Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  The dogs—they knew how to handle the cold; like hunting, they weathered the weather in packs, sharing their body heat. The cats—who knew? But they still probably had a better chance outside than in—especially now. He could leave garages and sheds open, drop off blankets, towels, throw rugs—give them plenty of places to hole up if they wanted, without having to deal with indoor skating rinks and falling plaster.

  Plus, it’d be good for the ultimate safety of Devonshire. Release the hounds, right? Let fly the dogs of war. They’d be his personal security detail, howling out the approach of intruders on four legs or fewer. And so Dev propped open the doors leading to the backyards of Devonshire as the dogs of war flew and the cats of chaos catapulted. Their various exits went so smoothly, in fact, he’d begun congratulating himself on another problem solved when he remembered what he’d forgotten:

  The fences. He’d forgotten about knocking them down. It wasn’t hard to do, his not having mowed the grass since it stopped growing in late October. And so he just assumed once he set them free, his neighbors’ dogs and cats would stick to their respective backyards. But his furry parolees had no preconceptions about where they belonged relative to fences that weren’t there anymore. As far as they were concerned, it was all one big backyard now.

  Except it was even worse than that. A single side gate, left open when the neighbor responsible for it died, had gone unnoticed by Dev until his newly released charges turned into a blur of fur funneling through it.

  “Stop!” he tried. “Wait!” he tried. But it was too late. The big backyard he’d released them into was still smaller when compared with the rest of Devonshire. And so they chose the latter, unbound by anything, except the wall of charred trucks full of bones at the end . . .

  “Oh crap,” Dev said, watching as the herd charged off to what surely must have seemed dog heaven. Bone, bones, and more bones—some much longer than any they’d ever gnawed on before. He hadn’t bothered locking the Devonshire-side doors, and the freeze-thaw cycle that did such damage to the houses had popped a few doors here and there. He’d tried closing them before, but the locks were pretty much shot, the doors bouncing back open no matter how hard he slammed them.

  And so Dev charged after them, after making sure Diablo was safe inside. But then he stopped short. Despite there being plenty for all, the dogs had started doing what dogs do: staking their claims by peeing on everything in sight.

  And peeing begot barking, and barking begot fang baring, and fang baring begat lunging at throats, chomping on ears, high-pitched yelps, and deep-throated growls. All Dev could do was stand and watch as Darwinism played out in front of him in real time—the tiny, the weak, the old and lame, torn apart in a blur of claws and teeth.

  The cats, meanwhile, found tree crooks to meow down from, perhaps reaffirming the advantages of being a little standoffish.

  Eventually, the killing stopped and that canine ESP that allowed dogs to hunt in packs kicked in. The survivors—the fittest of the fit—were enlisted, en masse, as Dev’s “men,” the ones to protect him if it ever came to that. They straddled the line between feral and civilized, licking the hand that fed them and attacking whatever it pointed to.

  “Listen up, men,” he’d say, hands behind his back, addressing the troops collectively. Though Diablo was the real alpha dog here, Dev was the alpha’s alpha: the holder of Diablo’s leash. Diablo did the translating and otherwise kept order. If a couple of roughhousing hounds got a little too rough, all he had to do was stare at them, tilt his head right, left, bare his teeth, bristle his fur, and the others snapped to.

  Needless to say, Diablo was not one of the troops. He was the dog who still had a human—the one with the inside track when it came to food. The others—Dev’s troops—were a means to an end if there was another end coming for him. They’d distinguished themselves by not eating their former owners; they’d further distinguished themselves by surviving the dog-eat-dog fiasco he’d inadvertently set in motion. He liked them, collectively, and would make use of their canine talents if (or when) the time came. But they were no Diablo, who’d already saved Dev, whether either of them knew it or not.

