“No splashing either,” she shouldn’t have to insist, but did. “No peeing-related noises, period.”
“Whatever,” he’d say, zipping up, but acting PO’d, like hearing himself when he took a leak was some personal affirmation or something.
Lucy shook her head to clear it of all urine-related thoughts and then returned to where her stream of consciousness had begun: Was she or wasn’t she dead? If finding Marcus didn’t necessarily disprove the “successful suicide” theory, what would?
A baby, she concluded.
If she had a healthy baby that wasn’t a demon or anything, that should do it, seeing as the very notion of the dead reproducing seemed counterproductive re the whole point of dying. But just seeming to get pregnant wouldn’t be enough. Hysterical pregnancies were a thing, after all, even among the living. Who knew what a postmortem pregnancy in hell might be like? Other than hellish, of course. Maybe she’d get pregnant but never deliver. Get morning sickness, forever. Mood swings, forever. Get bigger and bigger until she blew up like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life, her rib cage thrown apart like an open book, but inside, where that reluctant baby should be, another her, like a nesting doll—this one already pregnant and getting bigger, the whole thing on infinite replay.
How’s that for the eyrons outdoing themselves?
But if she got pregnant and had a healthy baby after only nine months? That’d mean some of the rules she’d taken for granted from before were still in play. And they’d also have a head start on the whole rebooting-the-species thing, which—sci-fi cliché or not—was pretty much obligatory, under the circumstances. Provided her peer, the happy pee-er, went along with it, of course.
Meanwhile: “Maybe the planet just got tired of us,” the pee-er himself suggested, breaking the ice that had formed while Lucy mulled her unmentionable theories. “Think of it: mass extinctions, global warming, deforestation, the ozone hole . . .”
Lucy nodded, then added to the litany of anthropogenic disasters. “That giant garbage patch in the middle of the ocean,” she said. “Ocean acidification, oil spills, genocide, freaking man-made earthquakes . . .”
It was Marcus’s turn to nod. “Exactly,” he said. “So maybe there are, like, ecoantibodies that planets have and when it gets bad enough, they go after the source of the disease. Maybe we’re all that’s left after the earth’s immune response to humanity.”
“But why’d we survive?” Lucy asked, because the whatever-it-was was a two-parter: (1) What happened? and (2) Why didn’t it happen to them?
“Because we’re perfect,” he said, smiling, but not unserious, not at the moment at least.
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said, playing along. “I forgot we’d already decided that.”
28
Driving back with a truck full of supplies for the last surviving pets in the world, Dev kept the same careful pace he’d set before, steering around corpses, braking for deer and dog stampedes, making note of how the world beyond the wall had changed to remind him why he would not be returning. And so the driving went, peacefully enough—until Dev slammed on the brakes so hard his seat belt seized to stop him from hitting the windshield. There, in the middle of the road, the embodiment of all his reasons for building the wall: an escaped cheetah, its face bloodied as it looked up from the ripe, ripped throat of a boy about Dev’s age, a fellow survivor who’d stopped surviving just minutes earlier. He’d hoped that when the zoo’s locks failed, the animals would busy themselves getting even with their dead keepers, feasting on their more exotic cohabitants, or just dying because they’d forgotten how to be wild. He’d also hoped that he didn’t have to worry about anyone else showing up to disturb the hard-won peace of Devonshire.
At first, Dev didn’t know which dashed hope was the more terrifying. But then he remembered a fun fact about cheetahs: they can run up to seventy miles an hour. Even in data-poor farm country, he’d never driven that fast. Of course, what was data sickness compared with being mauled? Plus, he was driving several tons of metal with a bumper height that could decapitate a Prius like it was a speed bump. All in all, he liked his chances—even if they came with a promise of panic attacks and puking.
“Let’s see what this baby can do,” he said, squeezing courage from cheap movie dialogue, before executing the tightest U-turn the truck was capable of. A few mailboxes lost their heads, and some wrecked cars got wrecked further along the way, but once the big cat was centered in his rearview, Dev smashed the pedal, jumping curbs, tearing up lawns, scattering uncollected mail and shredded metal as he headed for freeway.
