How I Spent the Apocalypse (9 page)

We were warm and cozy and I was so glad to have my boys home that I didn’t even really notice when they started fighting over who was going to cook dinner. I think Lucy was a little surprised because they weren’t arguing about who was going to have to cook dinner but who was going to get to.

“They both like to cook,” I explained.

“They don’t look alike,” she said conversationally.

“They had different fathers,” I said. I was answering blog questions. There weren’t many new ones, and I knew that meant that most people had lost the means to run their computers, but it didn’t mean they were dead. “And before you say neither of them looks like me—they aren’t biologically mine.”

She nodded as if to say she had guessed that, but I could tell by the puzzled look on her face that she hadn’t.

The arguing from the kitchen had reached a crescendo, so I yelled, “Jimmy, you cook dinner! Billy, why don’t you go take care of the animals?”

There was a moment of triumph from Jimmy as Billy grumbled something about the size of his brother’s penis and went off to the barn. Of course Lucy just sat there as I answered e-mails.

Wireless communications… satellites… well there were just enough booster towers to keep that going indefinitely if you could keep your system charged. Of course I was reaching a lot more people and they were reaching me by radio. I couldn’t be getting the satellite images I was getting without the super high-tech equipment I had. Of course I almost wished I couldn’t. It didn’t look or sound good. From what I was getting from the few people still talking and what I could see with the satellite images, hurricanes had wiped out most of the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Tornados had torn up Arizona and New Mexico and torn holes all through the south. A tidal wave and then strong straight-line winds had pounded the Pacific coast. I didn’t even bother to look and see what was happening to the rest of the planet, but I doubted they were faring much better.

See, the planet is all connected, and all of these faults and volcanoes… Well they have been rumbling and not going off and a big one could happen at any minute and… Dominos. People seem to forget that the world is all connected. That when you’re talking fault lines or major volcanic eruptions… Well islands have been born or died all the way across the globe from major geological events. You get more than one started by man-made stupidity, and you’ve got instant Armageddon. It was going to take the Earth a while to settle from this, and even I didn’t know how long it might take or even when the dominos might stop falling.

Suddenly Lucy was franticly digging through my left pocket.

“What the fuck!” I said, making an off key stroke that had me telling someone to shit tight.

“Can I use your phone?” Lucy asked, as she fished it from my pocket.

“Yeah, but I think you need to kiss me now,” I mumbled, and fixed the whole shit problem.

Lucy started hitting numbers. She must have realized that cell phones would still work for a while and that she knew people she could try to call. I half watched her as I worked. No one was answering. That was obvious because she was either saying nothing or leaving messages and giving out my number. Every time she looked a little closer to absolute panic.

See? That’s what grief does to you. It’s not about the dead person. It’s about you, what you’ve lost, and that feeling that you’re all alone in the world. That’s what Lucy was finding out as she went through those numbers of people she called so much she had their numbers memorized. I’d had no friends like that in years. I hated my family because they hated me, but when Cindy died… Well let’s just say I knew how she must be feeling calling people who weren’t answering and probably weren’t ever going to.

The world was coming to an end, and we might survive—in fact I was pretty sure we would—but the world would never be the same again. It was all sort of surreal then, me just going through what I’d planned to do for years. Fixing what had to be fixed, staying warm, trying to help those who could still be reached. Billy was taking care of the stock, Jimmy was cooking, and everyone and everything I really cared about in the whole world was there with me. But I knew how she felt. That’s why I turned into a total coward, mumbled some lame-assed thing about checking on Billy, and took off.

Of course I ran away from Lucy’s grief and right into Billy’s because when I got to the barn Billy was milking Spot and crying like a baby, which was sort of making all the animals a little jumpy.

“Oh baby,” I patted his back, “What’s wrong?”

He looked at me like I was crazier than I am, “What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong? The world’s coming apart. People are just dead everywhere and more of them are going to die in this cold, aren’t they? I remember, Mom. I remember what you said. Watch out for rising water, fire and cold. Everyone was trying to leave the city, Mom, everyone trying to get to relatives' or friends' houses. Cars were mostly useless. I killed a guy, Mom. I killed a man who was just trying to get out of there like everyone else was.”

“He would have killed you and your brother…”

“And maybe we’d be better off. Who wants to live like this in a damn bunker? No one wants to live like this except you.”

And this is my good kid, so again I say… Why do people think they have to have kids?

“I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” He stood up and hugged my neck. Spot kicked the milk bucket over, wasting a lot of milk and making a God-awful mess, but I just held my boy who dwarfed me and patted his back. “You were right. I think I’m mad because you were right. I was happy. Life was good. I liked my house, Mom. I know you always thought it was a waste, but I loved it and all my stuff, and now they’re just a huge pile of crap and… Well you were right and living like that destroyed the world and now everyone’s paying because I wanted a seventy-inch plasma screen TV.”

So they do eventually learn. Of course it took the apocalypse, but there you go.

“You know what I keep thinking about, Mom? There was this girl named Cherry who worked at the Waffle Hut. She was nice and always friendly and I really liked her, but you know how I get around girls I really like…”

Did I ever. Both of my boys suffered from a not-so-rare malady of young men I like to call penile stupidia, in which the victim can look across a room full of attractive, intelligent young women and fall hopelessly and completely in love with the one truly psychotic bitch there. Billy was always with some trampy-assed, drug-addicted or alcoholic psycho bimbo because he didn’t have any trouble talking to them or picking them up because they were nothing but trash. But a nice girl with a job and brains? Well he could talk to them all day but he couldn’t bring himself to ask them out.

