Countdown City

1.

Route 4 meanders eastward from Durham and then north-northeast along the line of the Piscataqua River, offering me a wide rolling view of Portsmouth Harbor: rusting lobster traps bobbing unattended; boats listing in their abandonment, paint peeling, hulls jutting out of the shallows.

It’s just me this time, bright and early and out on my mission. Detective Palace, retired, on his ten-speed with the dog hitched to the back in the little red wagon.

Cutts Neck—Raynes Neck—the long span of Memorial Bridge reaching high over the harbor. Then the series of roundabouts that spit you out onto 103 East. I know this route by pure sense memory from our handful of summers at York Beach, before the bottom fell out of my childhood. I roll past the big blue donut that had marked Louie’s Roadside Diner, now torn from its mooring by weather or vandals and lolling across the parking lot like a giant’s abandoned toy.

The sun is almost all the way up now, it’s close to nine, and I’m leaning into the curve of the third roundabout, navigating around the pits and gashes in the asphalt, speeding past the gates of Portsmouth Naval Station on the seaward side. I’m coming. The woods huddle in close against the road as 103 crosses the border and cuts into southeastern Maine, gives up its last pretense of being a highway and settles down into a crooked little two-lane road with a faded yellow line down the middle.

Here I come.

Fort Riley, when I find it, sits on the northern lip of Portsmouth Harbor, a castle keep built on a cliff wall, staring out at the sea. For a couple hundred years it was an active United States Army fort, minding the coast during the Revolution, the War of 1812, all the way up to World War II, when civil reserves in green helmets would sit in seaside redoubts like this one, up and down the coast, peering out at the northern Atlantic for U-boats. For half a century Riley was a state park and historical site; now it’s where Brett Cavatone, my missing man, has come to make camp. I turn off the highway into the parking lot, a long narrow spit of gravel with dense woods to the left and, to the right, the high tumbling stone wall of the old fort itself.

I get off the bike and lift Houdini from the wagon and set him down in the gravel. My chest is thick with anticipation. The air smells like the sea. He’s here, I’m thinking. This is it. Hello, sir. My name is Henry Palace.

I walk slowly down the length of the parking lot, hands out of my pockets and slightly raised, a picture of harmlessness, in case anyone is watching—anyone with a pair of sniper rifles and reason to be wary of visitors. There’s one car in the lot, a gray Buick LeSabre with Quebec plates and all four tires shot out. In the backseat, a teddy bear and an Uno deck. The entrance to the fort is all the way at the end of the parking lot, an arched doorway just where the stone wall bends away to the south and the gravel ends in grass and weeds. Farther on is the ocean.

Put down your weapons, sir. Your wife would like you to come home.

“Okay,” I say, to no one, or to the dog I guess, but then I see that he’s decided to stay back by the bicycle. I turn around and he’s way back up there where the parking lot begins, skittering back and forth between the chained-up ten-speed and our supply wagon. I gesture to my right, around the corner of the wall, into the fort proper.

“You coming?”

Houdini doesn’t answer. He growls uneasily, sniffs at the ground. “All right,” I tell him. “You stay there.”

The buildings of the fort, half a dozen tottering stone piles and decomposing wooden ruins, are scattered over one big uneven hill—an acre or acre and a half of muddy grassland, sloping down toward a cliff over the water. The layout is as haphazard as might be expected of a centuries-old military campus, built piecemeal by different commanders at different times for different purposes. It’s all centered around one structure, though: the blockhouse, a wooden tower on a sturdy granite base, rising high above the center of the fortland like a birthday cake. The blockhouse could be somebody’s tidy colonial house, a charming white-sided vacation home overlooking scenic Portsmouth Harbor, except that it’s perfectly octagonal and slitted all around its eastern faces with narrow rifle ports, for spotting incoming ships and shooting at them.

I shade my eyes and look up at the narrow windows. He might be up there. He might be in any of these buildings. Cautiously I pick my way through the mud and seagrass, over the foundation stones like flat gravestones, alert for the presence of Brett.

The rifleman’s house is a square red-brick building, as small as a one-room schoolhouse. A cornerstone announces the structure’s provenance of 1834, but there is no roof; maybe it was never completed, or maybe the tiles were repurposed by the army when this fort was decommissioned, or maybe they were stripped last month by looters and carted away like Sergeant Thunder’s brick shed.

I linger there in the roofless shelter. This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. In fifty years, everything will look this way, desolate and quiet and overgrown. Not even fifty years—next year—by the end of this one.

I make my way carefully down the gentle slope to the granite wall that rings the fort’s easternmost edge. There’s a narrow trench dug into the mud just in front of the wall, except it’s not a trench at all, it’s an entrance, a stairhead carved out of the wet ground. A gash in the base of the wall, and then a short steep staircase into a dark chamber with a wet clay floor. The room is dank and close, as long and narrow as the barrel of a gun. A brass plate screwed into the granite wall identifies the room with an unfamiliar word: caponier. It smells like brine and fish and ancient mud. Light seeps in through nine high slit windows along the eastern face.

I am too tall, in a room like this. It bears down on me, coffin-like, and I can hear my heart beating, experience an unexpected sharp awareness of my body’s functioning as a machine.

I walk slowly across the room and lean into one of those slitted windows and squint. To the south there’s a lighthouse, to the north, uninterrupted miles of Maine coast. Way out on the horizon is the tiny black dot of an incoming ship and, twenty degrees to its left along the blue-green horizon, the tiny black dot of another. I stare for a minute, watching them come.

They must come all day. Big ships, their holds packed with desperate cargo, famished and exhausted, people from all over the world, the Eastern Hemisphere emptying itself out.

