Lucy was perversely fond of the survivalists she found. There seemed to be a lot of them below the M-D. She wondered what they’d make of this unimagined version of their dream: the end that left so much stuff behind, with so little competition for it. Most seemed to have been prepping for the Obama apocalypse, the one with FEMA storm trooping in, black helicopters dispatched by the first black president, come to seize their guns, hustling them off to camps where they’d be forced to read the Koran, eat kale, who knew what, while they waited to be dragged before death panels. Scary, scary stuff—that’s what they’d been prepping for—all of it squat patties at least partially endorsed by the Cheetos-tinted successor to the White House, the one who’d convinced the liberal end of the political spectrum that the end was indeed nigh. Craigslist missed an opportunity, Lucy figured, not setting up a matchmaking service for right- and left-wing preppers to sell their stuff back and forth to each other with each swing of the political pendulum. In the end, none of it mattered, all the vacuum-packed MREs, iodine tablets, fire-starter kits, and firepower had been bequeathed to, well, her.
Thanks, she thought, tipping back a fresh-cracked bottle of fluoride-free water distilled from the runoff of melting glaciers. You really shouldn’t have . . .
During his home stays, Marcus kept an eye out for pornography, which was always hidden, though with a sort of consensus on cleverness that made it easy enough to find: in underwear drawers, in toilet tanks inside Ziploc bags, clipped into family-friendly DVD clamshells unlikely to be viewed anytime soon (see Swiss Family Robinson, Gentle Ben, Flipper, et al.). Props to the guy—he assumed it was a guy—who squirreled his stash away in the refrigerator, under a false bottom of the lunch-meat drawer.
Of course, when it came to hard-core voyeurism, nothing beat the financial porn of their filing cabinets: the bank statements, tax information, pay stubs. Marcus—the onetime future accountant—was amazed by how many people had been living so close to ruin. One unexpected health emergency would wipe most of them out, and as far as retirement, they seemed to have settled on one of two options: hitting the lottery or dying on the job. In a way, it made the catastrophe of what happened seem less catastrophic. The whatever-it-was spared so many people a future of saltines and cat-food pâté. That was the lesson he took away from these amateur audits; it helped assuage any guilt Marcus might feel for using all these dead people’s stuff. Because, all things being equal, they hadn’t paid for it either. Not with money, at least.
And then one night, there was just night: no islands of light to drive toward. Lucy decided to go west, partly because of the famous advice regarding young men, whom she wouldn’t mind meeting. As far as deserts went, this is what she knew: at least it was a dry heat. Not like Hotlanta, where the humidity was so thick just breathing seemed like being waterboarded. Plus, California was the place to head to find others, assuming the more people you started with, the more likely some would have survived. Worst-case scenario—she figured—the Day of the Dead souvenirs got more authentic the farther west you went.
But after a few days of traveling in her chosen direction, Lucy decided she needed something a little more planned. Or plannedish. It wasn’t lost on her that all it took was a few detours for her to have no idea where she was. And all it took was a few evenings spent driving through woodland and/or farm country that didn’t seem to end to convince her that heading for the bigger dots on a map would make sense.
When the lights disappeared in Marcus’s neck of the woods, he knew it was time for an old-fashioned, foldable map. But even the search for directions meant more detours. He had tried several chain gas stations, hoping to find a map of wherever he was, preferably one with all the side streets and intersections labeled, so he could check the nearest cross street and get his bearings. But paper maps were even rarer than pay phones and record stores in the years just before; they’d all been replaced with the convenience of an iSomething, tucked neatly into one’s hip pocket.
Marcus had started his journey with his pocket-sized world, still functional but becoming less so as the internet died along with the cell networks to connect him to it. Even stuff he thought he owned—music, e-books—disappeared. Turned out all that stuff needed an okay from the cloud to work. Unfortunately, said cloud was about as substantial as smoke on a windy day; it disappeared when the older-tech grid that supported it did likewise.
