World of Trouble

1.

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh—

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh no—

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh God, oh no.

Cortez, please don’t do this. Please don’t have done this. I know so much—but not enough. I’ve almost got it but I don’t have it yet.

But he did, he did it, it’s done. I’m in the holding cell, I’m on the bad-guy side, behind the bars, on Lily’s thin mattress. The sturdy Rotary Police Department RadioCOMMAND console is a few feet away, droning its endless warning about the Muskingum and its stupid toxic watershed. Cortez must have done it while I was still rolling in and out of consciousness, my head still buzzing, considerately dragged the RadioCOMMAND down the hall for me, and left me food, too, a pile of those MREs, along with four of the big jugs of water. I can see them when I turn my head, my neat pile of refreshments, squared off against the rear wall of the cell.

I bend forward on the thin cot and roll over onto my stomach and heave myself up to all fours. This is going to be fine. It is unquestionably a setback, yes, no question, but there has to be a solution, there has to be a way out, there must be and I am going to find it and be fine.

The radio squawks and hisses. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.” The rest of the recording, the part about the safe harbors, the first-aid stations, the drop-off/pick-up sites and the Buckeyes helping Buckeyes, has been edited out of the broadcast. Now it’s just the warning about the water, on and on into infinity.

There is sunlight in the room, which means that it is daytime. The Casio says 12:45, so it’s 12:45 in the afternoon but on what day?

I grind my fingertips into my eyes and grit my teeth. I don’t know if I was ever actually unconscious, but I don’t think so. I might have been. I experienced the shock and pain of the Taser, half an amp lighting up my abdomen, and then my arms and legs locked and shook and I was on the floor and my assailant, my friend, he bundled up my body in a tarp, and I was only flickeringly aware, my brain temporarily made into hash. I might have even struggled, might have even tried to lodge some sort of groaning protest—but at some point the struggle became impossible and I felt him drag me up the stairs and over the lip of the basement, and my mind slipped out from under me.

I breathe the dust of the small gray cell. I’m going to get out of here, of course. I’m locked in here at present but I obviously will not die in here. This bad situation, like all bad situations, will find its resolution.

I check the Casio again and it still says 12:45. It’s broken. I don’t know what time it is. Maia is out there streaking closer, and I’m locked in place. A hot bubble of panic rolls up from my lungs and I swallow it with difficulty, breathe and breathe. New spiderwebs have been knitted between the legs of the bed and the corners of the floor, to replace the ones we scraped away when first we made the room ready for Jean. For Lily, that was her name at the time. Lily—Tapestry—the sleeping girl.

She’s not here. I don’t know where Jean is. Cortez is down there. I’m up here. The ladies’ room is full of corpses, the men’s room has just one. Nico is gone. The dog’s on the farm. I don’t know what time it is—what day—

I lurch up out of the bed and my right foot stumbles into something on the ground that makes a wobbling hollow noise as it falls over. It’s the carafe, from our rickety coffee-production operation. It’s all here, carafe and pencil-sharpener grinder and hot plate and an approximate half share of our dwindling beans. Cortez betrayed me and attacked me and dragged me up here, exiled me and my intentions, and left me here in the jail cell with food and water and coffee and beans. He is way down there rubbing his hands together, flitting among his treasures, a dragon on his pile.

I stare at the beans, halfway up and halfway still lying down. Didn’t I have a feeling that I would end up in here? Didn’t I? I can’t remember, but I think I did, I think I recall staring at poor sick Jean and imagining myself, unwell and declining in the same spot, poor sick me. Like it’s all a loop, like time is just this bending, folded-over strip, eating its own tail.

I try to stand up again—I succeed—I’m up—I try the door, the door is locked.

Nico, I’m just—I’m trying to do it. I’m trying. Okay? I’m doing my best.

I bring my hands up to my face, the stubbled surfaces of my cheeks. I hate my face right now, this ungainly disorder, like an overgrown garden. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s plenty of time left. I’ve lost track of it. I’ll rot in here. I’ll piss in the corner. I’ll get hungrier and hungrier. I’ll count the hours. Man in a box.

I can see it on the wall opposite the cell: the hook just inside the door where the key ring used to hang.

This is a death that is worse than death, buried alive in a country jail cell, knowing a lot but not enough—what I have is the dark circle of the story like a rock and I need to keep it rolling forward and accreting mass like a snowball, I need for it to grow. What time is it, what day—maybe it’s about to happen right now, right now: the boom, the flash in the sky, the rattling of the ground and then everything to come after, and in the chaos and fire the crime scene will be burned away and this police station will collapse in on itself and I’ll be dead and no one will ever know what happened.

I scream full-throated and launch myself at the bars and grip them and shake them and still screaming I slam my hands open-palmed against them, again and again, because I have to get down there, I have to know, I have to see.

And then footsteps, coming down the hall. I shout and bang on the bars.

“Cortez? Cortez!”

“Who the fuck is Cortez?”

“What?”

