“Why did you kill her?”
I have to know. That’s all I need is to know. I am dimly aware of the RadioCOMMAND still going, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and Jordan reaches for my throat between the bars, but his hand is all slick with the blood from his stomach and it slides off me. I move backward and spit at him. “I’m looking for her,” he insists. “I came here to find her.”
I slide a long hand between the bars and grab his leg, worm my forefinger under the bandage and jam it into the wound on his calf and he screeches and I jam it in more. A nasty trick, bad-guy wrestler move. Jordan writhes away from my hand, but I don’t let go—I’ve got both of my hands wriggled through the bars now, one hand clamped onto him at midthigh, the other hand still gouging his infected wound. I’m behaving like a monster. He is screaming. I want answers. I need them.
“Stop screaming,” I tell him, both arms extended as if through the holes in a puppet theater, holding him fast through the bars. “Talk. Tell me.”
“What?” He says, choking out the word, gasping from pain. “What?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?” Jordan gasps. I ease up slightly on my grip, give him a moment of relief, not wanting him to pass out. The information is more important. I have to know. He’s heaving desperate breaths, clutching at his wound, both of us on the ground in the grime. I give him what I already know, build a bridge of common understanding, Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation, chapter 14.
“You abandoned your girlfriend in Concord. You and Abigail were supposed to stay but you left anyway. You made sure you were here on the big day, T-minus one week, when the whole group was supposed to go underground. How did you know that was the day?”
“I don’t know anything. I told you.”
“Liar. Killer. You were here at five on Wednesday the twenty-sixth because you knew that that’s when they’d be going underground and you knew that Nico would leave. Maybe you told her—maybe you told her to leave, to meet you outside the station. And there she was. She had a backpack on. She was happy to see you.”
I twist my finger, work it into the wound, and he writhes away, tries to, but I’ve got him tight, I’m clutching him to the bars, holding him in place.
“The other girl was an unwelcome surprise though, right?”
“What other girl?”
“So you had to kill her first, quick, knock her out and slash her throat and then chase Nico—”
“What the fuck—no—I came here to save her.”
“Save her? To save her?”
Now I’m just twisting at his leg, now I’m trying to inflict as much pain on him as I can. I don’t care if we both die here, locked in our improbable clench for however long is left. He can tell the truth or both of us can die.
“You slashed her throat, and you slashed that other girl’s throat, and you left them. Why, Jordan? Why did you do that?”
“Is that what happened? Is that what happened to her?”
And then he throws his head back and slumps over on his side of the bars. I don’t care, I keep at it, I have to hear him confirm it. I need that, and Nico does.
“Why did you kill her? Why? How does killing my sister fit into your stupid plan to save the world?”
There is a long pause. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” the radio says, and then again. Jordan starts laughing. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he gives off this weird cold laugh, a gurgling throaty chuckle.
“What?”
Nothing. Dead, dry laughter.
“What?”
“The plan. The plan, Stan. There’s no plan. We made it up. It’s not real. We made the whole thing up.”
2.
Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.
A massive asteroid really is coming and it will kill us all. That is a true fact, hard and cold and irreducible, a fact that can be neither diverted nor destroyed.