Page 115 of The End of the World As We Know It

“That’s right.” Her fine-boned jaw was set hard. “But I kill only the ones who talked to me of joining the dark man.”

“And you’d study that blood, ultimately use it somehow in creating a vaccine?” Off her nod, he said, “Well… what if instead of a vaccine you succeed in making more just like him?”

For the first time, he saw she had fears of her own. “I don’t think that will happen.”

“That’s exactly what the president said about mass death.”

She swallowed. “We have to try.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” Kovach asked.

She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she pointed at the pier, where the sniper watched the shoreline through his scope, and then down to the rocks, where gulls fought over what little was left of the human foot.

“I have to try.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Kovach reached out and tapped the clipboard, which held a printed list of names and addresses in neat columns, with handwritten notations in tiny script jotted here and there.

“This is your kill list,” he said.

Her eyes answered yes.

“You let yourself do that,” he said wonderingly. “Murder people. Hang them up and drain their blood into Pepsi bottles. Adoctor.”

“I’m not a doctor anymore. I want to be one again. That can only happen if we rebuild this city, this world. Some kind of civilization. Don’t you see that?”

Kovach, once a cop, thought that his eyes also probably answered yes, although he didn’t let himself speak.

“You asked me what if I’m wrong,” she said, “and that’s the right question. But it’s not so different from the old woman on the farm and the dark man with the wolves, is it? Two sides of the same coin. So… what if I’m right?”

Kovach stayed silent. His hand was on his gun and his eyes were on the gulls, which were busily pecking the last strips of flesh from the stark white bone.

“You could help me,” Ruth Pritchard said tentatively.

He shook his head. “I’m a cop,” he said. “A homicide detective. Istoppeople like you.”

When she touched his hand, his entire body thrilled. There was something in that touch that reminded him of the sound of laughter he’d heard up the avenue before it was lost to the dark. Something that made him think of the beautiful wordmother. He couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eyes.

“There are no police anymore,” she whispered. “And there are no doctors. There are only survivors and dreamers, and there are two kinds of dreamers. Only one of them is going to write the story from here. Which one will it be, Detective Kovach?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What do you want me to call you?” Still with her hand lightly on his. He forced himself to look away from the gulls just as one of them took flight with a piece of tendon in its jaws.

“Fast Eddie,” he said. “Now, let me have a look at the kill list, would you?”

He didn’t see that she was crying until she passed him the clipboard.

Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. They sat with their heads bowed over the list of names and the map of the city that had once been theirs, and Kovach thought that if she was wrong, she’d surely been his last case, and if she was right…

Maybe not.

God willing, maybe not.

MAKE YOUR OWN WAY

Alma Katsu

Maryellen’s mother had been the first in the family to die.