How I Spent the Apocalypse (23 page)

So she was crying and upset mostly because she wasn’t upset enough and… When someone figures women out I hope they write a book.

Yes, I know I’m a woman, but remember I said I’m a guy? Well this is why I think that. When guys are sitting around talking about the things they don’t understand about women… Well I can’t help them because I don’t get it, either.

“Lucy, that has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” Yep that’s what I said. See? Now do you get it? I’m a guy.

“What?” she asked in disbelief.

“That’s stupid. It’s over; close the page. You either adapt—which you seem to be doing very nicely—you go crazy here, or you die. You know why people don’t get over their grief? Because society tells them that it is their duty to show their love for their dead loved ones by dwelling on their death and wallowing in their grief. Why? Who does it actually serve to be miserable forever over something you can do nothing about? Life runs in cycles, cycles end, and other cycles begin. You’re always talking about fate. Worse than that, you want me to believe in it. But now I’m going to ask you, do you believe in fate?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then everything you just said is utter bullshit, because according to your way of thinking, you’re
supposed
to be here with me now, and if everything that happens is destined to happen then why dwell on what brought you here now and…”

Well I don’t really know what I said or why she reacted like that but she was just all over me kissing me and kissing me till I was kissing her back.

Maybe having sex made her forget all the stuff she didn’t want to think about. Maybe I was just being used.

I wasn’t worried about it either way.

Chapter 10

Even Colder

***

Cold and water, that’s what will kill most people,
not lava, or earthquakes, or noxious gas streaming from a volcano, or even tons of ash and mudslides. The real killer during this apocalypse will be the weather and mostly the rising water, lack of potable drinking water, and cold.

People fail to understand that increasingly cold winters are also caused by global warming. I mean most people don’t get it, but we’re getting worse winters because the planet as a whole is getting warmer. Any of a half dozen different disaster scenarios will sling God alone knows how much debris into the atmosphere and on a planet already badly out of balance… We’re very likely to have a mini ice age.

You can have all the food and potable water you need for five years and outrun the flood or the fire, but if you don’t have a way to get away from rising water or to keep warm you will not live through this apocalypse.

Learn to build a fire and keep it going now. Don’t think you know how to do this. Don’t assume any idiot can make a fire and keep a wood stove going. This is not true. Spend even one weekend trying to keep a fire going and you’ll figure out just how easy it isn’t. Buy extra warm clothes and extra warm blankets even if you live in an area of the country that has never been cold enough to need them and put them back just in case.

Do not take down insulation or other modifications you make to your shelter that make it easier to heat until all the snow and ice has melted and you’re sure warm weather is on it’s way. A warm day does not necessarily mean you are looking at a warming trend.

Cold kills painfully and not so quickly, and it’s a good bet that when you think it can’t get any colder, it absolutely will. If you aren’t ready, this will be what kills you.

***

And, brother, did it get cold that night!
When I woke up it was still dark, and it was cold but when I looked at the clock it was seven-thirty.

I say it was cold because I was in bed with Lucy with blankets wrapped all around me and my feet were still cold. I probably would have panicked right then if I didn’t realize that: a) I was naked, and; b) we had forgotten to open our bedroom door. We had been more concerned with our privacy than opening the door to let in heat. See I have vents to the barn and greenhouse because they are far away from the heat source. Our bedroom is less than thirty feet from the stove so if the door is open it’s plenty warm in there and at the time I built it I didn’t plan on having a woman.

My ribs hardly hurt at all and since Lucy had a fist resting on top of the bruised area I figured they were already mostly mended.

Still the room had been toasty when we went to bed and like I keep telling you this house is half way under the ground and it has two eight-inch walls of concrete one foot apart with sand between them between us and the outside. The snow had once again covered the window, which blocked the outside light—if there was any.

I tried to get up without waking Lucy but… I’ve never really been good at that. “Where ya going?”

“It’s seven-thirty. I’m going to open our door, let some heat in, go tend the fire, and check on the girl.”

“Alright,” she let me go. “Can you come back to bed?”

I thought about it for only a second, why the hell not. “Sure.”

I pulled on my forgotten pajamas and walked across the room. When I opened the door I was hit with a blast of hot air that felt damn good.

When I got to the living room Evelyn was sleeping. Her breath was raspy but she was breathing. Cherry was on the other couch asleep and the stove was blazing, so I guessed the boys had taken care of it in the middle of the night. A little light was coming through the sky light—not much because it was coming through I couldn’t tell how much snow. I decided to check the “air lock.” Out the door I could see we’d had probably six more inches of snow. The temperature outside was seven below zero; I took a double take. The wind chill was twenty below and that was here in the south. A lot of people would have died last night. People who like Cherry and Evelyn had made it by their wits and by the skin of their teeth would have lost their fight last night.

