Happy Doomsday: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR DAVID SOSNOWSKI

  VAMPED

  “Sosnowski’s wholly original mythology explains everything from the ideal vampire vacation spot to why their strip clubs keep the heat cranked up.”

  —Washington Post

  “Vamped is not an outright spoof of vampire fiction—it has too much respect for its subject for that. But it does smuggle some welcome modernity and comic irreverence into the form. . . . The chief pleasure of Vamped is in its rich imagination of the small details of modern vampire life.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “This darkly comic tale . . . provides intriguingly offbeat insights.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Few writers have taken as good advantage of the comic potential in vampiric metaphor as David Sosnowski does in his new novel Vamped . . . Audacious . . . unexpected and delightful.”

  —U.S. News & World Report

  “Smart and funny . . . it’s high time for a dark vampiric comedy.”

  —Hollywood Reporter

  “Sosnowski’s gleefully wicked sense of humor . . . and spot-on pop-culture references make Vamped a giddy page-turner. But at its core is a decidedly human tale.”

  —Time Out New York

  “With wry wit and deft turns of phrase, David Sosnowski has penned a darkly humorous tale . . . A fresh breeze on a genre that can all too often be as stale as a dusty crypt. A fun read.”

  —Christopher Moore, author of Noir, Lamb, and Bloodsucking Fiends

  “Inventive . . . intriguing . . . fun.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Full of wit and charm, Sosnowski’s fast-paced second novel . . . offers delightfully quirky characters and plenty of hilarious scenes.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Sosnowski’s easy mixture of warmth and humor makes for a winning, original tale about love in the unlikeliest of worlds.”

  —Booklist

  RAPTURE

  “Sosnowski has staked out a patch of turf somewhere between Franz Kafka and Douglas Adams, and made it all his own.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A delightfully fresh book . . . an imaginative, uplifting tale.”

  —Ann Arbor News

  “A hilarious, knowing, and, yes, uplifting treatise on the possibilities of being.”

  —New Age Journal

  “Spinning an inventive, new riff on contemporary angel mania, Sosnowski’s first novel is a fanciful zeitgeist satire.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “What’s subversive about Sosnowski is his subtlety; the most lurid passages are lyrical, and the funniest ones are slightly poetic. There’s no way to race through his prose, or you’ll miss layers of subtext.”

  —Detroit Metro Times

  “Written with much wit and humor.”

  —Library Journal

  “A witty, clever, original debut. Sosnowski writes like—well, an angel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  ALSO BY DAVID SOSNOWSKI

  Vamped

  Rapture

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by David Sosnowski

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503901308 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503901300 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503901292 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503901297 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Tim Green

  First edition

  In memory of Mark Schemanske, friend, first reader, fellow writer— and gone far too soon.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  PART TWO

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PART THREE

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  PART FOUR

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  He heard the tune in his sleep: “Pop Goes the Weasel” looping over loudspeakers as an ice cream truck circled the neighborhood, pied-pipering kids out of their homes, money out of their parents. Only in the dream, it wasn’t children chasing the truck but actual weasels. Dev stood on his front porch, watching as the rodential flow streamed through the red dot of his laser sight, humming along as he tightened his finger around the trigger, timing his shot to the word Pop! when his eyes flew open.

  Bits of the dream floated away, but not the song. It was still playing a handful of blocks away and getting closer. The gun in the dream was real too—a sniper’s rifle with telescopic sight, laser targeting, a silencer. Dev kept it next to the couch where he slept, fully loaded and just in case. He’d hoped to never have to use it on people, proving yet again what a fat lot of good hoping does. Threading his arm through the shoulder strap, he ninja-ed his way to the wall next to the picture window and teased the drapes open just as the truck rounded the corner.

  “Crap,” Dev said, ducking under the sill.

  He could just keep quiet and wait for them to drive away. But how likely was that? There were only so many doors to kick in, revealing immediately how unoccupied the houses behind them were. Whoever was in that truck would know his place was different once the doorknob punched a hole in the drywall, exposing all the evidence he’d left lying around, from fresh embers in the fireplace to the unmoldy dishes he hadn’t washed to the still-warm dent from his body on the couch. Even if he hid in the attic, all they’d have to do was wait for the predictable betrayal of his stomach or bladder.

  For a second, the truck seemed like it might drive by, but then it stopped and backed up, the music still playing. Nosing the curtain apart again with the silencer, Dev squeezed one eye closed as he lined up the crosshairs with the passenger door that was just then opening.

  “Crap,” Dev muttered as the door in the crosshairs closed, leaving a pregnant girl his age standing there, crucified, the laser’s red dot resting on her belly button, an outie pressed against the stretched fabric of a Walking Dead T-shirt. All Dev had to do was squeeze the trigger to exchange one red dot for another not made of light.