The back wall of the cell explodes, showering dust down all around me. Then the dust is clearing slowly and Jordan is on the other side of the bars, holding a black semiautomatic pistol in one hand, holding the keys to the cell in the other hand, and he’s staring at me and his eyes are burning and fierce. No sunglasses, no jaunty ball cap, no smug smile.

“Where is she?” he says, holding his gun straight up in the air. “Where’s Nico?”

I edge backward in the cell. There’s nowhere to hide. Just a bed and a toilet.

“She’s dead,” I tell him. “You know that she’s dead.”

He fires again, and the heat of the bullet rushes past me and the back wall explodes again, closer to my head, and I discover that I have thrown my hands up over my face, ducked and flinched. It won’t end—that dumb animal instinct to live, to keep going. It doesn’t end.

Jordan looks bad. I’ve only known him smiling; smirking; leering; taunting. That’s how he lives in my mind, the punk kid lording it over me, hoarding his secrets in Concord. Now he looks like a composite photograph where they’ve aged the criminal so you can recognize him after years have passed. His young face is mossy with stubble, and he has a deep gash running down from one ear to the corner of his cheek. There’s some manner of acute infected injury on his right leg, the cuff of his pants rolled up over a haphazardly bandaged wound, dripping around the edges with red and black and pus. He looks grief stricken and desperate. He looks how I feel.

“Where is she, Henry?”

“Stop asking me where she is.”

He did it. He killed her. The clarity is like fire. Jordan steps toward me. I step toward him. It’s like the bars are a mirror, and we’re both the same guy, two images coming together.

“Where is she?”

He raises the gun and aims it at my heart. I feel again the stupid shivering need to live, to turn around and duck, but this time I stay put, I grind my heels into the floor, staring at his wrathful eyes. “She’s dead,” I tell him. “You killed her.”

His face narrows with pretend confusion. “I just got here.”

He points the gun at me, and now I do, I feel like, fine, that’s fine, let me die here, let the bullet collide with my brain and be done with it, but first I need the rest of the story. “Why did you cut her throat?”

“Her—what?” he says.

“Why?”

I drop quickly, bring my knee down on the coffee carafe and bust the glass. Jordan is jerking the gun to follow my actions, Jordan is saying “stop that fucking moving—” but now I’ve got an uneven triangle of glass in my hand and I launch myself forward off the ground in an ungainly leap, find his stomach between the bars and stab him in the gut. “Hey—goddammit—” He looks down, horrified. It’s a superficial wound, the glass dangles at a shallow angle, but there’s blood coming out of him like crazy, a thick fast welling out of blood like oil, and my hand is darting for the key on its ring in his other hand. I’m a beat too slow, he flings the ring and the key out behind him, out the doorway and into the hallway.

I say “Damn it,” and he says “You asshole,” clutches a hand to his stomach and brings it up all bloody.

“Why did you kill her?”

I have to know. That’s all I need is to know. I am dimly aware of the RadioCOMMAND still going, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and Jordan reaches for my throat between the bars, but his hand is all slick with the blood from his stomach and it slides off me. I move backward and spit at him. “I’m looking for her,” he insists. “I came here to find her.”

I slide a long hand between the bars and grab his leg, worm my forefinger under the bandage and jam it into the wound on his calf and he screeches and I jam it in more. A nasty trick, bad-guy wrestler move. Jordan writhes away from my hand, but I don’t let go—I’ve got both of my hands wriggled through the bars now, one hand clamped onto him at midthigh, the other hand still gouging his infected wound. I’m behaving like a monster. He is screaming. I want answers. I need them.

“Stop screaming,” I tell him, both arms extended as if through the holes in a puppet theater, holding him fast through the bars. “Talk. Tell me.”

“What?” He says, choking out the word, gasping from pain. “What?”

“The truth.”

“What truth?” Jordan gasps. I ease up slightly on my grip, give him a moment of relief, not wanting him to pass out. The information is more important. I have to know. He’s heaving desperate breaths, clutching at his wound, both of us on the ground in the grime. I give him what I already know, build a bridge of common understanding, Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation, chapter 14.

“You abandoned your girlfriend in Concord. You and Abigail were supposed to stay but you left anyway. You made sure you were here on the big day, T-minus one week, when the whole group was supposed to go underground. How did you know that was the day?”

“I don’t know anything. I told you.”

“Liar. Killer. You were here at five on Wednesday the twenty-sixth because you knew that that’s when they’d be going underground and you knew that Nico would leave. Maybe you told her—maybe you told her to leave, to meet you outside the station. And there she was. She had a backpack on. She was happy to see you.”

I twist my finger, work it into the wound, and he writhes away, tries to, but I’ve got him tight, I’m clutching him to the bars, holding him in place.

“The other girl was an unwelcome surprise though, right?”

“What other girl?”

“So you had to kill her first, quick, knock her out and slash her throat and then chase Nico—”

“What the fuck—no—I came here to save her.”

“Save her? To save her?”

Now I’m just twisting at his leg, now I’m trying to inflict as much pain on him as I can. I don’t care if we both die here, locked in our improbable clench for however long is left. He can tell the truth or both of us can die.

