Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (29 page)

“Many hundred pounds of them. You want to know where I got them? It’s a great story.”

* * *

Most days, as we get closer to the end, I am content to just be, to wait, to enjoy the company of McConnell and the others, to conscientiously perform the share of tasks that fall to me. And I am usually successful in my efforts to keep my mind focused on the immediate present, on whatever event or requirement comes next—to see not too far into the future, nor too far back into the past.

We tend to get up early, McConnell and I, and it’s morning now, and we’re drinking coffee in the kitchen and looking out the window at the lawn, the sheds, and past that the wooded expanse of
the world. The very beginnings of autumn in western Massachusetts, the green trees goldening at their edges. Trish is across the table, telling me about an irritating conversation she had last night with Officer Michelson.

“I’m serious, I was about to fucking strangle the guy,” she says. “Because basically what he was saying is, at this point if it
didn’t
hit—if there was some last-minute thing, you know, some crazy scenario, like they can blow it up after all, or deflect it, or the religious people pray it out of the sky—Michelson says maybe that would be
worse
, at this point. You know how he is, sort of smirking, so you don’t know if he’s being serious or not, but he goes, at this point, imagine winding it back. With everything that’s gotten f’ed up, imagine starting over? And I just said, ‘Man, anything is better than death.
Anything
.’ ”

“Yeah,” I say, “of course,” and I’m nodding, trying to pay attention, but the moment Trish said the word
deflect
, my mind exploded with thoughts of Nico: memories of my vanished sister are suddenly everywhere in my head, like invaders pouring across a border. She is four years old and toppling off her bicycle; she is six and staring in confusion at the crowds during the funerals; she is ten and drunk and I am telling her that I will never let her go. The helicopter swoops down to lift me up from blockhouse at Fort Riley, and Nico presses masses of white washcloths into my mess of an arm, tells me it’s going to be okay.

“Hank?”

“Yeah?” I say, blinking.

“You all right?”

In five minutes of talking I tell Trish the whole thing. About Next Time Around, about Jordan and the blonde girl and the computer, about the helicopter. She asks, so I give her what details I remember about the plan itself: the nuclear-standoff blast and the “back reaction”; a sufficient change in velocity with a minimum of ejecta; the secret scientist moldering in the military prison.

“Jesus H. Christ,” says Trish.

“I know.” My coffee is cold. I get up to refill it.

“If the government is so determined to keep this from happening, why didn’t they kill the scientist?”

“Oh, hey,” I say. “Great question. I didn’t even ask that one.”

“Listen, you can’t beat yourself up about it,” murmurs Trish. “If she was going to go, she was going to go.” She had met Nico a couple times over the years—at cop parties, at the station, at my house once or twice.

“Go where?” says Kelli, wandering in in her Sleeping Beauty nightgown.

“Nowhere, honey.”

Kelli is holding hands with her brother, and she opens the pantry to get them snack cakes. Police House follows a strict “kids can eat whatever they want” policy.

“You should go and find her.”

We hadn’t seen Cortez come in. He is standing in the doorway, his expression unusually serious.

“Why?” says McConnell, looking at him. They have yet to make up their minds about each other, these two.

“She’s his sister,” says Cortez. “Can I have one of those, please?”

Kelli hands him a snack cake, and he unwraps it while he talks.

“She is family. She matters to him. Look at him. Everything is different. The asteroid will strike in one and a half months. What if she’s in trouble? What if she needs help?”

Cortez studies me while he bites into the snack cake. McConnell is looking at me, too, her hand on my forearm while I watch the steam rise off my cup.

Yeah
, is what I’m thinking.
What if?

THANK YOU

Dr. Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Officer Joseph Wright and everyone at the Concord Police Department in New Hampshire; Andrew Winters

My family at Quirk Books: Jason, Nicole, Eric, Doogie, Mary Ellen, Jane, Dave, Brett, and—seriously—everyone else they got over there

My family at my house: Diana, Rosalie, Ike, and Milly

My agent, Joelle Delbourgo

Smart people: business and economics author Eduardo Porter; Mitch Renkow, professor of agriculture and resource economics, North Carolina State University; Christopher Rudolph at the School of International Service at American University; Joe Loughmiller at Indiana American Water; Dr. Zara Cooper; Dr. Nora Osman; Dr. Gerardo Gomez and his colleagues at Wishard Hospital, Indianapolis; Dani Sher, PA-C, and her colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago; Lieutenant Colonel Eric Stewart of the Green Berets; the folks at Snipercraft, Inc., Sebring, Florida

Early readers: Kevin Maher, Laura Gutin, Erik Jackson, and especially Nick Tamarkin, my own personal Detective Culverson

Colleagues, students, and friends at Butler University, Indianapolis

Colleagues, students, and friends at Grub Street, Boston

And a special thank you to everyone who submitted a “What Would You Do?” essay at
TheLastPoliceman.com
. Keep ’em coming.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO …

 … with just 77 days until the end of the world?

Author Ben H. Winters posed this question to a variety of writers, artists, and notable figures.

