. . . so mean
. . . depressed
. . . happier than me
. . . taking up zumba
Even when he forced the issue and typed in the word dead, the predictor guessed beyond what he was looking for:
. . . on the walking dead
. . . on the last man on earth
. . . at the end of hamlet
So there was his answer; he was it: the sole survivor. Or at least the sole survivor who did Google searches in English. And had internet access. And who—before searching for loved ones or their remains—decided to check Google instead. And if not sole, among too few to skew Google’s infamous ranking algorithm.
The next stop on his tech tour of assurance was TV. And bingo, even live TV was still there, though “live” really needed quotes. Surfing the channels, Dev found a combination of local stations broadcasting a variety of static scenes: a news desk with anchor and sidekick, one slumped back, mouth agape, sharp-knotted tie acting like a tourniquet, stopping the gerbil of his Adam’s apple from further passage down the digestive tract; the other slumped forward, a mop of spray-hardened hair split open from the force of her head hitting the particleboard desktop, her carapace sprouting a few blond strands, stirred upward by the studio’s still-functioning air-conditioning. On another station, a basketball game had gone into sudden death—so to speak—tiers of dead fans having avalanched out of their seats into body piles here and there, while the players on both sides lay splayed across the hardwood, in and out of the paint, the basketball having long ago rolled to a stop where it would wait forever—or at least until a dozen freeze-thaw cycles opened up the roof to let the rain in, after which the ball would slowly bob and rise as the arena became a watery graveyard. Another channel was a rainbow with a black box along the bottom with the words “Sat Feed” in white and a whirling countdown marking the hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of seconds since the whatever-it-was happened—or the pretaped soap opera that had been running at the time ran out. Followed by snow, snow, “Please stand by,” snow, “We are experiencing technical difficulty,” a Twilight Zone marathon, snow, a close-up of floor tile, snow . . .
Dev took the clicker and clicked back a few channels to where the Twilight Zone episode was reaching its punch line, that “To Serve Man” is the title of a cookbook. In the next, the future Captain Kirk freaked out big-time on a plane, followed by the pig faces, followed by the one with Burgess Meredith as the last bookworm on earth who winds up breaking his glasses.
Even though Dev knew the ironic twist was coming, still a kind of cold wind blew through him. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say he was feeling creeped out by the parallels between his own experience and the one he was watching on TV. But that was the beauty of having what Dev had, especially postapocalyptically: he didn’t creep out—at least not easily. He did respond to physical stimuli, however, often in a spectrum-enhanced fashion, but abstractions leading to a physical reaction like goose bumps? Not really. And so he checked the windows and doors, trying to track down the source of this strictly nonmetaphorical chill, only to find he’d left the refrigerator open as he’d darted around the house, switching things on.
He pushed against the enameled door now until it gasped, confirming its seal, and then thought about the fallout shelter where he almost died. The shelter had a door just like the fridge, a rubber gasket sealing it hermetically against human stupidity. He wondered whether the shelter saved him. Thought: probably. Thought: good. Because the odds against anybody else being in an abandoned fallout shelter at precisely the same time seemed pretty slim. At least he hoped so. After all, now that Dev had the world to himself, he wasn’t exactly eager to share.
To kill time before the sun set, Dev downloaded everything on the web he could find that might come in handy once things like the web disappeared. After sunset, the plan was to kill something else: streetlights, specifically. Dev had been an amateur astronomer, after all, and had been repeatedly thwarted in the practice of his hobby by clouds, daylight saving time, neighbors who thought he was spying on them, and—even when everything else cooperated—light pollution. Doomsday—he figured—provided a certain leeway for addressing the last of these.
The neighbor he borrowed the rifle from was—had been—a deer hunter, as advertised by the buck head decal on the rear window of the pickup’s cab. In the bed of the truck lay a blanketed lump in the shape of an assault rifle, concealing—of course—an assault rifle, fully loaded with laser sight and silencer for catching the deer by surprise. If he’d had a pole that reached, Dev could have gone after the streetlights like so many glowing piñatas, but shooting would work too. Plus, it probably wasn’t a bad idea to learn how to use a gun, given everything he didn’t know about what might be coming next.
He’d known about his neighbor’s hobby even before finding the gun—had gone looking for it, specifically. He’d known because he’d found actual deer hooves in his neighbor’s trash once. Unfortunately, his parents had been feeding him the whole Santa story at the time, sanitized of any religious affiliation, and solely as a behavior modification technique.
“If you don’t stop that,” they took turns warning him, “Santa’s not going to . . . ,” etc.
Looking at the hooves, he wasn’t sure what they were at first. The actual hoof part looked like it was made of some heavy black plastic, the tawny fur like paintbrush bristles. He’d made the mistake of pulling one out, and that’s when he saw the bone knob and caked blood, dropped it, and just stared. Having finally realized what it was and where it had come from, Dev felt his moral universe collapse. What was the point of being good anymore? How was Santa supposed to bring him anything with the reindeer equivalent of a flat tire?
And so he started acting up until his fake dad made his diagnosis and began treating his stepson accordingly: under-the-counter by shorting the prescriptions of other kids with official diagnoses.
