How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  “Sure I do… Well, at least as much as I like anyone. Hell, you’re my best friend.”

  She laughed through her tears and then made those sounds that let you know someone is about to stop crying. She pushed away from me and held out her hand. I knew what she wanted so I handed her the handkerchief. “I’m sorry that I made you mad and sorry that I cried on you and I’m just… plain sorry.” Then she was making that sound that people make when they are going to start crying again.

  “Now don’t start up again,” I begged. I pointed at myself. “I’m manic-depressive, obsessive-compulsive, all right? In short, crazy. And I don’t take meds for it. I tried it once—turned me into a zombie. So I live with it, and the people around me have to live with it, too. I try to control it, but sometimes… lots of times… it controls me.”

  She nodded like she’d already figured that out, and then she said, “But you aren’t crazy.” She forced a smile then. “My dad, now he was crazy. Voices talking to him, running naked down the street during the Saint Patty Day’s parade, whacking off at the breakfast table—insane. You aren’t even starting to be crazy.”

  I almost took offense at that.

  She blew her nose on the over-used handkerchief then wiped her face on her sleeve. “Truth be told, it’s probably why I had no patience at all with you or what you thought. I thought you were crazy just like my old man, and he ruined our lives with his crazy shit.”

  I smiled at her. “And I’m sure when you talk to my boys they’ll happily tell you that I ruined their lives with my crazy shit.”

  “Yeah, but they’re alive because of your crazy shit.”

  Chapter 6

  Stay Out Of the Cold

  ***

  When temperatures drop into the teens or below you need to stay in your shelter, leaving only when you absolutely have to and, for no reason—even to look for food—venture far from your shelter if it’s super cold. If you can’t see your shelter, then you are way too far away from it.

  Hypothermia will kill you faster than hunger will. Never leave the shelter at night, and try to wait for a break in the weather to leave it at all.

  Keep your wood supply close.

  If anyone gets sick it will be that much more important that they keep warm. If the sniffle turns into a sinus infection you will be screwed unless you have antibiotics, and if you get too cold you DO increase your risk of a minor illness becoming a more serious one. The colder you get, the more calories you have to take in just to keep warm, which will tax your food supplies.

  If you are very smart you will get some antibiotics and keep them on hand. Now we all know you can’t get antibiotics over the counter for humans, but you can for animals. It’s the same stuff, so stock up. It will work in a pinch.

  ***

  For the next few days we had just done what we had to do to keep things going. Once a day we’d all go out and shovel the snow off the windows. The first layer of snow was dirty, but even it wasn’t more radioactive than normal when I checked it. The rest was pretty clean, so at least the air was starting to clear. Yep, I have a Geiger counter and a full chemistry set, and yes I know how to use them.

  Cherry called once a day and so far they were doing fine. She’d built a heater out of bricks and mud and hooked up a stove pipe. The only time she’d really sounded freaked out was the second time she’d called—she hadn’t been able to figure out how to cook. They had a few cans of food which heated up just fine on top of the bricks, but it wasn’t hot enough to cook beans and rice, which was what she had as her emergency supply because… Well, she’s a smart girl.

  I explained she needed to soak them in water over night and then put them on and leave them on all day. It worked and now she was calm… Well as calm as you can be living in a car igloo after an apocalypse when the snow just keeps coming down and it never gets warm enough to melt it.

  I’d lived in the area most of my adult life. In all that time the most snow we’d ever gotten was seven inches. Now there was two feet of snow out there and the wind wouldn’t stop blowing, which was why we had to clean the windows every day, not that they let in much light. Even during the day it wasn’t exactly light outside. Dust was blocking the sunlight, which was why it was so cold.

  Only the day before the last broadcast channel—which had been running news—blinked out. The end of an era. They’d been broadcasting out of New York. The last thing they reported was that I was up and running and was giving out both weather info and helpful hints on survival and to tune their radios to one ninety-eight. I did news and weather reports at eight A.M. and eight P.M, and I had taken to letting them repeat till I did another one. This way whenever they turned it on they’d get something. And I was still getting questions—not many, but some—and I answered as many as I could.

