World of Trouble (3 page)

The kitchenette’s two slim cupboards have been rummaged. Plates broken and disarrayed; bowls tossed onto the floor. Only two coffee mugs are still intact, one reading P
ROPERTY OF
R
OTARY
P
OLICE
D
EPARTMENT
, the other I
’
M
T
HROUGH WITH
L
OVE
; F
ORTUNATELY
T
HERE
’
S
S
TILL
S
EX
. I smile and rub my bleary eyes. I miss cops, I really do.

Was she here? Did Nico take the candy?

The gooseneck spout of the sink is in the on position, angled up sharply to the left, as if someone came in for a glass of water, forgetting that the municipal supplies have stopped. Or perhaps the water went out right in the middle of someone using the sink. Some cop in the break room after a long and treacherous shift, filling up his cup or washing his face, her face, and suddenly, whoops, no more water for you.

The sink is full of blood. It’s a deep-walled sink with a basin made of stainless steel like the handle, and when I look down into it the sides and the bottom are covered with a rust-red explosion of blood. The drain is clotted and thick with it. I look again at the gooseneck spout, closer now, shining the light, and find the faint smudged patches: red, bloody palms clutching and jerking the handle.

STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES
.

Above and behind the sink, bolted to the wall, is a horizontal
rack hung with three knives. All of them are stained with blood, up and down, freckled from hilt and blade. A clot of dread and excitement forms in the base of my gut and floats like a bubble up into my throat. I swing around, moving quickly now, heartbeat thrumming, back through the muster room and out into the hallway, and now the sun is all the way up outside, casting a muted ochre glow through the glass door and I can see the floor clearly, see where the trail of blood runs down the hallway. Discrete spots, leading plain as bread crumbs from the kitchenette sink through the muster room, pass the dry-erase board and the flagpole, all the way down the hall to the front door of the station.

My mentor Detective Culverson, my mentor and my friend, he called it
walking the blood
. Walking the blood means walking with the escaping suspect or the fleeing victim, it means “you find the trail and see what songs it wants to sing you.” I shake my head, remembering him saying that, most of the way joking, purposefully hokey, but Detective Culverson could turn a phrase, he really could.

I walk the blood. I follow the steady line of drops, which appear on the tile at six- to eight-inch intervals all the way down the hallway and out the glass door, where the trail disappears in the thick mud just outside the building. I stand up in the gloomy daylight. It’s raining, a sputtering indecisive drizzle. It’s been raining for days. When Cortez and I got here late last night it was squalling hard enough that we were biking with our jackets tugged up over our necks and the backs of our heads, like snails, a blue tarp tied tautly over all our stuff in the Red Ryder wagon trailing behind. Wherever the bleeding person went from here, there is no trail left
to sing about it.

Back at the bloody sink in the break room, I open my small blue notebook to one of its last fresh pages and draw a rough annotated illustration of the knives behind the sink. Butcher’s knife, twelve inches; cleaver, six inches with a tapered spine; paring knife, three and a half inches, with the brand initials W.G. inlaid on the handle, between the rivets. I sketch the blood pattern on the knives and in the basin of the sink. I get down on all fours and walk the blood again, and this time I note that each of these drops is oblong, less a perfect circle and more an oval with a pointy end. I go again, third time, nice and slow, running my big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass along the trail and now I’m seeing that they
alternate
: an oblong droplet pointing this way, and then one pointing that way, one eastward droplet, one westward, all the way down the hall.

I was a detective for only three months, promoted out of nowhere and dismissed just as abruptly when the CPD was absorbed by the Department of Justice, and so I never received the higher-level training I would have in the normal run of a career. I am not as versed as I might wish in the finer points of crime-scene forensics, I cannot be as sure as I would like. Still, though. Nevertheless. What I’ve got here is actually not one trail but two; what the alternating droplets record are two separate instances that someone passed along this corridor either bleeding or carrying a blood-stained object. Two journeys in opposite directions.

