World of Trouble

1.

“I made coffee. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’s not gourmet or anything, but it’s coffee. It’s something.”

“No, thank you.” The girl looks up, looks at me quickly, a frightened bird, and then quickly down again. “Do you have tea?”

“Oh, shoot,” I say, “no. I’m so sorry. Just coffee.”

Lily doesn’t say anything else. She’s sitting on the edge of the thin mattress in the holding cell, staring at her hands folded in her lap. The politeness and patience I am showing her, the composed and even casual demeanor, is all artifice, a strategy designed to achieve a goal. The feeling I have inside is of having been exploded—like all of the things that for so long have defined me, all of my habits and memories and idiosyncrasies, everything that I have built up around whatever core there is of me, all of it has turned out to be plaster, and now it has been blown up and I am watching the powder drift in the atmosphere and settle slowly on the ground. The question now is whether there is or ever was anything underneath all of that, or was I always papier-mâché, a dragon head in a parade, all exterior adornment and nothing inside. I think there is something that remains, a hard warm stone like you find glowing on the ground after a fire. But I’m not sure. I don’t know.

I am leaning against the back wall of the holding room, on the good-guy side of the bars, sipping from my thermos with exaggerated calm. From down the hall, in the garage, there is an occasional rattling blast of sound, Cortez grinding away at that concrete wedge with a diesel-fuel jackhammer. My sister’s body is in the dispatch room, wrapped in a wrinkled blue tarp.

“So why don’t we start by getting your name straight,” I say. “It’s not Lily, that much I know.” I laugh a little, and it sounds hollow, so I stop.

The girl watches her hands. The jackhammer sounds again, growling from down the hall. So far the interrogation is going poorly.

“I wish that I could leave you alone,” I say, “I really do.” I talk slow, as slow as I can force myself to talk. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“I have?” She looks up, genuinely asking, and then her finger runs along her throat, where she has allowed me to reapply the bandage. “I guess I have.”

Mental pictures in strobe-light flash: Two girls, crazy with fear. Tan sandals slipping on leaves. Heavy footsteps crashing through the woods behind them. Nico, facedown, blood flooding from her neck. I blink, clear my throat. Talk very, very slowly. “Your mind is processing trauma. It’s hard. The thing is, though, we’re in a tough spot, so to speak, just in terms of time.”

She nods some more, her small head nervously bobbling up and down, her hands twitching in her lap. “Actually,” she says softly. “Can I—you said, about time…” She peeks up at me, and then down. “How much longer?”

“Oh,” I say. “Sure.” She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She doesn’t know. “It’s Monday morning, October 1,” I tell her. “There are two more days.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She licks her dry lips nervously, pushes one stray lock of black hair behind one small ear, a simple gesture redolent of who she is, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, a kid who got lost in something terrible and strange.

“So I’m really…” I smile one more time, try to make the smile look human. “I’m really wanting to figure out what happened.”

“But I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember. It’s all like this—I don’t know.” Glances up at me, scared, touches the thick gauze on her neck. “It’s all black.”

“Not everything, though, right?”

She shakes her head, barely, a tiny motion.

“Not your whole life?”

“No,” she manages, glancing up. “Not my whole life.”

“Okay, then. So we’ll start with what you do remember, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers.

It’s not okay. It’s really not. What I want to do and what I would do if it would work is lift her and shake her by the feet until the facts come flying out like coins from her pockets. But this is how the process works. It works slowly. It’s impossible to tell at this point what portion of her not remembering stems from literal amnesia, what portion from the atavistic fear of reliving whatever horrors she has encountered. The necessary tactic in either case is bound to be patience, small steady movement through the fog, toward the truth. You build trust: Here are the things we both know. Here are the things we are going to talk about. You coach. You coax. It can be hours. Days.

I slip through the bars onto her side of the room and place my coffee cup carefully on the floor and take a knee like I’m going to propose.

“You had this bracelet in your pocket, with the charms,” I say. “The lilies. So that’s why we called you Lily.” She lifts it hesitantly from my hand and then presses it in her palm, folds her fingers around it tightly.

“My parents gave it to me.”

“A-ha.”

“When I was little.”

“Gotcha. Nice. But, so—what is your name?”

She says something, in the back of her throat, too soft for me to hear.

“I’m sorry?”

“Tapestry.”

“Tapestry?”

She nods. Sniffs a little, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. I feel a dim glow of knowledge in the darkness between us, the first teardrop bulb glowing on in a string of Christmas lights.

“And is Tapestry a nickname?” I say. “A code name?”

“Yeah.” She looks up and gives a watery smile. “Both, sort of. We all have them.”

“A-ha.”

They all have them. Tapestry. Tick. Astronaut. Does Jordan have one of these nickname/code names, I wonder? Does Abigail? Tapestry’s black eye, I notice, is at the bare beginnings of the healing process, fading from dark purple to a soft bruised pink. She is—what? Nineteen? Twenty maybe. She’s like a hummingbird, this girl. She sort of reminds me of a hummingbird.

“Did Astronaut assign you the code names? Astronaut is—”

The end of the question is “the leader, right?” but before I can get there she inhales sharply and her eyelids drop shut like window blinds.

“Whoa,” I say, standing up. I take a half step forward. “Hello?”

She sits in her silence. I can see, or imagine that I can see, her eyes moving behind the lids, like dancers behind a curtain. Slow, Detective, slower. Build trust. Have a conversation. This is all covered extensively in the literature. In the FBI’s standard witness-engagement guidelines; in Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation. I can picture the books on the shelf in my house, the neat line of their spines. My house, in Concord, that burned down. Suddenly, from down the hall, there is a determined thirty-second burst of jackhammering, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, followed by a loud backfire, and then Cortez’s exasperated hollering. “Oh, fucker! Fuck me sideways! Fuck!” and the girl looks up, surprised, and bursts out laughing, and I grab the moment, giggle also, lean in, shake my head with amusement.

“Oh, hey,” I say, sighing. “My name is Henry. Did I tell you that already?”

“You did. Yes. Henry Palace. My real name is Jean,” she says. “And I think—” She looks up at me, rubs her bloodshot eyes. “Actually, could I have—is there any water? Is that okay?”

“Of course, Jean,” I say. “Of course it’s okay.”

The jackhammer is the property of Atlee Miller. It was hidden in the fruit-and-vegetable stand, as it turns out, where the farm lines up against the highway. The piece of light machinery was stashed there along with a range of other specialty equipment, the existence of which would raise uncomfortable questions among his family: like sophisticated radio equipment, for example, like heavy artillery. These items were under the guard of a solemn young man named Bishal, with whom I had a quick, tense exchange before I said the password Atlee had provided me and produced my notebook with his signature on it.

The jackhammer is “an old dog,” Atlee warned, but he also assured me it worked with some coaxing. He did not say that the best coaxing involves shouting “fuck me sideways” when it stalls, but I trust Cortez knows what he’s doing, digging away in there. The two of us proceeding along parallel tracks in our investigation, our earlier altercation behind us. Both of us drilling down—he into the dense resistance of the stone and I into this poor kid’s damaged psyche.