As I watch I see a third one, another speck on the far edge of the horizon, almost to the lighthouse on the harbor’s southern lip. I have a sudden vivid picture of the earth as flat, a tray, covered in marbles, and someone is tilting it, and the marbles are rolling, cascading, from east to west.

“It is hard to imagine the conditions onboard those ships.”

A voice deep and calm, and then there’s the scrape of a boot heel behind me, and I take a breath and turn around and there he is at last.

“The countries of origin, many of them, were impoverished to begin with,” says Brett Cavatone, his voice soft, even, scholarly. “More so since Maia. The ships are packed with travelers. They live in darkness, below decks in miserable dank holds, crawling with rats and bugs.” His beard has grown in more, thickened into a dense black jungle. His eyes are deep set and black as a well. “It is hard to conceive of what they eat, on those ships, or how they drink. Still they come.”

“Officer Cavatone, my name is Henry Palace. I’m from Concord.” He doesn’t respond. I keep talking. “Martha asked me to find you. She wants you to come home.”

Brett’s face betrays no surprise or confusion at this announcement. He doesn’t ask, as I have anticipated, how I found him or why. He just nods his head, once—message received.

“And has Martha found Mr. Cortez?”

“Yes.”

He nods again. “And is Mr. Cortez honoring our bargain?”

“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

“Good. Then Martha is safe? And healthy?”

“She’s devastated. Heartbroken.”

“She is safe and healthy?”

“Yes.”

Brett nods a third time, nods deeply and closes his eyes, almost bows. “Thank you for coming.”

I hold up my hands. “Wait. Wait.”

It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem real, somehow, that at the end of this journey I should find a thirty-second conversation, a quick fair hearing and then goodbye, thank you for coming.

“Do you have a message for me to bring back to her?”

Brett closes his eyes and steeples his fingers. He’s in camouflage pants but a plain white T-shirt, sandals on his feet. “You may tell her that the asteroid has forced some hard decisions in me, as it has in many of us. Martha will understand what I mean.”

“No.” I shake my head.

“No?”

“Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It’s just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.”

A smile flits across his lips, down in the thickness of facial hair. “You asked me to provide a message, and now you disapprove of it?” His voice is deep, hushed, rhythmic, like an Old Testament prophet. “You have discharged your obligation, friend. Your work is done, and now I must return to my own.”

“You are a married man,” I say. I’m pressing my luck. He stares back at me in silence, impassive as a mountainside. “Your wife is confused. You’ve left her terrified and alone. You can’t just abandon your promises because the world is over.”

I’m aware, even as I am talking, that these arguments are doomed to be unavailing. It is clear that Brett Cavatone is as rooted in his purpose as the fort’s stone walls, planted for centuries in this craggy soil, and my suggestion that he return to Martha and Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl is not only impossible but ridiculous, juvenile somehow. Oh, why should he do what I say? Why, again? Because he promised?

“I am not coming home.” He looks steadily at me, black eyes under furrowed brows. “Tell her that. Tell her our contract has been abrogated. She will understand.”

I can see her, Martha Milano at her kitchen table, aghast with grief, hand trembling on her teacup, stalking back and forth to the cigarettes she will not allow herself. “No,” I say to Brett. “I don’t think she will understand.”

“You said your name was Henry?”

“Henry Palace. I used to be a policeman. Like you.”

“There are things you don’t understand, Officer Palace. Things you cannot understand.”

He takes a step toward me, compact and powerful as a tank, and my mind flies to the little gun tucked in the inside pocket of my blazer. But I have no doubt that Brett, if he wanted to, could be on top of me before I drew, hammering me with his fists. Condensation drips from the ceiling of the room, sweats down the walls. I have to say one more thing, though. I have to try.

“Martha says your salvation depends on it.”

He repeats the single word, “salvation,” lets it hang in the gloomy air between us for a moment and then says, “I’ll need you to leave the grounds of this fort within ten minutes.”

He turns on the steps, presenting me with his broad back, and takes the first step out of the darkness of the caponier.

“Brett? Officer Cavatone?”

He stops, speaks quietly over his shoulder, without turning around. “Yes, Henry?”

I pause, gut rolling. Seconds pass. Yes, Henry?

My investigation is over. Case closed. But I hear Julia’s voice in my head, tense and taut with anxiety: Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…

I find that I cannot leave. I don’t know anything, but I know too much to leave. Brett is still waiting. Yes, Henry?

“I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I met Julia Stone, and she told me. She explained your intentions.”

“Oh,” he says calmly. “Well.” He is incapable of being surprised.

“And I—I’d like to help.”

Brett comes back down off the stairs and toward me, holding up his big hands like he’s warming them over a fire. I get the feeling he’s getting a sense off me, interpreting me like a crystal ball.

“Are you armed?” he says.

“Yes.” I take out the Ruger and hold it up. He takes it, weighs it in his hands, drops it in the mud.

“We can do better than that.”

Together we walk up the slippery and mossed steps of the caponier, and then together, silently, we cross the patched mud and seagrass of the fort to the blockhouse. Using a long stick with a curved hook on the end, Brett releases a rope ladder coiled at the elevated doorway, tumbles it down to where we can reach it to climb up. Brett goes first, swift and sure-footed, and I follow, heaving my ungainly body up the rungs, one at a time, all knees and elbows, like some kind of invading mantis.

I’m not sure what happens now.

