Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  All in all, Diablo took the news that his owners were never coming home reasonably well, especially since Dev leavened it with the news that he had decided to adopt the devil dog.

  “Would you like that?” he asked, cheating by asking it after he’d returned from the kitchen with two Tupperware bowls, one full of water, the other a can of Campbell’s Chunky beef stew. Afterward, wherever his boy went, Diablo went too.

  And that’s how Dev figured he avoided talking to a soccer ball named Wilson—not that he really believed he was capable of such a thing, dog or no dog. Dev was an aficionado of aloneness—always had been. In a position to serve it, he’d have done solitary confinement on his head. A dog-less postapocalyptic world would be a piece of cake. But having a dog was nice, even if his need for a comfort animal seemed largely to go away—along with all the people who’d made him uncomfortable.

  For having spent most of his life outside, Diablo adjusted to the indoors pretty quickly. After dinner and a little stargazing, during which Dev felt compelled to point out Sirius, the Dog Star, the two settled in for a good night’s sleep: the human on the living room couch and Diablo . . . also on the couch, on top of Dev. At first, he tried pushing the animal off, but then noticed how the dog’s weight pressing down on him actually felt good. It was Dev’s paradoxical relationship with being touched: light touches freaked him out, while being squeezed calmed him down, just like those high-pressure showers of his.

  “You know what,” he said, addressing Diablo, whose nose was conveniently close to his own. “On second thought, stay. This is good. You’re good where you’re at.”

  Dev yanked the chain on the little lamp next to the couch on the end table, and the house went dark. He could feel Diablo lowering his head to his chest and had a fleeting moment of déjà vu, back to when he’d fallen asleep as his father held him, only the roles were flipped this time—Diablo was Dev, and Dev was his father. His real father—the one who visited him in a dream that night, for the first time in a long time.

  “How’s the ticker?” his dream dad asked.

  “The what?”

  “Ticker,” his dad said. “Your heart.”

  “Kind of heavy,” Dev said in the dream, feeling the weight of Diablo pressing down on him through the fog of sleep. “Like it’s full of something.”

  “That’s responsibility,” his dream dad said. “And love.”

  “I thought love was supposed to be like fireworks,” the boy said.

  “Nope,” his dream dad said. “It’s like a lump in your throat. But in your heart.”

  “Oh,” Dev said in the dream, thinking it sounded more like a blood clot than love, but not quibbling for once.

  The next day was perfect. It should have been a school day but wasn’t and never would be again. Dev and Diablo woke at the same time, to the same sound: the rooster in the garage, crowing. Though Dev had closed the overhead door against any wandering critters with a taste for poultry, there were windows in the front through which the rising sun made itself known, knifing through the dark, igniting the rooster’s spidey senses. With a reinforced door and insulated walls between the rooster and them, the noise of its crowing was muffled just enough so that it woke them without causing Diablo to bark wildly or Dev to want to break things.

  “Morning, devil dog,” he said, opening his eyes to the big, wet eyes of his buddy and blanket. Diablo’s big paws were resting, sphinxlike in front of him, one on each of his human’s shoulders. At the sound of Dev’s voice, the dog proceeded to lick the Labrador crap out of him until the boy just had to laugh—something he’d almost never had to do before. As it turned out, he liked it. The way his insides jiggled felt good—like exercise, but without boring him to death.

  Of course, there were limits.

  “Okay, okay,” he finally protested. “I’m getting pruney already.”

  Feeling Dev push up ever so slightly, Diablo took the hint and relocated himself to the floor with a quick clatter of dog nails on hardwood.

  “Guess I should have warned you about the roommates,” he said, his head tilted toward the garage. “And”—reaching for the still-wound alarm clock—“guess we won’t be needing this.” After unsetting the alarm, he rested his hands on his knees and rubbed them, back and forth, contemplatively.

  “So,” he announced, “got any plans for the day?”