“You slashed her throat, and you slashed that other girl’s throat, and you left them. Why, Jordan? Why did you do that?”

“Is that what happened? Is that what happened to her?”

And then he throws his head back and slumps over on his side of the bars. I don’t care, I keep at it, I have to hear him confirm it. I need that, and Nico does.

“Why did you kill her? Why? How does killing my sister fit into your stupid plan to save the world?”

There is a long pause. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” the radio says, and then again. Jordan starts laughing. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he gives off this weird cold laugh, a gurgling throaty chuckle.

“What?”

Nothing. Dead, dry laughter.

“What?”

“The plan. The plan, Stan. There’s no plan. We made it up. It’s not real. We made the whole thing up.”

2.

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.

A massive asteroid really is coming and it will kill us all. That is a true fact, hard and cold and irreducible, a fact that can be neither diverted nor destroyed.

I was right, all along, in my pedantic obnoxious small-minded insistence that the truth was true—the simple brutal fact that I kept explaining to Nico, that I kept trying to use to corral her or cudgel her. I was always right and she was always wrong.

Jordan is explaining it all to me, running down the whole story, laying out the inside scoop on the great underground asteroid-diversion conspiracy, explaining in intricate detail how I was right and Nico was wrong, and I am experiencing no joy in having been proved right. It’s actually the opposite, what I’m feeling, it’s actually the black and bitter opposite of joy: this awful opportunity to say “I told you so” to someone who is already dead, to say “you were wrong” to my sister, who has already been sacrificed on the altar of what she was wrong about. I am wishing in retrospect that I hadn’t told her so, that I had just let her alone, maybe even allowed her the pleasure of thinking for half a second that her brother and only living relative believed her. That I believed in her.

It wasn’t just that the plan would never work, the standoff burst, the precisely orchestrated atomic recalibration of Maia’s deadly course. The plan never existed. Its author, the rogue nuclear scientist Hans-Michael Parry, never existed either. They were pure suckers, the lot of them, Astronaut and Tick and Valentine and Sailor, Tapestry—even Isis. Suckers and saps. They were huddled together out here at the police station waiting for the arrival of a man who never was.

Now she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter. They came all this way for nothing, and now she’s dead.

We’re outside, between the flagpoles. It’s a beautiful afternoon, cool and crisp and sunny. The first pleasant day since I got to Ohio. Jordan is running down the whole story and while he does I am clutching my face and tears are spilling out around my fingers.

Astronaut’s real name is Anthony Wayne DeCarlo and he has no scientific training, no special understanding of astrophysics, no military background of any kind. He is, or was, a bank robber, a retailer and manufacturer of controlled substances, and a conman. At age nineteen DeCarlo drew a ten-year prison sentence in Colorado for boosting an SUV as a getaway vehicle when his older brother robbed an Aurora-area Bank of America. He was paroled after four years and three months, and six months after that he was arrested in a rented apartment in Arizona that he had turned into a laboratory/dispensary of designer narcotics. Five-year bid, out in two on good behavior. And so on, and so on. By the time he turned forty, which was the year before last, he was known to law enforcement in an impressive range of jurisdictions as a good-looking and silver-tongued bad guy, skilled in the manufacture of a variety of illicit substances—so much so that one of his aliases, the one he prided himself on, was “Big Pharma.”

He would have spent a lot more time in jail, over the years, except he had a special knack for gathering acolytes and setting them up to do the dirty work—younger men and plenty of younger women, who frequently ended up serving prison sentences for carrying, for selling, all the stuff that otherwise he would have done himself. One parole officer lamented, somewhere in DeCarlo’s thick case file, that he “would have made a great leader, had things gone another way.”

And then they did, they really did, things went another way. The asteroid appeared, transforming the lives of thugs and drug dealers right along with policemen and actuaries and Amish patriarchs. By the time there was a ten percent chance that Maia would smash into the Earth, Anthony Wayne DeCarlo is living in a basement apartment in Medford, Mass., and he has become Astronaut: leader of a movement, weaver of conspiratorial webs, savior of humanity.

For a restless soul like DeCarlo, paranoid and insecure, Maia was the answer to a prayer he didn’t even know he was praying; a basket in which to put a lifetime of inchoate antiauthoritarian energy. Suddenly he’s on a soapbox in Boston Common, a charismatic voice for the government conspiracy line, a street-corner preacher with a fistful of dubious scientific “findings” and a handgun jammed in his back pocket. And he’s attracting a new constellation of followers: young people, freaked out by death rolling across the sky, looking for something—anything—to do about it.

They fell for it. My sister fell for it. And it’s not hard to see why, it’s never been hard to understand. The alternative was to believe what her droning, lecturing, scolding cop brother kept telling her: We’re in for it. There’s no hope. The truth is true. The Astronauts of the world were selling a better story, much easier to swallow. The Man is setting us up. The fat cats and the big shots, brother, they want you to die.

Lies, lies—it’s all lies!

