How I Spent the Apocalypse
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How I Spent the Apocalypse
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Selina Rosen
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-937105-22-8
Electronic Edition Copyright © 2011 by Selina Rosen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology should send their inquiries to Yard Dog Press at the address below.
Yard Dog Press
710 W. Redbud Lane
Alma, AR 72921-7247
http://www.yarddogpress.com
Edited by Selina Rosen
Copy & Technical Editor Lynn Stranathan
Cover art by Mitchell Bentley
First Print Edition October 15th, 2011
First EBook Edition October , 2011
Printed in the United States of America
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For Roland and Zeb.
I hope this isn’t the future you inherit
from all of us dumb-f---s.
Chapter 1
Don’t Leave Home Without It
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Don’t try to travel during the disaster. Unless you have days to get the hell out of Dodge you’re much better off to stay put and hunker down. In other words, if you waited till the last minute to try to make it through the apocalypse you’re probably already screwed, so you might as well stay put where at least you have some stuff.
If you have to leave because a river of lava…or just a river…is headed your way, then take your survival kit, all your food, as many blankets and sensible clothes as you can, and get while the getting is good. But if you leave empty handed you will be as screwed as you would be if the lava hit you.
Don’t wait till the last minute to go when every other idiot is trying to get away. You’d be better off on a rubber raft than stuck in traffic ’cause even if it’s a river of lava at least you’ll go quick—without having to hear idiots honking their horns as if that could magically clear sixty miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic. And then there’s all the screaming as the lava consumes them.
And for God’s sake when evacuating don’t be one of the idiots who runs out of gas. Turn the car off if traffic is stopped. Carry gas with you. Real survivalists always keep their gas tanks in all their vehicles full and have an extra five-gallon can full at any given time.
If you’re on any coast and you hear something apocalyptic may be happening then if you’re smart… Well if you were really smart, you would have already moved years ago… But if you’re still there just load up all you can and head inland. Find a nice park with cabins or get a hotel room in a small town. Hell, move in with family or friends.
Our most likely doomsday scenario will be caused or made worse by climate change. I know—every right winger in this country seems to think this is something liberals made up to scare us into regulating big business and doing without all that big crap you just have to have—but just because some idiots refuse to believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I mean come on! People were convinced the world was flat—some still are—that doesn’t make it flat. If you’re on one of the coasts and you want to survive—get inland. If you’re in a big city—get out. You might have done everything right but your neighbors won’t have and they will kill you and take your shit.
Inner-city gangs will likely be killing everyone else to live. If anyone survives in the big cities they will most likely be exactly the sort of people we least needed to have survive. They will have survived not because of their wits but because there is strength in numbers and they will be willing to kill to get what they need.
The only trouble thugs might have is that they are all idiots. Let’s face it; smart people don’t buy into the things a gang promises. With no one to inhibit them, the morons will most likely do their drug of choice till they die. Of course, in the meantime, they won’t have any trouble at all killing you to take your food, water, or prescription meds.
Now as soon as you land someplace if the worst hasn’t happened yet—and if you’re smart you saw the signs and got out in plenty of time—take any credit cards you have, go to the store, and max them out. Buy all the dry goods you can. If you’re afraid you won’t have a way to cook beans and rice or other grains, then get peanut butter, canned meat and honey—lots of honey—even sugar. Both give you quick calories. Max your cards out buying sleeping bags and other survival-type stuff. After all, if the worst happens you won’t have to worry about paying it off. Even if civilization does survive enough for debt to still be a problem, well… Would you rather be dead or have a little debt?
Grocery stores have already been emptied when you get there? Head for a feed store. They sell several animal products that can be consumed by humans. Wheat bran, rice bran, and ground corn come to mind. Use your head. Only get full-grain products and stay away from pelleted feed with chemical additives.
So there are reasons to evacuate even at the last minute, but for the most part if you’ve waited till the apocalypse begins to leave the coasts or the cities it’s probably too late for you anyway. As a basic rule, don’t travel once the apocalypse has started. Look, Flo Jo couldn’t outrun cancer, and you won’t be able to outrun the tidal wave, the hurricane, the tornado, or the blizzard, either.
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Yep, that’s the kind of sound advice that I used to hand out on my weekly podcast entitled, Living Through the End dot com. A long title I know but sort of catchy and not the sort of thing people easily forgot. It had over three million loyal listeners. Their donations didn’t make me filthy rich, but they did give me more than enough money to quit my job about eight years before the end of the world as we knew it and allowed me to devote all of my time—and all their money—to preparing for the coming disaster.
