Dev tipped the threaded neck to the smooth rim of the graduated cylinder and let the vodka glug out halfway to his stepfather’s mark. He tipped more vodka in until the surface made a silver disc level with the line his stepfather had established, back when he’d perfected his high-functioning alcoholic routine. He cracked the cap off a bottle of tonic with a gasp and topped off his first real drink-drink.
“Cheers,” he said to Diablo, dragging the dog’s water bowl forward so he wouldn’t have to drink alone. And then he brought the glass to his lips, sipping one of his stepfather’s patented hummingbird sips. He wondered what the magic would feel like once it happened.
Except it didn’t. And it continued to not happen, even as Dev stepped up the pace. For his next drink, he skipped the cylinder and the tonic. Now there was something. Not necessarily a good something, but something for sure. It felt weird, this room-temperature liquid making his mouth feel cold when he inhaled afterward, followed by a warmth that traveled down his chest and felt, maybe, okay. He tested to confirm the feeling: yes. And another yes. And yes again. And still yes, until . . .
He hit maybe.
And then a string of noes and one, big definitely not—as he realized, too late, that everything in his stomach wanted out. Now. And now. And no please no, not . . .
Now!
And in the morning, Dev still didn’t know whether he had Lyme disease, but he did know one thing: inside his own head was no longer his favorite place to be.
Once the hangover let go—one bloody talon at a time—Dev decided the only way to deal was to go on as if nothing was wrong. He should be able to, he figured. Call it the hypochondriac’s paradox: if he could talk himself into being sick, maybe he could talk himself out of it as well.
And so that was the plan: to live until he stopped. Or just keep on living forever, if that was in the cards. Because he still hadn’t entirely ruled out being immortal—despite his one data point to the contrary with its throat ripped out. Still, being alive when most people weren’t? Who knew how badly the end had messed up the rules previously in play? Like universal mortality, for example. There were experiments Dev could use to test this hypothesis, of course. But why spoil the surprise? If Dev was immortal, he figured, he’d prefer to find out by not dying. No need to force the point.
It wasn’t until late August, maybe early September (fear, like happiness, played a number on his sense of time) that Dev admitted—finally—he probably didn’t have Lyme disease. Try as he might, he couldn’t talk himself into any of the symptoms. Did he feel like he had the flu? No. Chronic fatigue? Nope, not really. Joint pain? Facial droop? Parkinsonian tremor? Nope. Nope. Nope. He couldn’t even work up a decent fever.
“Well, devil dog,” he announced, “looks like I’m not going to die.” Pause. “Not right away anyway.”
Judging from the way his tail wagged, Diablo was glad to hear it. As would be the other critters that had come to depend on him, if he’d ever confided his fear to them, which he hadn’t. “This is between you and me,” he told Diablo. “No telling the others.”
Diablo woofed his agreement.
“No use getting them worried when there’s nothing they can do.”
Diablo cocked his head, as if considering the wisdom of this.
“I’ll leave the door open,” he concluded. “Just in case.”
Diablo looked confused.
“So you won’t have to,” Dev said, before miming a set of jaws clamping on his throat.
Diablo responded by licking Dev’s hand, a gesture his human would have found reassuring—if not for the knuckle bones at Pet Supplies Plus. Those gruesome dice just kept coming up, the fact that the animal hadn’t stopped at the bone, but cracked them open, sucked out the marrow, left splinters and those bony knobs behind.
Diablo looked at his human like he was reading his mind. His eyebrows seemed especially agitated, vexed by not having the ability to speak, to plead his case. He nosed at Dev’s hand, the one that had recently played the role of Diablo’s own jaws. He kicked his nose up and then slid his head underneath so that Dev had two choices—slapping the back of his head or petting him. He chose the latter, and the dog seemed satisfied with that decision.