  Dev did. Several, actually. Plenty for both of them. Having plans was one of the things that would make the day perfect. Because nothing beat nothing like something, and now that Dev was on his own, he had plenty of somethings to do. Like locating the Shop-Vac for when the shower went out. Like making breakfast with eggs fresh from his own chickens. Like setting the neighbor’s lawn on fire . . .

  Not that arson was the original plan. He’d started the way he assumed he should, with a shovel, rake, hoe, and the bag of feed corn he planned to plant to ensure a supply of chicken feed into the foreseeable (and sustainable) future. But it was a big yard, and cultivating was hard, turning the soil over a shovelful at a time. After picking through the first few clumps, sifting and inspecting to make sure there was no grass or grass roots that’d take hold again, Dev looked around and realized that the combination of the yard’s square footage and his OCD would mean he’d still be at it by the time the first flakes fell.

  But then he remembered a show on PBS his mom watched, about the history of agriculture and something called “slash-and-burn” farming. It wasn’t necessarily the most environmentally friendly form of farming, especially not when practiced in the Amazon rain forest, but Dev figured that nothing he could do would reverse the environmental boon of everyone else being dead.

  And so he took the gallon of gasoline his neighbor had set aside for his lawn mower, dumped it into a sprinkling can, and sprinkled the lawn from corner to corner, before stepping back to his side of the fence and flicking a match. Diablo woofed as his old world was swallowed up by a circle of flame spreading outward from where the match landed, like ripples running away from a stone. The fire was pale in the sunlight, manifesting itself more as heat shimmers, as the grass itself darkened, then lightened, becoming a thousand tiny embers before blowing away and turning to ash as they cooled: an early, gray snow. Eventually, the fire died as its fuel did, leaving dirt above, dead, compost-ready roots below.

  A pick, a hoe, a rake—lots of sweat, but laughing in spite of it—Diablo playing foreman (or foredog) while Dev did all the work. “We’re getting there,” he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve before removing his shirt. The early-summer breeze on his sweaty skin felt like a miracle. Why hadn’t anyone ever told him about this? To hear his stepfather tell it, any work that involved sweating might as well be done by an ape. To hear the television tell it, the very act of sweating was something embarrassing and in need of chemical prevention. Apparently, sweating was just another one of those things the neurotypicals got wrong.

  “I’d invite you to join me,” Dev said, addressing his furry friend. “But dogs don’t sweat; they pant.” He paused. “Which you’re free to continue doing, by the way.” Diablo, as if waiting for the permission, panted even harder, like watching his human work was pretty hard work itself.

  Once the corn was planted, Dev showered again because he could—still, for the time being, without needing gasoline for a generator to run a Shop-Vac backward. After dressing, it was time for lunch, some soup and a sandwich from what remained of the refrigerator’s lunch meat and a can from the kitchen cabinet. Diablo got some kind of stew again, which seemed to be his favorite stew, i.e., some kind. Dev, meanwhile, read the cans’ labels while he ate, a habit going back as far as he could remember.

  This time was different, however. This time, Dev didn’t look at the labels as exercise for his eyes or something to kill time while he chewed. This time, he actually looked at the ingredients and their percentages with an eye toward actually living off the stuff. “I’m going to have a heart attack before I’m twenty,” he announced to Diablo. “Th
e sodium alone is off the charts. My head will literally explode.”

  Diablo looked up from his some kind of stew.

  “We’re going to have to do something about this,” Dev said, and after lunch, they did.

  Just like he’d read the labels with fresh, postapocalyptic eyes, Dev toured his neighborhood after lunch, looking at how much of it he could eat. And to those new eyes, the world suddenly seemed like a Jewish mother in a sitcom; it wanted him to “Eat, eat . . .” Food didn’t rain down like manna, per se; it sprang up like dandelions, mushrooms, rhubarb, wild strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, sunflowers—all already there with no effort on his part but partaking. Food also came hopping in and flying over and swimming by. Sure, it’d be a while before he trusted the Ecorse River as a food source, but eventually even it would provide a meal or two a week, the catch fresher than anything he could have gotten at Kroger’s before the whatever-it-was.

