How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  We cut and stacked enough wood from trees that had fallen just on our property to heat both houses for three more winters just like the one we’d just had and our winters were going to be bad for a few years but not like that one. I had reseeded the whole property as soon as it was dry enough to do so. Even as I was doing this I noticed that the grass was starting to come back up. See it just looked dead, it wasn’t actually dead. The snow protected the plants from most of the serious cold and kept them alive. They’d gone dormant but they were coming back fast. I’d planted flower bulbs and garlic all over the place over the many years I’d lived there, and I could even see the hint of these plants breaking the surface of the ground.

  Our orchard had taken some damage from the wind but we’d only completely lost two trees. While some of them had to be cut back pretty far just to save them I was sure it would be back in full production given a year or two to recover. By the time we’d finished clearing the debris and trimming up the damage I could see buds starting to form on the ends of some of the branches. Life was returning to the land.

  As soon as the water had receded and the creek was down closer to its normal banks—we knew it was likely it would be higher indefinitely—we took the dozer and pushed the old bridge around to make a new bridge. Now the bridge was a rough ride in a truck, but we didn’t plan to run a lot of them over it any time soon, and it was perfectly good for tractors and four-wheelers.

  The snow levies still hadn’t melted completely and the small airfield I hoped to turn into a community garden for the Rudyites was mostly still a couple of feet of mud. So we worked on taking everything—and I do mean everything—from the old railroad damage store. We took all the merchandise, the buildings, the freezers—everything.

  Now some of the others had thought this was ridiculous. They didn’t understand why we couldn’t just go up and get what we needed when we needed it. Some of them even wanted to all just move up there. I explained that the store had been on a main road. We didn’t want to be on a main road. That there was no readily-available water supply and that Rudy still had a viable water tower and a running creek.

  They wanted to know why it would be bad to be on the main road because… as I’ve said before people are stupid! Like I was talking to kindergarteners I told them that we weren’t likely to be the only people looking to scavenge for stuff—and some of the people, likely all of the people who went hunting for stuff—would be armed. We were. And we weren’t the only ones knew the store was there. I also explained that there wasn’t going to be any way for us to just manufacture the things we needed for a long time so we needed to get all there was to get and horde it.

  It’s amazing how fast a group of people can get things done when they are motivated by survival. We stripped the entire All ‘n More complex down to the concrete slabs in a little over a week. In Rudy we used what we’d scavenged from those buildings to build several warehouses to house all the stuff we got there. Billy cleared the old general store and the damaged buildings next to it to the slabs with the dozer and we built three huge warehouses there. In one we put the foodstuff that was still viable. In another we put all the paper goods and cleaning products. And in the last one we put all the tools and fasteners we’d gotten from their tool store. We built another one at the end of what used to be Main Street, well away from all the others, and we put all the combustibles in there.

  The whole time I’d been scavenging the place I’d wondered where the people who owned the place were. See, their house had been right in the big middle of the complex and like I said the tornado had missed them. Let’s face it; they never would have run out of supplies. Hell, we’d had to fill their semi truck—hey we’d cleared the roads so why not use the big truck once Billy got it started—twice just to haul off all the cans of Coleman fluid, kerosene, and thousands of bottles of lighter fluid, lamp oil, and so many candles it was crazy.

  In short they could have lived fifty years easy without breaking a sweat… Or you know starving or freezing to death. Their house hadn’t lost but maybe two shingles off the roof. It didn’t make any sense until I noticed a tree had blown over in the back yard. It was a big one, and when I went to take a closer look I realized that the trunk was lying across the door of their storm shelter. I’d called Lucy over to me and pointed.

  “There’s the answer to the question ‘where the hell are the owners’? Harsh irony—their home and all the dozens of buildings that made up their business were basically untouched.”

  “The roofs on all the big buildings caved in,” Lucy pointed out.

  “But that was the snow, baby, not the tornado. And if those buildings hadn’t been so quickly and cheaply shucked together they would have been fine.”

  “Are you sure they’re in there?” Lucy asked.

  “Would you like me to get the crew over here with some chain saws to see?”

  Lucy shook her head no.

  “Where else would they be? They ran in their storm shelter to get away from the storm and the only damage from the storm that I can see is that damn tree blew over on top of the door to the storm shelter, trapping them inside.”

  Lucy got that look on her face—the one I’ve come to expect will be followed by her saying... “But you don’t believe in fate.”

  “Christ Lucy,” I said. I started walking away to go back to work moving boxes of something or tearing something down so that it could be rebuilt somewhere else. I don’t really remember what I was doing at the time only that Lucy followed me so that she could go on and on with her rant about fate.

  “We find my car and my glasses, and everything else I had with me might as well have been stuck in some time capsule they were so pristine. That’s not fate. These people had everything. If they had lived they could have been the king of everything instead of you. We sure as hell couldn’t just come here and take everything. It’s got to mean something.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, it means they had some really shitty luck. That’s what it means.”

