How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  I stepped into the “air lock” and checked the temperature. It was now eight degrees; the wind chill was ten below zero already. Anyone stuck out in this—even in a house—if there was no heat source they wouldn’t make it through the night unless they near smothered themselves in blankets and coats. I couldn’t imagine how cold it was getting to the north of us if we were this cold. I did know the front was covering most of Canada, the United States, and part of Mexico.

  “It’s really cold in here,” Lucy said, and she was right. It was damn cold in the air lock, which was alright. That was what it was for to stop the real cold from getting in the house, but it had never been really cold before.

  My mind got this weird picture of a dozen humans with popsicle sticks up their asses in a box marked human-sickles. I shook the image from my mind and hoped that the people in Rudy proper were watching their fire and keeping it hot. I hoped that somewhere the girl with the stripper name had found a place to keep warm.

  Thinking about how cold it was made me decide to fill the wood box, so I turned and walked back into the barn, opened the door and walked into the hallway. It is ten feet wide, twenty feet long, and right then all but a two-foot path down the middle was filled floor to rounded ceiling with wood.

  “Wow!” Lucy said at my back.

  “There’s more in the shop.” I pointed to the closed door at the end of the hall.

  Lucy held out her arms, so I filled them up and grabbed an armload myself. Now the hall was damn near as cold as the airlock, and it is two layers of concrete and all that wood is insulation, too. All but the domed top of the hallway is underground just like the rest of the house.

  I need to clarify something now. When I say it was cold I mean it was about forty. So it was cold, but not freezing. Because of the way the building was constructed, even without heat it kept a constant forty in even the coldest weather and a constant seventy in even the hottest.

  We easily filled the wood box and then I stoked the fire completely up and got it blazing before I shut it down. I opened the door between the greenhouse and the house so that more heat would reach the plants. I went back into the greenhouse and checked the temperature. It was fine. Of course anything above freezing would be fine, and I was sure I could keep it that warm, but part of me was worrying because the temperature was dropping so fast. We’d be fine, and I wasn’t even worried about the plants, but there were people out there struggling and it was just dropping too fast for most of them to have time to prepare if they hadn’t already.

  Jimmy made a dinner of sausage and eggs and a fresh salad he’d just picked from the greenhouse.

  “This sausage is really good, guess we better enjoy it while we can,” Lucy said. The boys looked at her like she’d sprouted a second head. “I mean when we run out that will be it.”

  “No it won’t. Mom makes it all the time,” Jimmy said. I shot him a look, but he didn’t get it ’cause subtlety is mostly wasted on Jimmy. “Rabbits have plenty of feed and they aren’t likely to stop breeding just because there’s an apocalypse.”

  A look of horror crossed Lucy’s face. “You mean this is made…”

  “From rabbit meat, yes it is. And you ate it this morning and you ate it just now and unless you’re an even bigger dumbass than I think you are you’ll eat it whenever it gets put on the table. You eat meat obviously?”

  “Well yes but…”

  “But what? You never had to see it when it was cute and furry, that’s what. Hypocrites! An entire society that wanted everything that isn’t clean and easy done by people they don’t have to go to the club with. How do you think that society is going to fare now, shitting in buckets and scrounging for food? Don’t judge me!”

  “I… I wasn’t judging you. I wasn’t going to judge you.”

  “That’s all you’ve ever done is judge me. Well guess what, everyone who believed me has a fighting chance of making it, and everyone who believed you is going to die.”

  “Wow,” Billy said, grinning at his brother as he suddenly figured out why Lucy looked so familiar. “Mom’s banging the news lady.”

  Jimmy grinned back, “You know what? Mom always says any port in a storm.”

  “I’m not banging her you dumbasses!” I said. “She was here when the tornado hit, so we’re stuck with her and she’s stuck with us.”

  The look on Lucy’s face was hard to read right then. She either wanted to storm out in the snow and die rather than stay there with me or she wanted to smack me in the head and tell me off—or she was close to just having a complete mental break down. Might have been all three now I think about it.

  I felt like a shmuck, so before she did any of those things I said, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m crazy.”

  “You aren’t crazy,” she said, looking at her plate.

  “Yeah I am. There’s paperwork around here somewhere to prove it,” I said.

  This brought a smile to her face that quickly faded.

  “You’re right. If I hadn’t slanted my reports, maybe more people would have listened and…”

  “Did you think I was crazy?”

  “Sure she did, Mom, you know she did. Everyone did. I know we did,” Jimmy said with a laugh.

  “I didn’t ask you, shit head.”

  I looked at Lucy. “Did you think I was crazy?”

  She took a deep breath, obviously not wanting to answer, but she finally did. “Yes, yes I did.”

  “Then it would have been wrong for you to tell people I wasn’t. Besides because of you lots of people did listen. Lots of people started to listen to me after you started reporting on my predictions. A lot more than ever would have known about me and what I thought. So the truth is you will have saved millions.”

  “You think lots of people will survive then, Mom?” Billy asked hopefully. No doubt because of the girl with the stripper name.

  “I do. I had three million listeners, and there are places that just won’t be hit as hard where people with half a brain will be able to make it.”

