He’d drive toward light at night; he decided that after his first sunset on the move. That’s what the others would do, he figured. He’d—they’d—be like moths drawn to the flame of electricity, for as long as it lasted. Each night began the same way after that, the visible world funneled down to whatever his headlights cut through, until the starry darkness above turned gray, meaning either the sun was coming up or he was getting closer to another flickering vestige of civilization. Once there, he’d beep his horn and see if anyone emerged for him to confess to. If not, it was on to plan B: breaking into someplace nice to spend the evening.
So far, every evening had ended in plan B. But that didn’t stop him from practicing his confession. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he’d say. “Something you need to know about the person I was.” He’d pause before adding, “Almost was.”
He’d confess so he wouldn’t have to go around with this secret splitting him in two—into the inside Mo and the outside Marcus. He didn’t want to worry about sleeping in another person’s company, having realized—now that he had no one to ask—that he didn’t know if he talked in his sleep. Total, brutal honesty would be his policy from here on out—theoretically, at least, until he found someone to be honest with, other than himself.
He hadn’t packed before hitting the road, and so he gathered supplies along the way, switching vehicles when they ran out of gas. But as his collection of essentials grew, Marcus came to appreciate the inefficiency of constantly moving his supplies from one ride to another. And so he began looking for something a little more “apocalypse ready,” which turned out to be a Good Humor truck, of all things.
In homage to his newborn apostasy, he edited the signage with spray paint to read, “God’s a Rumor.” The message seemed about right, given the lack of heavenly announcements regarding recent events. Plus, Marcus was probably the only one left to be offended, and he wasn’t, so why not?
The other nice thing about the truck was the loudspeaker, broadcasting his survival to any who might hear, to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” This was much better than just driving toward light and beeping when he got there; the weasel covered both darkness and light, in case any of the survivors were afraid of their fellow survivors and were avoiding the islands of light for the same reason Marcus drove toward them.
A dirge may have been the more appropriate soundtrack under the circumstances, but Marcus was okay with a little discordant peppiness. Counterprogramming—he thought they called it. It’s what all the cool kids were doing—assuming there were any cool kids left.
The beauty of an ice cream truck as one’s vehicle of choice for surviving the apocalypse was this: on-board refrigeration and a generator to power it. Plus sinks, a porta potty, and a soft-serve machine that could be easily disconnected and left at the side of the road—after opening the rear doors and rocking gears back and forth until the unhooked unit walked itself out. An air mattress fit neatly into the vacated space, for when the shark needed a little shut-eye.
A mobile home might have been even better, but the ones Marcus checked out along the way were more “home” than “mobile,” meaning they were designed to be parked somewhere with hookups for electricity and sanitation. Plus the Good Humor truck (with edited signage) made him smile in a way a Winnebago wouldn’t: perversely. It’d be a conversation piece too—if he ever found anybody to converse with.
“Ice cream, eh?” he imagined this hypothetical human saying.
“I sure did,” he imagined saying back. “Didn’t you?”
His itinerary was pretty simple: someplace else, preferably with fewer earthquakes and pigs and more survivors. Once that was settled, it was just a matter of eliminating compass points he didn’t want to travel toward. North got eliminated from the start because things just got colder the farther north you went. South, too, was dismissed because things just got hotter until you either hit the Gulf of Mexico or Mexicans. Not that Marcus had any problems with Mexicans, seeing as they had a common enemy in the Orange One, but all he knew was English and a smattering of Arabic that was mainly about holidays, food, and swearing. Going west looked like sand, sand, and more sand, which might seem perfect for the descendant of a desert-dwelling people except, yeah, no thanks. Oklahoma was wasteland enough for one lifetime. And so east it was. Or eastish, depending on the condition of the roads and/or what looked interesting on the horizon.