It’s around this point, late autumn last year, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation starts keeping tabs on Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Astronaut. The FBI, like most federal agencies, is suffering from employee attrition, with agents leaving in droves on their various Bucket List adventures. For those still at their desks, a lot of the workload in the last year has been keeping an eye on creeps like DeCarlo, all the terrorists and psychopaths and run-of-the-mill criminal jackasses whom Maia has given a new lease on life, all of them talking big about last-ditch antigovernment violence, how they’re going to reveal or disrupt the cover-up, whatever they claim is being covered up: the government made up the asteroid, the government is hiding the truth of the asteroid, the government built the asteroid. You name it.

Astronaut and his crew weren’t even cracking the top thirty, in terms of threats worth worrying about, until a kid named Derek Skeve got caught breaking into the New Hampshire National Guard station. Under interrogation he admitted that he had been pressured into the dangerous mission by his new wife.

“It was Nico who sent him in there, see? She sacrificed him,” says Jordan, whose name is not really Jordan. “It was demanded of her. To prove her loyalty to Astronaut, to the organization, the goals of the organization.”

Jordan’s name is really Agent Kessler; William P. Kessler Jr. My mind is filling with new information, filling up fast.

“DeCarlo loves to play these kinds of cruel games with his people: in group/out group dynamics, tests of loyalty,” says Kessler. “He used to do it when he was running dope: needle scumbag number one into lowering the hatchet on scumbag number two, and he’s your scumbag forever. He did the same tricks to build his new conspiracy group.”

Agent Kessler is FBI. He was a trainee in the technical services division, he told me, rapidly promoted to field agent, just as I was rapidly promoted to detective when everybody else quit or disappeared. The Astronaut conspiracy was his first case—“still working on it, as a matter of fact,” he says, staring up at the flagpole, at the ragged lawn of the Rotary police station.

It took ten minutes of good cop/bad cop for Skeve to start babbling about moon bases, and Kessler’s team knew he was a patsy. But then they got ahold of one of Astronaut’s other shed dupes and figured out what the man was really after: loose nukes. They decided to give them to him. Kessler made his debut as Jordan Wills, a smug wisecracking provocateur in cheap Ray-Bans.

“I showed up at the dude’s house in the middle of the night,” says Jordan. Kessler. “And I give him this whole crazy rap. I’m a former Navy midshipman. ‘I’ve got this hidden trove of documents, about this scientist and his master plan. I heard about your group… you’re the only ones who can help us. You’re the only ones!’”

“And he bought it?”

“Oh, yes,” says Kessler. “God, yes. We told him there were other teams, teams all over the country. We gave him the specific part that he and his buddies were supposed to play. And zoom. Off they go. Chasing the imaginary bombs in all the places I told them to look. Hither and thither, hither and yon. Kept them from killing anybody. Kept them from finding any actual bombs. Kept them spinning their wheels.”

I listen. I nod. It’s good—it’s a good story. The kind of story that I like, the story of a well-conceived and well-executed law-enforcement operation, carried out by diligent operatives staying on the job to keep decent people safe even in the most difficult circumstances. A slow-play sting with a clear intention and a simple strategy: identify the membership of the organization, keep it busy, feed the fire of their lunatic hope. The story, though, it’s hitting me in a tender place, it really is. I’m listening and periodically I’m reaching up to clutch my face while tears roll down and around my fingers.

Kessler and his fellow agents provided Astronaut with all the necessary window dressing to convince them they were involved in a real conspiracy. Internet access and communications equipment, official-looking NASA and Naval Intelligence documents. And of course the ultimate prop: an SH-60 Seahawk, a twin-engine medium-lift helicopter that one of Kessler’s FBI associates was able to “borrow” from a Navy division that had just been recalled from peacekeeping operations, now moot, in the Horn of Africa.

All the stuff that made me wonder, in my dark moments, if I was wrong, if the truth was not the truth. It all looked real because it was supposed to look real.

“What about the document itself?” I ask him. I’ve still got it, it’s in the wagon somewhere, fifty pages of gobbledygook and indecipherable math. “Where did the numbers come from? The whole—the plan?”

“The Internet.” Jordan shrugs. “Public records. Someone might have pulled a file from NASA. The truth is, at a certain point it was like a game. How preposterous can we make the whole thing? How unlikely a scenario, how self-evidently unbelievable, and see if these people would still believe it. Turns out: pretty much all the way. People will believe pretty much any goddamn thing if they want to bad enough.”

The endgame played out just as they had imagined it. Kessler in his role as Jordan lets Astronaut know that Parry has been located and set free—one fake person telling a conman about the location of another fake person—and that he, Jordan, is arranging his transportation to the Ohio location. It’s Astronaut’s responsibility to gather up everyone else, get to this abandoned police station near a municipal airfield, and wait.

“And he did it.”

“Of course he did. By that time, he was sure that he really was going to save the world. He thought he was the drug-dealing robber who had turned into an action hero. But we were writing the script, and the script ended with them sitting in the middle of nowhere, not bothering anybody, waiting for someone who doesn’t exist, until lights out.”

