And so he stopped the red Miata and put it in reverse. Fast. Or fastish. Fast enough to bend the pole the sign was attached to, for the sign itself to gong against the trunk. Shifting into drive, he jerked forward, and the sign slid off, hitting the ground like a cymbal. Reversing again, Dev looked over his shoulder as the car’s passenger side drive tire rolled onto the painted sheet metal. He pressed the foot brake and yanked up the emergency, put the car in drive, and punched the gas, hard. And there went his sign, flung skyward by the spinning tire before sailing back down and wedging itself—thunk!—deep into a tree trunk where the wobbling from its final impact sounded like thunder.
Satisfied, Dev released the brake and drove the rest of the way home, one long-overdue task checked off his to-do list.
Pulling into the driveway, he noted the absence of their cars, as well as of smoke, water, and/or flames. So that was good. His mom and the other guy both likely did their dying at the thrift store or at work, respectively, which is where they usually were while Dev was serving time at school.
But for all the dead bodies lying around and the fact that he’d driven himself home, the latest return to base camp wasn’t a whole lot different from all the other times. He let himself in with his key and headed for his room, where he locked the door. This time, though, he added a step: a pit stop in the kitchen. The whatever-it-was happened before he’d had lunch, and surviving the apocalypse had kicked his hunger into overdrive.
So Dev opened the fridge and removed a package of cold cuts, two different kinds of cheese, and an assortment of condiments in chilled, squeezable bottles. These, he laid out on the counter along with a carton of milk like the props in a religious ceremony. From the rolltop bread box, he fished out half a loaf, spun it open counterclockwise, set aside the twist tie, dealt out two slices, and closed it again with a clockwise spin. The roll top slid shut with a satisfying thunk and clatter as Dev turned to assemble his sandwich, pour milk, and unclip a bag of chips from the top of the fridge, which he shook out in a kind of nest around the rim of the paper plate on which the aforementioned sandwich rested like a bull’s-eye. Satisfactorily provisioned, he proceeded to his bedroom—more out of habit than necessity—closed the door, and proceeded to enjoy his sandwich in a fashion he was sure Warren Zevon would approve of.
8
Until she found herself surrounded by them, Lucy had never seen an actual dead person in person. She’d seen thousands on TV and in movies, where dead bodies were like parsley—a garnish that came with pretty much everything. Even when her grandparents died and she went to their viewings, she hadn’t really seen dead bodies. What she saw was the plastic fruit equivalent of dead bodies: close, but a little too idealized. They looked like they’d been airbrushed in 3-D. The only real thing about their posed deadness was how cold they felt when she brushed their hands, saying goodbye. The thingness of their bodies came through in that touch. It resonated on her fingertips long after, like the ghost of a camera flash, but one she could feel instead of see: the phantom limb effect using someone else’s limbs.
Is this what people mean when they say they’re keeping someone’s memory alive? she’d wondered.
The corpses all around her now hadn’t been pumped full of antifreeze, gussied up, had their hair sprayed hard. They were death au naturel, their hair doing the wind’s bidding, unable to lift a finger to brush it out of their eyes. When she first started walking through the valley of death, a part of her wanted to do it for them, reach over, there, that’s better. But then she stopped feeling it. Looking at them now, she tried to think of them as the former vessels of souls. She couldn’t. Even the bodies she knew, she didn’t know anymore. The transformation of death turned them into human-shaped things that were just shy of real, like that CGI Tom Hanks in The Polar Express that gave her nightmares for weeks. And probably would again, now that she remembered it. Shite . . .
Of course, CGI Tom would have plenty of competition when it came to poisoning her dreams after all that happened the day It happened. To keep things manageable, Lucy placed the day’s events into two boxes: (1) the miscarriage and (2) the . . . rest of it. She started with the miscarriage because she’d been living longer with the need to do something about her condition, and in a way, she’d caught a lucky break, seeing as ever since she’d lost the cell clump, she hadn’t had a panic attack.
