Dev nodded. And while most of what his fake dad said exited his opposite ear without pausing for speed bumps, this particular idea set the hand brake and stayed. It helped that his mom already called him a homebody, while his stepfather figured agoraphobia was more like it. All Dev knew was he preferred places he knew to those he didn’t. So when the world offered him the home-field advantage to excuse his natural inclination, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
After using up the outside bodies with the wall only half built, Dev took a day off because of rain. He hadn’t noticed the sky darkening at first, confusing the black clouds rolling in with the smoke rolling up and away from the latest truck as it burned. Once drops started sizzling on the hot metal, though, he turned for home but then stopped. He was already wearing a raincoat; staying put meant he wouldn’t have to hose it off.
And so he did. He stayed put. And as the rain fell on him, Dev remembered why walls were necessary throughout history, and probably still were. It was a seemingly innocuous sight: foam. Like from soap or detergent, bubbling on the ground, conjured up from the grease and ashes of his neighbors by the steady, pattering rain.
That’s when he remembered a chemistry lesson his stepfather had taught him about man’s inhumanity to man. The senior Brinkman had read about foam just like this, forming outside the crematoriums in the death camps during World War II. Eventually, the Nazis capitalized on the process. Industrialized it.
“They used our bodies to make glycerin and soap,” he said. “Glycerin to make nitroglycerin to blow up more Jews.” He called this the opposite of the circle of life; it was the circle of death—and mankind was still paying the karmic debt for that depravity.
“It’s one thing to use every part of a whale,” he continued. “It’s another to use every part of a person. Cross that line, and it’s worse than eating some fruit in a make-believe garden. It answers the question: Is man good or evil? Well, I’m here to tell you, any species that can turn its own into soap and bombs is evil. End of story.”
Dev looked up at his stepfather’s indictment of the human race. Finally, something the two of them agreed on.
PART THREE
21
The hardest part for Lucy and Marcus in their separate search for others wasn’t the wild-goose chases or the false alarms: it was finding fellow survivors who’d succumbed to something else. The accidents were heartbreaking in every flavor: electrocution, asphyxiation, blood poisoning, animal attack, heart attack, or just thinking they could make it when they couldn’t. Each new find was a thwarted hope that nevertheless kept hope alive. But the suicides—the hangings, gunshots, ODs, bloodlettings—these felt like déjà vu from the future, but-fors that were also maybe-stills . . .
But then they found each other, in spite of everything—including Marcus’s decision to not chase black smoke anymore. Later, Lucy would admit she didn’t know how to change or even top off the oil in a car—or, indeed, that she needed to. But this was the stroke of dumb luck that made their meeting possible. Because the reason Marcus went back on his previous decision was this: the black smoke Lucy made kept moving.
Recalling previous failures, Marcus imagined the worst: some poor animal caught on fire, running madly as the flames ate through fur, flesh, fat. Or worse, a survivor who’d chosen to stop surviving through self-immolation before having second thoughts. But the longer he watched, the more obvious it became how unrandomly this smoke was moving. If it was an animal being burned alive—or some jackass human—it was an especially focused one, not zigzagging or running in circles but heading steadily west in a straight line without slowing down or stopping to die and smolder.
A few turns on his part and the smoke was coming straight for Marcus. He looked toward his shotgun, but let it be. He thought about turning off the loudspeaker, but left that alone too. It was easy to be paranoid when the others were strictly hypothetical. But seriously, why wouldn’t they be grateful, like he was feeling now? It wasn’t like they were competing for resources or anything. And so he sped up. When his tires didn’t blow, he sped up even more. The smoke continued at its steady pace and so Marcus drove toward it, halving the distance and halving it again until he could see the other and then floored it.
The ice cream truck reading, “God’s a Rumor,” and the Hyundai Sonata with the deep-fried engine screeched to mutual halts just short of colliding. Both drivers jumped out at roughly the same time.
“I can’t believe it,” Lucy kept saying.
“Neither can I,” Marcus kept saying back.
