Post-Diablo, Dev didn’t like being himself so much anymore in the postpeople world. The great adventure seemed tedious without that floppy-eared black Lab to share it with. And that was the trouble with having a heart. Things got into it, and you stopped knowing how to live without them. Before, Dev was sure, he could have done solitary confinement on his head. And he probably could have. But then he had let Diablo in like a drug he was now withdrawing from.
How did neurotypicals do it? Why didn’t they all just kill themselves the first time their hearts got broken, like he’d tried to when Leo—well, he certainly hadn’t broken his heart, but made him feel stupid, which was nearly as bad? What was in the nerves of other people that his lacked? Copper wire? Something stronger, more resilient? And was there something he could take to make his nerves like that? A painkiller, maybe—one he could load and aim.
Dev looked at the rifle that had done the deed. It was too long. The barrel was too long. He’d have to take his socks and shoes off—one of each, at least, and from the same foot—to pull the trigger. And how would that look, the last human on earth, his head blown off—and half barefoot? When you were the last human on earth, your death warranted a certain gravitas—certainly more gravitas than having a naked big toe stuck against the trigger of a rifle.
Not that the rifle was his only option. His ex-neighbors had constituted a well-armed militia, even if they didn’t hold regular meetings to practice. He’d collected a small arsenal from them, ostensibly for self-defense against wildlife, but also for a little hunting when he ran out of the frozen meat he’d put aside before the power went out. The point was, he had guns, including hand ones because you never knew when you might need an option you could hide.
He looked out the window again, at his former friend, dead in the snow, a jet-black crow already perched on his jet-black head. He threw open the door and fired a warning shot as the crow hastened skyward. But whom was he fooling? They’d be back—the crow in question and his hungry pals. Without him to shoo them off, they’d be back. And there was no shooing off the eventual chemistry of decay. Dev knew; he’d gotten a lot of that chemistry smeared all over himself, clearing bodies.
But Diablo was too majestic an animal for that. Diablo, of all his neighbors, deserved a proper burial. And so Dev got a shovel and tried wedging it into the earth. It sliced through the snow and stopped. He shoved harder and pried up the shallowest divot and a few brown strands of dead grass. The rest was frozen solid.
Crap.
He went back to the garage and returned with bottles of lighter fluid in various stages of fullness. He traced a circle in the snow with the liquid: Diablo-sized, plus a little more. The snow fled away from wherever the fluid fell before soaking into the dirt like a sponge. There were matches in the kitchen and he got them, struck one and dropped it to the ethanol-soaked earth. The uprush of flames seemed fitting for a dog with a name from hell.
Blue tongues were still licking up from the dirt when he tried the shovel again. Much better. The blade sank halfway in this time, and when he pried up a chunk, a fireball followed as fresh vapors from the overturned dirt met flame. And onward he dug, one hour, two, following the lighter fluid down as it seeped slowly into the earth, releasing little Hiroshimas with every new shovelful until the hole was big enough and Dev stopped digging, rested his chin on the handle, and watched his breath for a while. Finally:
“Come here, boy,” he said, hooking up his friend’s leash for the last time. And then he dragged the body through the snow, from where the loyal beast dropped to where he would rest forever—a smear of red against white connecting the two.
35
They’d broken into various houses in search of warmer clothing because the sweaters weren’t cutting it and neither was the truck’s nonexistent heater. Snow tires also were not standard equipment. Seemed Marcus had managed to pick a dedicated warm-weather ride, the market for ice cream noticeably dropping once the temperature got low enough to wish your truck had a heater.
They did have a generator, of course. And since the freezer had become redundant (seeing as anything needing its services could be stored in garbage bags bungee corded to the roof), they got a ceramic cube heater, which helped keep the truck if not necessarily toasty, at least ice-free around the window areas.
Unfortunately, the extra drain on the generator meant a lot more stops to refuel. Which meant getting outside where the heater wasn’t. And getting down on hands and knees on the ice-cold ground. And cursing at the chassis-to-ground icicles fanging the latest donor ride, some of which yielded to kicking, some of which required a hammer, and the thickest of which required getting back in the ice cream truck to touch bumpers before giving the other truck a little nudge. The gas donors were always trucks lately, so Marcus could do them, seeing as Lucy’s condition had sidelined her in the scooting-under-things department.
“You know, when I said I wasn’t sure having a kid was worth it,” he said, pulling a second pair of gloves over his staying-inside pair, “I had no idea how right I was.”
Marcus, of course, blamed Lucy for their having to head north to the land of ice and snow in the first place. Sure, the pigs had been pushing them in that direction, but Zika had sealed the deal, which wouldn’t have been on the table even, if she hadn’t taken a pin to his condoms and now worried about having a pinhead baby as a result. At least he could still feel his fingers after swatting a mosquito, as opposed to them cracking off from frostbite or whatever.
“Would you like some cheese with that whine?” was all Lucy had to say.
They might have been tempted to stay in one of the houses they broke into, especially one of the ones where someone hadn’t died or left out food to rot, the more temperate climate leaving the air inside stale but not necessarily toxic. Unfortunately, what the southern heat hadn’t ruined, the northern cold had. Pretty much everywhere they went it was the same story: burst water pipes, indoor skating rinks.
