The thing about listening to the ebb and flow of static day after day—it could make a person appreciate the complexity of country-western music. Not that she didn’t have musical options. She had a phone full of MP3s and the stolen car she was driving had Bluetooth, so she was good when it came to tunes for the road. Plus, she should probably stagger the radio monitoring—break it into shifts. Listen to dead air for an hour, cover the local bandwidth a couple times, listen to Nine Inch Nails, go back for another hour of Radio-Free Doomsday, take a break with some old-school Alice Cooper, “I Love the Dead,” especially, on repeat and extra loud—let the ex-populace of the latest necropolis know she cared.
“I’m on your side, dead heads!” she screamed after dropping her window. “Dead lives matter, woo-hoo!” Followed by a power fist before hastily shutting the window again. She’d closed the outside vent a few days ago and forgotten just how bad it had gotten. Now she remembered. Dead lives mattered, all right, but more importantly, dead matter stank. Hard. Like a-pie-tin-full-of-crap-in-your-face hard.
She’d finally gotten that army surplus gas mask she’d promised herself—a sweet little two-barrel number with replacement canisters—but didn’t want to wear it while driving because the lenses tended to fog up in the southern heat and humidity, which was also aiding and abetting all that decomposition out there.
“That’s a catch-22 or something,” she said to the mask, lying on the passenger seat next to her. “That’s what that is.”
And there—that was another good reason to play some tunes. Because singing along wouldn’t make her question her sanity like talking to herself did, and she’d been doing it . . .
“. . . a lot,” Lucy said to herself, completing the thought aloud.
The thing was, she didn’t trust her luck. She’d also become convinced that if she started listening to music, she’d get lost in it and miss something. Back before, driving around with her brother and a learner’s permit, she’d turn on some tunes and promptly miss the exit he’d told her was coming up “three freaking times . . .”
“Pay attention,” he’d snap, turning off the radio before changing his mind and switching it back on—but tuned to NPR, to teach her a lesson.
“I hate you,” she’d say, not knowing how soon she’d come to regret those words.
“Right back atcha, sis-boom-bah,” he’d say, grinning his older-brother goofball grin.
Listening to static for hours, hoping for signs of life, was a little like floating in an isolation tank. Deprived of the stimulation it sought, the brain started making stuff up. Or maybe it was like hearing the landline every time she stepped into a shower. Or like feeling her phone buzz against her leg, even though she could see it right there in the cup holder. Phantom ring effect: every time it happened those first few days, her heart would race, and every time, it was a false alarm. Even after the phone totally bricked on her and she tossed it into the back seat, she could still feel it vibrating against her thigh.
And that’s what did it, finally: growling at her leg to “Stop it!” That was the gateway to talking to herself. Eventually, the phantom phone stopped ringing, but Lucy kept on talking to herself. Eventually, she started hearing answers in the static.
The first time it happened, she slammed on the brakes, cranked up the volume, and shouted, “Hello, hello,” as if the radio worked both ways. But it was just like when she showered and stepped out naked for a phone that hadn’t rung or somebody who’d just hung up. And unlike with the phone, the car stereo didn’t come with caller ID.
It wasn’t voices she heard, in her head or over the radio; it was dots and dashes. Her father had been a radio operator a million years ago in the peacetime navy, back when it wasn’t just a job, but a wholesale relinquishing of your civil rights. He’d taught her the Morse code that meant (secularly) “save our ship,” but which her dad, a devout Catholic, always translated as “save our souls.” Long after she’d stopped hearing ringing phones, she heard patterns in the static, waves of sound that ebbed and swelled in what she swore was a series of three threes: dits, dahs, dits.
SOS, SOS, SOS, she thought.
“SOS, SOS, SOS,” she said, aloud.
16
Waking to the sound of crowing, Dev extricated himself from under Diablo before the two headed to the kitchen, where the human opened the refrigerator to darkness. He waved his hand through the unlit space. It was still cool but not cold. Certainly not cold enough to keep its contents from smelling, Diablo already nosing at the spoils destined to be his.