  As for the cats, they were cats: softly padding mysteries, keeping their agendas to themselves. Watching from a distance, Dev realized he’d been wrong about them all along. Cats weren’t dogs with Asperger’s; they were neurotypical women. He could look at them all day long without knowing a thing about them, except that he admired how well they carried their indifference for him. “Ladies,” he’d say, tipping an imaginary hat whenever two or more approached.

  If they were hungry, they might draw closer, snake a tail around his ankle, deign to purr. But if they weren’t, Dev might as well have been a ghost lost among the ghosts only cats can see. The sting of rejection never lasted. After all, Dev already had a friend, the most important dog in Devonshire—the only one with a name.

  33

  It wasn’t fleas; it was worse. Because there was something between rats and pigs to worry about, and while fleas were a pretty good guess, they weren’t the right one. The correct answer didn’t reveal itself until Lucy’s scratching reached her head, and her raking fingers dislodged a stowaway that landed on Marcus’s arm and ended its days as a smear of bug parts and blood among dark hairs.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Was,” he corrected, checking his palm for additional evidence. He almost laughed with relief, after miles of worrying about the plague. “Mosquito,” he said, offering his open hand for inspection. “Tank was full, too, by the looks of it.”

  Marcus continued driving. “You should probably give that do of yours a good shake, make sure there aren’t any others,” he advised. He saw a peripheral flash of red hair being stirred on both sides by furious claws and waited for the report. Nothing. He looked in the rearview; Lucy looked like a clown on a very bad hair day, head sunk so he couldn’t see her eyes, just the top of her head, flanked by shoulders, trying not to shake. Lucy herself was quiet. Too quiet, as they say in horror movies.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked finally.

  “Can we go back to it just being fleas?” she asked, her voice tiny, her eyes jiggly with tears.

  The Zika virus and the small-brained babies it led to hadn’t been on Marcus’s radar because the stakes were so much less for a guy, especially a virgin who was busy preparing to wage small-town jihad when the press was full of reports warning pregnant women to stay inside, to not travel to certain warmer climates, to wear deet like old women wear perfume: in copious amounts. And during her first pregnancy, Lucy was too preoccupied with ending it to give Zika more than a passing glance, even though the pope himself had given pregnant women with the virus a get-out-of-hell-free card if they got abortions under the circumstances, while also allowing birth control for a limited time only.

  Irony, again.

  Had Lucy known—had she been paying attention—she could have argued “special circumstances” with the pope as a character witness. It probably wouldn’t have flown with her parents, but maybe the but-lady at the fake clinic would have slipped her a card for one of those “other places” that weren’t so picky about the state’s faith-based paperwork. But since that time, the mother-(again)-to-be had gotten caught up, reading through magazines from before in the library’s periodical section while they took their little vacation from the road. Now she had all the information she needed to be scared out of her wits.

  “Zika” was all she said, eyes welling, after Marcus asked what was wrong.

  He tried placing the word. “Wasn’t that, like, some kind of wine cooler from the nineties?”

  It was Lucy’s turn to try to place the reference. “Do you mean Zima?” she asked.

  Marcus snapped his fingers and pointed. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it!”

  “No,” Lucy said, shaking her mussed head. “Not Zima. Zika. With a k. The virus.”

  Marcus presented a passably blank face, made all the more convincing t
hanks to the fact he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Zika,” she repeated. “It makes pregnant ladies give birth to babies with small heads.”

  “And you’re sure that’s not Zima.”

  “This isn’t funny,” she insisted.

  “Neither’s drinking while pregnant,” Marcus said. “So if you’re planning to do it, you can just forget about it.”

  “What makes you think I’d want to drink while pregnant?” Lucy asked. “Did you ever see me drink when I wasn’t pregnant?”

  Marcus admitted that he had not, but then pointed out that she’d sabotaged his condoms without his noticing—at least not before it was too late, along with her period.

  “So just because I wanted to preserve the species,” she said, “I’m pretty much capable of anything. In your opinion.”

  “Just calling ’em like I see ’em,” Marcus said. Paused. Said: “Small heads? Like in more than one?”