  There was, of course, a certain amount of skill required to differentiate food from poison when it came to flora and fungus. Fortunately, his stepfather, the cheapskate, had several books on foraging and freeganism he’d bought for pennies at yard sales, determined to stretch the family’s food dollar by means of free salad that he’d scavenge and prepare but never partake of, being a devout carnivore. He’d forage a T-bone if he could, he’d said, but hunting in residential areas was frowned upon, at least back then. Not to say that he didn’t come close. He once fought over the ownership of some roadkill, pulling off to the shoulder while the driver who’d grilled it was still stunned from being punched in the face by his airbag. When he’d returned home, the blood in his stepdad’s trunk attested to how close they’d come to eating free venison, while the blind sockets where his headlights had been attested to the persuasive power of a tire iron.

  The point was Dev’s little corner of the world was a bountiful place, despite the suburban kitsch of lawn gnomes, fake geese, or waterless bird baths topped with colorfully mirrored gazing balls. The tackiness of these did not suck the world dry of its eagerness to please the belly or parched throat. Before he went looking, Dev figured his one option for staying hydrated, once the taps ran dry and he’d emptied the neighborhood of its bottled water, was to start treating rainwater. Worried about losing the internet, he made a point of downloading plans for making his own water treatment system. It wasn’t as bad as he thought; gravel, sand, and activated charcoal seemed to be the main ingredients. He wasn’t sure what the difference was between regular barbecue charcoal and the active kind but learned it was pretty basic chemistry. All he needed was some heat and that other bulk staple of suburban garages, at least in the Midwest: rock salt.

  But there was a far easier and time-honored way for purifying water, called photosynthesis. Sunlight, dirt, and biology would do the hard part, and all Dev had to do was squeeze. His neighbors who couldn’t afford privacy fences had bequeathed everything he needed by growing grapes to obscure each other’s views. A good half-dozen chain-link fences in the neighborhood had been taken over, the vines growing explosively, twining and winding in, out, and around the wire diamonds, replacing the see-through chain-link fences with walls of shivering green. The grapes did the rest, filling with water, sunshine, and sugar, testing their skins, pulling down their vines with fist-sized clusters, weighted and waiting to become juice or wine or vinegar or all three.

  Elsewhere in the neighborhood, there were apple trees for cider, cherry trees for cherry juice, every kind of berry you could think of, and even tomatoes if Dev had a hankering for a virgin Bloody Mary. So even after the last bottle of Ice Mountain was sucked dry, he wouldn’t die from dehydration—a nice thing to know, especially since discovering the joys of sweating.

  In the evening of that perfect day, Dev and Diablo dined on roast beef. He’d found it in the freezer and thawed it out in the kitchen sink during the day. He originally planned to just stick it in the oven, prepared like his mother always prepared it, meaning overcooked and thus dry. But overcooked roast beef is hardly any way to celebrate a perfect day.

  The temperature had dropped sharply later in the day as clouds moved in and it began to rain. But even the rain was perfect—just enough to be entertaining without being scary. Dev left the front door open so he could hear the pattering rain falling through leaves and lit a fire in the fireplace to counteract the slight chill of having the door open. Watching the fire, listening to the rain, Dev had a moment of inspiration and stepped out to the garage, returning with the motor and spit his stepdad used for making rotisserie chicken during the one or two summer weekends when he took over cooking duty from his wife. After seasoning the meat with salt and pepper, Dev drove the spit through it and transported the skewered roast to the fireplace, where he’d set up the rest of the rotisserie.

  “This is going to be better than watching the laundry,” Dev told Diablo. As it turned out, a rotisserie in the fireplace was Dev’s equivalent of the most virulently mesmerizing of viral videos. He loved watching the gears turn, the teeth meshing neatly and predictably, their turning translated to the meat on the spit, turning slowly from white or red to golden and brown, rivulets of fat and juice drizzling down, the meat basting itself, the drops hissing against orange embers, sizzling and flaring up, the light in the living room reminding him of the light outside, now that the sun was setting—one of those golden moments cinematographers called the magic hour.