“Well,” Dev said, pressing the door closed until the gasket gasped, making it airtight like the upright coffin it now was, “it was fun while it lasted.”
And then he went from room to room, confirming that all the things that didn’t work anymore, didn’t work anymore. The lights, yes, obviously. The TV—not that there was anything to watch, but yes. The burners on the stove neither hissed nor ticked—so the gas was gone too. The little timers all around the house that always blinked midnight or noon when the power came back on after a blackout weren’t blinking at all, a little like Dev as a baby, or so he’d been told. He tried the faucet and hit the trifecta: all his utilities had died peacefully while he slept.
Well, he’d gambled. He’d gone with eggs in the “What comes first?” debate: eggs versus electricity. Which was fine; at least breakfast was locked down. The other meals he’d planned, using all that now-thawing meat? The clock was ticking—or would be if he’d remembered to wind it, which he hadn’t, defaulting to the organic alarm clock in his garage. Not that his point needed literal ticking. It needed electricity, which meant he needed gas, pronto. He also needed to relocate a neighbor’s generator or two.
But even considering all the SUVs in the neighborhood waiting to be siphoned, how long could he keep a generator puttering along? Certainly not the sixty or so years he planned to keep living. How many swimming pools would a supply like that take? And would the smell of it alone make the place uninhabitable?
Dev decided to take the chicken-run truck, the bed full of garbage cans, lids, and bungee cords to make sure they stayed on. He’d trace the streets he’d driven earlier, repeating the same clusters of franchises on infinite loop until he hit an intersection that was still lit, with a gas station on each corner, the neon open signs still burning bright. He’d pull up to a pump, hope the card readers worked, enter his zip code if asked, seeing as the credit cards all came from the pockets of neighbors.
And if there weren’t any islands of light left? Well, that’s why he loaded the smallest generator into the back of the pickup: gas, for electricity, for gas. Newton was right, after all: energy could be neither created nor destroyed, merely changed from form to form. And that was the good news, for this doomsday week two, and counting.
The last time he’d been through this part of town, he’d taken the greenway at about twenty-five miles an hour, which had been fine at the time, but gas stations were built to be accessed from the road, not by crossing somebody’s front lawn. So Dev had to take a real road this time, surrounded by stuff, as opposed to the two-lane ribbons running through nowhere he’d practically flown over during his trip through farm country. In this case, the real road was named Telegraph, and doomsday had not been kind. Everywhere he looked, there were clusters and clutches of twisted metal, plowed-over traffic signs, crashed-into trees, storefronts with the rear ends of cars and trucks sticking out of them. He zigged and zagged, driving down this obstacle course, looking for that island of light he’d promised himself, along with pumps that worked, and a fifteen-horsepower plan B if they didn’t.
But then he saw it.
It wasn’t an island of light, not even a peninsula. And he wouldn’t be needing plan B. It was a Sunoco station with an eighteen-wheeled tanker truck that looked like it was just getting ready to fill up the underground storage tanks when the whatever-it-was happened. The door to the tanker truck was wide open, the driver dead on the pavement, a clipboard ly
ing where it had clattered to rest, the wind flipping through its pages like a student caught napping when the teacher asked a question.
Dev turned the steering wheel so fast two tires left the ground, the pickup tilted, and the empty trash barrels went bouncing as he braced himself for the roll he hoped wouldn’t stop with the driver’s side pinned against the pavement. It didn’t. The truck landed and wobbled on the roof of the cab, neither door pinned, all four tires spinning in the air, like the legs of a turtle flipped on its back, pedaling frantically. Dev had just enough time to unbuckle, drop to the ceiling, and wiggle out through his kicked-open door before the truck’s cab—rendered structurally unsound once the door was open—gave way, spraying safety glass like rock salt in all directions. Belatedly, the airbags thumped and gasped inside the now considerably smaller cabin, followed by a bunch of pointless binging, warning alternately of unfastened seat belts and doors ajar.
