Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  She didn’t realize she’d miscarried for the longest time, not until she noticed her robot legs getting itchy and saw the blood now dried down either thigh. The cell clump she’d been so worried about had died right along with everyone else. Which was sad, but Lucy was too busy to mourn. She had walking to do—that, and staying what she was for now: not dead.

  6

  Though he’d renounced many Western temptations, there was one Mo couldn’t shake: Twinkies. His mother had barred them at home, believing they were haram. She’d heard the creamy filling was confectioners’ sugar whipped with some kind of animal fat, undisclosed as an industry secret, so of course she suspected pork. Mo figured he could google the answer but didn’t; on the subject of Twinkies, ignorance was bliss.

  He’d discovered the devil’s yellow cake in grade school during lunch. Everyone’s mother but his had packed their little Americans off to school with these cellophane-wrapped loaves of gold. All Mo ever got was an apple he’d snap into with an envious eye turned toward all those face holes stuffed with sun-colored cake.

  Finally, one day, his future best friend took mercy on him and offered a lopsided trade: an apple for one of the two Twinkies the other’s mother had packed. “Deal,” Mo said, having to remind himself to remove the plastic before inhaling all that cakey goodness. The other kid became his dealer after that, accepting milk money instead of an apple, which he’d accepted only so that first taste didn’t come off as charity. It hadn’t been, of course; bait was more like it.

  As Mo grew older and learned to ride a bike, he found himself riding by the local 7-Eleven, where, it seemed, he could buy a two-pack of Twinkies for what he’d been paying for one. He got into a fight with his best friend the dealer over it, but unlike fights between girls, theirs didn’t last. They went back to being friends once the other kid turned over a stack of comic books to Mo in reimbursement for the overpayment.

  Afterward, Mo prided himself on not being anyone’s fool—ignoring the common wisdom about what happens to pride just before a fall.

  Though Mo had his driver’s permit by the time he was being recruited for martyrdom, what he didn’t have was a car. That was okay; school was a bike-able distance away, and there was a 7-Eleven between there and home. He’d long been in the habit of stopping to feed his Twinkie addiction before pedaling the rest of the way—to home, to school. At this particular 7-Eleven, the bike rack was right next to the large picture windows out front, the ones advertising new Slurpee flavors, Big Gulps, or specials on those scary hotdogs rolling in their own grease in the glass case next to the register. Mo was pretty sure the roller dogs were not halal, but if they were, he wouldn’t have touched them, not even with those glove boxes used for handling plutonium.

  On the day he decided, he’d stopped for a Twinkie fix and had just clicked his bike lock when all the bikes tipped to the left. Earthquake, he thought—punctuating it with a period, not some amateur’s exclamation point. Just, earthquake, as in, oh yeah, as his legs struck the stance they usually did in these situations—a kind of bowlegged half crouch with his free arms horizontal to the ground, to provide extra stability as he rode the rocking earth. He looked like a cowboy at high noon or maybe a sailor on shore leave trying to get his land legs back.

  It was a “good-un,” as the Okies would say—a respectable 5.1 magnitude that lasted about twenty-five seconds, during which the window Mo was standing closest to split from top to bottom. In the slow-motion way these things usually go, he could see the crack spread, hear the splintery squeak of it until it hit the bottom of the frame, and the single pane became two, separating at the crack, one half tipping into the store, the other tumbling out.

  Seeing what was going to happen and not having time to get away, Mo squatted further into his earthquake-surfer’s stance, raising his arms to shield his head just before the large pane shattered over his crouching body. Shards flew everywhere, including one long sliver that found its way into the hand of a kid who’d just stepped out with a lemon-lime Slurpee, now a plop of yellow-green slush, blood drops from the wound making brown polka dots in the colored ice. Mo blinked as the kid screamed bloody murder but with the sound turned down. All he could hear was the crash, stuck in a loop, playing over and over.

  The world returned only after the cashier’s hand—red specked, lacerated—touched his shoulder. That’s when Mo could hear things again: the screaming kid, mainly, but also the cashier’s softer, “Are you okay?”