Dev risked another look in the rearview. The cheetah was still there, still too close, but clearly not going as fast as it could. Pounding bare pawed across sun-cooked concrete couldn’t be any fun, which might explain why instead of running, the cheetah was springing like the gazelles it once chased, all four paws air cooling before hitting the hot pavement again. Even empathetically challenged Dev could practically read the animal’s thoughts, which were basically one, repeated:
Hot, hot, hot . . .
And then the animal stopped. Turned. Figured: Why bother? Or maybe it was lured away by the smell of corpse jerky wafting from the ad hoc convection ovens collected along either side of the road. Whatever the reason, once stopped, the cheetah’s reflection shrank so fast it was like clicking off an old-fashioned TV. Dev was so relieved he almost cheered—just before the TV inside his own head blipped out.
He could feel something coming away from his face and was able to breathe through his nose again—making him realize he hadn’t been able to before. Doing it now hurt, along with pretty much the rest of his body. His shoulders, his chest, and neck—all ached. The pain in his neck differed depending on location: in the back, it was skeletal-muscular pain, while in front, his throat felt rug burned. Until he opened them, he hadn’t realized his eyes were closed. Once opened, it took a few seconds to focus on anything, as if the fluid in his eyeballs had been stirred up and still needed to settle down.
The windshield was gone.
Even before he could focus, Dev knew this, the warm wind whipping down the artificial canyon of the freeway brushing against his face, making something in the cab rattle like a plastic grocery bag pinned against a fence. The airbag had gone off, was even now hanging out of the steering wheel—crumpled, deflated—like the steering column had puked it into his lap. Rock-salt chunks of safety glass spilled off as he brushed it aside. What had he hit? He couldn’t see anything over the accordion-crumpled hood . . .
Something was inside the truck with him. He sensed its presence before he saw it, the sensation slowing his ability to turn and look. But he did. He turned—slowly—and looked. And there, wedged into the passenger seat next to him: an adult male deer, folded almost in half. Dev just stared at it for a moment, watching as the warm wind tumbling through the cab rustled its sandy brown fur. The fur looked soft; Dev wanted to touch it. Did.
Mistake!
The deer wasn’t dead. The pressure of Dev’s fingers on its fur was enough to switch it back on. The triangular head yanked up, turned, turned, craned up at the roof of the cab, ears pitched at full alert, pivoting independently of one another, seeming to lock on Dev’s breathing as both ears turned in his direction, followed by the rest of the animal’s head, its black marble eyes drilling through him. Snot and blood leaked from its black nose, its nostrils flaring and collapsing, its breathing labored. The thing’s hooves began pedaling in the air, looking for ground to escape over, only growing more frantic when they found none. One of the hooves dangled and flopped at the end of a break, the bloody stick of a bone poking through the fur.
Dev flashed on this very image in his neighbor’s garbage, pre-school, pre-Christmas, pre-disillusionment with the things his parents told him. He wanted to reach out, to pull on either side of the break, set it right before apologizing for being the cause of it. But the animal wouldn’t hold still that long. One of its unbroken hooves kicked out a c
hunk of the padded dash before cracking the plastic lens of the odometer. Another banged against the roof of the cab, tenting the metal overhead. And all the while, it was emptying every deer hole it had, blood and vomit from its mouth, arcs of urine, blasts of deer feces and death stink.
Dev, cinched in place by his seat belt, was right within blast range of all the creature’s exiting fluids. But sheer grossness was the least of it. He was also within striking distance of the dying deer’s dangerous hooves, which didn’t seem bent on revenge, necessarily, but not not either.
And that’s when Dev’s Aspergerian tendency to map—once debilitating—suddenly started feeling like a superpower. If this had been a movie, his POV would have overlapped with computer-generated targeting circles around the three hooves that could still do any damage, the circles doing a complicated dance in front of his eyes, our hero ducking and darting, keeping his eyes and the head that held them just a split second ahead of disaster.
