Ben Winters - World of Trouble

Look what you made me—

I sidestep small mounds of rubble still on the top step and into the garage and even among the horror of all that’s happening, the desperation to catch up to Jean and get the rest of the story, still I feel a rush of gladness from being done with that bunker, that crypt. I burst up into the aboveground, drinking air and daylight like a surfacing diver.

I stumble across the three-car indoor garage, navigating the craters and piles, and then I’m in the hallway and I can see Jean, racing hopelessly a few paces ahead of me down the hallway, down the long corridor where I started my search, the corridor marked by my sister’s blood and her blood, one trail in and one trail out.

I had to stop her, see—I had to—

I’m much faster than Jean. She’s fast and desperate, but I’m tall and my legs are very long and I’m desperate too, and I do it—just as the glass front door of the police station is swinging shut behind her I push it back open and launch myself and catch her legs and get her down into the mud, and then I push myself back up so that by the time she turns over there I am, looming, full height with weapons drawn, the knife and the gun.

“Please,” she says, her body trembling and her hands clasped together. “Please.”

I glare down at her. We’re surrounded by the overgrown bushes, blinking green in the daylight. The autumn wind riffles my hair, tickling up my shirtsleeves.

“Please,” she says softly. “Do it quickly.”

She is assuming my intention is to kill her. This is not my intention but I don’t tell her that. I have no interest in her in any way. But I don’t say that and I’m standing here with the butcher’s knife and the SIG and I see that she sees those things, I see that she sees the flat look in my eyes. “Tell me,” I say. My voice is flat also, flat and cold.

The flags ripple in the breeze, making a tinny tink-tink-tink as the ropes dance against the poles.

“I killed her.”

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know that,” I say again, and what I mean is “I don’t care.” Her sorrow is beside the point. I want answers, my chest is swollen with the wanting, my weapons are shaking in my hands. She thinks I am going to slay her where she lays, she thinks that I am vengeance-mad and bent on slaughter. But she’s got it wrong, I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.

“He made you do it.”

The word “yes” comes out softly and sharply, a little agonized rush of air.

“How did he make you do it? Jean?”

“I—” Eyes closed; breathing hard. “I can’t.”

“ Jean .” She’s suffered enough. I am aware of that. Everybody has, though. Everybody has. “How? When?”

“As soon as—” Her whole body spasms, and she turns her face away. I crouch down and seize her chin and turn her face back to me.

“As soon as you went underground?” Nod. Yes. “Between four thirty and five thirty last Wednesday. Let’s call it five. Five o’clock on September 26. What happened then?”

“He said we were going to have a party. To celebrate our new lives. We can’t be gloomy, he said. A new life. New time. We didn’t even, you know. Didn’t unpack. Or look around. It was just—as soon as we got downstairs we sat down.”

“In the room marked LADIES.”

“Yes.”

Nodding, nodding. I won’t let her become like she was in the jail cell, withdrawing, floating away like a space capsule drifting from the mother ship. I stay close, keep my eyes boring into hers.

“Did it seem strange to you? To be having a party at such a time?”

“No. Not at all. I felt relieved. I was tired of waiting. Parry wasn’t coming. ‘Resolution.’ It wasn’t happening. We all knew that by then. It was time for plan B. I was glad. Astronaut was glad, too. He poured drinks for everyone. Proposed a toast.” A flicker of a smile rushes across her face, a vestigial fondness for the charismatic leader, but it dies fast. “But then he—he starts this speech. About our loyalty. About how we’ve lost discipline. How the hard part hasn’t even started yet. He said our behavior outside, all the hanging out, while we had been waiting, it was bullshit. He told us we were weak. He spray-painted on the wall.”

I listen. I am down there with her, watching his face contort with anger, watching the words appear on the wall: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

“And then he started talking about Nico. He said, look who’s not here. Look who abandoned us. Look who betrayed us.”

Kessler was right about DeCarlo. He had him nailed. Suicide didn’t fit the profile, but this: in group/out group dynamics. Cruel games. Tests of loyalty. And drugs, of course, Big Pharma and his clever hand with a concoction. He had resolved to kill all of his erstwhile coconspirators—he was doing it even then, merrily topping off everybody’s tea—but first he was going to have some fun.

“Go on, please.”

Jean looks at me helplessly, piteously. She is desperate to stop this line of conversation, desperate not to get to the end. To just lie in peace like Agent Kessler, waiting for the end.

I can see myself, a form of myself, floating up out of my body and running to get her a blanket, lift her gently, get her water, protect her. Young girl—recent trauma—curled in fear on the forest floor. But what I’m doing is nothing, what I’m doing is standing here clutching my weapons waiting for her to continue.

“The rest. Tell me the rest.”

“He, um—he looked at me. At me . And he told me I was the worst. The weakest. And he told me what I—what I had to do. To earn my place .” Her lip curls, her face tightens. The words are dull stones, she chokes them out one by one. “I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘Goodbye then, good luck. We are happy to drink your share of the water, little sister. To eat your share of the food.’”

She closes her eyes and I watch tears roll out from under the lids.

“I looked at the rest of them for help—or for, for pity, or—”

She looks down at the dirt. She got no help and she got no pity. They were as afraid as she was, all the rest of them, Tick and Valentine and Little Man and her old pals Sailor and Delighted, all as scared and confused, all just as firmly under the thumb of their leader. A week from impact and sharply aware of how isolated they had become, as the world narrowed to a pinpoint like the circle of darkness at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. As their leader and protector peeled off his layers, showing them the cruelty at his core.

So Astronaut tells Jean to go on now, he says get up, and she does, she gets up, she goes—and as she is telling me this story she is dissolving. She is seeing the memory complete itself out of the fog of forgetfulness, and it is killing her, I can see it. Every sentence is killing her. Every word. “I loved Nico. She was my friend. But as I was walking up those stairs my mind got—I don’t know. Hollow. There was all this shouting, these weird voices shouting, and—like—giggling?”

“You were hallucinating,” I say. “He drugged you.”

She nods. She knows this already, I think. Weird voices and dark streaks from the cruel courage in her tea. Whatever secret ingredient he put in to add to his private fun. His game, his apocalyptic April Fool’s Day joke. Given her overdose and the subsequent patchy spots in her memory, we’re probably talking about a hallucinogen, some sort of dissociative anesthetic; PCP, maybe, or ketamine. But I can’t say with certainty, it’s not my area of expertise, and if it would do any good I would take blood, I would stick her with a needle and catch any lingering molecules still swimming in her veins. Send it to the lab, boys!