Page 110 of The End of the World As We Know It

I belong ocean.

“I think I can take you back there,” Seth said.

Getting the mermaid out of the tank proved to be the hardest part. He was afraid of hurting her (his mind still wanted to use that pronoun), and while she wasn’t terribly heavy, she was slippery as hell. Finally, he managed to clutch her to his chest and half slip, half stagger past Mole’s pitiful corpse, down the stairs, and out onto the beach.

He flopped down at the water’s edge, spent. The mermaid slipped out of his arms and into the water. He saw her blossom there like a many-petaled blue flower, saw gold ripples unfurl beneath her skin. Once more she spoke in his mind: “Thank. You. For. Freeing. I. Love. You.”

“I love you, too,” Seth whispered. He pushed himself up on his elbows and watched her swim away, then let himself sink back down. The water lapping at his face was cold, and the rocks dug into him everywhere, but he couldn’t move yet.

Pain cored into his bones. His throat was full of razors.

When he closed his eyes, the torn paper face of thechochin’obakeloomed out of the darkness, its long tongue lolling. He wondered if the dark man would still want him.

KOVACH’S LAST CASE

Michael Koryta

He thought he might be the last homicide detective in America. Maybe the world.

The problem wasn’t a lack of murders to solve, of course—the killings had been relentless, and make no mistake, plenty of them were murders, slayings without regard for defense of life or property—but there was no one left with an interest in solving them.

Eddie Kovach had been on the homicide beat for twenty-seven years, and he should’ve retired after the twenty-fifth and moved up to Wisconsin to buy the bait shop, the one beside the lake where he’d had some of his best days. He knew it now; he’d known it then.

But he hadn’t, because there were the unsolved cases. White whales. Every detective had them.

Or they’d had them once.

A lot had changed in a hurry.

Police departments had disbanded, the formal chain of command in the law enforcement world disintegrating alongside every other institution in America as the virus known as Captain Trips swept from coast to coast—nobody was sure of the origin point, althoughmany rumors focused on the West, some military installation in the desert. Others put it in Nebraska, or maybe in rural Maine, where something called Project Arrowhead was underway, although nobody could agree what Project Arrowhead was. No one seemed to think the flu’s origin was a natural mutation. Beliefs divided largely into one of two camps: the superflu was a disaster of the government’s making, or an act of a wrathful God.

Eddie Kovach didn’t care much one way or the other. Wherever the virus began, it had whisked the remnants of law and order right out of the world, efficient as a broom wielded for spring cleaning. What little policing remained, be it conducted by those in a uniform or by private citizens, was focused on protection. That was fine. “Protect and serve” was the motto for a reason.

But Kovach was a detective, not a beat cop. And as the days passed and the bodies stacked up in the streets, floated by in the rivers, and banged against the breakwater on the lake, as the gunfire echoed throughout the city, first at night and then in broad daylight, the summer soundtracked by constant rattling semiautomatic small rounds and the big booms of twelve-gauge shotguns on Cleveland’s near west side, Kovach began to wonder who would speak for the dead.

For twenty-seven years, it had been his job.

No, fuck that.

For twenty-seven years, it had been hisidentity.

You were supposed to have more than your job. Everyone knew that; every cop surely did. But Edward J. Kovach—Fast Eddie K, as he’d been known as a kid, the nickname following him from Thomas Jefferson Middle School through West Tech High School before he’d become a cop and simply become “Kovach” to everyone and anyone—had never succeeded with the task of being more than the job. One marriage had brought him close, maybe. His ex-wife would probably dispute that. She’d say the job was what ended the marriage.

Of course, Debbie couldn’t say anything now because she wasdead. Kovach had found her body slumped beside that of her new husband at their house in Parma, a western suburb representing the longest trip he’d dared to take since the chaos turned bloody at the end of June. He’d shot three men on the way out to Parma and two on the way back, wild-eyed looters on dirt bikes, two carrying rifles, two carrying machetes, one with an actual fucking sword. At least four of them had been sick. One of them had breathed right in Eddie’s face.

He made it home, though, thinking of the insane toll—five killed simply to locate two who were already dead, and nobody helped. He wondered why in the hell he’d returned home at all. There was something about heading west that had felt right in a way he couldn’t articulate, and yet he’d come back to his house in a neighborhood that was mostly empty, and sometimes still burning.

He thought that if Debbie and Tom, her new husband, had been alive, he’d have tried to talk them into heading west with him. Heading to… where, exactly? He wasn’t sure. West, though, that was the direction. Why? He was a west-side guy, was Fast Eddie K, and there was the vague American notion of manifest destiny floating around in his skull, the history books telling you west was the way to go, but he didn’t think either of those reasons carried the day.

The dreams did, maybe. The dreams that came for him in the night were of wide-open plains and a farmhouse and although he didn’t know the exact location, he was sure that it was west of the Cuyahoga River. Somewhere in the great open expanse between Cleveland and Colorado where the evening sun squeezed blood red over the plains, and the mountains—the snow-covered, perilous mountains—waited beyond.

He didn’t want to make the trip alone, though, and he hadn’t found any allies with whom to make the journey. Just fought his way out to the city’s suburbs and buried his ex and then—with maybe a little more happiness than he cared to admit—buried her husband along with her. Kovach had met Debbie when she was nineteen, themost vibrantly alive woman he’d ever known, buzzing with an energy that made him wonder if she was on drugs. She wasn’t. That was just Debbie, operating on a different lifeblood than Kovach could fathom, with enthusiasm foreverything.

Now she was dead, like most of the city, the state, the country, probably the world? It was hard to know for sure. No news updates in weeks. There had been a few days in June when it seemed like the thing could be put back in the bottle. The president had spoken, assuring a tense nation that contrary to the reports of an “irresponsible, fear-mongering media,” the virus not only wasn’t the work of the U.S. government, but wasn’t fatal at all. Eddie hadn’t voted for the guy, but he trusted the speech, because he figured the stakes were too high for a lie.

Guess again.

Day he knew it was real? When they’d canceled the baseball season. You didn’t just stop playing baseball. The game went on, always. Hell of a season shaping up for the Indians, too, the old retreads like Keith Hernandez and Brook Jacoby on their way out, promising kids like Sandy Alomar Jr. and Carlos Baerga coming up, solid veterans like Candy Maldonado holding it all together. A new ballpark was on the way, made a sure thing in May after the voters agreed to a “sin tax” on cigarettes and alcohol to fund it. Very exciting. So much promise for the city.