Now, with the stock nestled against his right shoulder and his finger poised on the trigger, Dev the first-time sniper prepared to return the universe (moral or otherwise) to its pre-Edison glory. Steadying the barrel with his free hand, he drew the laser’s bright-red dot up the lamp pole until it disappeared in the glow of the mercury vapor light. He pulled in a breath, held it for a heartbeat, and then squeezed the trigger. The silencer dampened the sound to that of a watermelon seed being spat away. But the recoil—the recoil put Dev on his back, staring up at the few stars he could see in the night’s milky gray, his hand already blistering, his target’s aluminum hood bullet-creased but with its bulb still shining.
Crap . . .
Staying where he dropped to avoid any reruns, Dev raised the gun again, testing the barrel with his finger until he found a spot to hold that wouldn’t burn him after firing. He squinted through the rifle’s telescopic sight, noting that the crosshairs and laser dot did not strictly agree, lowered his aim a tick, and braced for the kickback. He let out his breath like a tire losing air and then squeezed the trigger. Thwip! Pop! Glass shards tinkled against the pavement like wind chimes as the street grew dimmer by a few lumens. A dozen more misses and twice as many bullets cleared the street.
Though Dev knew what to expect when he finally stopped shooting and looked up, he didn’t really know what to expect. There’d be more, he understood, but actually seeing them was on a whole other level. It didn’t seem possible the night sky could hold so many. There were the usual suspects, of course. The bears, major and minor; Polaris; a few other connect-the-dot constellations he’d made up on his own, changing their names as his obsessions changed, his latest sky including such notables as the Dyson, the Hoover, and the constellation Electrolux. But there were so many others, not even counting the Milky Way spilled like a pail of pale light crawling across the sky, every dust speck in that incandescent cloud a star like the sun, with worlds maybe, some peopled, maybe some peopled wholly by people like Dev . . .
The thought made him feel tiny and light,
the burden of being the only person like himself wherever he went suddenly lifting as if in zero g, floating off his shoulders and away. Under all those would-be worlds, he’d be too tiny to be anyone’s target. And he could feel them—muscles he never knew he had—unwinding.
And then came the long-overdue breathing out. Until he did it, Dev never realized how much of his breath he’d been holding back. But now there was no reason to. No more crosshairs to avoid. No one left to disappoint. No one to compare himself with, or love, whether he wanted to or not. The indifference of the stars was positively Aspergerian. Maybe that’s why Dev liked them so much.
11
The animal came bounding up to her while Lucy was shooting up the bait-and-switch clinic. She’d found a gun shop just a few doors down, and it seemed like kismet—or at least a good excuse for venting a little, semiautomatically. After all, what good was doomsday if you couldn’t raise a little hell—as gratuitous as that might be under the circumstances? She did it mainly for the sound and feel—she told herself—the thunk of a shell hitting reinforced wood, the tinkle of the casing hitting concrete, the shoulder shove of the stock kicking back like Max joshing her, trying to make her drop her books.
“Quit it,” she’d always told him—willing to pay almost anything now for him to do it one more time.
And it was in this mix of mayhem and melancholy that she heard the thing yipping toward her: a little dog came from out of the . . . rest of it, demanding her full attention as its nails clicked across the sidewalk, the clicking stopping every few seconds as the animal leaped over another body and kept coming. It was still collared and leashed but otherwise ownerless. It seemed as needy as Lucy was determined not to be.
A determination, alas, that did not last.
“Okay, okay,” she said, squatting to scratch behind its ears. “Chill, you little SOB . . .”
The dog responded in a decidedly unchill manner, licking her hands, face, and hands again. Apparently, she thought, I’m being adopted. And so, because she could, she slipped her hand through the loop at the other end of the leash and took charge. She didn’t have any dog food back home, which—now that she had a dog—was where she decided she was going. The Abernathys had never gotten one because both her dad and brother were allergic. But pretty much anything could be dog food—Lucy figured—just so long as it wasn’t chicken bones or chocolate.
“You like steak?”
The dog, one of those dust mops with legs, yipped.
“Thought so,” she said, stepping over another body and letting the dust mop lead the way.
By the time they reached home, she’d dubbed him Sir Sheds-a-Lot because he looked like he would, judging from the staticky strands of white hair all over her fingertips. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to flick them away. And as for brushing them off against her gothic black apparel—yeah, she wasn’t making that mistake again.
Before turning up the front walk, Lucy stopped and bent down to explain the situation to her traveling companion. “Now, I know you don’t seem like an outside dog,” she said. “But you’re going to have to give it a try. I’ve got some peeps ain’t exactly down with dog dander, so . . .” She paused to tie the leash to the mailbox post. “But hey, there’s a steak in it for you, so keep your eyes on the prize.”
Sir Sheds whimpered as she mounted the porch steps with her back to him. Turning, she aimed a warning finger. “You know, you’ve got a lot of nerve trying to make me feel sorry for you, considering . . .” She didn’t add, “the . . . rest of it,” but that’s what she was thinking.
