Blood bubbles up out of his mouth with the words, and in the glow of the fire behind me the blood looks black.
“Try not to talk,” I say. “I’m putting pressure on the wound.” I lean forward, flattening one hand over the other hand, flattening both hands over his gaping chest.
“Don’t put pressure on the wound.” He reaches up with surprising strength, pushes my hands off him. “Don’t do that.”
“Please remain quiet and still,” I say, “until I can staunch the bleeding.”
“I am going to bleed out and die.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I want to bleed out and die. Palace! This is so much better than a—fucking—I don’t know—tsunami or something.” He laughs, coughing, blood spraying out. “This is the best-case scenario.”
I don’t like it. I shake my head. The idea of just leaving him here. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. God, yes. Did we get the monster?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, go get him.”
“Her,” I say.
“What?”
The door to the room behind us is open, and Astronaut I can see in there, melted and smoldering, but it doesn’t matter—it’s Jean, it’s Jean who rushes past in the corner of my vision, hoping I don’t see her, but I do—I do.
4.
I don’t know why it matters, but I know that it does. Getting the rest of the story, hearing a confession, checking off the final details.
Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.
But society is dead. Civilization is burning cities, its terrified animals clustered around grain silos, stabbing each other at burned-down convenience stores for the last can of Pringles.
Nevertheless—even so—here I go, I go charging through the darkness toward the stairs, following Jean’s frantic small form.
I don’t yell for her to stop, because she won’t stop. I don’t yell “Police!” because I’m not a policeman anymore, I haven’t been for some time now. I hear her thin feet clanging up the stairs, hear the narrow metal stairwell rattling as she bolts for daylight. I charge across the floor and I follow her, hurling myself up the thin steps for the last time, putting the last of the pieces together, following Jean as she rattles up the stairway toward the clustered shadows at the top.
Look what you made me—
I sidestep small mounds of rubble still on the top step and into the garage and even among the horror of all that’s happening, the desperation to catch up to Jean and get the rest of the story, still I feel a rush of gladness from being done with that bunker, that crypt. I burst up into the aboveground, drinking air and daylight like a surfacing diver.
I stumble across the three-car indoor garage, navigating the craters and piles, and then I’m in the hallway and I can see Jean, racing hopelessly a few paces ahead of me down the hallway, down the long corridor where I started my search, the corridor marked by my sister’s blood and her blood, one trail in and one trail out.
I had to stop her, see—I had to—
I’m much faster than Jean. She’s fast and desperate, but I’m tall and my legs are very long and I’m desperate too, and I do it—just as the glass front door of the police station is swinging shut behind her I push it back open and launch myself and catch her legs and get her down into the mud, and then I push myself back up so that by the time she turns over there I am, looming, full height with weapons drawn, the knife and the gun.
“Please,” she says, her body trembling and her hands clasped together. “Please.”
I glare down at her. We’re surrounded by the overgrown bushes, blinking green in the daylight. The autumn wind riffles my hair, tickling up my shirtsleeves.
“Please,” she says softly. “Do it quickly.”
She is assuming my intention is to kill her. This is not my intention but I don’t tell her that. I have no interest in her in any way. But I don’t say that and I’m standing here with the butcher’s knife and the SIG and I see that she sees those things, I see that she sees the flat look in my eyes. “Tell me,” I say. My voice is flat also, flat and cold.
The flags ripple in the breeze, making a tinny tink-tink-tink as the ropes dance against the poles.
“I killed her.”
“I know that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know that,” I say again, and what I mean is “I don’t care.” Her sorrow is beside the point. I want answers, my chest is swollen with the wanting, my weapons are shaking in my hands. She thinks I am going to slay her where she lays, she thinks that I am vengeance-mad and bent on slaughter. But she’s got it wrong, I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.
“He made you do it.”