There is a monster out there somewhere. You are a lone cop, running full tilt through the ravaged streets, rifle shoved against your shoulder, trying to hunt it down and kill it. As far as you know, you're the last remnant of the police force. You can't afford to pause and tend to the wounded, slumped bloodied against storefronts or dangling from overturned cars. The town looks like the chaotic aftermath of a hurricane: crumpled roofs, jumbled heaps of 2x4s and drywall, downed electric lines giving off sparks, bedframes and couches torn from houses, scattered clothing and kids' toys and mangled bikes.

     Though you have yet to see it with your own eyes, to witness its senseless rampage, you know it's out there beyond the smashed buildings and plumes of black smoke. Its throaty growl rises from the curdled screams of victims. By the wide swath of damage, you can tell it's big. Much bigger than any known creature. 

     In your two decades on the force, you have never encountered anything like this. Just the crime log of small-town life: traffic tickets, petty theft, drunks. You've only got a carbine and a few rounds of ammunition, but it's your job to go after it, even knowing your efforts may be futile. At least you're free to risk your life, your kids are grown and far away, your wife passed two years ago from cancer. 

     The end was swift, just ten months from feeling exhausted after New Year's. You did your best to comfort her, doling out morphine pills, reading to her as she lay with eyes closed in the darkened bedroom, arguing with doctors and pharmacists to get her what she needed. Placing a cold washcloth on her forehead when her temperature rose. Helping her hold onto a thread of hope as her white blood cell count rose and fell then dipped below what chemo could allow. Agreeing tacitly not to talk about the looming shadow threatening to envelop them. Even as her classes were cancelled and readings of her new novel delayed, he played along with her faint vision of a future. 

     He sat beside her bed in the morning, when she could sit up and drink tea, and typed into his laptop the new piece she was working on. She would dictate in a half-whisper, very different than her previous whiskey-tinged voice. The theme was a big departure from her family dramas set in Derry, where she's from. This was a sci-fi novel, in which an alien invader drops out of nowhere and wreaks destruction on a remote harbor town. Everyone is powerless to stop it, even the lone policeman hurtling through the empty streets with a rifle raised to his shoulder.

     
Based in Boston, Gary Duehr has an MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He has received an NEA Fellowship, and he has also received grants from the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His books include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press).