The plan for the backup rooster was to repeat the same steps used with number one. Unfortunately, while his human stink had proved an annoyance to the first rooster, introducing a direct breeding competitor (albeit caged) into another bird’s territory proved utterly unacceptable. He hadn’t even gotten the crated rooster all the way through the door when the backup bird cocked its head one way, then the other, its comb flopping like a bad comb-over, while at the same time, the carrier began jerking wildly as the other ball of territorial feathers thumped about every compass point in his shrunk-down world. Looking down, Dev saw talons hooked through the carrier’s grate. A stabbing beak followed, and it was all he could do, just holding on, as the uncrated bird came at him—them—claws first and crowing like dawn hadn’t just broken but exploded into a million pieces.
Backing away, Dev slipped and dropped the carrier, which proceeded to scoot and rumble around the hay-and-excrement-strewn floor, the uncrated bantam riding it, half fighting, half trying to breed. And for a moment, all Dev could do was watch, amazed by the unimaginable sordidness that went into a protein-dense breakfast.
In the end, he broke up the cockfight by sliding the pet carrier back through the doorway and then pulling the plywood sheet after it, so the rooster riding had to decide whether to keep hump fighting with broken legs or just give up and let go.
“I think I’ll call you Lucky,” Dev said to the crated rooster after draping a towel over the cage to simulate night and then strapping it into the passenger seat. “That goes for all of you,” he added, looking at the rearview mirror reflecting the two carriers he’d strapped into the back. Along with the chickens, he’d raided the barn for bags of feed, a bale of hay, an incubator, and several years’ worth of the Farmers’ Almanac. As for the inevitable, there was an ax and a foot-driven sharpening wheel. But even this eventual fate was better than what waited for the ones he was leaving behind. The local predators might be fooled by habit into leaving the untended chickens and cattle and horses alone, but eventually they’d figure it out. The darkened farmhouse at night, the overgrown fields, no more smell of diesel in the air or the sound of farm equipment. Or maybe they’d just catch a whiff of rot on the wind and follow it back to dead farmhands . . .
“Yep,” Dev said, steadying the rooster’s crate while he eyed the hens in back, “I’m calling all of you Lucky.” He paused before adding, “It’ll be easier that way.”
13
After getting home from not blowing himself up, Mo-now-Marcus found to his surprise that there was still some electricity and most of the internet left, which he decided to celebrate by downloading and playing some of the loudest, head-banging-est, Satan-loving-est death metal he could find, the sort that could make a teenage boy’s heart feel its most alive because that’s what Marcus still was: alive! The bass made the windows wobble and hit him in the chest like the explosion from his suicide vest. Looking at his reflection bowing in and out, he flashed devil horns with both fists, because this Marcus guy never did anything halfway, including apostasy.
The thing with head banging, though—after a while, that’s what it feels like: like you’re banging your head against a wall. And though Marcus had his reasons for doing so—first to knock some sense in, and next to justify with physical pain the tears that kept coming for all he’d lost—after about a week, he could tell it was time to stop and did so. The problem was, even once the music stopped, the windows still wobbled while the floor underneath his feet kept on shaking.
Earthquake, he thought, in the blasé way he affected, though it had been harder since nearly becoming collateral damage outside the 7-Eleven. But blasé or not, Marcus knew he shouldn’t be in his bedroom where the floor could collapse out from under him. He should be at ground level, under the arched doorway between the living room and kitchen. The wall it was in was load bearing, and the arch itself provided additional, structural strength, should things start falling down around him, as they occasionally did ever since the frackers came, along with informational pamphlets about the importance of load-bearing walls and standing under archways during an earthquake. So Marcus took the steps two at a time to the living room, which was surprisingly dark for the middle of the day.
He’d thrown open the curtains after getting home from not blowing himself up, seeing as there were no neighbors to see anything anymore. And he’d left the curtains open ever since, getting a certain thrill, walking in front of them naked just because he could. The point was, at this time of day, on a day like this, the living room should be bright and cheery, not buried in gloom.