“There’s the Portsmouth naval base, there’s a base at Cape Cod, and there’s what used to be the coast guard station at Portland, Maine. That is all. Three stations and by my count eight or nine cutter ships. There was a nuclear submarine called the Virginia assisting them, but no one seems to have seen it in months. AWOL, maybe, or else they’ve run it south to help in Florida.”

I nod mutely, my stomach a tight ball of astonishment and unease, as Brett tells me his plan. Our plan.

“I have renderings from all of these facilities. We can’t know precisely what the state of readiness is, but we can presume it is lower than we might have found pre-Maia, due to desertions and technical limitations related to resource depletion.”

While he talks Brett runs his fingers delicately over the maps and blueprints he has taped all around the walls of the blockhouse. He’s papered over the historical displays and the park-service timelines, but they peek through, the glowering faces of old soldiers from old wars, staring sternly at the portraitist or daguerrotype man. I think that Brett is wrong about our likelihood of success. I think we may find these naval and coast guard bases, like the Concord police department, better defended than in the past, not worse. I would predict multiple checkpoints, added layers offence-line security, skittish base patrolmen operating under strict shoot-first orders.

It is clear though that Brett’s calculation of these dangers is purely abstract. One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade. Brett’s intention is to commit murder in the name of a greater good.

Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…

“This strikes me,” I say quietly, “as more than a two-person job.”

“Well, it was a one-person job until ten minutes ago,” says Brett. “Our obligation is to do what we can with what we have. That is all we can do, and the results are up to God.”

I nod again.

We are going to break into the naval and coast guard stations—shoot guards if necessary—shoot seamen—set fire to the ships. Whatever means necessary to prevent further missions by those vessels. A one-man crusade to stop the interdiction and internment of catastrophe immigrants along the northern Atlantic coast. A two-man crusade, I correct myself. We are going to the Portsmouth naval base first, and if our efforts are successful there, then we will come back here, to Fort Riley, resupply, and make the longer trip to Portland later in the week.

“I believe, Officer Palace, that you were sent for a reason,” says Brett, turning away from his wall of Scotch-taped plans and barracks blueprints. “To ensure the success of this work.”

There’s a rusting piece of artillery in the center of this room, a cannon with its nose thrust out the centermost window toward the sea. Beside it Brett has a heavy trunk, and now he kneels and pops it open and starts to sift through the supplies inside, jugs of water and rolls of gauze and iodine capsules and plastic grocery bags full of jerky and cheese; as he’s sifting through, something catches my eye, a flash of bright color, out of place. Then he shuts the trunk and hands me my gun, exactly the gun I was expecting: the second of the M140s that Julia Stone boosted for him from her stash at UNH. He presses the gun into my hands. I feel my simple missing-person case crumbling under my feet, melting beneath me.

“When do we go?” I ask.

“Now,” says Brett. “Right now.”

We throw the weapons down from the top of the blockhouse, and they land with two overlapping thuds in the dirt and then we begin to climb down, hand over hand, Brett first again and me behind. And when he’s just touched down and I am two rungs from the bottom I lose my grip on the ladder and tumble down, landing squarely on Brett’s back and knocking him over, and he goes, “Hey,” while I roll off and land on one of the rifles and come up pointing it at his back.

“Don’t move,” I say. “Stop.”

“Oh, no, Henry,” says Brett. “Don’t do this.”

“I am sorry to have been duplicitous, I really am.” I am speaking quickly. “But I can’t allow you to proceed with a plan calculated to result in the death of servicemen and -women.”

He is kneeling in the mud, head slightly down and turned away from me, like a praying monk. “There is a higher law, Henry. A higher law.”

I knew he was going to say that—something like that.

“Murder is murder.”

“No,” he says, “it isn’t.”

“I am sorry, Officer Cavatone,” I say, my eyes watering, readjusting to the summer brightness. “I really am.”

“Don’t be,” he says. “Each man in his own heart takes the measure of his actions.”

The M140 is a bigger weapon than I’m used to handling, and I was unprepared for the weight of it. There are no iron sights on it, just the scope, long and thin like a flashlight bolted to the top of the gun. I’m trembling a little as I hold the thing steady, and I focus on controlling my hands. I will them to be still.

Brett is still on his knees, his back to me, his head slightly tilted upward, toward the sun.

“I understand,” I say, “that you disagree with the interdiction and internment policy being carried out by the Coast Guard.”

“No, Henry. You don’t understand,” he says softly. Mournfully, almost. “There is no such policy.”

“What?”

“I thought you understood, Henry. I thought that’s why God sent you.”

The idea of that, that God or some other force of the universe sent me here, renews my sense of unease and distress. I adjust my hold on the big weapon.

“It’s not interdiction. It’s slaughter. Those cutters open fire on the cargo ships, they sink them when they can. They shoot the survivors, too. They don’t want anyone to land.”

I blink in the sunlight, my rifle trembling in my hands.

“I don’t believe you.”

After a moment Brett speaks again, calm and ardent. “What do you think is easier for the Coast Guard—what remains of the Coast Guard? A massive and resource-intensive interdiction effort, or the simple and efficient operation that I’ve described? They could stand down, of course, stop their sorties entirely, but then the immigrants get through. Then they arrive in our towns, then they are so bold as to want to share resources, share space. Then they want to be given their own chance at survival in the aftermath. And we are determined, God forgive us, we are determined that not be allowed.”

He is crying. His head is bent toward the green of the fort, and his voice comes out choked with lamentation.

“I thought you understood that, Henry, I thought that’s why you came.”