  Mo had no idea what he was, other than still crouching, still waiting for the crash, now a minute or two in the past. He tried standing and found he could. He checked his hands, arms: nothing, just the cashier’s bloody handprint on the shoulder of his tunic. He touched his face, looked at his fingers: nothing. The top of his head, still stinging from the crown where the pane made first contact: nothing. Nothing leaking through his skullcap or underneath it either.

  When the cashier realized that Mo, a regular, was okay, he darted back inside and out again with a pack of Twinkies. “Here,” he said, pushing them into Mo’s unstained hands with his own bloodied ones, “on the house.”

  At home, in his bedroom, he sat at his desk, his phone plugged into its charger. The uneaten Twinkies sat next to him. The blood on the cellophane was sticky but still red. The light from a desk lamp passed through it, drawing spots of orange against the unnaturally yellow cake. Orange, like the perma-tan of the Muslim-hating president, the one who hadn’t dropped any bombs on the Middle East—yet. Still looking at the Twinkies, Mo was remembering what he’d read about how Bush the younger used widely discredited claims that Iraq was seeking “yellowcake” uranium as a front for bombing a bunch of innocent civilians, when his phone issued two quick tones, letting him know they were reaching out through Snapchat again.

  “So?” it read.

  It felt like they’d been reading his mind. “O,” Mohammad typed, slowly, deliberately, his index finger stabbing the virtual keyboard, “K.”

  Mo had filled PVC pipes with black powder, fashioned triggers from instructions online, wired batteries, and made a dead-man’s switch from a clothespin and a strip of copper. He fitted the device into a vest designed to carry it underneath his clothes and tried it on to feel the weight of it. It was heavier than his football gear; it pulled down on him harder.

  The time, place, and date had been set. All that remained was writing his martyr’s statement. This, even more than blowing himself up, was the part he’d been dreading. Part will, part obituary, part apology to those left behind, his martyr’s statement was to be a declaration of faith, a condemnation of its opponents, and his last words for all time. As such, they weighed much more than ordinary words, and Mo hadn’t been a fan of writing essays before, when the stakes were much lower. Very soon, he’d talked himself into a writer’s block he could have built a nuclear bunker out of. Twice he had to postpone what his coaches referred to euphemistically as “the event.” The grounds: “personal reasons.”

  “Your personal reasons sound like feet that are insufficiently warm,” they told him, their hang of idiomatic English a little weak in spots.

  “Do you mean cold feet?” Mo typed back.

  “Yes.”

  So Mohammad confessed the problem he was having, composing his martyr’s statement. Their reply came moments later in the form of two Microsoft Word documents, one .doc and the other .docx, “In case you haven’t upgraded.”

  They had boilerplate, it seemed.

  After filling in the blanks, printing it out, and sealing it in an envelope to be left behind just before, Mohammed prepared for his last night on earth. He’d read that several of the 9/11 martyrs had spent the evening of September 10 at strip clubs, which sounded great—except that pedaling up to valet parking would probably be a dead giveaway that he was underage. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he’d been too busy being devout to get a fake ID. He could always steal a car, he guessed. Or borrow his parents’—if they’d let him—but they were kind of
sticklers about obeying the laws of their adopted country, and Mo had only his learner’s permit.

  And so he decided to bike around his neighborhood instead, mentally saying goodbye to—well, everything. He picked his favorite time of day, just as the sun was setting, painting the sky to the west miraculous colors: pinkish purples sliced through with clouds, up-lit yellow and dark on top. Faced from the other directions, the world turned golden, shimmering leaves lit with lemony light, their branches outlined in it, shadows stretching to their breaking point.

  As dusk became twilight became night, the windows of the neighborhood clicked on, yellowed through draperies, silhouettes of domesticity passing over them, while others, un-blinded, let the world peek in as they watched their big-screen TVs, some tuned so loud he could hear the cheering of crowds for one sporting event or another as he rode by. Or maybe he was just remembering the cheers—from his own days on the other end of them, those days like all the rest, filed down to this last handful of hours, minutes, seconds . . .

