Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Part One: Whateverpocalypse
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part Two: We Have Seen the Enemy
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Part Three: Dungeon Master
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2021 by Gene Doucette
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doucette, Gene, 1968– author.
Title: The apocalypse seven / Gene Doucette.
Description: Boston : Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | “A John Joseph Adams Book.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2020023911 (print) | LCCN 2020023912 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358418948 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358450290 | ISBN 9780358450481 | ISBN 9780358419471 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3604.O89446 A86 2021 (print) | LCC PS3604.O89446 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023911
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023912
Cover illustration and design © David Curtis
Author photograph © Leanne’s Studio of Photography
v1.0521
Part one
Whateverpocalypse
One
Robbie
1
Robbie wasn’t sure how he ended up back in his own bed.
Not that this was an unwelcome discovery. He’d gone to his first bona fide collegiate keg party the night before—a staggeringly bad idea given it fell just before his first full day of classes—and drank . . . well, a lot. He wasn’t sure how much; potentially enough to warrant measurements in gallons, but not enough to convince him he liked beer.
The party was in an off-campus apartment roughly six blocks from the dorm, so his being able to drunkenly stagger back to the room and then pass out on his own bed made plenty of sense. He just didn’t remember doing it.
He rolled onto his back and noted that he was still fully clothed. His shoes were still on. He still had his wallet. All good things.
Then he took a look at the alarm clock. It had no display.
“Hey, what time is it?” he said—to nobody, apparently, as he was alone in the dorm room.
He had two roommates. He barely knew them, because everyone was a freshman, and it had only been four days since they had come together for orientation.
There was Nguyen, about whom Robbie knew only two facts: He was Vietnamese, and he groomed his own eyebrows with tweezers every morning, for no good reason. The other roommate was Taylor, who folded his underwear.
That was the extent of what he knew about them, up until he discovered there’d been some kind of power failure during the night. Now he could add “won’t wake up their roommate even though he has an early class the next day” to the list.
He dug his cell phone out.
It was dead.
“Aw, come on.”
He got out of bed, ignored the rush of blood that made him a little dizzy, and pulled open the dorm room door.
The hallway had no lights. It was daytime, clearly, but the only windows in the hall were at the ends, which didn’t do much to help illuminate the middle.
“Hey, does anyone know what time it is?” he shouted.
No answer. He stepped back into the room.
“Well, this is crazy,” he said.
It was a weird moral quandary. The sun was up, so it was evidently morning. Probably early morning, but maybe not. Could be, he’d missed his first Intro to Macroeconomics class already and was now well on his way to missing Freshman English. He should be grabbing his bookbag—which he’d packed the night before, after memorizing the locations and optimal paths for all his classes—and running out.
Brushing his teeth and getting a proper shower would have to wait, and he probably smelled a little funky in the same clothes as the night before, so when he got to class, he’d have to hide in the back or avoid talking to women until that situation was rectified, but it was all manageable; he just had to leave right away. The quandary was, he should probably be knocking on doors and letting everyone know the dorm had lost power.
Unless they had all gotten up and left already, in which case they didn’t do for him what he was thinking he should do for them, and anyway, why was it his problem?
He walked around the side of the bed to grab his bag.
It was gone.
“Great.”
Maybe the problem is that I’m in the wrong room, he thought.
The beds all had the same bedsheets, which not incidentally smelled like mildew. He didn’t notice that the first few nights, but thanks to all the alcohol, his nose was going out of its way to call to his attention every smell that would trigger bad behavior from his digestive system. Likewise, the dressers were all basically the same, and the layout was a standard arrangement. This could be any room in the building; it didn’t have to be his.
He opened a drawer, and no, those weren’t his clothes.
“All right, Robbie, buddy, when you tell this story tonight it’s going to be hilarious. Get it together.”
He pulled open the door and checked the number: 315. Unless he was remembering it wrong—and he liked to think he had a very good memory—his room number had been 315 all week.
“Right room number, wrong building?”
He was in a section of Harvard called the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Robbie had only been inside one of the buildings—his own—but he could imagine a scenario where (1) all of the room designs in the quad had the same square footage and initial state, (2) he walked into the wrong building the night before but went to the right room, and (3) somehow gained admittance to that room and passed out on someone else’s bed.
He decided what would make this really funny was if the owner of the bed he’d crashed on had also gone to the same party and later made the exact same mistake Robbie did and was now waking up in Robbie’s bed, wondering where all his stuff was.
Yes, that would be funny, but this was not the time for funny.