We walk slowly through the woods, Kessler and I. To the small rutted field surrounded by bent trees. Patches of black-red blood are still evident in the muddy puddle where I found the body. He told me he wants to see the crime scene; take prints, do a sweep for evidence. I’ve explained that I did all of those things, but he said he’d like to do it himself.

He wants to see, so here we are, but he’s not doing anything. Agent Kessler just stands at the edge of the clearing, looking at the ground.

Everything is clear except one thing, and even that is pretty clear.

“Jordan?”

“Kessler,” he reminds me quietly, stepping into the clearing.

“Kessler. What happened? Why are you here?”

He squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them again.

“Kessler?”

He’s crouching down on his heels, staring at the mud where Nico died. I need to hear him say it, though. I need to know everything. I have to.

“Kessler? Why did you come out here?”

He speaks slowly. His voice is choked, low.

“DeCarlo’s a maniac. At heart. The file is spiked with bad acts. Sudden violence. He gets double-crossed or cheated, or when things go wrong… bad acts.” The smug kid that I so hated is gone; the furious FBI agent on a mission is gone. Kessler is just a kid. A young guy with a heavy heart. “We knew he was capable of anything at the end, if he figured out that it was all bullshit—or even if he didn’t figure it out. When he finally realized that the world was really going to die, that he was really going to die. The fucking narcissist. God knows what sort of horror show this thing might turn into.” He drifts off, staring. “God knows.”

I picture my sister facedown in the dirt. Of course I do. I can’t help it. Facedown in the dirt, her open wound clotting with mud. God knows.

“I couldn’t—” Kessler says, and then he breathes through his teeth, stamps his boot on the ground. He covers his face with his hand. “All the rest of ’em, fuck ’em. Stupid wild-eyed hippies, let ’em get what they deserve. Trying to steal a fucking bomb. But not—” He cries out again. He sinks slowly to his knees. “Not her.”

I knew it. I guess I’ve known it since he came limping down the hallway to the cell.

“You—had feelings for her.”

He laughs, a wet mucous weeping laugh. “Yeah. You man-child. You weirdo. I had feelings for her. I fucking loved her.”

“But you could have saved her. You could have told her not to come, told her it was all a set-up.”

“I did!” He looks at me, not angry but imploring. Desperate. Bereft. “I told her everything. That day in New Hampshire, out in Butler Field, waiting for the chopper to come and scoop her up, I told her that the whole thing was a set-up, that I was an FBI agent, that DeCarlo was a fraud and a psychopath. Capable of anything.” He chokes out the nickname. “Big Pharma. I showed her my fucking badge.” He trails off. “But…”

Damn it, Nico—damn it. “She didn’t believe you.”

Kessler nods, exhales. “It was too late. She was too deep into it. Into this fantasy world that I created my damn self. I said, you’ll believe me when Parry never shows up. I said, promise me, if he doesn’t show up in two weeks, you’ll steal this fucking helicopter and come back home. I said, promise me.” He is crying now, his face buried in his hands.

No way she promised. My sister has never promised anything.

“She never came back. I had to come. At a certain point, I just—I couldn’t stop thinking about her—try and find her. I couldn’t let her die out here—” and he says it, the exact words I was thinking ten minutes ago. “Couldn’t let her die out here for nothing.”

Neither one of us says what is obvious and true, that he was too late. That we were, both of us, too late.

Agent Kessler doesn’t actually look for evidence. He doesn’t take any prints. He just stares at the ground for a while, and then we turn around and slowly walk back together through the woods.

3.

Now it’s my turn. I’ve got his story and now Agent Kessler wants mine.

We make our way back through the woods from the crime scene to the police station, stepping over brambles and then across the rope bridge, grunting with the exertion, two twentysomethings hamstrung by multiple injuries, walking slowly through the woods like old, old men. While we walk I run down the investigation in progress, piece by piece: I tell him about finding Jean in the woods, about the subsequent discovery of Nico’s body, bearing a similar injury, similar in kind but not degree; I tell him about my eyewitness to Nico’s argument with Astronaut an hour before her death. I talk and talk, and he interrupts on occasion with insightful or clarifying questions, and we fall into my old favorite rhythm of conversational police work—the laying out of a fact pattern, the straightening out of details in my own mind so they can be vetted by a fellow officer.

When we are back at the police station Kessler stops in Dispatch to examine Nico’s body while I go back to the garage and walk slowly around the cratered wreck at the center of the floor. It looks like Cortez took the time to fill up the stairwell with as much rock as he could—all the stones that resulted from smashing out the wedge, plus more big chunks he jackhammered out from all over the garage floor. It’s rutted and cratered in here, like the surface of the moon. At the edge of the pit is a loose end of rope, snaking out from the pile of rubble. I can picture my erstwhile sidekick after he left me in the jail cell: loading up the tarp with stones, pulling it down in his wake, collapsing the tunnel mouth behind him like the Red Sea crashing down behind Moses.

Cortez, putting up a KEEP OUT sign; Cortez, taking over the lease.

“No way on the suicide,” says Kessler abruptly, coming into the room.