  But then the other invader emerged from the ice cream truck—a guy also around Dev’s age, but bigger, with football shoul
ders carried in a way that suggested a future of beatings, especially if Dev shot the waddling body bag next to him.

  “Crap, crap, crap—double crap . . .”

  Until that point, things had been going reasonably well for Dev. Sure, it had been a little rough in the beginning, but he’d adapted, made do, developed a couple of life-preserving routines. It didn’t hurt that he’d always preferred his own company to that of others. But now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, bang, here comes this, what, couple, he guessed. They looked like a couple, anyway, stepping out of an ice cream truck, the same one that woke him by playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” as it prowled the streets he’d claimed as his, having done all the hard work of clearing out the bodies. But here came these two—soon to be three, apparently—just in time to ruin everything.

  Thus, the question: Should he, or shouldn’t he?

  “Shit,” Marcus, the football-player-looking guy, said, thereby confirming the day’s excremental turn. Simply put, he didn’t want to be here. The only reason he’d come was because she wanted to. He’d tagged along because, well, it wasn’t like girls were growing on trees nowadays. Plus, he bore a certain responsibility for whoever was growing inside that beach-ball belly of hers. Marcus claimed it was a he while she insisted it was a she, so whatever it was, it was basically a he-said-she-said situation.

  He probably should have explained earlier why he didn’t want to come here, but that would have meant going into a bunch of other stuff he hadn’t mentioned. So he’d kept quiet while she prattled on about “the future,” leaving him to do most of the driving and worrying.

  The reason for Marcus’s expletive was the red dot he’d noticed trained on the baby’s head or tail, whichever way it happened to be floating at the moment. The possibility that they’d wind up with red dots trained on them was why Marcus hadn’t wanted to come. Noticing it now, he would have loved to say, “I told you so,” but then again, he hadn’t told her anything, so instead he stepped in front of his baby mama, turning sideways so the red dot fell on his arm—the one he didn’t write with, not that he’d been doing a lot of writing lately. As acts of chivalry went, it was decidedly qualified. He was ready to lose an arm or a leg to being noble, but he wasn’t ready to go full martyr just yet. For a guy who’d once been known as Mo (short for Mohammad), martyrdom was a touchy subject, especially considering some of those things he hadn’t told her about.

  “‘Shit’?” This time the fecal epithet was voiced by the pregnant girl, Lucy. “What are you shitting about?” she continued. “And why are you doing that?” Meaning Marcus’s stepping in front of her before scrunching his eyes shut, like they’d agreed she should kick him in the groin and he was bracing for it.

  “Nothing,” Marcus said, eyes still scrunched. “I was just hoping not to get shot today.”

  That’s when Lucy saw the red dot on his forearm. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, like he was some little kid cowering because of some itsy-bitsy spider. Pushing him aside, she stepped back into the path of the laser.

  “What the TF are you doing?” Marcus demanded, taking hold of her shoulders and trying to change places again. But everywhere he moved, she parried, making him think she’d make a pretty good offensive lineman—if she wasn’t pregnant, that is, and there were enough people left to make two football teams.

  “Saving your life,” Lucy said.

  “But I’m trying to save the baby’s,” Marcus insisted, and then, as an afterthought, “And yours.” Pause. “Too.”

  “Listen,” Lucy said, having done the survival-of-the-species math a while ago, “nobody’s shooting a mother-to-be. Not nowadays.”

  “What about when President Pro-Life bombed Iraq?” Marcus begged to differ. “News flash: there were pregnant women under a lot of those bombs.”

  “I said, ‘nowadays,’” Lucy said. “I distinctly remember qualifying my statement.”

  “Are we seriously arguing about this?”

  Lucy didn’t answer. Instead, she braced her back with one hand and cupped the other next to her mouth. “We come in peace!” she shouted before crossing her arms and daring the laser-dot aimer to prove her wrong.

  PART ONE

  1

  If he had to pick someone to be the last person on earth, Dev Brinkman would pick himself—and not just for the obvious reason of wanting to stay alive. Constitutionally—neurologically—he was either in a perpetual state of PTSD or Teflon-coated against it. The artful euphemism placed him somewhere “on the spectrum,” as if he were trying out for a role in The Wizard of Oz. Or the Wizard of Odd, as his stepfather had described him, much less artfully.

  If he’d lived before Dr. Asperger bequeathed his name to a spectrum disorder, Dev probably would have been considered shy, possibly accruing other labels along the way: peculiar, stuck in his ways, eccentric. They’d skip retarded altogether because Dev clearly wasn’t, as demonstrated by his talent for becoming an expert in anything he put his mind to. He had no doubt he’d have made an excellent jack-of-all-trades, grumbling to himself but nevertheless in high demand because “that Brinkman boy can fix anything.”

