Ben Winters - Countdown City

“I’ll die,” Jeremy gasps, and I recover myself and I let him loose.

“No, you won’t.”

“You don’t understand,” he says. “I’m already dead.”

I can see it now, in his eyes, the welling sickness, the pupils tightening. Dammit .

“Come on,” I say, crouching, pulling on his left arm with my left arm. “Let’s get to the bathroom.”

He waves me off, slumps back against the bannister.

I roll him down the stairs, drag him to the bathroom, watching the black bruise take shape across his Adam’s apple where I attacked him. I don’t know when he took the pills, I don’t know how long he was sitting there before I showed up. If I can get him to the john I can bend him over the toilet, get those pills up. Clear whatever it is from his system. I can do that. His body can’t have metabolized much of the poison, not yet, it’s too soon.

“Jeremy?”

Laboriously I settle him on his knees in front of the toilet and he wobbles, body rolling forward and back. I clap my hands in front of his face. His head lists on his neck and his torso slides forward.

“Jeremy!” I throw the taps so I can splash cold water on his face, and of course nothing comes out. The flesh of his body is getting strangely warm, like he might begin to melt like a wax candle, turn from solid to liquid and drip away from my grasp.

I try one more time: “Where’s Martha, Jeremy?”

“You’ll find her,” he says, almost gently, encouragingly, like a coach—and you can really see it, with an overdose, you can watch the light dripping out of someone’s eyes. “I bet you can find anyone.”

Houdini and I look in every corner of that house. In every corner and under every bed and mattress, in the cheap wood pantry, overrun with roaches and water bugs, in the dark spiderwebbed corners of the basement.

My arm swells and radiates heat and pain. Sweat runs down my forehead and into my eyes. We look and look.

But it’s not that big a house, and I’m not looking for misplaced keys or a wayward pair of glasses. It’s a human being. My terrified friend, bound and trembling, or her body, hollow and staring. But we keep looking. There’s no attic; the second-floor bedrooms are arched and peaked, but I get up on a chair and bang on the plaster of the ceiling to eliminate the possibility of a hidey-hole or secret room where Martha might have been shoved, duct-taped and struggling. The closets, the kitchen, the closets again, tearing everything out, kicking against the beadboard for a false back or hidden chamber.

Houdini yelps and sniffs at the floorboards. I find a claw hammer in a tool chest in the pantry, and I use the claw to pry up the floor in the living room, board by board, my back aching against the strain of it. I ignore the stabs of pain and the waves of nausea, drag up the boards one at a time like peeling open a stubborn fruit, but beneath the floor is insulation and pipes and the view of the basement.

I check it again, the basement, but she’s not there—she’s not here—she’s nowhere.

I keep looking. The noise of the guns and the screaming outside, the windows lit up with the fire across the street, I keep looking, long after even the most diligent investigator would be forced to conclude that Martha Milano is not inside this house.

I look and look and scream her name until I’m hoarse.

Jeremy’s body I leave in the bathtub. There is no other option that makes sense. I happen to know that the Willard Street Funeral Parlor is home now to a clutch of doomsday prophets, just as I happen to know that the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital is abandoned, Dr. Fenton now upstairs doing furious triage along with whoever else is around.

There is nowhere to report this death or deliver this corpse, because suddenly the streets are on fire and ours is a savage land. I lay the man out more neatly in his claw-footed bathtub, push his eyelids shut with my forefingers, and go.

My house is gone.

When at last the dog and I get back to my address on Clinton Street, we find just the bones of a house, just the beams, leaning precariously in the summer darkness among the shadowy silver maples. It was stripped for the metal and the siding and the bricks and then burned; or possibly it burned first, and then the looters came and carried away the remains. Grim drifting heaps of ash and stray pieces of furniture. My hoard of goods, my jars of peanut butter and my gas mask and my jugs of water, these were beneath the floorboards under the sofa in the back end of the living room. The hoard is gone. The floorboards are gone. The sofa is gone. The living room is gone.

Houdini and I wander slowly through the ruins like we’re walking on the moon. The cement foundation is still in place, and I can trace the rough outlines of where the rooms used to be: the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. Disintegrating plasterboard piles that used to be walls. Houdini noses at the wreckage and comes up with a table leg, clutched in his jaws like a shankbone. I find my copy of Farley and Leonard’s Criminal Investigation , charred, recognizable by the pattern of colors on the cover. Piano keys like teeth. A scattering of old Polaroids: my parents mugging at a holiday party, Dad in a mistletoe cap, Mom’s lips brushing his cheek.

I am aware, in an abstract way, that this is a catastrophe. The countdown has begun, and all the haphazard arrangements—the rummages and the ersatz restaurants and the bartering and the residents associations—all of the vestigial institutions are crumbling into the past, and it’s every man for himself from now on, and here I am with no house, no gun, no possessions of any kind. I’m down one arm. I’m wearing a borrowed shirt and torn suit pants.

But what I feel is nothing. Numbness and cold. I’m a house full of burned-out rooms.

I told Martha I would make every effort to find her husband and bring him home. I told her I could do it. I promised.

The man she longed for is dead. And now she, too, is dead, or somewhere dying, somewhere alone, and the only person who knows her whereabouts is yet another dead man. The world collapsing, turning into death, disappearing before my eyes.

I sat at her kitchen table, smiled to see her again after all these years, looked into her worried eyes, and made a promise.

Houdini hunts around me in a circle, nose down, lifting and then dropping bits of plaster with his sharp teeth.

There is a bright and beautiful glow in the direction of downtown, a radiant bulb, pulsing with light. I stare at it until I understand that this is the capitol dome of the statehouse of New Hampshire, and that it is on fire.

The practicalities of my situation are hard to grasp. I will need help, but from whom? Dr. Fenton? Culverson?

I sink down cross-legged in the dirt and Houdini takes a position next to me, erect and watchful, panting. I lift a photograph from the mud, Nico and me with arms wrapped around each other at her high-school graduation. My expression is adult, serious, self-congratulatory, quietly proud for having seen to it that she made it to that day. Nico for her part is grinning, ear to ear, because she was high as a satellite.

I could have stayed on that helicopter. Could be in Idaho or Illinois right now, reconning with the team. Saving the world.

The thought of Nico is suddenly devastating, and I can’t pretend to be cynical about it, not even to myself—the idea that I’m sitting here, and she is there. What have I done? What have I done? I should have stayed on that helicopter. I never should have let her go. I lie in the rutted crater that was my home and consider my choices: calling my sister a fool for pursuing a one-in-a-million chance at survival while I’m the one who’s accepted a hundred percent chance of death.