  She stomped off to do something away from me because she was pissed off that I wouldn’t just agree with her stupid-assed fate bullshit. I just didn’t get it. I was the crazy, irrational one. Wasn’t she the investigative reporter? Wasn’t she supposed to be all-logical and crap? If anyone was going to believe in fairytale bullshit it should have been me. She was creeping onto my turf insisting that things were meant to be and happened for a reason and such utter crap as that.

  When we left for the last time having taken everything from furniture—which was the last load and got left in the truck—to sporting goods that we thought might be remotely useful I looked at the main house that we’d left intact… and that tree on the top of the storm cellar.

  As if reading my mind Lucy said, “You can’t just explain that away even in your own mind can you, Kay?”

  “I already did. Now shut up and get on the four wheeler,” I ordered. But I was smiling when I said it.

  As soon as we were all through salvaging stuff, I had Billy take the dozer blade, tilt it, and rip a six-foot ditch in the middle of the road. See I was still worried about survivalists. We ditched every road, paved or dirt, coming into Rudy in the same way. If we wanted out we could take the dozer and smooth it out for the day. Otherwise we were closed off.

  I drew up plans of simple, one-family homes the Rudyites could build using the best storm cellars they could find as a base. See the idea was to still have that ’fraidy hole because… Well, all of those who had made it through the storm had done so in their storm cellars. I figured that if they each built small, efficient homes over storm cellars, they would never have to run outside if a storm headed our way. It also meant the storm cellars were much less likely to fill with water. The houses were built to hold no more than four small rooms and a bathroom. A wood stove went in the middle of each house.

  The plans were simple: two steel walls were held up with metal posts—usually metal T-posts every two feet, then the space between was filled with a la
yer of brick, rock, or other such hard, broken debris six inches deep, then six inches of dirt was thrown on top of that and pounded down. Up to six foot. We had lots of windows because while a lot got broken just as many didn’t. Hell, at the time we started building the new homes there were still houses that had that weird tornado look where the whole house was gone but this one wall with a window still intact. Three feet of windows—or as close as what we could find would allow—two thick, were set on top of the south wall, framed out, and topped with a good, strong header. We made shutters that accordioned on either side of the windows made from the metal shelving we’d taken from All ‘n More. Close the shutters when a storm was coming and I was fairly sure the houses were more or less tornado proof.

  The roofs were a simple lean-to job. They were constructed by laying steel across the whole thing then laying the joists out on top of that. We had plenty of wood to work with. There was torn and blown pink insulation everywhere you looked so we “harvested” this and we would fill the spaces between the joists completely full of it and then lay another layer of steel over that. When we had finished the shell of the house as a community, the individual families went in and put in the interior walls and fixed it the way they wanted it. This included putting in a floor, which most of them did out of bricks—because we had loads of those—but a couple of people did theirs out of stone.

  To figure out who got digs first they all put their names into a hat and they built the houses for the families in the order they drew them out of the hat. There was more than enough building materials between what was left of the steel buildings we’d salvaged at the railroad damaged place and all of the materials that could be scavenged from the trashed houses the tornado had left behind in Rudy and the surrounding area. Eventually they wound up gathering up everything else that was useful as they cleaned and stacked and covered it to use later.

  I have to give Roy and those other people there in Rudy credit. They got their water system up and running themselves using the town’s huge storage tank and all the old plumbing. They all busted their asses that first summer and just and worked at working well together. By the middle of summer—with our help of course—they had not only put in and tended the huge community garden and built a barn and pens for livestock which they’d be getting from me and from Matt, but they’d also all built their own homes and had managed to clean up most of the wreckage of their town. They made the church into a recreation center. They put the pews back and they were still watching movies there, but they were also getting together to play instruments and sing together and they were talking about trying to do a play. So far no one has talked about starting a church, thank God.

  They salvaged what they could and put both the baseball field and the playground back together.

  Oh we still had lots that needed to be done and lots we wanted to do but even if winter slammed us early and hard we’d all be alright. We helped Matt fix up some stuff on his place and rigged him up with a windmill. We were working on a hydroelectric plant for Rudy. For the time being we still had plenty of gas to run generators—and more generators than we’d ever be able to use—to run power tools, chain saws and such. But eventually even I would run out of gas, and I had a bigger tank than the one that had sat damn near under the store.

  You don’t wait till you’re down to your last gallon of gas to work on alternate energy. You do it when you have the time to screw up a couple of times before you get it right.

  That’s something we learned the hard way.

  Eventually everything would need to run on electricity created by the wind, sun or water. Things like trucks and four wheelers and tractors would have to be converted over to run on methane.

  We had all the stuff to do it with. We just had to get it done.

  It had always been my experience that a good snow in the winter meant good crops in the summer, but I’d never seen plants grow before or since like they did that summer. Matt said the same thing. No doubt all of that crap that had been in the air and had fallen to earth helped the plants grow. I checked and… Well, it wasn’t radioactive and no one died from eating the food so it must have been alright.