  Mo found himself pedaling faster, the rushing air making the skin of his cheeks tighten as the tear tracks dried. With his knees and heart pumping, he could feel his contempt leaking away as something else took its place. Something unproductive: his empathy.

  They—his handlers on the other end of the internet—had used his empathy against him, directing it first at the scores of dead children they showed him before weaponizing it. He even empathized with their using him like this—understood that in conflicts as asymmetrical as the one they were in, fighting dirty was their only hope. Mohammad just happened to be the dirty bomb du jour.

  Eventually, his pedaling carried him past the houses and their humans to the land of parking lots and strip malls and gas stations on each of the four corners at intersections. He passed a Walgreens and a CVS and a Rite Aid. He heard his handlers’ haptic typing:

  “So many drugs for such a sick civilization . . .”

  And there. He could feel it coming back, and just in time: his contempt.

  Mo was wearing the vest at a pep rally the day everything changed. All morning he’d been saying goodbye to things in his head: his locker, his teachers, his supposed infidel friends, his footsteps echoing down the empty hallway as he carried his bathroom pass to the boys’ lavatory to throw up.

  After rinsing his mouth in the sink, he made his way to the gym, took a seat in the bleachers. It was early June, and the school year was finally ending after being extended to accommodate a series of wholly non-fracking-related building repairs. There were no more games, away or at home, but they were still having a pep rally—perhaps as a pep booster shot to carry them through the long, pepless summer. Mo tried cheering along but mainly just watched, trying to imagine the bodies after the blast, trying to imagine paradise. It was easier with his eyes closed, and so he shut them tight, as all around him his fellow students stomped and clapped the intro to Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Mohammad, meanwhile, prayed silently, asking for guidance on whether he should say “God is great” or “Allahu Akbar” before doing what he’d come to do.

  Suddenly, everybody—the whole gym-full of people—skipped a beat, followed by a stomp so thunderous it was a miracle the bleachers didn’t collapse. Mo’s eyes snapped open, and there they were: all the bodies he’d imagined and more, well beyond even the most optimistic blast range. But these weren’t torn apart and bleeding. These bodies were just suddenly, cleanly dead.

  He elbowed the body to his right that had slouched into him, and the rest of the bodies on that side followed suit, dominoing until they reached the bleacher’s end, followed by the sickening thud of a body hitting the gym floor. He nudged the corpse to his left, and it was the same thing: tilt, tilt, tilt, tilt, thud. And there was Mo, the only one in his row, sitting upright—an exclamation point with back slashes and forward slashes on either side of him. But why?

  7

  Before, Dev liked sneaking out to ride his bike around the neighborhood while the rest of the world was asleep and the place was his. He liked how quiet the streets were, the only sounds coming from him and nature: the wind, the insects, the circle-sounding sound of his bicycle tires turning on pavement, a sizzle if it had rained, a whisper if it hadn’t, punctuated regularly by the seams in the pavement, bonkity-bonk, bonkity-bonk, bonkity-bonk . . .

  So the feeling he experienced crossing that threshold from the school’s basement wasn’t necessarily new. It was just like the world at 3:00 a.m., but with dead bodies everywhere he looked. Cheerleader bodies, jock bodies, bullies, burnouts, dweebs, teachers, one traitor he thought was a friend . . . people in style and out, people who gave a crap and didn’t, lying tumbled down in the hallway, facing up, sideways, down, as randomly arranged as if a bulldozer had dumped a bucketful of mannequins.

  For the most part, the bodies seemed peaceful, as if suddenly overcome by an irresistible need to sleep. Seemed, but what did Dev know? He’d never been that good with people’s faces, and their being dead didn’t change that. All it did was stop them from changing so fast, as if he’d finally gotten that pause button his hand kept imagining. That they were dead and not just faking was apparent only from the unnatural poses some of them struck—a head at a ninety-degree angle from its neck or crashed through the window in a just-opened door.

