Happy Doomsday: A Novel

by David Sosnowski

  “Let’s wait it out,” she said as they sat in the truck and listened to the rain moving in waves across the metal roof, counting Mississippis each time the sky lit up its nervous system, the branches of lightning making it easy to imagine the air itself was breaking up.

  “It’s looking a little biblical out there,” Marcus said, looking at the angry green sky. Though he was no stranger to tornadoes, this seemed somehow worse, making him double down on being a jerk. “Those things can go, like, what, forty days or something?”

  “Not helping,” Lucy observed.

  They’d driven way beyond either of their comfort zones, meteorologically speaking, into a kind of terra incognita where anything seemed possible, including fire and frogs. Fortunately, the worst they got this time was baseball-sized hail, quick and violent, out of the seaweed-green sky.

  “What the hell?” Marcus said, looking up at the roof of the truck, which gonged like it was being played by a thrash-metal drummer. He looked out the windshield and saw what appeared to be translucent tennis balls bouncing off the pavement ahead of them.

  “Exactly,” Lucy said.

  “Exactly what?”

  “Hail.”

  “That’s what I said. What the hell?” It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen hail before—just never this large, nor so long lasting. This stuff just kept banging the roof and piling up around them. He worried about the windshield breaking, or at least shattering in place so thoroughly he wouldn’t be able to drive anymore.

  “Not hell,” Lucy said. “Hail.”

  Marcus heard the difference through her accent but decided to play with her, perhaps in hopes of assuaging his own fears. So: “Who’s on first?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Old comedy routine,” he said.

  “What’s so funny about hail?” Lucy wanted to know.

  “Ain’t nothing funny about hell,” Marcus said. “Especially since we seem to be parked in the middle of it.”

  “Not hell,” Lucy repeated. “Hail.”

  Marcus shook his head, still playing dumb. She wrote the words out on the fogged windshield.

  “That’s quite some accent you got going there, girl.”

  Lucy blushed. “It’s just how I talk,” she insisted.

  “And it’s darlin’,” he drawled, kissing her bright-red forehead. “Just don’t let the Yankees catch you talkin’ like that.”

  Lucy was about to object that all the Yankees were dead, to the best of her knowledge, when she noticed the smile on Marcus’s face. “I shall chahm them with my Southun hospitality,” she said. “Darling,” she added, landing extra hard on the g.

  34

  Snow finally came to Devonshire, five, going on six months since the whatever-it-was. And it kept on coming—a big, goose-down miracle, erasing sidewalks and streets, merging with the surrounding lawns, everything blending into everything else, a universal blank slate. Porch railings and naked tree limbs were outlined white, while the branches of evergreens weighed heavy, clotted with the stuff. Canine jaws snapped at the flakes; cats brooded, annoyed by beaded whiskers. And the human, Dev, was content to watch it fall.

  Minus humans, he’d assumed the snowy white, once fallen, would stay that way. And maybe it would have, if not for packs of well-fed dogs and solitary cats, pooping and peeing wherever they wanted. And thus the pristine landscape he’d been waiting for was spoiled by holes drilled in yellow- and brown-bombed craters. “Crap,” Dev said, literally enough.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d used the oversized backyard he’d created when he pulled down all those fences. But these animals knew better than to get on the wrong side of a gate ever again. Which left the big backyard for Diablo and his human to play in when they wanted to avoid their adoring fans.

  More snow fell the next day, erasing the damage out front for a while. Dev stood guard while it came down, making sure, prepared to tap the bay window with the butt of his rifle at the first sight of a squatting butt or hiked leg. “Scram!” he’d shout at those view spoilers, feeling like an old man already, railing against those darned kids ruining his lawn.

  If only the picture window faced the backyard. The only damage back there was from foot and paw prints marking where Diablo and he’d played fetch just the day before. Dev didn’t consider those marks damage so much as memories. But then the snow started falling again, and then stopped, perversely, once the last trace of their fun was erased—as if removing those memories had been its aim all along.

