Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  “What, like, sexting?”

  “No,” Marcus said, again too hastily. “Like to make me feel sorry,” pause, “for her.”

  “How’d she make you feel sorry,” Lucy said, echoing his pause, “for her?”

  Feeling cornered, Marcus went for broke. “I think someone was beating her. Her dad or somebody. She’d send pictures of bruises, blood, and stuff.”

  “Why didn’t she go to the cops?” Lucy asked. “Why didn’t you go to the cops?” Pause. “And how was sending money supposed to help?”

  Marcus could feel the lie getting away from him and wanted to wrap it up. “She was going to run away. She needed money for a ticket, to get a place and stuff.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “And then what?”

  “Everybody died,” he said.

  To her credit, Lucy didn’t make any jokes about Nigerian princes or Russian chatbots. She could tell Marcus was still pretty shaken up by the whole thing. Instead, she tried to console him with a thought that would have consoled her under similar circumstances. “Well, on the plus side, you won.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Whoever she was—if she even was a she—she’s dead and you’re not,” Lucy said. “Plus, who needs money nowadays anyway?”

  “Well,” Marcus said. “There is that.”

  “And plus,” she said, feeling a little cocky, “you got me.” Pause. “Bonus points!”

  “Bonus points, indeed,” Marcus said, leaning sideways to mime a kiss in the general direction of her cheek, as if he’d actually confessed and been forgiven.

  “A long, hot shower,” Lucy said, initiating their next game of What Do You Miss?

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “Wow. Yes, yes, yes.”

  “It’s not like I said I knew how to get one,” she admitted.

  “No, it’s just,” Marcus started, switched gears. “You win. You win What Do You Miss? forever.”

  “Your turn,” Lucy said.

  “No point,” Marcus said. “You’ve won for all time.”

  “It’s not really a winning kind of game,” Lucy pointed out. “It’s a time-killing one.”

  “Oh, okay,” Marcus said before trying to win anyway. “Being ten,” he said, thinking, Take that.

  “Ten what?” she asked.

  “Years old.”

  “That doesn’t count,” Lucy said. “We stopped being ten a long time before.”

  “I still miss it, though,” Marcus said.

  “Yeah,” Lucy said, “me too.”

  Being ten. In a lot of ways, Lucy thought it was the perfect age. You were smart enough to understand most things when explained the right way, but still young enough not to care about things like your appearance, the opposite or same sex, life plans that preempted things like being an astronaut or princess or princess astronaut—back when magic wasn’t just possible, but how you made it through the day, from the miracle of meals to the casual assumption that your safety was somebody else’s responsibility. The only thing better than being ten was being ten during the summer, when even school couldn’t interfere with your plan to read comic books all day on the porch, play video games until you discovered secret levels the conquering of which would make you famous but on your own terms, signaled by your saying, “Okay, I’m famous now,” or “Time to leave me alone.”

  “Yeah, ten,” Lucy sighed. “I think you may have won after all.”

  26

  Dev remembered an online meme from before. The top half was a stock image of Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, his mouth open, his arm out, palm up, declaiming, “Who the hell . . .” The punch line was the caption for the picture below, whatever it happened to be. In the one Dev remembered, the bottom was a still from The Walking Dead, the caption: “. . . is mowing lawns during the zombie apocalypse?”

  He had the answer, now that the apocalypse had arrived, minus the zombies: Dev. Dev mowed lawns during the zombie apocalypse. Why not? He needed to do something now that the wall was finished. And keeping things tidy prevented Devonshire from looking quite so apocalyptic, now that the bodies had been dealt with. So Dev and Diablo did whatever yard work needed doing, which is to say, the human did it while the foredog watched.

