Take that first hard freeze post-whatever. The day before had been fall-like, but on the warmer end of the scale—light-jacket weather, probably around fifty degrees or so, precipitation best described as indecisive: mist, sometimes bigger drops, a general pain in the butt, but not committing to what type of pain it wanted to be. After sunset, the rain came down just hard enough, just long enough to make noise against the windowpanes, while leaving puddles marking the uneven collection points along the sidewalk and street. Those puddles would burn off well before noon the next day if there was any sun at all, Dev was sure.
But the next morning, the rooster’s crowing sounded more miffed than usual, though neither boy nor dog mentioned it. Instead, Dev stretched and rolled Diablo off him before padding to the living room window to see what the day had to offer. Before he could focus, though, the pane fogged in front of his eyes. Diablo, standing next to his human, smudged the chilled window with his wet nose. As they stood there, the smudge turned to frost, the geometric crystals feathering outward according to their molecules and math.
Dev wiped a clean porthole and squinted before it could close up again. The puddles from the night before had turned into black ice marbled with white air pockets.
The boy clapped his hands and rubbed them in anticipation. “First ice,” he observed, looking down at Diablo. “You know what that means,” he added, and the dog woofed as if he did, though really, he hadn’t a clue.
“Snow’s on its way,” he said before preparing for it, locating his hat and scarf, boots, gloves, ski mask, and parka, all smelling of mothballs from the storage tub his mom had put them away in the previous March. And most came in handy almost immediately, as Dev dressed to do his outside-going chores. His boots, however, stood sentry in the vestibule, emptily awaiting their imminent donning. And kept on waiting. And waiting.
Dev knew the transition between seasons could be a little bipolar at times, especially in Michigan, where you could sunbathe one day and freeze the next. It was just that sort of schizoid meteorology that made the TV weather report so vital before, reassuring viewers that it was just the weather, and not a sign of the apocalypse.
Now it was a different story, and all he had to go by was his calendar and the memory of what was and wasn’t normal. But Dev hadn’t been alive for a hundred years, and if Michigan was about to experience one of those once-in-a-hundred-years kind of winter—some El something, Niña, Niño, maybe even Diablo—he’d just have to wing it.
Not that Dev was complaining about the lack, thus far, of any appreciable snow. Though he loved the way it uncomplicated the outside world, he could wait. Because winter would be the first real test of his ability to survive, alone, in the world postworld.
Diablo barked suddenly, almost as if he’d read his human’s mind and objected to the a-word. “Well, of course I’m not alone-alone,” he reassured the animal, wondering what he should do about the snow if and when it came.
Before, it was just a given that the neighbors took care of their paved areas, the fear of getting stuck or sued real and ever-present. So out came the snowblowers and shovels, cutting troughs through the white stuff while the city’s plows and salt trucks took care of the roads. Dev hadn’t been crazy about this haste to unbury the neighborhood, partly because the Brinkmans’ snow removal duty usually fell to him, but deeper down, he hated the way everything looked afterward. Where once great white dunes of snow blanketed his suburban homeland, afterward, it just looked like crap, all that simplicity rendered complicated by block-long gashes of exposed concrete, flanked by dirty snow and slush, the underbelly of civilization unearthed by the slide and scrape of shovels, the great roar of snow-vomiting machinery.
“People have to work, don’t they? They have to get to school,” his mother—the snow-ruiners’ spokesperson—always justified.
“And what if someone broke his neck, slipping on our sidewalk?” his stepfather added.
Whose? Dev wanted to know, trying to imagine how the breaking of a neck that wasn’t his should matter.
“Like the mailman,” his stepfather added, almost as if he’d been reading Dev’s mind.
Oh, Dev thought, yeah . . .
Not that he had any feelings for the mailman personally. He was just the means by which the stuff Dev ordered arrived, all the magazines and boxes feeding whatever the latest obsession happened to be. Properly schooled in his personal stake in snow removal, he’d reluctantly pull on his boots, zip up his jacket over layers of clothes, and mummify his head with a scarf to clear a path between his passions and front door.