Jean starts talking and talks for a while, sometimes in long jags but mostly in quick anxious bursts, frequently stopping and restarting, choking off sentences midway through, as if afraid of saying too much, saying something wrong. Bits and pieces. In her manner and appearance she is nothing like Nico—shy and hesitant where my sister was bold and direct—but sometimes, just the fact of her, her being a college-age kid who got sucked into this end-times looking-glass world, she reminds me so much of my sister that I have to stop talking for a second and hold onto my mouth or risk collapsing onto the ground.

“I was at Michigan,” Jean tells me, clutching the paper cup of warm water. “The university? That’s where I’m from. From Michigan. My parents are from Taiwan. My last name is Wong. They wanted me to come home. When the—when it started. Home to Michigan, I mean. Not Taiwan. They told me to leave school and come home and pray. We’re Catholic. I was born in Lansing.”

I’m not writing any of this down. My notebook is full, and anyway it’s better not to write, not to draw her attention any further to the fact that this is not just a regular conversation. I listen because I have to, to show empathy and build trust, but I do not care at all about her lineage, her faith and family. I am a question mark aimed at an answer.

“I didn’t want to, though, to just—just go home. Pray. I wanted to—” She shrugs, bites her lip. “I don’t know.”

In mid-January the University of Michigan wrapped up its existence with a final gathering of the community on the main quad to sing the fight song and raise a toast in Latin. But Jean Wong remained on campus through the early spring, hanging around, at loose ends. As little as she was interested in huddling in a church with her parents and reciting psalms in Mandarin, she was equally repulsed by the last-months options being explored by her former classmates: all the drum circles and “sexperimentation,” the semiorganized bus caravan heading south to the Gulf of Mexico, with pillowcases full of dope and breakfast cereal looted from the student center cafeteria. She was mainly angry, she says, and confused.

“I wanted to—I don’t know.”

I speak softly. “You wanted to do something about it.”

“Yes.” She looks up, and then repeats the phrase mockingly. “Do something about it. So stupid. Now, I mean. In retrospect.”

For a while, Jean wanders around Ann Arbor. She is briefly signed up for a mission to the Arctic, being touted by an energetic young entrepreneur who claims the world’s polarity can be shifted with the right combination of magnets. When that falls apart she moves in with strangers who are starting a cooperative “pickling and canning society,” to lay in huge quantities of preserved produce for the aftermath. But none of this feels quite real, nothing feels useful. Finally Jean finds herself at a house party slash political gathering in the basement of a Pattengill townhouse, drinking bathtub wine from a red plastic cup, listening to a man standing on a coffee table explain how the whole thing is a “con job” and a “frame-up” and how the government could “stop it like that if it wanted to.”

Jean snaps her fingers like the man on the coffee table snapped his fingers, and in my mind I am watching Nico snap her fingers, trying to sell me the same story. I experience a melancholy roll of feeling, sensing her presence in the room with us, her emphatic intonations, knowing that really she is dead down the hallway, in Dispatch, rolled up in a tarp.

The guy on the coffee table at the Pattengill party was a young man with “crazy curly hair” and bright blue shoes. He wore some kind of cape covered in glittering yellow stars. He was called Delighted—just the one name, says Jean quietly. Like Madonna. Or Bono.

“We kept talking to him after the party. Me and this girl Alice, I had met her doing the other thing. That pickling thing. We ended up—actually, we ended up moving in with him. Me and her and some others.” She bites her lip, and I don’t ask if Astronaut was one of the other people, he of the calm demeanor and the tools on his belt, because I don’t want her eyes to slam shut again.

I guide her instead into a description of the sorts of activities that she and her new housemates got up to: throwing more parties, giving more speeches, printing pamphlets to convince more people that the government was playing false about the asteroid threat. That’s as much as Jean will say, but presumably this upper-midwestern branch then progressed to the same second-order mischief as Nico and her pals in New England: committing street-corner vandalism; amassing small arms and hauling them around in duffel bags; eventually escalating to targeted trespassing on military bases, like the escapade that got Nico’s husband, Derek, pinched at the New Hampshire National Guard station.

The one thing that troubles me is the geographic reach of the organization. When Nico told me that there was a “Midwest branch” of this collective, I wrote it off as more tough talk, more BS; Nico having been fooled or trying to fool me. But here’s Jean confirming she was recruited into this gang at a basement house party at the University of Michigan, many months and miles away from when Nico came in, in central New Hampshire. It’s another aspect of this thing that speaks to a certain level of capability, a scale of operations that sits uneasily with my mental picture of Nico and some goofball pals playing at revolution in a Concord vintage store.

I don’t know what to do with this kind of information. I don’t know where to put it.

“Jean,” I say abruptly, “we need to skip ahead.”

“What?”

“Eventually a plan emerged, to track down a former United States Space Command scientist named Hans-Michael Parry, who claimed to be in possession of a plan to blow the asteroid off course. Right?”

“Right,” she says, startled. I press on. “Your group or an affiliated group was going to find Parry and free him, get him to England where he could orchestrate a standoff burst. Right?”

A stunned pause, then a quiet “Right.” She brings her pinky finger up to the corner of her mouth and gnaws at the nail, like a nervous child.

“And then he was found, right? In Gary, Indiana? And everyone was going meet down here in Rotary and await his arrival.”

“It was all so stupid.” This is the second time she’s said it, and now her eyes are flashing anger at all of this stupidity. “We sat here. Waiting and waiting, just—waiting.”

She stops there, and I watch her hand rise mechanically back to her neck, her wound, her fingers twitching along the edges of the bandage. It’s like she senses it, that we are getting nearer to the heart of this conversation, to the events of Wednesday, September 26—the mud, the knives, the violence in the woods beside the station—and the nearness of it draws her and repels her, like a black hole.

I force myself to go nice and slow, get there in time. I ask her about the people she was here with, and she does, debuting more silly code names: there was not only Delighted, there was Alice, who at some point became Sailor; there was “this real smiley kid, very young, called Kingfisher.” There was a girl named Surprise and a man called Little Man, who was “super big, actually,” so that was kind of a joke. Ha-ha. They all came down via a long zigzagging van ride from Michigan, detouring to pick up a couple of people in Kalamazoo, detouring again for a ton of packing crates from a warehouse in Wauseon, west of Toledo.

I lean forward.

“And what was in those crates?”

“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t—I never saw. He said—no peeking.”

“Who did?”

No answer. She really won’t say his name; she won’t even let herself think it. I watch it appear and linger on her face, again, her palpable terror of this man, this leader. “Never mind,” I say, “go on,” and she does. She and her bunch were joined by the other group, the group that included Nico, in late July. People came and went. As she describes the atmosphere on the lawn of the police station these last couple months, awaiting this elusive scientist, Jean’s face brightens, her body visibly unclenches. It’s like she’s talking about a garden party, like some sort of asteroid-conspiracy day camp: everybody hanging out, smoking, cooking hot dogs, flirting.

One guy in particular, she says offhandedly, was “totally in love” with Nico.

