Post-Diablo—Dev and the vodka had decided the night before—he would be postpets. The whole notion of pet having was irrational after all. Why on earth would you attach yourself to something biologically predetermined to die before you? It was crazy. Becoming attached just guaranteed a painful amputation somewhere down the road, and there you’d be, this phantom limb in your head—this active absence—following you around, only to disappear whenever you turned around to look at it. Pets—and the acquiring thereof—was just a setup for gratuitous grief.
And why? Why would a person do that? More importantly, why would he do it twice? So Diablo the First would be Diablo the Last; there’d be no Diablos II, III, or IV—no Diablo Dynasty. His presence while it lasted had been precious, and precious things are precious because they’re rare. The preciousness of Diablo would not be watered down with more Diablos.
That was the decision he’d come to, while not watering down the vodka he’d hoped would help him sleep. But even drunk, sleep eluded him without Diablo’s weight on top, holding him together. While he hated being touched—especially lightly—being nearly crushed had a calming effect. The weight—the pressure—counteracted the normal chaos of feeling threatening to blow him apart. Through the simple act of lying on top of his human while they slept, Diablo had helped keep Dev’s pieces together.
Around midnight, still unable to sleep or at least black out, he fashioned a Diablo simulator: a sleeping bag from his deer-hunter neighbor filled with books from his just-in-case library, the same ones that had proved useless in the one case where it mattered. Under the weight of all those useless words, he hoped to sleep once again like he had when Diablo was still alive: like a baby, albeit one who cried while awake for no reason. Or rather, one: for one reason.
But his decision to go petless left him with a problem—or problems, really: all the animals his neighbors had left behind. During the Age of Diablo, he hadn’t been tempted to adopt any of the others. He was their caretaker; he was doing mankind’s duty to those left behind. He’d not bothered to name any of them, and if they had tags or a bowl that announced what they were called, he ignored them. “Good boy” and “good girl” didn’t need remembering—and were responded to as well as anything else.
Standing by the window, curtains spread for the free light, not that he felt like using it for anything, Dev looked idly outside, at his remaining responsibilities. He should have stopped feeding them when the food ran out that first time. He should have taken the Lyme scare for what it was: a warning. Looking now at what was left from that pet-food run, Dev knew he’d have to decide it, sooner rather than later. At the rate they were eating—now that food had to compensate calorically for living outside—he’d need to do another run before the winter was through.
Or . . .
Even murderers got a last meal; and those that survived their first taste of freedom were either murderers or accomplices by virtue of the fact that they hadn’t been weeded out. He’d set the table one last time, and after that, they could fend for themselves. For water, there was snow. Maybe having to rely on it would make them a little more careful about where they did their business. And for food, there was what he had left—a few twenty-pound bags of dry food, a few cases of the wet stuff. He dragged the bags into the snow out front, sliced them open like bodies being autopsied. He tucked a pistol into his belt to resolve the inevitable disputes.
Within moments, the furry horde descended upon the food pile like water funneling down a drain. He just stood back and watched. When a squabble broke out, he fired, and all the chowing heads bolted up, focused on him. That’s when he’d grab an open can of the wet stuff and fling it as far as he could, just to see their faces trying to decide whether to chase after it or stick with the sure thing.
More shots, more cans, more anthropomorphizing of canine philosophies, until he reached and found his hand on the last can. “Your inheritance,” he announced, and then launched it, “from Diablo.” He paused. “Spend it wisely,” he said before stepping back inside and locking the door for the first time since locking doors had become gratuitous.
Every morning afterward, Dev would check to see if they were still there, and they were. They didn’t seem to be getting thinner, nor did they crap any less. What they were living on, he didn’t want to know, though he suspected it was something that could either fly over or burrow under the wall. He was pretty sure they hadn’t nosed out a secret stash of preserved corpses anywhere, and the ones in the trucks that made up the wall had already donated to the cause.