But there was no more mail service, FedEx, or UPS, and as far as necks went, the only one left was his own. The unopened pouch of vintage 1930s Electrolux vacuum cleaner bags he’d ordered on eBay but never got? It was out there, somewhere, lying in some pile of boxes at the end of a conveyor belt in some mail-sorting facility or in a delivery truck, maybe, squashed between semis or upside down in a ditch.
So why not just leave it? Dev wondered, imagining the snows to come, unmarred as he stood by the window with a warm cup in his hands.
To leave something alone, of course, it has to be there in the first place. But the snow wasn’t. By the beginning of December, there’d been no measurable snow, which was weird, even by Michigan standards. It was almost as if the sky had forgotten how. Everything else was on schedule: the trees got naked; the sky turned dryer-lint gray; the temperature fell below freezing while Diablo’s fur thickened and Dev started wearing sweaters over sweaters whenever he went outside. Inside, they kept the fireplace going and used the generator to run a space heater in the garage for the chickens. The freezer had been shut down for the season, the unheated garage next door being plenty cold enough to keep frozen food frozen. His neighbors’ warm-blooded pets began breathing fog, even inside.
Dev wished he could do something about how cold the other houses were, but what? Setting unattended fires in the houses with fireplaces? Not smart. Space heaters? Right, he was going to spend the winter keeping a dozen generators going, running around with sloshing cans of gasoline, getting it on his gloves, his clothes, risking self-immolation every time he struck a match.
Plus, they had fur coats. All those hairy mouth breathers chugging away like chain smokers? Their ancestors used to live outside all the time. These pampered pets had it easy—a roof and four walls keeping the wind off them and, once it started snowing, keeping that off too. Not to mention the free food they didn’t have to catch for themselves. Or the couches and beds for sleeping on. No rolled-up magazines coming at them no matter where they decided to poop. All in all, it was a pretty sweet existence, even without central heating.
Meanwhile, outside, the snow continued not falling.
And Dev kept waiting, scanning the overcast sky for promising clouds. But aside from a few flurries to turn the dead lawns salt-and-pepper, there’d been nothing worth noting. The real snow—the snow measured in inches and feet—that snow, apparently, was AWOL for the time being, leaving the temperature to do what falling there was.
Unfortunately, not all degrees are equal—not in academia, not in fevers, or global warming, and not when it comes to the temperature in your living room. The difference between sixty-five and seventy on a sunny day is hardly noticeable; ditto, the difference between ten and fifteen degrees below zero. But make a one-degree difference between thirty-three and thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and everything changes.
That shift had already happened outside. After the first hard freeze, there’d been several freeze-thaw cycles, but now the ice stayed ice, morning, noon, and night. Inside the houses where the pets had begun chain smoking, Dev figured it was probably somewhere around forty, maybe the midthirties. It wasn’t freezing, though. Every time he visited, he’d kick a water bowl and watch it jiggle before topping it off. And as far as the pets without fur, strangely, they didn’t seem as bad off as the others: case in point—no visible breath. Sure, that could be a sign that they were already dead. So Dev
flicked his fingernail against the glass, and watched as a coil unwound here or a tongue flicked there. Just to be sure, he emptied his neighbors’ linen closets of their blankets and quilts, and alternately wrapped or draped these around the cages, bowls, and aquariums.
But then one night, what little heat was trapped by insulation inside his neighbors’ walls leaked away, escaping through loose doorjambs, single-pane and steel-pan windows, up chimneys and out through the holes where gas, water, and electricity were previously piped in. And that’s when the inside temperature everywhere but where Dev and Diablo lived crossed that all-important, one-degree threshold, heading down.
When they made their rounds the next morning, the boy and his dog found them: reptiles frozen in their last gestures, lying on their ridged backs, green, brown, or yellow limbs in the air; scaly black-and-green bodies wrapped around driftwood, forked tongues frozen midflick; a half-dozen burst fish bowls, their sun-orange residents decoupaged in ice; an aquarium with the safety glass splintered but holding, the fish gathered like dead leaves in a layer on top, their swimming no longer enough to aerate this kind of stagnation; a pair of parakeets, inert among the spilled seed and droppings at the bottom of their cage; the parrot who’d talked him into this folly, speechless now and forever.
