How I Spent the Apocalypse Read online

  “There is a storm coming down from the north right now. An arctic blast, a strong one. It’s dumping snow, lots of it, everywhere and causing record cold temperatures. When it hits us I expect we will have the worst winter we have ever had, but it will be bearable if you have shelter and food. I’m not so sure about the northern states.

  “But the world will right itself eventually. Could be weeks, most likely months, and maybe years. After that humans will have to dig themselves out and go on. There may be fighting, maybe even wars over food and land to grow crops. That depends on how many people actually come through this, and what sort of people survive.”

  “I can never go home,” Lucy said in a hollow voice. I hadn’t come right out and said it, but she’d guessed.

  Just then I heard the alarm on the front gate. My boys were finally home.

  Chapter 3

  Please Don’t Flush

  ***

  Don’t flush the commode! Water will be precious in the post-apocalyptic world. Every time you flush you are wasting vast amounts of water. Have a bucket on hand and learn to use it. Or if you’re able to go outside build yourself an outhouse. Just dig a hole, put a shelter over it, shit in the hole and cover it with dirt. It ain’t rocket science.

  Keep the shit away from the general population. Urine smells bad when it ferments but is mostly sterile; the problem is the shit. So take it as far away from people as possible. Try not to dump it in a runoff area or anywhere you will likely have to walk later. Bury it if you can. If you have a septic tank you could open the lid and dump it in there, again it ain’t rocket science

  You could prepare by buying a fifty-five-gallon drum and a bunch of garbage sacks. Stick the garbage sack in the bucket, use it all day, and then tie it closed tightly and put it into the drum. I suggest putting this drum someplace where you will just never have to touch it again. In time the planet will right itself and then you can build an outhouse or maybe go ahead and use that toilet. But through the worst of it, fight the urge.

  You will want to use the toilet. You will want to watch your refuse washed away like you always have. But if your water runs out you will be screwed. If you have plenty of water from melting snow or rivers or streams, then flush it with a bucket by pouring the water directly into the stool. You can flush more with less water this way, oh, and you could bathe with the water before you use it to flush with, so it gets two uses.

  Now I know you’re all freaking out from all the shit talk. You like to sit down, go, and then just flush; anything else seems intolerable. This is one of the big problems. You’ve all been flushing that shit all this time, and if you don’t have a septic tank, guess what? All that shit has to be treated and then do you know where that water goes? Into our rivers and streams, then out to the ocean.

  If you’re in a city that is flooded, guess what? You will be adding crap to the filthy water that already surrounds you every time you flush. As a general rule don’t flush. If your area is flooded, then boil and strain not only the water you drink but also any water you bathe or brush your teeth with. Try to stay out of the flood water. If you get in the water, bathe and wash anything that gets wet. Flood water is full of shit and dead bodies and every kind of toxic bacteria. If you are in an area that floods, when the worst passes pick up and try to get to higher drier ground.

  ***

  My boys were cold and near tears as I hugged them and then hustled them to the stove to shed their clothes and warm up.

  “Temperature’s dropping like a rock,” Jimmy said through chattering teeth. Jimmy is blond-headed, blue-eyed and homely. The fact that Lucy fit into his clothes perfectly tells you he’s not a very big man and what God didn’t give the boy in size or beauty he didn’t give him in brains or charm, either. Yep, Jimmy came from the short end of the gene pool. Let me tell you just how stupid this boy was. When he was in his teens I used the phrase—I still often use these days to explain the cold—“colder than a well digger’s ass.” Jimmy asked me why anyone would want to dig on a whale’s ass and if that was why we needed to save them. Nope, not the brightest crayon in the box, my boy Jimmy. Of course that was in part because from the moment he’d sprouted his first pimple he didn’t even try to pretend to be interested in anything he couldn’t eat or slip on his penis.

  “The Simpsons were all ready to go when the wind just got colder and then they decided to try to hold up in my basement. I’m glad my supplies won’t go to waste,” Billy said, his skin was red from the cold. Now Billy was everything poor Jimmy wasn’t. He was a huge guy, six-foot four, with black hair and baby-blue eyes, good looking, and though he sometimes did stupid things he wasn’t actually stupid. That boy could charm the birds right out of the trees.

  You try not to have favorites, but it’s hard when the kids are so different. Hard when one of them judges you harshly and the other just loves you even when he thinks you’re a flake.

  Of course the sad truth was that Jimmy was my favorite.

  They both seemed to notice Lucy at the same time and got this stupid-assed look on their faces as they both said to her at once, waving like morons, “Hi, new Mommy.”

  And this might have been yet another reason I’d had so much trouble keeping a woman after their mother died, to have two grown boys calling you Mom? Well it near screamed that I was older than dirt, and they loved to tease the living shit out of whoever I was with, too. In fact, meeting the boys had sort of been the acid test for girls I was dating. Up to that point none of them had passed.

  “Hello, I’m Lucy.” If she knew what they meant she didn’t show it, and I didn’t bother to tell them any different. The longer I could keep them from finding out she was a single, straight chick, the less I had to contend with the two of them running around with hard-ons trying to bed her and fighting with each other.

