The Last Policeman (Last Policeman, #1)

by Ben H. Winters

There are any number of jobs in this world still being efficiently and diligently accomplished, but the late-night cleaning of twenty-four-hour fast-food-restaurant bathrooms is not among them.

“Depressed?” she says, smiling faintly, ironically. “Aren’t we all depressed, Detective? Under the weight of all this unbearable immanence? Aren’t you depressed?”

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.

I drink my coffee and ignore the menu, surreptitiously inspecting the faces of my fellow diners, weighing the relative melancholy in each of their eyes, the shell-shocked expressions. An old couple murmuring to each other, bent over their soup bowls. A girl, nineteen maybe, with an enervated stare, joggling a pallid baby on her knee. A fat businessman glaring angrily at the menu, a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t know how you’ve been sleeping, Detective, but I have not been sleeping too well, me, personally. Every time I’m about to crash out I think to myself, now, Vic, baby, that’s just dead hours. That’s just golden hours right down the tubes.”

People are building rocket ships, people are building tree houses, people are taking multiple wives, people are shooting indiscriminately in public places, people are setting fire to themselves, people are studying to be doctors while doctors quit work and build huts in the desert and sit in them and pray. None of these things, so far as I know, has happened in Concord. Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

stare at him, standing there, still smirking. It’s such a fine line with some people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.

“You know what I’m doing right now?” I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. “I’m thinking: Oh no! The coffee’s going to spill onto the floor! I’m so worried! Let’s keep talking about it!” And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas’s shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk. “Oh, look at that,” I say. “It happened anyway.”

“Okay then. So, your brother-in-law, Skeve? He’s a terrorist.” I laugh. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.” “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”

I squint into the gray sun, seeing Andreas plastered against the bus, slowly sliding down. IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY. Secret government escape bases. People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.

All of this, all of it, what did I think? You go into this hall of mirrors, you chase these clues—a belt, a note, a corpse, a bruise, a file—one thing and then the next, it’s this giddy game that you enter into, and you just stay down there, in the hall of mirrors, forever.

In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi’s skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth’s fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.

It’s exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy’s skirts.

The world is decaying bit by bit, every piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.