Although I’ll be completely honest and tell you that I didn’t need their money or the time because I’d been preparing for the inevitable since I was a kid, and it turned out that what I had without all the cool shit I managed to put back would have been enough. Having money just let me do it bigger and better. It allowed me to help other people, too. The truth is without the money me and mine would have made it, but lots of other people wouldn’t have.
And having all the really cool shit… Well it really livened up the ole apocalypse for me.
As a kid I started doing things like hording batteries and food. Soon I’d escalated to spending time my teachers thought I should have spent studying, playing sports, or socializing with my peers trying to figure out where the safest place in America was.
Of course the joke’s on them because turns out I really didn’t need to learn any of that crap I told them I didn’t need to learn, and I’m alive and most everyone else is dead. So na na na boo boo.
About now you might be asking yourself why I knew. How I knew. Am I some modern-day prophet, a psychic?
Nope. If I was, my own life wouldn’t have had so many snags, would it? What I am is obsessive compulsive and crazier than a shit house rat. I’ve had recurring ni
ghtmares of the destruction of the world for as long as I can remember. I have no idea what started the dreams. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my parents loved disaster movies and I’d seen way too many of them from my crib. Or maybe I was one of the few people who paid any attention at all to the news. But the dreams were what started my obsession with doomsday.
Also… Well, I’m really smart. I know that makes me sound egotistical, but it’s also true. I heard what people were saying about global warming—later changed to Catastrophic Climate Change in the hope that stupid people would quit saying, “Where’s my global warming?” every time it was colder than shit. And I read too much—or so my trailer trash family would say over and over. I swear what really saved me—and through me a big slice of mankind—was my family disowning me. I never would have amounted to shit if they hadn’t kicked me out on my ass when I was sixteen.
Anyway, I read a lot, so I knew what was going on in the Middle East. While we were farting around over there trying to keep our fingers on the pulse of one of the biggest oil veins in the world, stirring up all those idiot, radical religious fucks in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan—giving them someone besides each other to hate—Pakistan and India were on the verge of a full-out nuclear war that was also driven by religious dissent.
Any idiot with a TV should have been able to see that our government had been taken over by people whose own religious beliefs said we were way past Armageddon and who were mostly into stuffing their already-full pockets. They didn’t give a good God-damn what happened to the people, the economy, or the world when they were done with it.
Our government at that time was made up of two kinds of people. The first were rich idiots who used the ultra religious to get them into power so that they could hand the world over to mega corporations. These same corporations somehow managed to pay huge bonuses to executives who had apparently run their companies and the country into bankruptcy but were still considered by the CEOs of their companies to be the BEST people for the job. The second type were rich idiots who talked a good game about making things more fair and who were all for throwing money at problems but who never gave up their big houses or cars or quit jetting all over. They looked down on everyone who wasn’t wealthy even as they said they wanted to help those less fortunate. They made it clear that they thought we “less fortunate” got that way because we were uneducated and uninformed. In other words, they thought we were just too stupid to dig out of poverty and better our lives without their help. They never understood—how could they when most of them were born to money, privilege or both—that some people just weren’t as fortunate. That it had nothing to do with being uneducated or stupid, and everything to do with the fact that so many of us were just handed a big shit sandwich. They really thought you could make everyone happy and… You can never do that, not when everyone has been brainwashed to think that success is measured in how much shit you own.
And all the while it was getting either hotter or colder depending upon where you were in on the globe, and everything was crazy and… No one seemed to give a damn as long as they could drive their cars as big as houses and live in there houses as big as churches and go to their church that was as big as a stadium. They just watched sitcom reruns on their seventy-inch plasma screen TVs and sucked down their micro-waved, processed food packets in their climate-controlled homes and ignored all the warning signs.
Yuppies and religious morons are equally responsible for the destruction of the world, make no doubt about that. Everyone having to have more than everyone else and not caring about the cost to the environment or whether our people were being sent to fight a war against terrorism that never would have started in the first place if we’d never allowed ourselves to become so reliant on oil. We played right into those idiot religious zealots in the middle East’s hands who, like the radical Christians wanted Armageddon because they all thought it would be a happy thing. Well they all got what their wish, didn’t they?
I wonder if any of them got sucked up into that heaven they were always talking about. If not, Armageddon wasn’t what they thought it was going to be.
I didn’t get to go to college. In fact, I barely made it through high school because as I said my parents kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen and I had to fend for myself. Of course with my family I’d always had to fend for myself anyway, so no big difference except that I had to put a roof over my head and buy a car. That meant working every night and weekend at a quick mart. And like I said before, the time I was supposed to be studying I spent reading all about everything that people should never know if they don’t just want to make themselves as crazy as… Well, as I turned out to be.