The atlases he found—pages yellowed, colors discolored—lay dust covered in little independent gas-n-go convenience stores whose main convenience seemed to be drug paraphernalia: rolling papers, bud vases that doubled as crack pipes, incense, potpourri, bath salts, Whip-Its—all helpfully labeled to inform the consumer that using them in a manner other than intended (undefined) was strictly illegal. The atlases themselves were better than nothing but hardly the turn-by-turn convenience of Google Maps he’d gotten used to. Afterward, he wound up driving pretty much as randomly as before, just with fewer stops looking for atlases.
For Lucy, the loss of electricity meant more than just no lights; it quickly turned into a lack of overnight housing. Found atlases got her to where the houses were, but minus electricity, those houses became inhospitable in the extreme. Take air-conditioning, for example, which was pretty much the only thing that made the South bearable during the summer. Without it, foam mattresses weren’t the only things with memories. Once the unrelenting southern heat bore down on all those hermetically sealed boxes of domesticity, they filled with memories—of all the smells building up inside.
Dead bodies were the worst of it, of course, but not the only things to rot and stink, permeating anything porous, from carpets to curtains to the aforementioned mattresses of memory foam. Every organic thing contributed to the general stench: fruit in fruit bowls clouded by flies, garbage in garbage cans leaking black ooze, sewers backed up into basements. Man-made products pitched in too: urethanes, synthetic fibers, and plastics, all shedding their toxic molecules when the temperature inside broke ninety. Even an empty cereal bowl, left in the sink before going to school for the last time, was enough to perfume an entire house with the dregs of unslurped milk left ringing the bottom.
Marcus was in denial about the lack of livable housing once the world went dark until his shoes squished after stepping on some stranger’s shag carpeting. A huge water stain on the living room ceiling had dropped paint and plaster like clumps of cottage cheese spattering the place’s 1970s bachelor-pad decor. The ceiling was still dripping when Marcus broke and entered, and the carpet squished all the way up to the second-floor bathroom.
Standing outside, he knew he shouldn’t open the door, but did anyway. And there it was: a body in the tub, lavender candles burned down to wax pancakes along the rim, a large rubber sex toy lying on the tiled floor, surrounded by a puddle that had skinned over green. The body seemed to be made of rubber too—a person-shaped balloon inflated until it took on the shape of the tub: SpongeBob SquareBody, minus the animation, and with a ball gag in its mouth.
Marcus tried hard not to judge. He’d made progress, after not blowing himself up. Tolerance would be his middle name—he’d vowed—belatedly forgiving the late of the world, but . . .
The world had ended before noon on a Monday. And this here—this was Saturday-night-after-midnight-grade kink. Being open-minded was one thing; having a little self-restraint was another. And then Marcus looked at the toilet next to the tub.
On top of the tank, a half-eaten sandwich was still plated, turfed thickly in mold, but with a dollop of congealed mayo still weeping out through multiple layers of bacon, maybe a half-inch thick. Apparently, Tub Boy wanted something for every orifice. Which begged the question: ball gag? Which forced the ex-terrorist to imagine the guy, lifting the gag to take a bite, his no-doubt yellowed and ill-fitting teeth splintering through strips of fried swine, squirting mayonnaise like ersatz ejaculate before lowering it again and . . .
Marcus felt a bolus of bile rise hotly up his throat, choked it back, and decided: karma
. That’s what caused all of this, meaning not just the guy in the tub, but all of it. Mankind had gone too far and had gotten what it deserved.
Good, Marcus thought, and thinking it, found he felt better. All things being equal, at least he wasn’t some pervert, rising like a loaf of bread out of a bathtub. He was just an ex-terrorist, accent on the “ex-.”