  Billy started crying then and he hugged my neck. I hugged him back. Soon I had his brother on the other side. I knew they’d been through hell before they started talking.

  ***

  I’d put them right on the radio, too. I figured it was more than safe now. I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be any FCC when this was all over. I can’t take credit, though, it was Lucy’s idea. She said she sort of had it figured that we were the news at that point and that people needed news.

  I didn’t know how important it was for anyone to do the “news,” but figured that hearing what the boys had been through and how they’d made it home might help someone.

  “All the streets on the whole north side of town were flooded,” Billy started. “There weren’t many buildings actually standing and even less that still had roofs. Just like you said, Mom, the steel buildings fared the worst and the old cement-block houses did the best… Though most of those didn’t have no roofs. Just like someone came along and opened them up like a giant opening up can after can. There were a few house didn’t look like they got hit at all, but not many. We didn’t see many people…”

  “But there were bodies everywhere,” Jimmy interjected. His voice got a little choked as he continued. “This one guy was naked, just sort of hanging on a tree limb. I don’t know if he was naked to start with or if the tornado ripped his clothes off, but there he was just as naked as a jay bird with a big ole limb sticking right out of his chest. Terrible.”

  I patted his back as I said, “Leave the bodies alone, people. Unless they are in your way don’t waste your time with them. Take care of what you need first. The dead don’t need food or shelter, so shove them out of your way and get yourself taken care of. It’s going to get cold if it isn’t already where you are, and it will be easier and safer to move those bodies when they freeze anyway. Don’t waste time. Get anything that will burn and bring it into shelter with you. I don’t care how much water you have, get more. Even if your town has been flattened there will still be water running out of busted lines for several days till the water towers empty. Don’t dwell on the dead; worry about living.” I nodded at Billy and he started talking ag
ain.

  “We had trouble even finding the roads and we couldn’t have gotten out at all if we hadn’t had the four wheeler. It was slow going because I didn’t want to pop a tire on a nail or something else sharp. We were just about out of town when this guy comes up with a shotgun and tries to stop us. I sped up and drove behind a van that was sitting on it’s top. I knew a guy pointing a gun at us trying to stop us… Well, he couldn’t want anything but to take our rig so he could get the hell out of Dodge. He took a couple of shots at the van. I grabbed my hunting rifle, aimed, and put one through his head. We made sure he was alone and good and dead and then we took his shot gun, just like you told us, Mom.”

  I patted his shoulder. He was a big-hearted boy, and I know that must have been hard for him. “That’s right, people. Listen and listen good. Someone approaches you with a weapon you better shoot first and ask questions later. There are a whole lot of survivalists out there who really believe they’re the only ones that deserve to survive. And when people get desperate, people that normally are fair and decent will kill you to get your food or your shelter. And don’t ever leave weapons behind. It’s that kind of world now, people.”

  “After that Jimmy just held the rifle in his hands where people could see it and we didn’t have any more trouble like that, but the roads didn’t get any easier to move on. Seemed like everyone was trying to leave town and they were having to move stuff to do it because so much was in the way. There were people who pulled their cars off the road, gave up, and started walking. There were people fighting over stupid shit like a gas can, and others were helping each other move stuff so they could all get out, but most were just screaming and fighting. Scared I guess. There was a hotel we passed in Van Buren hadn’t taken any damage, but they obviously didn’t have power and their parking lot was so full of cars you couldn’t have gotten another one in there.”

  Now that is some stupid shit. Move a bunch of people into a small area with no food and no way to get heat with a blizzard on the way. They’d never make it. There was a grocery store close by and even if it was damaged if they gathered the food up and stored it someplace safe, if they carefully rationed the food and water… Well they’d still most likely be screwed because someone always has to be in control and it usually winds up being the biggest asshole with the most guns instead of the guy with the brains and… Unless I was wrong—and I hardly ever am—there was going to be a lot of cannibalism going on. And no need for it. If people used their heads and congregated in places like schools and other buildings with big common rooms, if they found wood heaters and all worked together to find all the food and blankets and stuff that they could, anyone who had made it though the storm would have a really good chance of making it. But the whole trying to get out of town trying to go someplace else… All those people would die tonight. If you got stranded in what was coming in with no shelter and no heat… Dead by morning. And there was no need for it because there were still lots of buildings still standing, if people had just stopped to think for a minute.

  “Lots of bodies all around the road, like maybe people just freaked out and started killing each other. Not a cop, not a national guardsman, no ambulances to be seen, just people going ape-shit crazy everywhere I looked. I think some of them people were thinking they could get someplace else and be safer. After the first tornados a lot of people had left. A bunch of them were caught by the second wave of tornados when one of the twisters obviously decided to just go right down Grand Avenue, just sort of tangling the cars up in the buildings,” Billy continued. “There are trees down all over the roads. Power lines were down all over the place, and I know for certain that a couple of them were live but we treated them all like they were. I don’t know if they are even going to try to fix things, but if they do it’s going to take them months. I was never so glad to see anything as I was that gate. By the way, Mom, it’s pretty bad bent. We need to fix it.”

