Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  And he’d found it, behind an unmarked door that led to the basement and another set of stairs leading even farther down. At the bottom, he found stacks of textbooks still in their boxes and good as new—except for being printed in an America with only forty-eight states. Behind the farthest pile, Dev noticed something attached to the wall, wiped it with his sleeve, and found a tin sign with a circle in the center containing three inverted yellow triangles—one on top, two at the base—and the words “Fallout Shelter” in black. Next to it was a door, and behind that: paradise for an Aspie needing a little me (and only me) time.

  Everything was there, still waiting for the bombs to fall. The cases of canned food were covered in dust, shredded cardboard, and mouse pellets, some cans rusted, others bulging. The cases of canned water had suffered a similar fate, minus the bulging, plus warped cardboard, the cans oranged by the rust of what they’d lost. Some aluminum-and-vinyl folding chairs were still waiting for their 1950s vacation from irradiation while the Geiger counter probably hadn’t worked since Sputnik. Other than that, there were bed rolls and simple plank beds that folded out from the wall like shelves for storing bodies, a hand-cranked ventilation system (jammed), iodine tablets fused into a fist, and one hermetically sealed door that gasped when Dev shut it, leaving the rest of the world on the other side.

  Despite the wonky ventilation, this was where Dev came to breathe, free from people and their distracting emotions. While his contemporaries were busy breaking hearts and/or impregnating one another, Dev drank Gatorade, chewed on 7-Eleven jerky, and imagined a postpeople world where he and his fellow Aspies survived to become the next step in human evolution—one where the species would be free from the irrationality that called down the cleansing fire in the first place.

  But then, a week before It happened, a smaller it happened, and Dev discovered that—just like his Aspergerian hero, Mr. Spock—he had an all-too-human side, after all. Which is why, on the day of the bigger It, Dev was in his bunker, eyeing a noose he’d tied in between glances at his phone. He’d downloaded the video a week earlier and had been replaying it ever since, a singular YouTube upload he was determined to study until he got it or it got him.

  Content-wise, it wasn’t much, but then again, neither are most last straws. Just a vid of a kid with his head down, walking toward the kid recording him, as the latter makes comments about the way the first kid walks. It wasn’t so much walking, really, as tripping in slow motion before catching himself and loping on, his head jutting forward like the prow of a ship on rough seas.

  “It’s McGruff the Crime Dog, ladies and gentlemen,” the videographer says before advising his audience to “Google it.”

  Dev recognized the voice of his best friend, confirmed when Leo turned the phone around so he could talk to its camera, the kid still loping just over his shoulder. And it was pretty funny, the way the kid walked. For a fleeting moment, Dev thought maybe this was how Leo and he could be a team again, by making fun of some loser who wasn’t them. But then the kid passed the camera, which started shooting from behind.

  “She-Ra,” Leo boomed. “Princess of power.” Pause. “Google it.”

  Which was exactly how Dev found the video in the first place—by googling She-Ra in an attempt to figure out what made a stupid used backpack worthy of ridicule. After watching it the first twenty times in his bedroom, he asked his mother if she thought he walked funny.

  “You have a determined walk,” she said, “like Sherlock Holmes when the case is afoot.” She paused, warming to the subject before informing him that “they” thought Sherlock might be modeled after someone with Asperger’s, and wasn’t that interesting?

  In other words: “Yes, Dev, you walk funny.”

  On the day It happened, his mother drove him to school, as usual. And Dev lay facedown on the back seat, as usual. The infamous backpack had been left in his locker because Dev wasn’t planning on going to class. He’d hide out in the bunker all day like he had the day before and the day before that.

  It had been a week since he’d discovered the YouTube video of Leo’s betrayal. It had been a week of feeling like what he’d hoped to never feel: stupid. Not being stupid was his compensation for having Asperger’s. But then along comes stupid yo-saying Leo to take away even that. Because what do you call someone who’s fooled by an idiot?

  Right.