  Chapter 5

  The Importance of Shelter

  ***

  After water and food, the most important things for your survival will be shelter and fire. Without those two things you will never make it through the apocalypse, and you can’t just assume that your house will get through the disasters intact. You should check out your area. What disaster is most likely to befall the area? Be best prepared for that. Fortify your house however you can. Dig a storm shelter. Keep a boat.

  Let’s say something happens and you are stuck with nothing but a car. Turn the car into an igloo. Cover the car with blankets, dirt, tree limbs, whatever you can find to cover it with. Put all your food in the trunk but then put a hole from the passenger compartment into the trunk so that you can cover the trunk completely. Block all airflow underneath. Grab debris, whatever you can find, and encase that sucker. Leave only one door unblocked. Build a break around this door and put a fire pit inside the break. It should be protected from the wind and you need to roof it with whatever you can. Then fill this area with as much wood as you can. Is this a fire hazard? You bet, but that’s the least of your worries right now. Find bricks or stones—preferably not from a river because if they get too hot they can explode. Always keep your fire going. Warm the stones or bricks and then take them into the car with you. Lay all the seats down flat and put all the blankets, clothes, and whatever you can find in it to make yourself a nest.

  You will cook, do your business, and feed the fire in the windbreak you’ve made. Who knows? If you build something tight enough—except for the smoke hole, come on people everyone knows you’re going to need a smoke hole—it might be warm enough to stay out there during the day and you might even be able to have it heat the car during the day, but get into the car with rocks or bricks at night and close the door.

  ***

  Because of course when the sun goes down the temperatures drop even lower. Even in my house I could feel the temp
erature drop with the sun. When I checked the temperature in the “air lock” at nine o’clock, it was minus ten, and the wind chill was twenty-six below zero.

  I’d just heard from Roy Jr. and they were fine. They’d even found a generator—they had plenty of gas between vehicles and what was in the gas tanks at the store—and were running some lights and a small TV with a built-in DVD system and they were all watching a movie. Believe it or not I was glad to hear that. It might seem frivolous, but thirty-four people stuck in one place for God-alone knew how long, they needed that TV. He said the fire was going good, they had plenty of wood, and as long as they stayed under blankets they were even cozy.

  I took a hot shower. Not a long one but a hot one, because the little bit I’d been out in it that day had left me feeling chilled. Besides, when the stove’s going it heats our water. A set of coils in the stovepipe does the job, so it wasn’t like I was taxing the battery bank to do it. When I crawled into bed, Lucy was already there and already asleep. I turned off the light—the last one on in the entire complex—and realized how dark it was. There was a window in my room that pointed towards the road, and usually I could see some light—a star, someone’s headlights, my neighbor’s security lights. Nothing. Just pitch-black nothing. Now here’s the thing. The neighbors’ security lights had always annoyed me no end, a waste of electricity and visual pollution that broke the dark, made the stars less bright, and screwed with fire flies. But as I looked into the black abyss that night I missed those lights.

  “The sixth mass extinction,” I mumbled to myself, except of course I wasn’t alone.

  “What?” Lucy asked sleepily.

  I was lying with my back to her, staring out the window, and I didn’t turn around. “You know that the planet has gone through five mass extinctions. I was just thinking this is the sixth one. Environmentalists have been saying we were in the middle of the sixth for years, but now… Well, this is it. Whole species will die off in this.”

  “It doesn’t seem real to me. Does it seem real to you? I mean you are ready, more than prepared, but can you ever really be prepared emotionally for the end of… everything?”

  “No, and it doesn’t seem real to me, either. And here’s the thing. I would have always just been that nut job in the bomb shelter, ole Crazy Katy, if this didn’t happen, but… Well I know you won’t believe this, but I never wanted the end of the world. I didn’t want it for me, and I sure didn’t want it for my boys.”

  “No, I do believe you. Having just spent a little over a day with you I can already see that your biggest problem fitting in was that you just care too much. Most people don’t give a damn about anything. I certainly didn’t. My job, my car, and climbing the ladder.” She sighed. “What you said at dinner, it really struck home…”

  “I’m sorry I just…”

  “No you were right. Everything you thought was important was. Everything I thought was important, all of it, everything I ever wanted, everything I worked for, is now and forevermore completely unimportant. I want to help because I know I’m using up your stuff and…”

  “I have more than enough stuff, Lucy.”

  “I want to help and all I do is get in the way and… I don’t know how to do anything that’s important now. I thought I was a Renaissance woman, but I can’t do anything.”

  “But you’ll learn, Lucy, because you aren’t stupid. You’re also trying, and that means something.”

  She was quiet for a while and then she said in a voice that was barely a whisper, “I called twenty people, Katy. Twenty. In seven different states. Not one of them answered. Most of the time there was just nothing. The whole system is breaking down. Last night when I could have still called anyone I wanted to, whom did I call? The news station. Even then I was still thinking about my God-damned job, and now I’m never going to get to talk to them again. Not my mother or my brother or my sister or my nieces and nephews.” She started to cry, and I did turn over then. I took her into my arms and patted her shoulder.