“Oh,” I say, suddenly changing my mind, suddenly wishing I had my notebook, some notebook, something. “What guy?”

“Tick,” she says.

“Tick.” Strange looking. Nervous disposition. “Did she reciprocate?”

“Ugh. No.” Jean makes a face, breathes out a tiny gale of fluttery sorority-sister laughter. “No interest. He looked like a—a horse, really. Plus he was sort of with this other girl, Valentine. But he would always make these jokes about Nico.”

“Valentine?”

“That’s her code name. Whatever. She’s so pretty. Black girl, really tall.”

Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.

“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”

“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”

“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”

“Oh,” says Jean, and laughs. “She didn’t use it much. She thought the whole thing was sort of stupid. But her code name was Isis.”

“Isis?” My eyes pop open. “Like the Bob Dylan song?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Is that where it’s from?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, that’s where it’s from.”

I savor this small pleasant factoid for a moment, half a moment, before we press on into the hard part of this. It’s going to get rough now, but it has to. Time is passing. There is nowhere else to go in this conversation but forward.

“So, Jean,” I say. “So Hans-Michael Parry never turned up. And a decision was made.” I look her in the eyes. “Astronaut made a decision.”

“I’m tired,” says Jean. She sets down her cup so fast that it tips over and the water rolls out. “I’m ready to stop.”

“No,” I say, and she flinches. “You just listen. Listen. Parry never showed up. And once everyone realizes it’s not happening, Astronaut makes the decision to relocate underground. To move everything downstairs. Jean?”

She opens her mouth to answer but the jackhammer abruptly roars down the hall, and her face constricts with fear and she closes her mouth just as the machine goes silent again.

“Jean? Was that his plan?”

“His plan,” she says, and then she shudders, violent but slow, like a theatrical enactment of a shudder: her face and then her neck and then her back and then her torso, a wave of revulsion rolling down the length of her body. “His plan.”

“Lily?”

“That’s not my name,” she says.

“Oh, God, Jean. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t want her to go. I told her not to.”

“What?”

“Nico. We’re going down, we’re making the last trips, and she goes, she goes, ‘I’m taking off.’”

“To go get Parry on her own.”

“Right,” says Jean. “Yes.”

“So this was what time?”

She looks up, confused. “What time?”

I know it’s after Nico and Astronaut have their argument in the hallway, and it’s before Atlee closes up the floor at 5:30. “Is this about five o’clock?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s say it’s five o’clock. She tells you she’s leaving and you did what?”

“I mean, I told her it was insane.” She shakes her head, and for an instant I see reflected in her eyes this incredulous exasperation that I myself have felt a thousand times, trying to tell Nico anything she doesn’t want to hear. “Just—useless. I said, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we can all be together? At least that, you know? Be together.”

“But she went anyway.”

“She did. We brought everything down, and I didn’t think she would really go, but then everyone was like—she’s gone. She was gone.”

“And you followed her?”

“I—” She stops; her brow furrows; her eyes well up with confusion. “I—did.”

I stand up. “Jean? You followed her.”

“Yes. I had to, see? I had to. She’s my friend.”

I’m leading her as far out into this memory as she’ll go, I’m holding her hand and leading her out on the slippery rocks toward the dangerous water. “You had to stop her from leaving, but then there was someone else. Someone followed you. Jean?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do, Jean. Yes, you do.”

Her mouth drops open, and her eyes widen, and then she shakes her head again, she stares forward into the air between us. “I don’t remember.”

She does, she is seeing something—someone—I see it happening in her eyes. I lean forward and grab her but she wriggles back, rolls away. “Jean, keep talking. Jean, stay with me. You went to stop her but someone followed you guys.”

But she’s gone, she’s done, she falls back on the bed and throws her hands up in front of her face, and I am saying, “Jean! Jean. Somebody surprised you outside the station. With a knife.”

She shrieks a little, a sharp burst of air, and then she presses her hand across her lips. And I grab her again, clutch her by the shoulders and lift her, and my shell of dispassion, my phony policeman’s calm, is melting off of me, burned off by heat: I can’t stand this, I have to know.

“Someone chased you and attacked you with a knife, and they killed my sister.”

She shakes her head violently, keeps her hand clapped over her mouth, like there’s a demon in there, something trying to slip free and wreck the world.

“Was it Astronaut?”

Eyes squeezed shut tight, body shaking.

“Or was it a stranger? A short man, sunglasses? Baseball cap?”

She turns her body away from me, turns her back. I wish I could pull out a picture of him—lay it on the bed, Jordan smirking in his stupid Ray-Bans, see Jean’s face see the picture. But it’s too late, she’s disappeared, she’s gone, turning her mind away from whatever it is she is unwilling to see. Her hand is clamped over her mouth, her body has fallen over onto its side and she lies there on the thin mattress, mute, terrified, useless.

“Oh, come on,” I say.

I kick the bed and it bounces with her in it.

“Oh, come on, come on, come on.”

2.

“Isis,” of course, is the second track on the 1976 album Desire, and for a brief period when I was about fifteen or sixteen it was my favorite Bob Dylan song. It was around that time Nico discovered a journal in which I had carefully recorded my top twenty Dylan numbers, each annotated with the year written and the performers on the track. Nico found something hysterical about the fastidiousness of this particular exercise, and she ran around the house, dying with laughter, tossing the notebook up and down to herself like a chimpanzee.

It’s weird to think back now, to think about who I was then, to think that at any time “Isis” was my favorite Dylan song. Now it probably isn’t even my favorite song on Desire. But there’s no reason Nico would have known that, and I think it is at least possible, I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.

I walk down the hall from the holding cell to Detective Irma Russel’s little office, and I flip her heavy leather-bound log book to the back and tear out sixteen sheets and fold them over neatly to form a book, and then I spend a good half hour recording everything that Jean had to say before she shut down, blanked out, went dark. How she came to be in the group; the names and approximate ages and appearances of her pals and coconspirators; the way her face turned cloudy and wild at the mention of the name Astronaut. How she realized that Nico had taken off, how she ran to follow her…

When I’m done writing, when I’ve written up to the brick wall at the end of the story, I walk back down the hall to Dispatch so I can sit next to Nico. She would laugh at me for all of this. She would tell me to take a load off, go back and have more beer with the rednecks, eat more chicken.

I press the power button on the RadioCOMMAND and the room fills with prayer: a gospel choir singing about the promised land in lush layers of harmony, transmitting up to God and out over a 600 MHz band. I picture a church somewhere, barricaded doors, blackout shades over the windows, a hungry happy congregation singing and singing till the day arrives. Till the promised land. I press SCAN and find someone claiming to be the president of the United States of America, proudly announcing that the whole thing was just a test of the resiliency of the American people, and—good news—we passed the test. It’s okay now, though, folks. Everything is fine.

