But as he and she worked their way through the various exhibits, all she could think was: interesting, but . . .
But what was she supposed to do with it? Where were the instruction books for rebooting civilization? For sale in the numerous gift shops? Nope. And even if she got, say, one of the mills or the abbreviated assembly line going again, what were they going to make that wasn’t as easily gotten, ready-made, in whatever store they chose to loot?
There were perishables, of course, which had promptly done what their name implied. Bread, for example. All the prepackaged stuff had turned into bags of black-and-green felt within a month. Fortunately, the ingredients had a much longer shelf life, and she’d already dazzled her traveling companion with her mad Suzy Homemaker baking skills. But eventually, even the store-looted flour and yeast would go bad or be discovered by mice, insects, maggots, and mealworms. So Lucy put a mental pin in the grain mill, even though she hoped to be elsewhere by the time they needed it, depending on whatever else the apocalypse had in store.
“Seen enough?” she asked, flipping through a rack of pamphlets for other touristy hot spots in the Mitten.
“More than,” Marcus said, joining her, looking for something that wouldn’t be a disappointment in the long run.
Pure Michigan!
According to the tourist brochures they found, the state’s brand message was fulfilled by things like cherries and fudge, factory tours, a couple of bridges, water (except in Flint), and the seasons. Oh, and an island where cars were banned, horse poop went unmentioned, and a grand hotel waited for guests who couldn’t afford it.
None of the pamphlets said anything about the weeds, about how pretty some of them could be, once you disconnected them from the word weed and just marveled at how confidently they’d taken over every unpaved space. There were a dozen different kinds of tall grasses waving wherever the ground was the least bit marshy, their flagging seed heads reminiscent of wheat, tasseled corn, caterpillars, ostrich feathers, the very beard of God. There were wildflowers with these gorgeous, spiky purple and yellow blossoms that looked like floral fireworks, surrounded by twiggy, thorny bushes exploding with berries so round and red they were almost certainly toxic. Standing outside the ice cream truck in the midst of all this, Lucy and Marcus didn’t speak but just listened to crickets sawing their legs for love; dragonflies buzz-zipping on cellophane wings through stems and stalks, hovering over lily-padded ponds while songbirds in the tops of gold-lit trees at sunset tweeted up a storm, ignoring the character limit.
“You’d think they would have said something about this in the brochures,” Marcus said finally in the deepening dark, his tone hushed, reverential, as if they’d gone into that mosque after all.
Since the world ended, they’d spent their time under an assortment of roofs—houses, stores, vehicles mainly, a library. Their options had been limited by the ambient stench of death, extremes of temperature, viruses, rats a-paw and hogs a-hoof. As a result, they hadn’t spent a lot of time outside, enjoying the simple pleasures of a warm—not hot, not freezing—breeze, minus the aforementioned stench of death. But it was springtime in Michigan, minus the people, minus the traffic, leaving just this star-spilt oasis of pleasantness behind.
“Maybe they were worried about crowds,” Lucy said.
40
Before the massacre, he’d built up a modest reserve of eggs he kept in a wicker basket on the kitchen counter. Eggs didn’t need to be refrigerated; he knew this from his research before, when he’d decided to get into the egg business. And during the warmer seasons, he didn’t. Unrefrigerated eggs were good for about two weeks, while refrigerated ones would stay good for up to three months, but once refrigerated, that had to stay that way, lest condensation promote bacterial growth. Pickled, they’d stay good without refrigeration for months as well, but pickled eggs started out hard-boiled—not his favorite way to cook eggs—and the pickling solution changed how the eggs tasted. For an egg to be an egg, it should be poached, soft-boiled, over medium, or basted. He liked his yolk slightly runny, so he could dip a slice of toast into it, though crackers were the best he could manage nowadays, his attempts at baking being closer to brickmaking than bread.
