How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  Katy,

  Thirty-four of us have made it through the storm last night. I am trying to get them to work together, and they are trying, but none of us really knows what to do. Can you help us?

  Please,

  Roy Cockrun JR.

  A guy like this kid’s dad should have a name like Cockrun. Though Running Cock would have suited him better, but then he wasn’t an Indian.

  I was hoping the kid was a nice guy who didn’t deserve the name.

  I guessed he had a satellite phone. Everything else would have likely been useless already.

  Where are you now? I asked and was surprised when he answered right away.

  We are in the old Baptist church. It didn’t take much damage.

  It was an old rock building, not too big, with a full basement. Less than a hundred feet from a big hill—that would have protected it. My mind worked quickly.

  Send five people to gather up all the blankets, clothes, and mattresses you can. Doesn’t matter if they are wet now; they’ll dry. Send five to gather all the food you can. Everyone should dress in layers and take turns being inside. Find a wood stove. There was one in the general store. Get it. Send ten people to start gathering wood. Get all the wood you can gather—pieces of houses and fences—anything that will burn. Drag everything up close. Worry about cutting it later. Stack the stuff that will go in a stove now in one pile and the long stuff in another. Get them started, but you stay here. I’m not done yet.

  “What’s going on?” Lucy asked at my back.

  “Thirty-four people are holed up in Rudy; I’m trying to get them lined out.”

  Roy’s message came back, Done.

  Josh Wintery had all those blue plastic barrels for sale. He got them from the baby food plant and all they had in them was banana purée. Send five people to collect as many as they can find. Do you still have water?

  Yes, in the tower, but I don’t know for how long it’s running out of broken lines everywhere.

  Have your barrel brigade find some hoses and hook them up somewhere. Put the barrels in the basement and fill them with water. Did the town ever win their bid to get on natural gas?

  No.

  I remembered the church had a huge propane tank.

  Turn the gas heater on in the church and start warming it up now. Send someone out and tell them to turn off all the tanks they can find before anything has a chance to make a spark and blow one up. Is the general store still intact?

  No, but part of it’s still there and the boys just hauled over the wood stove and they found plenty of stovepipe.

  Good have them put it in the middle of the church against an outside wall preferably on the south wall… No wait, it’s an old building. Look and see if there isn’t maybe a chimney that’s been covered up.

  We found it.

  Make sure it’s clear. Hook up the stove and get a fire going immediately. The gas isn’t going to last long if you use it to heat. If I remember right there is a small kitchen in the church with a gas cook stove. As the blankets come in hang them over all the windows. Use the wet ones; it doesn’t matter. It’s going to get cold, colder than any of us have ever seen before. Get everything you can from the store and from the other houses, wet or not—medicine, candles, all the food… Don’t leave any food out of the church; bring everything you can find in. You’re going to need it all. Candy… Anything the least bit edible… Everything. Drag up all the wood you can find. Break it up, saw it up, get as much inside as you have room for and pull the rest up outside and keep doing it till you run out of wood or strength or daylight or it gets too cold.

  And then I told him about not flushing and the importance of letting the light in if the sun was shining outside and pulling the blankets closed again when it wasn’t. He said they were going to build an outhouse.

  “Don’t flush?” Lucy asked at my shoulder.

  “That’s right. I need to fill you in. Around here we don’t flush pee; we only flush shit. Four squares of toilet paper per job and the TP goes in a waste can and gets burned in the stove. It doesn’t go in the toilet.”

  “You have rules for using the bathroom?” she said in disbelief.

  “Sugar, we have rules for everything.”

  Chapter 4

  Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow

  ***

  You can melt ice and snow to get water if you have a heat source. Ice takes longer to melt but you get more bang for your buck. You’re melting snow… Well it takes a lot of snow to make just a little water. Another problem with melting it on your stove is that bringing that much ice or snow in is going to cool your space, so you may want to do it in small amounts.

  The snow will not necessarily be clean. It may be filled with dirt particles and may even be radioactive depending on what has happened. So boil and filter even the water you make from ice or snow. Boiling and filtering won’t take care of any radioactivity, but nothing will, so if that happens we’re all screwed anyway.

  ***

  Just before the sun set it actually warmed up several degrees and then the snow started to fall. At first just a few flakes and then it was as if they were blowing it up against the west windows. There was so much coming down so fast that it didn’t look real. It looked like movie snow in a Christmas movie… The old one where Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer saves the day. The boys and I were all sort of psyched. We’d always liked the snow. We used to get at least a good six-inch snow every winter till climate change screwed us and all we ever got was freezing fucking rain. Snow was fun, but freezing rain just sucked for everyone, and I was glad that on top of everything else we didn’t have ice to contend with.

  We were warm and cozy and I was so glad to have my boys home that I didn’t even really notice when they started fighting over who was going to cook dinner. I think Lucy was a little surprised because they weren’t arguing about who was going to have to cook dinner but who was going to get to.

  “They both like to cook,” I explained.

  “They don’t look alike,” she said conversationally.

