Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  He looked at the couch now, as full of ghost dents as his secondhand mattress. The difference was he loved the ghost who’d first made those dents, the last person he could remember to whom the word love truly applied. And so Dev grabbed the blanket and pillows from his room and took them to the couch. He placed the clock on the coffee table, and his head on the pillow, scrunched up next to the arm of the couch where his father—his real father—had died with him in his arms. That—and not having a target on his back anymore—made a world of difference when it came to sleeping, which Dev proceeded to do—just like a baby.

  “Priorities.”

  Under the happy-doomsday note, he’d written a reminder for the day: he needed to set priorities. Like most invalids (and those treated like invalids), Dev hadn’t had to worry about setting priorities before the whatever-it-was. His parents—the real one and the fake—had set priorities for him, leaving Dev to focus obsessively on trivia and vacuum cleaners. But now that his caretakers had taken their leave, well, Dev had better get busy deciding what needed to be decided. He hoped he’d do a better job of it than he had picking friends.

  “First things first,” he said out loud, raking a hand through his hair before giving his tangled mane a shake. He could feel the previous day on his fingers, rubbed two together, felt the oiliness, sniffed it too. Yep. “Shower,” he announced to the nobody who cared whether he took one or not.

  Dev knew that a lot of Aspies don’t care for showers. The drops hitting their skin either tickle like feathers, feel like someone trying to get their attention, or pelt them like hail the size of golf balls. This aversion to showering often leads to a side benefit only an Aspie could appreciate: a significant increase in personal space. And Dev appreciated this—he did—except that smell was one of his amped-up senses, one that didn’t distinguish between his stench and that of others when it came to being offended.

  Not that he didn’t have showering issues. There’d been a lot of experimenting with water pressure and showerheads before they found the Goldilocks combination that was just right. First, no interruptions in flow—no syncopation or strobe effects like with most shower massagers. For Dev, the sudden on-off pressure was like an anxiety machine gun, his body tensing between each pulse until he either jumped out of the shower, threw up, or both. Second, the stream couldn’t be too misty or too tight. The former felt like someone blowing, the latter like being poked by broom handles. Heavy rain was what he needed—a downpour. He had to not feel the individual drops, but instead a constant, wet embrace.

  Once they’d found the right combination, his parents had noted that keeping Dev clean wasn’t a problem anymore; keeping him dry was. “Again?” his stepfather would ask as Dev walked from his bedroom to the bathroom wearing nothing but boxers.

  “Panic attack,” he’d learned to reply, a justification that caused his stepfather to shoo him on, throwing in the proverbial towel.

  Taking a shower that first post-whatever morning, Dev’s enjoyment was tainted by the realization that it couldn’t last. Sooner or later, the taps would tap out, the spigots squeak with nothing to show for it. He had no doubt about getting enough water; it fell from the sky, after all. Purification? He had downloaded instructions from the internet while he still had it. But what about water pressure? Would gravity and acceleration be enough? Could he hoist a bucket so that when he dumped the water over himself, the effect would be the same as that of the showers to which he’d grown not only accustomed, but depended upon for mental as well as physical hygiene? Seemed it would have to be an awfully short shower, or an awfully big bucket. And getting it high enough so it came down hard enough meant he couldn’t do it in the house, so winter was going to be a problem. Plus, for all he knew, just waiting for that quick hit of water might produce more anxiety than the dousing could possibly alleviate.

  “Okay,” Dev said to his reflection after wiping away the steam, “Project Number One: The Shower Situation.”

  The problem with establishing priorities based upon projecting how much you’re going to miss something is this: that’s not how priorities work. Set one, and as you move through your day, you quickly realize how interconnected everything is. Take the shower project. Getting a decent shower would mean using all three of the utilities currently on life support: water, gas, and electricity—the first for obvious reasons, the second for heat, and the third to create enough pressure. Rain could replace the faucet, the fireplace would serve as water heater, and he’d heard enough generators put-putting around the neighborhood whenever there was a blackout to know where to get the electricity. The last puzzle piece was a pump of some sort to create pressure.

