Ben Winters - Countdown City

A screech of tires and the slam of a car door, ancient and familiar sounds, and I sit upright and jerk my head around and Houdini takes a stance and barks. Parked diagonally across my yard is a Chevrolet Impala, the standard Concord Police Department vehicle, a glimmer of moonlight dancing across the hood.

Footsteps, getting closer. I struggle to my feet. Houdini barks louder.

“Let’s go, Henry.”

Trish McConnell. I gape at her, and she grins like a naughty kid.

“What are you doing here?”

“Saving your life, Skinny.” Officer McConnell somehow looks more like a cop when she’s out of uniform: short and tough in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. “What happened to your arm?”

“Oh—” I wiggle the thick limb. It hurts. “It’s fine. What’s happening?”

“I’ll tell you in the car. Come on.”

I look at Trish and then toward downtown, toward the fires and the wildness. The city smells like smoke. “Shouldn’t you be on patrol?”

“No one’s on patrol. Our orders were to stand down, let this shit burn itself out. Risk no department resources. The rest of the force is at School Street, drinking beer and looking at dirty magazines.”

“So, why aren’t you there?

“I don’t like dirty magazines.” She laughs. McConnell is all fired up, that much is clear, this is her play, she’s ready to roll. “I am away without leave, Officer Palace, and I ain’t going back. I borrowed the Chevy from the Justice Department and I am taking off, right now, very quickly, and you’re coming, too.”

“Why me?”

She smiles cryptically. “Come on, you dummy.”

The vehicle is on and purring, the exhaust from some real genuine DOJ regular unleaded gasoline pouring out of the tailpipe. It’s a beautiful thing, a Chevrolet Impala, it really is, clean lines, efficient: a pure police car. Houdini is over there, peering up at its tinted windows. I’m trying to think quickly and smartly, trying to process everything. The statehouse is blazing ferociously in the distance, a Roman candle burning down in the heart of our little skyline.

“Come on, Palace,” says McConnell, standing at the driver’s side door. “The worst of the chaos is up by the reservoir, but we’re going exactly the other way.” She pounds on the hood of the car. “You ready to rock?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let me just…” I look around. I have no suitcase. No clothes to pack. Someone took my house. I tug Culverson’s dress shirt closer around me and walk toward the car. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

The shotgun seat is stuffed with suitcases and cardboard cartons of food and bottles of Gatorade. So I slide into the backseat next to McConnell’s children, and Houdini takes a position between us.

“Hi,” I say to Kelli and Robbie, as McConnell guns it and screeches out onto Clinton Street. Robbie has his thumb in his mouth, a ragged blue teddy bear tucked against his chin. Kelli looks solemn and scared.

“What kind of dog is that?” she asks me.

“A bichon frisé,” I say. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

“Really?” says Kelli. “He actually looks pretty tough.”

McConnell takes the Chevy down Clinton Street, away from downtown, toward the highway, and while Houdini consents for Robbie to tickle his neck scruff, I lean forward into the mesh grate and ask McConnell where we’re going.

“The mansion.”

“What mansion?

“I told you, Palace.” She laughs. “Me and some of the others, the old-timers—Michelson, Capshaw, Rodriguez—we blocked this all out months ago.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Oh right.”

“It’s in Western Mass., a little town called Furman, near the New York border. We got the place all set up. Plenty of water, plenty of food. Cooking oil. Necessary precautions.” She raises her voice, glances in the rearview mirror. “And there are even some kids there, other kids. Officer Rogers has twin boys.”

“Those guys are assholes,” says Kelli, and McConnell says, “Language, honey,” and leans on the gas, hits ninety miles an hour, sure and straight, barreling over back roads on the way out of town.

“I thought you were kidding about all that. The mansion in the country. The whole thing.”

“I never kid.”

McConnell smiles, sly, elusive, proud, the Impala whooshing along Highway 1, the Merrimack a brown ribbon to our left. Holy moly, I think, holy cow, easing back into my seat. Western Mass. Kelli asks for a bottle of water so Houdini can have a drink, and McConnell pushes two bottles through the seat-grate opening, not without a small wince of anxiety—nothing as precious as a bottle of water. I say thanks on the dog’s behalf, and McConnell says, “Sure,” says “Drink one yourself, you damn scarecrow.”

McConnell, I like—I always have.

The moon glimmers through the tinted backseat windows of the Impala as we rattle over untended roads, out across the bridge, toward the junction with 89 South, the city in flames all around us. Robbie falls asleep. We roar past a long line of people, a block and a half long, lugging backpacks and duffel bags and pulling rolling suitcases, a residents’ association heading together into exile by some prearrangement, headed out of town but God knows to where.

Despite everything, I lean back and let the exhaustion overtake me, let my eyelids drift and flutter, Houdini safe in Kelli’s lap beside me, and I start to feel that kind of dreamy magic that comes with car rides late at night.

There’s a word my mind is looking for.

I said, McConnell, what are you doing here? and she said, Saving your life, Skinny .

What’s the word I’m looking for?

I lay in the dirt patch that had been my house, and the Impala came and what did she offer me?

Tell him he has to come home , Martha said, urgent and imploring. Tell him his salvation depends on it .

My eyes shoot open.

Kelli and Houdini are both snoring gently; we’re way on the outskirts of the city by now, coming up on its limits and the westward highway.

Salvation .

All these people braving the terrible seas, getting shot or dragged out of the water in nets, casting themselves upon unfamiliar shores in search of what—the same thing my sister is chasing across the country in a stolen helicopter.

Salvation. And not in some glorious tomorrow, not in the majestic heights of heaven. Salvation here .

I’ve got no notebook. No pencil. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to do the timeline work, put it together, see if this makes sense.

Sergeant Thunder got that stupid brochure last week and bartered away his worldly goods last week, but evacuation day was today —Culverson saw him today, out on his porch, waiting and waiting, miserable and forlorn. That was today .

“McConnell?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

Cortez saw her waiting on her porch at let’s call it 8:30 this morning, waiting for someone. Jeremy got there at nine or ten, desperate and excited, ready to make his lovesick plea, but Martha was gone. Long gone.

“McConnell, I need to make just one quick stop.”

“ What? ”

“Or—it’s okay—you can drop me off.”

“Palace.”

“I’ll catch up with you. Leave me the address. I need to get to this pizza place.”

“A pizza place?”

“It’s called Rocky’s. Up by Steeplegate Mall.”

Officer McConnell is not slowing down.

“One quick stop, Trish.” I lean forward and plead into the mesh, like a criminal, desperate, like a sinner to his confessor. “Please. One stop.”

McConnell growls and goes full code, kicks on the lights and screamers and throws the Impala into a fishtailing U-turn, takes us a thousand miles an hour toward Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl up by the mall. She veers onto the sidewalk to get around a thick mob milling about at the intersection of Loudon Road and Herndon Street. Half of them have big flashlights, most of them have handguns, and they’re circled around a cluttered herd of shopping carts. One man in a leather jacket and motorcycle helmet is hanging from the top of a lamppost, shouting at them, instructions or warnings. I squint at the man as we race past—when I was a kid, he was our dentist.