  “And the whole time we were traveling it was getting colder,” Jimmy said. “It was colder when we left the house than it had been when we got up, and it just got progressively colder all day long. Just now when we came in, the thermometer in the air lock said it was thirteen degrees.” I had a little weather station out there—everything with sensors outside. It was more like a mudroom than an air lock, but the boys liked to call it that because it had two doors and had all that high-tech equipment in it. Yet they thought they weren’t kids anymore. Thirteen degrees—explained why it had been so cold in the greenhouse before I stoked the fire up. It was getting cold quick and we were running out of time.

  “Listen up and listen up good. All indications, everything I’ve heard, all that I know from my own instruments says that it’s about to get a lot colder very quickly all over the US and Canada, so find a place and hunker down. Don’t waste a minute. You don’t have shelter? Find or start making it wherever you are and start gathering food from wherever you can. If you can’t make yourself warm in the next few hours you won’t make it through the night. Right now we have to get ready ourselves. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  I fed the boys a hearty meal and then we all got dressed as warm as we could and walked outside.

  I hadn’t been outside since the storm, and I wasn’t really ready for the devastation. My trees… So many of them were just destroyed, bent and twisted, broken and uprooted. It made me sick, so I ignored it. The perimeter fence had held. It was made of concrete block laid so that there were six-inch holes every foot—sort of checkerboard style. I’d had a footing poured and I’d had a six-foot T-post stuck into the holes in the blocks every four foot and cement poured into it to the top. The blocks went to four foot and then on top of that we strung barbed wire up the T-posts every two inches so it was a six-foot fence. It had taken a crew of ten men six months to build, but it was worth it because all me and the boys had to do was dress warm, run around on the four-wheelers, and fix a couple of holes in the wire part of the fence. We also fixed the gate and I padlocked it. This was it. If anyone wanted in now they were going to have to ask for entry, crawl over or cut the fence, and they’d better not do that.

  Lucy had insisted on going with us, so we’d given her warm clothes. She’d mostly stood around right in my way and crowded me on the four-wheeler, freezing her ass off until we had finished. I made a mental note of where big trees were down. If things got really bad we might be digging them out of the snow and cutting them for fire wood later.

  At one point Billy pointed to the six sets of metal doors seemingly buried in the side of a hill that was covered in what was new grass. “What’s that?” he asked. Which was a good question because it hadn’t been there the last time he’d been on this part of the property. It was, in fact, a fairly new addition.

  “Insurance,” was all I said. “Go on back to the house. We’re done.” Billy and Jimmy headed back up to the house and Lucy and I headed for the “Insurance.” I got off the four wheeler and started checking the doors, just making sure they were all still closed and locked.

  “What sort of insurance?” Lucy asked while I was checking the latches.

  “When I realized it was going to happen at any time I still had nearly two million dollars in the bank.” Lucy looked a little shocked. “Turns out there was all sorts of money in the crazy-doomsday-lady business. Who knew? Any way, I bought six brand new inter-mobile cargo containers. Had a small hill knocked down. Had the boxes put here and then I had them covered in rebar and steel mesh and covered them with six inches of fibered concrete, leaving only the doors free. Then I had the bulldozer come back in and cover it with the dirt from the hill we moved. Now do you want to stand around out here in the cold or get back to the house?”

  I got on and she got on behind me but screamed in my ear as I took off, “But what’s in them?”

  “Insurance.”

  I let Jimmy and Billy put my four-wheeler away and Lucy and I went in the front door. The thermometer in the “air lock” read ten degrees, and it was nowhere
near dark yet.

  Lucy immediately ran to the fire to try to get warm. The boys standing next to the stove shucking their outer layers of clothing. I headed to my bedroom to do the same. I turn around as I’m taking off the last of my outside clothes and there’s Lucy, still dressed for the outside, and I had to tell her, “You’ll get warm quicker if you take off your coat and all the shirts and extra socks you’re wearing.” She started peeling off layers, and I didn’t even ask her why she was still following me around even though the boys were there to pester all piss out of. I decided it was like some take on Stockholm Syndrome and tried to just ignore her. “You should strip by the stove.”

  We warmed up by the fire, and then I went to check the computer. As you might have guessed Lucy had followed me. I had a text message. At first I thought it was from the mayor of Rudy asking for my help, and I damn near deleted it. Then I saw the “junior” after the name and knew it was his son.

  Why did I damn near delete it? Because the mayor of Rudy had never done anything but make fun of me and glare at me like he thought if I looked at small children they’d wind up wall-eyed or hump-backed. Hell, once he’d even called the cops and tried to have me hauled in because he said I threatened him. All I did was tell him if he wasn’t ready he was going to die with everyone else, and I wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t insist on telling me that I was crazy. If that old son of a bitch wasn’t dead, he should be, and I sure wasn’t going to do anything to save him.

  But it was his son who was asking for my help, which meant the old son of a bitch was probably dead, which served him right. The boy wasn’t his father, thought, any more than my boys are me, so I took a deep breath and read his message.