He still hadn’t caught his nonrabbit, noncanned, made-out-of-meat something to please the mother of his child and self-appointed castrator. He’d come that close to scoring a goose, but now that was out—along with using the shotgun. It wouldn’t be a good idea, broadcasting their location to a possibly homicidal, definitely antisocial maniac, whether or not he happened to be hoarding a herd of humanity’s last breeders.
Behind him, the cattails shushed like a room full of librarians as the wind came up, as if scolding him for such chauvinistic thinking. Turning, Marcus watched the corduroy-covered corn dogs waving at him, wondering if they might be edible and, if so, how best to prepare them. But then the wind died, and he heard what he’d missed before: a piping-chirping-burping noise, punctuated by the occasional plop and splash.
As a culinary backup plan, frogs came with one big advantage: he didn’t need to shoot them. All he needed was a reasonably straight stick he could sharpen to a point, which he proceeded to find and whittle, already imagining his return bearing a kind of frog abacus: spear one, slide it behind his fist, spear another, slide, repeat. Since they’d only be eating their legs, he figured they’d need several each.
“I bought a different vowel,” he’d say, presenting his frog kebab. “Ribbit for rabbit.” Lucy would laugh at that (he hoped). They didn’t laugh enough—not since she’d become the self-appointed vessel of the future. Maybe laughing more would help. Marcus hoped so.
But when he parted the curtain of cattails, there was a different and more pleasant surprise waiting for him: a nest full of giant eggs. From the geese, no doubt, and at least three that he could see, more than enough for both of them, given their size.
Imagining omelets the size of medium pizzas, Marcus let go a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Between the eggs and the frogs, they had enough food for several meals, not a shot fired, not a ball busted. Now all he had to do was keep it that way—on both accounts.
At first, Lucy was just happy for some fresh protein that didn’t remind her of Easter. Not that eggs didn’t run the same risk, but between the two, eggs were the novelty, so . . .
“I never realized how much I missed these before,” she said before moaning her approval over the next several bites.
“Cool,” Marcus said, hastily and hushed. “You mind keeping it PG, though?”
“I thought you liked it when I moaned,” she said, a dab of yolk on her chin. “Not that I’ve had much occasion to,” she added, an unsubtle allusion to his recent drop in libido. A drop that correlated disturbingly with the expansion of her waistline—or so it seemed to her.
“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” he said. “I know the books say that’s not a problem,” because Lucy had told him they said that, every time they had this argument. It was easier for her; she had a direct line to the kid and the kind of jostling it was subject to. Marcus, on the other hand, just felt like he was returning to the scene of some vague crime he’d be paying for for the rest of his life.
But in the end, Lucy recognized a convenient excuse and accepted it, albeit reluctantly. After all, barring a significant change in circumstances, the man serving her giant fried eggs was pretty much it from here on out.
Pee.
Ever since getting pregnant, she’d had a thing about it—hers, specifically, but the urine of pregnant women more generally as well. She couldn’t say where in her stash of trivia it came from, but she was convinced there was something in the excretions of pregnant women that attracted wild animals.
“Why would that even make sense?” Marcus objected. “From an evolutionary standpoint, I mean. Pregnant ladies—as you’re fond of pointing out—are the future of the species. So why ring the dinner bell every time one of them squats to take a leak?”
“You’re thinking like a human,” she countered. “Maybe it’s something that evolved in the predators, making them better at tracking down inconveniently hobbled prey.”
There was no point in arguing the point, of course. The decision re peeing, and where she did it, rested with Lucy. And as long as she was pregnant, her preferred peeing places would involve running water, based on the assumption that doing so would disperse whatever predator-attracting pheromones might be contained therein.
Fortunately, as they learned from one of the tourist pamphlets they’d picked up at Greenfield Village (a.k.a. the Henry Ford), among its various nicknames, Michigan counted Water Wonderland, thanks to its eleven thousand inland lakes, rivers, and streams. And that didn’t include the Great Lakes that surrounded the Mitten on all sides except the one they’d entered from. Bottom line: Lucy’s bottom had plenty of places to choose from, whenever her spirit or bladder was so moved.