“What?”

He clears his throat. “The rest of them, sure. For the rest of them, I like it. They give up on Parry, maybe they realize they got punked. Maybe they even realize DeCarlo is a psycho. Life postimpact is going to be brutish and short. Bunker or no bunker. Poison becomes the good option.”

Kessler’s manner on all this is staccato, clipped, just the facts. He’s doing exactly what I did after looking at what he was just looking at: Nico’s frozen face, the red and black wreck of her throat. He’s wrapping up the pain of that in CAUTION tape, drowning it out in crime-stopper rhythms. I like it. I find it soothing.

“But Astronaut? No,” he continues, shaking his head. “No way.”

“You said he was a maniac,” I say. “You told me: capable of anything.”

“Right. But not that. Capable of talking other people into suicide, yes, but not himself. He’s a world-class narcissist. Delusions of grandeur on an astronomical scale. Suicide doesn’t fit the profile.”

“It’s a different world.”

“Not that different.”

“But I—” I glance down into the rubble pile. “I saw him. A middle-aged man with bushy black hair, horn-rim glasses, dark brown eyes.”

Kessler scowls. “Where did you get that description?”

“Miller.”

“Who?”

“This Amish guy. My witness. Was there another man in the group who might have matched that description?”

“Not likely,” says Kessler. “Possible. We did our best to keep track, but people drifted in and drifted out. All I know is, in no scenario is Anthony DeCarlo a suicide.”

I turn back to the rubble-choked stairhead. The idea of this, of my having made a wrong ID down there, of the man who killed my sister still being alive—it flickers in me like a pilot light. I bend down without thinking about it and roll an oblong stone from the top of the pile, and then another one.

“So you think he’s down there?” I say to Kessler.

“Oh, I certainly hope so.” He comes over and gets down on a knee to help me, grunting and lifting a stone. “Because I would very much like to kill him.”

While Agent Kessler and I dig out the rubble from the stairhead, while we pull out boulders one by one and the muscle ache gathers in my shoulders and in my back, my mind flies out from my body and circles the globe, zooming over distant landscapes like a ghost in a fairy tale, wandering the world. Everywhere there are people praying, people reading to their children, people raising toasts or making love, desperately seeking pleasure or satisfaction in the last tissue-thin hours of existence. And here I am, here’s Palace, knee-deep in a pit of stone beside a stranger, digging and digging, tunneling forward blindly like a mole into the next thing that comes.

When the path is clear we go down, the narrow metal stairwell shaking under us as it did before, me first and then Agent Kessler.

In the basement corridor I flick on the Eveready and shine it into the corners and everything is as it was: darkness and silence and cold. Concrete floor, concrete walls, weird chemical stink.

Kessler stumbles on something, sending pebbles scuttling and rolling. I turn and gesture for him to be silent, and he scowls and gestures for me to be silent—a pair of bedraggled law-enforcement professionals pulling rank on each other in a darkroom dumbshow.

I sniff the air. It’s the same, everything is the same down here, but it’s not the same; it feels different. The air has been unsettled somehow. The same darkness, with new shadows in it.

We move past the tiny furnace room and shine our flashlights over the three doors: ladies’ room, general store, and then the door with the graffiti.

“The bodies?” says Agent Kessler. “Palace?”

“One sec,” I murmur, my eyes fixed on the door of the general store, which is open, open at an angle of about twenty-five degrees. It’s propped open, as a matter of fact, held in place by an empty box of macaroni and cheese, folded over into a wedge. I step toward the door, my gun raised. Cortez told me his intentions in no uncertain terms: to stay in that room for six months after boomsday before creeping out to assay the outside world. And yet there’s the door, held purposefully ajar. The question is why, the question is always why.

“Cortez?” I say, letting my voice travel down toward the door. I step toward it. “Hey, Cortez?”

Kessler mouths something in the darkness. I lean closer and squint and he holds up his light and mouths it again, exaggerated: “Fuck him.”

Right. He’s right. Fuck him. I shine my light at the door marked LADIES, I nod to Kessler and he nods back and pushes in. I look back again at the general store, experiencing dark waves of anxiety, and then I walk in after Kessler.

“God,” says Kessler, full voice. “For God’s sake.”

I walk past him, into the grim waxwork tableau. I breathe slowly, not letting it get to me, the rotting air and the corpses like mannequins, slumped against each other like melting candles. Valentine and Tick with their hands linked, Delighted in his sparkling cape. Sailor/Alice under the table, legs daintily crossed. All of them with hooded eyes, their cheeks frozen and pale, their mouths falling open as if wanting more to drink. Jordan moves through the room as I did before, getting fractured pieces of the whole horrible vision, muttering “Jesus Christ” to himself and shaking his head uneasily. A technical services trainee. A kid.

He shakes it off, though—quickly, quicker than me. Kessler starts ID’ing bodies as he finds them, calling out the code names I already know—Delighted and Tick and Valentine and Sailor under the table—and adding some I hadn’t yet heard. “This is Athena,” he says of the round-cheeked girl with her back half turned away from Delighted. “A veterinary assistant. From Buffalo. Delighted’s name is Seymour Williams, by the way. He’s a paralegal from Evanston. His father owned a clothing store.”