Before the massacre, he thought the biggest threat to breakfast would be running out of crackers. He’d already worked out a list of dipping alternatives, beginning with fried Spam, running through various jerkies, and ending with his pinky, though unlike the others, this last would merely be licked. There needed to be a line, after all, and autocannibalism seemed a good place to draw it.
But the massacre changed everything. The half-dozen eggs in his strategic egg reserve were effectively all the eggs left in the world. Rationing was a must. And so he went from two eggs a day to a half, scrambled one at a time with lots of powdered milk added and stretched over two days. He’d hard-boiled the last two so he could quarter them, but his first attempt was disappointing. He’d rested the egg on its side and cut four slices—one of which, the tip of the small end, held no yolk at all. The last he held big end down and then cut it from top to bottom twice, in the shape of a cross, each grinning slice with a happy bit of sun inside.
And after that, there’d be no more eggs. No more eggs, no more breakfast, as strictly symbolic as that meal had become in its final days. No breakfast, and there went any reason to get out of bed, which would become the final resting place of the human species, as its (maybe) sole surviving member belligerently starved himself to death out of force of habit.
The robins were returning now that it was spring in Michigan. And his portion control had become so extreme by the end that a fried egg the size of a quarter might very well have seemed filling. But there was a problem with robins and sparrows and even the garbage-picking seagulls and crows: unlike chickens, when they flapped at the sight of a human, they actually took flight. He knew; he tried, felt stupid doing it. And as far as raiding one of their nests, they built them inconveniently high, so when they caught you stealing eggs and started pecking at you, it’d be a miracle if you just hurt your leg after falling, instead of breaking your neck. Dev knew; he’d tried; he’d started up the refrigerator to make ice to put on it.
He tried imagining the post-Dev world. Couldn’t. Remembered a line from The Shawshank Redemption instead: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
Okay, he thought, the latter.
And so, feeling sorry for himself, he laid his body out on the couch next to the fireplace, a sleeping bag full of books weighing him down as he looked up at the ceiling, the paint meant to hide the cracks pulling away in spots. He thought about writing a note, in case there were others, in case they found his dead needle in the world’s haystack. But all he could think to say was the truth—“Ran out of eggs”—which seemed too stupid for an epitaph, even to its author.
Luckily, starving yourself to death out of sheer bullheadedness proved harder than it seemed. The level of difficulty was roughly the same as trying to suffocate yourself by holding your breath, a method of self-removal Dev had tried and failed at, a thousand years ago, in his fallout shelter. He could puff out his cheeks, bulge his eyes, sweat and squirm desperately—even go as far as pinching his nose and covering his mouth—but passing out was the best he could expect. And once that happened, his fingers would unpinch, his hand would fall away, and those autonomic bellows, his lungs, would go back to sucking air.
What the autonomic response to starvation was, Dev still didn’t know. As it turned out, he didn’t even get as far as passing out. He was imagining what it would be like to starve to death, picturing his stomach shrinking until it touched his spine, his rib cage vacuum-wrapped in skin. His body would slowly eat itself until it finally ran out of him just like he’d run out of eggs . . .
But then a spurious thought flitted like a butterfly across his mental landscape of personal ruin: I could really use a cookie.
It didn’t even sound like his voice, frankly; it sounded smarter. And so Dev took its advice an
d got up. He mixed some powdered milk and unclipped a sleeve of stale but acceptable Oreos. As a rule, he didn’t eat sweets that often; the only reason they were even in the house was because of his late stepfather, the vector through which all things sugary entered the Brinkman estate. But just like a pregnant woman can find herself suddenly needing smoked herring and ice cream, the quasi-starved Dev found he suddenly needed lard whipped with confectioners’ sugar sandwiched between chocolate cookies. Following the memory of his stepfather’s preferred approach to cookie eating, he dunked his into a glass of reconstituted milk.
Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all . . .
The milk undid the cookie’s staleness, helping it dissolve in his mouth, the texture surprisingly buttery against his Aspergerian tongue. He fished out another, dunked it, and was struck by how familiar the motion felt, though he’d never been a cookie dunker before. His muscles remembered it, remembered doing something just like this every . . .
