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.
6.
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.
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.