  Lucy shook her normal-sized head. “Like in learning disabled. Like those pinhead circus freaks.”

  “From a mosquito bite?”

  Lucy nodded.

  Marcus gripped the steering wheel and glanced at his bug-smeared forearm. “What’s it do if your head’s already all grown up?”

  And it was a sign of the extremity of her distress that she let a straight line like that pass.

  What followed were several days of hell, waiting to see if Lucy’s self-diagnosis was confirmed with actual symptoms. According to what she’d read, the first signs for the mom were like a really bad flu. Thank you, diagnostic medical people. Could you be a little more ambiguous? Ebola? “It starts with flu-like symptoms, but . . .” Dengue? “It starts out like the flu, but . . .” And it was always after that “but” that the nightmare symptoms followed. Bleeding from the eyes? Check. Internal organs liquefying? Double check. Pinhead babies? And that’s three in a row. We have ourselves a winner!

  Lucy stayed in the truck while Marcus, in gas mask, baseball cap, and long sleeves, ran swatting at the air to a Walgreens, in search of a thermometer to check if she had a fever.

  “Couldn’t you find anything that doesn’t need batteries?” she asked when he returned. “What about false readings if the batteries are low?”

  Marcus pointed to the battery-life indicator.

  “Right,” she said. “What if that’s the first thing to start acting squirrely when the battery’s going?” He suggested they could just replace them. Nice try. It wasn’t like they were making new batteries anymore. For all she knew, they were all going bad. She’d started having doubts about the ones in her watch, which seemed to be disagreeing with the windup one more and more often. The question: Which was right, and which was wrong?

  “I looked for one of the mercury ones,” Marcus insisted. “I think they might be banned or something. You know, because of mercury poisoning?”

  Lucy figured it was probably likelier that the makers of button batteries and digital thermometers had joined forces to drive the analoggers out of business, perhaps with the help of an environmental cover story. She was also starting to think that Marcus’s theory about President Bozo wondering, “What’s this one do?” was probably likelier than not. Paranoia—it seemed—could metastasize even easier than cancer.

  In the end, it was a lot of nothing about nothing, thank God—or whoever it was capriciously doling out miracles while also creating the circumstances under which such were prayed for. Lucy wondered if maybe she should convert to Norse mythology or something, one of the ones with trickster gods, like Loki. The available evidence seemed to vindicate that kind of god, as opposed to the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving creator of space-time she’d been raised to believe in.

  And maybe that was the problem; maybe people gave God too many alls to juggle. The combination seemed self-canceling. Because how could an all-knowing, all-powerful god who let babies die in earthquakes be described as all-loving? “Answer me that,” Lucy demanded, and Marcus just shrugged.

  “You sound almost angry about being okay,” he said.

  “For the time being,” she said, pointing out the bug-starred windshield, waiting for just one more to splat before adding: “For example . . .”

  Neither the Aedes aegypti nor the Aedes albopictus—the mosquito species that carried the Zika virus—were known to inhabit the northern states of the US, partly because those states routinely experienced hard freezes during the change of seasons. Though freezing temperatures were not unknown in the American South, they were far rarer and shorter and occurred within a far smaller window of time during the year. And so, along with stampedes of rats, followed by stampedes of feral hybrid pigs like buffalo of old, Marcus and Lucy had another pest driving them precisely where they didn’t want to go: north.

  “But it’s cold up there,” Marcus protested.

  “And sadly,” Lucy countered, “that’s the point. Too cold for mosquitoes carrying brain damage. Pigs? I have no idea. Here’s hoping.”

  “But it’s cold. And I come from a desert-dwelling people . . .”

  “Buck up, my little nomad. I’m sure we’ll be able to scrounge some parkas and long undies along the way.”