  And then Dev heard the tires squeal, felt his body ricochet off the backrest and onto the floorboard, heard his mother cursing, followed by: “It’s a stop sign, idiot. That means you stop . . .”

  Stop, Dev thought, still lying where he’d landed, on his back and looking up.

  Wouldn’t that be a relief, he thought, watching the reflections and shadows of their tree-lined street play across the car’s ceiling as his mother drove on.

  Of course, Aspies are too logical to commit suicide, right? The act, at its core, is all about emotions. And just because he couldn’t stop thinking about making everything stop, that didn’t . . .

  Dev stopped. Heard Leo’s voice saying, “Google it.”

  So Dev did. Turns out that not only did Aspies commit suicide, it was the second-leading cause of death after accidents among high-functioning adolescents on the autism spectrum. Suicide among Aspies was as much about emotion as ulcers were about stress. They’d learned long ago that the cause of ulcers was viral, and suicide among his cohort was largely due to glitches in their neural anatomy and chemistry. Take the amygdala, for example—the fight/flight/freeze part of the brain. In Aspies, it was ten to fifteen percent larger than in neurotypicals. That meant that a stressor of one for everyone else was a ten for someone like Dev, leading to what clinicians referred to as “depression attacks,” in which the experiencer goes from feeling fine to suicidal in a matter of seconds. It also contributed to a tendency known as “catastrophizing,” in which every conceivable scenario suddenly morphs into the worst possible outcome—a tendency that went a long way toward explaining his own fascination with doomsday scenarios a few topiques ago . . .

  All of which meant Dev didn’t just have a diagnosis; he had an excuse too. Which made it okay to do what his brain kept telling him to do. It wasn’t even a decision; it was a symptom. And a pretty foolproof way to stop feeling like crap all the time.

  Well, almost. It wasn’t until he decided on the ultimate painkiller that Dev realized how unprepared he really was. That’s when he started noticing things about the bomb shelter he hadn’t before, despite having mapped it.

  For starters, the whole room was capsule shaped, having been repurposed from an underground storage tank of the type used at gas stations but with what looked like a surplus submarine hatch for a door. The walls curved smoothly up and over on all sides to the ceiling, leaving no need for rafters because the structure’s strength came from its shape. There were also no water pipes, or gas pipes either—or, for that matter, enough headroom for someone Dev’s height to hang himself.

  But what if he tucked in his knees? Dev looked at the length of his leg below his knee and compared it with the ceiling overhead. Nope. The extra drop space still wouldn’t be enough to break his neck—and strangling to death was a nonstarter, especially since his autonomic nervous system would probably veto him the second he blacked out. He’d have better luck trying to hold his breath until he died. Just testing, he grabbed the free end of the noose and pulled with both hands.

  Nope.

  So Dev dropped the untied end and watched it swing back and forth two-point-five times before coming to rest. It looked like the world’s worst necktie. He thought about emerging from the basement with the noose still dangling, inviting all the abuse that didn’t need to be asked for twice: a victim embracing his victimization.

  He’d begun reaching for the hatch when an idea stopped him. Perhaps if he closed the door on the free end and just fell horizontally. It’d be like walking, but more conclusive. And so he measured the hypotenuse from the hatch to the floor, darkly amused that his geometry tea
chers were right: it really had come in handy in the end. All he had to do was subtract a foot or so from the overall length so he’d stop short of hitting the floor, hopefully with a good, sharp snap. He tied a knot at the sweet spot, ensuring the cord wouldn’t just slip through the door’s rubber gasket when he fell.

  But once Dev opened the hatch to insert the rope, he stopped cold. It was too quiet. He checked the time on his phone. The bell should have rung; everybody should be in the hall between classes. There should be lockers banging, feet drumming, an assortment of stupid teenage noises. Instead: nothing. Just nonhuman noises: the boiler; the wind outside the basement windows; dogs from the surrounding neighborhood, howling like it was the end of the world . . .

