After rummaging through the kitchen, Dev returned with a handful of drinking straws and poked one through the bars above the water dish, where it immediately became victim to a vicious beak attack. “Too short,” he said, letting go of the first before grabbing three new straws and wedging them together. Taking a sip from the tray, he poked the straw through the bars and released a stream into the empty dish.
“Don’t mind the spit,” he advised, and the bird didn’t seem to as its tongue darted and flicked water down its arid throat.
“Thank you,” it said after a dish and a half.
“You’re welcome,” Dev said back, for lack of anything better to say.
There was a pause then as one survivor eyed the other two between bars. “Food?” it finally squawked, pitched perfectly so even Dev could hear the question mark at the end.
The parrot became the spokesbird for the rest, talking Dev into the totally impractical decision to take care of his neighbors’ pets. And it was true what they said about pets resembling their owners. Not necessarily physically, but in terms of circumstance. That was the conclusion he’d reached after noticing that wherever he found aquariumed, bowled, or caged pets, there was also a dead caretaker who looked like they hadn’t gotten out much. Two were further confined to wheelchairs, which was considerate of them, especially when it came to removing their bodies.
As imprisoned as these animals were, they had done reasonably well, all things considered. The snakes still seemed to be digesting their last meals while the reptiles with legs benefited from the clouds of flies their rotting benefactors had drawn. The birds, too, appeared to have supplemented their diets this way once their seed stashes ran out, while the fish didn’t want for food or water, the latter for obvious reasons and the former because fish tended to be notoriously overfed. What the fish needed most was oxygen, once the air pumps died and the water in their tanks grew stagnant. Dev found several aquariums that had simply become slime-green monstrosities full of dead fish. Ironically, the few that had survived he thought owed thanks to thirsty, furry housemates who’d helped themselves to the tanks’ water, keeping it moving and oxygenated until the water level was too low for them to reach, by which time the fish’s own swimming was enough to stave off stagnation.
While the fish won Dev’s admiration for the improbability of their survival, the rodents earned his ire by having resorted to cannibalism, the evidence of which consisted of little curled paws lying among their wood shavings. Dev’s response to this lack of civility was feeding the offending creatures to the snakes that still had room for dessert, his acts of mercy limited to those that deserved it.
From the looks of things, some of the dogs and cats not lucky enough to bunk with a tankful of fish had either been left with the toilet seats already up or had figured it out for themselves, while also having access to bags of dried food whose chip-clips were no match for a good set of claws. The less lucky had improvised their survival, recycling their own waste and/or gnawing on anything leather. For water, they had lapped at puddles from the defrosting coils of inefficient refrigerators, air conditioners, knocked-over vases, and/or backed-up sinks.
In retrospect, Dev probably should have set them free to fend for themselves. The dogs and cats probably stood a fifty-fifty chance. The lizards, who knew? And the snakes—especially the boa constrictor—might lower the odds for the rest.
But then there were the fish.
If the parrot hadn’t talked him into it, the fish would have. They’d already been through so much, had survived so improbably, he couldn’t condemn them to the Ecorse River, which had been used as an industrial toilet too long for anything but Frankenfish to survive. Eventually, it would heal itself just like the air, but Dev wouldn’t be dining on anything he pulled from the river at the end of his block anytime soon. He’d wait until the mayflies came back; Google said that was the sign a body of water was on the rebound—even though Google itself hadn’t been so lucky.
So he’d take care of the fish until the river was ready for them. And if he was going to take care of the fish, he might as well take care of the lizards, the birds, and the snakes. And if he was going to take care of all those refugees from the Jurassic, could he really ignore the mammals with which he shared so much more DNA?
The answer in at least one case was yes; he could ignore one such animal. It had not restrained itself. It had gone the dog-eat-dog route, like the rodents he turned into snake food, though this one had dined further up the food chain. He’d already imagined as much. But imagining and seeing were two different things. Diablo tried to warn him the only way a dog could, by tugging in the opposite direction as they approached the crime scene in question.
