Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  Dev waited to see if the car’s bleating called anyone else out of the woodwork. The sound carried for blocks, at least. If there was anyone within hearing, Dev imagined them stumbling out of their nearby houses . . . only to be attacked by the scattered dead, suddenly rearing up again and shambling after the still living, cannibalism the only thing on what was left of their minds.

  Dev watched from the sidelines of this fantasy, willfully impervious to the impending buzz-saw gore. His premise: zombies were attracted by the smell of the emotions he lacked. Interesting theory, Brinkman, he thought. Interesting theory . . .

  But as long as Dev waited, nobody else came from anywhere, and the dead did not rise to feast upon them. Instead, the animals that had been startled away came ambling back once they got used to the noise of the car alarm.

  Well, that settles that, Dev thought. Whatever-it-was was at least as big as the several blocks surrounding Edsel Ford High School. Did it extend to the other school districts, the names of which he’d seen scrolling across the TV screen on snow days? To the post offices, libraries, parks, and municipal airports that sometimes also closed? To the Upper Peninsula? Other states? The European Union? To other, less Caucasian parts of the world?

  Did it stretch all the way back to the house where he lived with his mom and stepfather? Which reminded him, he needed to let his mom know to pick him up early. He checked his phone; it still seemed to be working. Dialed home. Listened to the ringing. She’d usually be home from the thrift store by now. Not that she needed to be home. She had a smartphone too. So he called that. Same nothing. She wouldn’t be coming early. By the looks of it, she might not be coming at all.

  And so Dev looked at the parking lot, where the zombies weren’t, but where a lot of unclaimed personal transportation was. He hadn’t bothered with driver’s ed—hadn’t seen the point. Though not being able to drive in Michigan rendered him pretty much an invalid, regardless of his position on the spectrum, Dev knew he’d never be able to drive. Moving through an ever-changing landscape at twenty-five miles or more per hour was just too much data for his brain to process. He knew this because it had been too much for him to handle just being a passenger, which had been his argument to Leo some time ago. If his parents and he ever had to go anywhere that involved getting on the freeway, his stepdad slipped him a Xanax, and then Dev would stretch out on the back seat, eyes closed, facedown. More than once, they’d been stopped while going through customs at the Ambassador Bridge that connected Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, the agents insisting that Dev get out and prove he wasn’t dead or a hostage. Maybe give him a chance to blink “help me” in Morse code or something.

  But now he needed to get home, and neither the bus nor his mom was coming. On the plus side, he figured, there was no law against going too slowly—not anymore, at least. Plus, his phone was still good for googling, and so he did, bringing up a host of YouTube videos in response to the search string “how to drive a car,” followed by “how to hot-wire a car,” and then finally on to Google Maps for the route home. After that, it was just a matter of picking a car, using another busted piece of concrete for his key.

  Except the windows didn’t explode like they did on TV. Instead, the concrete bounced off, taking out a thumbnail-sized chip, but that was all. He tried again, and got another chip bounce. By the third attempt, he had to admit (1) this was going to take all day and (2) the car he’d picked didn’t have an ignition like the ones in the how-to videos, just a button on the dash. And so it was back to googling, this time to learn how to start a car with just a button for the ignition, which is how he learned about the antitheft benefits of the wireless key fob.

  It was obvious what he needed to do, both to get into a vehicle and to start it: he needed to choose a car whose owner he knew, go back inside, and get the keys and/or fob. It’d be easy. As easy as, well, taking keys off a dead guy. He’d already decided he wouldn’t be going through any girl’s purse, partly because he was a little afraid to, but mainly because he couldn’t remember what any of the women he knew drove. Trying to picture them in vehicles, it was always with some guy who wasn’t Dev, the ride always something sleek and red or big, black, and combat ready.