Bobbing and weaving for his life, Dev felt hypnotized by the motion—his and the deer’s—the chaotic dance of one dying, the other trying to stay alive, the latter suddenly on autopilot, leaving his mind free to observe. And what he observed was this:
Death.
Death with a capital D. Death getting ready to happen right in front of him. Death as one big, bucking muscle, covered in skin and fur, refusing to be taken alive, kicking and smashing until it cried uncle and died . . .
Death so full of crap it wasn’t even funny. Because the thing was still emptying itself all over him, filling his nostrils with the pestilential stench he knew all too well, like something had crawled up somebody’s butt and died. He’d thought that was a funny way to describe a fart back when Leo first said it. He’d thought about it breathing through a respirator full of air fresheners, and he thought about it now.
What crawled up your butt and died?
And then the deer did. Its limbs stopped thrashing and shuddered instead, as if it were cold despite the windblown heat filling the cab. All four limbs, including the broken one, gave in to gravity. Its ears folded back, the black marble eyes locked open, and the head dropped against a chest that was white underneath the spatter of everything that had come out. Little beads of fluid hung at the tips of the longer hairs around its black leather nose, the nostrils open, but slack, not going anywhere anytime soon.
Dev tested his luck and turned the key. The truck was seriously crunched but not dead. The battery worked, at least. He could tell from the lit dash full of warning lights. The engine didn’t turn over at first, but then he checked the emergency fuel cutoff under the dash with the little fuel pump in a circle slash. He flipped it, kerchunked back into park, and turned the key. And even though the windshield was missing; even though the front end was an accordion; even though the airbag was puked out and the deer in the passenger seat was for-real dead this time—still, the truck started. It was drivable. The engine wasn’t happy about starting, but it did, sending up the sound of something loose and metallic from underneath the crumpled hood. A ball of blue smoke coughed out of the tailpipe as Dev watched in his side mirror, the rearview being lost somewhere in the back, along with the rest of the windshield. Another blue ball of smoke, some more rattling, and Dev kerchunked into drive.
The exhaust drove itself clean while the busted-out windshield—mercifully—provided adequate venting against the buildup of shit-piss-puke-related smells. And as Dev brought the truck up to forty, the rattling underneath the chassis sped up too, becoming a whine that turned into a ping, followed by a chewed-up bit of sheet metal, skipping down I-94 behind him in the side view. That was a close one, Dev thought, assuming that the specter of death was through with him for the time being.
Wrong.
Driving back home, he noticed them in his dead passenger’s fur: little black specks framed against sandy brown. At first, Dev thought they might be dried flecks of blood or vomit, maybe some other dark fluid atomized as the poor thing bellowed out its last breath. But then they moved. The deer’s fur was full of ticks—literally crawling with them.
And even though he couldn’t see them on his own arms, he could feel them. Ditto, his neck and scalp. He couldn’t see those, either, but they were there, a small battalion of deer ticks, plotting their invasion of his bloodstream with any number of pathogens, though there was only one he was sure of: Lyme disease.
Pulling up outside the wall, he exited the truck, tugging at his shirt as the buttons went flying, followed by his shoes and socks. When the zipper jammed on his pants, he shimmied out of them, followed by his underwear, pulled up and over, down and off. He’d not bring a stitch of that infested fabric inside the world he’d set aside for himself and a handful of select others.
After unloading the pet food wearing nothing but the skin he was born in, Dev stuffed a sock in the gas tank, lit it, and stood back as flames like liquid spread throughout the wreckage. The buffeting heat made every hair on his body move—at least he hoped it was just the heat. He stood there, watching, making sure it was done. Once the deer’s sandy brown fur had withered to black, each bristle of it melting down to a hard ball of charred keratin, Dev gathered up the pieces of his abandoned wardrobe and chucked them into the flames, one by one. Satisfied that everything that needed to be was burned, he padded home, barefoot and scratching, until blood ran.