My rifle is trembling now, and I force myself to steady it, trying to figure out what happens next, while Brett gathers his voice, keeps talking. “But perhaps God has given you eyes that cannot see that deeper kind of darkness. And that is a blessing in you. But I beg of you, Henry, to let me be to carry out my mission. I beg that of you today, Henry, because if I can save even one boatload of those people, even one child or one woman or one man, then I will have done God’s work today. We will have done God’s work.”

I think of those dots on the horizon, the tiny ships I saw from the slitted window of the caponier, steaming closer, even now.

“Brett—” I begin, and suddenly he ducks and rolls into the mud and comes up with the other rifle, all in one swift motion, ends up on his knee facing me, the gun angled up toward me, as mine is angled down toward him.

I didn’t fire. I couldn’t. How could I?

I shake my head, trying to shake the sunlight out of my eyes, shake the sweat off my forehead. Figure this out, Palace. Handle this. Then I just start, I start talking:

“Does anyone know where you are and what you’re doing?”

“Julia.”

“Julia thought that someone else knew. She thought someone would try to come and stop you.”

“That was an assumption on her part. She’s wrong. No one knows.”

“Where did you get all the—the blueprints and so on? Of the various bases?”

“From Officer Nils Ryan.”

“Who—”

“A former colleague of mine from Troop F. Also a former chief petty officer in the Coast Guard.”

“But he doesn’t know what you wanted them for?”

“No.”

I don’t need to ask why this man, this Officer Ryan, would turn over such documents: because he asked. Because he’s Brett.

“Okay,” I say. “So no one knows about this. No one knows where you are. Just me and you and Julia.”

“Yes.”

“So let’s—” I look away from his gun barrel, into his eyes. “Brett, let’s end this right now. I do not want to harm you.”

“Then don’t. Go.”

“I won’t. I can’t.”

And then we stand there, my gun pointed at him, his at me.

“Please, Officer.”

“These are human beings with no chance left but one.” Brett, with his soft rumble of a voice, slow train rolling. “Who have risked everything, traveled thousands of miles crammed and sweating in shipping containers and overstuffed holds, and maybe it’s a fool’s chance they’re taking, but that is their right, and they do not deserve to be murdered thirty yards from shore.”

“Yes, but…” But what, Officer Palace? But what? “We were sworn in once, you and I. Right? As officers of the law. We still have an obligation to do what’s lawful and what’s right.”

He shakes his head sadly. “Those two things you said there, friend. Those are two different things.”

I’m standing on a slight rise, looking down at him in his crouch, feeling very tall indeed. A bird flickers past overhead, and then another, and then there’s a wind, stronger than usual, a summer wind carrying up the scent of fish and a pinch of gunpowder from the churning breakers. We can just hear the rushing of the tide, barely reaching us way up here above the cliff face.

“On the count of three,” I say, “we will lower our weapons, both together.”

“Fine,” he says.

“And then we will figure out what to do next.”

“Good.”

“On the count of three.”

“One,” says Brett, and lowers his gun a little bit off his shoulder, and I lower mine an inch or two, my muscles crying out with relief.

“Two,” we say, together now, and now both rifles are at forty-five-degree angles, pointed at the ground.

“Three,” I say, and drop my rifle, and he drops his.

We remain frozen for about a quarter of a second, and both of us start to smile, just a little, two honorable men on a green field, and then Brett is starting to get up and he’s extending his hand and saying “My friend—” and then as I raise my arm there is a sharp bang, a crack in the sky, and my arm explodes in pain, hot and savage, a roaring pain, and I whirl behind me to find the shooter, and by the time I turn back around Brett is on the ground, flattened in the dirt with arms and legs windmilled out in the grass. I leap to him, screaming his name and clutching my arm. I land beside him and lie there panting for five seconds, ten seconds, waiting for more shots. I’m trying to summon up the protocol for victims of gunshot trauma in the field, trying to recall my training regarding rescue breaths and compressions and so on, but it doesn’t matter: The bullet caught Brett dead between the eyes and half the front of his face has been swallowed by a hole. It’s useless—there’s nothing to be done—he’s dead.

The first thing to do is tourniquet my arm. I know that—that much I remember, and besides it’s obvious, the wound is bleeding like a rushing faucet, great gouts of bright red blood exploding out of my arm, darkening my shirt and coat and puddling between my shoes in the mud and the dirt. Brett’s dead body beside me on the ground.

It’s funny because I’m watching it, this fountain of blood, and it’s happening to someone else, like this is some other man’s arm exploded arm, another man’s torn suit coat and pulsing wound. That one sharp instant of terrible pain I felt at impact has completely receded, and the wound, high on my right arm, at the biceps, is something I can see, and register as severe, but not feel.

This is shock. This absence of feeling is the result of the adrenaline flooding my system, rushing through my veins like seawater crashing the breached holds of a ship. I examine my arm like it’s a joint at the butcher’s counter: a gunshot trauma to the brachial artery, and I’m losing blood quickly, too quickly, precious milliliters gushing out onto the dirt field of Fort Riley. I’ve had general first aid and CPR training and annual continuing education courses per Concord Police Department regulations, and I know what to expect here: blood loss, dizziness, coldness, clamminess, and finally a high risk of fever, high risks all the way around, gunshot wounds in general requiring immediate medical assistance—arterial gunshot wounds in particular. “High risk of loss of limb and/or death.”

I need to stabilize the wound and get to a hospital.

Brett is lying three feet away from me, sprawled out in the dirt. The horrible front-face wound, the stillness of his body. “That contract has been abrogated.” Why did he say that? What does that mean?

Focus, Palace. Tourniquet the wound.

“Okay,” I tell myself. “Geez.”

