Lucy almost patted his shoulder and told him not to worry—she was that sure of herself and her secret—but decided to keep teasing instead. “Wouldn’t that be ironic,” she said, playing Marcus’s paranoia like a harpsichord, “the last people on earth running into the last serial killer?”
“A serial killer would have definitely included his address,” he observed, straight-faced.
“Or her address,” she added.
“Well, excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply that women couldn’t be homicidal maniacs just as well as men.”
“And yet you did,” Lucy said. “Chauvinist . . .”
Marcus shrugged. Was it his imagination, or was she getting mouthier the closer they got to finding somebody else?
Meanwhile: “Do you think we should knock?”
“Where?” he asked, looking down the line of burned-out vehicles for some way to get in.
Lucy stepped aside so he could see the single uncharred SUV she and her pregnant profile had been blocking from view. “Ta-da!”
Great, he thought, looking at the truck like he was looking at a wedge of cheese in a supersized rat trap. Just great.
Lucy hoisted herself up into the SUV, preparing to move it. Marcus spoke up before she put the truck in gear: “I don’t like this. It’s like a mansion with the door left open. It feels like a trap.”
Lucy turned off the ignition. “A pretty bad one,” she said before assuring him he’d been right: a serial killer would have included an address. “I mean,” she continued, “let’s say I was a serial killer trying to lure victims. I’d advertise everything from gourmet cooking to free Wi-Fi. You wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without tripping over blinking arrows showing the way. And when the people showed up, there’d be a gingerbread house because, well, you know.”
Marcus wondered who he was supposed to be in this fairy tale of hers: Hansel or Gretel. Under the circumstances, it was starting to look like the latter.
Lucy, meanwhile, slid back the seat and let out a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s one thing we know,” she called out, checking the rearview, where Marcus was heading back to the ice cream truck so he could move it once she’d cleared the way.
“What’s that?” he called back without turning.
“Our killer’s not pregnant,” she said, giving the engine more gas than was strictly necessary.
PART FOUR
44
He’d heard the tune in his sleep: “Pop Goes the Weasel” looping over loudspeakers . . .
Except this wasn’t a dream. There really was an ice cream truck out there, with a malevolent-looking guy (though Dev could be projecting) and a pregnant girl dancing around the dot of laser light he’d trained on first one, then the other, trying to decide: Which, both, neither?
Weighing the options, he found himself thinking back to that English class where they’d read about Gregor, the guy who turned into a bug. They’d read a lot in that class, precious little of it involving vacuum cleaners, though the teacher had said something that caught Dev’s attention, and it came back to him now: the name Chekhov. When his teacher had dropped the name in class, Dev had stopped his doodling of assorted parts from a disassembled Dyson Animal and raised his head expectantly. Could it be they were finally going to discuss the much overlooked and underrated original Star Trek, about which he had theories related to who was evolutionarily superior, humans or Vulcans?
Sadly, such was not to be; the Chekhov in question turned out to be some Russian playwright, first name Anton, who had something to say about guns not unlike the one he found himself holding and couldn’t decide whether or not to use. Apparently, this Russian was of the opinion that guns, once written into a play, had to have a purpose. His point, which seemed painfully obvious to Dev, was that if you showed a gun at the beginning, it better go off by the end.
And so he used it.
The jock looked like he was about to spring into action, and so, drawing a bead on the guy’s leg, Dev pulled the trigger and exchanged one red dot for another. The silencer was superfluous under the circumstances, as there was a pane of glass between it and said leg. When Dev pulled the trigger, the window blew out a split second before his target buckled in pain, hitting the sidewalk hard with both knees.
“Shit!” the target yelped, repeating the word among several colorful others as he rolled around on the ground, holding his wounded leg and painting the air blue with profanity.
Dev let go of something he didn’t know he was holding—a breath, maybe, a grudge—something invisible but with a kind of weight that left him feeling relief in its release. The feeling was the opposite of how he’d felt when Diablo was at the other end of a decision to shoot. It was as if with one bullet, he’d avenged himself against all the bullies who’d ever bullied him.
Minus the glass, with the curtain billowing around him, Dev could hear the target screaming, swearing—not unexpected, but a little ungrateful, considering where the bullet could have gone. The woman, meanwhile, was making what he’d come to think of as pregnant-lady noises, trying to decide between taking care of her sperm donor or charging the house. In the end, she decided to stick with the inseminator while she shouted instead.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded at the top of her lungs.
It seemed a fair question, and so he tried to answer it. “Asperger’s,” he shouted back.
The target stopped his yelping just long enough to ask: “Did he say ass burgers?”
Perhaps it’s how I’m pronouncing it, Dev found himself thinking.
Later, in the middle of providing aid, Dev tried correcting the impression that he’d been trying to kill the guy he learned was called Marcus. What part of shooting him in the leg didn’t they understand? Not that his logic did much to stop the rain of fists the pregnant girl delivered to his back while he was still assessing the damage. Perhaps if he could fix this, they’d be on their way.
“That’s not helping him,” Dev pointed out to the one he learned was called Lucy.
“It’s helping me,” she said through gritted teeth, still hammering away.
