Forever Magazine Issue 45 by Paul J. McAuley & Pat Cadigan

Author:Paul J. McAuley & Pat Cadigan [McAuley, Paul J. & Cadigan, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novelette, novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2009.

Nothing Personal

Pat Cadigan

Detective Ruby Tsung could not say when the Dread had first come over her. It had been a gradual development, taking place over a period of weeks, possibly months, with all the subtlety of any of the more mundane life processes—weight gain, graying hair, aging itself. Time marched on and one day you woke up to find you were a somewhat dumpy, graying, middle-aged homicide detective with twenty-five years on the job and a hefty lump of bad feeling in the pit of your stomach: the Dread.

It was a familiar enough feeling, the Dread. Ruby had known it well in the past. Waiting for the verdict in an officer-involved shooting; looking up from her backlog of paperwork to find a stone-faced IAD officer standing over her; the doctor clearing his throat and telling her to sit down before giving her the results of the mammogram; answering an unknown trouble call and discovering it was a cop’s address. Then there were the ever-popular rumors, rumors, rumors: of budget cuts, of forced retirement for everyone with more than fifteen years in, of mandatory transfers, demotions, promotions, stings, grand jury subpoenas, not to mention famine, war, pestilence, disease, and death—business as usual.

After a while she had become inured to a lot of it. You had to or you’d make yourself sick, give yourself an ulcer, or go crazy. As she had grown more experienced, she had learned what to worry about and what she could consign to denial even just temporarily. Otherwise, she would have spent all day with the Dread eating away at her insides and all night with it sitting on her chest crushing the breath out of her.

The last ten years of her twenty-five had been in Homicide, and in that time she had had little reason to feel Dread. There was no point. This was Homicide—something bad was going to happen, so there was no reason to dread it. Someone was going to turn up dead today, tomorrow it would be someone else, the next day still someone else, and so forth. Nothing personal, just Homicide.

Nothing personal. She had been coping with the job on this basis for a long time now and it worked just fine. Whatever each murder might have been about, she could be absolutely certain that it wasn’t about her. Whatever had gone so seriously wrong as to result in loss of life, it was not meant to serve as an omen, a warning, or any other kind of signifier in her life. Just the facts, ma’am or sir. Then punch out and go home.

Nothing personal. She was perfectly clear on that. It didn’t help. She still felt as if she had swallowed something roughly the size and density of a hockey puck.

There was no specific reason that she could think of. She wasn’t under investigation—not as far as she knew, anyway, and she made a point of not dreading what she didn’t know. She hadn’t done

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