Even after he’d cleared himself of Lyme disease, however, Dev kept thinking about death. Not his: Diablo’s. In many ways, he was more attached to the devil dog than he was to life itself. It was a little pointless, after all, surviving everybody else just to die anyway. But taking care of Diablo, playing with him in the backyard: those were something. They weren’t pointless. And if he was being honest with himself, the only thing Dev really feared about the future was Diablo’s exit from it.
And they’d reach a future like that; it was pretty much a mathematical certainty, given the human-to-dog ratio when it came to years. The only way that future didn’t happen was if Dev died first. And so he was a little disappointed, having to admit he didn’t have Lyme disease. Maybe Lyme would have been the handicap Diablo needed so the two of their biological clocks could run down together.
“But hey,” he said, still patting Diablo in the here and now, “maybe I’ll get something else fatal,” he added, leaving the door open in more ways than one.
31
There was only one thing wrong with the library: having to decide whether to stay or go. After three months on the road, first separately and then together, they could be forgiven for finding stasis attractive. But how long before stasis became paralysis?
“This could be it,” Marcus suggested. “We could live here.”
It sounded like a proposal, making Lucy flinch even though her leftover Catholicism saw marriage prior to procreation as the only way to go. “Let’s not get,” she started. “But,” she started again.
“I’m just saying it wouldn’t be so bad a base camp,” he said. “Send out our own smoke signals, let others find us. Why should we have to do all the work?”
“Because the earth’s round,” Lucy said. “Because you can only see smoke from so far away. We could end up waiting an awfully long time.”
“I meant smoke metaphorically,” Marcus said. “I was actually thinking about something like a bunch of helium balloons attached to a fishing line. Reel it out as high as it can go, for maximum visibility.”
“Like that old song,” Lucy observed.
“What old song?”
“‘Ninety-Nine Red Balloons.’ It was originally in German, I think. Luftballons. It was about accidentally starting World War III.”
“Lovely.”
“Speaking of,” Lucy continued, “if we just signal and wait, what if the others turn out to be creeps? Or crazy? Or just plain dangerous? There’s no guarantee we’ll get as lucky as you got.”
“Cute.”
“But the point I’m making is serious,” she insisted.
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “In a zombie apocalypse, maybe. But it’s not like there’s a shortage of stuff around. No need to fight over it.”
Lucy stretched out her arms. “With the exception of a good place to live,” she said. “For example,” she added.
They wound up taking sides in the ongoing debate over the relative desirability of finding or being found by others—just not always the same side as they’d taken before. Sometimes Lucy cheered for the family of man while Marcus pointed out the territorial nastiness of the species. Other times, it was Marcus who sang “Kumbaya,” while Lucy suggested something by Wagner was really mankind’s tune. Who came out where was probably an indicator of how claustrophobic one or the other found their cramped, little, four-wheeled world.
And that’s why the library was such a lucky break. It offered their relationship the one thing it lacked: space. A place with a roof and space where they could get out of eyeshot of each other without worrying about being attacked by wild dogs or pigs. Give the heart a little bit of what it needed to grow fonder.
And so they started spending their days apart, while in the evenings, they’d meet like they
were meeting for a date. They’d go up to the roof of the library and set off some fireworks they’d found. The green, red, and yellow blossoms of light were more romantic than flares and still sent the same message to whoever might be out there, letting them know that they were not alone. And after that, the two went back inside, where they were not alone together until one of them fell asleep while the other watched them, the light of the moon outside the window painting their skin the loveliest shades of blue.
He’d noticed the changes in her body and wanted to blame the Oreos but had his doubts about whether eating too many cookies could actually increase the size of a person’s chest. Plus, she’d been “secretly” throwing up—which was difficult to pull off behind a library restroom door where the sounds of retching tended to echo.
The question of how was natural. And not the basic how, but the particular how, under the circumstances, considering his own efforts to prevent such an outcome. And so Marcus filled an unused condom with water, acting on a hunch. Dangling the bulbous thing, he frowned as a needle of liquid whizzed out.