The one called Marcus had passed out by this time, as Dev ripped away the bloodied pant leg, starting at the bullet hole and continuing until the rip met itself, coming around from the other side. He slipped off the injured leg’s shoe and sock, noting how cold the limb felt before pulling the bottom half of the pant leg off. The bullet had not been kind to the flesh, but also hadn’t overstayed its welcome, exiting through a complementary wound on the other side before continuing into one of the ice cream truck’s tires, flattening it. It was just dumb luck that the bullet missed hitting bone, passing through nothing but meat and muscle, proving, as Marcus would later say, that he hadn’t wasted all that time building up his legs for football.
Looking at her lover’s leg, Lucy composed herself long enough to admit there were better things she could be doing than hitting Dev. Boarding the truck, she thought about grabbing the shotgun but hesitated. If she shot the shooter, who would tend to Marcus? A zombie-loving goth, Lucy was nevertheless no fan of for-real gore—chalk up another point for irony. And so she grabbed the box of emergency medical supplies they’d collected along the way.
“Will any of this help?” she asked.
Dev singled out the hydrogen peroxide, some gauze, and a bottle of antibiotics.
Lucy shook her head at the last of these.
“No?” Dev translated.
“Allergic,” Lucy answered.
“How bad?”
“Very,” she said, “apparently.”
“Crap,” Dev said, not using that exact word for the substance in question.
By the time they were through with Marcus’s leg, they’d made use of his two favorite shopping items from whenever they shopped together, not counting condoms: duct tape and an extra-large zip tie. The latter worked well as a tourniquet, while the former kept the wads of blood-soaked gauze from falling off. Marcus roused near the end, a
hand reaching for his leg, making sure it was still there.
“That looks awful,” Lucy said.
“Feels it too,” Marcus said. Though everything below the zip tie was tingly, the trauma of being shot was still echoing around his nervous system, lighting up every place where bone rode bone with radio waves of pain.
Fortunately, Marcus was not allergic to painkillers. Doubly fortunate was the fact that, during their pharmacy raids, Lucy had gotten “the good stuff,” based on her recollection of what Max had told her the good stuff was. When she’d asked him how he’d come by that particular knowledge, Max had joked that obviously, he was in a lot of pain. At least she’d thought it was a joke at the time.
Now that her only other lover had been patched up so he wasn’t leaking all over the place—and Lucy had gotten over not being welcomed with open arms of the embracing sort—the two relocated to Dev’s place, moving the victim into the senior Brinkmans’ bedroom to recuperate, while Lucy inherited Dev’s old bedroom, along with the mattress full of ghosts. Compared with the truck’s air mattress, it was a step up.
Dev, too, had improved his situation. Now that he had guests—invited or not, recuperating from his having shot them or not—he had to admit he’d gotten low on some supplies he’d been reluctant to make a run for: things like toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, shampoo—things they all agreed would make life together easier if restocked. Fortunately, one of his guests—the unshot one—had no qualms about making a quick dash for some toiletries as well as anything else that might come in handy under the circumstances. And so Lucy borrowed the Miata after securing Dev’s assurances that he wouldn’t shoot Marcus again while she was gone. His insistence that he wouldn’t because it would be redundant wasn’t exactly all she’d hoped for in a guarantee, but it would have to do.
Once it was “just the guys” and Marcus had been placated with one of the better painkillers they had on hand, Dev explained why he’d had to shoot him. “I needed to level the playing field,” he said, resorting to another bit of sports terminology he’d inherited from his late stepfather, along with the home-field advantage.
“You know,” Marcus said, doing his best to rise up on an elbow, an attempt thwarted by the memory-foam mattress into which the elbow kept sinking, “when they talk about handicapping somebody, they don’t mean it literally.”
“Literally works better,” Dev pointed out.
“I guess that depends on who’s doing the handicapping,” Marcus said, “and who’s being handicapped.”
They were quiet for a while, Marcus waiting for Dev to say something in the way of an apology, Dev wondering how soon the other would be well enough to leave. Neither was destined for satisfaction, though Marcus opted for the next best thing. “Um,” he said, after clearing his throat. “Can I have another one of . . . ,” he said, lifting his chin toward the bottle of painkillers, just out of reach.
Marcus, it turned out, really enjoyed the good stuff and, when he wasn’t knocked out by it, got chatty under its influence. Too chatty. “I’ve got something I need to say,” he said once they were all together again, he in bed, Lucy and Dev to either side. He’d had something to say for quite some time, he said. This was also true of Lucy, and Dev, too, though of the three, Dev hadn’t had a human audience since the whatever-it-was. It seemed they’d all been harboring the same secret, the other thing they all had in common other than being alive.
Marcus cleared his throat and then said what he had to say: the part of his just-before story he’d left out before. He prefaced his confession by saying he’d had this—meaning his being shot—coming.
Lucy’s face went from light to dark and all the gray emotions in between as her lover and the father of her child spoke. Finally, when he was finished, the words came out of her:
“Like blow-yourself-up up?” she asked. “Like with a bomb and everything?”