  Fortunately, Dev was familiar with something that worked a lot like a pump, thanks to his obsession with vacuum cleaners, including the subset of wet/dry Shop-Vacs. The average such machine had two ports for attaching a hose: one for suction, the other for blowing. His stepfather had used theirs to drain the laundry room after a blocked sink left it flooded. Dev could just fill the collection drum with hot water, fit the hose with a showerhead, and instead of sucking water into the drum, flush it out. Use a dimmer switch to adjust how fast the water pumped, which would translate into pressure on Dev’s end.

  But then priority creep settled in. Generators need gasoline. Fine. Dev could get it from the SUVs parked all over the neighborhood. Except something happened to gasoline when it lay around too long—something his stepfather always remembered too late, the first time each season he went to use the snowblower or lawnmower. Presumably, gas stations had something to keep the gas from settling, but gas station pumps ran on electricity. To get a decent shower, Dev was going to need gasoline to get electricity, and electricity to get gasoline.

  So he’d need to ration the energy situation. What else couldn’t he live without that needed electricity? Most of his gadgets ran on rechargeable batteries, meaning he could run the generator, charge them, and then turn it off. Light? There were candles, kerosene lamps, the fireplace, those solar-powered path lights everybody seemed to have nowadays. So what else?

  As if in answer, the refrigerator’s compressor switched on and started cycling.

  Crap, Dev thought.

  A freezer seemed obvious, at least for the warmer months, to keep frozen however much frozen meat he managed to rescue from the world’s last and longest blackout. As far as how much meat that might amount to, the hunter next door had a dedicated freezer in his garage for storing venison. It was empty at the moment, he’d heard his neighbor tell his stepfather, thanks to two missed deer-hunting seasons: the first because his neighbor had accidentally shot himself, and the second because his neighbor’s hunting buddies wouldn’t let it drop.

  As far as the fuel situation went, he wouldn’t have to run the freezer constantly. Once it got down to freezing, he’d work out a schedule, limiting the times it was opened to keep the cold in. Dev remembered his mother and her husband having the same argument whenever the power went out.

  “Just keep the door shut and we’ll be fine,” his stepdad would insist.

  “But what about food pois—”

  “The last time you defrosted,” he’d cut her off. “Remind me again, how long did that take?”

  These arguments invariably ended with his mom telling the step that nobody liked a know-it-all, followed by said step reminding her she’d married two.

  But did he need a refrigerator too? Dev opened his own to see what needed to be kept cold that he couldn’t live without. Ketchup, mustard, salad dressing, lunch meat, a six-pack of beer minus two, orange juice, milk, cheese, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, some diet pop, the last batch of his mother’s chicken soup (ever), an aluminum foil brick he knew to contain emergency cash intended to fool burglars if they ever got robbed, and that was about it. Dev was all ready to move on, when he bumped aside a tub of butter and his heart sank.

  Crap, Dev thought.

  Eggs were what Dev had for breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Cereal? Not b
reakfast. Breakfast bars? False advertising. Pop-Tarts? Be healthier smoking a pack of cigarettes. As far as he was concerned, all such breakfast impersonators were stomach occupiers that left him feeling bloated and vaguely depressed.

  “But it’s fiber,” his own mother had tried one day after carelessly running out of eggs and replacing them with a bran muffin.

  “Fiber is for old people,” Dev rebutted this lame bait and switch. “It helps them poop. I don’t have any problem pooping.”

  Dev looked inside the carton—complete, minus the two for breakfast the morning before. Assuming two eggs per day, that meant he had five days of breakfast left—well within the carton’s expiration date, but far short of Dev’s own. Even if he raided his neighbors’ refrigerators, the expiration dates wouldn’t be much more than a month on either side of the one he was staring at now like the second set of numbers on a tombstone: his.

  Was that overdoing it? Dev didn’t think so and had learned he could blame his amygdala. The catastrophe in this situation? It was simple. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, but without eggs, he’d have to skip it. But without the most important meal of the day, how could said day begin? It couldn’t, clearly. He might as well stay in bed. And if his day never started, how was he supposed to get to lunch, and from lunch to dinner? That was equally obvious; he couldn’t. So: no eggs, no food; no food, no Dev; ipso facto, egglessness equaled Devlessness.