He tried picking up where he’d been, pre-Diablo. When it came to talking, he did that in the morning, when he collected his eggs for breakfast, greeting and thanking his various Luckies. And then he’d start the fire if it had gone out, take a book to his chair by the window, and think about reading it, as his attention was drawn by something the animals were doing outside. There were some new ones, he noticed, runty little things doted on by what he assumed must be the mother, though right behind her was another, baring fangs at any that got too close.
He actively resisted the temptation to name—especially the newest ones, born cute as their number-one defense. Fifteen years he might get out of them, tops. It wasn’t enough.
And so he’d open the book he’d taken with him, try focusing on the words on the page. Couldn’t. Stared out the front window. Yawned. Wake with a start, still sitting in the chair, the shadows outside suggesting how much time had passed—along with the fire in the fireplace, having gone cold once again.
In between waking and needing to, Dev imagined what other sorts of tracks he might see in the snow someday, other than the ones that were already there. Bear and deer were possibilities, but not the ones his worried mind went to. Because there was only one kind of track he truly feared: the human kind.
He’d never been able to rid himself of the sight of that one other survivor, getting his throat ripped out by a cheetah. And so he imagined waking up one morning, business as usual, fresh snow having fallen, fresh footprints cutting a path down the center of the road. Sometimes, the imaginary maker was wearing thick-soled boots; other times, inexplicably, they were barefoot and bigger than normal, some postapocalyptic, giant mutation here to stake its evolutionary advantage by killing and replacing the last of the previous kind. Whether shod or not, these imaginary footprints always terrified Dev. Not that he didn’t know what he’d do if it ever happened. He did. He just didn’t want to have to. But his privacy had become too precious, and he’d already lost his quota of precious things. Luckily, Dev had the firepower to make sure he didn’t have to lose anything else.
37
Lake Forest, Illinois, was affluent. How affluent? They didn’t have a McDonald’s. They didn’t have any fast-food chains, except for a singular Burger King the couple saw later, hidden in an office park near the edge of town, presumably where the people who worked with their hands and didn’t live there—the housekeepers and groundskeepers—had gotten their breakfast and lunch calories in wax paper and cardboard.
It may have been a sign of how firmly ingrained Marcus and Lucy were in their birth-assigned class—the middle one that had been shrinking all the time they were alive, right up until everybody else wasn’t—that they chose one of the more modest homes to break into first. Of course, it could also have been because the homey home in question was one of the few structures that didn’t show any obvious damage from frozen pipes, and its windows were neither broken nor especially frosted over.
“That’s strange,” Lucy said, just after they’d driven past, making Marcus turn the truck around.
“Why, yes, it is,” he said, setting the brake. Because not only were the windows free of frost or ice, the building itself was surrounded by the thinnest gap between its exterior walls and the snow that covered the ground everywhere else.
“Shall we?” she asked, offering her hand grandly.
“We shall,” he said, taking her hand and trying to affect a similarly royal
manner.
The chicken pot pie looked like a chia pet on the counter, right next to its unzipped carton with instructions that read, “Preheat oven to 425o.” And that’s exactly where the knob on the electric oven was set and had been, apparently, ever since the person who set it there had died. Whatever food spatters once decorated the appliance around its four burner coils had blackened to crackling and ash, the smoke detector still pipping its distress feebly every five minutes or so. Meanwhile, the front window of the stove glowed the happiest orange either could remember seeing since they’d given up on feeling much through their fingertips until spring.
Lucy, overwhelmed by their luck, simply said, “I’m feeling like I want to kiss the linoleum. Is that weird?”
“Not if you stop at kissing,” Marcus said, surprising himself by already being on his knees, facing a direction that reminded him of his more observant self from not so long ago.
The freezer they promptly raided was like Christmas for her, the end of Ramadan for him. “Look,” one would say, holding up a box of frozen french fries, fish sticks, a pizza. “Look,” the other would say, holding half a bag of frozen corn, twist tied closed, a Ziploc bag of hamburger patties that clattered, a package of steak.