“Like with a bomb and everything,” Marcus confirmed, the drugs that warmed his blood adding a little reverb, making the words sound profound as opposed to what they described, which was still all kinds of stupid.
“So you’re, like, a terrorist, then?”
“Was,” Marcus corrected. “Would-be.”
“I don’t know that I like that,” she said, touching her stomach reflexively.
“Join the club.”
“No, seriously,” she insisted, her anger trumping any sympathy she may have felt for his being shot. “Does stupid run in your family or something?”
“I don’t—” Marcus tried before being cut off.
“Is there, like, some gene for gullibility?” she wondered aloud. “Because I’ve got to be honest with you: I can’t imagine what anyone could say that would make blowing up myself and a bunch of other people sound like a good idea.”
“It’s complicated,” Marcus said. “Was. Was complicated.”
“Well, that’s the understatement of the millennium . . .”
“Like you never did anything stupid,” Marcus tried.
Cue Lucy.
“Not that being stuck between an unwanted pregnancy and my best friend’s suicide is on quite the same level as waging global jihad,” she said once she’d finished.
“But planning to kill yourself?” Marcus said. “What part of two wrongs . . .”
“At least I’d be the only victim . . .”
“Plus one,” Dev said, making the others turn.
“Do you have something to contribute, Mr. Hotshot?” Lucy asked, wheeling on him, spoiling for a fight.
Cue Dev.
“Hmmm,” Marcus mused after their host had finished. “What are the odds?”
In typical Aspie fashion, Dev had done his research before executing his plan, including looking up suicide statistics in general, the current thinking on neurochemical causes, and how those causes expressed themselves differently based on age, sex, and location on or off the spectrum. Also in typical Aspie fashion, he couldn’t help but share the results of that research.
“Before, about one hundred and seventeen people killed themselves in the United States per day,” their host said, not realizing until he was doing it again how much he missed showing off. “The rate for nonautistic adolescents was roughly twelve percent versus other age groups. That made about fourteen successful teen suicides in the US per day. On average, there are—were—about twelve attempts per successful suicide. So that’s one hundred and sixty-eight attempts for our age group per day.”
“Fascinating,” Lucy said. “So what’s that tell us about what happened?”
“I’m still thinking it through,” Dev admitted. In fact, until his visitors’ confessions, he’d been hoping that being inside the fallout shelter had saved him, with the one cheetah-mauled survivor perhaps having been somewhere else especially fortified when it happened—like a bank vault, maybe. “But if our age and suicidal thoughts are what saved us, we’re looking at a few hundred survivors at best, spread over slightly more than three million square miles covering just the continental United States. If those survivors kept on moving—like you two—it’s a small miracle you found each other, much less me. Plus, I know for a fact that not all the initial survivors . . .” Dev paused for an uncharacteristic moment of tact, trying to choose the right word before concluding with, “Persisted.”
Lucy and Marcus both nodded at this last observation. To lighten the mood, Marcus called attention to how dark it had gotten. “And that, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “was just about the most depressing story problem in the history—”
Lucy cut him off. “But what makes suicidal teenagers different from all the ones who died?”
“Our brains are different from the ones the whatever-it-was targeted,” he said—guessed. “My stepfather was a pharmacist, and there was this one side effect that drove him crazy: ‘May lead to suicidal thoughts in teens.’ Had to do with how the drugs interacted with hormones or something. And the brains of teenagers already having suicidal thoughts are even more different f
rom everybody else’s.”
“How could they know something like that?” Marcus asked, rising halfway up from the bed. Ex-Muslim or not, he still harbored the hope that he might have a soul to go somewhere when he died—despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “How can they know what’s in a person’s head?”
“It’s a kind of MRI,” Dev said. “It lets you see what parts of the brain light up when you’re thinking something. And when teens are thinking about suicide, it lights up different areas than it does when adults are thinking about the same thing.”
“So, like, what,” Lucy said, “they stick a kid in this giant metal tube and ask her to think about offing herself?”
Dev shrug-nodded.
“That sounds awfully triggering,” Lucy observed, which struck her traveling companion and baby dada as suddenly—almost unbearably—funny.
“What?” Lucy and Dev said together, donning their “What?” faces for emphasis.
Finally: “Somebody should sue,” Marcus wheezed before gesturing for another one of those painkiller thingies.
45
The pregnant one could bake bread, so there was that. And the ex-terrorist (once he was sufficiently medicated) treated Dev like a peer, but more interesting—so there was that too. These traits served as the couple’s visas to Devonshire. How temporary those visas would be, only time—and their host’s atypical nervous system—would tell.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Dev’s deciding how to handle his intruders: he became popular. Without meaning to, he became the one the others sought out—the one they wanted to be alone with. Lucy and Marcus wanted to talk to him—not just at him. Instead of being mocked for his eccentricity, he was consulted for his outside-the-box wisdom. And what was the source of this popularity? Dev’s not being the other one.
“She tricked me into getting her pregnant,” Marcus complained. “I didn’t say, ‘No kids,’ but—you know—condoms. Hello?”
“He thinks I’m disgusting because I’m fat,” Lucy theorized. “I’m not fat; I’m pregnant—with his child.”
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 32