So that’s why she’d taken to prolonged bouts of cuddling afterward, not wanting to decouple right away, giving his little swimmers a shot at establishing a beachhead. He walked to where Lucy was reading a warped copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting (hint, hint). He let the stream hit her in the forehead before running down into the collar of her three-sizes-too-big T-shirt. Having gotten her attention, he stepped back, the condom still dangling, still tinkling as it drew a darkened slice across a page.
“Yes?” she said, looking up, a rather large drip balanced on the tip of her nose.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“We—” Marcus began.
“If you’re about to say ‘can’t afford another mouth to feed,’” Lucy said, “let me present to you exhibit A.” A hand thrust dramatically in a broad sweep. “The whole frickin’ world.”
“But we’re still kids ourselves,” he insisted. “I’m not even seventeen yet.”
“Me neither,” Lucy said. “But news flash: that still makes us the oldest people on earth.”
“Allegedly,” Marcus qualified.
“You keep hanging on to that,” Lucy said, returning to her reading. “In the meantime, I’ve decided to seize the means of reproduction.”
Marcus watched the top of her head, trying to imagine how it worked. For once, his knack for empathy utterly failed him. Not that it mattered what he thought about what she thought. What mattered was whether she was or wasn’t. “So?” he said, opening the door for the answer he dreaded.
“It’s looking pretty good,” Lucy said, pulling from her pocket a white stick with a blue cross on it.
He couldn’t kill her. Well, he could—but he couldn’t. And when it came to appeasing the universe for prior sins, giving up Twinkies was really pretty lame, Marcus had to admit. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life: so sayeth that part of the Bible her ex-people and his ex-people agreed on.
So, atoning for planning to take life demanded he either save one or make one. Hopefully, there were others elsewhere, deciding the same, so that when their kid and his kid were old enough to start making their own kids, the species would have a shot at not being a bunch of inbred idiots—which might be a nice way of rebooting a species that had been tending toward idiocy, especially in its waning years.
“Okay,” he sighed finally, like the cells already dividing inside her were just waiting for his permission.
“Okay what?” Lucy asked, clearly wanting him to say it—needing him to say it.
“I’m happy, I guess,” he said, shrugging. “Happy?”
“Now there’s the enthusiasm I was missing . . .”
“It’s just taking a little getting used to,” he said.
“We’ve gotten used to bigger things,” she pointed out.
Their break from the road came to an end with Marcus standing on the library roof with a pair of binoculars while Lucy read inside. As usual, he was looking for signs of others. What he saw instead was a tidal wave of rats, heading right for the library.
Marcus tapped on the skylight to get Lucy’s attention. “Um,” he called down, “we’ve got a little problem here.”
“What kind?” Lucy asked, looking up from the last issue of Entertainment Weekly in the periodicals section. It was a double issue: their summer blockbuster preview. Lucy had been silently mourning not just the movies she’d never see, but all the actors who were probably dead on the sets of the sequels, already in production, each set probably looking the same about now: like something out of The Birds.
“Rats,” Marcus called down.
“Shoot ’em,” Lucy advised.
“We don’t have that many bullets,” he said.
“How many are there?”
“Take a look,” he said, and Lucy moved toward a nearby window. “What’s your estimate?” he called down. “A bazillion?”
Lucy went quiet, just staring.
“Hello?” Marcus said, knocking on the skylight. “You still down there?”
“I don’t like rats,” Lucy said, backing away from the window.
“Join the club,” Marcus said back before rejoining her inside the library. Outside, the rodential river kept flowing past the windows. He wrapped his arms around her, and she let him. The ice cream truck—their ride away from the worse that was coming—seemed to be parked in a vast brown lake, the muscles under all that fur making the surface ripple. A wave here and there would overtake the one in front of it, rats scrambling over rats, their squeaks of protest coming to the humans through the glass, making their skin crawl.
“I’ve been through this before,” she said. “In Georgia. There’s more coming.”
“More, in like . . . ?”
“Pigs,” Lucy said. “That’s what I think the rats are running away from.”