The built blond guy with the scar on his face is Kingfisher. The other women are Atlantis, Permanent, and Firefly. The big man is Little Man, as I suspected.

“No Astronaut,” says Kessler, and I say, “he’s back over here,” and I move in the darkness to find him and I find Cortez instead. He’s rolled halfway over, his body hidden by the open door, his right arm awkwardly thrown over his torso, like he was rolled in here and dumped like an old carpet.

And his face—I shine the light—he’s been shot in the face.

“Palace?”

I find my feet as conclusions tumble into my mind, quickly, a rush of realizations, like keys turning in a series of locks: Cortez was killed recently, in the past twenty-four hours, that’s the first thing I think, so this is a new murder, so the killer is still alive—and Cortez blocked the stairs behind him so the killer is down here with us, the killer is close.

“Palace?”

I have my hand on Cortez’s neck to make sure that he’s dead, but he’s definitely dead because of his face: he has been shot in the face with some sort of expanding projectile, a hollow round, causing an explosive blast wound, cratering his mouth and nose. Poor Cortez with his face blown off, dead of a gunshot wound in a room full of people who drank poison. It’s like he was invited to the wrong party. It’s funny. Cortez would find it funny.

“Palace, goddamnit,” says Kessler, and I look up, startled.

“Kessler—”

“It’s not him.”

“What?”

“This. Here.” He’s a few feet away, in a squat like me, shining his light on a body, like me, the corpse of the man with the thick hair and the glasses. “This is the body you thought was Astronaut, is that correct?”

“It’s not him?”

“No.”

More realizations, tumbling into place. I pivot and look where Kessler is looking, where his light makes an eerie halo around the face.

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve seen the man,” says Kessler. “I’ve talked to him.”

“That’s not him? Dark brown eyes—”

“Those eyes aren’t dark brown.”

“Of course they’re not now, he’s dead—”

“They’re hazel.”

“Well, they’re not hazel.”

“Palace, it’s not him.”

We are whispering, intensely, and then a gunshot explodes somewhere in the silence of the basement, and then somebody is screaming—maybe more than one person—and we race toward the door, the two of us, trap ourselves briefly in a Three Stooges moment, two abreast in the entranceway, and then we burst free and scramble, me first and then Kessler, across the wide empty furnace room toward the origin of the noise.

It’s the men’s room, the one with the graffiti, except now that door has been shot open and there are lights in here, and I can see them both as soon as I get in there, frozen in place across from each other in the tiny space. Jean with a handgun clenched between two hands, held out directly in front of her small body and aimed at his stomach: Astronaut, a.k.a. Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Big Pharma, in a flapping-open terry-cloth bathrobe and nothing else, unconcerned about his paunchy nakedness, unconcerned about the woman with the gun, seemingly unconcerned about anything.

The room is the size of an apartment kitchen, lit up like a barroom with neon lights, crammed with paraphernalia for cooking drugs: empty vials, long twists of tubing, one Bunsen burner active and bubbling with something foul, another burner shut off.

In one of the raised hands he’s got a gun of his own, the gun that killed Cortez—a big antique long-barrelled pistol that must be loaded with some sort of nasty homemade semijacketed rounds. The belt, I notice, is still on his pants, a pair of filthy Levi’s crumpled in the corner. Only the clawhammer is still on the belt.

I say, “Everyone lower your weapons.” Nobody lowers their weapons. I’m one step into the room, and Kessler is just behind me, breathing hard, holding his gun, trying to see around me into the room. Astronaut yawns, a long lazy lizard’s yawn. Jean’s body is twitching, shifting, oscillating. It’s like her atomic structure has been unsettled, like she’s a jet traveling too fast, breaking some sort of barrier, and we are watching her shake apart.

“Drop the guns.” I try it again. “Drop them.”

Jean keeps her eyes on Astronaut but responds to me, a murmured shush like we’re at the library and I’m talking too loud. Astronaut laughs and winks at me, quick and reptilian. For someone who has been holed up smoking crack or meth or whatever he’s cooking behind him on that elaborate works, he is cool as a cucumber, steady as she blows, hands still half raised as if by choice: I submit to your firearm’s implied threat but I’m not going to make a big fucking deal about it.

The room reeks: hydrochlorides, ammonia, burnt salt. There is a background noise, a low chug-chug of the gas generator keeping the room alive with neon: beer-brand signs, a gaudy colored-glass Captain Morgan figurine, strings of Christmas lights. The armchair that Cortez saw, plus a piece of a sectional sofa and an ugly lamp, all crammed in here. It’s like the man has re-created his natural habitat below the world, a scumbag terrarium.