As he drove, Marcus became a broadcaster and a seeker, both, playing the truck’s loudspeaker full blast while on his dash rested two scanners, one police, one CB. He didn’t bother with commercial frequencies, mainly because of his personal bias for movement versus standing still. Sure, a commercial signal could cover more ground, but you couldn’t see what was on that ground as the radio waves passed over it. Listening for other mobile broadcasts as he sent out his own low-tech signal and scanned the world rolling past his windshield for any other signs of human activity seemed the most effective way to go. Plus, if any other humans started squawking on one of his scanners, he’d know they were relatively close. Also, he could talk back to them anonymously, just in case they weren’t as happy to hear from him as their shared humanity and survivorship might suggest—an attitude toward others Marcus was starting to think wiser than not.
Because that was the thing about being without people to reflect back to themselves: all Marcus had was Marcus, and this Marcus, left to his own devices, got increasingly paranoid about others the longer he drove with no sign of them. Take the idea of driving toward a commercial signal without being able to interact with the signaler at a safe distance first. Once there were no more islands of light to drive toward anymore, he started seeing what he hadn’t before: that showing up after being called was a good way to get ambushed. As a son of immigrants, Marcus had too much secondhand paranoia to leave any room for naïveté like that. So even if all the Whos in Whoville started shouting, “We are here,” as far as the ex-terrorist was concerned, it was, “Proceed with caution.” That, and a shotgun.
18
Dev did the outside bodies first, seeing as they were the most immediate affront to his olfactory senses, which—contrary to popular belief—were not limited to the nose but included the tongue and, to a lesser extent, skin. Regarding the last, it was almost as if he could feel the rot molecules wafting over him from the scattered jigsaw of crime-scene bodies. He could feel the oily, pestilential specks alighting on his skin, making him look intently at, say, his bare arm just above the wrist, at the tiny hairs bristling there, imagining little drops of death hanging on their tips, like dew on blades of grass.
It was amazing how many there were, above and beyond the fact of their being dead. Doomsday had come on a Monday, in the middle of the day, toward the end of the school year. It was the sort of day that made people complain about having to go to school or work—about being trapped inside when there was all that (indicated by a hand thrust dramatically toward the nearest window) out there.
So what were they all doing outside, where they could die, leaving their rotting bodies behind for Dev to clean up? Had they called in sick, not knowing how prescient the lie would prove to be? No, they were just laid off. Again. At the time it happened, Michigan was in the middle of its latest cycle of rebound and bust, triggered once again by the price of keeping a gas tank full.
To get even with Russia, or Iran, or whomever, the Saudis had cranked open the spigots, gas dropped below two dollars, and his neighbors exchanged gas sippers for guzzlers, parking up the driveways and side streets with shiny new pickups and SUVs. Suddenly, MPG was out and towing capacity was in. To satisfy the public’s schizophrenic taste in personal transportation, the Big Three had shut down their assembly lines to retool from subcompacts to behemoths with tanks measured not in gallons, but Gulf wars. And that was why so many of his neighbors were outside the day it happened, making the best of their unemployment, washing the brand-new trucks they’d no longer be able to fuel, once the oil derricks swung in the
opposite direction.
Not that Dev minded all the trucks with their extra-large gas tanks. They’d come in handy given the chore at hand—one he’d already put off for too long, judging from the way his skin tingled with all those pestilential molecules clinging like dew to all those tiny hairs.
He left Diablo at home while he collected the bodies—not that the dog seemed especially eager to join him. Having seen a dog eat its own poop once, he was worried that once the black Lab got used to the smell, it might not be too great a leap to that first nibble. Though he had no idea whether rot-tenderized flesh would tempt a well-fed dog, he figured it best not to find out. Not only was it a bad idea letting him know what humans tasted like, but Dev heard once that a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s. The thought had gotten him through Diablo’s tongue-based displays of appreciation with a minimum of flinching. He wasn’t sure he could keep it up if he started wondering not what the animal had been eating but whom.