Their fingers reached toward each other as if toward their own reflections, or perhaps their shadow’s projection against fog, tentative, waiting for the resistance of glass, the passing through of a figment of their own longing. Instead, warm skin met warm skin.
“Thank God,” she exclaimed, temporarily forgetting she’d given up on religion.
“Allahu Akbar,” he said, likewise.
They both paused.
“This is going to be interesting,” they said together, before laughing a nervous, tandem laugh, the harmonics of which, bouncing off the empty world, only made them laugh more nervously still.
Leaving their rides where they’d come to a stop, the two sought out the shade of a tree that looked like God himself might have planted it, during that six-day burst of creativity. Under its sprawling branches, with their backs resting against its massively contorted trunk, they told the stories of where they were when, each leaving out a few details. Both had been at school, they learned. Lucy, in the eastern time zone, was getting ready for lunch, while Marcus, central, had been stuck in a pointless pep rally just before. Telling what they’d seen had the effect of making them relive it. Lucy shivered as if cold, despite the warmth, even in the tree’s shadow. Noticing, Marcus held her to provide what comfort he could—and for something to hold on to.
“It was just terrible,” she sobbed finally, her face buried in his shoulder.
“I know,” he said, patting her back while his own eyes welled. “I know, I know . . .”
And as they sobbed, reliving the worst day of their lives, they kept sneaking little touches of each other: an arm, a neck, a shoulder, a face. It was practically autonomic—their bodies still needing to confirm the reality of the other. And once their bodies were satisfied, their brains and emotions got in on the action, hugging to console, and then hugging just to hug. Kissing just to kiss. Making love just to make love . . .
Over the next few days, they spilled out their selectively edited lives, organized around the dividing line of “before” and “after.” The stories of their lives before, naturally, took up the most time, while the afters were short and ended the same way:
“And then I met you . . .”
Once they both finished, it seemed natural for one of them to ask, “And so now what?” So Marcus did.
“To be continued?” Lucy said, making it sound like a question as she waited for Marcus to squeeze her hand—which he also did.
They decided the ice cream truck was big enough for two with the added advantage of not having a blown engine. Plus, they both concurred with the truck’s editorializing: Marcus because he’d done it, and Lucy because she’d felt it, not only after, but just before, when it seemed as if she’d been abandoned by the guy upstairs. But when it came to the vacancy their former faiths had left behind, neither wanted to talk about it. Instead, they filled said vacancy the old-fashioned way: with survival sex. Still, it was a present absence, manifesting itself euphemistically during moments of frustration.
“So who thought this was a good idea?” one might ask with his or her eyes cast ever so subtly skyward.
“Who knows?” the other would answer, shrugging, at a loss over whom to blame for this nondenominational apocalypse. After that, there wasn’t too much left to say but:
“You wanna?”
“Sure, why not?”
Checking herself in the rearview mirror afterward, Lucy announced that she hated
her smile. They were practicing with admissions, tiptoeing up to the line of confession and then chickening out last minute with benign substitutions. The latest safe category for discussion was certain attributes they didn’t like about themselves. Lucy hadn’t mentioned her modest weight issues, mainly because several weeks on the road away from Häagen-Dazs had worked wonders on her figure. Despite their living in a literal ice cream truck, the on-board freezer was not stocked with the stuff.
“You like Blue Bunny?” Marcus had joked when she noted the irony. “Here,” he said, producing two he’d caught, skinned, and frozen. He clacked their carcasses together; they sounded like rhythm sticks.
So, no, it wasn’t her body generally that Lucy hated at the moment, just her teeth. Marcus kissed the lips she’d wrung down over the offending dentition. “Think of it this way,” he said. “Let’s say you’d gotten braces.” Pause. “Let’s say you still had them.”
Lucy thought about it—her jaws wired for the rest of her life, or at least until they stumbled onto somebody else who happened to be an orthodontist. She smiled, imperfectly, but smiled nevertheless. “Good point,” she said. “Now you.”