And it was because of this preference re peeing that Lucy found herself along the banks of the Ecorse River not too long after her partner made his discovery and kept it to himself. Since that day, he’d also kept them moving, never staying in one place for more than a night. Though he was curious about what the shooter might be hiding, he was in no hurry to be shot—a possibility he further deferred by observing radio silence as they drove.
“Why aren’t you playing the weasel anymore?” she asked as they sped away from the latest campsite like they were fleeing a bank robbery. It was not the first time they’d so sped, nor was it the first time she’d asked the question.
“Saving the battery,” he’d said the first time she asked. “Driving me crazy,” he replied the next time, which was true enough, but not the whole story. “Don’t want to scare the food away,” he tried yet another time. By the time they parked along the banks of the Ecorse River, he’d stopped even trying to come up with excuses, just shrugging his shoulders as he bent over the steering wheel, hell-bent on being somewhere else.
This predisposition for movement did not sit well with Lucy’s inclination to sit tight—especially not since she’d shown a liking for the Ecorse River. It was prime peeing real estate, after all, and promised to last her for a while, based on how far the pale-blue squiggle ran along the pages of her atlas—nineteen miles, give or take, winding through a dozen cities from before until it branched, north and south and met again, before spilling into the Detroit River.
Off the page and in the real world, the river was shielded for most of its length by trees growing on either bank, their branches touching in a canopy overhead. The trunks were further stitched together by a dense tangle of woody vines, so that the river flowed through perpetual shadow, sparsely dappled here and there, wherever a coin of sunlight managed to drop through. Berms of concrete and railings of galvanized steel had been installed during the before time, the barriers running flush with the grid of side streets and overpasses that sat above the river in its modest valley. Following the slanting earth to the water, Lucy felt like she’d entered a large tunnel, overgrown on the inside with ivy. She liked the feeling of her little bower, especially given the preciousness of privacy in a world boiled down to a population of two, going on three.
“Gotta tinkle,” she announced after lunch, before rising and waddling off that fateful afternoon. Usually, these trips seemed too short to have done much of anything in the way of relieving one’s self—at least based in his personal experience. And so it was worrying when she hadn’t returned right away. So worrying, he’d fetched the shotgun and was about to go after her when Lucy suddenly came quick-waddling back, holding her stomach against bouncing. She was out of breath, and her eyes looked as excited as they had the first time they’d met—maybe even a little more excited.
“Come,” she demanded, grabbing his arm with surprising ferocity.
“Careful,” he complained, but she ignored him, tugging harder, lifting him until he was half-standing before heading back to the river. He kept tripping, just trying to keep up.
“Just say what it is,” he demanded, stopping and refusing to take another step.
Lucy wheeled on him. “No spoilers,” she said before resuming her quick waddle to whatever perishable thing
she’d found.
42
While he knew, intellectually, that the season had changed from winter to spring, Dev didn’t take it personally until it pooped on his head. Looking up to get a better look at his aerial assailant, he saw them: geese returning from their whirlwind tour of elsewhere. Bringing his hand back from his head, he called after them. “Happy spring to you too,” he shouted, flicking his spattered hand in disgust.
He thought he’d taken care of sneak attacks after the raccoon incident, taking a chain saw to all the low-hanging branches he found reaching inside his fortress against the world. He’d also filled jars with predator urine—his—and heaved them over the wall of charred trucks, to pop against the street on the other side. The pee and broken glass, he hoped, would keep even rabid quadrupeds at bay. But what was he supposed to do when his attackers could fly? And that’s what it was, he decided: an attack. Biological warfare, specifically, because who knew what sorts of poultry-borne diseases would be raining down on him once word got out that you could crap on the human with impunity?