“And for dessert,” Lucy said, removing a drum of ice cream that had been hidden in the back. There were ice crystals in it, and it tasted funky, but it was ice cream and cured what ice cream cured while the two sat in front of the stove, eating right out of the container, watching the cheery, cherry-red coils glow as their toes and then the rest of them thawed out.
Once they were comfortable enough to go exploring, they discovered that the woman who’d turned the oven on had conveniently nipped off to the powder room while the stove warmed, only to die like the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, with her jeans around her ankles, tipped off her porcelain throne, but doing them the added courtesy of sliding the bathroom rug up into the gap under the closed door, which had segregated the stink of her rotting from the rest of the house. Bleach, generously dispatched, took care of any hygiene issues, real or imagined, while the room’s single window offered the quickest route for eliminating the source of those issues. After easing their rotting benefactress over the sill and out, they quickly gathered and chucked the various stench-absorbent articles lying about, including the fortunate rug, a set of towels and washcloths, a roll and a half of toilet paper, and a cloth shower curtain, before sliding the window shut. The tub they stopped and filled with water from melted snow they heated on the stove that had saved this place for them. The thought of sharing the bath wasn’t raised by either, and so they luxuriated separately, remembering only after having it again how good privacy could feel.
And so they dug in for the winter, the ice cream truck parked out front, space heaters plugged in to heat the rooms the warmth from the stove couldn’t quite reach. They’d go back to looking for others once the weather turned nice again. That’s what they told themselves. They’d also keep better track of directions, so they could get back here, where they’d leave a couple of space heaters going, just in case. Just enough to keep things from freezing, to make sure that their welcome, upon returning, would be as warm and inviting as when they first crossed the threshold of the house they both thought of—though not aloud—as their miracle.
Eventually, the snow stopped falling with any frequency worth noting and started thawing instead. The frozen ground loosened, giving up its loamy scents, before making way for shoots of green pushing up and out, waking up after their season-long nap.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Marcus said.
“Don’t tempt me,” Lucy said back.
“So, why are we leaving again?”
“I told you already. It takes a village to raise a child.” Pause. “We need to find our village.”
“And if there isn’t one to be found?”
Lucy hesitated, not wanting to tempt the possibility by acknowledging it with a backup plan. But just because she was superstitious didn’t make her stupid. “Then we come back here,” she said, “to resume our program, already in progress.”
Before leaving to find their village, Lucy charged her phone and took pictures of the miracle house: the kitchen, the bathtub, the stove, the empty freezer still rimmed with a half-inch of frost. She even took a picture of the empty tub of rocky road they’d tried to save but finished off over the course of three stove-lit evenings. There’d been more ice cream since then, scavenged from the houses and mansions with electricity that they weren’t staying in because the owners had died less miraculously than their benefactress, spoiling all their tastefully curated furnishing with the stench of their messy return to the dust from whence they came. But that first scoop after the long ice cream drought was the one she remembered most fondly, ice crystals, funky aftertaste, and all.
Marcus walked in on her as she was printing the pictures out. “Um,” he said, standing in the doorway. He’d spent the morning being practical, filling the truck’s freezer with a collection of goodies they couldn’t approximate by hunting or with something already canned. Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of it wound up being ice cream, Marcus having caught the habit from his pregnant partner.
“To remember,” she admitted. “And.” She paused.
“What?”
“To show our daughter when she asks where we spent our honeymoon.”
Marcus blinked ever so slightly at the h-word, an ocular flinch. “Son, you mean,” he said, as if trying to cover.
“The newcomer who’ll increase the world’s population by fifty percent,” she offered, by way of compromise, “whatever she happens to be.”
Without stampeding pigs or Zika to give them the nudge, the searchers were a little unsure of where to go next in their search. “Not back” was Marcus’s not-very-helpful, no-brainer suggestion, which Lucy countered with the equally sarcastic, “And not into Lake Michigan.”
