How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  “I have an insane amount of hay because… Well, who’s going to come buy it now?” Matt cut hay and had supplied every feed store in the area for years. “I’m missing a bunch of cows and I know some are dead because we’ve already found and butchered some but I think some just might have run off. I’ve got fences down everywhere. Damndest thing though…” He laughed; he’s a big guy with a good sense of humor. “…I’ve picked up five zebras, two llamas, and four buffalo. Guess from up there on the road. They’re mostly as tame as my cattle and they are just hanging around there with them eating hay. Took the cows a couple of days to get used to them but now they’re just all laying around the feed lot together like it’s normal. Drink a lot and I have to fill the water in the barn every day, but there’s plenty of water in the well and it’s good for me and the boys to pull water out of the well. Only takes us about thirty minutes a day to get enough water for us and all the animals and… Well it’s about the only exercise we get and… Well if we run out of beef before the weather clears I figure we can eat those critters just as well and if not… Well might not hurt to have our new world have some of those critters in it.”

  There had been a guy with about eighty acres all under six-foot chain link with barbed wire on the top who had kept all sorts of exotic animals. I don’t think there was any doubt that this was where Matt’s refugees had come from.

  “I’ve got all the cattle we had to butcher just cut up and sitting in bags in our garage, even with the door closed they are all frozen solid, so the garage makes a damn good freezer.”

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked.

  “Well we’re running low on human provisions… except for meat. When we heard you saying on the radio yesterday that there was going to be a break in the weather Jenny made a list and told me to get over here and see if you wouldn’t trade me a butchered cow for it. The beef is in the trailer behind my tractor.”

  “Sure. What you need?”

  He handed me the list. It all made sense. Sugar, flour, corn meal, salt, eggs, milk, cheese, floor. Then there was the last entry, “Gloves,” written in someone else’s hand in big block letters. Matt must have seen me smile when I read it because he said, “My oldest boy put that there. He has some jersey gloves but that really isn’t enough in this.”

  “Not a problem, anything else you can think of that I might have that you might need?”

  “Snow shovel,” he said with a shrug.

  “Done… Boys!”

  Jimmy grumbled something about never getting to finish his dinner. Then there was a slapping sound and he let out a yelp and then Billy was muttering something about not making me mad because they were in enough trouble as it was.

  Billy and Jimmy walked in the room, Jimmy rubbing his arm and staring holes in his brother’s back.

  “Boys get the beef out of Matt’s trailer and put it in the cold room.” It is what it sounds like—it’s a small room I built into the north side of the storage room. It has an old freezer door to get into it. Inside is my freezer and there is a two-foot hole that is covered in screen and steel bars two feet off the ground that goes into a tunnel that goes to the outside of the complex mound where it catches wind. The room is always cool, the idea being that freezers have thermostats and the colder it is the less they work. My freezer, well it’s on a switch and any time the temperature in that room drops below twenty degrees it shuts it off altogether. “Just put it in the room on top of the freezer. Then fill this order.” I handed Billy the list. “Give them four pairs of the good, heavy gloves and a snow shovel as well.”

  Billy nodded and the boys took off grumbling at each other till I couldn’t hear them any more.

  “Matt Peters, this is Lucy Powers.” They shook hands. He was looking at her like he thought she was familiar and couldn’t quite place her.

  “So how have you been really?” I asked.

  “We’re good, all mostly living in just the living room. Boys are fighting all the time so… About like you all,” he said with a smile.

  Lucy laughed and then patted me on the ass and went to the kitchen, no doubt to finish eating her dinner.

  “That’s new since I was here last,” Matt said, warming his hands over the stove as he nodded his head towards Lucy’s fine, departing ass.

  I grinned, no doubt like an idiot. “Yep, got here just in time for the apocalypse.”

  “So… You were right about everything, feeling pretty smug?”

  “You know just because I saw it coming doesn’t mean I’m a big-assed fan of the end of the world.”

  “I know that, Katy, I was just kiddin’ ya… Heard you ride off for Rudy a couple of days ago and heard you talking about it on the radio. You didn’t say nothin’ about having any trouble, but I found the Burkholder boys frozen dead in the middle of the road, and I notice you’re gimping around a little bit. Want to tell me what happened?”

  “Dirty sons a bitches waited for me and popped me in the ribs with a fucking tree limb. Sent me and Lucy flying off the ATV and screwed up my back and my ribs, so we killed ’em.”

  “I have to tell you the truth I was awful relieved to find those two fuckers dead. You can ask my missus next time you see her, I haven’t really slept since the shit hit the fan for fear those turds were going to crawl out of their hole, try to kill us all and take our shit,” Matt said. “I drug them off the road. They was froze solid; it was like moving a rock. You suppose those fuckers had mines around their place, trip wires?”

  Now that was a damn good question and with fences down a real potential problem.

  “Don’t know. I guess when the smoke clears we’ll need to go check it out.”

  “Stupid cows will doubtless walk over there and step on one if there are any,” Matt muttered.

  Evelyn stirred, made some mumbling sound, and then just went right back to sleep.