“I’m starting to wonder how bad it would really be,” he said, breathing fog into his gloved hands, “getting trampled by pigs. At least there’d be some body heat.”
Lucy ssshhhed him. They each had an armload of freshly looted winter wear—scarves, jackets, gloves, long underwear—and were on their way back from the latest ice rink when she stopped and ssshhhed him again. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
“Hear what? You ssshhhing me? Twice?” He and his freezing testicles were seriously not in the mood.
“That,” Lucy said, using her head to gesture overhead.
So Marcus listened and heard . . . a lot of different things: the wind the city they were just outside of was famous for, whipping off Lake Michigan, turning the frigid air into knives. It rattled through the few leaves still clinging to their trees—either lucky, tenacious, or just stuck there by ice. But this didn’t seem to be the “that” Lucy was hearing, something Marcus confirmed by asking, “You mean the wind?”
“No,” she said. “Underneath the wind. Or between it. I don’t know. It’s a whole different frequency. Like a hum but a crackle too.”
“Maybe God’s enjoying a bowl of Rice Krispies.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m not.”
But then Marcus heard it, too, and looked up.
It was snowing at the time, and looking up into the flakes was like looking at sand funneling down on top of them from inside an hourglass. Only the snow kept coming and was somehow the source of the sound they were both hearing now: a kind of humming crackle. And though both were looking right at the actual source of the noise, it was Lucy who finally saw through their ubiquity.
“There,” she said, pointing at the power lines gridding the sky overhead. “I think it’s coming from them.”
Turns out they’d entered a part of the country which—despite its reputation for being so cold sometimes it was hard to think—at least acknowledged that global warming was a thing and was already happening. It seemed midwestern utilities had begun
experimenting with energy sources like solar and, better yet, wind. Lucy and Marcus passed billboards for NRG Energy and Dynegy, with slogans like “The Future Is Bright” and “Wind Power for the Windy City,” while others featured windmills off the shore of Lake Michigan, noting that the Great Lakes were the “Saudi Arabia of Wind Energy.”
Marcus, who was sensitive to the rhetorical formulation “the Saudi Arabia of . . .” whatever, made note of the first half of that factoid without fully appreciating the second half. Not until the snow started humming overhead, that is.
“Isn’t the Sears Tower near here somewhere?” he asked.
“In Chicago, yes,” Lucy said. “Only it’s called the Willis Tower, I think.”
“I really don’t care what it’s called. I’m just hoping it’s still there.”
It was—all 110 floors of it, including the Skydeck on the 103rd. The building had ventilated itself since the whatever, windowpanes tumbling out of their steel frames to shatter against the concrete below. Lucy and Marcus could feel the shards of broken glass crunching underneath the snow, the latter finding the experience of walking on broken panes a bit more poignant than the former.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, pushing through the revolving doors, depositing two trapped corpses, one inside, one out.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Lucy joked, stepping over the outside one, failing to notice that Marcus was a million miles away from a joking mood.
In a part of the country with more topography, he’d have suggested going to higher ground. In the Midwest, the area’s tallest building would have to do. In both cases, the point was perspective and range. He just wanted to see as much of the area as possible without having to go door-to-door, checking for light switches that worked. Killing two birds with one stone, he could also check for smoke, because if there was anybody else still alive out there, they’d have built a fire and kept it going. That was the theory, at least.
And who knew? Maybe they’d get lucky and the Willis would turn out to be on the receiving end of those humming wires . . .
It wasn’t. And so the elevators didn’t work. And there were 102 flights of steps between them and that magnificent view, which better pay off or he was going to hear about it all 102 flights back down.
Speaking of which: “Not fair,” she called after Marcus let his eagerness get the better of him and started taking steps two at a time. “I’m climbing for two.”
“I could carry you.”
Lucy crouched in the stairwell, hands on knees, trying to catch her breath. “No, you couldn’t,” she said. And just to confirm that this wasn’t a reference to her current weight: “I wouldn’t let you.”
Marcus did an honest appraisal of the situation, including the state of his own knees, which were killing him thanks to the unfortunate combination of an old football injury and the brutal cold—though he’d sooner die than say so. “Have it your way,” he fake conceded.
“Why, thank you,” she said, marshaling her breath for another flight.
Seeing his opportunity to give his knee a rest without seeming as frail as he frankly felt, “You wanna take a break?” he asked.
Lucy nodded.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, sitting down on the nearest step, purportedly to wait for Lucy’s next wind.
The view would have been breathtaking if either had much breath left. Several windows, seemingly at random, had shattered in place, thanks to the same expansion and contraction that had caused several panes already to tumble out of their frames to the street below. When their breath returned, they could see it hanging in the air, over the knit fingers they were both blowing into, trying to keep warm.
The sun was still up when they got to the Skydeck, though it had passed behind one of the Willis’s second-class neighbors and was closer to setting than not. With her naked eye, Lucy couldn’t tell if she was seeing smoke or not. There seemed to be a kind of fog rising off the snow, as if the entire landscape were one big ice-cube tray, steaming coldly just out of the freezer.
