Ben Winters - Countdown City

“Well, it’s just that Nico, you know, your sister, she was really hurt that you didn’t believe her. About everything. Our group, our plans, our future.”

He’s speaking in a leisurely adagio, doing it on purpose, absorbing my sudden desperate impatience and feeding it back to me as a taunting molasses rhythm. “You probably don’t realize how much you mean to her.”

I calculate my odds of just busting past the man and running out of here. He is small but compact, energetic, and though I am much taller I am also exhausted, I have been on my feet all day after a night in the hospital, and I have one arm that is useless to me.

“To be honest with you, I had forgotten all about it.”

“Oh, well,” he says, and shrugs. “I’m reminding you.”

I switch modes, drop into rapid-fire cop talk, keeping my voice even and open and honest. “Jordan, listen to me. There is a woman whom I believe to have been abducted and I need to help her right now.”

“Seriously?” he says, eyes bulging. “Are you serious? Gee, you better go! Are you going to stop at a phone booth on the way, Nico’s brother? Put on your cape?”

“Jordan,” I say. I think maybe I could take him, actually. I don’t care how many arms I have. “Move.”

“Take it easy, dude.” He blows a bubble, pops it with one finger. “All I asked is whether you believe us yet.”

“Do I believe that because you have a helicopter and Internet access, that means you have the capability to alter the path of an asteroid? No. I don’t.”

“Well, see, that’s your problem. Limited imagination.”

I barrel forward and roll my shoulder into him, but he just steps out of the way, sending me stumbling wildly out of the manager’s office. I straighten up and walk quickly toward the front of the shop, Jordan laughing behind me, and I’ve got the front door open and Houdini is waiting for me as instructed on the curb.

“It’s Nico’s problem, too, you know,” he says, and I stop with my hand on the door and turn back around. Such an innocuous comment, nothing to it at all, but something in the way he said it—or is it just that there’s something in the way he says everything?—I turn.

“What do you mean, it’s Nico’s problem, too? What is?”

“Nothing,” he says, and smiles wickedly, delighted, a fisherman hauling in a live one.

Jordan’s friend Abigail comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a flowery skirt and a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Jordan, did you know the water’s out?” she says.

“I did, actually,” he says. “I did. And I think we should probably stay in tonight.”

He’s talking to her but his gaze is locked on mine, and all the funny ha-ha clown nonsense is drained from his eyes and suddenly he’s all low-down nasty menace. “All I was pointing out, Mr. Palace, is that your sister suffers from a similarly limited imagination. Haven’t you ever felt that?”

I’m across the room in two long strides staring intently in his eyes and holding on to his arm with my one good hand. Abigail says “hey” but Jordan doesn’t flinch.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he says, and the clown’s grin is back. “I’m just talking.”

I tighten my grip on his arm. When I first heard about this elusive organization of Nico’s was when she explained to me that her husband, Derek—who had thought he was on the inside, thought he understood it all—had been unknowingly sacrificed to a greater goal that he had no idea about.

“Where’s that helicopter going, Jordan?”

There is, then, a massive explosion. It sounds close—loud—like the stumbling tread of a dinosaur.

“Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Looks like one of the rez associations is breaking out the big guns.”

“South Pill Hill,” Abigail says.

“You think?”

She nods and looks at him like, duh, of course .

“This is going to be some night,” says Jordan. “Like the Fourth.”

“Worse,” she says, gives him the look again. I’m standing here looking back and forth between the two of them. “Way worse.”

“What?” I ask angrily, even though I know exactly what they’re talking about: it’s what McGully said, exactly what he warned, shouting in the Somerset, just wait until the water goes out . “What do you know?”

“I know everything, man, remember?”

“It’ll be a kind of war,” says Abigail simply, talking softly from the doorway. “There’s one residents association that’s been hoarding Poland Spring bottles in the gym at the YMCA. Thousands of them. Another group has got a ton in the basement of the science center. Everybody’s been hearing the rumors, everyone’s got a plan to protect their own stash and go after the other stashes.”

“Or make a go at the reservoir,” says Jordan, peeling my fingers off his arm, one by one.

Abigail nods. “Well, yeah, the reservoir goes without saying.”

“It’s going to be like capture the flag, except with guns,” says Jordan, and Abigail nods again. “ Lots of guns.”

As if to underscore the point there’s a second reverberating explosion, and it’s hard to say whether it was closer or farther than the first, but it definitely sounded louder. A pause, and then the chilling multilayered sound of a lot of people screaming at once, followed by the unmistakable typewriter rattle of machine-gun fire.

I’m listening to all this, breathing heavily, my head tilted to one side. It’s the overwhelming police presence that’s been keeping the fragile peace, everybody knows that, the DOJ cruisers, a cop on every block, that’s what’s prevented the wariness and anxiety of the population from bubbling over and bursting out like underground steam. I haven’t seen a single policeman today. Not a single car.

“Hey, Henry? You better get going. It’s going to be a busy night.”

It’s the one asset I have left, the one piece of law-enforcement equipment that I still carry with me, my bone-deep knowledge of the streets of Concord. I biked them as a kid and drove them as an adult, and now I walk swiftly and unerringly, from Wilson Avenue back up toward Main Street.

My house is back to the west, past Clinton Street, but I’m headed the other way. I just have to—I just have to get this done. That’s all.

Jordan was right: It’s going to be a busy night. I can hear gunfire coming from a dozen different directions and see smoke rising from a dozen distant fires. I pass a mob of people, thirty at least, walking down the street all together in a tight quasimilitary formation, dragging a trail of shopping carts lashed together with ropes and dog leashes. A family of five hightailing it on foot down the center of the road, dad carrying two kids to his chest, mom carrying one, looking back anxiously the way they came.

Detective McGully, glowering again in my memory, red faced and jabbing his finger: You just wait until there’s no water, you just fucking wait .

Houdini is scouting ahead of me with his mottled-fur flanks and predator’s sneer, lips pulled back over yellow canines. I bend forward, hastening my stride to keep up with him as we pass the Water West building, pass the statehouse, pass the McDonald’s where once upon a time I found the corpse of a suicide named Peter Zell hanging in the bathroom.

On Phenix Street, where the movie theater still stands, the marquee still advertising the final installment of Distant Pale Glimmers from two months ago, a guy wearing a baseball cap backward is rolling by on a skateboard, clutching what looks like a five-liter drum of spring water, trying to get somewhere fast. A young woman in flat black shoes and a housewife’s apron appears out of the doorway of the theater with a shotgun and shoots him in the side, and he topples off the board and into the street.