Happy Doomsday: A Novel by David Sosnowski

Author:David Sosnowski [Sosnowski, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781503901308
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2018-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

27

“You don’t think Babyhands pressed a button he shouldn’t have, do you?” Marcus asked one day, out of the blue, not unlike the whatever-it-was he was referring to. “Like, maybe he thought he was just sending a tweet but . . .”

“There’d be mushroom clouds,” Lucy said, “fallout, instant skin cancer—all that.”

“Only from what we know about. What if there was something we didn’t know about, like some secret doomsday machine.”

“Like in Dr. Strangelove?”

“Like the neutron bomb that just kills living things but leaves buildings standing,” Marcus said. “Something like that, but targeted to just people, so everything else survives.”

“So, in this scenario you’re suggesting,” Lucy said, “the Orange One is, like, tweeting something nasty about his target du jour but launches these specializing nukes instead?”

Marcus shrugged.

“You know what the sad thing is?”

“What?”

“For as totally stupid as that sounds . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I can still kind of see it.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “We are so doomed.”

“Were,” Lucy corrected. “Past tense. Now we’re just, you know, left.”

“Do you remember when everybody was talking about the God particle?” Lucy asked. “That big collider they were using to find the pigs bison of something . . .”

“Higgs boson,” Marcus corrected. “Yeah, it was like in Sweden or somewhere. The Hadron Collider. I had a science teacher who was all geeked about it.”

“Do you remember how they were saying there was this really slim chance it might destroy the universe?”

Marcus nodded. “‘Not impossible’ was how my teacher put it.”

“So maybe . . . ,” Lucy began.

But Marcus was already shaking his head. “They were worried about creating a mini black hole or antimatter or something, maybe ripping apart the fabric of space-time,” he said. “Nothing that would leave puppies or us behind.”

“So what do you got,” Lucy asked, “other than bombs with a discriminating taste in their killing?”

Marcus rubbed his fingers across his lips, thinking. “Maybe the void got mad at people always giving God credit for everything. It’s like, ‘Dudes, listen, there’s no God. I’m all you’ve got, the cosmic goose egg, okay?’”

“Um, I think you’re kind of personifying the impersonal universe, there.”

Marcus shrugged. “Force of habit.”

“That’s what Sister Mary said,” Lucy said, tapping out a rim shot on the dash.

There were at least two theories Lucy wasn’t putting forward because mentioning them meant using the s-word. The first was that irony wasn’t just a rhetorical device, but a force of nature, like gravity. Because that’s what her survival had been, Lucy knew. Being saved from suicide because everybody else died? That was some big-time irony right there. And there was more where that came from. Looking back, a lot of her life seemed like it might have been written by Rod Serling. Losing her virginity to a friend she thought was gay? Getting pregnant by that same maybe-gay friend, who commits suicide before she can tell him he’s the father? Being a liberal intellectual born in the heart of Dixie? A Catholic nihilist? Being a goth chick who secretly digs Hello Kitty pretty much exclusively because doing so is, well, ironic .

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