  The last broadcast said that all attempts to reach the capital had failed and as far as they knew neither the president nor vice president could be reached. The last act of the president was to declare marshal law. Stupid since most of our military—including the National Guard—was actually still in the God-damned Middle East. You know the Middle East, which was now most probably nothing but a smoldering, radioactive hole. They also said that New York and the entire northeastern seaboard had been without power for five days because of the hurricanes, and the ice storm that followed that. It was snowing again on top of the five feet of snow they already had and the people who hadn’t been killed and who hadn’t left the city were apparently all fighting amongst themselves over food and shelter. They didn’t know how much longer they could broadcast because for days people had been trying to get to their generators, and it was only because of the police that they were able to be on at all.

  I’d managed to contact them the day before and I tried to line out a plan for them. Told them to quit worrying about broadcasting, pool all their resources, and get as many people as they could into buildings like theirs and hospitals with generators. They told me that there was not a hospital in the city that was operational because gangs had shown up in force and stolen the generators and taken them… Well, no one knew where.

  Like I said all along, if you were in a city when this hit, you were as good as dead. All the scum rises to the top when something like this happens. They don’t have things like right or wrong to stop them from doing what they think they need to do to survive. However, meanness alone won’t help you survive a long-time disaster. You have these morons stealing and killing to live, and guess what? They will steal and kill till there is no one left alive because they aren’t smart… just mean. They’d rather everyone die than share, and…

  Let’s just cut through the crap right now and say what we all know. No one in the big cities survived. They all died. The ones who didn’t die of natural causes died in the gang wars.

  When the TV just went blank as we were watching it that night, I think we all felt a sick little twist in our guts. Lucy, though, felt it more than me or the boys, because those were her people. I’d turned the TV off, got on the computer and radio, and had done my broadcast, and Lucy had been unusually quiet. She’d been helping me do them the last few days, but that night she didn’t say a word, just sat in the office. Yep there, she was always there, but I was getting so used to having her shadow me that I think I would have been disappointed if I’d turned around and she wasn’t there.

  Anyway we were all sort of quiet that morning when we got up and went about our chores. It was still bitter cold, eighteen degrees with wind chill of five degrees. We were all already getting tired of being cooped up in the house with each other. Every day I had to break up a fight between Jimmy and Billy, and we were reading a lot and watching a lot of movies just to be someplace else for awhile.

  I was checking my messages, and I must have looked as unhappy as I was because Lucy asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “The six-year-old is getting worse,” I said. Two days ago Roy had written to tell me that one of the children was sick—a little girl named Karma who
se parents had been killed in the twister. They had treated it like a cold, mostly on my instructions, but now I realized that, likely as not, the child had some internal injury and we were talking about a serious infection at this point. One that needed treatment with antibiotics. and they didn’t have antibiotics—not even for animals. Antibiotics might not be enough, but they might be, and I didn’t think she had a chance without them. I had them. I had them in abundance. But it was dangerous cold out there, and the usual ten-minute trip to Rudy could take as much as an hour. I had good gear. It was supposed to be rated for the Arctic Circle, so it should be good enough but God-dammit, you aren’t supposed to get out of sight of your shelter in the cold. It’s just stupid.

  “I have to go and bring supplies,” I said mostly to myself.

  “You can’t go out there. You’ll freeze to death,” Lucy said, in a near panic.

  “No I won’t. I have Arctic gear.”

  “Well you aren’t going alone,” Jimmy said from the door. I had no idea when he got there.

  “Well you boys aren’t going with me, that’s for damn sure. You’re staying here where you’re safe.”

  “I’m going with her,” Lucy said matter-of-factly.

