Page 114 of The End of the World As We Know It
“Well, you’re not going to arrest me, right?! There’s no jail left.”
He tried to project false confidence, as if he might know of a holding cell that she didn’t. She sighed again. Ran a hand through her hair.
“I would urge you to hear me out,” she said, and then gestured at the brick Tudor. “Because there is a man inside that house who dreams of the dark man and is recruiting a team to follow him west, and I think his blood will be far more useful in service to research than it will be if it’s spilled for the dark man and his wolves.”
And his wolves. Kovach felt his stomach clench. He hadn’t dreamed of the dark man, wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he knew of the wolves. They lurked in the high windswept wheat in his own dreams, howling and snarling. Waiting on their master’s call.
“Hear me out,” she repeated, softer but more urgent now.
“Okay,” Kovach heard himself say. “But I’ll take your bag—and keep the gun in my hand.”
“That’s fine.”
They walked to Edgewater Park and sat on a picnic table looking out at Lake Erie. There was a sniper on the pier, but he didn’t take a shot. The snipers usually didn’t. They wanted to be seen and feared, that was all. The man might even have been a colleague of Kovach’s at some point, another badge-toting fool who stuck to his mission as Kovach had.
They watched the gulls circle and swoop as the woman told Kovach her name was Ruth Pritchard and that she’d been employed as a research scientist at the Cleveland Clinic in the days before the end.
“I ran a sleep research program,” she said. “The focus was on lucid dreaming. We were nearing the end of our grant funding. Not enough people saw the practical value.”
The practical value, she’d decided in the lonely days holed up in her apartment during the summer, watching the city and country collapse, might just exceed any hope she’d ever had for her own study.
“While the phones stayed up, I kept calling my patients,” she told him. “Pointless, right? I mean, we all knew how bad it was by then. Nothing would ever be the same, and still I kept pretending, kept going through the motions. It filled my days. It was better to pretend that there might be a return to normal than to accept that it was gone forever.”
Kovach thought of himself, walking the neighborhood streets, wearing his badge and carrying his radio, long after they’d told everyone in the department good luck, and God bless.
“A surprising number of them answered my calls,” Ruth Pritchard went on. “That was astonishing, because… well, statistically speaking—”
“They should have been dead.”
She nodded. “More of them, anyhow. Many more. I was working with a group of a hundred and fifty. They were intensely lucid dreamers with unusually high recall. And because I didn’t know what else to do, I kept calling them, and I kept asking questions, and it became obvious that they were still dreaming. No surprise. I was, too. The unique thing was…”
She paused as the sounds of cawing became higher and harsher. Kovach followed her eyes. The gulls had discovered a human foot and most of an ankle wedged in the rocks. The rest of the body was missing.
“The unique thing was, we were all dreaming of the same things,” Ruth said, turning from the gulls to Kovach, her dark-rimmed eyes intense with a quality he hadn’t seen in so long. A quality like hope.
“Do you see the farm?” he asked softly.
He could see her exhale. Her entire body loosened.
“With the old woman,” she whispered. “Yes. You too?”
“I don’t see a woman,” he said, and she tensed a little again. “I see a farm, surrounded by high wheat, and I think that if I head that way…”
His words trailed off and he shook his head.
“What?” she said. “If you head that way, what?”
“I don’t know. I think it may be good? May be… necessary? But then there are the wolves.”
He stopped, embarrassed, because she surely had heard his fear.
“Yes,” she said. “There are the wolves. And the one who commands them.”
Silence. He cleared his throat, said, “What’s the deal with the blood?”
“Vaccine research,” she said. “There are three doctors from the Cleveland Clinic’s vaccine program who are still alive. I won’t tell you who they are, or where. But they’re out there. And they’re working. And that is the closest thing to hope that I can offer.”
“You do the killing, and you bring them the blood?”