But then he saw them, blocking the ground floor windows on all sides of the house. Pigs, both domesticated and feral, their squeals pitched high and hanging over the heavy bass of their hooves. Oklahoma’s neighbor state Texas had been breeding the sausage kind since the mid-1800s, according to his ag studies teacher, an antikosher and/or halal neo-Nazi aptly named Bücher but pronounced butcher behind his back. The fanged kind—per the same source—had been imported as Eurasian wild boar in the 1930s by Texas sportsmen for target practice. But then “nature kinda ran away with itself—you boys know what I mean—and lo and behold: hogpocalypse.” The Butcher had gone on to explain that the feral pig population in the US had exploded to around six million or roughly one pig for every fifty people, and they’d spread to nearly every southern state, including Oklahoma and as far east as Florida and up through Georgia into the Carolinas, causing approximately $2 billion in damage and control costs per year.
“And you’re probably wondering why I’m yammering on about this,” Mr. Bücher said, preparing to bring his lecture in for a landing. “It’s because swine eradication’s gonna be the next growth industry, boys. Once this fracking thing taps out, it’s all gonna be about hunting hogs.” He closed by doing his Porky Pig impersonation, waving the class out with a “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”
That lecture had left Mo-now-Marcus with a greater appreciation for religious prohibitions against eating pork—a sentiment only strengthened by his current predicament. He’d taken the class only because all the football players took the class, an easy GPA booster for those who might need the buffer. Who knew a blow-off class for jocks might actually come in handy—if only for explaining his current predicament.
Speaking of which: there had to be about twenty pigs out there, a half-dozen domesticated monsters lumbering about, bumping into the side of the house, making the walls shake, and the rest, these smaller but scarier fanged variety, covered in wiry hair and rooting up clods of lawn with their preternaturally long snouts. Both varieties of pigs were omnivores, he remembered from the lecture, but didn’t need to; he could see it for himself, especially after he tried to scare a path through them with his father’s shotgun and watched them cannibalize the one pig he’d made a lesson of. After that, there was really nothing to do but wait them out as the pigs ate their way through whatever parts of the local landscape they found tasty.
Lucy hadn’t heard Sir Sheds when he wrapped himself in his leash, the dog’s reaction to that particular humiliation being an embarrassed whimper. But she heard him this time, a full-throated bark that sounded like it was coming from a much larger animal. Going to the window, she saw what warranted so much noise from such a little dog: rats. Dozens of them, skittering in waves down the street like something out of the Pied Piper story, minus the flute.
Lucy was appalled. She hated rats deep down in her DNA. She hated the way the sun stretched out their shadows, making them look even bigger, more hunchbacked. And she hated watching Sir Sheds straining at his leash, each bark propelling him upward like he’d fly if he could. She felt like darting out and snatching him inside, safe and away from the steady, rodential flow polluting her once-decent neighborhood. But there’d be the hassle of undoing the leash, the possibility of Sir Sheds bounding out of her arms to join the rats because there was no way he was beating them, stupid dog. Under all that fur, he probably wasn’t much bigger than they were. Fortunately,
the actual rodents didn’t seem to notice the yapping mutt attempting to fly in their direction. They were too busy getting to where they were going—a destination Lucy could guess: the bodies, of course.
The bodies had spent about a week in the Georgia sun by then, plenty of time to get fragrant. Lucy herself had started using her hair like a wind vane, letting her know where to point her face if she didn’t want to get sick every time she went outside. She kept telling herself to go to the army surplus downtown, get herself a gas mask, one with charcoal canisters for capturing sarin or whatever. Except every time she went out, her plans and thoughts scattered, replaced by one overriding need: getting back inside.
So: rats.
Of course.
They had rotting flesh to get to. And once their numbers dwindled to a few then none, Lucy figured she’d seen the worst when it came to unwelcome critters parading through her designated comfort zone—an uncharacteristically upbeat thought for a girl whose chosen color was black. It just never occurred to her that instead of running toward something, it was equally likely they were running away.