“What is it, boy?” Dev asked, tugging on the leash and meeting canine refusal. “Pretty bad, huh?” he guessed, not having the slightest idea of how bad bad could get. The Lab sent a sort of Morse code with his eyebrows before finally resorting to a prolonged howl as Dev opened the door.
It was worse than he’d imagined. The animal in question was one of those pocket dogs and would surely have died without its owner as a ready source of protein. Said owner was—or had been—an older woman, judging from the housedress the bones wore and the tufts of gray hair scattered about the living room. Dev had dealt with a lot of bodies on their way to becoming skeletons, but this was the cleanest picked he’d seen that hadn’t been cleaned by fire. He paused for a moment to admire the job when he noticed the housedress moving. The top of the dress twisted and snarled as if one breast were fighting the other.
And then, just as quickly, the dress stopped as the fattest little Chihuahua Dev had ever seen waddled out from underneath the skirt. Its round belly was just a few meals away from lifting its feet off the ground, leaving its paws paddling air. As it licked its chops, Dev stepped back out onto the porch and closed the door.
“You were right,” he said, pulling Diablo away from the place.
He returned later, with a can of Alpo and a handgun. Opening the door, he whistled until the offending beast came waddling out, looking more like a pregnant wiener dog than a Chihuahua. “Here you go, fatso,” Dev said, tipping the open can over a bowl and letting its contents plop out. He stepped back and sighted down the barrel as the bobbing brown head chewed its own grave.
But then he hesitated. He’d never killed anything of any appreciable size before. There were the unavoidable worms that got squished on rainy days, the mosquitoes he slapped out of instinct, and the countless other bugs, from the barely visible to the microscopic. And the gerbils he’d turned into snake food, of course, but they still fell below the threshold of what he considered murder. Protein reallocation—that’s what they were. But a dog—a dog of any size was killing, no matter how justified the death might be to avoid corrupting the others.
And so he closed his eyes and then squeezed the trigger. The shot went astray, blowing out a window across the street, missing its intended target by a mile. The bang, however—the bang was like a dog whose bark was worse than its bite. Dev opened his eyes in time to see the dog complete a somersault as if it’d jerked its little rat head up at the sound and just kept going. After sticking the landing, the Chihuahua looked a little surprised to still be alive, but then bolted—or as close to bolting as it was capable of, with its low-slung belly and too-short legs.
Dev followed, firing into the air whenever the dog showed signs of tiring. “Keep going,” he shouted, driving the herd of one toward the wall of SUVs. Once there, he wrenched open the driver-side door of one of the lower riding ones and popped the passenger-side door before capturing and boosting the mega mutt up to where it could bounce on the blackened springs.
“Good boy,” he lied, before slamming the door shut. And then he listened. Heard springs squeaking like they were trying to make up their mind. He fired the gun one last time and thought he heard the springs sproing, though it could have been the ringing in his ears. As the echo faded and the ringing stopped, they were replace
d by the unnatural thing’s yipping, growing ever fainter as it waddled away to its death by other means.
Dev blew across the muzzle that had already cooled. Going to holster the gun, he realized he hadn’t brought one and shrugged. And then he went home to Diablo, where the lucky dog got extra helpings of the food that may have spared the Chihuahua its fate, if only it had thumbs to work the can opener.
23
Marcus didn’t notice them until the third or fourth time after they’d done it, watching Lucy get dressed. “Two watches?” he said.
“Correct,” Lucy said, buckling the second one on.
“Why two?” by which he meant, really, “Why any?” It wasn’t like they had to worry about missing the bus or anything.
Lucy pointed to the one on her left wrist, a cheap LCD number with the day, date, and year. “This is so I’ll know the date,” she said, before pointing to the old-fashioned windup one on her right. “And this is the backup.”
“But why bother keeping track at all?” Marcus asked, finally.