  To be sure, Dev pried an iPhone from the closest limp hand and checked to see if the screen fogged when he placed it under a random selection of noses. It didn’t. He checked foreheads, necks, wrists, but it was the same story each time: nothing. Nothing to the power of nothing . . .

  Tiptoeing between them and over them and around them, Dev made his way down the hall, his handkerchief out and pressed to his face, in case whatever killed everybody was still in the air. It was only after he saw a blind kid’s dog nuzzling its late master, trying to wake him up, that Dev decided the whatever-it-was probably wasn’t airborne.

  Seeing the dog also reminded him of what Principal Butler said when his mom and stepdad asked about getting him a comfort animal to help with the stress of high school: “Why don’t you just get him a teddy bear?”

  Dev whistled for the dog and clapped his knees. “Here, boy,” he said. And the dog, as spooked as any living thing would be around so much sudden death, ran, tongue flagging, toward the human voice calling him. “Good boy,” Dev said, grabbing hold of the dog’s lead. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Standing outside the office door, like he had so many times before, the victim as the accused, Dev poked his head in to confirm Principal Butler’s untimely but warranted demise. Releasing his hold on the leader dog, he shooed it inside before closing and locking the door.

  Whatever-it-was had happened between classes; doors were open all up and down the corridor, sunlight from windows spilling across the floor as slanting white rectangles, lighting up specks of dust still adrift from the violence of all those bodies dropping at once. Continuing down the hallway—stepping over ex-classmates, dropped books, the coughed-out contents of backpacks and purses—Dev wondered what to call this particular tableau. Neurotypicals, no doubt, would call it hell, but his Aspie sensibilities begged to differ. For one thing, Dev didn’t believe in an afterlife, be it heaven or hell, having been raised by a not-particularly-practicing Anglican of Indo-American descent by way of the Church of England and a not-particularly-practicing Jew by way of Bloomfield Hills. But if heaven was like this, he just might have to change his mind.

  Regarding those who hadn’t survived, Dev looked into the faces he could see, once so inscrutable, rendered meaningless once the muscles that animated them stopped. He wondered if the nothingness he felt toward them now was the same nothingness he’d felt before, or if it was something new, like shock.

  Am I in shock? he wondered before following it almost immediately with: And so what if I am? Because if he was in shock, it felt like he’d felt most of his life. And so Dev shrugged. Moved on. Waded back into the Jell-O of his previous life, emotions a rumor, going through
the motions, including walking to the bus stop, where he waited for his mother to pick him up.

  It was hardly the only rote thing he did, immediately afterward. He’d also gone all the way back to his locker, tripping over bodies along the way, having to slide one aside so he could get the door open, before wrestling his She-Ra backpack out and on, and then stepping over bodies again to the bus stop, where he waited. There was no one else waiting, of course, and so he set his backpack beside him on the bench and stretched his arms along the back. Letting his head drop back, he looked up at the sky to see what it was doing.

  Nothing especially doomsdayish at first glance. Brittle blue, birds still flying in it—probably good. But there were also oily black clouds churning up from the direction of the interstate—which probably wasn’t. Otherwise, the scene outside was the same as the scene inside: humans sprawled here and there, with the exception that there were more animals to investigate the nonliving, meaning birds and squirrels and a few stray dogs licking here, test nibbling there.

  He wondered how long the guide dog in Mr. Butler’s office would wait without food. Not long, he hoped.

  The fact that there were dead people outside helped confirm that whatever-it-was wasn’t limited to the building, wasn’t a gas leak or carbon monoxide, though the leader dog’s surviving had suggested as much. The question remained, however: How far did all of this go?

  He could walk from the school grounds and go house to house, he guessed, but then he had another idea. Getting off the bench, Dev found a chunk of concrete from a crumbled parking berm and threw it as hard as he could into the grille of a car that had “Please don’t steal me” written all over it. And just like that, the tranquility of birdsong and whispering leaves yielded to flashing lights and the whoop, whoop, whoop of a car alarm, sliding up in pitch and decibel before sliding down and starting all over again.

  He waited.