Read Online Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) by Ben H. Winters - Free Book Online Page A

nonsense, and we have not spoken since.
    And yet here I am, turning the pages of
Popular Science
, reading for the millionth time about the soil composition under the Indonesian sea, and what that means for the ejecta that will be blasted into our atmosphere at impact—here I am, waiting to assure myself that Nico is safe. Once she was gone for two days, and I was anxious enough about her absence to spend three miserable hours crouched in that filthy back alley, listening through the windows until one of the scumbags within mentioned to another that Nico was down in Durham, mingling with the utopians and self-styled revolutionaries at the Free Republic of New Hampshire.
    The details I ignored. I just needed to know, as I need to know now, today, that she’s okay.
    At last the front door opens and a fat twenty-something boy with greasy hair emerges to dump out a bucket full of some fluid—urine? cooking oil? bong water?—and I see Nico, slight and pale and smoking, just inside.
    I wish I could abandon my sister to her cronies and her idiotic plans. I wish I could stop giving a flying fig, as my father used to say,about this selfish and petulant and ignorant child. But she’s my sister. Our parents are dead and so is my father’s father, who raised us, and it’s my responsibility to ensure, for now, that she stays alive.

2.
    “Sit anywhere, hon.”
    It’s lunchtime but Culverson and McGully aren’t here, and as I slide onto a stool at the counter I feel a roll of anxiety. Every time someone isn’t there who is supposed to be, a part of my mind defaults to the certainty that they’re dead or disappeared.
    “It’s early yet,” says Ruth-Ann, reading my mind, as she comes over with the carafe of hot water and a tray of teabags. “They’ll be here.”
    I watch her walk back to the counter. The asteroid will come and destroy the earth and leave behind only Ruth-Ann, floating in the vast blackness of space, one hand clutched around the handle of her carafe.
    On the counter is the valedictory edition of the
Concord Monitor
, from a Sunday four weeks ago, and though I’ve surely read itcover to cover a hundred times by now, I pick it up to read it one more time. American and European bombing campaign against nuclear, general military, and civilian targets across Pakistan. The newly formed Mayfair Commission, subpoenaing the records of the Space-guard Survey and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The massive twelve-deck cruise ship, flying the Norwegian flag, that plowed into Oakland Harbor and turned out to be carrying more than twenty thousand catastrophe immigrants from Central Asia, women and children “packed like animals” into its holds.
    There’s a long feature story on the back about a young woman, a former Boston University law student, who has decided to head eastward, to Indonesia, a CI in reverse, to await the world’s destruction “in the epicenter of the event.” The article has a gently amused, “well, what do you know?” sort of tone, except for the quotes from the kid’s horrified parents.
    And then, in the lower-left corner of the front page, the short, anguished mea culpa from the publisher: lacking in resources, lacking in staff, it is with great regret that we announce that effective immediately …
    As Ruth-Ann centers my teacup on its saucer there’s a rush of noise from outside, someone pushing open the front door. I swivel, knock the teacup with my elbow, and it shatters on the floor. Ruth-Ann pulls out a double-barreled shotgun like a gangster from under the counter and aims it at the door.
    “Stop,” she says to the trembling woman. “Who are you?”
    “It’s okay,” I say, sliding off my stool, tripping over myself, rushingover. “I know her.”
    “He came
back
, Henry,” says Martha, frantic, pleading, her face flushed and pink. “Brett came home.”
    * * *
    I put Martha Milano on my handlebars somehow and bike her home like we’re old-timey sweethearts. Once