  “You did your job. That’s instinct, Lucy. It’s what everyone did last night. They did what they thought they were supposed to do. Whether they were prepared or not they all just did what instinct told them to do. You just have to find a place to put it. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. You just have to not think about it and when you do you just have to stick it someplace in your brain and think about something else.”

  She nodded against my shoulder silently as if what I said made sense to her, and I really figured I was the only person it made any sense to because the shrink had told me that it wasn’t healthy. That I needed to deal with my grief. I don’t think he understood that was the way I was dealing with it.

  “What happened to the boys’ mother?” she asked, so I guessed she had figured everything out.

  “She drowned in a flood. Before you jump to conclusions, no, that wasn’t what made me crazy. I’ve always been crazy, but it sure as hell didn’t help.”

  Lucy quit crying then and pushed away from me, so I let her go and turned back over onto my good sleeping-on side. “So you don’t have any problem sleeping with a queer woman?” I asked.

  “Are you going to force yourself on me?” she asked, a hint of laughter in her voice.

  “Not tonight. My butt’s dragging my tracks out,” I said.

  “So I’m safe for tonight anyway. Besides, who’s going to talk, and if they did who would they talk to?”

  ***

  I don’t know if I woke up because Lucy was spooning me or because it was a little chilly. Like it wasn’t cold under the covers but my nose was cold and so was my arm where it lay out of the covers. Now, up to that time I’d never had to feed the stove during the night. In fact, I’ve always said I could damn near heat the place with a match. I peeled myself away from Lucy—who didn’t wake up—and got out of bed, grabbed a flashlight, and went into the living room to feed the stove. The living room wasn’t as chilly as my room. I opened the damper, stoked the stove, and then went to the bathroom. When I came back the stove was roaring so I shut it back down and started back for my bedroom. In the doorway I ran into something that my flashlight revealed was Lucy, but not before we both jumped and I screamed like a fucking little girl. Billy came running out of his room, and I just waved him back in for which he seemed glad. See, like I told you I’m crazy, and I have these terrible nightmares, and I have roused the whole house screaming more than a few times. I think Billy was just relieved that I hadn’t had a nightmare and wasn’t going to run around the house all freaky for thirty minutes to an hour checking all the windows and doors with my gun in my hand.

  “Sorry,” Lucy said in a whisper. “You were just gone and I got worried.”

  “It’s alright,” I said. “Let’s just go back to bed.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. I started to hand her the flashlight and she looked at me. “Could you go with me?”

  Now I know you’re thinking I threw myself a little fit right then, but I didn’t. Any time I got woke up I have to pee, too. And for months after Cindy died I didn’t let the boys out of my sight and I went and checked on them four and five times a night.

  When we got back in bed the house was already starting to warm up but when I got comfortable Lucy still wound up spooning me. I didn’t complain; it felt good. It had been a long time since I’d had anyone else in bed with me, and I was starting to think that boyfriend or not I’d been right about that gay vibe.

  ***

  When I woke up in the morning Lucy was still wrapped around me and the house was toasty warm. Still I wasn’t in any hurry to get out of bed.

  “Mom,” Billy said from the door in a whisper. “Mom?”

  “What?” I answered, also in a whisper.

  “I need to charge my phone.”

  “In my office on my desk,” I said. I had no idea how long the cell phones might work, even the ones with the new satellite technologies. The satellites all ran on solar power and if they didn
’t get hit with space debris they’d all keep working long after we were dead, but there had to be towers and dishes down all over the planet, and they still needed those to work.

  “Thanks,” he answered, and he was gone. I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten. Worried about that girl and whether she would call. I felt for him, he’d worked hard for the things he had. He’d had nice things, and now the world was all fucked up and he was back to living with his mother. He just really needed to save this girl because if he could then he wouldn’t feel like he’d lost everything.

  “What’s wrong?” Lucy asked in a sleepy voice.

  “Nothing, my son’s just trying to find a silver lining in this dark cloud,” I mumbled back.

  “Do you… do you think everything happens for a reason?” Lucy asked, and she still wasn’t letting go of me or moving away from my back which… Well, let’s face it, the girl was just looking less and less straight by the minute.

  “Not really,” I said. “Most things that seem odd aren’t even that big a coincidence when you think about it.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. I’d been on the outs with God and fate and everything else ever since Cindy died, and the end of the world certainly wasn’t warming me to them. If there was someone pulling our strings it just seemed to me that they’d have to be pretty damn sadistic to just always make bad crap happen to good people and let assholes rule and rape the world and everything on it. Then to wipe out the whole planet because you let the assholes run it into the ground… Well, that didn’t make any sense either. It made God seem like a really bad parent. You know, tell a kid not to do things, then make the kid do them, and then punish them for doing them.

  Lucy was looking for answers, and she was looking in that place that way too many people looked where, in my opinion, all the trouble had started. People would live who wouldn’t deserve to and people would die. Lots of people would die that didn’t deserve to, and if there was some power that makes that sort of crap happen then not only am I not going to worship them, but I have a bone to pick with them as well.