  In the end, he picked a cherry-red Mazda Miata belonging to a kid named Kevin, a Beavis-and-Butt-Head yes-man to the latest leader of the We-Hate-Dev Club. This one had distinguished himself by using Dev’s tie with Dev still attached to buff away an accidental fingerprint on the car’s paint job. Dev found him pinched between the door and jamb to the boys’ restroom, the key ring making a bulge the size of a fist in his hip pocket. He tried extracting them, first by dipping his index and f-you fingers, tweezer style, inside the pocket. But then he wondered what he was being so careful for. Straightening back up, he proceeded to kick at the pocket bulge repeatedly until the key ring came rocketing out before landing on the floor with a clatter. Scooping it up, he looked back at Kevin. Nothing. Not a blink. Not a flinch. Dead, dead.

  He threw the key fist in the air and caught it. It felt good, and so he did it again, and kept doing it, all the way back to the parking lot—where he hit the wrong button. Once again, his peaceful doomsday gave way to a frantic whoop, whoop, whoop as he fumbled, clicking randomly before remembering there was no peace left to disturb. So he stopped. Composed himself. Let a few more whoops go before locating the alarm button and tapping it off. The next button he hit popped the doors.

  After reviewing the owner’s manual he’d found in the glove compartment and assuring himself he knew where all the important controls were located on this particular make and model, Dev adjusted the mirrors, pulled on his seat belt, and checked the mirrors again. He put his foot on the brake and made sure the car was in park before turning the key. His skin tingled. The sound the engine made, made his skin tingle. It also made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say he felt excited—as opposed to the feeling he’d been expecting, namely a Pavlovian urge to vomit. But no. He did a literal gut check; whatever else his bile was doing, it wasn’t rising. His skin, meanwhile, was still tingling.

  What was different? He looked around at his suddenly—miraculously—de-peopled world. And it was as if, by dying, they’d taken his anxiety with them. He had a couple of emergency Xanax from his stepfather in the coin pocket of his jeans. He thought about taking one but really didn’t seem to need it. Because, what was different?

  Everything is different, Dev decided. Including me.

  He was in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t a hostage with no control over where he was going, every bump a surprise. He was in control, and it made a bigger difference than he could have imagined. Tapping the gas, still in park, he tingled all over again.

  His top speed while riding his bike was about ten miles an hour. Dev didn’t get sick while riding his bike, especially when he mapped the route ahead of time using Google Street View. So driving at ten miles an hour seemed safe for starters, especially after previewing every five hundred feet or so ahead of him, shrunk down and manageable by definition, seeing as it fit on his smartphone, which, in turn, fit into his hand.

  Balancing his phone where he could see it on the dash, Dev took hold of the steering wheel, placed his foot on the brake, and kerchunked the shift into drive. Easing his foot off the brake without touching the gas, he held his breath as the car started rolling. He listened to the slow grind and pop of the tires as they crawled out of the parking space, rolling over pebbles and other parking-lot confetti.

  He could feel the gentle but persistent pull of forward momentum. He imagined himself an astronaut, strapped in during liftoff, the g-forces rippling his cheeks, stretching his lips into a teeth-baring grimace. He looked down at the speedometer, the needle wobbling midway between zero and ten.

  Tapping the gas the slightest bit humanly possible, he wound up bumping over a dead classmate—but so slowly he could hear the bones breaking individually. Again, they sounded like broomsticks, wrapped in towels, crac
king one after the other. Dev tapped the gas again, harder this time, just to make the sound stop faster.

  The needle now flirted with twenty, while the car, only marginally steered by Dev, left the asphalt parking lot. A sidewalk appeared, and the tires rolled over it, onto the grassy green space on the other side. Unlike the noisy asphalt, the grass was practically silent, the only sounds being the engine and the wind shaking the trees, a sound like the ocean rushing to shore or a chorus of librarians, all shushing at once. It was peaceful—calming—like the sound of his mother vacuuming outside his bedroom door.

  If this is what driving is like, Dev thought, I wish I’d known sooner . . .

  But it wasn’t, of course. Driving—at least, driving before—was nothing like this. But it is now, Dev thought. Why?

  Because I said so.