Shaking glass from his hair, Dev proceeded to the ride he’d just upgraded to, his future several thousand gallons brighter, after just one pit stop.
After patching the biggest generator he could find into the main circuit box in the basement, Dev ran a length of duct-taped extension cords over to his neighbor’s garage. The air inside the empty chest was still cold but no longer freezing, judging from the lingering aroma of dead deer that rose out of it when he checked. The fact of its being empty no doubt contributed to its rapid loss of cold once the power cut out. It would take a few hours to get down to freezing again, and in the meantime, he left the neighborhood’s freezers full, closed, and cold—the fuller, the colder, at least for the time being.
Diablo had followed him to the basement, a little skittish after his new human disappeared earlier only to return wholly unlickable thanks to Dev’s smelling like gasoline. With the air conditioner dead and the temperature outside rising with an extra shot of humidity, the basement was now the coolest place in the house—one that stopped smelling like gas as soon as Dev left it. And so Diablo stayed downstairs while his human returned to the first floor, where he rebooted the router to check on how the internet was doing.
Not well.
His first attempt—Google—came back with the dreaded 404: site not found. He tried Bing, and bingo: same nada. Yahoo!, too, had gone missing, which was hardly a surprise; Dev was pretty sure they’d gone missing even before the whatever-it-was. The inexhaustible internet had finally died from exhaustion, the almighty cloud, so much vaporware.
Too bad, because Dev wanted to check how long a fully stocked freezer would stay cold after the power goes out. Based on past outages, a day didn’t seem unreasonable, but beyond that—he couldn’t remember any blackouts that lasted longer than twenty-four hours. He’d been a toddler during the Northeast blackout of 2003 and couldn’t trust his memory of the time, which was secondhand from his secondhand father and mainly involved complaints about getting charged twenty-five dollars for a gallon of gas.
And so once again, he was on the clock, suddenly second-guessing his plan to rescue whatever was in his neighbors’ freezers. It now seemed like a good way to waste a lot of time. What if his neighbors all turned out to be vegans, with freezers full of frozen broccoli and harvest burgers? Plus, he’d have to break in, mentally map a bunch of new places, try not to trip over any dead bodies, and get past all the spiders. Not that Dev was arachnophobic, but . . .
He’d first noticed them that morning before leaving to find gas: webs everywhere, like the internet’s nickname turned literal. Silky threads strung from porch railing to porch railing like crime-scene tape, but dazzling, too, every thread beaded in dew and lit by the rising sun. Clearly, the arachnid community had gotten the message that humans weren’t storming around all over the place anymore, wrecking their hard-spun traps.
The spiders responsible were brown and humpback, a species he’d nicknamed, collectively, Quasimodi. He was reluctant to disturb their handiwork—or leggy work, he guessed—in equal measures out of respect and fear of getting some on him. Because even though he wasn’t arachnophobic, he could not abide the feathery touch of anything against his skin.
All in all, the better plan was to go looking for that island of light again—this time with a grocery store in it, preferably a Kroger whose floor plan he’d already mapped. He’d make quick work of it, having already decided that this trip “out there” would be his last. He’d stock up on stuff from the pharmacy first—first aid supplies, medications previously available only through prescription, like antibiotics, mainly, some painkillers, Xanax in case his symptoms returned, as they threatened to with each new, unavoidable trip “out there.” He’d grab some luxuries, too, like toilet paper, toothpaste, lots of peanut butter—because, well, it was peanut butter—some proper dog food for Diablo, and then enough frozen meat to fill his neighbor’s game locker.
Meanwhile, the spiders did a little stocking up themselves. Unlike Dev, however, all they had to do was wait to get what they needed delivered, as if Amazon had finally gotten that whole drone delivery thing off the ground. By the time he returned with the tanker truck, he couldn’t help but notice that the morning’s chandeliers had become dotted with countless flies, some still struggling, others already mummified in silk. One web was so weighted down with insect death it had torn away and now hung off to one side like a parted curtain.
