How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  “Mom was an EMT,” Billy explained.

  “Jimmy?” I called.

  “Yes, Mom,” he said, running into the room eager to please, no doubt because he didn’t want any of the ass-kicking his brother had coming.

  “Go in and make some dinner. We could all use a good, hot meal. Warm up some chicken broth for the girl.”

  He nodded and headed for the kitchen.

  “I’ll help him.” Lucy started to leave and I took her hand.

  “No, you stay with me,” I said.

  She smiled at me and I smiled back.

  “Billy, stoke the fire and bring in more wood.”

  He nodded and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  I smiled and patted his cheek. “No, but you will be. By God, you will be.”

  He made a face and started taking care of the stove. When he was finished he headed off to get wood, no doubt glad to put some distance between him and me.

  Cherry sat down on the couch with a sigh, a look of relief on her face.

  “Tough time?” Lucy asked.

  “Awful,” she said. “I never thought I’d be warm again. Thank you, thank you so much,” she said to me. Then she started telling us what they’d been through.

  When they heard about the storms that were coming she and Evelyn had filled the tub and a bunch of jugs with water. Cherry had already cut a piece of plywood to go over the tub so she covered the tub and piled blankets and pillows on top of it.

  “I felt it was going to get really bad… I just knew it. Maybe I’d read too many of your posts.” She’d managed a smile. “Anyway I didn’t just have my survival kit in there when it hit because we’d moved all of the food in the house, all of it, in there and most of our clothes, too.”

  The house had been ripped apart around them, but the bathroom had been left intact. The rain had been relentless and it had leaked through the bathroom ceiling but they’d managed to cover themselves and their provisions with plastic sheeting from her survival kit and stay dry. In the morning she and Evelyn had surveyed the damage and gone to work. The bathroom was still standing and mostly whole and they had Cherry’s car. Cherry figured that it didn’t matter what happened to the car, so the first thing she did was to drive it up on the concrete slab and right up to the bathroom door, leaving only enough room between them to open the car door.

  “… then it was all about rolling appliances around. We used the washer and dryer, washer on the bottom and dryer on the top, to make the wall on the north. Then we rolled the refrigerator over and used it on the south wall, using the door as the door to the outside and filling the inside of the fridge with wood. Then I started throwing two by fours over the gap between the car and the bathroom and on top of it. It wasn’t hard to find stuff to work with—it was just torn up and thrown all around us. We stuffed couch cushions and pillows and that pink insulation crap under the car and then we just started throwing old clothes and blankets and stuff over the bathroom ceiling and the car and over the roof I’d made between it. We left the windshield—which was pointing south—uncovered and cut a piece of cardboard to go in it at night. We knocked the front seats all the way down into the back seats and threw in all the dry blankets we had.”

  She explained that the temperature had been dropping fast, so she’d realized there was no need in even finishing their shelter if they didn’t have heat. It was an old house and the gas stack in the wall behind the toilet was metal so she’d unscrewed it. They’d each used the toilet one last time and then flushed and removed the tank and the toilet seat and baled all the water out of the bowl. She’d made a hole in the bathroom ceiling, found a piece of tin that had a hole in it almost the right size, and forced it over the pipe and then she’d nailed it to her rafters. They’d been careful to keep the blankets and old clothes they were using for insulation away from the metal. She put the vent pipe into the tank hole but then realized it wouldn’t draft. This whole time Evelyn had been hauling bricks up. They got some mud in a bucket and stacked the bricks using the mud as mortar all around the commode till it was about a foot over the commode on the three sides and to the commode in the front then they set the toilet tank upside down on the back of the stove and connected the pipe. They found a piece of tin and used it for a top, sealing the cracks with mud and got another piece of tin to put over the door. They started a fire immediately and it drafted fine, so they were sure they were going to make it.

  “…till then I just didn’t think we had a chance. I was mostly just working because if we didn’t try we didn’t have a chance in hell, but once we had fire I knew we could make it, so we just started working faster and harder.”

  They had thrown plywood scraps on their roof over the top of the two by fours and stacked bricks and mud up to the bottom of the refrigerator door they were going to use to get in and out. They covered their whole shelter with the plastic sheeting she’d had in her survival kit and held the edges down all the way around with bricks. Then they threw some more two by four scraps on the plastic to help hold it down if there was wind.

  “Then we just started hauling pieces of wood small enough that it would work in our stove or that we could cut up with my hand saw without much trouble. It wasn’t hard to find—the twister had just flat shredded stuff. We just kept getting wood. We filled every space in the shelter and then we just kept stacking it outside the front door till it was too dark and we were too cold to go on. Then we went in the shelter, closed the door, and lit a couple of candles. When we heard from you… When I knew we weren’t alone… I knew we could make it. But then when Evelyn got sick…”

  “She’s going to be fine,” I said. Again I still didn’t know that for a fact. Prolonged exposure, not enough food—once the body starts breaking down it can sometimes be hard to get it to stop cannibalizing its own organs and work right again.