Speaking of, it was a pity none of his neighbors had a hazmat suit. Instead, Dev had to make do with a raincoat, duct tape, gloves, boots, a painter’s respirator augmented with a couple of pine-scented air fresheners, and a pair of goggles. He’d already made the rookie mistake of trying to grab a body by its hand, only to have the skin strip off like a glove. A surprising amount of stench and spatter followed the skin off, along with a sound that sounded like Velcro pulling apart. After that, Dev grabbed whatever they were wearing that was handy—belts, mainly; waistbands; something equatorial body-wise so the deadweight balanced on either side as he lifted or dragged or pushed.
He propped a plywood sheet against the open tailgate of the vehicle he was loading and rolled the bodies up the incline, using either gloved hands or booted feet, depending on how heavy the body was. It was a little like riding on a flat tire, but still better for his back than trying to clean jerk one of these gut tubs. Plus, after the first one, the skids were greased, so to speak, every new body laying down a fresh trail of leaking lipids and generic dead-person goo, so their movement up the impromptu ramp was part rolling, but mainly sliding.
Kids—and there were some, the ones too young for school—these he lifted like rolled rugs, their bruised faces turned toward the earth, where he didn’t have to look at them before loading their bodies onto the truck. This face thing with kids was a total reversal from how things had been before. Back then, kid faces had been the only human ones Dev could look at. Their palette of emotions was so limited, their needs so elemental, their eyes so lacking in the need to judge that he’d found no reason to look at his shoes in their presence. Quite the contrary, he’d played hours of peekaboo, standing behind some frazzled parent with a child slung over their shoulder, the kid facing him as they all waited in line. The eyes of children were almost as good as dogs’ eyes, meaning Dev could look at them without feeling stupid or judged like he was taking some all-or-nothing quiz. He could just look at them, hide one eye behind a palm, hide the other, unmask both, and get a giggle. He’d do it again, and it was like the first time, a little kid shaking full of little-kid delight. And on and on and so on, until the groceries were bagged, the check deposited, the package mailed. And there went that little hand, reaching out for him, its little fingers opening and closing: bye-bye, bye-bye . . .
“Bye-bye,” Dev echoed now, placing another precious, limp bundle ever so gently upon the latest pile.
Now that he was up to his goggles in viscera, Dev looked back at all the doomsday fiction he’d read, back when that had been his latest obsession. And the thing that struck him now was how they’d cheated. Whether nuclear or viral, through asteroid collision or climate change, those would-be apocalypses almost always left the world conveniently unpeopled. It was like there’d been some kind of rapture that made all the decomposable bodies disappear, leaving the last remaining protagonist to pursue his make-believe adventures safe from the mundane danger of tripping over corpses.
The only exceptions Dev could think of were the zombie apocalypses, which were pretty much wall-to-wall dead bodies in various stages of decomposition, shambling about, looking for brains or brainless humans to infect. But even in the zombie apocalypses, the problem of body disposal was largely ignored. Decapitation, skull cleaving, rotten bodies exploding across windshields and speeding grillwork, or just heads getting blown off by shotguns: yes, plenty of that. But as far as cleaning up afterward, they didn’t, despite the tripping hazard created by leaving a headless body lying around.
Dev wasn’t going to make that mistake, filling up another SUV, driving to the perimeter he was slowly creating, shoving a rag in the gas tank, striking a match, and standing back as the greasy black smoke turned another nice day to soot and ash. Looking back, it occurred to Dev that they’d all been pretty nice days lately, with the exception of the corpse burning, of course. He hardly ever flinched anymore and hadn’t needed his meds at all. With the exception of the smoke, which was strictly local to the latest torched SUV, the air was clearer than it had been in years, replacing even the noise pollution with the rustling of leaves, the chirping of birds, the tick, tick, tick of an acorn pinballing through branches. The temperature anywhere but the immediate vicinity of the fire was a pleasant seventy-two degrees, balanced on a dew point that actually felt like seventy-two degrees.
Not too far away, lawns like green carpeting fronted a Tetris pack of working- to middle-class houses, the streets dividing them featuring fewer and fewer bodies, thanks to Dev, his nose and mouth covered with a respirator, his face shimmering through heat ripples. The hard part done, he supervised the flames as they un-skinned his ex-neighbors, the white parts blackening, the black parts glowing orange, almost festively, like Halloween decorations, except for the fact that they were real ex-people burning away in there.