I change the station. I change it again. Flickering voices, bursts of static, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and then a tipsy ecstatic teenager: “I don’t know where y’all motherfuckers are at, but we all motherfuckers are in the Verizon store at the Crestview Hills Mall in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, bi-zatch! Anyone looking to par-tay get on fucking I-75…”

It’s foolish to keep listening to strangers. I should preserve the battery; I should preserve my time. I press the SCAN button just one more time, the last time, and find a quiet and urgent voice, and I have to move right up close to the speaker to hear it.

“I repeat, I am in my car and I am driving south on Highway 40, if you get this and you still love me, I will be in Norman by five tomorrow, that’s tomorrow… I repeat, I’m in the car, I’m on the highway, and I love you. I, uh…”

The voice trails off into silence, the rush of highway wind. I wait a moment holding my breath and then I turn it off, just as the jackhammer starts up again at last, steady and sure from Cortez’s end of the hall. He fixed it. He’s got it.

It remains hard to fathom, hard to believe, that this is what the world has become. That this, of all possible worlds and times in which I could have been born, could have been a policeman, that this is the world and time that I got.

“We got ripped off, Nic,” I walk back over to my sister, look again at her face, the savaged flesh of her neck. “We got ripped off.”

I start to pull the tarp up over her head but then I stop, I just hold it there like a blanket.

It’s the wound. It’s her throat.

Maybe I didn’t look hard enough out in the woods, maybe I was distracted or maybe it’s that just now I’ve had the experience of sitting and staring at Jean for half an hour, watching her talk, looking at her throat. Out there in the woods, at first glance, it was clear to me that these two wounds were the same: two girls, throats slashed, victim one and victim two, wound one and wound two.

But it’s not so. Nico’s injury is worse—much worse. Which makes sense, of course, because she’s dead and Jean isn’t. I lean in close, trace the line of the assault with the tip of a finger. Looking closely I see it’s not a cut but a mass of cuts, a cluster of overlapping lacerations, forming a rough V below the victim’s chin, pointing down. With the other wound there was blood, there was the raw pinkness of the exposed muscle, but now here with this second victim it goes deeper than that—below all the blood of the jugular and the shredded layers of throat there is the shell color of bone, the off-white piping of the trachea. The depth of the wound and its messiness suggest that she was struggling, moving the whole time, trying to defend herself, get free from what was happening.

I blink back to Jean’s wound, the one I was just staring at while she stumbled through her story, a less messy wound—a single slash, suggesting little struggle or no struggle, contrary to the bruising and lacerations on her face.

So—then—so—I stand up, pace in a tight circle—so she fought back, Jean fights back but is captured and subdued. Let’s say a pill or pills, let’s say the assailant pushes something into her mouth, covers her nose with his hands and forces her to swallow.

No—stop—I stop, smack the wall with my hand, think faster, Palace, think better. We’re in a fast-moving scenario here, victim two—Nico—is already sprinting off into the woods, I’m the killer and I’ve got to catch her, can’t let her go. I hit her with something. Knock her down. Jean’s in the dirt—unconscious?—gets her with one quick smooth slice to the throat and then I’m off and running after victim two, after Nico Palace tearing breathlessly in her sandals through the woods.

But I checked Jean’s body, while she was asleep, when she was still Lily, I checked her scalp for blunt force trauma, surely I did.

She was, though, she was still. Pills or an injection or the blow of a hammer to the side of the head, she wasn’t moving when she was cut and Nico was.

I find that I’m panting, pacing, horrified. It’s out there, it’s up there, the dark heart of the sky, coming in fast.

Focus Palace but I can’t but I have to. Keep going.

Killer catches up to poor Nico in that second clearing, gets on top of her and pins her down, and she’s terrified, she’s awake, she’s writhing, and he grabs her from behind and slashes her throat until it’s open.

I am trembling, like I’m there, like I’m in the scene, like I’m cutting or being cut.

There’s something else, too. I turn around, away from the window, look at her one more time, wiping tears out of my eyes, feeling my knife hand clenching and unclenching. There’s something else.

Among the messiness and the gore of the wound there is something—I crouch—lean forward, take out my measuring tape, and murmuring apologies to Nico, after all that she has suffered, murmuring “holy moly” and then “holy shit,” I peel back small portions of her lacerated skin, one-tenth of a centimeter at a time, and I keep discovering them—smaller cuts within the larger, lines as small as insect legs. I move my magnifying glass across the neck and confirm that these smaller cuts are regularly spaced at quarter-inch increments along the whole line of the wound.

Parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound. Dr. Fenton would say that nothing is certain, that certainty is for schoolchildren and magicians, but that parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound strongly indicate that the weapon used was a serrated blade.

I burst out of the dispatch room and run down the hallway, hands spread out to either side like an animal wingspan, fly down the corridor to the kitchen to confirm my snapshot memory of the knives on the rack behind the kitchen. Butcher’s blade; paring knife; cleaver. Nonserrated.

Back in Dispatch I run it down for Nico, explain to her about her wound, the parallel superficial incisions and what they mean. I remind her, furthermore, that the only serrated blade I am aware of, in the context of this investigation, is the sawtooth buck knife noticed by Atlee Miller, hanging from Astronaut’s belt.

“Policeman.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

Cortez. Tentative expression, narrowed eyes. Looking at me like I’m not actually okay.

I clear my throat. “I’m fine. Did you crack it?”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I am. Did you get us down?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the tarp.

“Palace,” he says. “Is that her?”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s her.”

I give it to him fast, the thumbnail sketch only. “The sleeping girl, whose name is Jean Wong, originally of Lansing, Michigan—her memory of the incident in question is very uneven, essentially empty, but she was able to lead me directly to a field in the woods where I located the body. Cause of death is a deep wound to the throat with a serrated blade. That’s about—that’s about what we’ve got. So.”

I stop abruptly. I know exactly what I’m doing by talking this way, very rapidly in crisp and distinct policeman diction, I’m stringing words out around my grief like a perimeter, like caution tape.

Cortez nods, solemn, adjusts his ponytail. I wait for him to ask again if I’m okay, so I can tell him I am and we can move on.

“Death,” he says instead. “It’s the fucking worst.”

“Did you get us down there?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Okay. Okay, great.”

He backs out of the room rather than turning, and as I stand up I see that for some reason I took one of the knives with me, the blood-stained butcher’s knife from the kitchenette. I’m holding the handle tight in my fist. I look at it for a second and then I slide it into my belt, on the inside, close to my thigh, like a huntsman.

3.

So the group goes underground but then Nico pulls a runner and Jean runs after her and Astronaut chases them both, catches them, kills them one by one.

This is last Wednesday, sometime after four thirty p.m., probably closer to five. Me and my dog and my goon rolled in about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Hours. A margin of hours. I can’t forget that. I won’t.

It’s Astronaut, or it’s Jordan and he’s using Astronaut’s knife.

Or it’s Tick, or it’s Valentine. Or it’s none of the above.

Nine times out of ten, in the usual run of things, a person is murdered not by a stranger but by a friend or family member, a husband or wife. There are exceptions—my mother was one—and neither is this the normal run of things. We live now in a world of wolves, blue towns, red towns, people roaming the countryside in search of safety or love or cheap thrills. Nico and Jean may well have emerged from their society of rogues unharmed, only to be set upon by some monster roaming the landscape, someone who had always wanted to slash the throats of two girls and took his opportunity before disappearing, laughing, into the woods. Plenty of people wear sunglasses. Plenty of people carry serrated knives.