  And so Dev celebrated the one-month-ish anniversary of the whatever-it-was (his calendar may have slipped during his getting-to-know-you period with Diablo; in his experience, happiness frequently had that kind of effect on time) by mowing every lawn in Devonshire, bringing each to its pre-whatever-it-was, well-trimmed height. The work went quickly, thanks to a riding mower he borrowed from one of the neighbors, and even more quickly when he realized that by knocking down the fences separating the backyards, he could just ride straight from one end of a block to the next. And so down they came: bolt cutters for the chain link, a crowbar for the pickets, and a sledgehammer for the privacy. After the fences were down, mowing the backyards was pretty much as easy as mowing the front, especially after he made the first series of end-to-end passes, taking out whatever flowers or decorative shrubbery had been planted along the fence lines.

  Dev’s goal was not to keep Devonshire beautiful, per se. It never had been in the first place, a suburb being a suburb being a suburb. But keeping the wilderness at bay was what people had been doing for millennia, and that’s all he was trying to do. That, and keeping himself busy.

  Feeding the neighbors’ pets was another way Dev kept occupied. Originally, he’d promised himself he’d set them free before he ran out of whatever food their owners had left behind. But then he got hooked on daily animal gratitude, accepting the wet tongues of appreciation, the trill, the flicked forked tongue and bubbles and blinking lizard eyes. Unlike the human variety, Dev liked looking into the eyes of his menagerie; they didn’t make him feel like he was in a gunfight without any bullets. Unlike with humans, he could look long enough to note the curve and shine of their eyes, how in just the right light, he could see a little silhouette of himself staring back.

  But then he ran out of pet food, or at least the stuff so called. Diablo had been eating what Dev ate all along, but if they started sharing with the rest, he’d be facing a trip out there anyway—just looking for people food. Plus, could some of them even eat people food? The fish, for example. He imagined dumping a can of sweet peas into an aquarium: yeah, no.

  “They better be extra grateful is all I have to say,” he said to Diablo, who wasn’t and never would be part of the group known as “they.” Diablo was Diablo: human’s companion, first class. And no, there wasn’t a second class. There was just the third-person plural for a lot of not-even-people he was taking care of: they, them, the others.

  While it was debatable whether this was his first or fourth trip beyond the wall, depending on whether you counted mental walls or just the real kind, one thing was clear to Dev afterward: it would be his last. All the way to Pet Supplies Plus, he kept having to stop, swerve, back up, to make way for deer running through what had once been traffic, followed by packs of feral dogs. Elsewhere, through former neighborhoods, rats and rabbits darted into and out of foot-tall grass and weeds, busily taking over the front yards on either side of the street. The houses themselves looked like they’d been through a riot—charred shells here, busted-out windows there, the latter, no doubt, thanks to startled deer making a last-ditch attempt at not being mauled.

  And then there were the bodies, the ones without a Dev to dispose of them. Left alone, their skin had been reduced to residue clotting their clothes, baggy and flapping around the remaining bones. There wasn’t much left for nature to recycle, except a few hairs, barely holding on to the skulls they once covered, glued there now by crusted scalp gunk. These last human scraps made good nesting material, it seemed—judging from the birds perched on all the dead heads he could see. The wide availability of hair also explained how everywhere he looked—in tree branches, under eaves, and even in the open mouth of a skeleton, still harnessed to a utility pole, its empty sockets facing skyward—Dev saw
these fantastic, bird-woven toupees of many colors. Human hair had become the seventies shag carpeting of the avian world—a questionable look destined to fade away, but comfortable underneath bare toes, or talons. And the chicks seemed to agree, peeping up a storm in their impromptu dos. Dev admired the creepy practicality of it, while also noting he should probably add a hat to his outdoor wardrobe.

  Dev parked outside the store like he was just another customer, avoiding the handicap spaces out front as if someone else might still need them. Stepping down from the truck, he passed other cars that had obviously pulled in just before the whatever-it-was, passengers just getting out before dropping and cracking their skulls on the asphalt. Others had corpses still inside, the windows rolled up and clouded with the grease and gas of their decomposition, their skin turned jerky, cooked by the sun day after sunny day.

