Author: Ben H. Winters
Category: Humorous
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“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll split up.”
“What?
I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.
“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.
“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”
“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry? “Cortez?”
This is insane. I stumble after him but he’s moving fast, swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. He’s got some plan, he’s following some star that I can’t see. A wash of panic rushes up from my stomach, a rush of fear, deep anxiety, as old as childhood. I don’t want to be down here alone.
“Cortez?”
4.
I take big careful steps along the gray floor, my back pressed against the rough concrete, my light bobbling in front of me like I’m an anglerfish. My gun is in my right hand. Eyes seeking, trying to adjust. Walking through a shadowland, through a photographer’s negative, shining the light. A few bulbs dangle bare and functionless from the ceiling, among a tangle of sagging, rusted pipes. A bare stone floor, uneven, cracked in long lines across the foundation. Spiderwebs and spiders.
The layout of the police station basement appears much like the layout upstairs, a single long hallway broken by doors. There are just fewer of the doors down here, spaced farther apart. It’s like this world down here is the corpse version of the world upstairs, the decaying mirror image of what’s above. Like the building died and was buried down here, underground.
Somewhere down the hall I hear the creak of a door, a footstep: steel boot heel on concrete. Another footstep and then a quiet rustle of laughter.
I whisper sharply. “Cortez?”
No answer. Was that him? The door creaks again, or maybe a different door. I turn slow, 360 degrees, watch my semicircle of light bobble across the darkness, but it doesn’t find him. What was he laughing at? What’s funny? I don’t know if he’s still somewhere in the hallway, on the far end of it hidden in shadow, or if he’s slipped through one of the doors.
There’s a scratching sound, above my head, something small up there, tiny claws scrabbling over the rusted interiors of the pipes. I stand for a long moment, as if at attention, listening to the mouse or mole or whatever it is, feeling each of my heartbeats like a whoosh of air in a bellows, feeling a flush of fever in my face. Maybe it’s a function of having lost so much weight—of being so tired—but I can, I can feel it, each individual heartbeat, every second passing.
All in all I’m counting only three doors, clustered together at the end of the hall. Two up ahead on my left, one just to my right. I shake my head, press my fingers into my eyelids. Three doors, three rooms. Doors and rooms. All I have to do down here is what I did up there, go down the line, search each room, clear each one, check them off, one at a time.
They’re even labeled. The door directly next to me on the right says GENERAL STORE in big spray-painted letters, bright red. On the other side of the hall, the closer of the two doors says LADIES, same paint, same color. The one next to it should say GENTLEMEN, but instead it has no words, just a graffiti depiction of male genitalia in bright blue paint. Sophomoric; charmless; bizarre in the context. This little masterpiece I presume to be what Cortez was laughing at, but it doesn’t look like it’s that room he chose to enter—it’s the door marked GENERAL STORE that’s slightly ajar. I peer through it and say, “Marco,” and he doesn’t answer and for a second I can see it vividly in my mind, Cortez in there, taken by surprise, his throat sliced open, red blood spilling out, writhing on the floor, blood spurting from the terrible wound.
“Polo,” he says, indistinct and distant. I exhale.
I shake my head. Where are the people? Maybe one of these doors leads to another hallway, another exit; another staircase, leading farther down. Maybe they came down here and disappeared, dissolved into patches of dust or shadows.
The door marked LADIES is locked. I rattle the handle. Bedrooms? Women’s bunks? I press the door with two flat hands, find it to be flimsy, just pine or pressboard. Eminently breakable, calling to be kicked down. I take a deep breath and prepare to kick in the door, and while I’m suspended there, between intention and action, another memory crowds in: my mother, a couple of years before she was murdered, she said this beautiful thing to me about how your life was a house that God had built for you, and He knew what was in each room but you didn’t—and behind every door there was a discovery to be made, and some rooms were full of treasure and some with trash but all the rooms were of God’s design—and at this point, these many years later, I have to wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say that life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.
I raise my gun up to chest height, like a real old-fashioned policeman, and kick open the door marked LADIES. It flies open and cracks against the wall, ricochets back against my shoulder and cracks into the wall a second time, and my light looks in on a room full of corpses.