“… So I never went out with her and I don’t even have her number and I have no idea where she lives and… Well I called the Waffle Hut when the shit started to hit the fan to tell her to come over, but she wasn’t at work and they wouldn’t give me her home number, so if she isn’t dead already she will be and…”

I pushed away from him. I let the goat out of the head gate and put her out of the milk room. “Come on.” I took his hand and lead him back into the office.

“What are you doing, Mom?” Billy asked.

“I have equipment that can crawl up a gnat’s ass in Detroit. If that girl's out there, we can find her.”

In the office Lucy was still trying to call people, tears running down her face. But her people were in Atlanta, and this girl Billy couldn’t quit thinking about was in Fort Smith. If she had hunkered down somewhere she might still be alive and she could make it if she really was smart. Since he’d never fucked her I figured she probably was, because if she was some brain-dead piece of trailer-trash he would have already screwed her and she would have taken a bunch of his money and slept with his best friend and hocked his sound system to buy crank… like the last one had.

And he’s the keeper. Remember that when you get to thinking that you just have to start repopulating the world.

If she had a cell phone and if it was on we might be able to reach her and if I could reach her I could talk her through this thing.

“What’s her last name?” I asked Billy, ignoring Lucy.

“Summers.”

I gave him a look. “Cherry Summers? Her name is Cherry Summers. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” With a name like that it was more likely he’d met her hanging on some pole at a strip club than a Waffle Hut.

 “I swear, Mom, that’s her name.”

I typed in the name and not too surprisingly got only one entry in Fort Smith. I gave the number to my son who hammered it greedily into his phone. Apparently he got the answering machine because he got that same look on his face Lucy got every time she made a call and got it—or worse yet nothing. I took the phone from my son.

“If you get this message call us back at…” and I gave her the number. “Find someplace still standing with a wood stove or fireplace. Stay warm. Dress in layers. Grab whatever food you can, find bring it into that room with you, cover the doors and windows with blankets or stacked furniture. Burn whatever will burn for heat.”

I hit the end of the message so I closed the phone and handed it back to Lucy. Between you and me, I figured the girl was dead or would be soon. Hypothermia is a bitch. Hypothermia with a big dose of shock and not enough food or water will kick your ass quick. But it put a look of relief and hope on Billy’s face, and that was reason enough to do it.

Lucy handed me my phone back, and I realized that she hadn’t followed me out to the barn, no doubt fully consumed with trying to reach someone… anyone. However when I said I’d finish up in the barn Lucy followed. In fact, she followed so close that if I’d stopped she would have run into me, and it dawned on me that since she couldn’t reach anyone she was probably going to be stuck to me worse than before.

She tried to help me clean up the mess Spot had made… Why do I have a goat named Spot? Because she has spots, of course, and when I finish milking her I get to say, “Out damn Spot,” which I always think is funny no matter how many times I say it.

As I was saying, Lucy tried to help me clean up the milk and tried to help take care of the chickens and guineas and rabbits. Mostly she just got right in my way. I grabbed a handful of fish food on the way back to the kitchen and threw it into the river where the fish greedily snapped at it. The waterfall was running at the far end against the wall to the house which meant either Jimmy was washing dishes or more likely the cisterns were all full of run-off and groundwater was seeping into them. When the cisterns are full a pump kicks on and the overflow runs down the waterfall into the indoor river. The waterfall helps to aerate the water. The water runs into the three-foot deep, two-foot wide trough that runs the length of the greenhouse. When it hits the wall to the barn there is a spillway that runs into another trough which runs into the barn to water the animals. The overflow there runs under the floor in pipes and runs all the way out to one of the outside ponds.

Now the water trough that goes through the greenhouse is filled with fish and plants and snails. Not cod, but perch and channel cats. All our bathwater, washing machine water, and sink water runs down the waterfall and into a box filled with lava rocks and water plants. The roots and rocks filter the debris and what comes out of the rocks the fish and snails eat. We have to watch what shampoos and soaps we use, but you know what? You ought to anyway. The trough has two-foot walls in it every three feet and this helps to hold the water while the fish and snails and plants clean it before it gets to the animals in the barn.

I stopped and was just watching the fish snap up the food. I didn’t have to feed them much; there was enough food that got washed out in the dishes, off our bodies, and out of our clothes that they had their own little eco-system going on here. The snails ate the algae and food particles, the fish ate the snails and the algae and the food particles and picked at the plants. The plants filtered the water naturally.

“They’re pretty,” Lucy said, and I probably would have laughed at her if I didn’t think sun perch were pretty, too. “And hungry.”

“I don’t know that they’re actually hungry. I think they’re just like my boys and will eat anytime there’s food whether they’re hungry or not.”

I stepped into the “air lock” and checked the temperature. It was now eight degrees; the wind chill was ten below zero already. Anyone stuck out in this—even in a house—if there was no heat source they wouldn’t make it through the night unless they near smothered themselves in blankets and coats. I couldn’t imagine how cold it was getting to the north of us if we were this cold. I did know the front was covering most of Canada, the United States, and part of Mexico.