World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(52)

“Policeman, listen,” says Cortez, no longer bothering to whisper, his eyes fixed on the thin staircase leading down. “We’re not going in there to play ping-pong in the rec room. This isn’t all the set-up for a surprise party I planned for you.”

He’s right. I know he’s right.

“Jean,” I say softly.

“No, it’s—” She turns away. “Fine. Okay.”

“We’ll be right back,” I tell her, which probably isn’t true, and “you’ll be fine,” and of course that’s not true either.

“You can’t save everybody, my boy,” says Cortez, while I watch Jean wander from the garage and maybe back to the holding cell that has somehow become her home, or maybe she’ll be darting off into the woods, taking her chances in the broken world until it’s gone. Or maybe she’s done, maybe she’s had enough and when we come back we’ll find her up here, hanging by a bedsheet, eyes bulging and lips blue like Peter Zell.

We go down. Down we go.

Cortez descends first and I follow him into the darkness. He’s whistling, softly, “hi-ho, hi-ho,” and I follow the sound of him whistling and the clang of his boot heels on the metal steps, my headlamp catching half-lit visions of his back and the backs of his shoes, until he reaches the bottom and stops and says, “Huh.”

There is no blast door. We come off the last step onto a cement floor; cement walls; a long basement hallway. It’s cold, noticeably so, an easy ten degrees colder than upstairs; cold and dark and utterly silent. The smells of old stone, of mold and standing water, and underneath that a more recent scent, an acridness like something burning somewhere nearby. As we look around the empty room our headlamps cut overlapping slices of yellow gloom from the darkness.

It’s nothing. It’s just plain nothing. It takes a moment or two for me to identify the feeling creeping up into my bones while I’m standing here, staring at this long empty quiet hallway. It’s disappointment is what it is, a low cold disappointment, because some part of me had wondered. At some point without meaning to I had allowed some faint bubbles of hope to form and rise. Because of all of it—not just the damn helicopter, but all of it: the impressive geographic reach of this group, from New England to the Midwest; the Internet capacity, Jordan nonchalantly hacking an FBI database on a dial-up connection while the rest of the world is in rapid regression toward the Stone Age; those mysterious heavy crates Atlee Miller saw being trucked down here on Wednesday afternoon.

Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from Star Wars. Something.

But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.

Where are the people? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?

Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.

“Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”

My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.

“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”

“We’ll split up.”

“What?

I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.

“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.

“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”

“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry? “Cortez?”

This is insane. I stumble after him but he’s moving fast, swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. He’s got some plan, he’s following some star that I can’t see. A wash of panic rushes up from my stomach, a rush of fear, deep anxiety, as old as childhood. I don’t want to be down here alone.

“Cortez?”





4.


I take big careful steps along the gray floor, my back pressed against the rough concrete, my light bobbling in front of me like I’m an anglerfish. My gun is in my right hand. Eyes seeking, trying to adjust. Walking through a shadowland, through a photographer’s negative, shining the light. A few bulbs dangle bare and functionless from the ceiling, among a tangle of sagging, rusted pipes. A bare stone floor, uneven, cracked in long lines across the foundation. Spiderwebs and spiders.

The layout of the police station basement appears much like the layout upstairs, a single long hallway broken by doors. There are just fewer of the doors down here, spaced farther apart. It’s like this world down here is the corpse version of the world upstairs, the decaying mirror image of what’s above. Like the building died and was buried down here, underground.