I scrabble in the dirt and come up with a short thick piece of wood. This is not going to work, not long-term, but I need to staunch the bleeding immediately—I needed to have done it thirty seconds ago—to remain on my feet, get to the bicycle and my first aid kit. I can use my necktie to cinch the wound, for now, but I reach up and my necktie is gone. I slipped it off, just yesterday—was it yesterday?—on the quad at UNH and now it’s lying somewhere along those winding paths like a shed snakeskin in the desert. I extend my left hand, trying as hard as I can to move only that side of my body, don’t jostle the wound; I lean forward and slowly pry off one shoe and then one sock. Wincing, I take the tip of the sock between my teeth and tie it off around my arm like a heroin addict, recalling the shabby gentleman I encountered in the grub tent, the old bearded addict. Here’s to you, sir, I think crazily as I jam the stick between the thin fabric and the flesh of my arm above the wound. I twist the sock tight around the stick and feel a radiating tingle as the blood starts to slow. I look down at the ragged hole in my arm and I can see the spurting of the blood begin to slow, to calm, turning into a bare trickle.

“There we go,” I say to my arm. “There we go.”

It still doesn’t hurt. The shock will wear off somewhere around a half hour from now, and then the pain will set in and intensify steadily over the following six to eight hours. I can see the words on the sea-green stapled booklet we got at EMT-First Responder training in the break room, black Helvetica lettering against the green background of the leaflet: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. Stabilize the wound rapidly and keep it stable until the victim can be moved to a hospital.

Hospital, Henry? What hospital?

The sock begins to loosen as soon as I release the grip of my teeth. It’ll last me maybe ten minutes. I stumble to my feet and limp toward the parking lot, toward my Red Rider Wagon full of supplies.

He’s Brett, is what everybody told me, he’s just Brett. Now I have some understanding of what they meant. A fascinating man, a force of nature. Charismatic, thoughtful, righteous and strange.

I’ve paused for a moment to rest at about the halfway point between the field where we were shot and the spot at the entrance to the parking lot where I’ve chained up my bike.

That contract has been abrogated, he said. What an odd word to import into the language of love: abrogated.

Among my regrets about what has just unfolded is that Brett never did ask me why I had come to find him, why I cared. I had my answer all figured out. Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form.

I explain all of these things to Brett as I trudge along, tugging my sock-tourniquet tighter and gasping at the first tingling promise of pain. I give him my answer even though he’s dead, and with each passing moment the odds are climbing that I’m going to die out here, too.

By the time I get to my bike, my improvised tourniquet is a dark bloody rag, and as soon as I peel it off the blood bursts forth. I fumble on the black pneumatic tourniquet from my first aid kit, cinch the cuff high on my arm, upstream of the wound, and inflate it as fast as I can, closing my eyes tightly as I squeeze and squeeze the bulb.

I pause, then. I am not dizzy yet, not yet experiencing severe pain. I can think now, for a moment I can think. From here I can see the road, the elbow bend in Route 3, and I can look up at the towering trees crowding in on the parking lot from all sides.

What hospital, Hank? I ask myself, dragging the question out of my consciousness and into the light—not meaning, which hospital will you choose? but rather, what operational hospital might be within biking distance of a fatigued man who has already suffered significant loss of blood? As much as a liter, maybe, half a liter easily. Portsmouth is the closest city, and I don’t even know if they have a functioning hospital anymore or if it’s all private duty. What about Durham? There must be a medical tent somewhere on the grounds of the Free Republic of New Hampshire, as there is a grub tent; somewhere in one of those basements some premed is boiling clamps and hypodermic needles in a lobster pot.

Will it be easier, I wonder, without the wagon? And I’m looking down at it, debating how risky or wise it might be to jettison the water and food and gauze and antiseptic to gain maybe three or four m.p.h. of travel speed. I’m crouching to look through how much water I have left anyway, and wishing it were more.

There. Now. Pain. There it is.

“Jesus.” I say the word, and then I scream it: “Jesus!” and throw my head back and scream again, louder. It hurts—it does—it hurts so much, a hot iron pressed against my biceps. I clutch the wounded arm with the other one and immediately let go and scream more.

I sink down, into a crouch, and close my eyes, and rock on my heels, and take a series of short and shallow breaths. “My God, my God.”

The pain is circling out from the impact site and burning into my shoulder, my chest, my neck, all the circuits of my upper body. More deep breaths, still down in my crouch, in the parking lot by the roadway. After several long moments the pain recedes, and I open my eyes and see on the ground with hallucinogenic clarity a single bright-orange leaf.

But it’s not—it’s not a leaf. I stare at it. It’s a fake leaf. I pick it up with my left hand. It’s made of fabric—a synthetic fabric—a synthetic leaf.

The thought appears in my mind not word by word, but wholly formed, like someone else had the thought and placed it there: This does not make sense.

Because I know what this is, this artificial leaf. It’s a piece from a ghillie suit, the full-body camouflage worn by professional snipers and police shooters, a costume of shrubbery worn so that they can wait unseen for long periods, buried in the scenery. I know what a ghillie suit is, not from my police training but from my grandfather, who took me hunting exactly three times, trying to cure me of my total disinterest in that pursuit. I remember he pointed out a fellow sportsman, crouched in a blind in a suit of leaves, and scorned the man: “Those are for hunting men, not rabbits.” I remember his caustic expression, and I remember the term, ghillie suit; it seemed such a comical name for something designed for the purpose of killing human beings.

The pain returns like an inrushing tide and I gasp, sink down farther into the gravel of the parking lot, still clutching the strange alien leaf. This does not make sense.