And then his database kicked in—all the images he’d stored and sorted, like with like: dipping toast in egg yolk, cookies in milk, doughnuts in coffee, chips in dip; basted egg yolks, Jell-O jiggling, chilled chicken drippings all a-jiggle; piercing the yolk, breaking the ice, peeling back the skin on chilled pudding. He remembered a science experiment from school, where they’d been blindfolded and had their noses stopped, to see how much sight and smell contributed to taste. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station experienced something similar, using hot sauce on everything just to taste it, because smell molecules got messed up in zero gravity. He thought about virtual reality and how it reminded him of how he watched TV as a kid, with his nose pressed to the screen as if he might pass through it into another world . . .
And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he could deconstruct the experience of breakfast into its gestures, its textures, its sensations edited, pulling forward some, pushing back others. Maybe it wouldn’t be the same breakfast from before, the sort he looked forward to and savored, but he could get close. Close enough to get past the mental block he’d erected, to check off “breakfast,” and get on with the day. He could at least simulate having breakfast with a cold. And considering the alternative, having breakfast with a stuffy nose wouldn’t be so bad.
And so: he found a professional photo of his dream breakfast in one of his mother’s glossy magazines, shot it, saved it on his phone, and strapped the phone to a pair of goggles like a VR headset. His nostrils he plugged with toilet paper. Egg whites he simulated by using some of the unflavored gelatin his mom used to make her nails stronger, adding lots of salt to trigger those taste receptors on his tongue. A dollop of vanilla pudding, also salted, and chilled until it skinned over, became the yolk.
It looked ridiculous and tasted like a slightly salty nothing. It was all textures. Mouthfeel. But it was better than nothing, this salty nothing, and it would do. It had to.
41
While Lucy collected edible flora, Marcus was charged with killing something that could be served fresh. They’d been living off the land to the extent they could, and when they couldn’t, they’d eaten what they’d found in the walk-in freezers of Lake Forest. It was Lucy’s doing. She wanted to stay away from food that came in cans because she’d heard they were lined with BPA, which she figured was bad because chemicals that hide behind initials usually are (with the exception of DNA, of course, which she was pretty sure BPA messed with). Plus, all the baby stuff they’d shoplifted was labeled “BPA-Free,” which suggested maybe she should be, too, especially in her current condition.
And that’s why Marcus was hunting when it happened. He’d been charged by his baby mama to kill pretty much anything but another rabbit, several of which still clattered in the freezer whenever they moved things about, looking for something else to thaw for dinner. They’d been avoiding these “blue bunnies” because along with abstaining from “robo-food,” as Lucy’d taken to calling canned goods, she’d also developed an aversion to rabbit meat, the distaste either hormone or repetition induced.
It was time to aim higher. “Like geese,” she suggested, having noticed them scissoring across the sky—though suggested might be too polite a term. If Marcus recalled correctly, she’d said something about turning him into a eunuch if she had to choke down one more bite of pan-fried Thumper.
“Shoot something else,” she insisted. “Something with feathers.”
“Emily Dickinson said, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’” Marcus noted, feeling a need to remind her that he had a brain as well as a trigger finger.
“And Plato said that man is a featherless biped,” Lucy countered. “So I guess that means men are hopeless.” She paused to let the gratuitous swipe at his gender sink in. “So why don’t you prove them both wrong by not being so hopeless, okay?”
It was the pregnancy talking; the hormones had her raging for two—or so Marcus told himself. And speaking of two, he was rather attached to the pair he’d been born with and preferred to keep it that way. So while Lucy foraged, the male of the species followed goose poop.
He’d noticed it earlier—quite a lot of it, actually, as evidenced by the bottoms of his shoes, which were puzzled with squished green logs looking like moldy cigars. He followed the poop he hadn’t stepped in (yet) down to a river of assorted grasses as tall as he was, seed heads shaking and shushing in the breeze.