Marcus went back to his room on the second floor to get a better idea of how many there were only to realize that they were still gathering. In the distance he could see several more of the domesticated variety, likely escaped from family farms and petting zoos, huffing and hoofing after their fleeter cousins, eager to get in on the everything buffet the avant-garde of the species had found to its delight, finally and completely unguarded.
Mr. Bücher had said that pigs were incredibly smart animals, and here they were in the process of proving it, by consolidating, by seeking out more of their number and joining the strength those numbers offered. His handlers had pitched jihad and the new caliphate to him in much the same way—conveniently ignoring how counterproductive it was to encourage new members to blow themselves up. Looking now at these porcine inheritors of earth, he couldn’t imagine any of them being stupid enough to put on a suicide vest. Nope, it took the pigheaded—not pigs—to do something like that.
Abandoning his attempts at conducting a local pig census—it was a moving target, after all—Mo moved on to the view from his parents’ bedroom window, to better survey the damage from whence they’d come. There, across the street, his neighbor’s lawn was completely gone, replaced by trampled mud and bits of bushes tossed off to the side like parsley. It had gone worse for the neighbor herself: the wife. She’d died in the driveway, car door still open, groceries dropped. Now there was no evidence of her or the groceries. The car’s door had been bumped off its hinges, the car itself, knocked partway onto another neighbor’s lawn, one tire rubbed till it blew out, the lack of clearance the only thing that spared the grass underneath the chassis, resting there unmolested like the car’s dark-green shadow.
The pigs had buzz cut the earth, mowing everything down to the dirt. Moving back to his bedroom window, Marcus watched as the growing herd finished up with his yard before moving on to the next-door neighbor’s, the one he shared a fence with—the fence the herd made short work of, the chain link sprung and unraveling. He looked down with a certain grim satisfaction at where the uniforms that had charged his family to tear down his swing set had been working before. They’d died like everybody else, leaving their bodies in the backyard for him to look at when he’d gotten back from school. He’d not thought much of them, other than thinking a silent, Good riddance, in their direction. And now that the pigs had been through, the only things left were metal buckles, key rings, hard hats . . .
“Good riddance,” Marcus said aloud, imagining the foreman’s passage through pig guts, regretting only that it hadn’t happened sooner, before the swing set came down. Though he hadn’t used it in years, he thought he might like to hear the old chains squeak a few more times before going to wherever the pigs weren’t.
When Lucy woke to noise in the middle of the night, she took it for thunder or a passing train. Groggily, she had to remind herself that the second wasn’t likely anymore, occupying her brain just enough so she didn’t stop to wonder where the lightning was if that really was thunder. Instead, she pulled a pillow over her head and dreamed she was on a train, rocking her to sleep in both the dream and the real world too.
In the morning, she saw how mistaken she was about the sound from the night before. In her defense, however, she’d never personally heard a herd of pigs stampede before. She’d heard about the feral pig problem on the radio farm report as she scanned through stations, trying to find something other than right-wing bloviators and pulpit-pounding preachers. But that was the closest they’d ever gotten to the Buckhead region of Atlanta. Perhaps the smell of still-living humans had kept them at bay; perhaps it was just the traffic-choked freeways. But now that both those perhaps had been rendered nonapplicable . . .
That’s when she realized the rats hadn’t been running to but from. Good for you, rats. Smart. Not like . . .
Lucy stopped. Thought: Sir Sheds! Ran to the front door, opened it, saw not just the mess the pigs had left behind, but also what they hadn’t. As inadvertently foretold, all that was left were a few hairs and a plop of dog poop. They’d also left some blood spatters, the metal clip from the leash, the buckle from the collar, and part of an ear, presumably Sir Sheds’s, though she’d never seen one before, just felt them here and there, under his fur.