“Ready, Policeman?”

“Yeah,” I say to Cortez. “I am.”

We are standing beside each other, hands on our hips, staring down the metal stairwell that descends, as predicted, from the middle of the police station garage. The infamous wedge of concrete that had hidden it has been reduced to a pile of rubble, which Cortez has arranged on a tarp beside the resulting hole, a pyramid of uneven stones. He’s sweating like crazy from his exertions, his T-shirt is soaked, his ponytail unkempt and sweat-matted, rolling down his back. Peering down into the darkness, licking his lips.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, okay. We get down there, first challenge will be getting through the blast door.”

“Blast door?”

“People build bunkers, this is what they do: they put in a toilet, a generator, and a blast door.” He’s fitting on a Rayovac headlamp, tightening the straps. “Plus, of course, I’ve been up here jackhammering for the better part of an hour.”

“And nobody came up.”

“Because they didn’t hear.”

“Through the blast door.”

“Gold star for you, Policeman.”

He hands me a second headlamp, and I loop the straps over my ears and across my scalp, wincing as the Velcro of the fastener brushes the gash on my forehead. “You can’t shoot through a blast door unless you’ve got a shoulder-mounted nuclear bomb, but you sure can pick the locks.” His headlamp winks on. “Well. I can.”

Cortez is talking fast, grinning like the devil, eyes flashing with excitement, ready to rock. There is a new intensity about the man, a thrill of having cracked the floor and a twitchy excitement about heading downstairs—almost as if this is his case and I’m the one tagging along to lend him a hand. He can’t wait to see what’s down there, what comes next. I’m feeling what he’s feeling, too, I need to know, I have to, and when I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell, beyond the edge of my headlamp’s halo I see Nico’s face, eyes closed, the dark red savaged mess of her throat.

Cortez steps down first, heavy boot heel clanging on the top metal step, me coming one step behind. The narrow metal stairwell shivers under our heels.

“Hi.”

A timid voice, from back the way we came. Jean is standing in the doorway that leads out of the garage back into the hallway. Cortez and I both stop at the same time and turn our heads, and our headlamps crisscross like prison-break spotlights on her small worried face.

“You’re going down?”

“Yes,” I say. “We are.”

“You must be Jean,” says Cortez. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

She shifts from one foot to the other in the doorway, shivering, holding herself tightly. She is wearing black pants and a red T-shirt I gave her out of Nico’s abandoned backpack, and over that one of my extra jackets, which hangs on her like a monk’s robe. She hovers there, uneasy, like she wants to leave but can’t. As if she is a ghost, captured in the gloomy corner of the garage, tethered by her curse to a given radius.

“Can I come?” she says.

“Why?”

“I just—I want to.”

I step back up, out of the hole. “Do you remember something, Jean? Something you can tell us?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. I don’t.” She crosses her arms, sniffs the thick gray air of the garage. “I just want to come.”

“Well,” I start, but at the same time Cortez says: “No.” I look at him, and he shakes his head. “No way.” Before I can marshal an argument, which I am not sure I have, Cortez is talking fast, stage-whispering his objections: “A, this girl is, tops, a hundred pounds; B, she’s unarmed; and C, she’s clearly not in a healthy place. If you gather my meaning. We don’t need her.”

“She’s been down there. She can guide us.”

“It’s a hole in the ground,” says Cortez. “I think we’ll figure it out.”

I look at Jean, who looks back at me pleadingly, wavering on her feet. She doesn’t want to be alone, that’s all. She’s so pale standing there in the dim light that she is virtually transparent, like I might look away and look back and she’ll be gone, she’ll just slip out of existence.

“Policeman, listen,” says Cortez, no longer bothering to whisper, his eyes fixed on the thin staircase leading down. “We’re not going in there to play ping-pong in the rec room. This isn’t all the set-up for a surprise party I planned for you.”

He’s right. I know he’s right.

“Jean,” I say softly.

“No, it’s—” She turns away. “Fine. Okay.”

“We’ll be right back,” I tell her, which probably isn’t true, and “you’ll be fine,” and of course that’s not true either.

“You can’t save everybody, my boy,” says Cortez, while I watch Jean wander from the garage and maybe back to the holding cell that has somehow become her home, or maybe she’ll be darting off into the woods, taking her chances in the broken world until it’s gone. Or maybe she’s done, maybe she’s had enough and when we come back we’ll find her up here, hanging by a bedsheet, eyes bulging and lips blue like Peter Zell.

We go down. Down we go.

Cortez descends first and I follow him into the darkness. He’s whistling, softly, “hi-ho, hi-ho,” and I follow the sound of him whistling and the clang of his boot heels on the metal steps, my headlamp catching half-lit visions of his back and the backs of his shoes, until he reaches the bottom and stops and says, “Huh.”

There is no blast door. We come off the last step onto a cement floor; cement walls; a long basement hallway. It’s cold, noticeably so, an easy ten degrees colder than upstairs; cold and dark and utterly silent. The smells of old stone, of mold and standing water, and underneath that a more recent scent, an acridness like something burning somewhere nearby. As we look around the empty room our headlamps cut overlapping slices of yellow gloom from the darkness.

It’s nothing. It’s just plain nothing. It takes a moment or two for me to identify the feeling creeping up into my bones while I’m standing here, staring at this long empty quiet hallway. It’s disappointment is what it is, a low cold disappointment, because some part of me had wondered. At some point without meaning to I had allowed some faint bubbles of hope to form and rise. Because of all of it—not just the damn helicopter, but all of it: the impressive geographic reach of this group, from New England to the Midwest; the Internet capacity, Jordan nonchalantly hacking an FBI database on a dial-up connection while the rest of the world is in rapid regression toward the Stone Age; those mysterious heavy crates Atlee Miller saw being trucked down here on Wednesday afternoon.

Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from Star Wars. Something.

But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.

Where are the people? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?

Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.

“Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”

My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.

“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”

“We’ll split up.”

“What?

I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.

“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.

“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”

“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry? “Cortez?”

This is insane. I stumble after him but he’s moving fast, swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. He’s got some plan, he’s following some star that I can’t see. A wash of panic rushes up from my stomach, a rush of fear, deep anxiety, as old as childhood. I don’t want to be down here alone.

“Cortez?”

4.

I take big careful steps along the gray floor, my back pressed against the rough concrete, my light bobbling in front of me like I’m an anglerfish. My gun is in my right hand. Eyes seeking, trying to adjust. Walking through a shadowland, through a photographer’s negative, shining the light. A few bulbs dangle bare and functionless from the ceiling, among a tangle of sagging, rusted pipes. A bare stone floor, uneven, cracked in long lines across the foundation. Spiderwebs and spiders.

