Page 65 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

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, although many 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 his identity .

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 was dead.

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, the most 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 for everything .

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.

On the twenty-seventh, Eddie had tuned into 3WE 1100, “The Big One,” the Cleveland-based AM radio station with supposedly the highest-powered broadcasting antenna in the nation, capable of reaching thirty-eight states and a portion of Canada at night in decent conditions.

All he’d wanted to hear was Herb Score talking about the return of baseball.

Instead, they’d been playing a clip from some radio station in Missouri.

A call-in show called Speak Your Piece , hosted by a guy named Ray Flowers, and Kovach desperately wanted it to be a hoax, because for a solid hour the guy fielded calls from around the country, offering up one horror story after another—bodies in Kansas City being removed from the hospital by the truckload; a doctor who claimed the government assurances of a vaccine were bullshit—and then it all ended with what sounded like a military assault on the studio, Ray Flowers saying, “I think they’re going to shoot me! ” and gunfire.

Kovach didn’t think it was a hoax by then.

That was the day he decided to go to Parma to check on Debbie. That was the day he gave up on the return of baseball.

In late June, the stadium known as the “Mistake on the Lake” was turned into a shelter, both because it could be easily defended against the bands of looters that had become the city’s second plague, and the experts from the Cleveland Clinic had compelling theories that the open-air venue might slow the spread of transmission.

There were more than twenty-five thousand corpses in the place when it had been set on fire a few weeks later.

After that, the city was mostly quiet except for the gunfire and the screaming.

Most of the people who hadn’t died had fled.

Ed Kovach—Fast Eddie K of West Tech High—wasn’t in either group, the dead or the fled.

He had no idea what kept him out of the former.

He’d held so many of the sick and the dying in his arms, and yet the virus didn’t take him.

He’d never so much as coughed, never had a fever…

although he had fever dreams. He would wake in a sweat with memories of a windblown wheat field and howling wolves trapped in his mind, stumble to the bathroom, grab the thermometer, and check, sure that it was his time.

Never did he crack 98.6.

So he stayed out of the dead group. Why did he stay out of the “fled” group, too?

Not so mysterious. He was alone and Cleveland was home. His job was solving murders. People kept killing in Cleveland, and on the one day when he’d thought with seriousness of heading west with or without an ally, he’d realized there was a serial killer in the city.

Not a spree killer. There was a difference.

Once, either kind had been rare, but in the summer of 1990, spree killers became commonplace.

There was rampaging, a return to the Crusades-style existence that now defined the American landscape, but somewhere along the Cuyahoga River a hunter had moved in, who called to mind those howling wolves in the wheat fields that he dreamed of again and again while he slept with his right hand resting on the stock of his duty pistol.