Visit
QuirkBooks.com/TheLastPoliceman
to:

•   Read their answers

•   Share your own responses

•   Watch the book trailer

•   Read a Q&A with Ben H. Winters

•   Discover the science behind the science fiction

And much more!

Also by Ben H. Winters

BEDBUGS

A NOVEL

Turn the page to read an excerpt

“Hey, Al. Come look at this one.”

Susan Wendt studied the screen of her MacBook while her husband, Alex, paused the DVR and walked over to the kitchen table. He read the Craigslist ad over her shoulder and delivered a quick verdict: “Bull crap.” He cracked his knuckles and scootched behind her to get to the fridge. “It’s total bull crap, baby.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“Gotta be. You want?”

He held up a Brooklyn Lager by the neck and waggled it back and forth. Susan shook her head, scanning the Craigslist ad with a slight frown. Alex opened the beer and went to crouch beside her. “It’s one of those where the broker lures you in and then goes, ‘Oh
that
place? That place got taken
yesterday
! How about this one? Rent is
joost
a
leeeeedle beeeet
more expensive….’” He slipped into a goofy gloss on the thick

Brazilian accent of the most recent broker to take them on a wild-goose chase through half of south Brooklyn. Susan laughed.

“But wait,” she said, pointing at the screen again. “It’s not a broker. See? ‘For rent by owner.’”

Alex raised his eyebrows skeptically, took a swallow of the beer, and wandered back to the TV.

Their apartment search, now two and a half months old, had been her thing more than his all along. He felt that their current place, a one-bedroom-plus-office-nook off Union Square, was perfect. Or, if not perfect, then at least perfectly fine. And the idea of moving, the logistics and the packing and the various expenditures—it all made him want to tear his own head off. Or so he rather vividly expressed it.

“Plus,” Alex had argued, “I’m not sure this is the time to jack up our rent.”

Susan had been calm but insistent: it
was
time. It was time for Emma to have a proper bedroom, one that wasn’t a converted office nook; time for Susan to have a place to set up her easel and paints; time for Alex to have a real kitchen to cook his elaborate meals. “And rents are a heck of a lot lower than they used to be, especially in Brooklyn. Besides, Alex,” she had concluded, making a blatant appeal to his vanity, “you’re doing really well right now. Come on. We can just look, right?”

Alex had relented, and “just looking” rapidly escalated into a full-on search. Every evening that summer, after Emma had her bath and went to bed, while Alex settled in for his nightly dose of god-awful reality television, Susan trolled Craigslist and
Rentals.com
and the
Times
real estate section, entering rents and square footage and broker’s phone numbers on a master spreadsheet dotted with hyperlinks. On the weekends the family tromped from open house to open house, from Fort Greene to Boerum Hill, clutching cups of deli coffee and informational folders from Corcoran, pushing Emma in her bright-pink Maclaren stroller.

They’d found places they loved for way too much, places in their price range that they hated, and, for occasional variety, places they couldn’t afford and hated anyway. Last weekend they’d schlepped all the way to Red Hook, riding the F train to Smith and Ninth and then the B61 the rest of the way. The apartment they’d seen there, a converted artists’ loft on Van Brunt Street, was Susan’s favorite so far. It was footsteps from Fairway, cater-corner from a hipster bakery famous for its salted-caramel tarts, and featured a master bedroom with a thin slice of East River view.

But the apartment was forty-five minutes from the city, and with no utilities included it was just north of their budget.

“We really can’t push it on price,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially with you not working right now.”

Susan had smiled tightly, hiding her deep disappointment at his veto. She’d been increasingly and painfully aware, as the apartment search continued, that she had little leverage on the question of cost. It was true—she
wasn’t
working just then, a state of affairs Alex had totally supported, but it didn’t give her a lot of leeway on rent. She carefully transcribed the details of the “for rent by owner” Craigslist ad into the spreadsheet on her MacBook. They hadn’t even
looked
in Brooklyn Heights, because—well, what the hell for? No one was renting two-bedrooms in the Heights for under four thousand dollars a month, recession or not. No one except (Susan copied the name carefully from the ad) Andrea Scharfstein, who was offering the top two floors of her Cranberry Street brownstone: “1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2B, d/w, ample closets.” All for a startling $3,550.

“Thirty-five-fifty?” Alex snorted, fast-forwarding through a commercial break. “Bull crap, baby. Guaranteed.”

When Alex, Susan, and Emma arrived on Cranberry Street a little before their scheduled appointment at 10:30 the next morning, Andrea Scharfstein was waiting for them on the top step of her front stoop, reading the Sunday
New York Times
and sipping tea from a big yellow mug with the WNYC logo blazoned on the side. As they approached, their pink stroller bouncing over the uneven slate of the sidewalk, Andrea folded the newspaper and stood squinting down at them with her hands on hips: a thin and frail old woman with a big cloud of curly steel-gray hair, wearing a sixties-fabulous peach sundress, a gauzy taupe shawl, and big chunky bracelets on both wrists.