  One night Matt and Jenny had come over on the tractor to trade us some sweet potatoes for some chicks. He’d built him a hen house and said he was ready for them.

  See, I’d hooked that incubator up and me and those Silkies were just cranking out chickens. The town needed at least three dozen chickens of their own, Matt and his family needed four hens, and there were a couple of other groups I was talking to that were close enough to trade with who wanted some, too.

  We’d had dinner together and then all walked outside to sit in some lawn chairs in the gazebo by the pond.

  “No fish in the creek,” Matt said, no doubt seeing a fish jump in the pond.

  “I noticed. There were a lot of dead ones in all my ponds, but a few lived, and I re-stocked them from the river in the house. I get back up where I need to be fish-wise and I’ll sling some in the creek,” I said.

  “No mosquitoes?” Matt said.

  “A few, not many. Not many flies either,” I said. “Enough they’ll come back. Can’t hardly get rid of bugs. They were here before us and they’ll be here after us, though I haven’t seen a tick or had a single chigger bite yet, so hope springs eternal.”

  “Bees seem to have done just fine,” Matt said. He looked some puzzled. “I mean bees were in trouble before the BS and now they’re everywhere all over my crops. Which I’m glad about, but I don’t get it.”

  “They’re my bees,” I explained. “They’ve already swarmed twice this year. I’ve started two more hives—one between my place and yours and one down in Rudy.”

  “Bees. How the hell did you keep bees through all that shit?”

  It was a good question. Years ago I went in this honey shop down in Van Buren and this guy had a beehive in his wall. It had little tubes to the outside that the bees came in and out of and he had this glass door and you could watch the bees. I built a similar hive between the cement walls of my dome. I used the door from an apartment-sized refrigerator on the outside. The bees actually have two access tubes into the hive—one that goes to the outside and one that goes to the greenhouse. When the BS happened I stuck a cork in the tubes to the outside. The bees got sluggish and went into a near-hibernation state that bees go into when the weather is cold, but every once in awhile you’d see one or more of them in the greenhouse getting nectar from one of the blooms on the plants or getting a drink of water. The minute it warmed up they were all over the greenhouse, and when Lucy got stung I went outside and took the cork out. They’d gone crazy ever since. I’d put back a bunch of hives and when they started to swarm I’d just put on my gear, smoked their asses good, and put them in a new hive with a new queen. When I was sure we had enough hives to keep the Rudyites in honey I’d just let the swarms start filling the woods.

  When I’d explained all that to Matt he’d just laughed and said, “You had the whole thing figured out didn’t you?”

  “She’s extremely clever,” Lucy said. She reached over and took my hand. I have to tell you I blushed a little.

  “I miss the birds. There are so few of them now,” Jenny said sadly.

  “Most of the ones I’m seeing I think came out of our birdhouse,” I said. “Of course every time we go out there I think a new batch of birds has hatched. The birds will come back slow, but they will come back. The bees will come back, too, and in time there will be fish in the creek again. The world will repair itself.”

  “You’ll just help it out a bit,” Matt said with a laugh.

  Jenny smiled then and shrugged. “We’re the only ranch I know of that has zebras, llamas and buffalo.”

  “Yeah, our llamas come up to the house the other day and they had a calf,” Matt said. “Is that what they call the little ones?”

  I just shrugged.

  “Act mostly like cows the lot of them, if you ask me.” Matt told me.

&n
bsp; “Yeah, I have deer that act more like goats.”

  “You see any wild ones?” Matt asked.

  “Only the dead ones we picked up when we were looking for dead stuff. Too cold too long and nothing to eat. No time to adapt.”

  “I’ve been wondering about breeding the dogs,” Matt said. See, he and Jenny for as long as I had known them had raised cattle and Welsh Corgis. The pups had gone for five-hundred dollars apiece. “I mean, there aren’t no dogs except ours that I’ve seen alive but maybe we don’t need dogs…”

  “You know what, Matt? Breed the dogs. They’re small stock dogs. They don’t eat much and you have plenty to feed them. Most people are going to keep small stock because that’s mostly what made it through, so you’ll be able to trade them.”

  Matt nodded, seeming pleased that the dogs he and his wife loved so much they’d kept them in the one room they were sharing with their two sons for the whole cold-assed winter might still be worth something.

  “It all happened so quick none of us really had time to adapt,” Jenny said. Then she added to Lucy, “I sometimes miss my old life, so I know you’ve got to miss yours.”

  Lucy was quiet for just a minute but she didn’t let go of my hand and then she said, “I miss my family and my friends, but I don’t miss my old life at all. I like it here being close to the earth, being with Kay. Sometimes you don’t know what you want till you have it. All my life… I was never really happy. I was always looking for something that would make me feel complete. I always felt like there was something I should be doing that I wasn’t. I don’t feel that way anymore.”