Now you might be asking yourself how I can say that I’m so smart and all-seeing since I didn’t have any high-falutin’ education and I keep admitting I’m crazy. Well I’ve read a lot—and not stupid shit, the important stuff, the stuff you need to know to survive through any disaster. I read about history, what we did wrong, what we did wrong. You study enough history you find out two truths. First, it’s absolutely true that humans are so God-damned dumb that history ALWAYS repeats itself! Second, anything that ever got done that was worth doing or wasn’t worth doing was done by some super-smart, crazier-than-shit person just like me.
Crazy Katy. Folks started calling me that back when I started building what people called The Bunker. It’s not a bunker; it’s my house. Alright, it’s a really secure house, but it’s not a bunker.
Though considering everything that’s happened, it wouldn’t have been so crazy if I was building a bunker.
Those stupid fucks! You ever just wish you could get super-famous and rich so that everyone who had ever put you down had to eat shit and die? Well everyone who was a real thorn in my side and tried to cause me any real trouble, they all died in the global disaster.
Everyone that is except for Lucy Powers.
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I was way busy getting ready for the coming apocalypse. I was also trying to talk my sons into giving up on riding it out in my son Billy’s home in Fort Smith and come home. I had my cell phone in one hand and a stack of wood in the other. See, you keep getting ready right up to the point you can’t any more once you know a storm or disaster is imminent. You never say, Well that’s enough, and stop because what if that last arm load of wood is the difference between living and dying? Then you’re going to be feeling really stupid—and cold—while you’re dying.
My oldest son, Billy Ray, sighed that sigh I knew meant he was just trying to shut his crazy mother up. Then he said, “Mom… I’ve got my survival kit and plenty of toilet paper, dried beans, rice, and enough kerosene to last a week all in the basement. Jimmy Dean…” My youngest son. Don’t blame me; I didn’t name them. “…is on his way over here right now.”
There was no sense in arguing with him, and the truth was I just flat didn’t have time to waste trying to convince him that this time I was sure. I’d hauled those boys into storm shelters and run them through drills so many times that they no longer even got upset. They thought I was full of shit, and the youngest one… Well, he’d given up long ago even pretending to have a survival kit or any extra food or fuel put back. He’d told me to my face that I was a nut job and that I had ruined their childhood scaring the shit out of them that at any minute the world as we knew it was going to vanish.
My son Jimmy Dean is often quoted these days as saying, “Just because Mom is crazy doesn’t mean she isn’t right.”
Ah vindication, sort of makes me understand why all the religious idiots kept working for the end of the world. I would have just looked really stupid to everyone, and my sons never would have really respected me if the apocalypse hadn’t actually come.
Anyway, my son Billy was pretending to take me seriously while telling me they could ride it out in town, which I knew was a crock, and I was trying to get the door open so that I could put the wood away. That was when the alarm went off telling me someone had opened the fr
ont gate. I jumped, dropped the wood, and damn near shoved the phone right through my head, so I was already in a mood when I saw what had become the bane of my existence—a freaking news team—coming through the front gates. I could have kicked my sons’ asses because if it wasn’t for them I would have had the front gates locked down tight already.
How did I know it was a news team? Because it was a shiny new car. I didn’t have many friends left, and the few friends I’d actually managed to keep over the years didn’t drive anything that wasn’t at least ten years old
“Fucking beautiful,” I mumbled.
“What?” Billy Ray asked.
“Not you son,” I said. “Fucking news crew is here.”
Billy chuckled. “What do you expect, Mom? You got on your podcast two days ago and this time no maybe, no might be, this time you flat-assed announced the end of the world. You should have known they’d show up.”
“Yeah… Well I know you think I’m just crying wolf once again, but this is it, Billy. Don’t you forget that, and don’t you or your stupid brother forget everything I taught you. I love you; I have to go.”
It sucks when you can’t get your kids to do what you need them to. Sucks when they won’t listen to you when you’re right and they’re… Well, stupid. Still I wasn’t too worried about my boys. They did know how to survive, they were only about twenty minutes away from me, and I had purposely moved to the hell which was Northwest Arkansas because it was one of the safest places in the country to be. All we had to worry about were tornados and ice storms as natural disasters went. We’re too far north for hurricanes or the people fleeing them to reach us. Too far south to get really hammered by a bad blizzard. Just out of reach of both a Yellow Stone Caldara eruption and the New Mandarin Fault. That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to get bad here; it just meant that we had a better shot at survival than most people.