  “How fucked up is this shit Katy? How fucked up? I wasn’t like you. Katy. You know that I thought all the global warming stuff was a bunch of liberal hippie shit, but that’s at least part of the problem, ain’t it?”

  “Yep, color you wrong, Matt. When everything’s close to being the devil’s own sperm anyway, it only takes one thing to make it all fall apart.”

  “Guess we’ll have to start all over again.”

  “Why?” I said more than a little mad. “‘Cause things were so God-damn good? Last thing we need to do is try to build things back to where they were. What we have to do is not make the same mistakes again. We don’t need to try to cover the planet in people, or build things that tear everything up. We need to go in thinking how to do it cleaner, and then better and do it right this time. The fewer people there are the more there is for everyone. If we don’t fuck things up in the first place we don’t have to fix them. If we do things right this time… I mean it’s not like we don’t know where all that shit is going to lead us now.”

  “You’re right, ain’t no doubt about that. I can remember my father saying work smarter not harder and that’s one of the things fucked everything up. Everyone so worried about breaking a sweat that they had something to do everything for them, and with everything they built to help us… They were really just putting another nail in our coffin.”

  And that’s why, in spite of what he’s said, he wasn’t really like everyone else. Matt used his brain. Matt had two kids and stopped, and he didn’t like liberal hippies but he hated right-winged idiots, too, so he’d been about where I had always been when I was voting—just vote for the rich idiot you think will do the least damage.

  “You know, Matt, those folks down in Rudy have plenty of food, mostly just like you running out of what makes food good to eat. They could use some meat, and we all know it’s easy to keep it cold enough. You might run some down to them if you have enough time after you get home.”

  “You know what, Katy, if you can help those assholes I can, too.”

  By the time Matt started back home my dinner was mostly cold. I ate it anyway. The boys
had made themselves scarce and Lucy was just sort of watching me like she was thinking deep thoughts. “What?”

  “I was just thinking that I knew so much less than I thought I did. I would have thought I was a good judge of character, but I didn’t get you right at all. All these years I had you pegged for a real hard ass and a total nut job. The kind of person who only ever looks out for themselves. I thought you were like one of those hard-core survivalists you hate so much and you’d just kill anyone who came near you if the worst happened.”

  “Yet you ran up here anyway,” I said, shaking my head and laughing.

  “Well it wasn’t like I had a lot of choices and the gate was down. I figured it was fate.” She smiled then and I shook my head. got up and put my dirty dishes in the sink, thinking the boys could by God wash them.

  “You’re like a dog with a bone.” I laughed.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not always.”

  “My point is you aren’t any of the things I thought you were because you ran around in camouflaged cargo pants…”

  “Hey, they’re comfortable and they don’t show dirt and I’ve been wearing them since I was sixteen—way before and way after everyone thought they were cool,” I defended, turning away from the sink.

  “The point is I thought I had you all figured out and it turns out that you aren’t any of the things I thought you were—except clever.”

  “Thanks… I think.” I smiled then. “You know what? You aren’t any of the things I thought you were, either.”

  “What did you think I was?”

  “A cold, self-serving, stupid, egotistical bitch—a bit of fluff.”

  “Ouch!” She looked wounded. “What do you think now?”

  “There isn’t anything cold, stupid, or self-serving about you, and surprisingly you are as tough as nails when you have to be and you know how to think on your feet.”

  “You still think I’m egotistical?”

  “Well yeah, but you’re hot as hell and you’re damn smart so why shouldn’t you be?”

  She laughed and decided to change the subject. “How are your ribs?”

  “Sore. Why, what did you have in mind?”

  She shook her head. “I was thinking maybe we ought to actually do something for the ribs besides try to break them.” She walked over and hugged me and it didn’t hurt at all; it just felt good and I thought, Why she isn’t ruining the apocalypse for me at all.

  ***

  That night as the sun started going down and the cold started setting in I could tell we were in for another round of hell. Oh alright it had nothing to do with intuition, how dark it got, or how quick, or even a feeling in my bones. I was looking at all the satellite images and checking all my instruments and there was another huge storm coming down from Canada. I’d picked up signal from a couple of Canucks and they were saying this storm was worse than the last one.

  I had the boys bring in a bunch of wood and we cranked the stove up. Evelyn was mostly unconscious and I wasn’t at all sure that she was going to make it, but I knew it would help if we could get her warm enough. People will try to cool the body down when someone’s running a fever. The truth is you only ever want to do that if the fever is so bad it’s going to burn up their brain. Otherwise you want to warm them up. See fever is the body trying to burn the infection out. If you help the body stay warm—especially a body that’s been so cold—it should help burn the infection out faster particularly since I had her on antibiotics.

  My ribs were starting to throb. I really shouldn’t have spent a big chunk of the day fucking like an animal, not that I was at all sorry that I had, just that it hurt.

  I told Jimmy to do the evening report. He nodded and headed towards the office. Cherry was just sort of looking at Evelyn like she was sure the girl was going to die and that it was maybe her fault.

  “Cherry why don’t you go help Jimmy? When he gets done giving the weather report you should tell the listeners your story. It may give them hope, might give them some ideas, too.”