In the houses of survivors—the ones with those fur coats—there was no wailing or gnashing of teeth at the passing of their less hirsute fellows. Nope. The dogs and cats left over panted and puffed, instead, licking furiously at frozen water bowls, unused to having to work so hard just to get a drink.
Dev ran from one survivor to the next, apologizing, giving each a brisk rubdown, trying to work a little of his own warmth in. He made a mental note to bring a thermos with hot water the next time they made their rounds, maybe with a splash of his stepfather’s vodka, to keep it from freezing so quickly.
And still the temperature dropped, well below zero, judging from Diablo’s frosty beard and Dev’s own frozen nose hairs. He thought about inviting a few of the other dogs back to their place—his and Diablo’s—but figured he better not. Diablo got along fine with other dogs when the pecking order was clear, but who knew what would happen if his authority was suddenly challenged? That’s all he needed, a bunch of dogs marking their territory with urine like streams of caution tape, part of that territory being Dev himself. So no. When it came to dogs, the Brinkman house would remain monogamous—or whatever the right word was.
“We don’t need any interlopers, do we?” Dev said, preparing the couch for bed. Ever since the change in weather, he’d inched that particular piece of furniture ever closer to the living room’s primary source of heat—the fireplace—while making sure the fire screen was in place to avoid any accidental immolations.
“Two’s company, right,” he added, patting the dog’s head, feeling like he felt most nights since the end, but especially so on cold ones, with a good fire going and a loyal dog settling in on top of him, all his doggy weight calming the boy underneath, keeping all his pieces together and in one place. And what he felt like was this:
Yes, he thought. This will do.
The explosions started sometime just before sunrise. Dev had been dreaming a dream that was basically him outside himself, watching as he slept with Diablo on top, the fireplace snapping, the occasional log collapsing, sending orange embers up the chimney. Except for the difference in point of view, his dreams were almost the same as his waking life—a byproduct, he assumed, of his Aspergerian literal-mindedness.
Before the first explosion, in the dream, a particularly large log cracked open, releasing a jet of pure blue flame the out-of-body Dev marveled at just before . . .
Boom!
Dev jerked out of sleep, his heart shot through with adrenaline. Another explosion went off, this time sounding like a backward bomb—the explosion coming first, followed by the long, steady hiss of a burning fuse. Another explosion followed, along with more postexplosion hissing. Then two more, right on top of each other, as if whoever was setting them off wanted to make sure he got the point.
Leaping from the couch, the maybe last boy on earth ran to the living room window and snapped open the venetian blinds, wondering who or what was attacking the neighborhood. The sun, just rising between houses, caught him right in the eye. Blinking away some tears, he made himself look again.
And that’s when he finally saw it—them—the rivers flowing, the geysers geysering from his neighbors’ houses, the water looking like blood in the streets, from all the rust after months of standing stagnant. And the frozen pipes kept bursting—boom, rattle, hiss—all up and down the block, followed by more rusty blood in the streets.
Diablo began howling, either because of the noise or in sympathy for his fellow animals. Listening hard between the devil dog’s long, doggy notes, Dev finally heard it—them—the others, yapping, yipping, or growling, trapped in the houses surrounded by exploding pipes punching through the drywall, spraying their fur, flooding basements, kitchens, bathrooms . . .
He hadn’t taken the hint after the first round of dead pets. How had he missed it? Easy: he reasoned it away. The survivors were safe; they’d survived; they’d all been wearing fur coats, blah, blah, blah. But what good was a fur coat once it got wet and there was no place to get dry before you froze to death?
For the briefest second, he thought about all the meat they’d leave behind. He’d unplugged the freezer because it had become redundant, but it was also nearly empty. There’d been plenty of cultures, before, that ate dog and cat. And cooked in a Crock-Pot, even the toughest cut . . .