“I could do without my overwhelming charisma,” Marcus said, even further from confessing what he needed to than Lucy was, replacing it not even with, say, crooked teeth, but with jokes. “It’s quite the burden. Women constantly swooning in my presence . . .”
“Where are these women of whom you speak?”
“Before,” Marcus said. “Trust me. It was crazy.”
“I shall try imagining it,” she said, brushing her fingers across his forehead, moving his charismatic hair out of his eyes. “You need a haircut.”
“That was going to be my second thing,” Marcus admitted. “This hair?” He tugged a fistful. “It just keeps on growing.” He thought about the hair on the heads of his would-be victims and how some people believed it kept growing after death. It didn’t. Really, as the body lost moisture, it began to shrink, including the skin around the face and head, creating the illusion that the hair was longer. Deciding to keep this fun fact to himself, Marcus turned toward Lucy, saying, “Your turn.”
His de facto girlfriend shrugged. “Got nothing. You?”
Her de facto boyfriend shrugged.
“What are the odds, huh?” Lucy said. “Two perfect people hooking up in this crazy old world of ours?”
“Lucky us,” Marcus agreed.
“Lucky us,” said Lucy, a trace of her imperfect teeth showing through her smile.
Before this conversation, they’d been talking about a different smile, Marcus’s, and its disappearance whenever the fuel gauge started flirting with E. With all its on-board appliances—the generator, loudspeaker, fridge—the ice cream truck was not the most fuel-efficient ride around. Not that there wasn’t plenty of fuel for the taking, even after the electricity died and the gas pumps stopped working. Everywhere they went, there were cars and SUVs and pickups with gas tanks like full udders, just waiting to be milked. And still Marcus frowned whenever faced with the prospect of milking another one.
“What’s wrong?” Lucy asked, after noticing him do it a few times.
Marcus had been transfusing fuel the old-fashioned way, with a rubber hose and a pair of lips. And even though he only ever got the slightest taste before the gas started flowing from one vehicle to the other, he’d been doing it so often he joked about blowing up if he ate anything too spicy. He didn’t mention the previous occasion when blowing up had been on the menu. Instead: “It’s the taste,” he said. “It tastes like brain damage and a side of cancer.”
Lucy laughed. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” she asked, along with why he was being so careful about the other cars. “It’s not like they’re going to bust us for vandalism or anything.”
True, Marcus thought. “True,” he said.
And so they got a Rubbermaid tub from under the bed of a house they broke into looking for assorted other supplies. They dumped the horrible-looking collection of Christmas sweaters out, a handful of mothballs bouncing across the floor, rolling under the bed, crunching under Lucy’s combat boots, courtesy of the same fashion depot from which she’d gotten her gas mask. The tub even had little casters underneath, which came in handy for sliding it under gas tanks. In the basement of the same house, she found a handyman’s workshop, from which she rescued a claw hammer and a file. She used the latter to sharpen the former.
“Observe,” she said, sliding the tub under their next pit stop, before scooting in after it with the hammer. She punctured the gas tank twice, once on the bottom and again as close to the top as she could reach. “It’s like one of those old-school beer cans,” she said. “The ones you needed a church key for, before pop-tops?”
“How old are you, again?”
“Dad collected,” she said, sliding back out. “eBay.”
Marcus nodded as they listened to the gas glugging into the tub. “Sweet,” he announced. “My DNA thanks you.”
“Excellent,” Lucy said back. “I’ve got me some plans for that DNA.”
They both stopped to let an uncomfortable pause go by.
Sure, they’d been having sex—a lot—but hadn’t openly discussed the possible ramifications. Of course, it was easier for Marcus to not think about the p-word than it was for her. And Lucy, apparently, had been thinking about it—apparently ever since that first time.
Noticing Marcus’s face, she waited to see if he said anything, assuming that if he didn’t, that was probably her answer. He didn’t and so she didn’t. Instead, they rode quietly for a while, the only sound “Pop Goes the Weasel” playing over the loudspeaker. In her current mood, the lyrics struck Lucy as especially Freudian.