  “Even better than new, sometimes,” the village folks would grudgingly admit.

  But Dev lived in a time with a diagnostic box waiting for him, which his stepfather placed him in on a lazy afternoon while reading the New York Times Sunday Magazine. “Asperger’s syndrome,” he pronounced, letting the magazine flop inward so he could stare over the tops of his glasses at the child he’d inherited from his dead brother. “What they call ‘on the spectrum’ anyway,” he continued. “It all fits.”

  This was when Dev was four, before he’d started school, which he’d been dreading—wisely, as it turned out—because there’d be a lot of people there and he didn’t like people, especially when they came in “lots.” At the moment, though, he was laser focused on the word his mom’s husband just used. “What’s spectrum?” he asked.

  Fortunately, it was raining while Dev’s replacement dad was mentally ticking off yeses next to the symptoms that led to a diagnosis like the one he was preparing to make. Also fortunately, the rain had stopped sometime between his pronouncement and his stepson’s question. So Mr. Brinkman tapped the boy on the head with the rolled-up magazine and indicated he should follow him out onto the porch. Towering over the little boy, he shielded his eyes and scanned the sky from one end to the next.

  “There,” he said, pointing out the ribbon of Life Savers colors arcing across the sky. “That’s the spectrum,” he said.

  Dev tried connecting his stepfather’s claim that he, Dev, was “on the spectrum” to the rainbow in the sky. He remembered that rainbows had something to do with people even littler than him who dressed in green, which, in turn, connected to four-leaf clovers, a breakfast cereal that turned milk funny colors, and gold like the fillings in his mom’s teeth.

  “Is being colored good or bad?” he asked, there being too many interlinking variables for Dev to decide for himself.

  The boy’s fill-in father nearly spat out the coffee he’d just sipped, having lost track of how their conversation started in favor of his little science lecture. Remembering, he waggled a finger as if Dev were trying to pull a fast one. “Touché,” he said before going off to look for his wife, to tell her what her son said, leaving Dev to contemplate the candied sky just the way he liked to: alone.

  After helpfully diagnosing her son, Mr. Brinkman handed Mrs. Brinkman the New York Times Sunday Magazine he’d annotated with insightful marginalia. “It fits,” he said, making it sound like all they were discussing was a pair of shoes. And the way he handed over the magazine reminded her of something else: the way he used to hand off the two-year-old Dev whenever his diaper was full. “Here,” the gesture said, “all yours.”

  Flash cards—that was her original intervention: a series of smiley faces displaying exaggerated emotions like the emoji that would become popular later, when people let their thumbs do the talking. Once Dev seemed to
get the hang of them, nodding when she asked leading questions like, “Is that a smile?” she followed up with actual faces she’d clipped from magazines and compiled in a binder she called (but unfortunately did not trademark) his “face book.”

  “Look here,” she’d said the first time she switched from cartoon emotions to the real thing. “What do you see?”

  “A head,” Dev said.

  “Yes, but what’s on the head?”

  “Hair.”

  “I mean in front of the head.”

  Dev looked puzzled before answering, “A camera?”

  His mom blinked. Not the answer she was looking for, but ingenious in its way. Of course, her son’s problem wasn’t thinking outside the box; it was understanding there was a box in the first place and learning to live comfortably inside it. So:

  “A face,” she corrected. “It’s a face, Dev.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, what’s on the face?”

  “A mouth,” he tried. “A nose,” he tried again. He didn’t mention the eyes.

  “An expression,” she said, cutting to the chase. “People’s faces have expressions that tell you what they’re feeling.” Pause. “What does this picture say about how she’s feeling?”

  Dev’s face said nothing, a word he proceeded to say aloud, followed by a shrug.

  “Look at her lips,” his mother continued. “See how they’re going up, here and here?”

  Her son nodded.

  “That’s a smile,” she said. “The lady in the picture has a smile on her face. She’s smiling. Why would she be smiling?”

  He answered the way she knew he would. “A prism,” he said, this being shortly after his stepfather had placed him on the spectrum and right around the time he’d developed an obsession with all things optical: lenses, mirrors, DVDs with their shimmering rainbows, and, of course, prisms.

  “Okay,” his mother said, playing along. She’d already learned that seventy percent of her job was going to be just that: playing along. The other thirty percent? Playing by ear. “A prism would make you smile, wouldn’t it?”

  Dev nodded, overdoing it. Whenever he was uncomfortable, she’d noticed, he found peace by moving: rocking or flapping or jumping up and down. So once he had an excuse to move his head, he did it like he was a cartoon character who’d just been boinged and was still vibrating.