  “They had different fathers,” I said. I was answering blog questions. There weren’t many new ones, and I knew that meant that most people had lost the means to run their computers, but it didn’t mean they were dead. “And before you say neither of them looks like me—they aren’t biologically mine.”

  She nodded as if to say she had guessed that, but I could tell by the puzzled look on her face that she hadn’t.

  The arguing from the kitchen had reached a crescendo, so I yelled, “Jimmy, you cook dinner! Billy, why don’t you go take care of the animals?”

  There was a moment of triumph from Jimmy as Billy grumbled something about the size of his brother’s penis and went off to the barn. Of course Lucy just sat there as I answered e-mails.

  Wireless communications… satellites… well there were just enough booster towers to keep that going indefinitely if you could keep your system charged. Of course I was reaching a lot more people and they were reaching me by radio. I couldn’t be getting the satellite images I was getting without the super high-tech equipment I had. Of course I almost wished I couldn’t. It didn’t look or sound good. From what I was getting from the few people still talking and what I could see with the satellite images, hurricanes had wiped out most of the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Tornados had torn up Arizona and New Mexico and torn holes all through the south. A tidal wave and then strong straight-line winds had pounded the Pacific coast. I didn’t even bother to look and see what was happening to the rest of the planet, but I doubted they were faring much better.

  See, the planet is all connected, and all of these faults and volcanoes… Well they have been rumbling and not going off and a big one could happen at any minute and… Dominos. People seem to forget that the world is all connected. That when you’re talking fault lines or major volcanic eruptions… Well islands have been born or died all the way across the globe from major geological events. You get more than one started
by man-made stupidity, and you’ve got instant Armageddon. It was going to take the Earth a while to settle from this, and even I didn’t know how long it might take or even when the dominos might stop falling.

  Suddenly Lucy was franticly digging through my left pocket.

  “What the fuck!” I said, making an off key stroke that had me telling someone to shit tight.

  “Can I use your phone?” Lucy asked, as she fished it from my pocket.

  “Yeah, but I think you need to kiss me now,” I mumbled, and fixed the whole shit problem.

  Lucy started hitting numbers. She must have realized that cell phones would still work for a while and that she knew people she could try to call. I half watched her as I worked. No one was answering. That was obvious because she was either saying nothing or leaving messages and giving out my number. Every time she looked a little closer to absolute panic.

  See? That’s what grief does to you. It’s not about the dead person. It’s about you, what you’ve lost, and that feeling that you’re all alone in the world. That’s what Lucy was finding out as she went through those numbers of people she called so much she had their numbers memorized. I’d had no friends like that in years. I hated my family because they hated me, but when Cindy died… Well let’s just say I knew how she must be feeling calling people who weren’t answering and probably weren’t ever going to.

  The world was coming to an end, and we might survive—in fact I was pretty sure we would—but the world would never be the same again. It was all sort of surreal then, me just going through what I’d planned to do for years. Fixing what had to be fixed, staying warm, trying to help those who could still be reached. Billy was taking care of the stock, Jimmy was cooking, and everyone and everything I really cared about in the whole world was there with me. But I knew how she felt. That’s why I turned into a total coward, mumbled some lame-assed thing about checking on Billy, and took off.

  Of course I ran away from Lucy’s grief and right into Billy’s because when I got to the barn Billy was milking Spot and crying like a baby, which was sort of making all the animals a little jumpy.

  “Oh baby,” I patted his back, “What’s wrong?”

  He looked at me like I was crazier than I am, “What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong? The world’s coming apart. People are just dead everywhere and more of them are going to die in this cold, aren’t they? I remember, Mom. I remember what you said. Watch out for rising water, fire and cold. Everyone was trying to leave the city, Mom, everyone trying to get to relatives' or friends' houses. Cars were mostly useless. I killed a guy, Mom. I killed a man who was just trying to get out of there like everyone else was.”

  “He would have killed you and your brother…”

  “And maybe we’d be better off. Who wants to live like this in a damn bunker? No one wants to live like this except you.”

  And this is my good kid, so again I say… Why do people think they have to have kids?

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” He stood up and hugged my neck. Spot kicked the milk bucket over, wasting a lot of milk and making a God-awful mess, but I just held my boy who dwarfed me and patted his back. “You were right. I think I’m mad because you were right. I was happy. Life was good. I liked my house, Mom. I know you always thought it was a waste, but I loved it and all my stuff, and now they’re just a huge pile of crap and… Well you were right and living like that destroyed the world and now everyone’s paying because I wanted a seventy-inch plasma screen TV.”

  So they do eventually learn. Of course it took the apocalypse, but there you go.

  “You know what I keep thinking about, Mom? There was this girl named Cherry who worked at the Waffle Hut. She was nice and always friendly and I really liked her, but you know how I get around girls I really like…”

  Did I ever. Both of my boys suffered from a not-so-rare malady of young men I like to call penile stupidia, in which the victim can look across a room full of attractive, intelligent young women and fall hopelessly and completely in love with the one truly psychotic bitch there. Billy was always with some trampy-assed, drug-addicted or alcoholic psycho bimbo because he didn’t have any trouble talking to them or picking them up because they were nothing but trash. But a nice girl with a job and brains? Well he could talk to them all day but he couldn’t bring himself to ask them out.

