How I Spent the Apocalypse Read online

  Do I have to keep reminding you that the listeners gave me a bunch of money?

  Anyway, once I had that I sort of built to it. The top of the greenhouse used to be a walk-through that went under a shark tank and the “glass” in the rest of the house was formerly pieces of the front of a five-hundred-thousand gallon Beluga Whale tank. It’s fifteen-inches thick and reinforced. It isn’t going anywhere unless something none of us could hope to live through hits it.

  The whole place—the corridor, the house, the shop, the storage building, the barn—is all under the ground five feet and then gets its height in the domes which are all above ground. It’s an engineering marvel that I for one am quite proud of considering I had no formal education and learned everything I know from reading books, listening to people, and hands-on experience. I worked construction. That’s right, you didn’t know I was a construction worker. Well I was. I worked every kind of construction—road crews, bridge crews, metal crews, framing crews, excavation—you name it; I did it. And I paid attention and asked questions. Think about it. I got paid to get an education in engineering and construction.

  I grabbed the milk bucket and headed for the house where I closed the door between the barn and the corridor. It is a Dutch door; the bottom is solid and there are actually two top doors, one is solid and the other is wire because the truth is the greenhouse warms the barn and the barn warms the greenhouse.

  But today it was cold. Too cold for the plants to be happy.

  I turned the lights on in the greenhouse, too. I only ever use them when the sky is dark because otherwise the plants get plenty of light. But the lights won’t heat the greenhouse. So I open the door to the house and leave it open. I strain the milk, put it in the fridge. and when I turn around there is Lucy again, freezing and shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds.

  I don’t say anything. Me, I would have wrapped myself in a blanket as I got out of bed, or I’d go back to bed when I realized it was cold, but I was a survivor and this girl wasn’t. If she’d been anywhere but right here she’d be dead already. She was… Well, not stupid, but she had not a lick of common sense. Or probably closer to the truth was that she’d been raised with a silver spoon in her mouth, had everything she’d ever wanted handed to her on a big, gold platter with a side order of diamonds, and just had no idea at all how the real world worked. Now she was going to have to find out the hard way, and I might have felt sorry for her if her all-but-crawling-up-my-ass wasn’t driving me nuts.

  I walked into the living room, opened the damper, and started messing with the stove. I stirred up the coals and decided I didn’t need to take any ash out. Then I stoked it full of wood and in minutes I had a roaring fire. Lucy showed her first signs of intelligence for the day when she moved closer to the stove and started to glean its warmth.

  I let the stove get going really good and then I walk across the room and turned on the fan. Heat rises. This fan forces hot air into an insulated duct that runs into and through the greenhouse where it has a vent and then into the barn. I had the storage room and the shop vents turned off because I don’t need heat there if I’m not in there. The shop also has its own heater that I can crank up if I’m working in there.

  When I turn around there is Lucy again, not by the stove but only inches away from me. I lose it. “What the hell are you doing?” I demand of the woman who jumps about a foot in the air.

  “I… I’m scared,” she says.

  “And standing five inches from me at all times, what’s that doin’ for ya?”

  “I… I… You’re the only one here!” She started crying. I felt bad then because she, of course, had every right to be scared. Her whole world had just for all intents and purposes blown up, and she was in the company of a strange, crazy woman stuck in… alright I’ll quit calling it a house, a bunker alright? There you go. Now are you happy? I live in a bunker, but don’t you all wish you had been? All things considered is it so crazy to live in a bunker?

  “I’m afraid… I lived in Atlanta. I’m sure my family, all my friends, my boyfriend... They’re all dead. I just saw the guy I’ve worked with for the last six years ripped away by wind and then I’m just running, and I know you don’t understand that I’m upset because I doubt you get upset about anything, but I’m just a mere mortal and I have no idea how to even begin to find a place in my head to put all the hateful stuff I know right now. I’m just scared, alright? And as long as I can see you I’m not so scared. I know that doesn’t really make any sense, but at least if I can see you I know I’m not all alone. That I’m not the last person on earth.”

  Boyfriend? That just didn’t sound right to me because I was pretty sure that she’d been putting off this totally gay vibe every time I’d seen her before. Of course I’ve often thought that whole Gay-dar thing is screwed completely up by wishful thinking. I only half heard everything she said after “boyfriend.” See, if she’d had a boyfriend she really wasn’t of any use to me. Oh well, I thought, maybe she’ll give the boys something to play with. To have to put up with her and not be able to fuck her… Well I’m here to tell you that did not help my mood one damn bit. I almost asked her right on the spot if she was at least bisexual or even curious, and then just put her right outside in my shorts and shirt looking like death warmed up if she wasn’t.

  Useless. She was useless to me, and likely as not she’d get my boys to fighting since they fought most of the time anyway and they were both as horny as the billy-goat in full rut and never had been able to just share a damn thing... Which was why they were always fighting.

  The apocalypse was looking worse and worse to me.

  Then I remembered the truth about women, or at least the truth the way I see it. All women are bi, all of them. I’ll explain this more later for all of the guys who are reading this and saying, BULL SHIT every woman really wants some cock.