Marcus had brought a pair of binoculars and was training them on the gauzy scenery, looking for blips rising above the rest, suggesting an active chimney. “If we don’t see anything this time,” he said, still scanning, “I say we call off the search for the winter. If there’s anybody else out there, they’ll be doing what we need to: hunkering down and trying not to die.”
“Not dying,” Lucy said, rubbing her gloved hands. “Roger that.” Pause. “Anything?”
He shook his head. “I’m mainly hoping for something after the sun sets,” he said. “Lights, specifically. Something to show us where those wires are dumping their high-tech voltage.”
“Assuming we can see them through the fog and other buildings and—” She paused. “Does that strike you as an especially large number of evergreens right there?” She pointed a gloved finger in their direction, near the horizon, green-needled tips poking up out of the blanketing fog.
“Not a lot for a suburb,” he said. Paused. “Correction: Not a lot for a rich suburb.”
“Roger that.”
Once the sun set, the moon and binoculars came out, the latter pointed down at the ghost-lit landscape below. The Willis’s lesser but nevertheless towering neighbors edited the available view more than Marcus had anticipated, while the sun’s setting hadn’t helped segregate the ice fog from active chimney smoke. But then they got lucky. Or luckier. Because out in the distance, where that unusual number of evergreens shielded the rich from the lesser so, a strange glowing arose. The fog was being lit from the inside, the light diffuse, allowing what witnesses there were to effectively see around the barrier of trees to where all that free electricity was going.
“Bingo!” Marcus declared.
“Yahtzee,” Lucy countered.
“No, look,” he said, pulling the binoculars’ strap from around his neck and handing them to his pregnant partner.
“I stand corrected,” she said, dialing the soft blur of light into a sharper blur of light. “Bingo, indeed.”
Before scaling Mount Willis, Marcus had insisted they hit Walgreens for a very particular item: air-activated hand warmers, which they found a half case of in the stockroom, up in the rafters, waiting for the next winter to be reshelved, by which time the store’s foot traffic had dropped off the cliff, meaning that he and Lucy were pretty much it. “Grab as many as you can,” he advised. “We’re going to need them.”
And so they did, on the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower, with busted-out windows, a wind rarely experienced by anything other than small aircraft slicing through the cross draft. Fortunately, as the packages said, the hand warmers could get up to 130 degrees and lasted ten hours. Add a little cuddling and the couple managed to avoid freezing to death.
“How’d you know about these?” Lucy asked, appreciative but curious.
“My dad and me attempted camping once,” Marcus said. “Trying to be real Americans. But my dad had to get the best price, so we stayed at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park near Keystone Lake in the off-season, meaning November.”
“So how cold does it get near Keystone Lake in November?”
“Enough to know about these,” Marcus said.
They took turns keeping watch on the ghost light in the distance, to see if it dimmed or went out during the night, signaling that it was something other than the street lighting of some affluent suburb just outside Chicago, fed by the renewable part of the grid and set on an automatic timer. Not that street lighting being juiced by the sun and wind was anything to sneeze at and could probably be tapped into, even with Marcus’s limited experience as an electrician.
“Light bulb, switch, dry cell,” he said. “Science fair. ‘What is a circuit?’ Participation ribbon.”
“Nice knowing you,” Lucy said, patting him on the back before huddling in her corner around her little pocket sun to get a half hour or so of rest.
By sunup, the lights went out, not having revealed any evidence of human
involvement in their cycling on and off. Lucy and Marcus had 102 flights to go down, which would be a lot easier, though not easy. Instead of sniping at each other, however, they killed the time imagining what they’d do with all that electricity, once they got to it.
36
It wasn’t their fault they were still alive; it just felt like it. Dev, thinking, feeling—sitting in front of the living room window, watching the others as they pooped with abandon. He wondered if all the people who had died while he survived were somewhere, feeling toward him the way he felt now toward a bunch of innocent animals, doing what animals do. Had they cursed him as he hauled their bodies off to be burned? Did they collectively wonder: Why him?
There was still vodka in the liquor cabinet, and Dev poured himself too much. He’d be hungover for sure. Good. Hungover wasn’t hung; maybe the pain would be instructive. And so he returned to the living room (so-called) and sat back in his chair, thinking of his stepfather’s little sips, dragged out over an evening. He took a spiteful gulp—gagged, coughed, and then vomited. Lifting his head, he looked out at all manner of dogs playing in his front yard, their paws smearing further the already poop-smeared snow.
The next morning, nursing the hangover he had foretold, Dev decided to stop going outside. There was really no reason to anymore. Diablo didn’t need to go out to relieve himself; Dev didn’t need to go out to play with him afterward. Other than keeping the generator topped off, the only reason he even needed to open the door anymore was to toss out buckets of food for the roaming horde of poopers and pee-ers he’d inherited from his neighbors. That, and scooping up enough snow to melt for his various bathroom needs. Unlike his neighbors’, Dev’s pipes hadn’t frozen, partly because he had a basement so none of the plumbing was exposed to the cold air and partly because with the fireplace and space heaters going nonstop, even the coldest part of the house was above freezing.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 26