I go back to the kitchenette and stare once more into the red mess in the sink. There is a fresh jitteriness in my gut, a new chaos
in my veins. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. New information. I don’t know if Nico’s here, if she was ever here. But
something
happened. Something.

*  *  *

It was not the impending end of the world that drove a wedge between my sister and me, it was our diverging responses to the end of the world, a bedrock disagreement regarding the basic reality of what is happening—i.e., whether it is happening or isn’t.

It
is
happening. I’m right and Nico is wrong. No set of facts has ever been as rigorously vetted, no set of data points so carefully analyzed and double-checked, by as many thousands of professors and scientists and government officials. All desperate for it to be wrong, all finding it nevertheless to be right. There are some uncertainties on the fine points, of course, for example regarding the composition and structure of the asteroid, whether it is made up primarily of metals or primarily of rocks, whether it is one monolithic piece or a pile of agglomerated rubble. There are, too, varying predictions as to what exactly happens, postimpact: how much volcanic activity and where; how fast the seas will rise and how high; how long it will take for the sun to be dimmed by ash and for how long it will remain shrouded. But on the core fact there is consensus: the asteroid 2011GV
₁
, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia, at an angle from horizontal
of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime.

There was this computer animation that got a lot of traction early on, a lot of “likes” and reposts—this was over a year ago, midsummer of last year, when the odds were high but not yet definite; when people were still at work, still using computers. This was the last wild flowering of social networking, people looking up old friends, trading conspiracy theories, posting and approving of one another’s Bucket Lists. This cartoon, this animation, it depicted the world as a piñata, with God wielding the stick—God in his Old Testament iteration, with the big white beard, Michelangelo’s God—whacking away at the fragile globe until it burst. This was one of a million versions of the coming event that ascribed it, however cutely, to God’s will, God’s vengeance, the interstellar object as Flood 2.0.

I didn’t find the cartoon all that clever; for one thing, the piñata image is way off. The world isn’t actually going to explode, fly off into pieces like shattered pottery. It will shiver from the impact, to be sure, but then continue in its orbit. The oceans boil, the forests burn, the mountains rumble and spew lava, everybody dies. The world keeps turning.

The crux of our falling out is that Nico imagines that she is going to prevent Maia from impacting. She and some friends. The last time we spoke at length was in Durham, New Hampshire, and she filled me in on all the details about her secret underground group and their secret underground plans. She was leaning forward, talking fast and passionate, smoking her cigarettes,
impatient as always with her narrow-minded older brother, stolid and disbelieving. She told me how the path of the asteroid can be diverted by a pinpoint nuclear explosion, detonated at a distance of one object-radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface, creating “a miniature rocket effect” and changing the trajectory. This operation is called a “standoff burst.” I didn’t understand the science. Nico, it seemed clear, didn’t understand it either. But, she insisted, the maneuver has been gamed out in classified exercises by the United States Department of Defense and has a theoretical success rate of more than eighty-five percent.

She went on and on, me trying to listen with a straight face, trying not to laugh or throw my hands up or shake her by the shoulders. Of course the information about the standoff burst is being suppressed by the evil government, for purposes unknown—and of course there is this one rogue scientist who knows how it’s done, and of course he’s being held by the government in a military prison somewhere. And—of course, of course, of course—Nico and her pal Jordan and the rest of the cabal have a plan to set him free and save the world.

I told her this was delusional. I told her this was Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and she was being a fool, and then she disappeared and I let her go.

This was an error, and I see that now.

I’m still right and she’s still wrong, but I cannot just let her be gone. Whatever she thinks, whatever she’s doing, she is still my baby sister and I am the only person left with a stake in her welfare.
And I can’t abide the idea of our final bitter exchange remaining the last conversation to take place between her and me, the last two members of my family who ever will exist. What I need now is to find her, see her before the end, before the earthquakes and the high water and whatever else is coming.

I need to see her so badly that it is like a low rolling heat in my stomach, like the fire in the belly of a furnace, and if I don’t find her—if I don’t manage to see her, hug her, apologize for letting her go—then it will leap up and consume me.