  The difference in views was one of scope and convenience. The view of the backyard was located above the kitchen sink, and could be expanded only by opening the side door, which was drafty and even farther from the fireplace, which was their primary source of heat. The fireplace and a conveniently positioned rocking chair were what made the picture window the best view in the house—until some squatters spoiled it. Standing by the kitchen side as it whistled from the slightest wind required a minimum of long johns and two or three sweaters. And if Dev was going to suit up anyway, he and Diablo might as well go out and play. And so they did, until the stinging wind drove them back inside, where the alpha dog’s human returned to his post, rifle butt at the ready, his trusty canine enforcer prepared to bark or bite, whatever the latest offense warranted.

  Dev let down his guard once the black curtain of night fell, as the flames from the fireplace turned the picture window as blank as a slightly yellowed sheet of paper. Shielding his eyes and pressing against the window, he still couldn’t see a thing, and so he curled up on the couch instead, slapping the cushion next to him for Diablo to take a seat. He then read aloud from one of the boy-and-his-dog books the boy and his dog preferred. These were usually picture books, featuring dogs of unusual hues and/or talents—books Dev would have derided as too childish if there was anyone left to catch him reading them. But seeing as the only witness now was his accomplice, he excused the simplicity of the narrative by acknowledging that the dog he was reading to—though possessed of infinite loyalty—was limited in terms of vocabulary.

  “You see what he’s got there?” Dev asked the evening before, pointing out a cartoon canine to the real canine beside him. Diablo licked the page—a yes as far as Dev was concerned.

  The next morning as he readied breakfast, he looked through the kitchen window to where all evidence of his and Diablo’s fun had been erased yet again. Not that the view he looked upon was pristine. Quite the contrary. Zigzagging everywhere he looked, there were paw prints, stopping suddenly in dents the size of golf holes to craters big enough for a baby’s snow angel. Most of the prints were small and rodent-like—squirrels, rabbits maybe—but there were bigger ones too. The larger prints seemed to have thumbs, suggesting one or more raccoons had been involved.

  Dev hated raccoons even more than rats. Raccoons were like those spreaders of plague, but bigger and fatter, already wearing the garb of thieves and sporting those creepy hands they kept rubbing as they plotted their evil. Plus: rabies. That’s what was behind those paw prints in the backyard, circling around so furiously they had trampled the snow clean down to grass and mud. Dev wondered if maybe this was how it would start: the real zombie apocalypse, the infected not people, but animals bent on one thing: spreading the contagion. First a few, then more, then every last mammal left alive, driven frothing mad and running in circles until they all just died.

  It was as they were eating that Diablo heard something, the sound yanking up on his floppy ears and dragging his head along with it. Dev had just offered him a slice of egg white, only to drop it on top of the dog’s head, between hiked and vigilant ears. Dev’s own head turned, drawn by the swiftness of the dog’s change in alertness status. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said.

  Diablo didn’t budge; it was all canine instincts on deck.

  And then he heard it: a scream in a blender, punctuated by a chattering giggle, turned hiss, turned angry psycho mumble, then back to a scream on frappé. Diablo teleported himself from
under the table to the kitchen’s side door, thwacking at the wood with his nails, nosing around the drafty gap between door and jamb. The dog made noises the boy had never heard before—a low bellow of mournful excitement.

  Dev leaned over the sink and saw it: an overwound windup toy, its spring sproinged, its fur flecked with frozen foam, its jaws bearded with the stuff. Its movements were aimless, darting after nothing, launching itself, all four paws in the air, landing and spinning, flinging snow and clods of dead lawn from underneath the snow. Its ringed tail moved separately from it, curling into a question mark, popping up in exclamation. The rest of the raccoon seemed at war with its tail, as if it were a snake that had rudely clamped onto the animal’s rear end and wouldn’t let go.

  “Well,” Dev announced, “that’s not acceptable.” By which he meant he was not going to be held hostage in his own house just because a rabid raccoon had wandered into their little refuge from the apocalypse. Not only that, but he had his “men” to think about—the ones who were supposed to protect him against something like this—but whom, it now seemed, he needed to save from being infected. Because that was all he needed—to be trapped in his own house, under siege by a pack of rabid dogs trapped by a wall of burned trucks, still full of bones, though fewer than before.