“I saw the pigs before leaving Oklahoma,” Marcus said. “Don’t remember any rats.”
“Maybe you slept through them. I did with the pigs. I mean, I heard them. Thought it was thunder. It wasn’t till morning when I saw what they left behind and put it together.”
“So, like, how many rats are we talking about? In Georgia, I mean.”
“This,” Lucy said, gesturing toward the window. “Minus a bazillion.”
“So, lots more this time.”
Lucy nodded. “Way,” she said. Paused. “How many pigs?”
“Two dozen. Around.”
“I wonder if they’re . . . ,” they said together, before stopping, trying to think of the word they wanted.
“Connected?” Marcus tried while Lucy suggested, “Correlated?”
Neither was a very comforting thought. And so Marcus returned to the library roof with his binoculars and scanned the horizon. What he saw reminded him of the dust storms from his home state during the Great Depression. His English teacher had shown them a video before dragging them through The Grapes of Wrath.
He broke the skylight in his hurry to get down. “Yes,” he shouted at Lucy, still rattled by the noise and glass shards. “They’re correlated.”
Pooling their educations, they decided it only made sense that the herd had gotten bigger. Herds from the southeast and herds from the southwest had probably met and merged in the middle, not unlike the humans now contemplating the future to come. Feeding, coupling, and spreading, that’s all mankind’s successor species had to do, now that the humans had gotten out of the way. And just like the humans before them, they were depleting the resources in one area and then moving on to the next, turning the world before them into trough and toilet. Lucy, remembering a poem from English class, riffed on T. S. Eliot re the world and its ending.
“Not a bang,” she said. “Not a whimper either. Just an oink.”
“Yeah, great,” Marcus said, before reminding her that the domesticated and feral pigs heading their way had likely begun interbreeding, conjuring up the image of five-hundred-pound
porkers with tusks in the not-too-distant future.
“Is it too late to vote for zombies?” Lucy asked, following Marcus out to the truck where the straggler rats were still straggling. Holding hands, the couple did a little run dance as they bolted so as not to be swept apart and away in a second wave, while individual rats kept skittering between, underneath, and around the humans’ pumping legs like pylons.
“You didn’t get bitten, did you?” Marcus asked, pulling the door shut while Lucy sat in the passenger seat, pant leg rolled up, sock rolled down, scratching.
“I don’t think so,” she said, moving on to the other leg, still scratching.
“So quit doing that,” Marcus said. “You’re making me itchy.”
“Can’t help it,” she said. “I can just feel . . . stuff . . . crawling on me.”
He held on to the steering wheel, dark knuckles blanching. “Don’t say it,” he said, not looking at her.
“Don’t say what?” Lucy said back, her pale leg candy striped with nail marks.
“It.”
“It?”
“Fleas.”
“Fleas?” Lucy echoed. Her fingers stopped scratching as her brain filled with pen-and-ink skeletons, merrily directing plague victims with their scythes to carts heaped high with medieval bodies, most nearly skeletons themselves.
“I said not to say that,” Marcus said as he started the engine and pulled forward, the truck’s tires leaving bloody toupees in their wake.
32
On clear nights, Dev could see them: the satellites mankind had flung into orbit around itself, some spying, some looking toward the stars, others there to bounce signals beyond the horizon, and still others playing fortune-teller in five-day chunks. All were no doubt still beaming their data back to earth, to control rooms full of desiccated corpses.
It was the last—the weather satellites—that Dev missed the most. Though it was popular to make fun of weather reporters and their forecasts, the truth was during his lifetime, he’d grown to rely on them. A tap on his smartphone provided hourly to weekly forecasts of amazing accuracy; if danger was on its way, the weather service sent him text alerts to take cover. The same app would show him animated satellite views so he could watch a storm traveling from Romulus, to Taylor, to Dearborn Heights, with pins listing the time and speed. But all those early warnings had gone away, along with all the people to intercept the satellite data streams that made them possible. Now weather was something it had never been for Dev: a total surprise.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 22