In retrospect, he probably should have kept a dog or two, murderers though they were. Having practiced, they’d be more than up to this new challenge. As it stood now, it looked like it was up to him. And so he went back inside and returned with the rifle he’d used on the raccoon—the one with the laser sight and silencer. On the bright side, he figured, he could take care of two problems with one bullet. His frozen meat supply had gotten dangerously low over the winter.
The clearest message was to go for the goose at the tip of the V. Give them a sneak peek at what messing with (but especially on) Dev Brinkman got them. Keeping the lead bird in sight was tricky, but the laser’s red dot helped a lot, as did the silencer when his first two shots fell somewhere between the legs of the V. The third time was the charm, as his target stumbled in midair and then gave itself over to gravity.
He was about to cheer his own marksmanship when the V broke open like a hinge. One leg flew out front while the other fell in behind, the birds ranking themselves like troops before banking and heading his way. They looked like Indians—the Native American kind—storming over a hilltop in some cheesy Western.
If he’d been the sort to swear, he would have right about then. Instead, he just yelled, “Crap,” which the geese seemed to take as a command. “Crap, crap, crap,” he continued, shielding his head as he ran for the safety of home sweet home. Slamming the door, he turned to the window just as the line of charging geese deployed their landing gears and stepped lightly as a group onto his front lawn where they proceeded to mill about like angry, honking villagers outside Frankenstein’s castle.
“Happy spring, my butt,” he whispered from the safe side of the glass.
A cooling-off period was in order. And even though to the outside world this “cooling off” might look like hiding, it wasn’t. He was cooling off, hoping the geese would do likewise, after which they could fly their bladders elsewhere and Dev could go out and appreciate the spring weather. He might even take the opportunity to restock his stash of frozen meat with some protein that couldn’t get the drop on him anytime it wanted. Maybe a few of the rabbits that had turned Devonshire into a golf course during the winter.
By next morning, the plan seemed to be working. Checking the front and back yards, he judged the coast clear and decided to set out his laundry to dry. The summer before, he’d taken to using the dead service line to the house to dry clothes on, his shirts, pants, and towels all whipping in the warm breeze like flags at a used-car lot. He hadn’t done a load of laundry all winter, gradually relocating all the Dev-sized clothing from the neighborhood into a pile filling his otherwise unused bedroom. But now that he was in hiding—he meant, cooling off—he might as well use his time productively, especially since his aerial tormenters seemed to be cooling off as well.
Wrong.
As he set his laundry out to dry, the birds’ sphincters must have tingled. All that flapping fabric suddenly became an excrement magnet, not a scrap of cloth spared from this new, aerial assault. They left green, purple, and gray asterisks bleeding on every flapping shirt and struggling pair of jeans. The towels, made for absorbency, were a total loss. Not that Dev didn’t have more; he had a whole neighborhood of more. But there was a principle here. He was the human. He held dominion over nature. It wasn’t supposed to be taking a dump on his clothes, especially not when he had just washed everything.
And that’s when he knew what he should have done when they were all just there, milling about, honking on his front lawn. He should have opened the window and shot the bunch of them like the sitting ducks they (almost) were. Teach them that on this piece of ground, under this particular square of sky, death awaited. Maybe then they’d leave him alone.
But there they went again—a great big V of judgment—honking and pooping with abandon. The sound of them made him feel like he hadn’t since the people went away: like he was being laughed at. He’d survived a Michigan winter on his own, something he could be proud of—but this undid all that. Suddenly, he was the little weirdo everyone picked on again.
“Crap.”
The more he thought about it, the less sense it made, how the geese seemed to be targeting him. Was it revenge for shooting their leader? Maybe, but that was stupid. How did they know he wouldn’t slaughter them all? He’d thought about it—still was—even though he knew in the end it didn’t make sense. Not if he wanted a steady supply of poultry for dinner. A couple of burps from a semiautomatic would do it, but he’d just be wasting ammunition and good protein. Once dead, the clock started ticking just like it did with all dead things. And there was no way he could get them all dressed and frozen before the vast majority started to rot.