  “… So I never went out with her and I don’t even have her number and I have no idea where she lives and… Well I called the Waffle Hut when the shit started to hit the fan to tell her to come over, but she wasn’t at work and they wouldn’t give me her home number, so if she isn’t dead already she will be and…”

  I pushed away from him. I let the goat out of the head gate and put her out of the milk room. “Come on.” I took his hand and lead him back into the office.

  “What are you doing, Mom?” Billy asked.

  “I have equipment that can crawl up a gnat’s ass in Detroit. If that girl's out there, we can find her.”

  In the office Lucy was still trying to call people, tears running down her face. But her people were in Atlanta, and this girl Billy couldn’t quit thinking about was in Fort Smith. If she had hunkered down somewhere she might still be alive and she could make it if she really was smart. Since he’d never fucked her I figured she probably was, because if she was some brain-dead piece of trailer-trash he would have already screwed her and she would have taken a bunch of his money and slept with his best friend and hocked his sound system to buy crank… like the last one had.

  And he’s the keeper. Remember that when you get to thinking that you just have to start repopulating the world.

  If she had a cell phone and if it was on we might be able to reach her and if I could reach her I could talk her through this thing.

  “What’s her last name?” I asked Billy, ignoring Lucy.

  “Summers.”

  I gave him a look. “Cherry Summers? Her name is Cherry Summers. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” With a name like that it was more likely he’d met her hanging on some pole at a strip club than a Waffle Hut.

  “I swear, Mom, that’s her name.”

  I typed in the name and not too surprisingly got only one entry in Fort Smith. I gave the number to my son who hammered it greedily into his phone. Apparently he got the answering machine because he got that same look on his face Lucy got every time she made a call and got it—or worse yet nothing. I took the phone from my son.

  “If you get this message call us back at…” and I gave her the number. “Find someplace still standing with a wood stove or fireplace. Stay warm. Dress in layers. Grab whatever food you can, find bring it into that room with you, cover the doors and windows with blankets or stacked furniture. Burn whatever will burn for heat.”

  I hit the end of the message so I closed the phone and handed it back to Lucy. Between you and me, I figured the girl was dead or would be soon. Hypothermia is a bitch. Hypothermia with a big dose of shock and not enough food or water will kick your ass quick. But it put a look of relief and hope on Billy’s face, and that was reason enough to do it.

  Lucy handed me my phone back, and I realized that she hadn’t followed me out to the barn, no doubt fully consumed with trying to reach someone… anyone. However when I said I’d finish up in the barn Lucy followed. In fact, she followed so close that if I’d stopped she would have run into me, and it dawned on me that since she couldn’t reach anyone she was probably going to be stuck to me worse than before.

  She tried to help me clean up the mess Spot had made… Why do I have a goat named Spot? Because she has spots, of course, and when I finish milking her I get to say, “Out damn Spot,” which I always think is funny no matter how many times I say it.

  As I was saying, Lucy tried to help me clean up the milk and tried to help take care of the chickens and guineas and rabbits. Mostly she just got right in my way. I grabbed a handful of fish food on the way back to the kitchen and threw it into the river where the fish
greedily snapped at it. The waterfall was running at the far end against the wall to the house which meant either Jimmy was washing dishes or more likely the cisterns were all full of run-off and groundwater was seeping into them. When the cisterns are full a pump kicks on and the overflow runs down the waterfall into the indoor river. The waterfall helps to aerate the water. The water runs into the three-foot deep, two-foot wide trough that runs the length of the greenhouse. When it hits the wall to the barn there is a spillway that runs into another trough which runs into the barn to water the animals. The overflow there runs under the floor in pipes and runs all the way out to one of the outside ponds.

  Now the water trough that goes through the greenhouse is filled with fish and plants and snails. Not cod, but perch and channel cats. All our bathwater, washing machine water, and sink water runs down the waterfall and into a box filled with lava rocks and water plants. The roots and rocks filter the debris and what comes out of the rocks the fish and snails eat. We have to watch what shampoos and soaps we use, but you know what? You ought to anyway. The trough has two-foot walls in it every three feet and this helps to hold the water while the fish and snails and plants clean it before it gets to the animals in the barn.

  I stopped and was just watching the fish snap up the food. I didn’t have to feed them much; there was enough food that got washed out in the dishes, off our bodies, and out of our clothes that they had their own little eco-system going on here. The snails ate the algae and food particles, the fish ate the snails and the algae and the food particles and picked at the plants. The plants filtered the water naturally.

  “They’re pretty,” Lucy said, and I probably would have laughed at her if I didn’t think sun perch were pretty, too. “And hungry.”

  “I don’t know that they’re actually hungry. I think they’re just like my boys and will eat anytime there’s food whether they’re hungry or not.”