  Over dinner Jimmy and Billy told us about the group holed up at the high school. Seemed like they weren’t nearly as inventive as Cherry. They were mostly some teachers and students who’d been working on getting the school ready for a dance when the storm hit. Other people had joined them, seeing that it was one of the only places standing, and they’d all brought supplies. They’d spent the morning after the storm finding everything they could and moving it all into the home-ec room. Amazingly, most of the high school complex had been left intact.

  “It looked like someone had rolled the chain link fence up and the activity center looked like it had exploded. Everything else was whole. They made a stove in their shop, but they didn’t get much wood. I think they thought it was a lot till they had to start burning it. They were having trouble running their wood stove, so they’ve just been scrounging for gas and running generators to run a few electric space heaters, so it’s cold in there. I told them how to build a damper and how to keep the fire going. I had to explain it like I was talking to some idiot. When I told the guy who has put himself in charge that they could use the tools in their shop to rape the rest of the building to make themselves more comfortable, that they could tear desks and shelves and stuff apart and cut them up to heat with if they ran low on wood, it was pretty obvious that he had never even thought of it.”

  “You shouldah seen this guy’s face, Mom.” Jimmy laughed. “You would have thought Billy made him eat a turd. They hadn’t even thought of burning the text-books.”

  “They were surely glad for the supplies, and when I hauled out that bag of chocolate I liked to thought I was going to have to shoot them to keep them back,” Billy said.

  It had been a dangerous thing to do. You’d think bringing people like that some food they wouldn’t likely try to do anything but thank you, but likely as not if the boys hadn’t been heavily armed they would have had some sort of trouble. See, people always want more. We gave them something when we didn’t have to give them anything, but they had to know that meant we had more, and human nature seems to never be happy till they have it all.

  “The new super center was mostly intact, t
oo,” Jimmy said. “Stuff all over outside, though, and only a few cars in the parking lot. Didn’t see any people.”

  “Let’s hope some of the survivors were smart enough to go there to get supplies.”

  The government and the news had been calling it looting and the National Guard—where it had been able to be deployed—had been told to shoot to kill. Stupid. The fucking government couldn’t think outside the box. They knew, they had to know, what was about to hit. What they should have done was order stores to give ten items to each customer who walked in, but NO, they never believed it would be as bad as it was. They couldn’t because if they did they had to admit that the all-important corporate America was going to fall apart. Since no one acted to control them, the corporations had upped the prices on basic items. Then the government sent out what sparse National Guard troops we had—not to help the people to prepare, but to stop them from looting.

  God Bless America. Of course if more of the troops had been here when the shit hit the fan there might have been some hope for people trapped in the cities, but probably not much. Most of the bases got wiped out one way or the other, too. See, just because you’re in uniform doesn’t mean you can’t die from mundane things like flood and ice and fire. People expected police and firemen and the military to risk life and limb to save them no matter what was happening. It never dawned on them to learn to take care of themselves. Civil servants have families, too, and when the shit hit the fan the smart ones left their posts and went to take care of their own business. It’s not disloyal to save yourself and yours first. Further you have to wonder about the real integrity of someone who would actually shoot looters at a department store instead of taking care of their own families.

  Let’s face it, when the world fell apart the military did what it could to help people up till they realized just what was happening, and then like every other sane person they worked on saving themselves and those they cared about. After all, they’d all had survival training.

  “Huge sections of Fort Smith and Van Buren are still on fire,” Billy said. “Broken gas lines I guess.”

  “Or people trying to get warm. Hell if I were stuck there I’d be real tempted to just start lighting all those damaged houses, stay by one till it burned out then move to the next one,” I said.

  I shifted in my chair; my ribs were starting to protest all the ways I’d twisted them while I’d been having marathon sex with Lucy.

  Lucy got up from the table and when she came back she had a bottle of ibuprofen that she put on the table in front of me.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” She kissed me on the cheek, my face turned bright red, and she sat down.

  Jimmy and Billy exchanged a look and giggled.

  “Fuck you boys!” I said angrily. “It isn’t any of your damn business what I do. If you don’t stop riding me I’m going to grab you and kiss you right on the mouth and you know damn good and well what I’ve been doing.”

  “God,” Jimmy said, holding his hands over his ears. “I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get that image out of my head.”

  Billy just looked at me, his face blank.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “I can’t believe you said that,” Billy said, making a face. “I’m pretty sure that your mom isn’t supposed to say things like that.”

  Lucy laughed, and I just kept eating. About the only way to stop those fuckers from teasing the living shit out of me when I have a girlfriend is to say something that will just completely gross them out. To tell the honest truth I don’t think the boys have ever been comfortable with me being with anyone who wasn’t their mother.

  When they were younger they’d just flat tell me they didn’t like… Well anyone I dated. As they got older and their own hormones started running their bodies I think they realized that I was never going to be happy unless I had a woman, but it still made them uncomfortable. They wanted to be alright with it because they knew it was stupid to expect me to be celibate, but part of them was always going to feel like I was cheating on their mom so they teased me and teased whoever I was with because to them that said they were alright with it.