There were few things in his life Robbie dreaded more than being late. This was likely due to some deep-seated anxiety going back to childhood, although he couldn’t point to any trauma in particular. One of his first memories was being upset that he’d missed a television show in which he was deeply invested, because he and his mother were traveling and they didn’t make it home until halfway through the show. He couldn’t remember the name of the show, and he couldn’t remember why they were traveling, so he always took that memory as evidence that he’d spent his entire existence fretting over being late and missing something.
Sleeping through his first class, then, pushed all the wrong buttons.
“Maybe it’s a closed building,” he said. He was talking to himself out of an instinctive need to fill up what was becoming an eerie silence. “That’s it, they haven’t put anyone in this dorm yet, because freshmen check in early. You’ve solved it, hero. Now let’s get to cla
ss.”
Except someone else’s clothes were in the drawer. It couldn’t be a closed building where someone also lived.
As preoccupied as he was with the death of the closed building theory, it didn’t register right away that the place was no longer silent.
Someone was shouting. No, not shouting: screaming.
It was a woman, and she was screaming “HELLO??” over and over.
It didn’t sound like they were on the same floor, but probably they were in the same building. Even then, he wouldn’t have heard it at all if the place wasn’t so quiet already.
Then he realized it wasn’t just the noise in the building he wasn’t hearing. There was no traffic outside, either.
Robbie grew up in rural Connecticut, surrounded by farms, a lot of open sky, and a surplus of quiet. He hated it. His joke when giving people directions there was We live ten miles past the point where you’re sure you’ll never see civilization again. When he got into Harvard, he was just as excited for a chance to live in a city as he was to go to the school in the first place.
Cambridge wasn’t even that loud normally, but the sound of traffic going past his window was more exciting for him than it should have been.
Now that sound was entirely absent. So was all the other ambient noise the neighborhood was supposed to be making.
All except the woman.
Screaming.
He stepped all the way into the hallway, cupped his hands around his mouth, and answered back.
“HELLO?”
The screaming stopped.
Then: “Hello? Someone? Is someone there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here.”
He had to shout, but a full-throated roar wasn’t necessary. She must be on the first or second floor, he thought, just below him.
“Have you seen my dog?” she asked.
This question was just strange enough for Robbie to wonder if she was speaking in code.
“No?”
“You don’t see a dog?”
“No, I don’t see a dog.”
“I’m missing my dog,” she said.
“I’m getting that. My name is Robbie.”
Introducing himself made little sense in the context of canine retrieval, but he felt it was time to move ahead, because he had stuff to do.
“And I’m late for class,” he added. “Do you need, um, do you need help?”
“Yes,” she said. “If you are not just a voice in my head, or a ghost, then I need your help.”
The notion that he might be a ghost haunting a dormitory at Harvard University suddenly struck him as theoretically feasible.
“I’m not a ghost. Why would you even say that?”
“I’m sorry. I’m very worried about my dog, that’s all. My name is Carol. Please come find me and we’ll go to class together. I think I’m on the second floor.”
He headed for the stairwell at the end of the corridor, wondering as he went how Carol could not know what floor she was on. He thought about suggesting she just look at one of the doors and tell him what room number to go toward, but it was only one flight.
By the time he reached the door’s crash bar, he was convinced they were in an unused building. It had a certain not-lived-in feel to it, and there was a lot more dust than there probably should have been. Yes, there were clothes in the dresser drawer, but he was willing to excuse that if all the other available evidence supported his theory.
Maybe it was shipped with clothing in it, he thought. Like the fake televisions in furniture stores.
The second floor was no more notable than the third. The walls were brick, the doors were wood, the lights were out, and the hallway was empty.
“Carol?” he shouted. “You’re not on the second floor.”
“I’m not? Okay. Do you see a dog?”
“No dogs.”
“Maybe the first floor, then.”
“Is this some kind of joke, Carol? Because I already told you I’m late for class.”
“No, it is not a joke. I must be on the first floor.”
“Can’t you just look at a door?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Are you trapped under something?”
“Your voice is getting louder, you must be getting closer.”
He sighed, and went back to the stairwell, and down one more flight.
Carol was standing in the middle of the hallway. She was a short, thin Asian woman, with dark glasses and a cane.
“Hello?” she said when she heard the door open.
“It’s me,” he said. “Robbie, I mean. It’s Robbie.”
Sorry, I didn’t know you were blind, he nearly said. He didn’t say that, because somehow that seemed more awkward than any of the awkwardness that had preceded this moment.
