Ben Winters - Countdown City

The flashlight beam is gone. I stare at the darkness, the overhanging trees, the summer-barren branches silhouetted against moonlight. My pulse galloping; Houdini’s rapid troubled breaths.

And then a crash outside, somewhere on the lawn, the sound of breaking glass, followed a moment later by a man’s voice, low but distinct: “Shit. Fuck. Balls.”

I push open the door and rush out, screaming, gun in one hand and knife in the other, like a barbarian rushing a medieval camp.

I stop halfway across the lawn. There’s nothing. I see no one. There’s a row of streetlights along my stretch of West Clinton, but of course they’re all dead now, dimly reflecting the starlight, hanging from their poles like fossilized glass fruits. More noise: a scrape and then a crunch, glass on glass, and then more muttered cursing.

The weight of the gun is unfamiliar; it’s smaller and more compact than the SIG Sauer P229 service revolver I used to carry on patrol. My friend Trish McConnell provided me with the Ruger just last week, after I mentioned that I was adhering to IPSS firearm rules and had no gun in my home. McConnell, a former colleague still on the force, later left the gun in a small manila envelope between my screen door and front door with a note. Take it , said the note. Please .

Now I’m glad I’ve got it. I sweep the gun in a wide arc across the lawn, talking big in the darkness. “Stay where you are. Freeze and drop your weapon.”

“I’m not—I don’t have a weapon. Shit, man, I’m really sorry.” That voice, croaking from my neighbor’s lawn as I approach—it’s familiar but I can’t place it, like a voice from a dream. “Fuck, man, I’m really sorry.”

I stop walking. “Who is that?”

“It’s Jeremy.”

Jeremy. The kid outside the restaurant, three-day’s beard and a ponytail. I exhale. My pulse slows. For God’s sake.

“I think I fell in, like, a trap or something,” he says.

“Hang on,” I say. “I’m coming.”

Jeremy’s in the ditch on Mr. Maron’s lawn, in a puddle of shards and thick pieces of broken glass. My eyes blink in the moonlight and I focus and find him, disheveled and confused, a gash like a stab wound in his forehead.

“Hey,” he says weakly. “Sorry.”

“It’s not a trap,” I tell Jeremy. I peer down at him, and he gazes back at me bashfully like a wounded fawn. “It’s a solar still.”

“What’s a solar still?” he says, and then looks around him at the mess of glass. “I think I broke it.”

I laugh out loud, feeling along with my wash of relief a muddled affection for this kid who has injured himself wandering around outside my house in the middle of the night. As if the stupid thing actually was a trap, and I’ve caught myself some kind of hapless fairy.

“A solar still is a catchment system,” I say, “for capturing water from the atmosphere. My neighbor built it.”

“Oh. Tell him I’m sorry.”

“He’s dead,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

Jeremy raises a hand to the cut on his head, winces, then inspects his blood-smeared fingertips. He looks much as he did at the restaurant: small guy, sensitive dark eyes, soft and unmasculine face. My neighbor, Mr. Moran, a jovial middle-aged bachelor shoe salesman, spent three weeks building the solar still before he was shot on July fourth by a group of vigilantes from an organization called American Soil. Mr. Moran was trying to pull them off a truck driver, who was leaving for the Cape Cod immigrant camp with food and first aid. The truck driver was murdered also.

“Yeah, I’m really sorry,” says Jeremy again. “It’s just, I didn’t want Rocky to know I was coming to see you, and I couldn’t think of any particularly buyable reason to leave the restaurant early, so I had to wait till we closed.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Then I had to get over to the library to look up your address.”

“Okay.”

“You weren’t in the phone book, but there was another Palace—N. Palace?”

“My sister,” I say. “She used to use my address for credit card applications.”

“Oh.”

He’s still lying there in the glass, which is where I want him until I know exactly what’s going on here. The main branch of the Concord Public Library is open twenty-four hours a day at this point, kept clean and lit by a skeleton crew of librarians and a cadre of volunteers.

“Jeremy,” I say. “Why are you here?”

“I just wanted to say, don’t do it. Don’t bring Brett back, I mean. Leave the guy alone.”

“Come on,” I say, set down my knife and my gun and extend a hand down into the remains of the solar still. “Get up.”

“This was stupid.”

“It’s okay.”

“I feel like a dummy.”

“It’s okay.”

Jeremy is sitting at my kitchen table now, a paper towel pressed to his forehead with blood seeping around the edges.

“Seriously,” he says. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Really,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

I don’t press Jeremy about Brett, not yet, don’t ask him to expound on his purposes for trekking all the way across town to find me. I don’t want him to run, and that’s what it feels like: He’s embarrassed and disconcerted, and if pushed he’s going to say “forget the whole thing” and book it, off into the night.

I light candles, get my camp stove going, put up a kettle for tea, and ask him a couple easy and casual questions. Jeremy’s last name, as it turns out, is Canliss, which sounds familiar, so I ask him to spell it.

“Huh,” I say. “Are you from Concord?”

“No,” he says. “Yes.” Exhales, resettles himself on the chair, getting comfortable. “Well, not really.”

He was born here, he says, but then moved at fifteen months old. It’s a typical New England story: raised outside Montpelier; limped through high school; did some outdoorsy stuff; “drifted away from my family, kind of,” ended up in Portsmouth and then went to UNH for a semester; dropped out, tried one more time, dropped out again; and then he ended up here in Concord, crashing with some friends in a “shitty little house.” Then he got a gig at the pizza place, and then they announced the end of the world.

“And what about Brett?” I say at last, very casual, pouring the tea, speaking softly and over my shoulder from the far side of the room. “Why don’t you want me to find him?”

“I mean, look, it’s none of my business,” he says, and then gets quiet, and I focus on the water and the cups. When I turn back he’s rubbing his chin, and then he just goes, “Because, man, he’s just Brett , you know?” I set down the teacups and sit, waiting.

“If he—” Jeremy raises his hands, as if literally groping for the words. “If he had to go, he had to go. You know what I mean?”

“Not really. I don’t know him. Tell me about him.”

“I don’t know.” He laughs uneasily, repeats himself: “He’s just Brett .”

In this unspecific and tautological compliment there is a respect and admiration so deep it changes the timbre of his voice. When he says “Brett” it’s like how other people might say Elvis or Jesus. He’s not just any person—he’s Brett . Houdini is still trembling beneath the table, not yet convinced that the danger has passed. I get up and pour him out the last of the bag of kibble, a treat to calm his nerves. Sixteen bags left, now, ten servings per bag.

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Jeremy blurts out. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“Man, come on,” he says, ducking his head. “You know.”

“I don’t. I really don’t. Were you close with him?”