Lucy’s home stays ended when she entered the house with the baby. She found it, dead in its crib, thumb still corking its mouth, skin robin’s-egg blue, flies at its lashes. Its stomach, full of gas, had inflated to the size of a soccer ball, stretching its onesie tight, rolling the body just enough so she could see the side of its face it had fallen asleep on before its life just tiptoed away. The heart stopped, its blood had pooled wherever gravity pulled it, staining its once-pink cheek, first blue, then bruised, then black as an eggplant. And there went her leading theory about what had happened and what caused it:
Karma.
What kind of karmic debt could a baby chalk up? She knew what her mom would say: original sin. She’d bought it herself—in the abstract. But here, served up in a bassinet: no.
And then a very different thought crossed her mind. Was she really alive, or had she gone through with it? Was everyone’s being dead just her point of view? Were they only dead to her? And had she ended up where she worried she might? The world she found herself in was decidedly hellish, especially lately, with the putrefaction, the isolation, the disappearance of all the conveniences she’d taken for granted before, even the finding of other survivors who’d stopped surviving before she got to them. And things were only getting worse. The bodies were stinkier, the sense of aloneness more profound. And then this last straw: the baby, worse than any of the pro-life splatter porn they’d shown her at the clinic. One look and she felt a tug behind her belly button as something whispered: “Am I yours?”
Running from the house, Lucy clawed the gas mask from her face and coughed out her last two meals: canned peaches for breakfast, pea soup for lunch. Afterward, when there was nothing left, she just stood there, bent at the waist, hands still bracing knees, staring at peach parts and bile lying there in the dying grass. She was looking for something else, some clue to her true fate, but didn’t find anything else she recognized—except that she wasn’t finished throwing up just yet.
After that, Lucy slept in her ride, windows rolled tight, engine idling, the white noise of AC and internal combustion lulling her to sleep through the now-useless nights. From then on, adventures under other roofs were reserved for emergency supply runs, and only with something to hide her nose.
During the day, Marcus resumed his search for others like a cowboy on a mission remounting his horse. Minus the glow of light bulbs to signal civilization’s bright ideas, he found himself looking for smoke instead. Where there was smoke, there was fire—the saying went—and hopefully the people who set it.
But the longer he drove, the pickier he became about the kind of smoke that warranted detours. He’d been fooled too many times by spontaneous combustion at untended landfills, lightning strikes, and downed power lines. He’d mistaken the clouds of carrion eaters over factory farms as something that needed investigating, only to have the clouds pixilate in front of him while the wind brought rumors of the stench to come.
In the end, he learned to ignore the angrier black plumes pumping their way into the sky like wannabe mushroom clouds. These were almost always petrochemical in nature, too toxic and too fast to get close to, useless for cooking, dangerous for heating—or even breathing near. White smoke was still investigated, even though his experiences with it thus far had been as wild and goose-like as the darker stuff he now steered clear of. White smoke meant something organic was burning, like a campfire doused before moving on to the next site. That was the theory, at least—the one that kept him chasing every white wisp he saw on the horizon, with a heart full of hope and the safety off.
20
Dev hadn’t planned on building a wall; it just grew out of a need to get rid of the bodies the world’s ending left behind. He’d filled, parked, and torched the first of his dead clown cars and was backing in the second when one of his passengers farted, he jerked his head, and bam! His rear bumper buckled the bed of the charred pickup truck behind it, scooting said vehicle a few sparking feet across the pavement. The tires that melted during the fire now scraped away to bare rims before the latter crumpled, followed by the truck’s much-abused struts giving out.
Dev stepped down from the cab and looked at the result: one brand-new truck, collision-welded to the rear end of a charred truck full of blackened bones. The exhaust system was pancaked so the chassis lay flat, while the crash and skid had ground the rest flush with the pavement. There wasn’t enough space for even a squirrel to squeeze through.
Dev touched the charred metal; it was cool. He wrenched open the driver-side door, where he’d rolled down the window so he could breathe while driving. He’d parked the pickup on the wrong side of the street because he could, but also so that the driver’s side faced home while the passenger’s side, still rolled up, faced everything else. Thus vented, the vehicle’s windows survived the fire without imploding.
