How I Spent the Apocalypse (33 page)

“I have no balls, none,” Billy said, and he wasn’t referring to some sissy thing he’d done. “I swear they have crawled all the way up in my body. All the way.”

“Ah… mine, too,” Jimmy said, as if his brother had insinuated he had balls and it was a bad thing. At that point in time I had no idea whether he had finally talked Evelyn into having sex with him or not, but Evelyn wasn’t sleeping on the couch and he had been less annoying, so I assumed he had. But when Jimmy bitched about his balls and Evelyn brought a blanket in and wrapped it around his shoulders I knew by the huge idiot smile he smiled that they were doing it.

I’d laid in enough rubbers and KY to last an army a lifetime, and I said a little prayer that these idiots were going to be smart enough to use them. Imagine being a huge obvious dyke and walking in and ordering twelve cases of assorted condoms. The least the horny bastards could do was use them.

Now you might be wondering why I didn’t buy a bunch of birth control pills and IUD’s and such. Well I’ll tell you why. Rubbers are the only thing that helps protect people from STDs, but guys would rather die than use them. Why? Because they can’t get off? Bullshit, a guy always gets off. They didn’t use them because it meant they had to actually think about someone and something besides their dicks. They were embarrassed to have to stop and put one on, such silly-assed shit as that.

If women faced with the apocalypse didn’t have enough sense to make a guy put a condom on, then they deserved to die in childbirth. Survival of the fittest.

Is that harsh? Look, if you haven’t found a doctor who can perform a C-section for your community, then chances are very good that if you get pregnant you’ll end up dead. See, for most of the history of humankind if a woman couldn’t give birth to a baby vaginally she died, which was awful but it meant that women who couldn’t have normal births didn’t reproduce. In two generations modern medical science managed to make a situation where nearly as many births were C-section as were vaginal. They undid generations of selective breeding.

And we over populated the planet and destroyed our world and had to start all over again because men didn’t want to wear condoms. So, in the new world women will learn to tell men no or they’ll die in child birth. It’s that simple.

Of course fear of death has never made women tell men no, so it likely won’t now. I’d brought a huge box of them to Rudy hoping they’d be smart enough to use them there, too, and they all acted like no one was having sex, which was just fucking stupid and I didn’t believe it for a second. People—well most people—we at least want to believe we have some privacy when we are doing it. The people in Rudy were saying they weren’t doing it and pretending that they didn’t know that everyone else was out of common courtesy, and then I come and bring them a huge box of rubbers.

I don’t expect people not to have sex. Hell, I think they ought to get as much as they can but wear a damn condom. This time, everyone replace themselves and stop. It shouldn’t have taken an apocalypse to make people protect themselves and each other, to realize that they should have two kids and stop. Two is enough for any couple—three’s pushing it, and anything more than that in a world already bulging with people is just selfish and stupid.

In the future when people look back at this time they will realize that the whole thing crashed only because men wanted to have all the sex they wanted and didn’t want to wear condoms or do anything at all to stop the spread of VD or unwanted pregnancies. Come on, men invented religion. Why do you think there was all that shit about women coming from men—by the way how the hell did they figure that happened, a rib? Come on—and be fruitful and multiply—what dumb ass thought that was a good idea? I mean maybe when there are only two of your species, but when there are so many of you swarming across the face of the planet that you can’t fart without someone else hearing it?

Everything has always been about serving a man’s fucking penis. I’m not just saying that because I’m a dyke, and as I’ve told you before I’m no man hater. The truth is the truth. Money and power—it’s all just the means to the end—which is more sex, which is really all men care about. Which there is nothing wrong with that but—wear a damn condom!

Before women get to thinking they’re so superior I think the shit women care about is a lot stupider than sex. Everything comes down to “Do I look good in this?” And not for the opposite sex, no they have to look better than other women, they have to make other women say, “I wish I looked like that,” or they’re not happy with how they look. When they have sex they aren’t normally physically satisfied so they do it for two reasons and two reasons only—to get control of a man or to have babies—and half the time when they want babies it’s only to control some man.

This is why I believe that all women are basically queer. Men are a means to an end, and they don’t care what men think only what their girlfriends think and…

Well I don’t give a damn what I look like or what anyone thinks of me. In fact, let’s just tell it like it is and say that I care a lot more about sex than just about anything else.

But I digress… Anyway I was standing there just warming my ass, listening to the boys’ sudden argument about whose balls were the coldest and hoping that they were both using rubbers to have sex when I noticed Lucy wasn’t by the fire. I saw her cover-alls hanging on a hook but she was gone. I shrugged and started to just stand by the fire but then something told me to go check on her. I mean after all at that time I usually couldn’t pry Lucy off my ass long enough to go to the can.

I found her in the bathroom and the door was locked. I wondered how long she’d been in there and then something made me knock on the door. “Honey, you alright?”

“I’m fine.” It was a lie; I could tell by the sound of her voice.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Nothing.” Another lie.

“Open the door.”

“Dammit, Kay…”

“Open the door or I’ll break it down.” I wouldn’t really. I had the key, I’d just go get it and unlock the door, but you never want to yell, “Open the door or I’ll go get the key where it’s stuck in the back of the silverware drawer and unlock it!” It lacks any sense of urgency.