  “So, did you wind up sleeping in the car or in the bathroom?” I asked Cherry, changing the subject as I downed four of the ibuprofen.

  “The stove worked good, but it smoked pretty bad, so we slept in the car wrapped around our rocks and each other right up till our wood started getting low and we realized we couldn’t stay out in the weather long enough to get enough wood to make it worth getting that cold. Then we moved into the bathroom and of course the smoke wasn’t as bad only because we couldn’t afford to burn much wood to make smoke. The last few days have really sucked and then Evelyn got sick and it’s…” Her voice broke. “If they didn’t come get us we wouldn’t have made it.”

  And this was no doubt why Billy had insisted on going today. And here was the thing—Cherry had used her head. She’d worked hard and done everything right. There just hadn’t been enough time to get enough wood to carry them through. And this was here where it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was up north. Other places might not have had tornados, but there was no area of the country that hadn’t been hit with something, and now there was this blizzard, this cascade of ice and snow. A lot of people who did everything right still wound up dead because—short of spending your whole life getting ready like I had—you just couldn’t be prepared for something like a winter that will not stop.

  And we weren’t done with the winter weather, not by a long shot. The alarm went off and we all jumped. Someone was at the gate.

  Chapter 9

  The Barter System

  ***

  In the post-apocalyptic world. paper money won’t be worth shit and all those people that hedged with gold or precious stones might as well have collected river rocks and turds. The only things that are going to have value are the things people really need—the things that will help them survive.

  Food, matches, hand tools, nails, screws, bolts, generators. If you know someone has extra of something you need, don’t try to take it by force. Find something they might need that you have and offer to make a trade. Then everyone is happy. Make allies not enemies.

  That will be the new world, a world run on the value of an egg and a hammer head—necessities not bullshit.

  The generation of people who always cared more about the way things looked than the way things really are, well they will have been wiped completely out and ALL that’s going to matter are things that are exactly what they seem to be.

  ***

  I went to the monitor and there was Matt Peters on his tractor.

  “Jimmy, it’s Matt. Gear up and go down to the gate and let him in. Take your gun just in case. Bring him round to the front door.”

  Jimmy grumbled some but turned on his heel and started for his coveralls and the four-wheeler in the shop.

  “How can you tell who it is?” Lucy asked, looking at the image of the bundled up man on the monitor.

  “Honey round here you know a man by three things his truck, his dog or his tractor.”

  Billy went back to the table to finish eating. “So… are they going to be alright with… us?” Lucy asked at my shoulder, I didn’t pretend I didn’t know who she was talking about.

  “They’re fine.” I wasn’t about to tell her what I just told you. Besides let me tell you something. People pretend to be alright with something long enough they wind up really being alright with it and it didn’t matter anyway. I wasn’t going to quit having sex with Lucy just because it made the boys a little uncomfortable. In fact the way I felt about the little shit heads right in that moment that just made it all the more appealing.

  “What’s he want?” Lucy asked, and while she didn’t come right out and say it, you could hear in her voice that she hoped it wasn’t to live here. It was a small house and with today’s additions I was already starting to feel the squeeze. Even if I was it’s for sure that Lucy was
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  “He’s not staying,” I said, and she let out a sigh of relief. “I like him, but not that much.” I watched as Jimmy let him in the gate then kept him on camera till they got to the house. I grabbed my gun, stuck it in my pocket, and went to the front door. Lucy followed. “All this crap is sort of ruining our honeymoon isn’t it?”

  Lucy laughed. “It’s a little annoying, but after all you are the king of the world now.”

  “King of the world… I think I like that.” I made Lucy stay inside when I went to open the air lock door. When I did Matt came lumbering in. “Leave your rifle and your gun here,” I told him. The part that was his head sort of nodded and he put the rifle down as I closed the airlock door. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear through the layers of scarf he had wrapped around his head and then he took off one of his gloves, pulled his gun out of his pocket, and laid it on a shelf there. I saw he’d worn sunglasses to keep from getting snow blind and felt some better about what I’d paid for those fog-proof goggles when I saw he actually had frost on his glasses—and remember this was the warm day. “Come on in and strip by the stove.”

  People have a tendency to want to strip gear that’s snow or ice covered outside so that it doesn’t get all over the house or because they figure it isn’t doing them any good and they’ll be warmer without it. WRONG! You expose already cold skin to super-cold air and it’s a good way to destroy several layers of skin immediately.

  He started stripping layers and when he got his head clear he said, “Looks like you’ve got a full house.”

  “Yep, no more room in the inn.”

  “What’s she got?” he asked, pointing at Evelyn.

  “Don’t worry. Its exposure, nothing catching,” I said. “So how’d you fair?”

  “House didn’t take a lick of damage. Neither did the barn. Fact my place didn’t get hit as bad as yours did and me and my boys spent that whole first day cutting wood and stacking it in the boys’ bedrooms—my wife just pitching a living fit the whole time she was helping us do it.