The layout of the police station basement appears much like the layout upstairs, a single long hallway broken by doors. There are just fewer of the doors down here, spaced farther apart. It’s like this world down here is the corpse version of the world upstairs, the decaying mirror image of what’s above. Like the building died and was buried down here, underground.

Somewhere down the hall I hear the creak of a door, a footstep: steel boot heel on concrete. Another footstep and then a quiet rustle of laughter.

I whisper sharply. “Cortez?”

No answer. Was that him? The door creaks again, or maybe a different door. I turn slow, 360 degrees, watch my semicircle of light bobble across the darkness, but it doesn’t find him. What was he laughing at? What’s funny? I don’t know if he’s still somewhere in the hallway, on the far end of it hidden in shadow, or if he’s slipped through one of the doors.

There’s a scratching sound, above my head, something small up there, tiny claws scrabbling over the rusted interiors of the pipes. I stand for a long moment, as if at attention, listening to the mouse or mole or whatever it is, feeling each of my heartbeats like a whoosh of air in a bellows, feeling a flush of fever in my face. Maybe it’s a function of having lost so much weight—of being so tired—but I can, I can feel it, each individual heartbeat, every second passing.

All in all I’m counting only three doors, clustered together at the end of the hall. Two up ahead on my left, one just to my right. I shake my head, press my fingers into my eyelids. Three doors, three rooms. Doors and rooms. All I have to do down here is what I did up there, go down the line, search each room, clear each one, check them off, one at a time.

They’re even labeled. The door directly next to me on the right says GENERAL STORE in big spray-painted letters, bright red. On the other side of the hall, the closer of the two doors says LADIES, same paint, same color. The one next to it should say GENTLEMEN, but instead it has no words, just a graffiti depiction of male genitalia in bright blue paint. Sophomoric; charmless; bizarre in the context. This little masterpiece I presume to be what Cortez was laughing at, but it doesn’t look like it’s that room he chose to enter—it’s the door marked GENERAL STORE that’s slightly ajar. I peer through it and say, “Marco,” and he doesn’t answer and for a second I can see it vividly in my mind, Cortez in there, taken by surprise, his throat sliced open, red blood spilling out, writhing on the floor, blood spurting from the terrible wound.

“Polo,” he says, indistinct and distant. I exhale.

I shake my head. Where are the people? Maybe one of these doors leads to another hallway, another exit; another staircase, leading farther down. Maybe they came down here and disappeared, dissolved into patches of dust or shadows.

The door marked LADIES is locked. I rattle the handle. Bedrooms? Women’s bunks? I press the door with two flat hands, find it to be flimsy, just pine or pressboard. Eminently breakable, calling to be kicked down. I take a deep breath and prepare to kick in the door, and while I’m suspended there, between intention and action, another memory crowds in: my mother, a couple of years before she was murdered, she said this beautiful thing to me about how your life was a house that God had built for you, and He knew what was in each room but you didn’t—and behind every door there was a discovery to be made, and some rooms were full of treasure and some with trash but all the rooms were of God’s design—and at this point, these many years later, I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.

I raise my gun up to chest height, like a real old-fashioned policeman, and kick open the door marked LADIES. It flies open and cracks against the wall, ricochets back against my shoulder and cracks into the wall a second time, and my light looks in on a room full of corpses.

It takes time. To get the whole picture, it takes some time. Investigating a pitch-black room with a headlamp, what you get is a mosaic picture, like shaking puzzle pieces one by one out of the box. You turn your head and suddenly the light fills with a man’s face, scruffy beard, features slack, eyes staring straight ahead. Turn your head again, the light moves, and there’s an arm in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, fingers curled, inches from the plastic Flintstones cup that’s rolled away from the hand.

My light moves through the room, seeing one thing at a time.

In the center of the room there is a small square card table with cups and saucers on it. There are dead bodies seated around it as if for tea. A man with a long ugly face and a buzz cut, head back and to the side, like he’s fallen asleep on the crosstown bus. One of his hands dangling down to his right, the other hand on the table, fingers interlaced with the fingers of the girl next to him. This is Tick, then, and the girl whose hand he is holding is Valentine—African American, very dark skinned, long arms. She has fallen forward and her cheek is flat on the tabletop, a line of fluid running from the corner of her mouth like a spiderweb.

Two more people are at the table. Everyone has a cup. Four for tea.

Across from Tick is Delighted, handsome young fella, clean-cut, slumped backward, head lolling. In the cape that Jean mentioned. I crouch under the table and find his trademark bright blue sneakers. Next to Delighted is a girl with a wide face, round cheeks, curly hair—maybe that’s Sailor, formerly Alice—her body turned slightly away from Delighted, as if upset with him or embarrassed by something he just said.

I shine my light into Sailor’s cup: it looks like tea, it really does. I sniff at it but don’t catch a scent. I don’t touch anything. It’s a crime scene.

I make my way from the center of the room out to the perimeter and find more corpses—many more. I am keeping it together, though, I’m doing fine. I’m shining my headlamp into each pair of eyes like an optometrist, examining each pair of dilated pupils.

I hold up wrists, take pulses, listen at chests. There is no sign of life in anybody. I’m in a wax museum.

Close to the door is a seated man, bearded chin resting on his thick barrel chest. Little Man. Remember? It’s funny because he’s so big. Ha-ha. Another corpse, a man I’ve heard no description of, shirtless with a muscle-man build and a scar on his cheek and a surfer’s blond hair. Next to him, jutting out from under the table, are two feminine bare feet, crossed demurely, slim ankle over slim ankle. For some reason I think this is more likely to be Sailor than the girl at the table, or maybe it’s someone else entirely, maybe it’s one of the four girls—four if I’m doing the math right, four of Atlee Miller’s estimated eight girls and six men—whose code names I never got. Whoever she is, she drank hers out of a thermos, the thermos is cupped in her lap with no top on, and I shine the headlamp down into it and catch a glimpse of the last few drops of dark liquid.

I go back to the table. The girl who is half eased away from Delighted, I’ve seen her face. I met her. Nico’s friend. She was flying the helicopter.

I look at it again, the poison, shine my light into the cups and glasses and thermoses, confirming that they all drank the same draft, whatever it is. I will never know what it is. We’re past all that now. Send it to the lab, boys! It was something bad for you. They all drank it and died.

There’s even a note. It’s on the wall, black and green graffiti letters on the concrete: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

There are more bodies. A girl curled up over here like a sleeping cat, a dreadlocked blonde next to her, arms and legs splayed out at crazy angles. A woman of early middle age, arms crossed, cross-legged against the wall like she’s doing yoga. What’s funny is that I keep expecting to find Nico among this room full of suicides, even though I already found her, I found her in the woods, she’s already dead.

The last body lies on the ground, in the back corner, facedown. A man, a generation older than the rest. Thick dark hair. Dark brown eyes. Glasses, one lens cracked where his face hit the concrete when he slid off a folding chair. I stoop and shine the light right into his eyes. Astronaut. Mouth open, tongue sticking out, eyes wide open and staring at the door.