  Judging from the snow tracks, the raccoon hadn’t been outside the big backyard, and Dev had already closed the gate that had let the others escape before. How the thing got into the yard, especially with the aforementioned wall and his roaming troops, was a mystery at first, until he noticed a sycamore leaning over the yard’s perimeter fence, its naked branches bent nearly to the ground and snowless. The sycamore’s corona of branches touched the branches of other trees on either side, forming a nervous system connecting Devonshire to the world beyond the wall. The creature’s madness must have carried it up a trunk on one side and deposited it in their backyard, once the limb it had ventured too far out on bent down, plopping it thusly.

  Not that it mattered how the thing got there. What mattered was getting rid of it. And so Dev got his neighbor’s sniper rifle, the one that had worked so nicely on the streetlights of Devonshire, the one with the laser sight to make the shot count. The fact that it also had a silencer was a bonus—to Dev’s, but especially Diablo’s, ears.

  The bullets he loaded were decidedly overkill, the armor-piercing kind preferred in urban warfare and by suburbanites for whom the only answer to how much stopping power they needed was: more. Not that he was anyone to judge when it came to personal safety—not under the circumstances. Which is why, along with the rifle and bullets, Dev’s raccoon-dispatching ensemble included his own armor of magazines and duct tape, wrapped around both legs, starting as close to the ankle as he could manage while still being able to flex. He continued layering, well past the height the raccoon seemed capable of jumping in its hyperadrenalized condition. Three pairs of pants followed, pre-apocalypse-new stiff denim. Together, the fabric and small-town-telephone-directory-thick copies of Vanity Fair should be an adequate buffer between his skin and the raccoon’s fangs. Even if it latched on with all its might, all it would get was a sore jaw and a mouthful of glossy full-page ads. If the animal’s fangs got to any of the actual articles, Dev would be very much surprised.

  All the while he was getting ready, he kept an eye on Diablo, who was keeping a nose on the raccoon. “Still there?”

  Diablo gave a low-throated growl that Dev took to mean yes.

  And so he opened the side door, pausing with his hand on the pane of the storm door. He didn’t want to make any noise, didn’t want to startle the startled-enough thing, hissing and popping, just a few annexed yards away. He also didn’t want to open the storm door any more than absolutely necessary to poke the barrel out while providing the laser sight a clear red shot at the middle of the animal that, unfortunately, was not offering much help in the staying-still department.

  Slowly, Dev tweezed up the latch on the storm door and pushed it open just a few inches, the sudden inrushing cold making him flinch before he went back to holding steady, his hand pressed firmly against the frosted glass . . .

  Then it happened.

  He felt it before he even knew what it was. The pane under his palm pulled away on its own as the door swung wide. For a hopeful second, he imagined the wind had just caught it. But the unbudging snow on all those still branches said otherwise.

  “Diablo!” Dev screamed the dog’s name, but he was already out, already halving the distance between himself and the raccoon. “Diablo!” he tried again. “Get back here . . .”

  But it was useless. The two animals met in a flash of fangs and claws. The snow grew red. A good part of one of Diablo’s ears wound up in the raccoon’s mouth, while part of the raccoon’s tail dangled from Diablo’s. With a jerk of his head, the dog flung the oversized rodent away. The raccoon rolled and hissed, plowing a trench into the snow before stopping with the laser light focused dead center. The air thwipped, and a heartbeat later, the raccoon exploded, fur and blood turning the snow into something by Jackson Pollock. Diablo, who’d begun running for round two, skidded to a stop, his big front paws sending up rooster tails of snow. He did that thing with his head, tilting it to one side, the look on his face saying, “Wha’d’ya do that for?”

  Good question.

  Diablo could have finished the animal by himself; it really didn’t matter who sent the thing to hell. What mattered was the fact it had already taken its revenge. The only question now was: How long was that revenge going to take?