Which brought her to the other box: the . . . rest of it. As boxes went, it was pretty big because it had to be. There was no other way for her finite brain to cope with the enormity of the enormousness she’d witnessed. Even summarized into those three monosyllabic words, the box in question was too heavy to lift without hurting her brain stem.
And the more Lucy walked, the heavier the box got, as more stuff went into it. Crushed cars placed next to the geysering fire hydrants they’d decapitated, followed by snapped power poles turned into hypotenuses by straining wires and geometry. A traffic light lay crashed in the bull’s-eye of an intersection, shocking her with how huge it seemed up close. Elsewhere, a car had jumped a curb into the plate-glass window of the non–abortion clinic she’d stomped out of, earning itself a very special place in Lucy’s . . . rest of it box.
She noticed that the traffic lights that hadn’t come crashing down into intersections still seemed to be working, cycling through their parfait lights. She also noticed that the space inside her—only recently vacated by the cell clump—was growling something powerful. Whether it was a stress growl, a miscarriage growl, or a growl of hunger, she knew what the answer was—“Who wants ice cream?”—phrased like they did on Jeopardy!, in the form of a question.
Me, Lucy thought, I could eat a whole freaking Baskin-Robbins after a day like today . . .
She decided to settle for the freezer section of the Walgreens up ahead, a pint of Häagen-Dazs white chocolate raspberry truffle. The working air-conditioning blasted dry the sweat from all her walking. It felt good.
What didn’t feel good was stepping over the dead customers along her way to chilly solace. She’d started noticing how the bodies didn’t seem so bad anymore. Dead, not talking, not posing any threat, they kind of grew on her in a way the living never had. They were all so soft and vulnerable, postmortem. Take the pharmacist with the bad toupee, lying facedown in aisle three, his toupee lying next to him like a hairy pancake, the peach-fuzzy wisps on his skull playthings for the AC. And right next to him, like the dictionary illustration for irony, the underage shoplifter the pharmacist had stopped everything to stop—or so it seemed to Lucy—the pack of Trojans still clutched by fingers starting to go rigid with rigor mortis. Two sad people, photographed forever together by death . . .
It was almost enough to make her feel sorry for them—a little too little, a little too late—but still, it was progress. Empathetically speaking.
The thing about the end of the world—that is, when it’s ended for everyone but you—is the melancholy that sort of creeps up on you. Granted, Lucy was neither the warmest nor fuzziest person alive when there were others to compare her with; the world had kicked all the warmth and fuzz out of her, along with any sense of self-worth she might have had. To the extent she had a chip on her shoulder, though, it had been nailed there by others, using one of those nail guns that uses shotgun shells. To say she was bitter fell a wee bit short, like calling sulfuric acid tangy.
But then everybody else died, leaving their stuff behind to find when she kicked open the door of some house she’d always wondered about from the outside. It turned out all that stuff had become infused with little bits of sadness she never knew anything about but could suddenly feel now, in the weight of a knickknack hefted in the palm of her hand.
Huh, she’d think, over some worthless piece of kitsch from under a bell jar on somebody’s mantel. What was the story, she’d wonder, and then . . .
. . . she’d find herself supplying it, before getting sad for no reason, because ownerless things gravitate that way: toward sorrow for all the absence they represent.
Pretty sappy, Abernathy, she thought, grateful there were no witnesses left to call her on it.
9
The weird thing about seeing all the dead bodies, it didn’t bother Mo as much as he imagined—in part because he already had. Imagined it, that is. He’d had help, what with the PowerPoint parade of war casualties they kept sending his way, most no doubt chosen for him, specifically, so many of the bodies seeming to be around his age or younger. The purpose—in addition to working up his righteous rage—was to disabuse him of the comfortable American myth that he was too young to die. “Here you go,” the slides implied. “Someone your own age and complexion: dead. And another. And another. We can do this all day.
“Shall we?”
Thus when it actually happened, it was very much a case of been there done that, became a jihadi and expected to die one. So the things Mohammad saw afterward weren’t the stuff of nightmares so much as dreams of paradise, suddenly exposed for all the many shades of stupid they really were.
