How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  Life’s too short to raise kids. It’s a giant waste of your time. I just don’t get people who willingly put themselves through that sort of total bullshit. Do you know why parents always want their kids to have kids? Because they know for a fact it’s the only way the ungrateful, judgmental little bastards will ever know what hell it is to raise fucking kids and how no one! No one! Ever gets it right.

  Anyway, Jimmy just kept glaring at me and I couldn’t be sure why till he said, “I’ve got this covered,” in his very best you-know-what-you’re-a-moron-mom voice.

  I smiled, in too good a mood to be thwarted, reached over and turned the transmitter off. “Fuck you, Jimmy. You know what? Don’t give me any of your bullshit. All the things you blamed me for, all the crap you’ve laid on my head over the years, it stops right the fuck now. I was right, alright? I was right and everyone else was wrong, which means all the crap you say I put you through wasn’t for nothing, it was for this.

  “You’re alive. Better than that, you’re alive and actually helping other survivors, and millions… MILLIONS are dead, Jimmy. You drove over some of their bodies today. You were warm and fed in here while those girls were freezing to death hungry in their car. Have you listened to her story, Jimmy? Do you see that girl in the next room fighting for her life? You had better by God learn to love me, Jimmy, because I’m all that’s between you and sleeping out there.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” he spat back. “You’re always on my back!”

  “A dead turtle could have told you were blowing me off. Now I don’t know who you’re showing off for or if you just feel like being a prick, but this house is too small and there are too many of us in it for your bullshit or one of mama’s conniption fits, so cut it out right now.”

  “Mom,” Billy said quickly. “He wasn’t mad at you, he was mad at me because I took over.”

  I looked at Jimmy who was now obviously mad at both of us. “But you snapped at me and that’s why I’m bitching at you.”

  Jimmy nodded silently and grumbled a half-assed apology.

  “Now I can see you’ve got this under control, so I’m going to get a shower and go to bed. Billy, let your brother handle this.” I looked at Cherry. “You sleep on the other couch in the living room and keep an eye on your friend, alright?”

  She nodded silently looking at her feet and I smiled because she already felt like one of my kids.

  “Anything goes wrong—anything at all—come and get me even if you hear noises coming from our room you don’t want to hear.”

  “Christ, Mom,” Billy said, turning red.

  “Don’t you give me any lip. I’m in a fucking good mood. Why can’t you hateful little turds let me be in a good mood? And Billy I meant it, Jimmy knows more about the equipment than you do. You let him run the show.”

  I turned and walked out of the room and Jimmy immediately grumbled something the equivalent of na na na na boo boo at his brother. Which I ignored.

  ***

  I was pretty sure my ribs weren’t going to get a chance to heal. Not that I really cared right then. Lucy was just sort of passed out against me her head resting on my shoulder.

  She sighed, a sort of pleased-with-herself sigh. “I can’t imagine what this is going to be like when your ribs are healed.”

  “Let’s hope better or you’ll be very disappointed.” I was actually feeling pretty smug my own self.

  “You were right.”

  “Hah?” I said intelligently.

  “You were right about me. I was a bit of fluff and I was a cold, self-serving bitch. I gave lip service to caring about the environment but I drove a too big car and lived in a too big house. I had the compact florescent bulbs and I recycled, so I felt good. I had no guilt, just like you said. I pushed my way to the top, then just kept pushing, trying to get higher. I thought being sent to report on you was way beneath me.”

  “I knew that,” I said not really caring.

  “My girlfriend Samantha she was crazy about me. She would have eaten broken glass for me. She wanted to go to Vermont and get married. She even bought me a ring. I’d been putting her off for two years. I was totally closeted; she was out. She wanted to get married and live together and I could never even fully commit to living together because… Well I loved her but I guess I loved my stinking job more, and lots of people had come out and some were alright but let’s face it most weren’t. So we lived between my house and her apartment and I never took her to any of my work or even social functions because I just didn’t want to risk getting caught by… well anyone. And my family has known since I came out to them when I was sixteen, so it was all about work. It’s hard to think about Sam now, knowing she’s dead, laying out there somewhere in the snow… everyone is.”

  Alright here’s something that sucks, having someone you’ve just made love to cry over their dead lover. There’s no Hallmark card for that. There is nothing to say and you’re naked, so you feel really vulnerable. When you’ve loved and lost, too, well you know how they feel and… Hello! Still naked! I sort of tried to pull the sheet up over me which I really couldn’t between where she was laying on me and the sore rib. I gave up and just held her, patting her back, which wasn’t good at all because she just cried more and I was still naked and I still couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Finally I said, “You know, some of them might be alive.”

  “No they aren’t. You know they aren’t. They were all in Atlanta. Atlanta was flattened and now it’s under three feet of snow. No one not a single person from that area has made contact with you,” she cried harder.

  It was closer to five feet of snow but I didn’t bother to tell her that.