  “Why don’t you go wash up and comb your hair? I’ll get some of Jimmy’s clothes for you. I think you and he are about the same size.”

  Scraping her off me long enough to get her to change clothes and do something about the mess which was her face and hair had been like trying to scrape the white out of chicken shit, and she left the bathroom door open a crack I guess so she could hear me?

  While she was in the bathroom I started cooking breakfast. I cooked it on top of the wood stove as I often did in the wintertime. There just wasn’t any sense in wasting the electricity, and my stove—even though it was the most efficient one on the market—used a lot of power.

  The wind generator and the solar panels were off line and we were running off the battery bank. I could always start up the methane-operated generator and recharge them, but I might as well save where I could.

  Where did my methane supply come from? Where do you think? My toilet flushed into it for a start. Rabbits and goats both have nice little round-pelleted shit that will roll. I built sleeping platforms for the goats that are slanted enough that most days you don’t even have to sweep the shit into the trough. The trough runs down hill into a big sewer pipe that runs directly into the collection unit. The rabbits have a piece of tin under their cage that runs into a large sewer pipe and then right into the collection unit. There is a sliding door between the collection unit and the actual methane chamber. One batch is always cooking while they next batch is getting ready to go. About every six months I have to release the sludge in the methane cooker. I open a big valve and the goopy shit gravity feeds into a big pit out in the garden. The pit is a cement basin with holes all in it and the cement basin is surrounded by three feet of rock. I throw a bunch of ashes from the stove on the top of it just to keep it from stinking so bad then I leave it alone. In about three months all the pathogens that might have been left in it are dead and I use it in the garden the orchard and the pastures for fertilizer.

  See I told you. I don’t like to waste anything.

  We have a machine that pressurizes the methane and then I use it to run the generator, my car, and our fo
ur wheelers.

  Hey I might have been set up better than most everyone else to ride out the storm, but I hadn’t been part of the problem. I’d always lived as green a life as possible. Having more money had just allowed me to buy the technology necessary to make me even greener.

  That was the problem. The rich people had all the money and the people who would have used it to make the world better didn’t.

  Now the rich people are all dead and the world is better off without them. See the mega rich have always been the problem. They consume so much and share so little so that when the end came no one gave a damn what happened to them. They were totally unprepared because the rich idiots never really believed that anything could happen to them that they couldn’t buy their way out of; therefore, none of them took their money and used it to build something like—oh, I don’t know—a self-sufficient bunker in the middle of one of the safest parts of the country. No, they just bought more and more pollution-spewing crap.

  They couldn’t buy their way out of the apocalypse, so I imagine—maybe hope would be a better word here—that they were some of the first to die. You can’t hire someone to save your ass from sure death, not when it’s obvious that money isn’t going to be worth a good damn when the smoke clears, and let’s face it… What survival skills did rich people have? None. They were incapable of doing anything on their own. They deserved to die, because they’re the ones that destroyed the world, not poor people. The rich—with more money than good sense and certainly more money than conscience—milked the world for all it was worth, more often than not using the poor as slaves. The only bitch was that the rich and greedy didn’t just kill themselves—of course they never had.

  The thing that really sucks, though, is that give us a couple of hundred years and greedy fuckers will have figured out how to get rich again and then all the crap will start all over. But it will take them a long time to completely fuck the world over again and… By then I’ll be good and dead so… Not my problem.

  I had just finished making breakfast when she walked out. She had obviously washed her hair, her long, thick dark-brown hair, which had probably used more water than I did in a week.

  As if reading my mind she said quickly, “I just got it wet, and then I shampooed it, and then I rinsed.”

  I didn’t get into the fact that she’d showered last night. After all I was just being picky. We had plenty of water; the well was full, and after that rain last night all of the cisterns would be as well. I just don’t like waste. Waste was one of the things that caused all the problems in the first place. Screw that, it wasn’t one of the problems it was THE problem. If we hadn’t wasted all our gas, or had worked on becoming less oil dependant way before it was necessary, we wouldn’t have needed the Middle East and they could have just kept shelling each other and we wouldn’t have given a shit. So everything that happened was the fault of waste and stupid-assed religion.

  And the eighteen-plus nuclear warheads. We’ll probably never know exactly how many of them were launched in the Middle East or who fired what at whom, when.

  I set the table and we sat down to eat a hot breakfast of scrabbled eggs, sausage, toast, and coffee. I momentarily felt guilty about all the people who were probably freezing to death, drowning, dying in a pool of lava, or lying under a piece of fallen debris. I even felt bad about people who weren’t getting to eat a nice, hot breakfast of fresh eggs in a nice warm house, but I pushed all that out of my head. Everyone could have prepared. They might not have been able to prepare as well as I had, but they could have all survived in some form of comfort with very little effort. Alright that’s bullshit because some places were literally no longer on the map when all was said and done. But certainly more could have made it than did.

  We ate breakfast in silence, so I think maybe she was thinking about everyone who wasn’t eating and everyone who just wasn’t anymore, too.