When the pain is gone—not gone, but dampened—I look past the stone wall, up onto the rise, try to pick out the spot where the shooter waited on the woody ridge between the road and the fort. I trace the bullet’s line in my mind, a bright red ribbon leaping from the gun muzzle and across the field. I eyeball it. I estimate. Three hundred yards. It was a sniper shot, no question about it, three hundred yards easy, through the barrier of my outstretched arm and right between Brett’s eyes. What I just witnessed was Brett’s assassination by a military sniper from the Coast Guard or the Navy. A professional killer who tracked him here and waited in his ghillie suit and fired from the woods between the road and the fort. A preemptive strike against his madman’s crusade.

So what is it? Why doesn’t it make sense?

I know the answer while I’m still formulating the question: because Brett said no. No one knew about it. He had told no one where he was. Just Julia, and Julia had told me.

How could the military have sent a sniper to take him out, before he carried out his raids, when no one knew that they were coming?

New pain. Worse. The worst. I throw my head back and howl. Nausea is rolling up in churning waves from my stomach and into my throat. The pain leaps out from the wound site in bursts. Spots buzz to life in front of my eyes and I hunch back over, count slowly to ten, dizziness seeping in around the back corners of my brain. Brett told me that nobody else knew. Brett had no reason to lie.

But what about the friend, from the troopers, the Coast Guard man who provided the blueprints? Did he suspect the full scope of what Brett was up to? Did he sound the alarm? Track him down?

There’s something else, something—I take a breath, try to remember—something in the blockhouse that didn’t belong there. The pain makes it hard to think. It makes it hard to move—to be, even. I sit down in the gravel of the parking lot, lean against the wall, try not to look at my arm.

A color.

A flash of pink from inside that trunk.

I get up and stumble back down to the gravel, where the killer disappeared onto the highway, on his own ten-speed.

Or hers, I remind myself, thinking of Julia Stone, thinking of Martha Cavatone—my mind suddenly racing, evaluating motives, performing a quick roll call of everyone I’ve met on my circuitous route to Fort Riley, thinking about all the guns I’ve seen: Julia’s M140s, Rocky’s paintball guns and target range, my little Ruger. Jeremy Canliss had a snub-nose pistol tucked up in his jacket when I met him outside the pizza place. No, no, he didn’t. I imagined that. Didn’t I?

It doesn’t matter. This is America in countdown time. Everybody has a gun.

“A hospital.” I find the words in my throat and pronounce them gravely, lecturing myself, stern. “Forget the guns. Forget about Brett. Get to a hospital.”

I look out at Route 103, where the asphalt is melting in the sun, letting off a blackish gummy steam. I’m swaying on my feet. The green pages of the stapled EMT booklet flutter in the wind before me, the all-caps text informing me that my dizziness will escalate from mild to extreme. In four hours the pain will begin to ease, as my soft tissue runs out of blood and the arm begins to die.

I’m staring vacantly at the bike and I realize that my decision has been made. It’s already too late. The idea of hopping on a bicycle right now and getting myself to a hospital, to any hospital, is ridiculous. It’s insane. It was already too late half an hour ago. I can’t ride a bike. I can barely walk. I laugh, say the words aloud:

“Henry, you can’t ride a bike.”

I look back over my shoulder. Brett’s corpse is still lying out there, facing up toward the sun. The missing-person case must be declared unsuccessful. I know why he left, yes, and even where he went, but he’s dead and I couldn’t protect him from dying.

I do, however, have some thoughts about who might have shot him, a few stray and feverish ideas on the subject.

It takes forty-five miserable and crawling minutes to retrace my steps—all the way down the length of the parking lot—through the stone archway back into the fort proper—across the spongy terrain to the foot of the blockhouse. The pain only gets worse now, never better, intensifying as it gains in territory, colonizing the farthest reaches of my body. By the time I reach the wavering shadow of the blockhouse I’m breathing unevenly, bent over, deteriorating in speeded-up motion like a man dying of old age in a cartoon. I collapse and land on my wounded right arm and shriek like a child from the electric pain and roll onto my back under the dangling rope ladder and the sheer wooden side of the building.

I stare up at that ladder. The thick hempen rungs I recently clambered down, just behind Brett, seemed like child’s play an hour ago, like one of the playground structures we used to tear around on in White Park. Now it’s a rock wall, a mountain’s face that I am somehow supposed to drag myself up, exhausted and one-handed.

I stand, slowly, look upward and squint. The sun is burning the top of my head.

“One,” I say, and take a deep breath and grunt and haul my entire weight with my one good arm, lift myself just enough to get my footing on the second rung of the ladder.

Then I wait there, gasping, barely three feet off ground level, with my head tilted up and my eyes closed, sweat pouring off of my scalp and pooling in my collar line. I wait for strength—for—I don’t know—a few minutes? Five minutes?

And then I say: “Two.”

Breathe—steady—grunt—heave. And then three—and then four—again and again, finding my footing on each new rung, humping myself laboriously upward and then exhaling—and waiting—panting—the sun baking me against the wall—sweat running down my spinal column and my arms, gathering in my waistband and swamping my armpits.

Halfway up the ladder, at rung number ten, I conclude that this is, in fact, impossible. I won’t get any farther. This is as good a place as any to die.

I am too tired and too hot and too thirsty—increasingly it is my thirst that is the main problem, superseding the exhaustion and the dizziness and even the nascent feverishness—superseding even the pain, heretofore the great champion among my tormentors. I have forgotten, at this point, just what I am hoping to find up there in the blockhouse, what if anything.