She wanted to cry, but didn’t, realizing she hadn’t before—not for all the people who, she now admitted, must have included her family. The loss hit her through a complicated combination shot by way of Sir Sheds: she wanted to tell her mother what had happened to her dog. And that’s when it all came crashing down: the . . . rest of it was made out of people, like Soylent Green, including all the people she’d ever known and loved. There was no one left to talk to about it or anything else, ever. No shoulders left to cry on—ever—not anymore.
She hadn’t cried back then—couldn’t—because she was too stunned. And the passage of time hadn’t lessened the yawning nothingness she felt whenever she tried to feel something. If anything, she was even more stunned now.
Stunned: as she kicked in the door of her neighbor’s house, the one with the car in the drive. Stunned: as she plucked his keys out of the ashtray on the coffee table next to the couch where the owner had been napping before his nap was extended indefinitely. Stunned: as she revved the engine and drove away from the lawns and flower beds of her neighborhood, all turned over, dirt-side up. Stunned: as she drove—stunned block after stunned block—until she came to a place it seemed like the pigs hadn’t gotten to yet and then kept driving, thataway: stunned.
14
Dev set the chickens up in the attached garage, splitting up the floor space with strewn hay, potting soil for dirt baths, and laundry baskets lined with his parents’ old clothes for nesting. Water was delivered via the plastic tub his stepfather used to soak his aching feet after standing all day, washed thoroughly to remove any lingering traces of Epsom salt, while feed was delivered through the same handheld broadcast spreader his stepdad had used during the winter to salt the sidewalk. As chicken coops went, sure, it was on the minimalist side, but what it lacked in accommodations, it made up for in space—at least compared with the coop they’d come from.
It was while he stood over the kitchen sink by the window, rinsing feathers and hay out of his stepdad’s footbath, that Dev spotted him: the neighbor’s dog, a black Lab named Diablo, waiting to be let in the door just off his owner’s back porch. He wasn’t howling; he wasn’t scratching at the door, just sitting at attention. He’d been locked out for about a week since the whatever-it-was, and in all that time, Dev hadn’t heard him bark, even though his food bowl and water dish were both empty. What he’d subsisted on during that time—rats, rabbits, birds?—Dev didn’t know, but one thing was clear: all told, the dog seemed to be handling doomsday exceptionally well.
Dev’s stepdad had hated Diablo—used to say Diablo was a good name for a hellhound. The feeling was apparently mutual
. The only time Dev could remember the dog making any noise was when his stepfather crossed through their backyard, wearing his pharmacy jacket. “Maybe you remind him of the vet,” his mom had tried, which angered the pharmacist even more, as if such a misunderstanding was a willful affront to the profession of pill dispensation.
Personally, Dev never had any trouble with the dog. Back in the days of the comfort animal debate, he’d decided he wanted a black Lab, just like Diablo. Before getting distracted by the end of the world, he’d looked forward to seeing his neighbor’s dog when he left for school in the morning and returned in the afternoon. Diablo was always there, the only creature on the planet visibly happy to see him.
Unlike the moods of humans, Diablo’s weren’t subtle; they shouted themselves with every muscle of the dog’s body. They were so loud even Dev understood them. Sometimes, doing the dishes at the kitchen sink, looking out at Diablo’s run, he’d wave to the dog, imagining they could read each other’s minds, the dog’s thoughts being in type large enough even an Aspie could read them.
Bolting through the back door and up to the fence line, Dev reached over to pet his animal buddy. “Hey there, devil dog,” he said, scratching behind a big, floppy black ear. “You’re a good dog, aren’t you, huh? Such a good dog. How’d I forget about such a good dog?”
Judging from Diablo’s tongue, lapping away at his free hand through the chain-link fence, his forgetting was already forgotten. Instead, the dog’s eyes just angled up at him, full of animal adoration. Seeing the look, Dev stopped scratching. “Listen, buddy,” he began—redundantly, seeing as the dog was obviously all ears to whatever his human had to say. “I’ve got some bad news . . .”
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 11