“Maybe we could just hop on I-94 and see where that takes us,” he suggested.
She reminded him that they had atlases that while not quite as granular as they might like, did include interstates like I-94 and where it’d take them. And so they checked, opening at Illinois, turning to Indiana, and then to Michigan.
“Anything catch your eye?” she asked.
Marcus nodded. “Anything catch yours?”
Lucy nodded too.
Neither wanted to say what it was before the other did, and so they agreed to blurt it out after the count of three. One, two, thr . . .
“Dearborn,” they both said, followed by a mutual, stunned silence, followed by Lucy shaking her head before channeling her inner Jean-Luc Picard: “Make it so,” she commanded.
38
Animals are animals. Formerly domesticated or not, they’ll revert. Stop feeding them, and they’ll revert even faster. Those claws at the ends of their paws, those fangs hanging from their jaws? They’re there for a reason. Their so-called “owners” just forget sometimes, until they’re playing and yank back a hand striped in blood.
Ever since he’d stopped feeding them, that very substance—blood—had joined the bodily fluids he’d see dotting his front yard and walk. The snow had pulled back, exposing the lawn on its worst hair day, dotted with fresh piles, as well as a winter’s worth that had been forgotten, until the blanket covering it was removed. In addition to blood, Dev noticed tufts of fur riding the breeze, along with feathers the color of the garbage birds living on the leftovers of civilization.
But then one day, he noticed more blood spattering his walk than usual. And the feathers in the wind weren’t brown, gray, or black, but white and rusty red. The white ones looked like snow blowing past the window, even though it was too late for that. But then Dev went for his morning eggs.
He could only stare at the blood, feathers, and viscera they’d left behind. The eggs he’d set aside for breakfast were smashed, their shells shrapnel stuck in slick spots where the rest had been licked clean. They tore them apart, he t
hought, the words echoing from one side of his cranium to the other. They’d even gotten the eggs he’d been incubating in hopes of future chickens and their future eggs, keeping him set until his own future ran out. But looking at the mess in front of him, he couldn’t see that future anymore. He still had surplus eggs in the kitchen, enough for a few days. But after that . . .
And that’s when Dev lost his mind a little, deciding to kill the whole bloody lot of them. He’d kill and eat them—some cultures did. The penalty for such theft in Devonshire—he decided on the spot—death. An eye for an eye, food for food. He’d kill them and skin them, cut through their major joints—the shoulders, hips—place the disassembled pieces into a Crock-Pot with a can of cream of mushroom soup. He’d imagine he was eating pot roast. The hearts, he’d eat raw. He’d paint his face with their blood. Make a necklace of their teeth. Clothes from their fur. He’d boil their murderous bones for broth and use their tails like Swiffers for dusting. He’d . . .
He stopped.
There really was an awful lot of dust everywhere. He could practically write his name on the mirror, looking back at himself through a gauze of his own dead skin cells, processed through the guts of dust mites. Dust—and its formation—had been a sub-topique of his. That’s what tended to happen with his topiques: they branched, and the branches branched, until the diagram of his interlinking interests looked like what he imagined his nervous system looked like. Neurotypicals tended to dismiss his obsessions as random, trivial, pointless, or just plain bizarre. They weren’t—not to him.
Take his obsession before the whatever: vacuum cleaners. A full and deep appreciation of vacuum cleaners wasn’t just a matter of rote memorization of makes, models, and model years. To fully apprehend the concept of “vacuum cleaner” required a knowledge of physics (electronics, air pressure, suction, acoustics, the behavior of particles in a vortex), entomology (the life cycle of dust mites, especially), schools of design (from the sleek spaceships of the 1950s to the x-rayed cyborgs of Dyson), even trends in marketing (from door-to-door sales to TV to internet pop-up ads). For Dev, every topique was a keyhole through which, when he looked hard enough, he could see the whole world. The whole world, that is, minus people.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 27