Doesn’t matter. I am too tired and too impaired and too thirsty to keep going. I will die here, plastered with sweat and crusted blood against this two-centuries-old wooden building, burned into the side by the afternoon sun. Here Maia will find the empty shell of my body and carry it away to sea.

The dog barks at the foot of the building. I can’t see him, of course. But I hear him. He barks a second time, loud and sharp.

“Hey,” I say, the word drifting feebly off in the air like a dead leaf. I clear my throat, lick my lips, and try it again. “Hey, boy.”

Houdini keeps barking, probably because he’s hungry or scared or maybe just happy to see me, even my long spindly bottom half. He’s probably been lost in the woods, chasing squirrels or being chased for the last two hours. But in my dizziness and fatigue I imagine his frantic yips as encouragement: He is insisting that I continue up, that I assault the next rung and the next.

My little dog has reappeared at the crucial moment to insist in his rough canine language that salvation waits at the top of the ladder. I keep going. Up I go.

When at last I’m on the floor of the blockhouse I just lie there for a while, coughing. My throat is shutting down, collapsing in on itself like a dusty mineshaft. I roll over when I can and crawl to the trunk under the cannon and manage to open it and find a two-gallon jug and heave the heavy thing to my lips and drink like the lost man in the desert, letting water spill out and soak my face and my chest. I come up for breath like a surfacing dolphin and then drink more.

I let the empty plastic jug drop from my hands, and it bounces with a hollow sound on the wooden beams of the blockhouse floor.

Then I go back to the trunk, and a minute later I’ve found it. The pink paper, buried—not even buried—half hidden at best, beneath a change of clothes and a flashlight, a single sheet of pink notebook paper, worried and blackened at the edges where Brett’s fingers, stained with dirt and gunpowder, have picked at its corners. Folded and grimy but still bearing the faint smell of cinnamon.

I laugh out loud, a nasty dry rasp. I take the page from Martha’s diary and wave it in the air, pump it crumpled in the fist of my working hand. The page is torn and jagged at one edge, ripped out as if with force. I look up at the roof of Brett’s cloister and press the paper to my chest and grin, feeling the grime on my face crack and fall away. I read it and reread it, and its meaning starts to well up around me, and then I’m getting dizzy and cold, so I press the torn-out scrap of notebook paper to my chest and lean back against the old wooden wall and shut my eyes.

He’s barking, down there. Houdini is shouting, beautiful and faithful creature, hollering to keep me awake, or maybe at some interesting clouds, or maybe he’s just giving his little voice box a workout, as dogs are famous for doing.

I should—I open my eyes, stare at the opposite wall, struggle to form the thought—I should check on him. I roll from sitting down onto my belly and crawl back to the doorway. The arm is starting not to hurt, which though a relief is nevertheless a very bad sign. I peer over the edge, and there he is, barking, purposeful, sending his voice up along the side of the building to where I can hear him, way up here.

“Good boy,” I whisper, smiling down at him.

The sun is lower now and not as bright and I can see clearly where, down at the base of the blockhouse, my dog has built a little pyramid of dead birds. And I am not sure whether this is supposed to be a kind of sacrifice in my honor, or a tribute, or some sort of bizarre enticement: Here, master, here! If you survive this situation, you can eat these birds.

“Good boy,” I say again. “Good dog.”

It is some time later. If I check my watch I will know what time it is, see how many hours have elapsed with most of my arm cut off from my circulating bloodstream like it’s downriver from a dam, and discover thereby how close I am either to dying or to losing my right arm forever.

There is an ache up and down the length of my body. In olden days they would strap you, hands and feet, to a machine, turn a wheel to make you talk. Or even not to, just to watch you experience it. Or because there was someone visiting the court who had never gotten a chance to see the machine in action. Another one of those things that makes you think, well, okay, the end of the human race, what are you gonna do?

I read it again, the pink page, Martha’s slightly slanted all-block-letter handwriting, just like the quote from St. Catherine above her sink. But different in tone, so different:

It ends like that, in the middle of a thought, to be continued on the next page. There’s a date at the top, July fifth, just a couple weeks ago.

He’s dead, she wrote, N.’s dead he’s really dead.

Who, Martha? Who is N.?

I still don’t check my watch, but I can feel it getting later. The day is wearing itself down, the sunbeams appearing and disappearing in the slitted windows. I wish I could send out my thoughts like medieval telegraph crows to gather clues and bring them back to me, up here in my doomed chamber.

Who was N., Martha? With gold teeth and hand-rolled cigarettes and funny tattoos?

How many guns are left in that storehouse by the power station, Julia Stone? Would you run and check for me? Do you even need to look, or is it you who’s spirited one away?

Officer Nils Ryan—Brett’s buddy from the trooper days—Nils starts with N. But there’s another one, another N., and I can’t remember it. The world spins. This case was like a straight line, simple and clean: A man is missing. Find the man. And now it’s like the wilderness is crowding in along the road, turning the world into a thicket, a maze, a tangle.

I squeeze up and down along the edges of my arm and feel nothing and meanwhile my breath is ragged and uneven. At a certain point I will cross a threshold where it won’t matter either way; “loss of limb and/or death,” the double-conjunction pivot point resolving decisively on “and.”

The kids are going to be okay. Alyssa and Micah Rose at Quincy Elementary. I gave that over to Culverson, and Detective Culverson will stay on top of it. I smile at the thought of Culverson—at the Somerset right now, dining alone, asking Ruth-Ann politely what he owes her.

The sun is losing its luster. It’s late afternoon. Next will be nighttime.