  “No you’re not,” I said, shaking my head as I stood up. “I’m going alone, and if I don’t come back ain’t no one going to be stupid enough to look for me, you hear me?”

  “I’m going with her,” Lucy told Jimmy. Jimmy left, no doubt to get his brother so they could double-team me. The whole time I was putting the skids on the front of my four-wheeler—that’s right, it has a snow attachment—hooking up the trailer and loading it, the three of them had been arguing with me—and each other—about who was going with me. I mostly tried to ignore them as I loaded the trailer with medical supplies, beans, rice and cheese—lots and lots of cheese—milk and eggs. Why? Because five goats give a lot of milk and we can’t drink it all, so I had made a lot of cheese. The same is true of eggs and twenty-four chickens. We were trying, but there was no way even my always-hungry boys could eat that many eggs or that much cheese. See, before the apocalypse I’d had customers who bought eggs, milk and cheese. Now our surplus would help the folks in Rudy. I had to pack the food and drugs that would freeze in ice chests to transport them.

  Apparently Lucy had won the argument with the boys because Jimmy had given her a set of his arctic gear and she was dressing in it as I was dressing.

  I just kept saying, “You aren’t going.”

  “I am it’s stupid to go alone. I can hold the gun.”

  “Do you know how to shoot one?” I asked hotly. And I mean hotly. I wasn’t really mad yet, but it was hot in all that gear in the house.

  “Yes. I’m not a moron you know.” Billy handed her his shotgun and told her how to use it.

  “She’s not going,” I told Billy.

  “Then I am.”

  “No you’re not,” Lucy and I said together.

  “You aren’t going,” I told Lucy, point blank.

  “If you let me go, I’ll sleep with you.”

  “You already do,” I laughed.

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  I smiled roguishly, thinking pissing her off would work better at this point than anything else and said, “So this is what it’s really all about. You don’t really want to go with me, you just want to have your wicked, wicked way with me.”

  She didn’t miss a beat but just smiled back. “No, I said you could have your wicked, wicked way with me.”

  I thought about it way longer than I should then said, “You aren’t going.”

  “I am.”

  “You aren’t.”

  And of course thirty minutes later when I roared out of the gates—we had been opening them every day at least once because it’s easier to move six inches of snow than it is to move three feet—Billy held them open for me, and Lucy was strapped to my ass holding Billy’s shot gun.

  The gear was everything it said it was, but it was still cold, and my no-fog goggles kept fogging up even with the face mask I was wearing, so they mostly sucked but I had to wear them. The going was slow. Heated socks and heated gloves, they are worth their weight in gold—everything fogless goggles aren’t.

  We moved quicker than I thought we would. In fact, in about fifteen minutes I was looking at the bridge that crossed the creek. The creek was frozen all the way across, which was a good thing because the tornado had mostly destroyed the bridge. It might have been nice if they’d bothered to tell me that.

  I stood there for a second and just looked at what was left of the town I’d lived near most of my life. It was mostly just sticks poking up through the snow, nothing but the church against the hill was still whole. It sort of drove the whole apocalypse thing home. It was the first time I, or Lucy for that matter, had seen the actual devastation. For a minute as I looked at it my heart just sank, and it just felt hopeless. But I shook it off. What choice did I have?

  Now it was cold and the ice was probably safe, but I couldn’t be sure because the water was still running under that sheet of ice, and springs and warm pockets can make ice treacherous. The last thing we needed was me and Lucy and the four wheeler wet in this cold.

  I stopped the four-wheeler and got off. “Lucy, I’m going to have to check the ice. You stay here.”

  She nodded.

  “I mean it Lucy, stay with the four wheeler.”

  “I will,” Lucy said hotly, and this time she was cold, so I mean she was mad.

  “Come on, Lucy, you don’t really think I’m going to make you screw me?”

  She laughed. “I’m mad because you talk to me like I’m a child, Katy.”

