How I Spent the Apocalypse (32 page)

And why were there only forty-three people there? What sort of government installation wouldn’t have just had thousands of people milling around making any chance at real security nearly impossible?

It just didn’t make any sense unless… “Gee, Mr. President, what did you do? Did you get you and a bunch of your peeps into the bunker and shut everyone else out?”

There was silence and then he spits out the sort of double-talk shit politicians always spill, “Someone had to protect the installation… The nation must be preserved.” And no doubt that was what they told all the military personnel guarding that place when this guy and his political buddies and all their wives and kids went into the bunker and locked all of them outside. See, military personnel are trained to follow orders without question, and let’s face it, how many people actually thought the end of the world was coming even when it was? So it’s not much of a stretch to see how this played out. He told them to stand their posts and they did, not expecting… Well what happened. Then, once the bunker doors were closed he didn’t have to let them in and so he hadn’t.

But where were all the supplies?

“Why don’t you have enough supplies to last you a hundred years?”

I didn’t ask that, my partner the reporter did. I just nodded so that she’d know I’d been thinking the same thing.

There was another one of those long pauses—you know the kind politicians always take while they’re getting ready to double talk you some more, or making up a good lie.

My mind started working. What could they have done to use millions of dollars worth of supplies? And that was the answer—it would have been millions of dollars worth of shit. I laughed again. “Some crooked bastard said they fully stocked the bunker and stuck enough stuff down there so that dumb asses like you would think it was a huge stock, and then they stuffed the rest of the money in their pocket.”

“Worse. They filled the space with barrels full of toxic waste.” He sighed. “We thought we had enough food to last longer than we could possibly need it, and then… Well, we opened a barrel and there was this green goop and most of them were full of that instead of food rations. We need you to send someone to evacuate us immediately.”

“Dude… Don’t you get it? Even if I wanted to I couldn’t come save you. There is no one to rescue you. This is it. You and people like you said that everyone who said there was a problem with climate or with starting wars everywhere was a mistake were crack pots or bleeding-heart doves who wanted to stand in the way of free enterprise. We were unpatriotic assholes who hated God and country. I can only rescue a few people. Only a few. And I’m not about to use my network or waste my time to try to find someone who may be able to help you and then convince them to do something I know is absurd. In case you haven’t noticed, nearly everyone is dead. They’re dead in part because the government never made any plans for what to do if the worst happened. You idiots filled your bunker with toxic waste to get even richer, and now you’ve got nothing to eat but… well, toxic waste…”

“None of us were responsible for this travesty.”

“A whole world full of people passing the buck. People like you playing with the facts, tinkering with them till they fit your needs. You are up to your ears responsible for this, and even if I’m wrong, you sure as hell didn’t do anything to stop it. And I’d bet a year of rations you’ve done as bad if not worse than filling a bunker with toxic goo instead of K-rations. Look, you left all those people outside. They’re all dead. Get out of your bunker, dig them up, and eat them.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. We couldn’t cannibalize the dead.”

“But you could and did leave them out there to die in the first place for no reason better than to stretch your rations—and that would have been way before you knew how short your rations really were. What’s worse? It’s really your only choice. Peoples who lived in harmony with the land, who were constantly being pushed onto less and less land, they all believed one thing—you should never kill something and not use every part of it. Most of them will die now. Their climate will shift, nothing they have done for centuries will work any more, and they’ll be just as dead as the guys you shut outside. What did the Hadza people do to deserve their fate? They lived on the land for thousands of years and left hardly any foot print, but they’re going to be dead if they aren’t already because of shit none of them even knew about much less did. You and people like you did this. You’ll have to excuse me while I don’t give a good damn what happens to you.”

“Won’t you at least try to help us?”

“I just did. I told you to eat what you killed. Look, I’m doing all that I can do. You just aren’t as important to me as the people who are struggling out there who are taking care of themselves. We don’t need a president, we don’t need a government. We certainly don’t need one run by people who did what you did to survive. You didn’t have any trouble killing those people; you shouldn’t have any trouble eating them.”

I turned the radio off. Jimmy and Billy and the girls were standing outside the door. “If he calls back, shut him down. We don’t have time for him.”

They all nodded and then made themselves scarce.

I fully expected Lucy to at least be a little annoyed with my cavalier attitude towards the “president” and his people but she just said, “What a dick.” And then she started kissing me so that I knew we were going to have to either close the office door or move to the bedroom. Who knew what turned her on in those days? It didn’t take much.

You know what? They say power is sexy and I’d just told the president—in not so many words—to go fuck himself. Maybe that was it.