One look at Diablo and his mind-reading eyebrows squashed that thinking in the middle of its being thought. “I wouldn’t,” he assured the dog standing ever loyal at his side. Diablo, meanwhile, had stopped howling. He stood guard with his human instead, his big, floppy ears flinching upward with each new explosion.
Eventually, the pipes stopped bursting and the water slowed to a trickle that finally froze, leaving a great bloody slick filling the street. The boy and his dog, too, were frozen. The former had pulled a kitchen chair to the living room window and just sat there, staring out, while the latter sat sphinxlike underneath, his back barely clearing the seat bottom, his big Labrador head wedged between his human’s knees. Dev angled his legs inward to hug and calm the animal while his hands worked behind the dog’s ears, soothing, thinking. Outside, beyond the chilled glass, the primal chorus was still at it, complaining loudly about this totally unacceptable development.
Reaching behind and bracing himself, Dev rose finally from the kitchen chair. “You can come if you want,” he told Diablo. “I might need a translator.”
And with that, Dev began loading up the wheelbarrow he used for making the round of pets, filled with cans of Alpo and Fancy Feast, a box of Milk-Bones, some catnip, and a thermos of water freshly nuked in the microwave. He plugged together every extension cord he’d scrounged from the neighborhood, duct taping the connections so they wouldn’t pull free. After suiting up—parka, gloves, ski mask—he topped off the generator before plugging one end of his extension cord into an outlet and the other into the biggest, baddest hair dryer he could find. He looked at himself in the hallway mirror, holding the dryer like a sheriff’s six-shooter. Stepping out the front door, he began unlooping yard after yard of duct-taped wire as he headed across the street.
“Anybody home?” he asked, letting himself into the first house, Diablo at his heels.
No answer.
And so the two went looking, Diablo in the lead, Dev holding his leash, calling, “Here, boy,” and whistling. They heard a sad yip from behind a couch, its skirt soaked dark with standing water, its cushions sliced from seat to back, tufts of batting yawning out. There were claw marks against the wall where the couch’s back once pressed—now pushed away from the wall at an awkward angle. And behind the couch, shivering out ripples in the standing water was the toy collie that lived there.
“Oh, buddy,” Dev said, sloshing the c
ouch farther away from the wall before scooping up the dog trapped behind it. He’d tried making it to higher ground, but apparently misjudged the reliability of a couch that had been set on glider pads to make vacuuming behind it easier for the long-dead housekeeper of this now-ruined house. He wrapped the animal’s shivering body in a blanket and began rubbing him down from snout to tail. When he’d done all he could with the blanket and fresh towel, Dev flicked on the hair dryer and began blowing out the dog’s new Einstein do. Its pulled-back lips made the collie look like it was smiling even more than usual, which it probably was.
From mammal to mammal, he dried them and fed them and watered them, wondering what to do with them once he’d finished with them all. The houses were a total loss—flooded, frozen, structurally unsound. Once it warmed enough to thaw, there’d be mold, rot, warped floorboards, cracks where the water got in, froze, expanded, the cracks growing deeper, spreading farther.
It had been a mistake, keeping them inside. He’d been anthropomorphizing—or maybe Aspiepomorphizing. He’d projected on them his own tendencies, assuming they’d prefer the home-field advantage and being left alone. But even Dev had Diablo, and the rest—all they had were walls and waiting for Dev to bring them food and water. No wonder they’d been so free with the gratitude.
Beyond the wall, the formerly domesticated had teamed up—the dogs, at least. The cats—outside of the cheetah, he hadn’t seen any. Perhaps they’d succumbed to something further up the food chain. Or maybe they really were like Dev. He’d always thought of cats as being like dogs, but with Asperger’s. So maybe they were all just hiding, solitarily, wary of making themselves a bigger target than necessary by banding together like those oh-so-needy canines. They’d stick to the night and shadows, lonely hunters hooked on the element of surprise.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 23