World of Trouble (23 page)

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.”

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.

“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.