyes are sunken and serious, not an ounce of baby fat to soften the hard lines of her face.

  Nico, Peter, Naomi, Erik—everybody hoarding secrets, changing. Maia, from 280 million miles, having her way with us all.

  “Derek was one of the saps, huh? You were on the inside, but your husband really thought we were escaping to the Moon.”

  “He had to. He had to believe he had a purpose in riding his ATV onto the base, but he couldn’t know the real purpose. Too untrustworthy. Too—you know.”

  “Too stupid.”

  She doesn’t answer. Her face is set, her eyes gleaming now with something familiar, something chilling, something like the aggressive religious types in Police Plaza, like the worst of the Brush Cuts, rousting their drunks for the thrill of it. All the true believers batting away the reality of all of this.

  “So, the level of security you mentioned. If that had been the real facility, the place you’re looking for, I would have found him, what, in shackles?”

  “No. You would have found him dead.”

  Her voice is cold, brutal. I feel like I’m standing here with a stranger.

  “And you knew he was going to be taking this risk when you sent him in there. He didn’t know, but you did.”

  “Henry, I knew it when I married him.”

  Nico looks off into the distance and smokes her cigarette, and I’m standing here shivering, not even because of what happened to Derek, not because of this crazy science-fiction madness that my sister has let herself become involved in, not even because I was unknowingly dragged into it, too. I’m shivering because this is it—when Nico takes off, tonight, we’re done—I’m never going to see her again. That’ll leave me and the dog, together, waiting.

  “All I can tell you is that it was worth it.”

  “How can you say that?” I’m remembering the last part of the story, too, the botched jailbreak, Derek left behind, left for dead. Expendable. A sacrifice. I pick up my bike, heave it onto my shoulder, and walk past her to the door.

  “I mean—wait—do you want to know what it is we’re looking for?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Because it’s worth it.”

  I’m done. I’m not even angry, so much as exhausted. I’ve been biking all day. My legs hurt from my ride. I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow, but it’s late. The world keeps turning.

  “You have to trust me,” say
s Nico to my back, I’m at the door now, the door is open, Houdini is at my heels. “It’s all worth it.”

  I stop, and I turn and look at her.

  “It’s hope,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. “It’s hope. Okay.”

  I close the door.

  THANK YOU

  Dr. Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

  Dr. Cynthia Gardner, forensic pathologist

  The Concord Police Department, especially Officers Joseph Wright and Craig Leveques

  Andrew Winters, Esq.

  Jeff Strelzin, New Hampshire assistant attorney general

  Steve Walters at Loyola University Maryland

  Binyamin Applebaum at the New York Times

  Dr. Judy Greene

  David Belson at Akamai Technologies

  Dr. Nora Osman and Dr. Mark Pomeranz

  Jason and Jane and Doogie and Dave and Brett and Mary Ellen and Nicole and Eric and everyone else at Quirk Books

  Molly Lyons and Joelle Delbourgo

  Early readers Nick Tamarkin, Erik Jackson, and Laura Gutin

  Michael Hyman (and Wylie the Dog)

  And thanks very, very, very much to Diana and Rosalie and Isaac and Milly

  * * *

  Rusty Schweickart, former NASA astronaut and asteroid expert, urged me not to write this book, suggesting I take on instead the vastly more likely scenario of a sub-apocalyptic but still-devastating impact. I failed to honor this request, but I can recommend that everyone visit his work at the B612 Foundation (www.B612Foundation.org).

  WHAT WOULD YOU DO …

  … with just six months until the

  end of the world?

  Author Ben H. Winters posed this question to a variety of writers, artists, and notable figures.

  Visit QuirkBooks.com/TheLastPoliceman to:

  • Read their answers

  • Share your own responses

  • Watch the book trailer

  • Read a Q&A with Ben H. Winters

  • Discover the science behind the science fiction

  And much more!