I do. I remember splashing through it, following Jean, desperate to get where she was leading me, not knowing yet but somehow knowing that it was Nico’s body we were running to find. I am staring at Cortez, my confusion melting over into anger, because I don’t care how many jugs of water are down here—I don’t care about the other stuff, either, all the piles of boxes and bulging black trash bags.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says suddenly, stopping in his frantic motion to take one big step closer to me and shine his headlamp bright into my eyes. “I know you. You can’t see it because you don’t know how to look, but I look around in this room and I see a room full of days. Days of life. And I don’t know what it’s going to be like out there, afterwards, but if days are invested wisely they can be turned into months, and months into years.”
“Cortez, wait,” I say, trying to focus, blocking his light with my hand. “How did you know they’re dead?”
“Who?”
“The—the people, Cortez, the—”
“Oh, right, right. I found one in that room with the cock and balls on it. In a Barcalounger holding a cup of something. Slumped over with his feet up and eyes aced out.” He does a quick pantomime of the vic, crossing his eyes and rolling out his tongue.
“Wait—”
“And when I heard you puking your guts down the hall, I figured you’d found the rest.”
“Cortez, wait—the man you found—”
“Can opener!” he says, diving his hand into a bag and yanking it back out. His voice is getting louder and louder, buzzing and jumping. “Jackpot! That’s really all you need, friend policeman, in our difficult modern times, is a good can opener.” He tosses it toward me, and without thinking I open my hands to catch it. “This is what we came for.”
“No.” I seek his eyes in the darkness, desperate now to make him calm down, to make him hear me. “We came to find my sister.”
“She’s dead. Yes?”
“Yes, but she was—she’s—we’re not done. I mean, we came here to help her.”
“You did.”
I drop the can opener.
“What?”
“Oh, Policeman,” he says. “Dear child.”
Cortez—my goon—he snaps a match and lights a cigarette in the darkness. “I knew I wasn’t going to spend the afterlife with a bunch of cops in the wilds of western Mass., no sir, that was not going to be a comfortable environment for a man like me when the going got rough. But I knew that there was a place like this at the end of your rainbow. As soon as you said that your sister rescued you in a helicopter, I said, well, gee, these people are loaded up. They have a safe place somewhere, full of stuff. Full of days. This down here, it isn’t as good as I hoped, but it’s not bad for the end-times. Not bad for the end-times at all.”
He laughs like, what can you do? Laughs and spreads his palms as if revealing himself, Cortez the thief, as he is and always was, the person I always knew was there but never wanted to see. I am surprised, but why am I surprised? I decided at some point that he had made my road his road, given over to me the last two months of preimpact existence, because I was on my cockamamie hero’s quest and required an able and agile sidekick—I reached that conclusion without thinking about it much and put the question aside. But everybody does everything for a reason. That’s lesson number one of police work; it’s lesson number one of life.
You would think I would have figured it out by now, that a person’s outward presentation is just a trap waiting to be sprung.
“I’m so sorry about your kid sister,” he says, and he means it, I can tell, but then he keeps going. “But Henry, the world is about to die. That’s the one part of this that isn’t a mystery. We solved it. The asteroid did it. And these people here have chosen to skip the part that comes next, so we’re moving in. We’re taking over the lease.”
This conversation is killing me. I have to get out of here. I have to get back to those bodies, I have to see that other victim, I have to get back to work.
“Cortez, the other man you saw, what did he look like?”
He steps forward, cigarette dangling, but he doesn’t answer.
“Cortez? What did he look like?”
He gathers up the front of my shirt and bounces me hard into the concrete wall. “Here is what is going to happen. We’re going to seal ourselves in this room.”
“No. No, Cortez, we can’t do that.”
He’s whispering to me, cooing almost. “We seal ourselves in, and we don’t pop the cork for six months. After that we make runs for water if and when we absolutely have to, but otherwise we relax in our new paradise until the spaghetti sauce runs dry.”
“We won’t survive the impact.”
“We might.”
“We won’t.”
“Somebody will.”
“But I don’t—I don’t want to do that. I can’t.”
This is a solvable case. It’s a crackable case. I have to crack it.
“Yes, you can. It’s a room full of days, Henry. Share the days with me. Do you want the days or not?”
“Cortez, please,” I say, “there are these bodies,” I say, “and I can pull prints with Scotch tape and gunpowder”—and his expression softens into sadness, and I see at the very last minute that he’s got one of the Tasers, he put one in his back pocket, and he jerks his arm toward me and the hot kiss of it shoots into me and I jerk and jolt and tumble to the ground.
PART SIX
Plan B
1.
“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”
Oh—
“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”
Oh no—
“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”
Oh God, oh no.
Cortez, please don’t do this. Please don’t have done this. I know so much—but not enough. I’ve almost got it but I don’t have it yet.
But he did, he did it, it’s done. I’m in the holding cell, I’m on the bad-guy side, behind the bars, on Lily’s thin mattress. The sturdy Rotary Police Department RadioCOMMAND console is a few feet away, droning its endless warning about the Muskingum and its stupid toxic watershed. Cortez must have done it while I was still rolling in and out of consciousness, my head still buzzing, considerately dragged the RadioCOMMAND down the hall for me, and left me food, too, a pile of those MREs, along with four of the big jugs of water. I can see them when I turn my head, my neat pile of refreshments, squared off against the rear wall of the cell.
I bend forward on the thin cot and roll over onto my stomach and heave myself up to all fours. This is going to be fine. It is unquestionably a setback, yes, no question, but there has to be a solution, there has to be a way out, there must be and I am going to find it and be fine.
The radio squawks and hisses. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.” The rest of the recording, the part about the safe harbors, the first-aid stations, the drop-off/pick-up sites and the Buckeyes helping Buckeyes, has been edited out of the broadcast. Now it’s just the warning about the water, on and on into infinity.
There is sunlight in the room, which means that it is daytime. The Casio says 12:45, so it’s 12:45 in the afternoon but on what day?
I grind my fingertips into my eyes and grit my teeth. I don’t know if I was ever actually unconscious, but I don’t think so. I might have been. I experienced the shock and pain of the Taser, half an amp lighting up my abdomen, and then my arms and legs locked and shook and I was on the floor and my assailant, my friend, he bundled up my body in a tarp, and I was only flickeringly aware, my brain temporarily made into hash. I might have even struggled, might have even tried to lodge some sort of groaning protest—but at some point the struggle became impossible and I felt him drag me up the stairs and over the lip of the basement, and my mind slipped out from under me.