I reach down to check the famous belt but it’s not on, so I get down on all fours and crawl around for a minute, trying to find it, and my hand comes down on the cold flat flesh of his hand, Astronaut’s, and I lurch up out of my crouch and race for the door because this is a crime scene, for God’s sake, I trip over Sailor’s extended feet, or whoever’s feet those are, and reach the hallway just in time to bend forward and vomit on the ground. Nothing in my stomach: black strings of coffee-colored bile, pooling at my feet in the light of the headlamp.

I straighten up and rub at my face with my shirtsleeve and try to think this through. Dead in that room are six women—Valentine, Sailor, and four more—and five men, Tick, Astronaut, Little Man, Delighted, and the stranger with the surfer hair.

This is what Nico was escaping from. This was the backup plan that sent the wave of atavistic revulsion shuddering down Jean’s face.

Mass suicide I understand, group suicide has been a part of the landscape since the beginning of this, since 2011GV₁ first made herself known. Spiritual pilgrims. Desperate seekers. More recently it’s only rumors: 50,000 people all dead together at Citi Field. A tribe of native Peruvian people burying themselves to the neck in the desert, their suffering meant as some kind of sacrifice to the fearsome new god streaking across the sky. Stories that can’t be true, that you hope aren’t true. Supposedly there was a group that drowned themselves in a reservoir outside Dallas, their bodies bobbing to the surface for weeks, hastening the end of the northeast Texas water supply. Supposedly there are “Last Call” party boats operating 24/7 now in New Orleans, going out on Lake Pontchartrain with champagne and caviar and enough dynamite to blow a hole in the hull once everybody on board is good and wasted and ready to go.

So this here, then, in the Rotary PD basement, this here is nothing. The plan to save the world gets scratched and this is the backup plan, one kind of craziness cross-fading into another. No one hunkering down to tough it out—it’s bottoms up, it’s ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT, it’s everybody dead in the same grave underground. Except that Nico Palace—I’m standing in the dark, still waiting for my stomach to settle, I’m staring at nothing, at the black-on-black outline of the door across the hall, thinking of my sister—Nico Palace says thanks but no thanks. Nico says I disagree, the situation is not what the situation is. Nico who, drunk at age fourteen, informed me that our father had been a coward for hanging himself over grief for Mom, “a rat-shit coward,” declines to raise a toast and gulp down a thermos full of death. She rejects plan B and heads out with her backpack full of candy on her Hail Mary bid to complete the mission and save the world.

And Jean follows to stop her, to convince her to take the easy way out, the quick way. Why would you want to leave for nothing, she tells her, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we could all be together?

She’s telling her all that when someone else emerges from that underground lair, bursts up from the ground like a hand from the graveyard at the end of a horror movie, someone follows them and catches them. Assumes they’re both slipping free from the plan and insists they both take part.

Someone. It’s Astronaut, if Astronaut has time. I’ve got him talking to Nico in the hallway at 4:30, when the move downstairs isn’t close to done. Benefit of the doubt, rapid motion after that, and it’s 4:45 before everything is downstairs. So that means Astronaut is then running back up the stairs, hunting down Nico and Jean, chasing and killing them sequentially, and then running back down the stairs before the hole is sealed at 5:30.

I glance back over my shoulder into the room full of the dead. I’m going to go back in there. I am. In just a second I will. If the Astronaut scenario is hobbled by the timeline problem, that means anyone else currently dead in that room is also eliminated, and that leaves the sixth man. It was eight women and six men who came down here, and eight women minus Nico and Jean equals the six female corpses in the ladies’ room, but six men minus who equals five dead men?

Is the answer Jordan? Jordan isn’t in the room—Jordan’s not dead from poison—where is Jordan?

But the other question, the main question really, the question that looms like a thundercloud over all of the others, is why—why—what sense did it make, whoever the killer was, why? What purpose did it serve at this late date for her to die like that, out there in a field, bleeding and gasping, what possible need could that have filled, to find those who’d slipped the suicide circle and bring them back and make them die? The word why a tenor bell clanging in my brain while I’m standing there with my back to the door, trying to get myself to go back in and take more evidence.

I can lift prints off of dead bodies with gunpowder and Scotch tape. And then if I can find the knife I can lift prints off of that too, either prove that Astronaut was the last person holding it or rule him out.

I’m close to this thing, I’ve almost got it, facts are crowding in around me and they just need to be sorted, sifted, thought through, pieced together. Stars in a distant sky, glimmering in and out of focus, almost in a constellation but not quite taking shape.

“Henry!”

Cortez’s voice, sharp, excited. He found more bodies. He must be in the other room, the one with the anatomical graffiti. He found something.

“Don’t touch anything,” I shout, feeling along the wall for the doors. “It’s a crime scene.”

“A crime scene? Henry, Jesus, come quick.”

His voice is coming from the third room, the room marked GENERAL STORE. I come out into the hallway, following my light, and I see his head poking out of the open door.

“Come in here,” he hollers. “Oh, Policeman. You’ve got to see this.”

5.

Cortez is standing in the center of the room, surrounded by packing crates stacked to the ceiling, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, man,” he says. Manic. Juiced. “Okay, okay, okay.”

“Cortez?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

I flash my light past him and around him and find the same dull contours of the rest of the basement: gray dusty walls, cracking concrete floors. The crates stand surrounded by piles of disorganized junk: sagging-sided cardboard boxes; a blue plastic packing bin filled with camping lanterns and kitchen matches. In the back, a rack of clothing: puffy coats and long johns and stocking caps. Two half-height steel filing cabinets, piled one on top of the other like decommissioned robots.

And Cortez in the middle of it all, his foot up on one of the packing crates like a conquistador, his face a mask of joy, eyes wide and full of promise. I aim my light at him and it’s like he’s glowing, all of that barely restrained intensity I sensed before is restrained no longer, it’s beaming off of him in waves.

“Well?” he says.

I’m impatient, I’m confused. I want to get back to my bodies, get back to work.

“Cortez, what?”

“What, what? What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About everything.”

“Everything what?”

He laughs. “Everything everything!”

We’re Abbott and Costello all of a sudden, down here in the darkness. My mind is elsewhere. Where is that weapon? The infamous sawtooth buck knife. It occurs to me with a shudder of horror that I won’t find it anywhere on that floor in the darkness, because the killer may have pitched it into the woods. But again why, always why—why throw away a knife when you’re about to kill yourself—why hide evidence in a forest that’s about to burn to ash? My mind is reeling with facts and suppositions, but Cortez grabs my arm and drags me over to one of the crates. He turns, squats, and slides the lid off and it clatters to the ground and he steps back dramatically.

I aim my headlamp inside the crate: it’s full of macaroni and cheese. Dozens of boxes of it. A generic brand, not even a brand at all, just the cardboard boxes stamped MACARONI AND CHEESE.

Cortez waits behind me, breathing heavy, running his hands through his hair. I pull out a few of the boxes, toss them aside, wondering if it’s under the mac and cheese—the gold bars, the guns, the bricks of refined uranium, whatever is supposed to be impressing me right now. But no, it’s a crate full of pasta, bright orange boxes of uncooked pasta as far down as I can dig.

