World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(67)

“As soon as you went underground?” Nod. Yes. “Between four thirty and five thirty last Wednesday. Let’s call it five. Five o’clock on September 26. What happened then?”

“He said we were going to have a party. To celebrate our new lives. We can’t be gloomy, he said. A new life. New time. We didn’t even, you know. Didn’t unpack. Or look around. It was just—as soon as we got downstairs we sat down.”

“In the room marked LADIES.”

“Yes.”

Nodding, nodding. I won’t let her become like she was in the jail cell, withdrawing, floating away like a space capsule drifting from the mother ship. I stay close, keep my eyes boring into hers.

“Did it seem strange to you? To be having a party at such a time?”

“No. Not at all. I felt relieved. I was tired of waiting. Parry wasn’t coming. ‘Resolution.’ It wasn’t happening. We all knew that by then. It was time for plan B. I was glad. Astronaut was glad, too. He poured drinks for everyone. Proposed a toast.” A flicker of a smile rushes across her face, a vestigial fondness for the charismatic leader, but it dies fast. “But then he—he starts this speech. About our loyalty. About how we’ve lost discipline. How the hard part hasn’t even started yet. He said our behavior outside, all the hanging out, while we had been waiting, it was bullshit. He told us we were weak. He spray-painted on the wall.”

I listen. I am down there with her, watching his face contort with anger, watching the words appear on the wall: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

“And then he started talking about Nico. He said, look who’s not here. Look who abandoned us. Look who betrayed us.”

Kessler was right about DeCarlo. He had him nailed. Suicide didn’t fit the profile, but this: in group/out group dynamics. Cruel games. Tests of loyalty. And drugs, of course, Big Pharma and his clever hand with a concoction. He had resolved to kill all of his erstwhile coconspirators—he was doing it even then, merrily topping off everybody’s tea—but first he was going to have some fun.

“Go on, please.”

Jean looks at me helplessly, piteously. She is desperate to stop this line of conversation, desperate not to get to the end. To just lie in peace like Agent Kessler, waiting for the end.

I can see myself, a form of myself, floating up out of my body and running to get her a blanket, lift her gently, get her water, protect her. Young girl—recent trauma—curled in fear on the forest floor. But what I’m doing is nothing, what I’m doing is standing here clutching my weapons waiting for her to continue.

“The rest. Tell me the rest.”

“He, um—he looked at me. At me. And he told me I was the worst. The weakest. And he told me what I—what I had to do. To earn my place.” Her lip curls, her face tightens. The words are dull stones, she chokes them out one by one. “I said, ‘I can’t.’ He said, ‘Goodbye then, good luck. We are happy to drink your share of the water, little sister. To eat your share of the food.’ ”

She closes her eyes and I watch tears roll out from under the lids.

“I looked at the rest of them for help—or for, for pity, or—”

She looks down at the dirt. She got no help and she got no pity. They were as afraid as she was, all the rest of them, Tick and Valentine and Little Man and her old pals Sailor and Delighted, all as scared and confused, all just as firmly under the thumb of their leader. A week from impact and sharply aware of how isolated they had become, as the world narrowed to a pinpoint like the circle of darkness at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. As their leader and protector peeled off his layers, showing them the cruelty at his core.

So Astronaut tells Jean to go on now, he says get up, and she does, she gets up, she goes—and as she is telling me this story she is dissolving. She is seeing the memory complete itself out of the fog of forgetfulness, and it is killing her, I can see it. Every sentence is killing her. Every word. “I loved Nico. She was my friend. But as I was walking up those stairs my mind got—I don’t know. Hollow. There was all this shouting, these weird voices shouting, and—like—giggling?”

“You were hallucinating,” I say. “He drugged you.”

She nods. She knows this already, I think. Weird voices and dark streaks from the cruel courage in her tea. Whatever secret ingredient he put in to add to his private fun. His game, his apocalyptic April Fool’s Day joke. Given her overdose and the subsequent patchy spots in her memory, we’re probably talking about a hallucinogen, some sort of dissociative anesthetic; PCP, maybe, or ketamine. But I can’t say with certainty, it’s not my area of expertise, and if it would do any good I would take blood, I would stick her with a needle and catch any lingering molecules still swimming in her veins. Send it to the lab, boys!

The rest of them got much worse, of course. This was Astronaut’s real plan B. Food and water were limited, everything was limited, and he wasn’t going to share any of it, not for a second.

So here comes Jean up the rickety stairs with Astronaut’s sawtooth buck knife, shoved out of the hatch and told the price of her future. Surfing darkly, wild chemical horrors churning in her gut along with the terror. Looking for Nico.

“You know what?” She looks up at me with hope in her eyes, a small spark of joy. “You know what I remember? I remember thinking she’s probably gone. Because she told me she was going to leave, on the stairs she told me. And then with the party, and the speech, I mean, we’d been down there for—I don’t know, half an hour? He sat us down, he gave the speech, it had been time. If she was leaving she’d be gone already. I remember thinking that.”