Shade of Stupid Number One: Imagining He’d Been Betrayed
Clearly, they’d been grooming someone else in case he chickened out. They’d given this “understudy” Mo’s time, his place, and his date. Maybe he’d postponed too many times because of his “insufficiently warm” feet. Maybe his handlers figured a ricin attack—so much deadlier and farther spreading—would creep out the cowboys even more. Except—yeah: Mo wasn’t dead. So scratch the whole backup-martyr-with-ricin idea, and start feeling stupid for having had it.
Shade of Stupid Number Two: Not Quibbling with the Method of Deployment
They’d asked him to strap on a bomb, walk into a packed gymnasium, and blow himself up. And what did Mo say? “Sign me up, my brothers.” Why? Why not buy a cheap clock, make a timer, stay home sick? Why not buy a burner phone, turn it into a remote detonator, and live to terrorize another day? Was Mo’s life so cheap it wasn’t worth the price of a TracFone? Or were his handlers just showing off—letting the world know they had martyrs to burn? So Mo felt stupid about that too.
Shade of Stupid Number Three: Believing a Straight-Up Murder-Suicide Could Be Called Martyrdom
Yeah, about that: How was picking the time and place and then doing it to yourself martyrdom? Didn’t that take paradise and turn it into just another thing you bought like groceries, but with your earthly life? Oh, he knew what his handlers would say, if they were still alive. “Allah knows what’s in your heart. Allah knows when your motives are pure . . .” Why did Allah suddenly sound like the heathens’ Santa Claus? “He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake . . .” Plus, what if Mo’s motives weren’t pure? What if the 9/11 hijackers getting lap dances were thinking how they wouldn’t have to pay for that kind of treatment when they got all those virgins? Was that martyrdom—or just an exchange of services?
He’d tried resolving his parents’ ambiguous Su-Shi Islam by embracing a weaponized variety made attractive by his handlers’ world-cleaving certainties. The world was simple; it was just a game of sides, believers versus heathens, with the latter one extreme haircut away from the damnation they deserved. Pick a side—they demanded—and Mo had. Now he’d just as soon not play the game at all. And so, the former terrorist stood up and carefully made his way to the center aisle. The bleachers squeaked as he headed down to the gym floor, littered now with dead cheerleaders and other pep-related corpses.
Before leaving, no-longer-Mo walked up to the school’s mascot, a giant plush badger. The head of the costume had been separated by gravity and the floor from the cartoonish body in red sweatshirt and no pants, the body itself now topped by a normal-sized head framed by a growing halo of red against the honey-blond floorboards. The bomb vest under his clothes would have left the same punch line, if whatever this was hadn’t beaten Mohammad to the punch. And it occurred to him that the bomb he was still wearing was every bit as much of a costume as a giant, pantless badger—and even more ridiculous, given the deadly seriousness of its intent.
And so he pulled his tunic over his head and off. He ripped the Velcro straps of his suicide vest, removed it, and slung it over his shoulder, like a sport coat too warm for the change in weather. He worked his tennis shoe into the opening at the base of the badger head, kicked up, and caught it as it came down. He tried it on; it was the perfect, imperfect fit, making the world outside echo around its inside.
“Hello down there, Marcus,” he said, remembering the mascot’s real name and realizing he liked the sound of it. “Hello, Marcus,” he said again, this time to his reflection in the gym door’s window.
Yes, he thought. As names went, Marcus had a nice, nonterroristy ring to it. And seeing as the badger wasn’t using it . . .
But no. That was too glib. Choosing a new name was something one did—he tried to remember that phrase he’d liked—in “the smithy of his soul.” Mo—now Marcus—had run across it in an English class while reading an anthologized excerpt from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He’d had to look up smithy and discovered it was another word for blacksmith. The smithy of the soul was apparently where an artist made things. Feeling a bit empty inside, Mo fell in love with the image of the soul as a workshop where things were made of iron, pounded red-hot on an anvil, metal on metal, clang after sparking clang. And now the phrase came back to him as he melted down his old self and prepared to make of it something new.
