The Last Policeman (Last Policeman, #1)

by Ben H. Winters

The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

“I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.” “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.”

People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.

You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they’re doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there.

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.