  Emerging from the fallout shelter, Dev followed the silence like he was following a prowler trying not to be heard. That was the quality of the silence that hit him—the silence of a breath held. Or really, a thousand breaths, all being held at once. It was the sound of a sudden, heavy absence, and Dev needed to know where it was coming from—or not coming from.

  This sudden need to know was like how he felt about his topiques. And maybe that made sense, because stepping out of the fallout shelter was like stepping into a vacuum—not the floor-cleaning but outer-space kind. The kind that creates suction through absence, pulling everything inside out, just as the silence pulled Dev back up the stairways from the fallout shelter to the basement and from the basement to the first floor, just through that unmarked door . . .

  But when he tried to open it, the door stuck. There was something blocking it. So he pushed harder. And harder. And harder still until he heard something crack like a broomstick wrapped in a towel. He looked through the wedge of half-opened door and saw an arm lying on the floor, its hand twisted the wrong way, the fingers pointing painfully backward, its owner not making a peep to disturb the sucking silence.

  Dev worked a shoe through the opening and kicked the arm out of the way, then pushed again until he hit another body part. He’d gotten leverage by that point, and so he kept on pushing as into the silence came the sound of a belt buckle, muffled underneath a body, scraping as it slid across linoleum, clicking when it crossed the seam between tiles: sssshhhh, click, sssshhhh, click, sssshhhh, click. It stopped when Dev stopped, started up again when he did, until the door was open wide enough to step through.

  And so he did.

  5

  She decided to tell Max. He might be avoiding her—had the sex really been that bad?—but she needed to talk to him. She needed to talk to somebody, and being sans friends as she was, that made Max it, like it or not. Plus, she missed him. They weren’t just BFFs; they were BAOFs—best and only friends, with an option now, apparently, on the forever part. And it wasn’t like she was going to ask him to marry her or help raise it or anything. His contribution would be as short-lived as the part that had gotten them into this mess. Just let her use his credit card and she’d take care of the rest.

  So she called him. Voice mail, no answer. Texted him. No answer. Snapchat. Facebook Messenger. Email, for Pete’s sake.

  No answer.

  Okay, IRL. She’d go to his house. In real life. Knock on his real door and confront him with their real problem.

  The boxes of his stuff packed up on the curb for Goodwill were not a good sign. Sure, she hadn’t seen him in weeks, but she just assumed he’d been avoiding her out of embarrassment. Maybe he’d used her as much as she’d used him, only he wasn’t doing it to lose his virginity so much as to confirm his gayness—maybe. They were both sixteen—the time biologically and socially ordained to be confused, or so she’d heard. So maybe their thing at the Sheraton cleared up any confusion—or maybe confused him more.

  Whatever.

  But those boxes . . .

  Had he finally done it? Had he clap-hands-gunshot split for more LGBT-friendly climes somewhere beyond the rainbow or (you know) the Mason-Dumbass Line? He’d always told her she was the only reason he hadn’t already . . .

  So she knocked. They had no idea who she was, but his life had always been a mystery to them anyway. “Had?” Lucy squeaked.

  “Oh, child,” they said, making Lucy wish she still were one, instead of one with one.

  “Oh, child,” they repeated, the monsters she’d heard about but never met, touching her, sans claws, as her shoulders shook.

  Well, that got serious real quick. And not like a heart attack, but worse, like a heart impossibly broken. He’d been her best friend and she missed it. She was carrying his child, and had tried to kill it while he was off killing himself for reasons she’d never know but could maddeningly guess—invent—until her own time came. Why? Why not?

  Shit.

  She was trapped. She was trapped worse than when she thought she was trapped and that Max held the key to getting out. No Max; no key; no way out. She still couldn’t tell her parents, but now, even if McDonald’s started doing drive-through abortions, she couldn’t get one, not with the last unburned-up piece of Max’s DNA multiplying inside her. Doing what she needed to do would be like killing Max all over again and . . .