  Finding the cruise control, Dev set it at twenty-five and watched the world go by from the driver’s seat, the self-appointed king of doomsday, returning in triumph. He took the route Google Maps suggested—or rather a route of his own, mostly next to the roads unfurling ever so slowly on the screen. And so onward he rolled, across manicured lawns and overgrown lots where dandelion seeds shook loose and hung in the air like snow in a globe. It was good being king.

  One way to find out how far “it” went was to keep driving the red Miata until Dev either met other survivors or ran out of land, at which point he could switch to a boat. Assuming the water he hit was an ocean and not just the Detroit River, wouldn’t that be an adequate sample size? Couldn’t he just decide, “The whole world’s dead,” and spare himself months of seasickness?

  Or if he really wanted to be efficient, maybe he could just turn on the radio, hit scan, and watch it weave back and forth across the dial, like some FM version of Pong. Robot stations without DJs wouldn’t count. Ditto anything prerecorded. But how would he know if what he was listening to was prerecorded? Unfortunately, this wasn’t Dev’s first national disaster; if whatever he hit wasn’t nonstop coverage of the whatever-it-was, it was prerecorded.

  And so he pushed the button and waited for a station that wasn’t there anymore. Which was adequate for the time being. No need to drive to either of the two oceans bookending the country. The broadcasting area around Metro Detroit and Windsor was a big enough sample size for him to call it. And so, at around noon, 12:30 p.m. eastern daylight time on a Monday in early June, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world—or at least the world of people, at least mostly—had come to an end. Cause of death: whatever.

  There was a bridge over I-94 along the route his mom took to and from school, perhaps to remind him of the trauma she was sparing him. But even if it weren’t, he would have wound up here anyway, to confirm with his own eyes what the empty radio dial already told him. Standing next to the Miata on the otherwise empty overpass, Dev surveyed the aftermath of whatever-it-was, cars whose drivers suddenly stopped being alive still moving until they hit something, usually another car or truck or wall. Amazingly, the center lane was clear, as if Moses had raised his staff, parting the interstate down the middle. This was no miracle, though—just the result of neglected roads and bad alignments, cars that tugged left crashing left, right, right. If he was one for political metaphors, he would have said this was a good one for the way the country had divided itself since just before he was born. But the closest thing he had to an interest in politics was vacuum cleaners. The thing they had in common? According to his stepfather, they both sucked.

  It must have been something to see when it was still happening, the vehicles piling up, steel and rubber, glass and combustible fluids, shrieking, squealing, imploding, exploding, compacting into denser and denser polarized clots of destruction as wave after driverless wave kept coming, kept crashing, kept coming, kept crashing, out, out, out, reaching toward the horizon. Now, quiet except for natural noises—wind, shaking leaves, the guttering flames of those vehicles that were burning—punctuated occasionally by an exploding gas tank.

  And then Dev saw it: a singular car, sticking to the center lane, performing evasive maneuvers around the occasional sheared-off tire or far-flung fender. He was halfway back inside the Miata, ready to start honking, when he noticed the GPS globe on top. Whose it was—Uber, Google, GM—he couldn’t tell, though he admired how well its sensors and programming were calling the shots, considering the unlikelihood that its designers had thought ahead to an apocalypse mode.

  Dev wondered what the Little Autonomous Vehicle That Could would do when it reached one of the broken planes that had dropped out of the sky shortly after takeoff from Metro Airport, this one leaving debris spanning both lanes of the freeway. Others had gotten farther in their doomed journeys, dropping out of the blue to incinerate whole neighborhoods, the blue-black crematory smoke billowing up like rough drafts of mushroom clouds. As best he could tell from his phone, none of the fires seemed to be coming from his neighborhood, though that was just luck; the entire area seemed to be under one flight path or another, judging from the grid of contrails thinning in the wind.

  If the Underwear Bomber had succeeded however many Christmases ago, Dev wouldn’t be standing here, watching what could have been back then playing out in front of him now. People at the time joked—what else could they do?—resorting to gallows humor, wondering what sort of terrorist would pick Metro Detroit for a target. Didn’t they teach that in Terrorist Targeting 101? When picking your target, make sure it’s somewhere where the damage will be noticed. Dev hadn’t thought it was funny back then, and still didn’t.