Reaching across a tumble of bones in the passenger seat, Dev pushed down the button to lock the side facing the whole rest of the world—the “intruder side,” as he now liked to think of it. And thus the wall grew, one rear-ended truck after another, following the line of the street until it came to an intersection, turned right, and kept going, truck, truck, truck, until it came to the next intersection and turned right again.
Before, the neighborhood he was gradually boxing in didn’t have a name. People lived on streets with names, in houses with numbers, but nobody ever bothered to set up gates, establish a homeowners’ association, or adopt ordinances against things nobody did anymore anyway, like drying laundry on a clothesline. As collectives went, the old neighborhood was about as loose as you could get, the people there bound mainly by: (1) their complaining about the smell coming from the Ecorse River next door and (2) not being able to afford anyplace better.
Regarding the former, the river cut through the heart of Dev’s block as well as several cities surrounding it, known collectively as “downriver,” though the Ecorse wasn’t the river they were all down from. That honor went to the much larger Detroit River, which the Ecorse drained into. As bodies of water went, the Ecorse was more like a creek, measuring mere yards across even though it ran nearly nineteen miles long and cut every riverside street in the neighborhood in half with a railing, a steep drop-off, and a bright-yellow “Dead End” sign.
The river meant that Dev had one side of his wall already taken care of. And as far as his new, gated community not having a name, he liked the sound of “Devonshire.” The vote was unanimous.
Working diligently for five days straight, Dev felt safer the closer he got to finishing. Now that the local infrastructure had failed, it was just a matter of time before all sorts of exotic ways to die made their ways to Devonshire. The Detroit Zoo was the one he worried about most. All it would take was for the backup generators to fail along with the electromagnetic locks. The animals might not notice at first, waiting to be fed out of habit, like Dev waiting at the bus stop for his mom. But eventually they’d get hungry enough, or they’d scratch their butts against the bars and notice the doors swing open . . .
Plus, there was always the possibility of people.
Even though no one had shown up yet, he couldn’t rule it out. And while people might fool him, the fact they’d have left the home they knew for somewhere they didn’t meant they were stupid or desperate or both—none a good trait in a world without rules, and potentially fatal in combination.
Staying put: Dev had decided that as his go-to survival strategy even before the world ended. The stupidest thing people ever did—and they always did it in those stories—was leave where they knew what was what to go wandering, which invariably led to exciting plot complications easily
avoided by staying put. So why go looking for trouble?
He’d had this very argument with Leo, back when they were both doing the doomsday thing. Leo followed the neurotypical line, assuming the survivors were just looking for others. “You know, for a sense of community.”
“What does that even mean?” Dev asked.
Foolishly, Leo tried explaining. “The need humans have to be together,” he said.
But young Brinkman’s Aspie superpowers were immune to such reasoning. “What else?” he asked.
“Um,” Leo tried. “Two heads are better than one?”
“Next.”
“It’s all about teamwork?”
“Are you kidding?” Dev asked. And so they continued arguing, Leo failing to convince Dev that leaving home during a zombie apocalypse made sense, while Dev wondered why the apocalypse was taking so long.
This conviction re staying put versus wandering didn’t come out of nowhere. It was rooted in some sports mythology he’d learned from his stepfather—the home-field advantage—a term his replacement dad first used not while watching a game, but Home Alone.
“You see that?” he asked.
Dev nodded, because he’d been watching the TV like he was studying it. His stepfather had stopped admonishing him for sitting too close, instead keeping Windex handy to clean off the nose smudges. This was before his Asperger’s diagnosis.
“That’s the home-field advantage,” his stepfather explained. “Kevin knows the house; the burglars don’t. That’s how one little kid gets the better of two adults. That’s how important the home-field advantage is.”
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 15