I decided not to think about it and headed back into the house to check on Evelyn and then go back to bed, which just seemed really decadent to me. When I walked back in the living room Evelyn was actually sitting up. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” she said in a choked voice, and then proceeded to start coughing—which was actually a good sign. “I… I need to go to the bathroom.”

I nodded and helped her get herself and her IV bag to the bathroom.

Cherry appeared at my side looking sleepy. “I’ll take care of her, I’m sorry. I was just so warm and so full and I just slept so hard.”

“No problem.” I left her to it and went back to my room and started to crawl back into bed. Lucy looked up at me and made the cutest pouty face I have ever seen.

“You’re leaving the door open?”

“It’s cold, baby.”

“It’s warm enough now.”

I closed the door.

I started to get in bed again and she made the face again. “You’re wearing your pajamas?”

I took them off. Yeah, no doubt about it, I was being used.

***

Several of the people I’d kept in touch
with over the last few weeks couldn’t be reached, and here’s the thing—the ones with radios that could actually still talk to me were the ones that were set up pretty well. I knew there were thousands of people who could hear me that couldn’t get in touch with me. If the ones who were set up were going, what hope did that leave for the others?

In Rudy they were having trouble keeping it warm enough, but they were doing it. I had given both Roy and Matt a ham radio, and Matt reported they were doing alright but burning a lot of wood and sort of wondering if with even as much as they had it was going to be enough.

“The cattle and all those other critters are all in one corner of the small barn so even they know it’s easier for more bodies to heat less space,” he told me. “I closed the door. Figured they weren’t going out in this shit anyway and might as well keep it as warm in there as I can. Like I said I got plenty of hay and I’ll just keep throwing it on top of their shit. Should be clean enough and a hell of a lot better than freezing.”

In Fort Smith at Northside High school they weren’t doing so well. It had gotten so cold there had been ice in their water jugs only a few feet from where they were sleeping. The real problem was they were running out of wood. They’d burned every desk, shelf, and chair they could find and they had started tearing rooms apart to burn the wood. They had already burned most of the gym floor, all the bleachers, and every single plastic thing they could find. They had started burning books and whatever else they could find for fuel, but they had very little actual wood left. Books will burn, but they won’t put off much heat doing it. They were reduced to melting snow for water, and I can tell you right now that doing that brings a big bunch of the cold in with you. They were running the electric heater off the generator, but the two of them together weren’t enough.

See, like I told you already, they made their wood stove in their shop and it was adequate but not too efficient. Even with a damper half their heat was likely as not going right up their chimney. And it was just that cold.

I told them to quit stuffing so many books in their stove at one time. All they were doing was smothering their fire. A smoldering fire doesn’t produce much real heat. I looked on my maps and saw that the new Wal-Mart the boys said was mostly intact was only a few blocks away from them. I instructed them to make snowshoes by tying metal tennis rackets from the gym room to their feet, to cover themselves in sunscreen or lotion if they had it—’cause it holds in your body’s heat. I more ordered than told them to hike to the Wal-Mart, make sleds from the hoods of cars they would doubtlessly find there, and then look for those fireplace logs in bags, charcoal briquettes, wooden furniture—anything that would burn.

They told me the Wal-Mart had been hit by the tornado. I wanted to just let them die in that moment because I decided they were too stupid to live. I explained that hit or not it was mostly standing and with a little effort they would find these burnable items. Three of them bundled up and went out into the sub-zero weather, understanding that they didn’t have a choice and that they might not make it back alive. They came back with three car hoods loaded with fireplace logs and charcoal briquettes. They even had some lighter fluid. They told the others there was tons of it and where it was. They had built a fire there at the site and had warmed up good before trekking back out into the cold.

Yes charcoal briquettes emit carbon monoxide and you’re never supposed to use them indoors. Here’s the thing—it’s a wood stove, a closed system, and the pollutants are going up the pipe. If not you’re mostly screwed any way because I’m sure you’ve all heard of smoke inhalation. Also if the choices were dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and freezing to death I’d pick poisoning every time.

They got their wood stove roaring again, and then they took turns going in groups. They made a total of six trips that day and they didn’t stop till they had everything burnable they could find, a whole car hood load of those memory foam mattresses, pillows and blankets—till then they’d been sleeping on wrestling mats and covering themselves with clothes and coats they’d found in the lockers. While there they grabbed some rifles and ammo and killed the half dozen dogs that tried to attack them when they raided the meat department. Everything was frozen completely solid, so they knew it would be good and they were all hungry for some protein that wasn’t canned since they had eaten most of the frozen meat out of the cafeteria in the first couple of weeks. The effort cost one of the teacher’s two fingers—frost bite—but proved to me that they did deserve to live after all.

The storm was horrible It stretched across most of the US and Canada all the way into Mexico. Europe and what was left of the Middle East and Africa looked bad, too. Australia looked mostly alright. Lucky Aussies.