My light moves through the room, seeing one thing at a time.
In the center of the room there is a small square card table with cups and saucers on it. There are dead bodies seated around it as if for tea. A man with a long ugly face and a buzz cut, head back and to the side, like he’s fallen asleep on the crosstown bus. One of his hands dangling down to his right, the other hand on the table, fingers interlaced with the fingers of the girl next to him. This is Tick, then, and the girl whose hand he is holding is Valentine—African American, very dark skinned, long arms. She has fallen forward and her cheek is flat on the tabletop, a line of fluid running from the corner of her mouth like a spiderweb.
Two more people are at the table. Everyone has a cup. Four for tea.
Across from Tick is Delighted, handsome young fella, clean-cut, slumped backward, head lolling. In the cape that Jean mentioned. I crouch under the table and find his trademark bright blue sneakers. Next to Delighted is a girl with a wide face, round cheeks, curly hair—maybe that’s Sailor, formerly Alice—her body turned slightly away from Delighted, as if upset with him or embarrassed by something he just said.
I shine my light into Sailor’s cup: it looks like tea, it really does. I sniff at it but don’t catch a scent. I don’t touch anything. It’s a crime scene.
I make my way from the center of the room out to the perimeter and find more corpses—many more. I am keeping it together, though, I’m doing fine. I’m shining my headlamp into each pair of eyes like an optometrist, examining each pair of dilated pupils.
I hold up wrists, take pulses, listen at chests. There is no sign of life in anybody. I’m in a wax museum.
Close to the door is a seated man, bearded chin resting on his thick barrel chest. Little Man. Remember? It’s funny because he’s so big. Ha-ha. Another corpse, a man I’ve heard no description of, shirtless with a muscle-man build and a scar on his cheek and a surfer’s blond hair. Next to him, jutting out from under the table, are two feminine bare feet, crossed demurely, slim ankle over slim ankle. For some reason I think this is more likely to be Sailor than the girl at the table, or maybe it’s someone else entirely, maybe it’s one of the four girls—four if I’m doing the math right, four of Atlee Miller’s estimated eight girls and six men—whose code names I never got. Whoever she is, she drank hers out of a thermos, the thermos is cupped in her lap with no top on, and I shine the headlamp down into it and catch a glimpse of the last few drops of dark liquid.
I go back to the table. The girl who is half eased away from Delighted, I’ve seen her face. I met her. Nico’s friend. She was flying the helicopter.
I look at it again, the poison, shine my light into the cups and glasses and thermoses, confirming that they all drank the same draft, whatever it is. I will never know what it is. We’re past all that now. Send it to the lab, boys! It was something bad for you. They all drank it and died.
There’s even a note. It’s on the wall, black and green graffiti letters on the concrete: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.
There are more bodies. A girl curled up over here like a sleeping cat, a dreadlocked blonde next to her, arms and legs splayed out at crazy angles. A woman of early middle age, arms crossed, cross-legged against the wall like she’s doing yoga. What’s funny is that I keep expecting to find Nico among this room full of suicides, even though I already found her, I found her in the woods, she’s already dead.
The last body lies on the ground, in the back corner, facedown. A man, a generation older than the rest. Thick dark hair. Dark brown eyes. Glasses, one lens cracked where his face hit the concrete when he slid off a folding chair. I stoop and shine the light right into his eyes. Astronaut. Mouth open, tongue sticking out, eyes wide open and staring at the door.
I reach down to check the famous belt but it’s not on, so I get down on all fours and crawl around for a minute, trying to find it, and my hand comes down on the cold flat flesh of his hand, Astronaut’s, and I lurch up out of my crouch and race for the door because this is a crime scene, for God’s sake, I trip over Sailor’s extended feet, or whoever’s feet those are, and reach the hallway just in time to bend forward and vomit on the ground. Nothing in my stomach: black strings of coffee-colored bile, pooling at my feet in the light of the headlamp.
I straighten up and rub at my face with my shirtsleeve and try to think this through. Dead in that room are six women—Valentine, Sailor, and four more—and five men, Tick, Astronaut, Little Man, Delighted, and the stranger with the surfer hair.
This is what Nico was escaping from. This was the backup plan that sent the wave of atavistic revulsion shuddering down Jean’s face.
Mass suicide I understand, group suicide has been a part of the landscape since the beginning of this, since 2011GV1 first made herself known. Spiritual pilgrims. Desperate seekers. More recently it’s only rumors: 50,000 people all dead together at Citi Field. A tribe of native Peruvian people burying themselves to the neck in the desert, their suffering meant as some kind of sacrifice to the fearsome new god streaking across the sky. Stories that can’t be true, that you hope aren’t true. Supposedly there was a group that drowned themselves in a reservoir outside Dallas, their bodies bobbing to the surface for weeks, hastening the end of the northeast Texas water supply. Supposedly there are “Last Call” party boats operating 24/7 now in New Orleans, going out on Lake Pontchartrain with champagne and caviar and enough dynamite to blow a hole in the hull once everybody on board is good and wasted and ready to go.
So this here, then, in the Rotary PD basement, this here is nothing. The plan to save the world gets scratched and this is the backup plan, one kind of craziness cross-fading into another. No one hunkering down to tough it out—it’s bottoms up, it’s ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT, it’s everybody dead in the same grave underground. Except that Nico Palace—I’m standing in the dark, still waiting for my stomach to settle, I’m staring at nothing, at the black-on-black outline of the door across the hall, thinking of my sister—Nico Palace says thanks but no thanks. Nico says I disagree, the situation is not what the situation is. Nico who, drunk at age fourteen, informed me that our father had been a coward for hanging himself over grief for Mom, “a rat-shit coward,” declines to raise a toast and gulp down a thermos full of death. She rejects plan B and heads out with her backpack full of candy on her Hail Mary bid to complete the mission and save the world.
And Jean follows to stop her, to convince her to take the easy way out, the quick way. Why would you want to leave for nothing, she tells her, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we could all be together?
She’s telling her all that when someone else emerges from that underground lair, bursts up from the ground like a hand from the graveyard at the end of a horror movie, someone follows them and catches them. Assumes they’re both slipping free from the plan and insists they both take part.
Someone. It’s Astronaut, if Astronaut has time. I’ve got him talking to Nico in the hallway at 4:30, when the move downstairs isn’t close to done. Benefit of the doubt, rapid motion after that, and it’s 4:45 before everything is downstairs. So that means Astronaut is then running back up the stairs, hunting down Nico and Jean, chasing and killing them sequentially, and then running back down the stairs before the hole is sealed at 5:30.