  “When do you think I’ll be able to go home?” she asked, and I thought but didn’t say, Never, no one’s ever going to be going home again because it isn’t going to be there. At least not like it was when you left it.

  I shrugged. “Weeks, maybe months…”

  “What!” she shouted, and she didn’t even let me get to years or decades.

  “Domino effect,” I said with a shrug, thinking that explained everything to anyone with half a brain.

  “Domino effect?” So at that point I decided she was a half-wit.

  “Chain reaction, whatever you want to call it. We have been just teetering on the edge of global annihilation for decades. When something is tipping so precariously, when so many things are just barely holding on, it only takes one thing to start everything sliding. Once one thing goes so does everything else… The domino effect,” I say again, but she’s still just got that blank, lost expression on her face. I stood up. “Come on, I have a chart in my office.”

  She just looked at my chart—the one I’d been making, adding to, and taking away from for twenty years, covered with news pictures and clippings and lines and calculations and estimates that covered most of one wall—with an expression that said it wasn’t actually helping.

  “Look.” I started pointing to things on the chart as I talked. “Birth of religion started all the crap which caused, or at least helped to fuel, almost every war since. To make matters worse, most of the religions said that the more kids you have the better—this led to over population. Advances in agriculture, the invention of penicillin—yet more population because all the advances to modern medicine kept an older population alive longer at great cost to our social and economic structure, and drove up the cost of medical care. Older people lived longer, younger stronger people in the working class died because they couldn’t afford proper health care, this means that as the end of the world as we know it hits, there are actually more people over the age of sixty-five in this country than there are under twenty-five. Old people are not going to be able to survive this, and if they do they won’t be any help rebuilding.”

  “The invention of the combustion engine, the American Dream, the industrialization of China, all good things, right? No. All of them contribute to our ultimate problem, which is climate change. The industrialization and the democratizing of China… All those people wanting to live the way we live in America… They started to pollute as much as we were and that further accelerated the problem. At that point it didn’t matter how many light bulbs we changed or how low the emissions from our factories and cars were because China was just belching huge plums of coal smoke into the atmosphere as fast as they could. And what could we say to them really? Don’t be like us just isn’t very convincing.

  “All these things, every one of them, are the dominos that all got set up. Jesus’ followers write down his words, split from Judaism, start a new sect; Mohammad reads the New Testament, decides to write his own bible, starts his own religion. The Germans start WWI then WWII—this causes all the mega powers to freak out so they all go after and eventually get nuclear weapons. The AIDS virus devastates Africa, causes more problems there, and more land gets cleared. The Brazilians switch to ethanol, good thing? Wrong. Mass deforestation to clear the jungle to plant sugar cane. Burning all that jungle, burning the sugar cane to make the ethanol, all leaves a huge carbon footprint. Slash and burn. Bio diesel—what a crock of shit. Growing the crops to make the fuel causes even more toxic chemicals to be released into our air and water. It’s not efficient. Crops into fuel causes the cost of feed to double, which causes anything to do with meat or dairy to double in cost. Everything else doubles because of gas prices. The cost of medical just keeps going up and up. America is thrown into an economic depression which only effects what used to be the middle class and isn’t any more.

  “Stealing freedom, starting wars that can’t be won, stirring up the entire Middle East, all those dominos were already lined up. Then they put that asshole in charge of what was at the time the strongest nation in the world and that was when the dominos started
tipping. At first they tipped slowly, but they gained momentum as they fell. Everyone is driving a car that burns enough gas to run a city, building houses so big fifteen families could live in them, burning copious amounts of energy. Energy that they are getting from the freaking Middle East! Using more and more, and wasting more and more. And then the Muslims want a holy war and the Christians just want the world to end so that their god can be right, and the Jews want the West Bank at any cost, on and on and on and... Katrina hits and no one really takes notice and snow storms get worse, and tornados are stronger and there are more of them, and there are more forest fires, and the Santa Anna winds just keep burning Southern California, on and on and… A million indicators that there is global warming and that we’re at least helping and no one will stop all their bullshit to even try to slow it down. Not if it means they might have to go without even one of the useless things they think they must have or life just won’t be worth living. And all the time people just keep popping out more kids, covering more ground with big-ass houses, and there is bird flu and monkey pox and AIDS, and all these indicators that there are just too damn many of us, but no one does anything. They just keep setting up the dominos.

  “Then Pakistan falls into the hands of a fundamentalist Muslim group and within months they make a nuclear strike against India. India makes a strike against them. Next thing you know both countries are smoking holes. This starts those dominos falling hard and fast. The bombs aggravate the fault line that runs through both countries as well as Turkey. Massive earthquakes and after shocks aggravate a volcano which blows and erupts. The lava runs into the sea, super heating it. Massive fish kill and typhoon hits the coast of Egypt. Between the bombs and the volcano they spew thousands of pounds of dust into the atmosphere. This cools the planet as quick cold-fronts hit a planet that’s been too hot for years. It spawns tornados in record numbers and ferocity, hurricanes, gale force winds, and blizzards—lots and lots of blizzards.