The only thing is that it’s too bad about Nico. Because I did, I promised her I would protect her until one or both of us were dead. She was drunk and I was fifteen, but I promised her and I meant what I said. I tell her I’m sorry, in my mind somewhere. If there is anyone that I can send a telepathic message to, it’s my sister, and I let my mind go blank and launch it into the air, Nico, my dear, I am sorry.

I open my eyes and see my watch without meaning to. It’s 5:13. Approximately six and a half hours since impact, since the bullet tore the hole into my biceps.

I haven’t heard from Houdini in a long time. Perhaps he decided to abrogate our contract, escaped into the woods, evolved into a sea dog or a wolf. Good for him. I reach up to my face as if to make sure it’s still there. It’s dirty. Cragged. Lined in a way I don’t remember. The edges of my mustache are growing in weird, all fuzzy and uneven like a disintegrating coastline. I hate that.

I read Martha’s journal page again. HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD.

When the shooting begins it begins all at once, not one or two but a hundred guns firing all at the same time, and of course I can’t move, can’t go down there to the water’s edge; all I can do is look from the narrow windows of the blockhouse and watch the horror unfold.

At some point during this long hot strenuous expanse of a day, one of those tiny dots I saw out on the horizon this morning has made its way into the harbor and dropped anchor out by the lighthouse; a cargo ship with long iron sides, anchored and massive, maybe half a mile offshore, with dozens of tiny crafts bobbling at its sides like suckling children. Six or seven of these little boats have been let down and are on their way in, maneuvering for shore, crowded with passengers, their small motors puttering. And now—as I’m watching—those boats are coming under withering fire.

“No,” I whisper.

But it’s just as Brett said, it’s a Coast Guard cutter, the sleek lines and the iron prow, the bristling masts and antennae, the noble shape of it parked in the water perpendicular to shore, offering not a lifeline to the incoming boats but a cannonade.

The small boats perform useless evasive maneuvers, rowboats and rafts wheeling unevenly this way and that while the cutter strafes the water, kicking up mountains of churning foam.

Seabirds dart overhead, flying fast, away from the pop of the guns.

“No,” I say, way the hell up here from my tower window, uselessly, ridiculously. “No.”

The rafts begin to capsize, tipping their inhabitants into the water, where they paddle and scream and grab for one another—children, old women, young men—and me just watching, helpless, trapped inside the blockhouse, inside my injury, coughing and lightheaded, watching them drown, watching them swim, watching the cutter send out speedboats to gather up those who remain.

“Stop,” I whisper, my eyes rolling up into my head. “Police.”

Children clutching at one another, little bodies boiling up in the breakers, lashed by the wake of the ships, opening their mouths to scream even as they are pulled under by the waves.

In the silence when it’s over I slip into sleep, and in my fever dream Brett is alive and squats beside me with his M140 pointed out the slit window of the blockhouse. He does not say “I told you so.” That is not his style. What he does say though is, “It was abrogated. Our contract was abrogated.” I want to warn him that the barrel of his rifle is poking back into the blockhouse at the next window over, a cartoon image, like it loops around out there and comes back in, pointing right at his own face.

Don’t do it, I say, don’t shoot. But my mouth moves and the words don’t come and he fires and an instant later topples over backward, somersaults and rolls till he’s still.

In the next dream, the next scene, he’s got a skeet gun and we’re up on the roof, me and him, and this time he smiles and when he smiles his mouth glows and he leans back and shoots up, up, up and the asteroid tumbles out of the sky, and Houdini goes and retrieves it, a burning planet of rock and metal clutched in his teeth like a fetched duck.

I wake up, because of a distant unfamiliar noise, and the first thing I think is that he wanted to leave.

He was not unfaithful to her; she was to him.

Oh, Martha—

She had taken a lover, the man she identified as N., and then that lover was killed in the riots on Independence Day.

And Brett had not left Martha, but he had been yearning in his heart to leave. He had information, he had a plan, he knew the good he wanted to do in the world. He even knew where he could go to get the guns that he needed to do it. But he could not and would not go, because he had made promises before his wife and before God and he would not release himself from those promises.

There’s a thrumming out there. What is the noise? The ship must be back, or a new one is coming, a fresh engagement threatening on the horizon line. The image of the dead and dying from the boats returns, as clear and detailed as a photograph. I try to lift my head but cannot. I stay inside the hole I’m in, close my eyes to what I’ve seen and instead return to considering my case, piecing it together.

When Brett found his wife’s diary page he reacted not with anger but with fierce and secret joy. He tore out that page and took it like a ticket, because this was permission to go and do what he wanted to. He made arrangements with the thief Cortez and off he went; by the grace of God his wife had been unfaithful, their contract had been abrogated, and he felt himself released and he left. He ripped out that page and held it to his heart and ran off to his seaside tower and his righteous crusade.

The thrumming is getting louder. I raise my arm and it lifts slow, dense, like it’s made of bundled sticks. Please don’t be another ship. Please. I don’t want to witness any more.

It’s a beating of wings, out there. Close by, much closer than the water. A motor.

I have to move then, I have to drag myself, and I do. I use my legs but not to walk, to launch myself forward like a worm across the small room and into the doorway and stick out my head and there it is—there she is—the great green-sided helicopter hovering in the sky above the blockhouse, rotors beating, the noise a great thundering rush.

I raise my working hand in the threshold of the blockhouse and wave it, feebly, and I’m trying to scream but there is no noise escaping my throat. It’s not necessary, though, because she’s already seen me. Nico leaning from the doorway of the helicopter, clutching the frame, laughing, shouting: “Hank! Hank!”

I can’t really hear her, I can just see her lips moving, just make out the words—“I told you so!”