Ben Winters - Countdown City

I am trying to formulate a reaction to some part of this story when Capshaw returns dramatically, bursting out of the woods with his gun drawn and aimed at Cortez.

“Put your hands in the air,” he barks.

“My hands are already in the air.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“It’s okay, Capshaw,” I say. “I know him.”

“I didn’t ask if you know him, I said who is he?”

Capshaw is all keyed up, ready to make an arrest, build a jail and toss this guy in it. He’s red faced, stormy eyed, brow furrowed under his crew cut. His T-shirt says Señor Frog’s Spring Break Fiesta Cancun 1997.

“Hey, you know what you should do?” says Cortez mildly. “Search the carriage.”

Capshaw looks at me and I shrug. He does it, stomps down the porch steps and begins rifling through the carriage while the horse shivers and tosses his head in the darkness. I keep the SIG Sauer pointed at Cortez as he leans against the rail of the porch stair, hands still in the air, unconcerned, humming. “Golden Years.” David Bowie.

“Clothing. Personal effects,” reports Capshaw, zipping closed a small black toiletries bag and tossing it in the dirt.

“There’re Ecstasy pills there, too,” says Cortez, to me, confidentially. “He missed the Ecstasy pills.”

“Cooking oil,” says Capshaw, taking out two big plastic drums. “A box full of magazines.”

“Mostly that is pornography.”

“Knives,” says Capshaw. “More knives.”

Cortez looks at me, winks. “He’ll find it in a second. Don’t worry.”

And then I hear it, a thick rustling sound like quarters in a casino cup. Or beans. My God. Beans tumbling over one another in a foil package. My heart catches in my throat, and Cortez grins. Capshaw looks up in amazement, tosses the bag back and forth in his hands, feeling its weight like recovered pirate treasure.

“Coffee beans,” he says, gaping up at Cortez, who takes his hands down from the air.

“Many hundred pounds of them. You want to know where I got them? It’s a great story.”

Most days, as we get closer to the end, I am content to just be, to wait, to enjoy the company of McConnell and the others, to conscientiously perform the share of tasks that fall to me. And I am usually successful in my efforts to keep my mind focused on the immediate present, on whatever event or requirement comes next—to see not too far into the future, nor too far back into the past.

We tend to get up early, McConnell and I, and it’s morning now, and we’re drinking coffee in the kitchen and looking out the window at the lawn, the sheds, and past that the wooded expanse of the world. The very beginnings of autumn in western Massachusetts, the green trees goldening at their edges. Trish is across the table, telling me about an irritating conversation she had last night with Officer Michelson.

“I’m serious, I was about to fucking strangle the guy,” she says. “Because basically what he was saying is, at this point if it didn’t hit—if there was some last-minute thing, you know, some crazy scenario, like they can blow it up after all, or deflect it, or the religious people pray it out of the sky—Michelson says maybe that would be worse , at this point. You know how he is, sort of smirking, so you don’t know if he’s being serious or not, but he goes, at this point, imagine winding it back. With everything that’s gotten f’ed up, imagine starting over? And I just said, ‘Man, anything is better than death. Anything .’”

“Yeah,” I say, “of course,” and I’m nodding, trying to pay attention, but the moment Trish said the word deflect , my mind exploded with thoughts of Nico: memories of my vanished sister are suddenly everywhere in my head, like invaders pouring across a border. She is four years old and toppling off her bicycle; she is six and staring in confusion at the crowds during the funerals; she is ten and drunk and I am telling her that I will never let her go. The helicopter swoops down to lift me up from blockhouse at Fort Riley, and Nico presses masses of white washcloths into my mess of an arm, tells me it’s going to be okay.

“Hank?”

“Yeah?” I say, blinking.

“You all right?”

In five minutes of talking I tell Trish the whole thing. About Next Time Around, about Jordan and the blonde girl and the computer, about the helicopter. She asks, so I give her what details I remember about the plan itself: the nuclear-standoff blast and the “back reaction”; a sufficient change in velocity with a minimum of ejecta; the secret scientist moldering in the military prison.

“Jesus H. Christ,” says Trish.

“I know.” My coffee is cold. I get up to refill it.

“If the government is so determined to keep this from happening, why didn’t they kill the scientist?”

“Oh, hey,” I say. “Great question. I didn’t even ask that one.”

“Listen, you can’t beat yourself up about it,” murmurs Trish. “If she was going to go, she was going to go.” She had met Nico a couple times over the years—at cop parties, at the station, at my house once or twice.

“Go where?” says Kelli, wandering in in her Sleeping Beauty nightgown.

“Nowhere, honey.”

Kelli is holding hands with her brother, and she opens the pantry to get them snack cakes. Police House follows a strict “kids can eat whatever they want” policy.

“You should go and find her.”

We hadn’t seen Cortez come in. He is standing in the doorway, his expression unusually serious.

“Why?” says McConnell, looking at him. They have yet to make up their minds about each other, these two.

“She’s his sister,” says Cortez. “Can I have one of those, please?”

Kelli hands him a snack cake, and he unwraps it while he talks.

“She is family. She matters to him. Look at him. Everything is different. The asteroid will strike in one and a half months. What if she’s in trouble? What if she needs help?”

Cortez studies me while he bites into the snack cake. McConnell is looking at me, too, her hand on my forearm while I watch the steam rise off my cup.

Yeah , is what I’m thinking. What if?

Dr. Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Officer Joseph Wright and everyone at the Concord Police Department in New Hampshire; Andrew Winters

My family at Quirk Books: Jason, Nicole, Eric, Doogie, Mary Ellen, Jane, Dave, Brett, and—seriously—everyone else they got over there

My family at my house: Diana, Rosalie, Ike, and Milly

My agent, Joelle Delbourgo

Smart people: business and economics author Eduardo Porter; Mitch Renkow, professor of agriculture and resource economics, North Carolina State University; Christopher Rudolph at the School of International Service at American University; Joe Loughmiller at Indiana American Water; Dr. Zara Cooper; Dr. Nora Osman; Dr. Gerardo Gomez and his colleagues at Wishard Hospital, Indianapolis; Dani Sher, PA-C, and her colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago; Lieutenant Colonel Eric Stewart of the Green Berets; the folks at Snipercraft, Inc., Sebring, Florida

Early readers: Kevin Maher, Laura Gutin, Erik Jackson, and especially Nick Tamarkin, my own personal Detective Culverson

Colleagues, students, and friends at Butler University, Indianapolis

Colleagues, students, and friends at Grub Street, Boston

And a special thank you to everyone who submitted a “What Would You Do?” essay at TheLastPoliceman.com. Keep ’em coming.

…with just 77 days until the end of the world?