“What’s wrong?” Billy asked.

“Go away; I’ve got it,” I ordered. He nodded and walked away.

“Lucy, open the door.”

“Kay…” She sighed and then I heard the latch twist and I pushed the door open.

She looked some startled and hid her hands behind her back.

“You hard-headed little dumbass,” I said, knowing exactly what was wrong. See she’d told me the batteries had run out in her gloves about half way through the day. I should have packed extra gloves and batteries and normally I did but I’d flat-ass forgotten. I’d offered her mine, even suggested we swap back and forth, but the silly little bitch kept insisting her hands weren’t cold.

“Let me see them,” I ordered.

Lucy held out her bright red, slightly-swollen hands and just started crying. “I really was fine until I got wet.”

I started the water in the sink going, got it luke-warm and stuck her hands down in it. She flinched. “How did your hands get wet?” Because you see when you’re wearing water-proof gloves and it’s so cold that unprotected water will freeze solid in ten minutes, it’s sort of hard to get actually wet.

Lucy was quiet except for the crying.

“You little dumbass, how did your hands get wet?!”

She cried louder but still didn’t answer.

“In a second I’m going to leave you here alone to thaw and go find your gloves.”

“I put them on the heater.” She cried still louder.

I’d brought a kerosene heater with us so that everyone could take turns warming themselves up. Lucy had taken her gloves off to warm her hands by the stove because the gloves will keep your hands from freezing but they can still get cold. Without thinking she’d sat her gloves on the heater. See, people who have never been around heat that didn’t come out of a register in the floor didn’t always understand that fire burns. They caught fire and she had to stomp them out. It not only burned up the heating unit in the gloves—turns out there was never anything wrong with the batteries and she’s damn lucky they didn’t blow up—but it burnt the rubber-proof coating off and actually put holes in her glove. Once that happened any time she touched snow her own heat melted it till her hands were wet and every time the wind rushed through those holes it had been miserable. At least she wasn’t stupid enough to take the gloves off. Of course she didn’t tell me any of that till later. She was too busy crying and I guess it was then that I realized why she was so upset.

“Oh, honey.” I took a second to kiss her cheek. “There are degrees of frost bite just like there are degrees of sunburn. This is actually pretty minor.” I turned on straight hot water then and kept it on till the water in the sink was almost too hot. “It’s going to hurt like hell, but you aren’t going to lose any fingers.”

I left her there and filled a dishpan with warm water and Epsom salts and moved her to the living room. The kids were smart enough to go away for which I was glad. I bundled Lucy up in a blanket, sat her close to the stove, set the dish pan in her lap and stuck her hands in it.

“Why the hell didn’t you just tell me?”

“Because you already think I’m a dumb ass.” She cried. I handed her a pill and a glass of water and she took the medicine without question.

“I don’t think you’re a dumbass,” I said. She just glared at me. I went over what I’d said in the last few minutes. “Well it was a pretty stupid thing to do, Lucy. You’re damn lucky it’s not a whole lot worse.”

“You were busy. Everyone was so busy and I was mostly just in the way and then I do something stupid and you want to share gloves with me and… Well the minute you would have seen them you would have known what I did and I didn’t want you to see that I’d burnt up my gloves because I knew you’d think I was just a huge dumb ass and… I used to be smart, Kay. Everyone used to say how intelligent and informed I was.”

“You are.”

“No I’m not, not any more.” Lucy cried again. “Is it supposed to hurt this much?”

“Let’s see, the blood in your hands started to turn to ice crystals and now you’re thawing it out. I’d say yes, it’s supposed to hurt a whole lot. The Vicodin should kick in soon. Give it a minute.”

“You didn’t want to take me with you in the first place and then I did something stupid and… I just didn’t want you to know.”

“That’s not true.” I smiled at her. “I did want you to go with me, but I have to say that I don’t so that it won’t be my fault if you do something stupid and wind up with frost bite.”

Lucy laughed then so either the Vicodin was working its magic or her hands were starting to warm up. Lucy stopped laughing and looked up at me. “Is it ever going to warm up out there?”

It was a good question. There was just no telling how long this was going to last. Everything had been perched on the edge for so long and then well everything just seemed to get pushed over at the same time. The little ice age had lasted several hundred years—though climatologists and historians were always arguing over just how many hundred—but if you’re living in it all you care about is that it’s cold. I knew it shouldn’t stay this bad, I knew the world should start to right itself, but all that equipment I have and limited knowledge of how it works and what I’m looking at will only get you just so far.

“A few months at the most…”

“Liar,” Lucy said.

I laughed then stopped. “I don’t know. I hope months, but realistically… it could be years.”

“How long can we last here?”

“Indefinitely if we can keep the animals and the greenhouse going. Of course eventually we’d have to thin our herds down, maybe eat that snake you love so much… We should be more than able to make it through this, Lucy.”

She nodded and didn’t push it. “I’m sorry, Kay,” she said looking at her hands.

“No I’m sorry.” And I was, too. “I should have kept a closer eye on you. I should have known.”