Why she didn’t let him into the house, considering the . . . rest of it—well, there was part of the . . . rest of it she didn’t quite believe just yet. A part she didn’t want to make come true by acting as if it was. No, as far as Lucy was concerned, she still lived with her father and brother who were still allergic to pet dandruff. It wasn’t Sir Sheds-a-Lot’s fault, but she wasn’t going to let him and his allergens jinx it. Plus, you know, there was a steak in it for him.
Sir Sheds got his steak and Lucy got a pint of rocky road, the former wrestling with his, slapped down on a paper plate and placed in front of him next to where he’d been leashed while his new owner sat down on the lawn with a plastic spoon, eating out of the carton. Ever since the . . . rest of it happened, she’d had a nursery rhyme stuck in her head:
Ring around the rosie
A pocket full of posey
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
Max had told her it was about the Black Death, that the rosie was a rash, the posey medicinal herbs, that “ashes” was a corruption of “achoo,” and the “all fall down” was, of course, a good chunk of Europe dying during the Middle Ages. Snopes, on the other hand, said it was all BS, but she liked Max’s explanation better. That’s what made them resonate, the way nursery rhymes and fairy tales blended innocence and morbidity—the real ones, at least, as opposed to the Disneyfied versions.
She wondered if there’d ever be others, a couple of hundred years in the future, chanting nursery rhymes about what happened, whatever that turned out to be. “What do you think there, Sir? What rhymes with ‘final judgment’? Spinal something? Vinyl, maybe?”
The tiny dog snarled into his slab of meat.
“Good point,” Lucy said, looking at the sky for any clues about what was coming next.
The two spent the next few days bonding, mourning, and planning their next move, though the last of these was pretty much Lucy’s doing. She still hadn’t let the dog inside, was still telling herself that the late members of her family were just late. The only time it was any problem for Sir Sheds was when it rained one day. Lucy had rushed out with apologies and two umbrellas, one for him, one for her. The only other time he needed rescuing was when she found he’d manage to lash himself to the mail post, having circled it too many times, chasing his rumor of a tail under all that teased-out fur. Inexplicably, she found herself crying as she carefully unwound him, the poor thing whining all the while.
“Don’t you say it,” she said, mad at herself, mad at her too-late tears. “Don’t you say anything . . .”
What she imagined Sir Sheds might say, even Lucy didn’t know. Non sequiturs, she’d found, were easier than trying to stay coherent all the time. And when you got down to it, the only thing the dog really cared about was the tone. And another one of those steaks the Abernathys seemed to have a freezer full of.
To prevent further attempts at canine bondage, Lucy redid Sir Sheds’s leash, unclipping it from his collar so she could feed the clip end through the loop at the human end with the hitching post in the middle. No longer knotted in place, the new arrangement slid around the pole with Sir Sheds-a-Lot as he circled, instead of wrapping itself around the pole until it ran out.
Ring around the posty, she thought. A pocket dog, well mostly . . .
“There,” she said, shaking her head. “Now you can keep moving without any mishaps.” She’d already told the dog how important it was to keep moving in this part of Georgia, lest the omnipresent kudzu snatch him up in its green tendrils like Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors. “And wouldn’t that be a fine howdy do,” she’d said, “finding nothing left of you but a few hairs and a tiny little pile of poo?”
12
Dev’s goal re what came next was to preserve as much of his pre-whatever routine as possible, minus the parts he didn’t care for, like going to school and being picked on. He figured a good place to start was where daily routines generally began: with waking up. So after he’d had his fill of the night sky, he wound and set an alarm clock for seven the next morning, just in case the infrastructure crashed in his sleep. Fortunately, he’d had this particular, ancient timekeeper since he was a toddler, when his mother discovered the calming effect its ticking had on the young Dev.
Before closing his eyes and slipping away under the clock’s metronomic ticking, Dev wrote a note to remind himself what was going on: “Happy Doomsday, Day One.”
He placed the note so it would be the first thing he saw when he woke and then settled back for a long . . .
Stopped. Got back up. Yes, routine was one thing, but the mattress in his bedroom had come from the same place all his other stuff did: the thrift store. Every night, he could feel the ghost dents of the mattress’s previous owners like a dozen different peas, his Asperger’s skin as good as a princess’s when it came to finding each and every one. The only reason he had spent so much time in his room wasn’t the bed; it was the door—and the way it kept the world on the other side of it.
Looking at the front door, just off the living room, and his bedroom door, just off the hallway to the bathroom, it struck Dev as overkill, putting up with a mattress he didn’t like just to place an additional door between him and the people who weren’t around to bother him anymore. Trying to recall the last time he’d felt comfortable horizontally, what surfaced was the memory of lying on his father’s chest as they lay on the living room couch together, taking a break from flying.
What he remembered was his dad’s steady hand on his back, keeping him safe, the waterbed lullaby of his breathing growing shallower as Dev grew sleepier. Even the way the warmth had left his father’s body was tranquilizing, like finding the cool spot on a pillow. He hadn’t woken up until his mother had opened the front door. And even after he had, he hadn’t moved, not wanting to wake his dad. It was the last good sleep Dev got for a while, thanks to his mother’s suddenly crying all the time.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 9