He looked at them, milling there again: a pair of pink flamingos that had grown into an infestation. Maybe they were smarter than he thought. Maybe they understood the safety their numbers provided. But why risk even a few if they didn’t have to? They literally had the whole rest of the world to honk and crap over. Why pick this nowhere in the middle of nowhere to make their stand?
He wondered whether the geese had some instinctual need to defecate near people. If so, their targeting him confirmed what he’d already come to believe: he really was the last one left. He wondered what they did when they were down south for the winter. Did they hold it? No, there must be people down south too. If they’d been holding it for months, that first dump would have been much bigger—up to his ankles, at least.
Not that crapping was the worst of it. And it wasn’t being chased every time he stepped outside either. It wasn’t their honking—not just—or their webbed feet paddling after him as they flapped their wings, trying to make themselves seem even bigger than they were. And he didn’t run because he was afraid of being hit by a couple dozen ten-pound fluff balls. Even collectively, it wasn’t like they could do much damage with their feathers.
Dev ran because of the beaks. He ran because of the cobra-like necks the beaks were attached to, darting and stabbing at his soft parts, grabbing hold of his pinchable flesh and leaving painful marks behind. Even when they missed latching on, just being struck was bad enough. Their beaks, while blunt, were hard. And those necks were all muscle-wrapped bone. When they struck, it was like being hit by a rock—dozens of rocks—pelting him from all sides. It was like the geese were stoning him—a fittingly biblical execution, tailor-made for the apocalypse.
So he ran.
He ran every time he’d thought the coast was clear and been wrong. He ran as fast as he could, leaping the front porch steps and then slamming the door as Hitchcock’s The Birds played out on his front lawn. And as he held his breath, holding on to the barely parted curtain, yellow flippers shuffled, cobra necks bobbed, and a vengeful flock bided its time.
Trying to sit it out, he endeavored to think like a bird. And what Dev the Bird wanted to know was: Why weren’t they afraid? Humans had killed them—many of them, hunting season after hunting season. He himself
had shot their leader right in front of them. But still, they showed no fear. Why? Was it because all geese look alike, even to each other? Did losing one here or there just not register? Plus, those (literal) bird brains probably didn’t help. Maybe there wasn’t enough room in there for the idea of death to stick. Maybe they all had bird amnesia and just forgot they could die.
Pain, on the other hand . . .
Pain was an excellent teacher. Because flesh and bone remembered what a bird brain might forget. A bruise or a broken bone was its own reminder, and even a bird—or its muscles—would know enough to stay away from whatever had caused it.
So Dev got a baseball bat. He opened the door and offered himself up for pecking. And when they came charging at him this time, he tapped a few (instructively) on their little bird heads. He didn’t hit them hard enough to send those heads soaring over home plate—though he was tempted. Instead, he hit them just hard enough to knock some sense in, let them know the human wouldn’t be pecked at with impunity.
It took a few turns at bat, and a lot of goose bells got rung, but eventually the flock understood. Eventually, all Dev had to do was rap the sidewalk with the bat before venturing out. He’d drag it across the pavement on the way to wherever he was going, the flock putting air between themselves and him.
And when he got a hankering for poultry, he’d leave the bat at home, take his rifle instead, and wait.
And then one day he noticed a pair of geese waddling in the distance—a mother in front, a father behind—with a string of fuzzy goslings padding in between. Despite the scraping bat, they hadn’t burst into flight. Couldn’t—not while guarding their babies, which were still too young to fly. Belatedly, he felt a twinge of nostalgia for the time he’d had parents—the real one and even the fake one. It was nice to have someone looking out for you—and somebody else watching your back. The lead bird and rear guard turned in sync at the sound of Dev, looked right at him, and then looked away again, picking up the pace of their waddle. The heads turning and turning again were like a slow but definitive no in stereo.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 30