  One car parked in a handicap space was particularly grisly. The driver’s window was rolled down just an inch while in the front, two bodies rested, one of an elderly man, judging from the plaid sport coat and matching fedora, and the other a dog—its skeleton, really—shrunk-wrapped in fur so tight Dev could count the bones. One of the driver’s hands was missing, the sleeve of the sport coat empty. Pressing against the window to get a better look, Dev noticed what looked like dice scattered about the front of the car. There were slivers of something too—splintered bone—and he realized that the “dice” were the knobby ends of finger bones, as if the driver’s passenger had taken the expression knuckle sandwich literally.

  Backing away, he noticed that the driver-side window, the one that had been rolled down an inch, had been scratched repeatedly from the inside. Along the top of the quarter-inch pane, the glass was chipped, while dried blood and spittle streaked either side of the glass. The fedora, meanwhile, was left unmolested, counterpointing the mess of everywhere else inside the car, some of the piles looking like they may have passed through the poor animal more than once as it starved to death just a few yards away from a fully stocked pet-food store . . .

  Dev shook his head and tested the front door. It was unlocked. Of course. The world had ended during normal business hours. And so he headed for the queue of shopping carts before stopping himself. What am I doing, parked all the way back there? Another head shake and he returned to the truck, threw it into reverse, and drove carefully up to the front window, watching as it loomed larger in the rearview. Stopping just inches from the glass, Dev got out to check the clearance between truck bed and windowsill. Perfect. Hoisting himself back into the cab, he pulled forward a few feet, and then slammed it into reverse again as the bottom half of the window exploded, leaving the top half to drop seconds later, sending a galaxy of shattered glass everywhere. He helped himself to a dead stock boy’s broom to sweep out the truck bed.

  Once inside, Dev wandered the aisles, filling his cart, steering around the remains of dead customers and whatever they’d knocked from the shelves when they died. And then he remembered what the “plus” in Pet Supplies Plus stood for: pets. Or more specifically: cages of dead puppies and kittens; tanks of back-floating fish; snakes and lizards reduced to leather; dead hamsters and gerbils surrounded by fur balls, wood shavings, and the same tiny dried paws that led to an earlier batch of rodents becoming snake food. The birds were self-plucked mummies, surrounded by their colorful plumage, as if feather bombs had gone off inside their cages. An emaciated ferret looked like somebody had stretch-limo-ed a possum before letting all the air out . . .

  It was the Animal Planet edition of It’s a Wonderful Life, showing what would have happened to his neighbors’ pets if there’d never been a Dev Brinkman in the world. There, he thought at the bullies who’d called him a waste of space. And then he moved on, down other aisles, tossing boxes, cans, shakers, and sacks into his cart a little faster than before, so he could get back to grateful wards of Dev even faster still.

  27

  “You don’t think Babyhands pressed a button he shouldn’t have, do you?” Marcus asked one day, out of the blue, not unlike the whatever-it-was he was referring to. “Like, maybe he thought he was just sending a tweet but . . .”

  “There’d be mushroom clouds,” Lucy said, “fallout, instant skin cancer—all that.”

  “Only from what we know about. What if there was something we didn’t know about, like some secret doomsday machine.”

  “Like in Dr. Strangelove?”

  “Like the neutron bomb that just kills living things but leaves buildings standing,” Marcus said. “Something like that, but targeted to just people, so everything else survives.”

  “So, in this scenario you’re suggesting,” Lucy said, “the Orange One is, like, tweeting something nasty about his target du jour but launches these specializing nukes instead?”

  Marcus shrugged.

  “You know what the sad thing is?”

  “What?”

  “For as totally stupid as that sounds . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can still kind of see it.”

  “I know,” Marcus said. “We are so doomed.”

  “Were,” Lucy corrected. “Past tense. Now we’re just, you know, left.”

  “Do you remember when everybody was talking about the God particle?” Lucy asked. “That big collider they were using to find the pigs bison of something . . .”

  “Higgs boson,” Marcus corrected. “Yeah, it was like in Sweden or somewhere. The Hadron Collider. I had a science teacher who was all geeked about it.”

  “Do you remember how they were saying there was this really slim chance it might destroy the universe?”