  She looked unsure but went anyway and Billy got up and followed her—no doubt because he’d tagged this one as his and didn’t want her alone with his brother. Cherry for her part was too run down and too worried about her friend to have any romantic feelings for anyone at that moment.

  I went and checked Evelyn. I put my stethoscope on and checked her pulse, which was still thready at best. Her lungs were full of fluid so I decided to shoot some Lasik into her line to help dry them out. I hated to do it because she was so dehydrated but as long as we had her on an IV drip she was getting rehydrated and we needed to dry those lungs out. I also went ahead and gave her a breathing treatment, which only works sort of half assed on an unconscious patient who’s breathing shallowly.

  “Well?” Lucy asked at my shoulder.

  “Girl’s got pneumonia and hypothermia. Add a big heaping portion of dehydration and malnutrition and… She’s in bad shape.”

  “Is she going to die?” Lucy asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know,” I snapped back, a lot angrier sounding than I meant. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. It was a stupid question.”

  “No, it’s actually a perfectly obvious question, I just don’t know. You know everyone was so obsessed with being as thin as they could be. They kept saying stupid things like you can’t be too thin. Well the truth is we’d all be a lot healthier if we were carrying a little extra weight—just ten to fifteen pounds. I purposely always carry an extra twenty just to be on the safe side,” I said, only about half kidding.

  “You look great.”

  “Why thank you, but it’s not about how we look it’s about how we are, and it’s fine to be just the exact perfect weight or even a little underweight until there’s no food or you get sick. When I was a kid I got Russian flu. I was a little overweight when I got sick. I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks, which actually made me a few pounds below my medical chart’s perfect weight. I was convinced that if I’d been any thinner I would have died. I’ve just stayed twenty pounds over the charts ever since.”

  I walked away from the girl and Lucy followed. I lowered my voice. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say this girl was way too thin to start with so she just had nothing to lose and nothing to help her stay warm. That’s why the other girl is still healthy and this one’s on the verge of death under the same damn conditions. The other girl started a couple of pounds over the charts. Your body burns fat to stay warm; you don’t have any fat there is nothing to burn.”

  Lucy nodded. “I fought my weight my whole life. I would fast if I gained a pound. Never ate what I wanted… It all seems so pointless now. I keep thinking about all the great, exotic food, prepared by some of the finest chefs in the world—food that I didn’t eat because it might make me fat, and now I’m never going to get to eat it. Even if I could have done like these girls and survived out there—and believe me I don’t think I could have lasted a night—I would have more than likely wound up like her. And for what? You’re right. Our whole damn society was completely consumed with the way things looked. And me? I was right there in the big middle of it.” She looked tired then. “I’m going to go get a shower.”

  I nodded and went to check on the boys and Cherry. They were still doing the report. Billy was telling them about all he’d seen. How they had to be super careful because you couldn’t be sure what the snow was covering. It was so deep that most of the time you just had to guess whether you were driving the right way or not.

  If he hadn’t gone those girls would be dead in this next storm, I had no doubt of that. Maybe those idiots holed up at that school, too, and they’d been through quite a bit. It didn’t matter; I was still going to get Billy back when he least expected it. Why? Because that’s who I am.

  Jimmy was glaring at me—so obviously he’d either forgotten that he didn’t want to make me madder than I already was or he’d decided I was going to beat his ass anyway so there w
as no sense in tiptoeing around me any more. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because Jimmy couldn’t stand for me to be happy. He blames me and always has for everything that he perceives is wrong with his life. In fact, I’m pretty sure that to this day Jimmy thinks I had something to do with the apocalypse just so I could ruin his day. He was fine as long as I was brooding and didn’t smile too much. Lucy had fucked me rotten most of the day so I was actually happy. I’ve never been good at hiding what I’m feeling, so Jimmy was pissed.

  Or maybe he was mad because I asked him to do something. That boy will ask me to jump through twenty hoops for him then act like I’m asking for blood if I ask him to do the slightest thing. He’ll ask me to do something for him and then when I do it he’ll complain that I’m always interfering with his life. He once had this skank-assed girl he was living with. She had a kid and he asked me to paint a room in his apartment for this kid. I did and even helped him decorate it. Hell I liked the kid. Then Jimmy ran out of money as Jimmy is prone to do—especially when he has a woman because he just lets her spend everything he’s got—and then the skank left—kid and all. Jimmy screams at me for thirty minutes about how I ruined his life and I’m just like my father—who he never met but he knew I hated him because I was always bitching about him—and how I just had to quit meddling in his life. He then spent an hour telling me all the stupid shit he had planned to do as if testing me to see if I would say anything at all.

  I didn’t. I went home and didn’t talk to him for three months. Decided to let him see what it was like to be out there without my help. See how long he could go without asking Mom for money or help. Of course what happened was he hit his brother up instead and then I gave Billy the money but still… It’s the principle, right? Jimmy didn’t call me at all because he’s a prick and I didn’t call because he told me not to. The next time I heard from him… Well that was the phone call I got when his brother called because the world was ending and the real reason he kept screaming, “I’m sorry, Mom!” over and over again.