“There are an awful lot of flies out there,” Dev announced, calling down to Diablo, who was still camped out in the basement. “I wonder what that’s all about,” he said, worried that he might already know, wondering if perhaps Diablo had simply gotten the olfactory news before . . .
“Oh, jeez . . .”
The wind changed, blowing through the house’s open windows, and there it was: what had drawn the flies that drew the spiders. Out came the handkerchief, clamped to his face, trying to block the nasal assailants eager to take advantage of the tiniest space between fingers.
Dev knew all about decomposition, having studied it as an auxiliary topique during the zombie period of his apocalypse phase. But he’d been in denial, at least partially enabled by the actual pace at which his local doomsday seemed to be unfolding. For example, Dev knew that normally, decomposition happens at a very predictable rate because death itself happens at a very predictable rate. In the insurance and funereal industries, they referred to it as the CDR—crude death rate—or the number of people out of a thousand expected to die in any given year. Before, in Dev’s corner of the world, that rate had been 8.4. This year, the rate would be 999. And next year? Next year, with any luck, the CDR would be zero, or so he hoped.
For bodies left out in the open, in a temperate climate experiencing moderate temperatures, the flies will show up within ten minutes to lay thousands of eggs in the mouth, nose, and eyes. Twelve hours later, those eggs hatch and the maggots begin feeding on tissue surrounding their writhing numbers. Twenty-four to thirty-six hours later, beetles show up to eat the dry skin. And two days after dying out in the open, the corpse is approached by spiders, mites, and millipedes, drawn to dine on the earlier arrivals. Three days after death, gas begins to form inside the body as bacteria digest the muscles, tendons, and organs. Two- to three-inch blisters form on the skin, and the body’s various orifices begin to leak. And on the grisly countdown goes, until flesh and bone become just bone.
But then there was that caveat: normally. There was nothing “normal” about the post-whatever-it-was world. It suddenly dawned on Dev that with nearly every human being dropping dead at once—a lot of them outside—the insect kingdom had been momentarily overwhelmed. Suddenly, the job of insect-facilitated decomposition became just like any other job in the modern economy: twice the work, half the workers, all of whom were expected to do more with less. It was Econ 101, supply and demand—or something like that. The point was, after the whatever-it-was, the bugs were working overtime and a little behind schedule.
So Dev had gotten lucky, for a while. Despite an unusually high number of his neighbors dying out in the
open, he’d been granted a little over a week’s worth of time-outs to enjoy this pause in the natural course of things. The dead were just dead, minding their own business while he was otherwise occupied. But now the insect facilitators had arrived, and Dev had another job to do, basically the same one the bugs were doing, but much too slowly by the smell of it.
17
Marcus found a car with the keys in the ignition, its owner still behind the wheel, getting ready to go somewhere he’d never get to. The oily sheen on the driver-side window did not bode well, despite the pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and sure enough, once Marcus opened the door, he stepped back as if slapped. Pulling up his T-shirt to mask his nose and mouth, he reached in and grabbed hold of the driver’s belt, tugged, and then tugged some more until, like a stubborn cork, the tugging and sloshing of the inside contents found their tipping point and the body fell sideways, after which Marcus let gravity take it the rest of the way to the lawn next to the driveway. Where he planned to go with his stolen car, he didn’t know at the moment; he just wanted to be going. He’d almost died twice within the last year—once by accident, the other time on purpose—and missed out on number three for reasons he couldn’t imagine. What mattered was that he’d been reborn a shark—one that had to keep moving or die. And when his fins got tired, there was always that ever-growing pig stampede to get him going again.
He made himself a promise as he drove. He’d see how far this went, this everybody-but-him-being-dead business. He’d keep moving until he found others alive like himself. He’d embrace them, call them brother, or sister, and confess what he’d almost done and ask if they forgave him. He hoped they would, but if they wouldn’t or couldn’t, he’d understand. If whatever this was, was strictly local, he’d work with the authorities to track down the monsters who’d recruited him. He’d serve whatever sentence he had to serve. And he’d atone. He’d atone like his life depended on it, which, as far as he knew, it did.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 13