“Nice to meet you, Robbie. I’ve been shouting for an hour and you’re the only one who’s come.”
“You have a dog?” he asked. Still awkward.
“Yes, his name is Burton, and I don’t know where he is. He should have been with me when I woke up. I’m worried something bad happened. Not just to him. Maybe we should go outside so you can tell me what I’m not seeing.”
2
Robbie took her by the arm and walked her out of the dorm and into the quad.
Everything outside looked wrong. The grass was suddenly too tall, and it wasn’t exactly grass. Rather, it wasn’t entirely grass: There was crabgrass, moss, dandelions, and some other growths he couldn’t readily identify. All of it had become so overgrown, the walkways were essentially gone. Then there were the trees. The ones that were still alive seemed taller somehow, although he’d only been in the quad a couple of times and couldn’t speak with authority as to how much taller. Two dead trees also took up space on the lawn. One was upright, but clearly dead, as moss had overtaken it completely. The other looked like it had collapsed very recently.
Other than the strange overgrowth, it was a warm, sunny, breezy-but-pleasant September day, with exactly no human beings.
“So?” Carol asked. “What’s happened? Where is everyone?”
“I don’t know. Not here. Beyond that, I’m not sure. And it looks like whoever does landscaping for the university is on strike.”
“What do you mean, ‘not here’?”
“I mean, the entire quad has nobody in it except for you and me.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good, I guess. I think if they were here, they would all be dead, because they aren’t making any noise.”
She sniffed the air.
“It smells different,” she said. “Not corpse-like.”
“Honestly, I would tell you if there was a pile of bodies here. It’d be the first thing.”
“Earthy I think is the word. Like a garden. Did the quadrangle become a garden overnight?”
“Yeah, I think it must have rained,” he said. “It’s like all the plants went nuts.”
He turned around to get a better look at the dormitory they just exited, and realized, first, it was the right building, which meant . . . well, he didn’t know what that meant yet; second, the ivy on the outside wall had an overnight growth spurt, just like the rest of the plants. It covered the entire wall now, and half of the windows.
“Hey, did you wake up in your own room?” he asked.
“What an odd question. Did you?”
“I don’t know anymore. The building’s the right one, but the clothes in the drawer weren’t mine and my stuff was gone. I have no idea what to make of that.”
“That’s interesting. You were at a party last night, I take it?”
“I, um . . .”
“Your clothes.”
All at once, everything that was wrong with the morning disappeared from Robbie’s brain, replaced by the embarrassing prospect that his body odor was intolerably bad.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I fell asleep in them, and I didn’t have a chance to take a shower.”
“It’s all right. The truth is, I don’t know if I woke
up in the correct room. I do know I went to bed in the correct room. When I got up, Burton was missing, my electronics were dead, and my roommate was gone; I didn’t stop to check the clothing in my drawers. But we can go back and find out, if you think it’s important.”
“No, it’s probably not. Let’s . . . let’s sit down and see if we can work this out.”
He led her to a bench in the middle of the quad. Two rabbits ran past them on the way, and a large squirrel on a tree nearby decided to chirp angrily.
They sat on the bench in silence. Robbie tried to come up with a simple explanation. When that didn’t work, he tried a complicated one.
“I’ve got nothing,” he admitted. “This doesn’t make any sense at all. Maybe they all . . . went somewhere. I mean, they had to, right? They’re not here.”
“All at once? With my dog?”
“I’m not saying it’s reasonable, that everyone left at the same time, with your dog,” he said. “I’m saying that’s the only conclusion we have to go with right now.”
Carol turned her head and listened.
“I want you to be honest with me, Robbie,” she said. “You asked earlier if I was a part of some sort of joke, or prank, and now I have to ask you the same question.”
“No, of course it isn’t.”
“It’s only that . . . your perspective on this scenario is profoundly different from mine. You understand? Someone took my dog, and now you tell me there’s nobody here aside from you. I don’t think you were a party to the circumstances that took Burton from me, because that is a truly awful thing to do and you don’t seem like an awful person. But just the same, the logical conclusion for me is that there are other people here, hiding, out of earshot. This is irrational, because I can’t imagine a single situation in which it would be . . . funny for an entire campus to orchestrate a practical joke on a blind person. I choose to believe people are not this terrible. The second option is that they are all dead. But again, I don’t smell death out here.”
“That would be terrible,” he agreed. “I don’t even know how anybody would pull that off. There are no cars, either, right? It’s not just the campus; this whole part of town is completely deserted.”
The Apocalypse Seven Page 1