  Neither had ever been above the Mason-Dixon before and assumed the worst: a nonstop polar vortex staining the actual ground the colors pointed to breathlessly by weather people on their maps of the country from before, warning of snowpocalypses, snowmageddons, killingly cold temperatures—the last they imagined being like brain freeze, but all over and forever until you died. It didn’t help that geography had been dropped from their curriculum, thanks to budget cuts, or that every science-denying politician hyped any snowflake anywhere as proof that “ecoterrorists hate America.” And so it was a pleasant surprise when they crossed over and failed to find either Game of Thrones white walkers or universal arctic desolation—even in December.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Lucy said, unzipping one of the jackets they’d scrounged along the way to let the three sweaters she wore underneath breathe.

  “Speak for yourself,” Marcus said, winding his scarf tighter.

  “Pish-posh.”

  “Pish-posh?”

  “It means don’t be silly,” Lucy said.

  “I know what it means,” Marcus said. “It just sounds old.”

  “If by ‘old’ you mean more mature, why, thank you.”

  “Whatever,” Marcus said, hands in pockets, shoulders slightly hunched, as if they aimed to cover his ears from the cold.

  “Think of it this way,” she said. “That snap in the air?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mosquito repellent.”

  They’d missed the explosion of color known as fall, all the trees that weren’t evergreens having shed down to their bones, leaving piles and drifts of brown jigsaw-puzzle pieces behind. Lucy was especially disappointed, the pervasively gray landscape really needing a little color—a sentiment showing how far she’d come since her goth days.

  “It’s just death,” Marcus grumbled, unconvinced that a patchwork of reds and yellows would have been adequate compensation for freezing to death. “The color changes just mean they’re dying.”

  “Well,” Lucy said, “they die very prettily—or so I’ve heard.”

  “So said the girl who never had to rake leaves.”

  “And you have?”

  The answer—no—was largely due to his former neighbors’ preference for evergreens and other nondeciduous landscaping options; in other parts of Oklahoma, however, leaf raking was indeed a thing. “I would have if I lived here, though.”

  “How hypothetically awful for you,” Lucy said, hands clutched belle style.

  “You know what I mean,” Marcus said. “The boys are always the ones who wind up doing the yard work.”

  “Don’t even start . . .”

  For Marcus, these sexist observations were a brief relapse, his chauvinist caveman persona, which had been in remission ever since the father-to-be found himself thinking, I’m
going to be a dad, whenever surviving called upon him to do something he’d rather not—like driving toward as opposed to away from the frigid north. You’re going to be a father, he kept telling himself, Time to grow up.

  She’d caught him trying on his new role one morning as they lay in the truck on their air mattress. He’d woken before her; the oversized T-shirt she’d slept in had bunched up around where her baby bump would be, once she started showing. She could feel his hand on her stomach, cracked an eye while still feigning sleep, and saw him staring at it like he was looking into a crystal ball that held their future.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he whispered in the vicinity of her belly button, which hadn’t pushed out, but eventually would, as the cells inside her kept annexing more and more territory in her womb, their brains, and their hearts.

  “It’s Dad,” the future father whispered, still imagining her asleep, letting her know without meaning to that he really was on board with this thing they’d made.

  Smiling inside, she made a show of “waking,” yawning and stretching as he hastily pulled his hand away. “What’s new?” she asked, tugging down her T-shirt.

  “Nothing,” Marcus lied. “What’s new with you?”

  Of course, being on board with the whole baby-on-board thing didn’t mean he had to like the weather being responsible was forcing on him. There was a reason the Haddads had settled in Oklahoma—in addition to its being where his dad’s job was—and the reason was this: the heat. As in not freezing. And so Marcus grumbled, a lot, and waited for his baby mama to finally crack, which she did—finally—with these words:

  “The weather report . . .”

  He’d nearly forgotten about What Do You Miss? until Lucy initiated the latest round by mourning the loss of satellite maps and five-day forecasts. The occasion was a torrential rainstorm that came out of nowhere and seemed to have no plans to go anywhere soon. Marcus had tried driving through it until she covered his eyes, forcing him to stop.