  As he drove out of the business district and into the surrounding neighborhoods, Dev noticed a return of the sound he’d heard outside school: the unrelenting howling of dogs. The sound followed him the rest of the way home, their guttural cacophony becoming his background music as he drove. It was the sound of humanity’s shirked responsibilities. As a shirked responsibility himself, he identified more with the dogs than the ones they were howling for. And so he let out an ow-ooo himself, sounding like Warren Zevon in “Werewolves of London,” a golden oldie his stepfather played often, sitting in the dark, ice clinking, sipping the evening away.

  “Warren f-ing Zevon,” he’d announce, as if Dev didn’t already know that from the dozens of times before. “You know what he said before he died?”

  “Enjoy every sandwich,” Dev thought, each and every time after that first time when he hadn’t known the answer. Still, he’d shake his head anyway. He’d learned that when his fake dad asked certain questions, not answering was the answer.

  “‘Enjoy every sandwich,’” the older Brinkman would say, right after a sip, delivering the line like it was something from centuries ago, perhaps carved in stone. Dev—an avid consumer of the food his faux father was forever reminding him he’d paid for—nodded, like he was thinking about it. And he was, kind of.

  What does dying taste like? he’d wonder. And how do you get it between bread?

  Getting closer to home, he saw smaller versions of what he’d seen on the freeway: man’s machines, suddenly unmanned, continuing on until something got in their way. Taking the green lane through one neighborhood, he noticed a self-propelled mower with its dead handler sprawled across a half-shaved lawn at one end, connected to the other end by a clean swath that jumped the neighbor’s driveway and continued on, cutting a path through neighboring lawns, steered by the ground underneath, its bumps and dips having caused the mower to go right, left, swerve, zigzag until it had finally jumped a curb and slammed into the passenger side of an SUV, where it was still chugging blue exhaust, stuck between the truck’s chassis and the pavement. Elsewhere, smoke whispered from under front doors or coughed out open windows, signaling the locations of unattended irons, frying pans, cigarettes, while from under other doorways rolled steady streams over porches and sidewalks to pool darkly around the nearest storm drains.

  Dev wondered about his own house as he approached the neighborhood he’d grown up in. Had anybody—meaning his real mom or f
ake dad—left anything going that had run amok in their absence? Probably not; hopefully not. They were both fairly careful about that sort of thing, mainly because leaving stuff running cost money and they’d been on the economy plan ever since Dev’s unexpected entrance into the picture, just months short of his mom going through menopause.

  According to his replacement dad, quoting his own dead brother, what followed was “a real joy,” though it didn’t sound like it: postpartum depression punctuated by hot flashes. And if that wasn’t enough, while Dev was still a baby, his dad—his uncle’s brother—died of a sudden heart attack. Of course, his uncle (now stepfather) stepped up and did the right thing, but the right thing wasn’t cheap, buddy boy—a hard reality Dev could hardly make it through the day without being reminded of.

  So yeah, they were old and cheap but also both out of the house the day it happened—at least he hoped so, because love lost or not, he didn’t want to come home to a dead parent, meaning his mom. As for what’s his name, finding him dead would be a drag too—as in, he’d have to drag him out before he stunk up the place any further. The actual sight of his dead body? Yeah, Dev wasn’t the emotional kind—in case his fake dad hadn’t heard.

  Before getting home, he drove by his sign, the one that had gone up shortly after his stepfather’s diagnosis. “See that?” his fake dad had said. “That’s your sign. That sign’s just for you.”

  The way he said it made Dev feel special—privileged—back before he could read. Afterward, though, it was a different story. “Slow,” the sign advised, “Autistic Child in Area.”

  There were other signs as well, signs for other children. “Caution Deaf Child Area,” “Watch for Blind Child,” “Children at Play.” Only the last didn’t seem to pass judgment on the children it warned about. But the one that warned people about him seemed most judgmental of all, because of that word: slow. Was it an admonition not to speed? Or an adjective? Either way, but especially the latter, hurt the feelings he supposedly didn’t have.