Ignoring Diablo for the dog’s own good as the animal’s whimpering followed him to the bathroom, he turned, said, “Stay,” and then shut the door. He filled the Shop-Vac without waiting to heat the water, stepped into the tub, and drew the curtain, poking just a finger out to flip the switch. Cold water pelted every inch of his body as he scrubbed, rinsed, and then scrubbed some more. Soap suds ran pink and gray down the drain. Clumps of hair—clawed out while working the shampoo around his scalp—collected in the trap and stopped the water from draining. Dev checked the cloudy runoff for swimmers, didn’t see any, but also didn’t know whether deer ticks could swim.
Still standing in the tub with the water off, he turned a white towel into a bloody candy cane from where he was still bleeding. He loaded a washcloth with hydrogen peroxide, wiping and foaming, foaming and wiping as more pink residue slid off him, bubbly this time.
Stepping onto the bath mat, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror hanging from the back of the bathroom door—the same one he could hear Diablo through, scratching and whimpering. He’d always heard the first sign of Lyme disease was a red, bull’s-eye-shaped rash, but couldn’t tell if he had one, thanks not only to all the scratching he’d done, but also because of the complexion he’d inherited from his mother. He tried smoothing his hands across his skin. If the rash was raised, maybe he could read it, like braille.
But everything felt wrong, his fingers dyslexic. Was that always there? Or that? And what about the parts of him he couldn’t see in the mirror or reach around to touch?
He unlocked the bathroom door, and Diablo fell forward with a click of nails against tile. Holding him at bay with the balled-up towel, Dev stepped around him and out, before closing the door so Diablo could scratch the other side for once.
“Sorry, boy,” he said, pulling up a clean pair of pants before tugging down a clean T-shirt. “Sorry,” he repeated, while rooting around his great big box of dead electronics until he found what he was looking for: his smartphone and charger. The thing couldn’t call or surf, but it could still shoot, and he needed video of the dark side of the Dev. While it charged, he crossed the street to a neighbor’s house where he remembered seeing a selfie stick he’d thought especially useless—until he’d found a use for it.
He thought about how he’d tell this to Leo—if he were still alive, if Dev had forgiven him. “Sounds like the world’s most boring porno,” his dead ex-friend might have said.
And true enough, the resulting footage was hardly titillating. In fact, if he hadn’t shot it himself, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell what it was. He’d maxed out the zoom, getting as close-in and c
lose-up as he could without going blurry. But he could just as easily have been shooting a leather chair—one with the occasional pimple and a lot of black hair. But no red bull’s-eyes or off-brown bull’s-eyes or slightly raised bull’s-eyes showing up as Dev lit himself like the moon going through phases—the craters always standing out best along the line separating light from dark.
Nada. Bubkes. Zilch.
He shaved his head just in case. He’d seen The Omen, and he could practically feel it pulsing there, hiding cleverly under his hair, just like those three sixes, which might be there as well, given the recent apocalyptic turn of events. But again: nothing. Not in the mirror, not on video, not when he went over every square inch with soapy fingertips.
He’d exchanged places with Diablo once more, and when Dev emerged from the bathroom this time, the dog held back. His human reached out a hand to pet him for the first time since the whole thing began. Any ticks that might have been hiding on his clothes, on his skin, or in his hair had probably dug themselves in so deeply by now it was unlikely they’d be able to launch a sneak attack on Diablo or any of the others.
“So?” he said, rubbing his shiny new dome. “Like it?”
Diablo seemed on the fence. And so the boy knelt and dropped his head. He could feel the dog’s breath as he sniffed around this new development, inspecting it nasally. And then he felt the dog’s tongue sliding across the top of his head. “You can keep doing that,” he told him, finding it hard to think about dying or strangers as long as Diablo was so occupied.
29
For a girl whose previous pregnancy had led her to contemplate suicide, it was a little odd, Lucy’s sudden desire to get preggers again. Timing: that’s what changed her mind. Before, the pregnancy and Max’s suicide had become inextricably linked, leading to those sneak previews of death known as panic attacks, triggered every time she saw anything about babies or overheard someone advise someone else to “take it to the max,” which she couldn’t anymore. Suicide had seemed preferable to the so-called miracle of birth because suicide introduced a certain level of conclusive certainty into her situation.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 20