Nosing a few stalks aside with the barrel of his shotgun, Marcus nearly stepped in what the river of grass had been hiding: an actual river. He paused midstep and was preparing to reverse course when an entire flock of geese lifted into the air on huge, pumping wings. The sight was enough to freeze him in place as he marveled at their size and labored disregard of gravity. They seemed to have gotten especially large on mankind’s leftovers; their flight, while still majestic, seemed a little sluggish, their huge wings pulling them up to the sky like fat men climbing ladders.
Remembering what he had on the line, Marcus rested the butt against his shoulder, tilted his head back, and sighted along the barrel. He drew a bead on the biggest one, following as it rose, preparing to squeeze the trigger when—poof!—feathers. Tipping the barrel out of the way and unsquinting his eyes, he saw the bird drop out of the sky.
Had he fired without realizing? he wondered, cracking the shotgun to check. Nope. Two chambers, both loaded, the primers set in the brass heads looking back at him like a pair of strange yellow eyes. No smell of cordite in the air. No report echoing in his ears. His shoulder didn’t feel sore from recoil. Nothing. Just a bird apparently shot—and not by him.
He stood there for a minute, feeling his testicles pull up into his body cavity, apparently as unsure of this new development as their owner was. Given the goose’s size, he guessed it could have had a midair heart attack, but then there’d been that puff of feathers. It had been hit by something. Assuming it wasn’t a meteorite, that meant Lucy and he had company. Armed company.
The thing that troubled him most was what was missing: the gunshot. The goose was there one second and falling the next, webbed feet over head, limp neck flailing in a tug-of-war between gravity and wind resistance, contrail of spiraling feathers following behind. As soon as he saw it, Marcus started counting Mississippis as reflexively as he did whenever he saw a lightning strike. But this time, the count just kept going up, followed by nothing louder than the insects scritching in the weeds.
If there’d been some sound, he could have gotten the shooter’s direction and gauged how far away he was. So either said shooter was so far away the blast got lost in the distance—unlikely—or a silencer was involved. But what kind of rifle comes with a silencer? Handguns, sure, but the only rifle he could think of that might come with a silencer was military-grade and used by snipers—hardly a reassuring development.
And what was the point of being quiet? Was the shooter worried about scaring the rest of the flock? Maybe. But no other birds fell from the sky. One and done, so who cared if the others heard? C
learly, whoever shot the goose didn’t want company. Meaning his original impulse—to fire his own gun as a way of saying hi—had been rightly second-guessed. For one thing, who says hi with a bullet? A psycho with a gun, that’s who. So he returned silence with silence, wondering if he was already being watched, perhaps through a sniper scope.
But why hide? Lucy and he hadn’t. They’d been through several states with and without each other. When they finally hooked up, it wasn’t a problem; it was the best thing to happen to either since that worst of all days. So what made this new stranger different? More importantly, what did the shooter have to hide?
It occurred to Marcus that all the other others either he or Lucy had found, had been found dead. Accidents and suicides—or so they thought.
But why kill other survivors? There was plenty for everybody; no need to defend the local stash. So what else was there? What resource was still worth fighting over? What, in a vacated world full of plenty, would somebody kill anybody else over? He ran through the three Fs of survival: food, fuel, and fortification. And then he thought of a fourth F.
Marcus kept the shooter’s existence to himself. Likewise, he saw no need to inform Lucy of her postapocalyptic status as potential bargaining chip. He was curious, however, about what sort of harem the shooter might be hiding. And truthfully, Ms. Abernathy hadn’t been his type when they hooked up—other than being alive and female and agreeable to the whole hooking-up thing. Plus, he had to admit, ever since she’d gotten pregnant, her less attractive features had become more obvious, starting with the castration threats, which seemed to be coming with far greater frequency than seemed healthy in a relationship. And speaking of castration . . .
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 29