* * *
It takes time. To get the whole picture, it takes some time. Investigating a pitch-black room with a headlamp, what you get is a mosaic picture, like shaking puzzle pieces one by one out of the box. You turn your head and suddenly the light fills with a man’s face, scruffy beard, features slack, eyes staring straight ahead. Turn your head again, the light moves, and there’s an arm in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, fingers curled, inches from the plastic Flintstones cup that’s rolled away from the hand.
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 gir
ls—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.
I glance back over my shoulder into the room full of the dead. I’m going to go back in there. I am. In just a second I will. If the Astronaut scenario is hobbled by the timeline problem, that means anyone else currently dead in that room is also eliminated, and that leaves the sixth man. It was eight women and six men who came down here, and eight women minus Nico and Jean equals the six female corpses in the ladies’ room, but six men minus who equals five dead men?
Is the answer Jordan? Jordan isn’t in the room—Jordan’s not dead from poison—where is Jordan?
But the other question, the main question really, the question that looms like a thundercloud over all of the others, is why—why—what sense did it make, whoever the killer was, why? What purpose did it serve at this late date for her to die like that, out there in a field, bleeding and gasping, what possible need could that have filled, to find those who’d slipped the suicide circle and bring them back and make them die? The word why a tenor bell clanging in my brain while I’m standing there with my back to the door, trying to get myself to go back in and take more evidence.
I can lift prints off of dead bodies with gunpowder and Scotch tape. And then if I can find the knife I can lift prints off of that too, either prove that Astronaut was the last person holding it or rule him out.
I’m close to this thing, I’ve almost got it, facts are crowding in around me and they just need to be sorted, sifted, thought through, pieced together. Stars in a distant sky, glimmering in and out of focus, almost in a constellation but not quite taking shape.
“Henry!”
Cortez’s voice, sharp, excited. He found more bodies. He must be in the other room, the one with the anatomical graffiti. He found something.
“Don’t touch anything,” I shout, feeling along the wall for the doors. “It’s a crime scene.”
“A crime scene? Henry, Jesus, come quick.”
His voice is coming from the third room, the room marked GENERAL STORE. I come out into the hallway, following my light, and I see his head poking out of the open door.
“Come in here,” he hollers. “Oh, Policeman. You’ve got to see this.”
5.
Cortez is standing in the center of the room, surrounded by packing crates stacked to the ceiling, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, man,” he says. Manic. Juiced. “Okay, okay, okay.”
“Cortez?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
I flash my light past him and around him and find the same dull contours of the rest of the basement: gray dusty walls, cracking concrete floors. The crates stand surrounded by piles of disorganized junk: sagging-sided cardboard boxes; a blue plastic packing bin filled with camping lanterns and kitchen matches. In the back, a rack of clothing: puffy coats and long johns and stocking caps. Two half-height steel filing cabinets, piled one on top of the other like decommissioned robots.
And Cortez in t
he middle of it all, his foot up on one of the packing crates like a conquistador, his face a mask of joy, eyes wide and full of promise. I aim my light at him and it’s like he’s glowing, all of that barely restrained intensity I sensed before is restrained no longer, it’s beaming off of him in waves.
“Well?” he says.
I’m impatient, I’m confused. I want to get back to my bodies, get back to work.
“Cortez, what?”
“What, what? What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“Everything what?”
He laughs. “Everything everything!”
We’re Abbott and Costello all of a sudden, down here in the darkness. My mind is elsewhere. Where is that weapon? The infamous sawtooth buck knife. It occurs to me with a shudder of horror that I won’t find it anywhere on that floor in the darkness, because the killer may have pitched it into the woods. But again why, always why—why throw away a knife when you’re about to kill yourself—why hide evidence in a forest that’s about to burn to ash? My mind is reeling with facts and suppositions, but Cortez grabs my arm and drags me over to one of the crates. He turns, squats, and slides the lid off and it clatters to the ground and he steps back dramatically.
I aim my headlamp inside the crate: it’s full of macaroni and cheese. Dozens of boxes of it. A generic brand, not even a brand at all, just the cardboard boxes stamped MACARONI AND CHEESE.
Cortez waits behind me, breathing heavy, running his hands through his hair. I pull out a few of the boxes, toss them aside, wondering if it’s under the mac and cheese—the gold bars, the guns, the bricks of refined uranium, whatever is supposed to be impressing me right now. But no, it’s a crate full of pasta, bright orange boxes of uncooked pasta as far down as I can dig.
“Cortez—” I say, and he waves his arms and yells “Wait!” like a TV pitchman. “Wait, there’s more!”