Ben Winters - Countdown City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There. Now. Pain. There it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A color.

A flash of pink from inside that trunk.

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

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

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