I am jerking my head back and forth between the two of them, doing rapid calculations, understanding things in reverse order as they happened, unspooling the film backward. Cortez peeked in this room yesterday and saw a man with his eyes aced out and his legs kicked up and assumed that he was dead. But Astronaut wasn’t dead, he was just riding the waves of whatever substance or combination of substances he’s been riding the waves of for the past week. Cooking and consuming, steeping himself in fumes, happy as a clam in this one-room infuser of hot chemical smoke. At some point, though, he came back to life, took a turn around his subterranean dominions and found Cortez squatting among his mac and cheese and shot him in the face.

I have to keep my eyes in the present—the story is proceeding in front of me—the parts are still moving—Jean is stepping forward with her gun leveled, ready to kill DeCarlo—just as she wanted to do yesterday when she asked if she could come with us.

“You monster,” she whispers, and he ignores her, replies cheerily: “You did it!” Like he’s proud of her. Like she just bowled a perfect game. “You’re back! I’m so proud of you, baby.”

“No, you’re not,” she says to him.

“Sure I am, little sister.”

“Stop.”

“Okay, I’ll stop,” he says, and he smiles at her and licks his lips. “I’m stopping. But I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re a liar.”

I look at him, smirking and naked. A liar is the very least of what he is. He killed them all. Not just Cortez, and not just Nico. There was no suicide pact—he poisoned the lot of them. It was his plan B. Just his.

Jean can’t shoot him—she’s working on it—she’s gathering the nerve. DeCarlo moves his non-gun hand down casually to scratch his ass. Comfortable, easy in his skin, high out of his mind. I’m trying to get the details right, thinking as fast as I can. What is he proud of her for? It’s a lie, she is calling him a liar, but what is the nature of the lie?

She’s getting ready, charming monster or not, she’s going to shoot him. He tried to kill her, and now she’s going to shoot him and the rest of the answers will be dead.

“Jean,” I say, but she doesn’t even hear me.

“Look at me,” Jean says to Astronaut, running her finger across the line of her scar, like I saw her do over and over during her interrogation. “Look.”

“You look beautiful, little sister,” he says. “You look amazing.”

“Look what you made me.”

I glance behind me at Agent Kessler and I can tell that he’s as confused as I am by this dialog, but I can also tell that he doesn’t care, the details don’t matter to him anymore. All he knows is that Astronaut killed Nico, whom he loved, and now he is bringing up his own weapon, trying to get around me to get his shot, even as I say “Jean,” sharply, loudly, to draw her attention and keep her from pulling the trigger.

Everybody needs to hold on—everybody needs to just hold on. Because nothing yet has explained Nico. I have no explanation for why he chased down my sister and cut her throat and left her gasping, breathing blood, to die alone in the mud.

“Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “Why did you kill Nico Palace?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Why did you kill the girl you called Isis?”

“Sorry, man, it’s not ringing a bell.”

He snorts laughter, and Jean’s eyes sharpen with anger, and I feel Kessler’s wrathful breath behind me. Astronaut grins at the girl tauntingly, radiating wickedness, standing in his louche bathrobe in a tiny room full of people who want to kill him. I feel the gun in my hand, the knife in my belt, I feel the Earth itself screaming for the death of this man, poisoner and conman and thief, but I need nobody to die right now. I need stasis, I need time to stop until I can claw the last pieces of truth out of this acrid little room.

“Nico told you she disagreed with the decision to go underground, Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “She left. She posed no further threat to you, she was going to take no share of your space or your water or narcotics.”

“Or pasta sauce,” he says, giggling. “Don’t forget about my pasta sauce.”

“Mr. DeCarlo, why did you kill her?”

“Shit, man, it’s a question for the philosophers,” he says.

“Why does anyone kill anyone, right? Isn’t that right, little sister?”

Jean’s hand goes back to her scar, and there is some slippery truth in Astronaut’s malevolent leer, in the terror on Jean’s small face, and I am trying to knit it all together when Kessler behind me says “Enough” and pushes past me into the room, and Astronaut’s eyes sharpen with recognition.

“Hey—” he says. “Jordan?”

“It’s Agent Kessler, actually, you prick.”

“Agent? Huh,” and he moves to one knee and fires his pistol straight into Kessler’s chest, and Kessler’s whole body flies back into the wall, and I shout “damn it” and then “no” because Jean has opened fire, she jerks the trigger of her handgun and misses Astronaut by a mile—but a spark flies off the wall and catches the flammable atmosphere and explodes.

For a long minute the world is just fire. The sound of exploding bottles and the smell of burning, and the air is on fire and Kessler is and I am, blue and yellow fire is all around us, and I am batting at our bodies, slapping down the flames, while across the tiny room Astronaut’s whole chemical-smoked body catches and bursts, and before he can react or move he becomes a pillar of fire, spiraling and falling. I get Kessler out of there with a few big heaves, cover his body with my body until we’re both extinguished.

It’s mostly our clothes, after all, Kessler’s clothing is badly burned, as mine is—the real problem is the hole in his chest, a golf-ball-sized gunshot entrance wound geysering blood, and so with the heat still pouring out of the small room, the stench of burn and death, I am hunched over Kessler panting in the hallway, covering his chest with two flat hands, blood from his heart and chest flooding out around my fingers.

“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.