  I think sometimes having sex opens channels. It makes you a little more emotional. All the hormones racing through your body and all and well… when you get that close to someone, especially when you are talking about the love between two women, it just makes you closer—breaks down any walls between you. I didn’t feel like there was anything between Lucy and me at that moment. Right then it was just us alone and all of the sudden I didn’t feel so naked.

  “I’m sorry Lucy,” I said softly, as I kissed her on the top of her head.

  “I know you are, Katy. And see? I think that’s why I’m so upset because you were right about me, but I was all wrong about you.”

  “No I wasn’t Lucy, no I wasn’t. You didn’t live the way I did, but you at least did something. If everyone had done even what you did, it would have made a huge difference. You at least admitted there was a problem, even if you didn’t fully understand how bad the problem really was. And let’s face it; everything would have probably been fine if those idiots hadn’t started slinging nukes at each other. So you wanted to stay in the closet to keep your job, big deal! How many queers did that and some with a lot less high-profile jobs than yours. Did Sam understand?”

  “Mostly, but she didn’t like it.”

  “Well if it made her very unhappy don’t you think she would have just dumped your ass a long time ago? I mean you’re a fine hot mama and you give great head, but you know butches. We’ll replace you in ten minutes if you’re too damn much trouble.”

  She chuckled through her tears.

  “Give yourself a break, Lucy. There are always things you wish you’d done or said different, whether you have a week together or twelve years. With me and Cindy I still loved her but the spark had sort of gone out. I’d sort of let it go out just too busy all the time and didn’t spend enough time just being with her. There were boys to raise and houses to build and an apocalypse to get ready for and I just sort of let the romance go. Oh we still had a great sex life, I’m not saying that, but we had stopped making time to do the little things, just take a walk, go out to dinner just the two of us, go dancing, or just sit outside without the boys and have a glass of wine. Just talk about… well something, anything besides my building projects, her job, the coming Armageddon or the boys.

  We just sort of forgot to t
alk about love and us and our dreams. It was all my fault, too, because Cindy… Well she was never romantic and never filled with ideas. I always had to be the one to say, let’s do whatever and then she’d do it and it would be wonderful and… Somewhere along the line I just got tired of always being the one to say let’s do because most of the time she didn’t want to at first. She had to be talked into everything and it just… made me tired. I wanted to say let’s go and have her be eagerly waiting in the car—or better yet have her say come on let’s do something. I realized she didn’t care. It didn’t mean anything to her, she was happy to just sit and be with me and… Well I don’t think she even missed it, the spark I mean. Who knows. maybe she never had it. Cindy… Well let’s face it Cindy had been through a lot before I ever knew her. She wasn’t a very passionate person, I was but she wasn’t. I just got tired of dragging her along for the ride. I let my obsession become my passion and she was happy to just coexist and have sex two or three times a week.

  “When she was dead, when there was no fixing it, then I wished I had done everything differently. Because I did love her and there was never any doubt that she loved me. But the fact is that I didn’t know she was about to die, for all I knew we’d be together for the rest of our lives and then the spark might have just come back some day and everything would have been the way it was.

  “You can’t spend your life second guessing yourself. Who knows? Maybe if you’d come out it would have cost you your job and then you would have resented her and maybe she would have run off with some girl from her office, and right now you’d be dead. Maybe if I had continued to court my wife it would have become increasingly obvious that there was nothing left there and I would have wound up giving up in that ‘get the fuck out of my house’ sort of way and then the boys would have gone with her and they’d be as dead as she is now.”

  Lucy had quit crying. “Wow, you’re really good at this.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve had a little longer than you have to try to rationalize my guilt away,” I said, and I was only half kidding.

  “Most of the time I just try hard not to think about it,” Lucy started. “You know everyone and everything that’s just gone. It’s like I just got picked up out of my life and shoved into someone else’s and everything here is so different from my old life that most days it’s just easy to pretend like I’m acting out a part in a play or something and that somewhere away from the stage everything is exactly like it was when I left it.”

  She moved off of me to look down at me.

  “But today… being with you, it’s very real and I just… I killed someone the other day and it didn’t even really phase me… I was so much more worried about you… and I’ve lost everything and everyone that ever meant anything to me and I should feel worse than I do… and I’m making love with you over and over… and Sam’s dead somewhere and… What kind of person am I that I’m not more upset?”

  So she was crying and upset mostly because she wasn’t upset enough and… When someone figures women out I hope they write a book.

  Yes, I know I’m a woman, but remember I said I’m a guy? Well this is why I think that. When guys are sitting around talking about the things they don’t understand about women… Well I can’t help them because I don’t get it, either.

  “Lucy, that has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” Yep that’s what I said. See? Now do you get it? I’m a guy.

  “What?” she asked in disbelief.

