Page 111 of The End of the World As We Know It
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 calledSpeak 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 KansasCity 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 hadbeen 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.
He’d thought he was numb to the sight of corpses until September, when he entered the freezer of Bad Boy’s BBQ on the corner of West 56th and Train Avenue. He was looking for food, same as anybody, and had the passing thought that maybe Ralph Wojesik’s propane generator had kept the freezer going for long enough that some of the meat inside hadn’t spoiled.
The generator was long silenced and whatever meat had been in the freezer was long gone—except for the human meat.
There were three bodies on stainless steel hooks that first day. Looked like a bad horror movie, the corpses hung high, impaled with the hooks carefully driven through the back of the necks so that their sharp points came out of the mouths, barely visible, the way you’d tuck a hook through a night crawler before casting it into the water and hoping to tempt a walleye.
Kovach had seen so much death by then that even a sight as gruesome as this wasn’t likely to give him much pause, except for one detail: the corpses had been drained of blood. Two men and one woman, one Black, two white, ages approximately twenty, forty, and fifty. No similarities between the vics. In another age, this would’ve been noteworthy. Now it was a day that ended inY.
Except for the way they’d been bled out. Even in a moment when carnage was commonplace, that was unique. They’d been hung carefully, and then the femoral arteries had been cut—neatly, probably with a razor or a scalpel, a precise, efficient incision, no rage to it. Hang a body up so gravity is your friend and then open the femoral artery and it doesn’t take long to drain the blood.
So where was the blood?
The bare concrete floor was speckled with a few rust-colored flecks. Kovach put on his gloves and used his pocketknife to lift those from the stone. Proximity told him the blood had likely come from the vics, but there was so little of it.
Why?
The freezer wasn’t operational, but it was still cooler than most rooms in the city. A smart space to work with a body when you didn’t have electricity, one that kept the smell from overwhelming you right away, and one that was discreet and out of sight, allowing time while you did your gruesome work. He suspected those elements played into the selection of the location, but it was impossible to know for sure. He lowered the bodies from the hooks, but didn’t remove them, because he tried not to burn corpses unless the wind was blowing out of the southwest, toward the lake, which carried the smell away from his house on Clark Avenue. He liked to sit out on the porch in the evening. Simple pleasures. It was hard to enjoy the porch when the wind carried the stench of the burning dead.
That day, though, the wind was pushing hard out of the north, cool and crisp and undercutting the humidity, a perfect night for baseball, if baseball had still existed. The breeze off the lake would’ve limited the long power hitters to the warning track, turned it into a pitcher’s duel, and that was always Eddie Kovach’s favorite style of baseball. Shame that the game, like presumably the rest of America, was dead. He wondered idly, as he walked away from the corpses with the hooks through their skulls, whether baseball would ever come back. It seemed unlikely, sure, but the human condition was an interesting one. Resilient, maybe? Delusional, certainly. Call it what you wanted, there was hope hiding in there. One night, not long ago, he’d heard laughter while he sat on the porch. Not the wild, mad laughter of hysteria that had become almost as common as the screams and the gunfire, butreallaughter, the kind that followed a joke, the kind that was joyful and partnered with a smile, and he’dwalked toward the sound, but then it was gone, and he’d never located the laughter.
He kept the memory, though. When he rolled the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson around in his mouth, he remembered the laugh. He had lowered the gun and gone to sleep and even when the wolves howled in his nightmares, he had felt better because of the memory of the laugh, had woken not soaked in sweat, but calmly, almost happily, thinking of his mother.
Or someone’s mother. Hell, maybe it had been only the word.
Motherwas a beautiful word. Beautiful as the sound of laughter.
Two days after he’d found the corpses, Indian summer flooded the city with heat and the wind swung around to the southwest. He returned to Bad Boy’s BBQ to collect the corpses and take them to the gravel lot across the train tracks, where he burned bodies. It was better than letting them fester. Felt kinder, somehow, and it surely was better for the neighborhood than letting them decompose, and Eddie had always loved his neighborhood.
You did what you could.
When he entered the meat locker, the three bodies on the floor were where he’d left them—but two more dangled above. A Hispanic man, maybe thirty, and a redheaded woman, probably fifty. Meat hooks pierced the bases of their skulls and the glinting tips held their bloodless lips apart. The femoral arteries had been opened with the same neat incisions.
There was no blood on the floor beneath them.
Everything was calculated, methodical. The manner of the killing wasn’t obvious, and Kovach’s gut instinct, that sixth sense honed by twenty-seven years of homicide study, told him the cause of death wasn’t the meat hook through the skull or the sliced arteries. A crime scene tech would be needed to verify that, of course, but all the techs he’d ever known were dead or gone, so he’d have to trust his gut. What it said: the vics were being killed elsewhere, transported to Bad Boy’sBBQ, hung carefully from the meat hooks, and drained of their blood. The bodies remained; the blood disappeared.
A serial killer. On Eddie Kovach’s block!
Somehow, this was the greatest indignity he could fathom in a world that had lost all dignity in June, when they’d called off baseball, and the president had given his last speech, and madness reigned.