  Marcus nodded. “‘Not impossible’ was how my teacher put it.”

  “So maybe . . . ,” Lucy began.

  But Marcus was already shaking his head. “They were worried about creating a mini black hole or antimatter or something, maybe ripping apart the fabric of space-time,” he said. “Nothing that would leave puppies or us behind.”

  “So what do you got,” Lucy asked, “other than bombs with a discriminating taste in their killing?”

  Marcus rubbed his fingers across his lips, thinking. “Maybe the void got mad at people always giving God credit for everything. It’s like, ‘Dudes, listen, there’s no God. I’m all you’ve got, the cosmic goose egg, okay?’”

  “Um, I think you’re kind of personifying the impersonal universe, there.”

  Marcus shrugged. “Force of habit.”

  “That’s what Sister Mary said,” Lucy said, tapping out a rim shot on the dash.

  There were at least two theories Lucy wasn’t putting forward because mentioning them meant using the s-word. The first was that irony wasn’t just a rhetorical device, but a force of nature, like gravity. Because that’s what her survival had been, Lucy knew. Being saved from suicide because everybody else died? That was some big-time irony right there. And there was more where that came from. Looking back, a lot of her life seemed like it might have been written by Rod Serling. Losing her virginity to a friend she thought was gay? Getting pregnant by that same maybe-gay friend, who commits suicide before she can tell him he’s the father? Being a liberal intellectual born in the heart of Dixie? A Catholic nihilist? Being a goth chick who secretly digs Hello Kitty pretty much exclusively because doing so is, well, ironic . . .

  She’d had an English teacher who’d spent a whole class on the topic of irony, tying it back to Greek tragedy. He’d said the word came from the Greek eyron, which was a kind of minion that kept mankind in its place. The punishment doled out by these creatures was ironic to the brink of tragedy, using their victims’ proudest qualities to bring them down. Think Achilles and his heel or Oedipus fleeing his fate only to seal it. Science class followed with a lecture on gravity, and Lucy had started thinking about irony as a force in nature, invisible but inescapable, quietly shaping the arcs of human lives. It was like Occam’s razor meets Murphy’s Law: faced with two equally likely outcomes, the universe was biased toward the most ironic one.

&nb
sp; “Maybe our money should say, ‘In Rod We Trust,’” Lucy said aloud, a throwback to when talking to herself was how she spent most of her time.

  “Excuse me?” Marcus said, not having been privy to the stream of consciousness that led to Lucy’s free-floating punch line.

  Shaking her head: “Low blood sugar,” she said, popping open the glove compartment for the Snickers she kept there. And so on they drove, Marcus chewing over theories, Lucy chewing chocolate, peanuts, and caramel, with occasional bites of her own tongue. And then:

  “What about the Rapture, but in reverse?” Lucy tried, remembering her panic attacks and how they seemed to be driving her deeper and deeper underground with every breath. “You know, instead of getting lifted into heaven, you get sucked into the bowels of hell.”

  “And what would this reverse Rapture be called?”

  Lucy thought about it for a moment. “The Crapture?”

  “Like in, ‘Holy crap! I’m dead’?”

  “Exactly,” Lucy said; not, she thought. Instead, she was thinking about the other theory she couldn’t mention: the one where she’d actually killed herself and this was her punishment. Not that she’d phrase it that way. Afterlife would be the euphemism for polite company—especially since any company in this scenario would be part of her torment. For the most part—and especially in the beginning—Marcus’s company had been so far from punitive she’d nearly abandoned the theory.

  But then he started getting on her nerves . . .

  “Could you please pee against something that doesn’t rattle?” she’d had to ask like a hundred times already.

  “Sure,” Marcus always replied, only to make it worse the next time—peeing into standing water, for instance. And Lucy would be stuck there, listening to the long, deep gloop of his spillage while it went on forever, teased an ending, and then went on a bit longer, practically echoing all the while. “What?” he’d say, looking over his shoulder at a growling Lucy. “No rattling. I’m not rattling anything.”