  “That’s stupid. It’s over; close the page. You either adapt—which you seem to be doing very nicely—you go crazy here, or you die. You know why people don’t get over their grief? Because society tells them that it is their duty to show their love for their dead loved ones by dwelling on their death and wallowing in their grief. Why? Who does it actually serve to be miserable forever over something you can do nothing about? Life runs in cycles, cycles end, and other cycles begin. You’re always talking about fate. Worse than that, you want me to believe in it. But now I’m going to ask you, do you believe in fate?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then everything you just said is utter bullshit, because according to your way of thinking, you’re supposed to be here with me now, and if everything that happens is destined to happen then why dwell on what brought you here now and…”

  Well I don’t really know what I said or why she reacted like that but she was just all over me kissing me and kissing me till I was kissing her back.

  Maybe having sex made her forget all the stuff she didn’t want to think about. Maybe I was just being used.

  I wasn’t worried about it either way.

  Chapter 10

  Even Colder

  ***

  Cold and water, that’s what will kill most people, not lava, or earthquakes, or noxious gas streaming from a volcano, or even tons of ash and mudslides. The real killer during this apocalypse will be the weather and mostly the rising water, lack of potable drinking water, and cold.

  People fail to understand that increasingly cold winters are also caused by global warming. I mean most people don’t get it, but we’re getting worse winters because the planet as a whole is getting warmer. Any of a half dozen different disaster scenarios will sling God alone knows how much debris into the atmosphere and on a planet already badly out of balance… We’re very likely to have a mini ice age.

  You can have all the food and potable water you need for five years and outrun the flood or the fire, but if you don’t have a way to get away from rising water or to keep warm you will not live through this apocalypse.

  Learn to build a fire and keep it going now. Don’t think you know how to do this. Don’t assume any idiot can make a fire and keep a wood stove going. This is not true. Spend even one weekend trying to keep a fire going and you’ll figure out just how easy it isn’t. Buy extra warm clothes and extra warm blankets even if you live in an area of the country that has never been cold enough to need them and put them back just in case.

  Do not take down insulation or other modifications you make to your shelter that make it easier to heat until all the snow and ice has melted and you’re sure warm weather is on it’s way. A warm day does not necessarily mean you are looking at a warming trend.

  Cold kills painfully and not so quickly, and it’s a good bet that when you think it can’t get any colder, it absolutely will. If you aren’t ready, this will be what kills you.

  ***

  And, brother, did it get cold that night! When I woke up it was still dark, and it was cold but when I looked at the clock it was seven-thirty.

  I say it was cold because I was in bed with Lucy with blankets wrapped all around me and my feet were still cold. I probably would have panicked right then if I didn’t realize that: a) I was naked, and; b) we had forgotten to open our bedroom door. We had been more concerned with our privacy than opening the door to let in heat. See I have vents to the barn and greenhouse because they are far away from the heat source. Our bedroom is less than thirty feet from the stove so if the door is open it’s plenty warm in there and at the time I built it I didn’t plan on having a woman.

  My ribs hardly hurt at all and since Lucy had a fist resting on top of the bruised area I figured they were already mostly mended.

  Still the room had been toasty when we went to bed and like I keep telling you this house is half way under the ground and it has two eight-inch walls of concrete one foot apart with sand between them between us and the outside. The snow had once again covered the window, which blocked the outside light—if there was any.

  I tried to get up without waking Lucy but… I’ve never really been good at that. “Where ya going?”

  “It’s seven-thirty. I’m going to open our door, let some heat in, go tend the fire, and check on the girl.”

  “Alright,” she let me go. “Can you come back to bed?”

  I thought about it for only a second, why the hell not. “Sure.”

  I pulled on my forgotten pajamas an
d walked across the room. When I opened the door I was hit with a blast of hot air that felt damn good.

  When I got to the living room Evelyn was sleeping. Her breath was raspy but she was breathing. Cherry was on the other couch asleep and the stove was blazing, so I guessed the boys had taken care of it in the middle of the night. A little light was coming through the sky light—not much because it was coming through I couldn’t tell how much snow. I decided to check the “air lock.” Out the door I could see we’d had probably six more inches of snow. The temperature outside was seven below zero; I took a double take. The wind chill was twenty below and that was here in the south. A lot of people would have died last night. People who like Cherry and Evelyn had made it by their wits and by the skin of their teeth would have lost their fight last night.

  I decided not to think about it and headed back into the house to check on Evelyn and then go back to bed, which just seemed really decadent to me. When I walked back in the living room Evelyn was actually sitting up. “How do you feel?”

  “Better,” she said in a choked voice, and then proceeded to start coughing—which was actually a good sign. “I… I need to go to the bathroom.”

  I nodded and helped her get herself and her IV bag to the bathroom.

  Cherry appeared at my side looking sleepy. “I’ll take care of her, I’m sorry. I was just so warm and so full and I just slept so hard.”

  “No problem.” I left her to it and went back to my room and started to crawl back into bed. Lucy looked up at me and made the cutest pouty face I have ever seen.

  “You’re leaving the door open?”

  “It’s cold, baby.”

  “It’s warm enough now.”

  I closed the door.

  I started to get in bed again and she made the face again. “You’re wearing your pajamas?”