  Diablo, a remarkably patient dog—or maybe just wary of being burned—sat next to Dev, seeming to sense that his patience would be rewarded, once the meat was removed from the flame and Dev took out the carving tools. “Here, boy,” the other boy said, flinging the first slice like a meat Frisbee, one half crust, the other juicy protein, as the dog made an expert leap and caught it in midair. Landing, Diablo tossed his head back, and the meat disappeared down his throat in a single gulp. And then he watched Dev as the latter raised and chewed his own slice of meat, seeing how long the dog’s patience would last before giving in and sending another meat Frisbee Diablo’s way.

  Later, happily groggy with roast, listening to the pop of the dying fire, the steady beat of the falling rain, Dev read from one of his favorite, nonzombie survival stories, My Side of the Mountain, about a boy who runs away from civilization to live in the Catskills, where he trains a falcon and has adventures. He began by reading to himself at first, silently by the firelight, but noticed Diablo watching him, his eyes heavy with sleep, but still guarding his human.

  “You wanna hear a story?” he asked.

  Diablo didn’t say no.

  And so Dev read, aloud, and Diablo listened or seemed to, until their perfect day came to its perfect end.

  “Night, Diablo,” Dev said, his hand on the dog’s back, rising and falling as their breathing synced up, carrying them wherever boys and dogs go in their dreams.

  15

  As she drove, Lucy listened to the radio—or rather for the radio—for anything suggesting there was someone still out there. Set on perpetual scan, the station numbers counted up, dropped back, counted up again, while the world’s most earnest listener became an aficionado of static. AM was different from FM, top of the dial different from the bottom. In the first few days, she’d catch the occasional live mic broadcasting dead air—literally. She’d stop on these stations, pull over, crank up the volume, and then listen as hard as she’d ever listened to anything: the hum of lights; an air-handling system switching on; ions from solar storms sizzling through the carbon and crystal of microphones. One studio must have caught fire. She could hear the alarm going off, the tapping of the sprinkler system on the hot mic. But no voices. No living human noise. No bodies banging into obstacles as they fled. And then, a loud, staticky pop followed by another dead line in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Lucy continued scanning even as it became obvious that the electrical grid, which had been on autopilot since the whatever-it-was, was catching up with the population it once served. As the islands of light toward which she dro
ve grew farther and fewer, Lucy thought about an old VHS cassette of an even older comedian whose name always reminded her of Halloween: Red Skelton. Her father had shown the tape to her, which was about right, because the guy specialized in what she considered old-people humor: funny voices, funny hats, mussed-up hair, crossed eyes. Except he’d get serious, too, sometimes. You could tell when he was, because the act would be silent, the stage minimally lit. The one she remembered as she drove through the night featured the comic with a broom, sweeping up circles of spotlight, like a janitor, until all the spotlights were one big circle of light. And that’s when he’d sweep it into his dustpan and click: the screen went black.

  That punch line hadn’t happened yet in the world she drove through, but would. And when it did, she’d still listen to the radio, ping-ponging from empty station to empty station. She’d already found a few survivors too late to actually hang out with, their having died of something else between the thing that happened and Lucy’s finding what remained of them. In one heartbreaking case, she’d heard the shot and found a boy her age, the gun still warm as the body cooled. She figured that if there were other survivors who hadn’t gone on to kill themselves, intentionally or otherwise, they’d come in two varieties: searchers, like her, looking for others, and broadcasters signaling for others to come to them. The latter would find a radio station, take it over, and keep it going, by generator, most likely. If she’d known anything about running a radio station, that’s what she would have done.

  And so she drove, listening, hoping for a break in the static that would mean others. Other humans, she hurriedly specified. As opposed to alien overlords or something, letting the stragglers know their vacating the premises would be greatly appreciated.