  The ice was sound and we drove across, me wondering if later on I might be able to convince Lucy that a promise was a promise and she had said she would if I let her go with me.

  Roy and the other survivors had done a good job. The pulpit was now a TV stand and the choir pews were now set up like a movie house. The rest of the pews they had stacked against the west wall to hold the mattresses they’d covered the windows with in place. They had stacked mattresses three high for people to sleep on and separated couples and family groups with sheets and blankets strung on ropes. They had plenty of wood. They had built a nice outhouse and had even fashioned a hallway of sorts to it from the building so that you didn’t have to go out in the snow to get to it. They had plenty of water, but when I got there they still had several number three tubs—new so I guessed they got them from the wreckage of the general store—sitting around the wood stove with snow in them.

  “We use it for washing and then we flush the toilet,” Roy JR explained. “Mind you, the adults take the long cold walk to take a dump, but we all pee in here, and the kids… Well, we have one sick as it is.”

  Now there were thirty-four survivors and twelve of them were kids and twelve of them were women. Only ten men, which was good. No, I didn’t say that because I’m a man hater. I have two sons. I’m not a man hater, but men burn twice as many calories as women and kids.

  “No other wounded?” I asked Roy.

  “No… people tried to get their families out, especially those with injured. They wanted to get to the hospitals.” Roy shrugged. “Weren’t many of them, Katy. The twister, it wasn’t natural. A bunch of folks, well they were at a prayer meeting at the Assembly of God church, my folks included, and they just kept praying. Dad tried to get me to take Belinda and our two kids and come there with them. Said it was the only place we’d be safe. But I remembered all the things you said, Katy, and I didn’t dismiss you the way he did. That twister killed everyone in that church, and me and mine were safe holed-up in our storm shelter.”

  “Hum,” I said, “Must have been a real shocker for them when judgment day came and they weren’t all lifted into heaven… But then again, maybe they were.”

  “Katy, for God’s sake,” Lucy said in a rebuking tone at my shoulder.

  “Let’s get the stuff in and then let’s look
at that sick kid.”

  The kid was running a real bad fever and looked jaundiced. I gave her a good look over and found a tender spot on her ribs and around her liver. “Does it hurt here?”

  “Yes,” Karma said. I thought her name was kind of ironic since she was the only one sick and both her parents had been killed.

  “What about here?”

  “Yes.” A tear came to her eye.

  I covered the child back up and turned to Roy, his wife, and Lucy. “Now mind you I’m not a doctor, but I am an EMT.” Roy nodded like he remembered that about me, yet another job I did to get paid for training. “But I’d say she’s bruised her liver and has an internal infection.”

  “I didn’t know you were an EMT,” Lucy said.

  “Two years,” I answered Lucy.

  “Is that bad?” Roy’s wife asked in a whisper.

  “Well it isn’t good, but I think we can give her a vitamin D supplement for a couple of days, and I’ll give her a shot of antibiotics and leave you a script. Do we know if she’s allergic to amoxicillin?” They shook their heads no. “Then I’ll have a pen ready to go.”

  “Pen?” Roy asked.

  “Adrenalin to counteract anaphylactic shock,” I said.

  I got in my EMT bag and pulled out a bag with some mullein leaves in it. I handed them to Roy’s wife. “Take those, wrap them in a small towel, dunk the towel into some hot water, and then bring it all back.” She nodded and took off. See, I believe in mixing the new with the old. Some of those old remedies work better than the pills doctors loved to shove down people’s throats.

  “So, Karma, do you know what you want from Santa?” I asked as I readied the shot.

  “No,” she said.

  “How about I tell him you want a doll. Would you like a doll?”

  Lucy chuckled. “God you’re such a sexist pig. Maybe she’d like a truck; wouldn’t you have liked a truck when you were a little girl?”

  I glared at Lucy. First off I was never a little “girl.” I was a little what-ever-the-hell I am. Second off, hell yes I wanted a truck, but I always got a fucking doll.