“Cortez—” I say, and he waves his arms and yells “Wait!” like a TV pitchman. “Wait, there’s more!”

He’s pulling the tops off more of the crates, wrenching them off like coffin lids, but it’s more of the same, more nothing—more macaroni and cheese and then a crate full of spaghetti sauce, forty Costco-sized megajars of lumpy marinara. Stuffed ravioli, applesauce, foil-wrapped snack cakes… it’s all nothing, boxes full of nothing, except it’s more like a parody of nothing. It’s like a joke you would play on someone who wanted to prepare for the end of the world. “Well,” you would say, smirking behind your hand, “well, you’re going to need pasta!”

But Cortez isn’t laughing. He’s looking back and forth between me and the boxes of junk food, as if waiting for me to drop and scream hallelujah.

“We found it,” he says at last, smile widening, eyes practically pinwheeling.

“We found what?”

“A stash. A horde. We found stuff, Policeman. Weapons, too: Tasers and helmets and walkie-talkies. Stuff. And this here,” he says, turning to kick another of the crates, “is full of satellite phones. All charged up. I knew these people had stuff down here.”

I stare at him, baffled. This is his own mania, Cortez’s very own brand of undiagnosed asteroid psychosis. Tasers? Helmets? Like we can sit underground with our helmets on and weather the collapse of civilization like a thunderstorm. Who does he think we’re going to talk to on our satellite phones? But he goes on, wrenching the lid off a crate of bottled water and shouting “Ta-da!” like he’s discovered King Tut.

“Five-gallon jugs,” he says, yanking one out by the thin plastic handle. “There are twenty-four in this crate, and five of the crates so far are just water, just so far. A person ideally has three gallons a day, but it’s really one and a half, just to live.” His eyes reflecting the headlamp are buzzing and flickering like a computer, crunching the numbers. “Let’s make it two gallons.”

“Cortez.”

He’s not listening. He’s done—he’s gone off to wherever he is, he’s jumped the rails. “Now, if we’re these jokers, if there are fourteen of us—you said fourteen?”

“There were,” I say. “They’re dead.”

“I know,” he says, offhandedly, and goes back to his calculations, “if there are fourteen people that’s a month, maybe. But for the two of us, Skinny Minny, for just the two of us…”

“How do you know they’re dead?”

“Wait, wait,” he says, dragging a cardboard box away from the wall and digging in, so keyed up he nearly pitches forward into it. “Look, water filtration tablets, at least a gross, so even once the jugs run out, we can unseal ourselves, get up to that creek, remember the creek?”

I do. I remember splashing through it, following Jean, desperate to get where she was leading me, not knowing yet but somehow knowing that it was Nico’s body we were running to find. I am staring at Cortez, my confusion melting over into anger, because I don’t care how many jugs of water are down here—I don’t care about the other stuff, either, all the piles of boxes and bulging black trash bags.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says suddenly, stopping in his frantic motion to take one big step closer to me and shine his headlamp bright into my eyes. “I know you. You can’t see it because you don’t know how to look, but I look around in this room and I see a room full of days. Days of life. And I don’t know what it’s going to be like out there, afterwards, but if days are invested wisely they can be turned into months, and months into years.”

“Cortez, wait,” I say, trying to focus, blocking his light with my hand. “How did you know they’re dead?”

“Who?”

“The—the people, Cortez, the—”

“Oh, right, right. I found one in that room with the cock and balls on it. In a Barcalounger holding a cup of something. Slumped over with his feet up and eyes aced out.” He does a quick pantomime of the vic, crossing his eyes and rolling out his tongue.

“Wait—”

“And when I heard you puking your guts down the hall, I figured you’d found the rest.”

“Cortez, wait—the man you found—”

“Can opener!” he says, diving his hand into a bag and yanking it back out. His voice is getting louder and louder, buzzing and jumping. “Jackpot! That’s really all you need, friend policeman, in our difficult modern times, is a good can opener.” He tosses it toward me, and without thinking I open my hands to catch it. “This is what we came for.”

“No.” I seek his eyes in the darkness, desperate now to make him calm down, to make him hear me. “We came to find my sister.”

“She’s dead. Yes?”

“Yes, but she was—she’s—we’re not done. I mean, we came here to help her.”

“You did.”

I drop the can opener.

“What?”

“Oh, Policeman,” he says. “Dear child.”

Cortez—my goon—he snaps a match and lights a cigarette in the darkness. “I knew I wasn’t going to spend the afterlife with a bunch of cops in the wilds of western Mass., no sir, that was not going to be a comfortable environment for a man like me when the going got rough. But I knew that there was a place like this at the end of your rainbow. As soon as you said that your sister rescued you in a helicopter, I said, well, gee, these people are loaded up. They have a safe place somewhere, full of stuff. Full of days. This down here, it isn’t as good as I hoped, but it’s not bad for the end-times. Not bad for the end-times at all.”

He laughs like, what can you do? Laughs and spreads his palms as if revealing himself, Cortez the thief, as he is and always was, the person I always knew was there but never wanted to see. I am surprised, but why am I surprised? I decided at some point that he had made my road his road, given over to me the last two months of preimpact existence, because I was on my cockamamie hero’s quest and required an able and agile sidekick—I reached that conclusion without thinking about it much and put the question aside. But everybody does everything for a reason. That’s lesson number one of police work; it’s lesson number one of life.

You would think I would have figured it out by now, that a person’s outward presentation is just a trap waiting to be sprung.

“I’m so sorry about your kid sister,” he says, and he means it, I can tell, but then he keeps going. “But Henry, the world is about to die. That’s the one part of this that isn’t a mystery. We solved it. The asteroid did it. And these people here have chosen to skip the part that comes next, so we’re moving in. We’re taking over the lease.”

This conversation is killing me. I have to get out of here. I have to get back to those bodies, I have to see that other victim, I have to get back to work.

“Cortez, the other man you saw, what did he look like?”

He steps forward, cigarette dangling, but he doesn’t answer.

“Cortez? What did he look like?”

He gathers up the front of my shirt and bounces me hard into the concrete wall. “Here is what is going to happen. We’re going to seal ourselves in this room.”

“No. No, Cortez, we can’t do that.”

He’s whispering to me, cooing almost. “We seal ourselves in, and we don’t pop the cork for six months. After that we make runs for water if and when we absolutely have to, but otherwise we relax in our new paradise until the spaghetti sauce runs dry.”

“We won’t survive the impact.”

“We might.”

“We won’t.”

“Somebody will.”

“But I don’t—I don’t want to do that. I can’t.”

This is a solvable case. It’s a crackable case. I have to crack it.

“Yes, you can. It’s a room full of days, Henry. Share the days with me. Do you want the days or not?”

“Cortez, please,” I say, “there are these bodies,” I say, “and I can pull prints with Scotch tape and gunpowder”—and his expression softens into sadness, and I see at the very last minute that he’s got one of the Tasers, he put one in his back pocket, and he jerks his arm toward me and the hot kiss of it shoots into me and I jerk and jolt and tumble to the ground.