“And he would be called Marcus,” the ex-Mo intoned inside the giant, hollow head, making the words sound vaguely godlike. And then he realized he should probably change his surname too. “Smith,” he decided with a smile, seeing not the motel anonymity of the name, but that maker he’d imagined, making metal sing.
Now that he was Marcus Smith, the boy formerly known as Mo ditched the extra head and borrowed a T-shirt from a classmate who hadn’t managed to bloody it while dying. The skullcap was a loss already, having been used to wipe the other Marcus’s blood from his hands. The vest, which he was still carrying, didn’t go with anything else he was wearing. And so he set it off in the middle of the football field long-distance, thanks to a match and a long line of gasoline between himself and it. The explosion left a crater the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and a concussion he could feel reverberating through his skin. Car alarms were still going off in the parking lot, and dogs howled pretty much everywhere as he grabbed his bike from the rack and headed back home.
10
When Dev was still on autopilot, it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder about things like utilities. He’d come home from school, gone to his bedroom, and shut the door, just like the school day before, and all the school days before that. But on the day everything changed, his routine did too. He’d been hungry after missing lunch, and so he’d taken a detour to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and assembled a quick snack before continuing on his way, not having noticed what he hadn’t been looking for.
That had been a few hours ago, and now he was looking at an empty glass on his desk, and a fly that had taken an interest in it. There was a milky film dulling the inside of the glass, and the fly was walking through the souring dregs at the bottom, its proboscis probing, its wings twitching.
Glad you waited, Dev thought, directing it at the fly as he set the glass off to the side so he wouldn’t reach for the last few drops while preoccupied with something else. No point getting food poisoning now that . . .
And that’s when the fingers in Dev’s head snapped: the refrigerator’s light had come on! The cold cuts and bottles of condiments had been cold. The traffic lights he’d passed on the way back home had dutifully directed the nonexistent traffic, those that hadn’t been downed in the immediate aftermath by cars jumping the curb into the poles they’d been suspended from. Even the wind dancers in front of the car dealerships had continued dancing. Sure, his phone still worked and so did Google, but that was often the case in blackouts before; that’s what allowed him to check the DTE maps to see how widespread the outage was an
d what the estimated time of restoration was.
So Dev got up and began flipping switches; yep, he had light all over the house. Not so much as a circuit breaker had broken the flow of electricity from the outside world. Back in the kitchen, more good news: there was water and gas too. Even without anyone to run it, the local infrastructure was chugging along all by itself. Thank you, robot overlords, he thought, grateful to see that even the router in the corner was still blinking so he could use Wi-Fi instead of his phone’s data plan—not that he was expecting a bill anytime soon.
Logging on, Dev found the Google suite of services still humming along—they’d gotten him home, after all—but was pleased to find several other sites still gathering and spitting back data on their users. Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook all came when he summoned them, though the last was minus its updates, likes, and comments now that the updaters, likers, and commenters were dead. Even doomsday hadn’t stopped the automated clickbait and pop-ups from mining Dev’s electronic cookie crumbs for fodder, informing him of the availability of women over fifty who weren’t into games, as well as steep discounts on Viagra and hair-replacement therapies. Apparently, his electronic self was a balding middle-aged man with ED who couldn’t find a date. Which was reasonably close, based on his social calendar—especially now—though the reason had nothing to do with needing hair plugs or boner pills. As unbiased a source as his own mother had informed Dev that he was handsome, and he’d even been approached by female members of the species who didn’t know any better. But then, as the story goes, he opened his mouth . . .
And that was another good thing about doomsday: the whole dating thing was off the table—a definite plus for someone who couldn’t stand being touched. But back to the interwebs—those parts that still worked, post-whatever. Skipping through banner ads and 401 error messages, Dev had a hunch about how to determine the extent of the whatever-it-was that didn’t involve leaving the comfort of his keyboard. And so he went to Google and started typing: “Why is everyone . . .” If Google’s predictive search algorithm filled in the word dead, Dev figured that would mean—ironically—that everyone wasn’t dead, because others were consulting the oracle of Google to figure out what happened. Instead, the top choices for completing his phrase were:
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 8