  . . . and then the panic attacks started, and everything seemed to be a trigger. Ads in magazines and on TV for Pampers, baby food, the maxi pads she didn’t need at the moment, even passing an artfully stacked display for Pepsi Max at the grocery store—they all caused her cortisol levels to skyrocket while her sense of self just kept falling. The attacks turned her heart—her breathing—into a ratchet pushing her, inch by inch, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, through layers of earth, not even giving her the courtesy of digging it, just pushing her down into the dirt of her own grave. And there was no fighting her way back up; that’s not how a ratchet works. Once the direction has been set, that’s where it goes, the other way blocked, and blocked again, down, and down, and farther down . . .

  She’d eat a bullet, she decided—fight the triggers with an actual trigger. An unusual choice for a girl, she knew, but this wasn’t going to be some girly suicide attempt. If gay Max had the balls to do it, so did Lucy. She just wanted to die, instead of feeling like she was dying all the time.

  She didn’t have a gun but got one easily enough. After all, what’s the point of living down south if you can’t get a gun out of a vending machine, practically? She’d do it in the girls’ bathroom at school, which was still in session in June thanks to a series of not-at-all-climate-change-related snow days earlier in the year. But that was okay. School was the better choice of venue. Spare her family, let the taxpayers pay for cleanup. And let all the jerks who’d ever called her weirdo wonder the rest of their useless lives whether they’d been the last straw. Consider it a twofer—no more panic attacks, plus revenge.

  The gun was in her locker, and she was headed toward it—dead girl walking—her books for her next class pressed against her stomach, as if a separate side of her was trying to protect itself while she plotted against the two of them. She was looking down when it happened: the soft thunder of bodies falling all around.

  Everywhere she looked, people just stopped being alive. For a second, she thought—hoped—it might be some sort of flash mob, except it was too disorganized for that, not to mention painful-looking. Heads gonging into lockers; legs buckling before kneecaps slammed into the tiled floor, making this horrible double-pop noise. A fellow student, now dead, fell right into her, knocking the books from her hands before she stepped aside so he and his face could fall the rest of the way to the floor. The sound of his nose and cheekbones breaking, muffled by the surrounding head, made Lucy’s pregnant stomach flip upside down. Before she could stop herself, she coughed out a blast of vomit that hit the back of her dead classmate’s head.

  “I’m so sorry,” she spluttered, but then stopped as a pool of red spread outward from her classmate’s head, mixed with the vomit, and then began crawling ever closer toward her shoes.

  She couldn’t tell by looking at the ones who’d landed faceup whether there was any recognition of wha
t was happening. She couldn’t tell if there had been any pain. They just stopped in the middle of a breath, a word, a heartbeat, a gesture. A foot that went up through an act of will came down again thanks only to gravity, the ankle buckling before bringing down the rest.

  The suddenness of it was like hearing about Max’s suicide standing outside his front door; he was there and then he wasn’t and there was nothing she could do about it. And somehow she hadn’t made the leap from that to what she’d been planning to do to her own family. She thought she’d be sparing them shame and herself pain; instead, she’d bequeath them this yawning ache. This, now, all of this felt like a punishment for what she’d been planning—a punishment she’d been spared specifically to feel its ripples . . .

  Her body flooded with chemicals, and Lucy thought she was going to have another attack, but instead of feeling like she was dying, she just felt numb. She’s in shock, a remote part of her thought. Her eyes were somehow behind her, pitched just slightly, like she was watching a movie over the back of her own head. She wanted to reach out, touch her shoulder, ask if she’d mind scrunching down, but was afraid if she did, she’d feel her own fingers tapping from behind.

  Shock. Definitely shock . . .

  Which was a good thing. Being self-anesthetized was the only thing allowing her to move from the spot she was in, stepping between the bodies until she reached the exit and left. Outside, there were more bodies and leashed animals minus their owners, running about. She could smell smoke from crashed cars burning nearby and was knocked to the ground by the concussion of a jet in free fall hitting the ground several miles short of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. Still in shock, Lucy got back up and continued walking. Where she was going, she had no idea. But the fact that she could still walk suggested she should. And so she did.