Patrick — The Man Keres Couldn't Kill

Patrick — The Man Keres Couldn't Kill No Tomorrow starts with a birthday, a wife, two kids, and a guy who needs to get to work. Patrick isn't looking for some supernatural purpose. He has a life he likes. He's turning forty, his family is giving him a hard time about it, and his biggest problem should have been his boss making him work late. Then his office building comes down. Patrick walks away with minor injuries. Everybody else in that workplace is gone. That sounds like a miracle until you see Keres watching him and realizing he shouldn't have survived. From her perspective, he's a mistake that needs correcting. From his, he's trying to understand why he's alive when the people he saw every day aren't. He also recognizes her. He saw her in news coverage of the Denver disaster, then at his office, and now she keeps showing up around other catastrophes. Eventually she looks out of the television and speaks directly to him. He mutes it. Doesn't help. He unplugs it. Doesn't help either. Imagine surviving something like that, getting home to your family, and finding out the thing responsible can reach you through whatever screen happens to be nearby. But the part that makes Patrick worth talking about is what happens when Keres can't simply dispose of him. She goes after the people he loves. His son Corey ends up in a coma after a car accident. His daughter Drea is manipulated into a violent breakdown and ends up hospitalized. Patrick can survive things he shouldn't, but that doesn't mean he can stand between his family and everything she does. That's a much worse kind of vulnerability than just being physically weaker than the villain. He tries to find answers through Professor Forrest Macary and the old stories about Keres. There's a very ordinary desperation to those scenes. Patrick isn't assembling a superhero team. He's grabbing onto the possibility that somebody, somewhere, knows what the hell is happening and can tell him how to stop it. Melissa believes him. I think that matters a lot. When he finally tells her, she doesn't become another person he has to convince. She tells him to go find a way to stop Keres, because none of them will ever be safe otherwise. Keres kills Melissa afterward, and Patrick loses the person who was helping him hold himself together. By the end, he understands something about his enemy that a weapon isn't going to solve. Keres can destroy everybody, but then what? She'll still exist. She'll be alone with nothing left to hurt. Patrick confronts her with the fact that even his miserable, devastated life contained love and meaning she doesn't have. He gets under her skin badly enough that she gives him her power. She actually makes him Death, becomes human herself, and realizes too late what she's done. Patrick pushes her into the pit of bones. Within this story, he beats her. And he still doesn't get his life back. That ending is why I wouldn't reduce him to another guy who acquired a powerful title. He stops the catastrophe and says his children are safe, but Melissa remains dead. When he meets her spirit at the cemetery, he can't stay with her. He's carrying the responsibility he took from Keres now. He wanted to protect his family, and he does. The price is that he can't simply go home and be their dad the way he was at the beginning. For a story full of earthquakes, plagues, and the end of the world, that last separation is the part that sticks with me. Source: Grimm Fairy Tales presents No Tomorrow #1–5.