“Because I’m a woman,” Lucy said, pausing to see if he got it. To her, it was obvious: women were practically clocks themselves, and a woman’s quality of life could depend on knowing what time of the month it was—something that had hit home for Lucy not too long ago.
Meanwhile, Marcus thought about it and was ready to admit he was stumped when it hit him. He palmed his face, embarrassed, before peeking at her through his fingers. “I’m an idiot,” he said.
“You know,” she said, neither confirming nor denying his idiocy, “I’ll bet the first astronomer was a woman. An astrologer, at very least. Primitive men would have been fine with the sun going around the earth, but it takes a woman to know that life revolves around the moon.”
Marcus nodded as if agreeing, hoping that by doing so they could get off the subject of women and their menstrual cycle sooner. No such luck.
“I’ll bet it was a woman that got men to build Stonehenge,” Lucy continued, warming to her subject—and the way it made Marcus squirm.
“Excuse me?” he said, part question, part request to be dismissed from the conversation.
Lucy, meanwhile, dramatized her thesis.
“I’d like that rock over there and that other one, just a skootch that way,” she said, impersonating her designer of Stonehenge, complete with hand gestures.
“But why?” she asked, impersonating the would-be stone haulers.
“Because you don’t want your women pregnant all the time, now do you?” she finished.
Marcus wondered whether Lucy’s question was aimed at those ancient Stonehengian contractors or some more contemporary listener, much closer by. Just testing, he tried a pointed joke of his own.
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess that’s something they didn’t have back then.”
“What’s that?”
“Biological clocks with,” he began, only to be cut off by Lucy’s eyes, set to stun.
“What?” she prodded.
. . . a snooze alarm, Marcus thought, not that he’d say it. Not anymore. Instead, sheepishly, he said, “I don’t know,” before picking an alternative nearly as bad. “Options, I guess.”
Lucy thought about going off on him before realizing Marcus was right—just not about the birth control options he was alluding to, nor the ancients who lacked them. The options they were out of? Other partners. And so she decided to make nice until either the odds improved or one of them died.
“Cute,” she said finally, not really meaning it, but not needing to, seeing as Marcus had the same number of options in the partner department as she did. So there.
When it came to getting what they needed to survive, Lucy and Marcus thought of it as shopping, minus the hassle of paying for stuff. The condition they found the stores in—unpillaged—contributed to the illusion. They’d found no evidence of roaming bands Mad Maxing through all the good stuff ahead of them. Every bit of new geography was virgin territory for the pair of ex-virgins, provided they didn’t get detoured back into the land of trough and toilet.
The main downside was the whole airtight, no AC, southern thing again. Even stores that had been reasonably body-free when what came down, came down, didn’t always stay that way. Stores with automatic doors had swallowed up the occasional wandering animal while the electricity still flowed—dogs, deer, a goat, skunks, a literal bull once but in an appliance store, not a china shop—only to trap them inside once the helpful electronics that had let them in died, followed by the eventual death of whatever wandered into whatever foodless business it had wandered into, after toppling shelves, shattering big-screen TVs, bashing their heads bloody against panes of shatterproof glass. Anything disturbed or destroyed in these places, post-whatever, had been disturbed or destroyed by something other than humans—either animals or some chain reaction triggered by something falling onto something else, rodents gnawing at the bottom of some stack of something that came Jenga-ing down to smash or roll or bounce to its penultimate resting place until Lucy’s or Marcus’s foot kicked it out of the way.
The grocery stores were the worst—even ones where no one and nothing had died. Because even without putrescent corpses and/or carcasses, there were still the formerly fresh fruits and vegetables, buzzing with flies, crawling with maggots, withered, burst, turning to mush, leaking down shelves, eyes sprouting through the mesh windows of five-pound bags, damp with the beginnings of fermentation. Eggs by the dozen, fragile bombs of stench; gallons of milk turned to watery cottage cheese; cottage cheese pushing out of its container, livid with mold; thighs and drumsticks with gangrene; raw hamburger as brown and crusty as meat loaf fully cooked; the other white meat blotched purple, orange, phosphorescent with exotic pathogens, flourishing under the plastic wrap.