“Knives? Really?” Cortez looks up. His eyes gleam. “Are they big and sharp?”

“Two of them are big. The third is a paring knife. I don’t know about sharp.”

“Paring knives can be surprisingly effective. You can do some serious damage with a paring knife.”

“You’ve seen it,” I say. “You’ve done it.”

He laughs, winks. I rub my eyes and look around. I’ve caught up with Cortez in the three-car garage, the last unexplored area of the station. No cars left in here, just stuff—engine parts, broken pieces of tools, other miscellaneous junk that’s been forgotten or left behind. It’s big and echoey, smelling of old spilled gasoline. The sun comes in refracted through two grungy glass-block windows along the north-facing wall.

“Knives are always useful,” says Cortez cheerfully. “Sharp, dull.
Take the knives.”

He gives me a congratulatory salute and goes back to what he’s doing, which is rifling his way along the wire shelving units in the back of the room, across from the big garage doors, looking for useful objects. Cortez’s features are strangely large: large forehead, large chin, big glowing eyes. He has the jollity and the fierceness of a pirate king. The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months. On this long and complicated journey he has proved himself to be endlessly valuable, skilled at picking locks, siphoning fuel and reviving dead vehicles, discovering stores of resources in a resource-depleted landscape. He is not the sort of sidekick I ever would have predicted for myself, but the world has been reordered. I never used to think I’d have a dog.

“The knives are covered in blood,” I explain to Cortez. “I’m leaving them where I found them, for now.”

He glances at me over his shoulder. “Cow’s blood?”

“Maybe.”

“Pig?”

“Could be.”

He waggles his eyebrows insinuatingly. We’ve eaten what we brought, what we stumbled upon or bargained for along the way: snack-type food, jerky strips, a big thing of honey-roasted peanuts in tiny foil bags. We caught fish in the Finger Lakes in improvised nets, salted them, and ate those for five days. All we’ve been drinking is coffee, working our way through one massive sack of arabica beans. Cortez rigged up a manual pencil sharpener into
a grinder; we measure out cups from the barrels of spring water we took with us from Massachusetts; we boil up the coffee in an old carafe over a camp stove, strain it through a mesh spatula into a hot/cold thermos. It takes forever. It tastes terrible.

“Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”

Cortez stands, stretches, takes the necessary items from his golf bag and gets set up, while I think about blood. Two trails, one running out of the kitchenette and one running back.

Coffee on the boil, Cortez goes back to rummaging for treasure, working his way down the shelving system, lifting each object to the light, quickly assessing, evaluating, moving on.

“Training manual,” he says. “Porno mag. Empty shoebox. Sunglasses. Broken.” He tosses the mirrored state-trooper-style shades over his shoulder, shattering them further on the patterned-concrete floor of the garage. “Holsters. Could use these, maybe. Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious, Policeman. Binoculars.”

He holds them up, bulky and black, points them at me like a birdwatcher.

“Bad news,” he says. “You look like shit.”

He takes the binoculars. He takes a bag full of cell phone batteries. I’ve stopped asking Cortez what good it all is, all of the collecting and acquiring and sorting. It’s a game to him, a challenge: keep gathering up useful objects until the world caves in and no one has any use for anything.

I am aware of the possibility, of course, that it is Nico’s blood on the knife, in the sink, on the ground. It is too early to think
about that, too early to reach that sort of conclusion.

The most likely scenario, after all, is that this blood is the blood of a stranger, and these knives are totally unrelated to my current investigation. It’s just some terrible act of violence among uncounted terrible acts of violence occurring at an accelerating rate. We saw a lot of this on our journey, met people who confessed, whether in tearful remorse or in fierce defiance, to some unconscionable deed. The old lady standing guard over her grandson in an abandoned grocery store, who whispered how she had shot a stranger for six pounds of frozen hamburger meat. The couple at the truck stop that caught someone trying to steal the Dodge pickup they’d been living in, and in the ensuing confrontation ran him over.