But here she is. Standing and waiting for me. Her fingers clutching at me. “How much longer?”
“Ruth,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
She tightens her grip on my sleeve. “How much longer?”
I could give her a reprieve: there’s a plan in motion, actually. Department of Defense Space Command, they figured something out. A standoff burst, a nuclear detonation at one object radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface … everything is going to be fine.
But I can’t do that, so I just say it as quickly as I can, tearing off the Band-Aid, “Three days,” and she breathes sharply and nods bravely but stumbles forward into my arms. I catch her and hold her small body to my chest and kiss her gently on the top of the head.
The voice of Cortez, singsong in my ear. Everything reminds you of your sister.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I’m really, really sorry.”
It’s just words, though. Just a bunch of tiny little words.
Everything is exactly as it was.
The headquarters of the Rotary Police Department is like a small gray ship docked in the gloom. The driveway a rough horseshoe of gravel. Two flagpoles, two beleaguered flags. I approach in sunrise silence, work shoes crunching on the gravel, like a mountain man returned to civilization after a long wilderness exile, only civilization is gone. It’s just the one dull municipal building, planted like a ruin in the center of an overgrown lawn. It’s raining again. It rained on and off all night.
I slept again for five hours in the middle of the night on the side of the road, at my same YOU ARE HERE rest stop, my coat jacket folded neatly for a pillow, my police-department pistol in the crook of my arm.
Now it’s morning and as I step off the road onto the grass I can sense them, feel them—I can practically hear them down there under my feet, nosing around in their underground lair, the basement warren they dug down into and took over, the maze they’ve occupied. My mind has built mythologies around them all, cloaked their names in malevolent auras. Tick, long-faced and bizarre. The very thin black girl, moody and cruel. Astronaut with his bushy black hair and his belt of weapons. All of them are listed now in black pen in my blue notebook. Suspects. Witnesses, though to what I am not yet sure. They’re all down there, scuttling around like spiders, and they’ve got my sister.
It’s Monday now. Monday morning; 9:17, according to the Casio. Two days to go. I’m almost to the door of the station when there’s a sudden sharp scrape from just above me. The roof. I jump back from the door, draw the gun, and shout “Police!”
Old habit. Can’t help it. My heart beats. Silence—ten seconds—twenty—me stepping slowly backward, one big step at a time, trying to get to a place where I can see what’s up there.
Then the noise again, a scrape and then a rustle, and then new silence.
I try again, louder. “If there is someone up there, show yourself immediately.” What do I say then? I’ve got a gun. Everybody’s got a stupid gun.
“Police,” I say, one more time, and a hail of rocks and loose dirt flies out of the sky onto my face and my head. Tiny pebbles bounce off my scalp, dust fills my eyes.
I grunt, spitting debris out of my mouth, and look up.
“Oh, no! Policeman!” It’s Cortez, just his face, big and ugly and leering, jutting out over the lip of the building. “I didn’t see you there!”
He cackles while I lower my gun. I clear my throat and hawk a thick clod of dirty spit out onto the lawn. A nasty trick, childish, somehow out of character for the man. All I can see of Cortez is his upper half. He’s lying down flat on the roof of the building, his torso extended over the edge, his big hands dangling down. His right hand is open, showing the palm, where he just let go of the dirt and rocks. His other hand is a tightly clenched fist. Behind him the sky is a fabric of gloomy gray clouds.
“What are you doing up there?”
Cortez shrugs. “Killing time. Hanging around. Investigating. I found solar panels up here, by the by. Hooked up to battery chargers. Whatever your sister and her playmates have got down there, it’s all charged up.”
I nod, combing grit out of my mustache with my fingertips, recalling Atlee’s description of heavy crates, tromped down the stairs one at a time. What’s in the crates? And then that question provokes the other, the question I can’t answer and can’t shake: Where’d they get the helicopter?
I swat it away, set my jaw against it. Stay on target.
“Cortez, can you come down from there? We’ve got to get to work.”
He stays where he is, props his face up on one hand, like he’s lolling on a summer lawn. “Cortez, they’re down there. I talked to the man who dropped in that wedge. What it sounds like is this was the backup plan, this was plan B. They realized that all this stuff about the scientist and the standoff burst was a fairy tale, and they went to ground.”