Marcus had teased Lucy about her gas mask precisely once—until he went shopping with her that first time and discovered that shopping wasn’t an ordeal to be gotten through with a handkerchief over your face while you grabbed what you needed and got out, preferably within the time frame of a single held breath. Nope. When Lucy shopped, she shopped—with two or three extra “ops” stretching it out. She lingered. She breathed through a double-barrel charcoal canister that stopped the fouled air from reaching her young lungs, allowing her to check labels, compare nutrients, check unit prices though they’d all been commonly denominated down to zero dollars and zero cents.
“I’m kind of wishing that was ‘zero scents,’” Marcus said, green at the gills and getting greener. After that, their very next shopping trip had been to an army surplus store, to see what kind of gas masks they had in his size.
The pair stocked up on the nonperishables, nonabsorbent, undamaged. Canned goods were good; things vacuum sealed like coffee, jarred nuts, crackers if they were shelved high enough; pasta; peanut butter; dried soup mixes; raisins; cookies; potato chips in tubes; multipacks of assorted carbonated beverages; cases of bottled water. Matches were essential, along with charcoal, lighter fluid, aluminum foil, toilet paper. Paper plates were always welcome, along with plastic utensils and Solo cups because, seriously, after the end of the world, who wants to do the dishes?
Each had their favorite things to scavenge. Lucy’s included button batteries for her LCD watch; feminine hygiene products; those little horoscope tubes (“for giggles”); Oreos because, well, they were Oreos. Marcus’s gotta-have-its included duct tape and zip ties, especially the yard-long ones he found at certain hardware stores.
“I’d be worried about that,” Lucy remarked, “if becoming a serial killer wasn’t a little pointless this late in the game.”
“What?” Marcus asked, exaggerating a look of innocence. “These? These are great. Something comes apart, a rusty bolt, whatever, you don’t have to sort through a million different screws because—boom—one size fits all. Just thread one of these puppies though, yank it tight, and you’re good to go.”
“Was your dad an engineer?”
“Yeah, so?”
�
�Nothing,” she said. “Just wondering if it was an inherited trait.” Was that too obvious? Inheritance, genetics, reproduction . . .
“What trait?”
“Being brilliant when it comes to fixing things,” she said, buttering him up like he were toast. Judging from the aw-shucks grin on his face, that’s exactly what he was.
Condoms.
They weren’t on either of their lists—not until after Lucy’s lecture on the menstrual cycle. After that, she found herself rounding the corner just in time to see Marcus stuffing boxes of Trojans into his pockets. Their eyes met, but they didn’t say anything. Instead, he deflected, as she was learning he tended to do.
“You ever use one of these as a water balloon?” he asked, holding up one of the unpocketed boxes, as if he’d just stumbled upon the display. “They hold a crazy amount of water . . .”
“I prefer not to sacrifice lambs for my water sports, thank you,” Lucy said back, wondering how on earth he imagined she wouldn’t notice that he was wearing a condom the next time they did it. What, was he just going to go around wearing one until—to quote the old Viagra commercials—the moment was right? That hardly seemed sanitary, especially for the party on the receiving end.
Marcus, meanwhile, showed every sign of imagining they’d moved on from the subject. She’d seen them, after all. Condoms would just be another step in their routine, one of a growing number of routines imposing order on chaos—or the illusion thereof.
And so they continued shopping—a young couple in gas masks—the first postpeople customers to enter this particular establishment and all the other establishments they’d entered thus far. It was fun, the two feeling less like survivors of an apocalypse and more like a newlywed couple with a bottomless expense account, shopping together, making inside jokes about the merchandise, everything still new to them, still funny, pulling little pranks on one another, like now, Lucy hiding behind the checkout counter, waiting to see how long it took before Marcus came looking for her.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 17