  Even with all the gasoline in the world and a refrigerator full of eggs, eating them for every meal with hard-boiled snacks in between until he looked like he might start laying his own, eventually he’d run out or they’d go bad. Meaning Dev was a goner unless . . .

  Exiting the house and walking the street, Dev picked the biggest pickup he could find, the owner of which was still seated inside, keys in the ignition, engine off, forehead resting on the dash. It was impossible to tell if he’d just returned or was just heading out. In either case, he was dead now and so Dev unbuckled the body, pulled it out, and hoisted himself up behind the steering wheel. He’d already raided the unlocked garages in the neighborhood for some of the supplies he might need, including: the rifle from last night, ammunition, a pair of leather work gloves, bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, duct tape, bungee cords, three empty pet carriers, rope, an ax, a machete, a chain saw, a case of water, and a roll of chicken wire, mainly because of the name. All of these were piled into the bed of the pickup truck, after which Dev pickpocketed a few of his neighbors’ credit cards, in case he needed more gas and the pumps’ card readers still worked.

  To chart his route to farm country, he resorted once again to his phone and Google Maps, figuring he should take advantage while he still could. He drove toward the relatively unroaded parts of the map, where the grids of cities yielded to solitary offshoots snaking through large areas of gray or green but not blue, to avoid driving into one of the state’s eleven thousand lakes, not counting the great ones surrounding it. Along the way, Dev made use of side streets, gravel and mud roads, parking lots, sidewalks, lawns, and vacant fields—pretty much anything reasonably flat and body-free. But he drove so slowly that after an hour, he was still passing through retail areas interspersed with suburban neighborhoods and industrial stretches sporting tank farms and smokestacks that had stopped staining the sky around them, before repeating the pattern all over again. The only thing that changed, and not by much, was the street signs, alternating between dead presidents and trees that didn’t grow there anymore, with a little unpronounceable French in between.

  Eventually, this sense of déjà vu started working in Dev’s favor, overwhelming his need to map with sheer monotony, kind of like how a file-compression utility minimizes the need for disk space. And so he pushed it up to thirty, didn’t puke, and goosed it to thirty-five. Still puke-free, thirty-five became forty, became forty-five, then fifty. Thus Dev discovered the attraction of speed: it made the boring stuff go by faster. Soon, the strip malls, tract homes, and “Coming Soon” signs yielded to open stretches of grassland, then woodland, then billboards for outlet stores, antiques, bait shops, and truck stops. Dev was doing fifty-five (still fifteen miles below the limit) when he noticed an interesting thing about driving several tons of metal at that velocity: smaller stuff lost, every time. As long as he avoided trees and brick walls, it was smooth sailing, with the occasional glance in the rearview for flying fur or feathers.

  Another hour in and Dev was passing signs for pick-your-own farms, followed by vast stubble fields dotted with rolled bales of hay, collapsing barns, and horses posing for postcards. Everywhere else, vast green, leafy swaths of corn, the stalks about thirty inches high, in rows miles long. Turning down a stretch passing between fields of the stuff, Dev started seeing signs posted on telephone poles, trees, stop signs. Some were little more than cardboard and Magic Marker, others laser printed on fancy, colored stock, while one was just a paper plate with the bottom sliced into phone-number tags for ripping off. Each sign was an advertisement for the local lifestyle: tractor repairs, tractor for sale, tractor for parts, the name of a lawyer who specialized in tractor accidents. And then, on a scrap of lumber nailed to a tree and painted in whitewash white—“Fresh Eggs”—followed by an arrow pointing up.