Eventually, realizing that quiet could become as lethal as talking about uncomfortable subjects, Lucy decided to try humor instead.
“You know what would be hee-larious?”
“What?”
“Rod Serling singing ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”
Marcus looked at her. “Rod who?”
Lucy was surprised they couldn’t hear the sound of her heart breaking. “Don’t tell me you don’t know about Rod. Not believing in God, fine. Been there, stopped believing that. But Rod? OMG! I . . .” But then she noticed the smile sneaking across Marcus’s face.
“Gotcha,” he said.
“True story,” she agreed, knitting her fingers with his.
22
The day after the storm, Dev continued putting off doing the inside bodies. He decided to walk Diablo instead. He felt bad about leaving the dog locked up in the house while he collected bodies. But now that the streets were free of possible temptation, he decided a little stroll through their semigated community would do them both some good.
They had barely made it past the Brinkman estate when Diablo found the end of the leash and started pulling. Well, duh. The house next door belonged to his previous owner. Of course Diablo would want to investigate.
“Sorry,” Dev said, giving the leash a tug. “You don’t need to see whatever’s in that house.”
But then it happened again. And again. House after house. Could the smell of rotting flesh be that tempting? Could Diablo even smell it through the closed windows and doors, all the way out on the street? But then he noticed it wasn’t the dog’s nose but his ears that were on high alert. They perked up as the two approached the next house, followed by Diablo’s head turning and the now-familiar tug on the leash. This time, though, the dog turned around again toward Dev, eyebrows asking a question in canine before actually whimpering.
“What is it, boy?” Dev asked, as if he might be spared having to check for himself. Unsurprisingly, the dog said nothing, just kept whimpering and pulling instead.
“Crap,” he said before letting the black Lab lead the way to the locked door, where Diablo parked himself as if waiting for his human to do something. Dev decided the front window was the path of least resistance, a theory he proved with a lawn gnome, thro
wn just so. He tinked off the jagged bits still clinging to the window frame, his thumb and index finger flicking, one, two, three . . .
As suspected, there was a body in full rot, an afghan on its lap, a TV tray next to the chair, flies. He’d not brought his respirator because the walk hadn’t started out as a body removal mission, not until Diablo insisted. Hastily pulling his shirt collar across his nose and mouth, Dev was prepared to leave the body for another day when he heard what the dog must have heard: the rusty-hinge squawk of a parrot, followed by the clink, clink, clink of its beak on what looked like an empty water dish.
“Oh jeez,” Dev said, his shoulders slumping like somebody just cut his strings.
It never occurred to him. Even though he’d adopted his own, he hadn’t thought about his neighbors’ pets. Innocent animals in desperate straits behind all those doors, untended to, un–provided for, now that their owners had very inconsiderately died.
He barely had a chance to wonder how the bird had survived when it showed him. Focusing on a fly that had foolishly flown within beak’s reach, the bird’s head darted and snapped. A couple more and the feathered Renfield had enough juice to hazard another door-hinge squawk.
“Water,” Dev supplied. “You want water, right?”
“Agua . . .”
Dev flinched. He hadn’t had one of his questions answered since all of his questions became rhetorical. The response so surprised him he momentarily forgot how plumbing worked. Assuming the house’s water lines were as empty as his, he checked the freezer instead and returned with a thawed ice-cube tray as the parrot began rocking its cage. Dev hesitated, seeing the talons hooked between the bars as the bird stirred the air with its green and shedding wings. “Coming,” he stalled. “Agua is coming . . .”
“Water,” the parrot translated.
Looking at the tray in his hands and the door in the cage, Dev couldn’t imagine opening it without getting pecked. “I’m . . . ,” he started, stopped, started again. “Wait right there,” he said, placing the tray beyond Diablo’s reach, even though the devil dog seemed more interested in this bird that could talk like a person than stealing its water.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 16