He’d not burned them before now out of an abundance of caution, he decided after the fact. Given the lack of any adequate explanation like a plague or smoldering ruins, maybe they weren’t really dead, just stunned or hibernating or something. Sure, the phone hadn’t fogged when he placed it under a sampling of noses, but what if they’d been congested or mouth breathers or something? What if the screens came with some antismudge, antifog technology? Sure, he couldn’t feel a pulse in the handful of necks he’d checked, but he wasn’t sure he’d checked in the right place, or how to distinguish the pulse in a neck from his own heartbeat, which he could sometimes feel all the way down to his fingertips.
It had been so sudden, so switch-like, efficient, and strange. Dev didn’t want to rush to any conclusions, especially if it hadn’t yet. Concluded, that is. So he’d waited, subconsciously, just in case the bodies started getting up again. While before he would have dismissed such magical thinking, he couldn’t anymore. Not once everybody dropping dead was added to the list of things that could just happen.
So Dev waited and his neighbors rotted, not changing into anything but stinkier versions of what they’d been. And even then, he held back, until the flies came and the stench rose to human-detectable levels. Left unaddressed, the flies would yield to whatever fed on them in addition to the spiders, followed by the creatures that dined on those, until the party grew to include beasts of the Dev-eating kind, which he wasn’t too keen on meeting. So:
He looked at the bodies left to go, still lying in the street, across lawns, bent over porch railings, and next to toppled bicycles. These were just the tip of the iceberg. Behind all those doors up and down the block, there were more, dropped where they were when the whatever-it-was happened, leaving Dev to clean up the mess.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d died politely like they did on TV, their looking-at-nothing eyes closed and their gas-venting mouths zipped tight. The real dead didn’t die like that. The real dead let it all hang out, mouths slack, lips pulled back, eyes bugged out. Blood did a funny thing once the heart stopped pumping; it pooled and bruised whatever part was closest to the ground, the bodies frozen in their last poses until rot beat out rigor mortis and they got
bendable again. That actually made things worse, though, as he discovered while shouldering a midsized body, only to be rewarded with a pair of dead hands slapping his rear end, making him turn, only to get slapped again.
When there was no room left, Dev paused to consider what had to be the world’s grisliest clown car. Its soon-to-be driver would fit right in, judging from his reflection in the side-view mirror. His goggles and goo-smeared raincoat had turned him into a giant bug like the one named Gregor they’d read about in English class. Dev wondered if that was the job of fiction, to test-drive the impossible, to loosen our grip on conventional reality. He guessed that’s probably what fiction writers would claim—if there were any left, that is.
Stepping into the driver’s seat of his latest mobile crematorium, Dev checked his rearview mirror, even though the view was blocked with another batch of ex-neighbors. Which was okay. He’d taken to watching them in his mirrors as he drove hardly faster than walking. Whenever he’d hit a pothole the arms would jerk and flop, like they were waving goodbye, which seemed appropriate.
Sometimes, Dev would wave back, and other times, he just waved to clear the air. Because the dead weren’t polite, as previously noted. They weren’t quiet either. One or two in every batch would make some kind of noise as the gases building up inside found a way out. The latest load was no different.
Gagging as the pestilential molecules slipped past the fibers of the respirator’s filter, Dev squeezed the mask more tightly about his nose and mouth. It didn’t help. The stench was impervious to a whole forest of pine trees. “Light a match,” he said finally, resorting to his stepfather’s fart humor. And then he thought about it.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s my job.”
19
For the first several evenings when it was time to stop for the night, Lucy would break into a home within the island of light she’d driven toward. Once inside, she’d take advantage of the air-conditioning and ice makers, raid the refrigerators, roll up any dead bodies in the nearest rugs and slide them out before sleeping like a baby in a full-sized bed. And between the splintering door frames and squeaking bed springs, she’d wander through the rooms of these borrowed lives, going through other people’s stuff, trying to CSI what the dead must have been like.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 14