The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters Read Free Book Online Page B

the main are simply muddling along. Go to work, sit at your desk, hope the company is still around come Monday. Go to the store, push the cart, hope there’s some food on the shelves today. Meet your sweetheart at lunch hour for ice cream. Okay, sure, some people have chosen to kill themselves, and some people have chosen to go Bucket List, some people are scrambling around for drugs or “wandering around with their dicks out,” as McGully likes to say.
    But a lot of the Bucket Listers have returned, disappointed, and a lot of newly minted criminals and wild pleasure-seekers have found themselves in jail, waiting in terrified solitude for October.
    So, yeah, there are differences in behavior, but they are on the margins. The main difference, from a law-enforcement perspective, is more atmospheric, harder to define. I would characterize the mood, here in town, as that of the child who isn’t in trouble yet, but knows he’s going to be. He’s up in his room, waiting, “Just wait till your father gets home.” He’s sullen and snappish, he’s on edge. Confused, sad, trembling against the knowledge of what’s coming next, and right on the edge of violence, not angry but anxious in a way that can easily shade into anger.
    That’s Concord. I can’t speak to the mood in the rest of the world, but that’s pretty much it around here.
    * * *
    I’m back at my desk on School Street, back in Adult Crimes, and I’m carefully cutting away the duct tape that holds the lid of the shoebox, and for the second time since I met her I hear the voice of Naomi Eddes—standing there with her arms crossed, staring at me,
so what are you looking for, anyway?
    “This,” I say, when I have the lid off the box and I’m staring inside. “This is what I’m looking for.”
    Peter Zell’s shoebox contains hundreds of newspaper articles, magazine pages, and items printed from the Internet, all relating to Maia and its impending impact with Earth. I lift the first of the articles off the top of the stack. It’s from April 2 of last year, an Associated Press squib about the Palomar Observatory at Caltech and the unusual but almost certainly harmless object the scientists there had spotted, which had been added to the Potentially Hazardous Asteroidlist at the Minor Planet Center. The author concludes the article by dryly noting that “whatever its size or composition, this mysterious new object’s odds of impacting Earth are estimated at 0.000047 percent, meaning there is a one in 2,128,000 chance.” Zell, I note, has carefully circled both numbers.
    The next item in the shoebox is a Thomson Reuters piece from two days later, headlined “Newly Discovered Space Object Largest in Decades,” but the article itself is rather mundane, a single paragraph, no quotes. It estimates the size of the object—in those early days still being referred to by its astronomical designation of 2011GV 1 ,—as “among the largest spotted by astronomers in some decades, possibly as large as three kilometers in diameter.” Zell has circled that estimate, too, faintly, in pencil.
    I keep reading, fascinated by this grim time capsule, reliving the recent past from Peter Zell’s perspective. In each article, he has circled or underlined numbers: the steadily increasing estimates of Maia’s size, its angle in the sky, its right ascension and declination, its odds of impact as they inch higher, week by week, month by month. He’s put neat boxes around each dollar amount and percentage of stock-value loss in an early-July
Financial Times
survey of the desperate emergency actions of the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He has, too, articles on the political side: legislative wrangling, emergency laws, bureaucratic shuffles at the Justice Department, the refunding of the FDIC.
    I am picturing Zell, late at night, every night, at his cheap kitchen table, eating cereal, his glasses resting at his elbow, marking up these