  Every search engine he’d ever used to look up something was gone. He looked numbly at a collection of reference books he’d collected from his neighbors, his just-in-case library. But now that he needed to, Dev realized he really didn’t know how to use the books he’d accumulated. They’d never taught him that particular life skill in school. When the topic was research papers, the focus had been on how to outline, how to write a bibliography, how to cite and attribute without slipping into plagiarism, how to judge if the source material you’d found was reliable or some crackpot’s theory from his crackpot conspiracy blog. That the bulk of a student’s research would be done online was just assumed. He looked at his just-in-case library, stacked wherever his arms got tired from carrying the latest haul. He looked at Diablo, bloody and panting in the snow, his foggy breath chugging like a train as he nosed around the raccoon’s scattered remains.

  Don’t eat . . . , Dev thought.

  Too late; it was already being gulped down.

  He looked back at the literary remains of civilization, such as they were, and began some nosing around of his own, turning to the back of one book, tossing it aside, cracking another before running a finger down the page where the r-words started. But none of the books he checked had anything to say about rabies.

  Dev looked out the window at his best friend in the whole wide world. Literally. And then he went back to looking for information, the before-he-was-born kind of way.

  Gradually, painfully, Dev pieced together a prognosis singularly frustrating in its lack of precision. Rabies, it seemed, was a spectrum disorder itself. Not all that were bitten were infected. If the bitten had been vaccinated, infection was less likely, but still not impossible. The virus could gestate for weeks, months, even years sometimes, varying depending upon the species of the victim but varying widely, also, within a species. The virus collected in the saliva and could still infect twenty-four hours after its host died. Before symptoms showed up, the bitten wasn’t contagious, but the symptoms themselves were just the sort someone with Asperger’s was likely to miss: changes in the victim’s mood. And even though dog faces were easier to read than human faces . . .

  Dev stopped.

  How did he really know that was true? He projected moods onto Diablo, just like humans had been doing with dogs ever since the two species teamed up. It was called anthropomorphizing: ascribing human emotions to animals. It was just one of the many signs of human arrogance when it came
to other members of the animal kingdom—the assumption that just because we saw a grin when a dog opened its mouth to pant, it must be happy. But who knew, really? And how was Dev supposed to know, especially when his neurology was so bad with emotions, generally? Was he willing to risk frothing madness on an Aspie’s hunch about how a dog was feeling?

  Dev looked out the storm door at Diablo. He’d mowed his way through the bigger chunks of rabid raccoon and had become distracted, instead, by the snowflakes that had begun coming down sometime while his human was looking for answers. As he watched the black Lab standing out against the white, chasing and snapping at snowflakes, he’d have said the animal certainly looked happy.

  That’s how it was, when you didn’t know any better. What was the saying? Ignorance is bliss. There, out there, was one blissful animal, if Dev had to guess—which was exactly the problem he was grappling with at the moment: guessing. Second-guessing. Looking for clues he might never see . . .

  There were two kinds of ignorance, it seemed. The blissful kind and the kind Dev was facing over all these questions with no definitive answers. And it was too bad the laser made missing almost harder than not. Winding back the clock, he wouldn’t have minded shooting the wrong animal by accident. At least he’d have that excuse—it was an accident—before pumping another bullet into the chamber and blowing that raccoon to eternity.

  In the end, it wasn’t like a zombie apocalypse movie, with infected friends begging to be put out of their future misery. Diablo didn’t know anything about future misery. That was all on Dev’s shoulders, one of which had a rifle butt resting against it as he chased his best friend in the world with a little red light as the other chased snowflakes.

  The sound the silenced bullet made—thwip—might as well have been the sound of Dev’s heart breaking. Assuming he had that mythical organ, which—judging from the pain he was feeling in his heart area—made him wonder if he was like the Tin Man, not knowing he had one until it broke. And this ticker, sad to say, couldn’t be replaced with the windup kind. He’d just have to make do with a broken one, thinking this wasn’t exactly like a zombie apocalypse mercy killing, but it was close enough for him.