 
***

For the record, two years later people
found that bunker when they were scavenging for supplies. It was obvious by what they found that the politicians and their families in the bunker had resorted to cannibalism, but it hadn’t saved them. They had all obviously died from some disease—most likely from being stuck in that bunker with tons of leaking toxic waste containers. The scavengers sealed the bunker and put up a warning sign.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

***

The next day went as planned but that
didn’t mean it was any walk in the park. We had to warm the dozer engine anyway then once we got it started Billy plowed on ahead—literally. Now see a D-6 dozer was built to tear up huge trees and dig great big holes in the earth, so pushing a few feet of snow and some tree branches, pieces of houses and cars out of the way was nothing. Still, the going was slow because it has a top speed of about fifteen miles an hour. It pulled Matt’s big hay trailer, Matt pulled the small one with his tractor behind that, I followed on the four-wheeler with my small trailer behind that carrying more fuel for the dozer. The truck plaza was gone but we could see where it had been. One of the men with us had worked there and knew right where the tanks were, so using an electric fuel pump Billy had rigged for the purpose—and later gave to the Rudy crew so that they could more easily get gas from the tanks at what used to be the grocery store—we refilled the dozer to make sure we’d have enough and then we moved on.

Matt’s boys and Jimmy came with us and we picked up five more people in Rudy to help us. Matt said that by God he was going to take first pick of the food, and I said I reckoned on how that was fair enough since we were using his two big trailers and his tractor.

It was cold, but I think everyone that went didn’t notice so much because it wasn’t as cold as it had been. Let’s face it, we were all just really tired of being all cooped up inside, and it was nice to have different people to talk to, even if most of them seemed to purposely avoid me most of the time. I even let Lucy drive part of the way there just because she wanted to I was in that good a mood.

When we got to All ‘n More as luck would have it—the good kind not the bad kind we were all sort of getting used to—it had been completely missed by the tornados but immediately covered with snow, so the roofs on most of its big, expansive steel buildings had buckled or fallen completely in. The grocery store was a smaller building but the roof had still sagged and was mostly being held up in the middle by the shelving system inside. So precarious to say the least.

We decided we’d come back when winter ended and get anything worth getting from the entire complex. No one, including the owners, were there because there was no smoke coming from anywhere and that year… Well if you didn’t have fire you were dead. No one else had claimed it, so I figured that meant it was all ours.

Right then all we were interested in was the food, and as much of it as we could haul off. Of course we had to be careful because like I said the roof was mostly caved in and the whole thing could come down at any minute. In fact, I gave Lucy the job of watching the roof for any sign of immediate trauma, any shift. She mumbled that I just didn’t think she was competent to help do anything important, but I just ignored her.

It was weird because there was a lot of snow that had blown in once the roof gave, but for the most part it was pretty clear inside and we were able to shore up the roof with a few well-placed metal struts we’d found. Cans had frozen and were all pushed out but that didn’t matter because they hadn’t had any chance to unfreeze and it wouldn’t be hard to keep them that way. They’d be fine to eat, at least until they thawed out.

Most of the stuff in glass bottles was ruined except for the oil and an entire pallet load of honey—both of which I had them load first. Matt immediately said he and his crew were getting a case of each. I took a case of each, too, even though I had plenty of oil and I have my own hives that I rob and so far my bees were fine—I’ll explain this more later. The dry goods were all fine, even the stuff packed in paper, because the snow was what had taken the roof out and it hadn’t been warm enough since it started to fall for it to thaw enough for anything to get wet. We just brushed any snow we found on the sacks and containers off and loaded them up. There were huge walk-in freezer units all stuffed full of every kind of frozen food, and of course none of it had thawed out.

We loaded up everything we had room for and headed back for Rudy. You did NOT want to be out after dark. Even though the daylight hours weren’t warm, night was as dark as anything I have ever seen—no light to reflect off the snow, and the minute the sun went down the temperature plummeted by twenty degrees and kept falling. So we rushed to unload. I took my small trailer full of what I wanted and Matt took half a trailer full of supplies for himself and his family. Everything else we left in Rudy in a garage that had been mostly still standing and that the Rudyites had shored up and fixed for the purpose of storing food.

Now I know what you’re thinking, why did I take anything at all? I mean what kind of greedy bitch am I? I probably had more food than we needed. Hell, I had animals and plants still giving us fresh food every day. Well, I’ll tell you why, because I had given a lot of my stockpile away and like I said there was no way to know how long this little ice age was going to last or if what I’d put back would in fact be enough. Our growing seasons were bound to be shorter for years which meant we weren’t likely to be able to grow all the crops I would have liked to.

I figured without me those folks would all—every last one of them—have frozen or starved the first week, and I didn’t owe any of them a God-damned thing. Hell, none of them had ever even been nice to me before this, just ignored me and took their children’s hands and pulled them close when I walked by. I was always just that crazy bitch who built the fortress because she thought the end of the world was coming at best. At worst I was that heathen dyke who they wanted God to smite. Part two of that was that I couldn’t trust those people to ration the way I would have done. They might use everything that should have easily lasted them another six months in two and then I’d have to feed them again, and if I did… Well, I just needed to hedge my bets.

I helped them more than enough. I don’t feel guilty for restocking my larder. Hell, it was my idea.

By the time we had knocked all the snow off ourselves and the four wheelers and had put up the supplies we’d taken we were all just freezing and exhausted. I was sure glad that Cherry had kept the fire stoked in the shop as well as the house because it made the whole knocking-the-snow-off process a lot more comfortable.

We all stripped off our outerwear by the stove and bitched about how cold we were.