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Ben H. Winters

WORLD OF TROUBLE

The Last Policeman Book III

Wednesday, August 22

“Are you here about the dust? Please tell me you’re here to do something about the dust. ”

I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say.

The girl’s voice is throaty and ill, her eyes looking out over a nose-and-mouth mask, staring hopeful and crazed at me as I stand baffled on her doorstep. Beautiful blonde, hair swept back out of her face, dirty and exhausted like everybody, panicked like everybody. But there’s something else going on here, something not healthy. Something biochemical in her eyes.

“Well, come in,” she says through her allergy mask. “Come on, come in, close the door, the door. ”

I step inside and she kicks the door shut and whirls around to face me. Yellow sundress, faded and tattered at the hem. Starved-looking, sallow, pale. Wearing not just the allergy mask but thick yellow latex gloves. And she’s armed to the teeth is the other thing, she’s holding two semiautomatics and has a smaller gun tucked in her boot, plus some kind of heavy-duty hunting knife in a calf sheath at the hem of the sundress. And I can’t tell if it’s live or not, but there is unquestionably a grenade dangling from a braided belt at her waist.

“Do you see the dust?” she says, gesturing with the guns, pointing into the corners. “You see how we’ve got a serious problem with the dust?”

It’s true that there are motes hovering in the sunbeams, along with the garbage scattered on the floor, heaps of dirty clothing and open trunks spilling over with all manner of useless things, magazines and electrical cords and wadded-up dollar bills. But she’s seeing more than what’s here, I can tell, she’s in the outer reaches, she’s blinking furiously, coughing behind her mask.

I wish I could recall this girl’s name. That would help a lot, if I could just remember her name.

“What do we do about this?” she says, rattling out words. “Do you just vacuum it, or—? Is that it—do you just suck it up and take it out of here? Does that work with cosmic dust?”

“Cosmic dust,” I say. “Huh. Well, you know, I’m not sure. ”

This is my first trip to Concord, New Hampshire, since I fled a month ago, since my house burned down, along with much of the rest of the city. The chaos of those final frantic hours has died down to a grim and mournful silence. We’re a few blocks from downtown, in the abandoned husk of a store on Wilson Street, but there are no jostling anxious crowds outside, no frightened people rushing and pushing past each other in the streets. No klaxon howl of car alarms, no distant gunfire. The people are hidden now, those that remain, hidden under blankets or in basements, encased in their dread.