  Turning from pavement, Dev drove down a dirt road flanked on either side by fields of stunted green corn stalks that appeared to be shaking with more than the breeze. It seemed like cows that had been grazing elsewhere when the whatever-it-was happened had wandered wherever their bovine curiosity took them, which for some was the cornfields he was just now driving between, broken stalks tipping into the dirt road before being smacked out of the way by the truck’s bumper. From the cab, Dev could see the cows drawing nearer, their legs eclipsed by leaves and shadow, their big heads and shoulders hovering above the green, looking like hippos wading through swamp. The cattle seemed curious but unhurried, ambling amiably his way, exuding the animal confidence that comes with hauling around a ton of beef packed to your bones.

  Dev stopped to let one cow pass, only to be ambushed by another, its black-and-white head gliding through the field until the corn parted and there was the whole thing, its barrel-muscled chest intimidating just by being there, its tongue pressing obscenely against the driver-side window. Yelping like a stepped-on poodle, Dev began pounding on the car’s horn to scare the animal away—stopping only when he felt the earth rumbling underneath him.

  He wasn’t sure how many charging cows constituted a stampede but figured even one, aimed unfortunately, was too much. And so he went back to the horn, hammering away at it, creating, he hoped, enough of a deterrent so the leaderless cattle drive heading his way would take however many cloven steps were needed to avoid a head-on collision with the source of all that racket. Just in case, he hit the alarm, his high beams, and the hazard lights too. And the wave of cattle parted around him, judging by the sound of it, the gonging of vegetable matter against metal sliding into a gentle swish. In all, it was perhaps a minute of pure terror; Dev couldn’t be sure because even after the ground stopped shaking, his body kept going, his eyes closed, his pulse sounding like the ocean in his ears. Why his brain didn’t hit “Ctrl-Alt-Del,” he didn’t know, but he was grateful it hadn’t, especially since there was no one left to make sure he rebooted with all his files.

  When Dev finally opened his eyes, all he could see was the haze of settled pesticide dusting the windshield followed by leaves and crippled stalks once he flicked on the wipers. And then something he hadn’t seen before, but could now that the cows had mowed down all the carefully planted rows stretching to the horizon on either side of him. In the distance off to his right, a farmhouse stood, visible through his passenger-side window, asterisked with corn spatter. Next to the house sat a tractor that had stopped in the middle of some tractor business, now playing roost to a bunch of crows. Set a little ways farther back from the house and idle tractor, a barn and, next to that, a white building on stilts with a pair of gangplanks leading up on either sid
e. The building was covered by an extended roof like a front porch and screened in, appropriately enough, by chicken wire.

  “Bingo,” Dev whispered, as if the sound of his voice, even this far away, might make it all disappear.

  He’d googled raising chickens before setting out on his quest for the sustainable breakfast. The math suggested he needed about four hens and a rooster. That way, he could set aside some eggs for food and the rest for future generations. While chickens can live for eight to ten years, he had no way of knowing how much of that time the grown specimens he’d be starting with had already burned through. So it would be prudent to get started on that next generation sooner rather than later—especially since he had no intention of coming out this way again, even if there was a chance there’d be anything left when he did.

  He thought about getting two roosters, one for backup, not wanting to put all his egg fertilizers in one basket. But when he entered the coop, he found it was actually two coops, each with about ten hens and one rooster, each feathered harem walled off from the other. In retrospect, those walls should have been a hint, as should the fact that cockfighting was still a thing in some of the world’s more savage places. But the phenomenon of cockfighting had never really crossed his radar. And so, after picking his four hens and packing them away in two of the pet carriers following the recommended handling instructions he’d googled, Dev returned to the divided coop with his third and last carrier.

  The hens hadn’t minded each having a roommate; considering the coop situation, sharing space with just one other bird instead of nine must have seemed almost like a private room. Dev saw no reason why the roosters should be any different. Sure, the first had put up a squawk—literally—when Dev entered his territory, but those YouTube videos on how to hypnotize a chicken had come in handy. Wearing work gloves, he’d scooped the bird up, pressed its head to the floor, and then drew a line with his finger, starting at the bird’s beak and drawing it out until the rooster’s eyes crossed and it went limp. He’d then set him aside until it was the rooster’s turn for crating, when he snapped out of it and resumed his angry, but now pointless clucking.