How I Spent the Apocalypse (19 page)

I was right about the girls’ shapes, too. Cherry was about five-four and a little chunky with huge breasts and short, red hair. Evelyn was probably five-seven and thin as a rail, which made her look taller. From the looks of her I’d say she was probably borderline anorexic when this all started and weeks of tight rations hadn’t helped.

I got the girl bundled up on the couch and then worked at getting the IV in. It wasn’t easy. The girl was so dehydrated it was hard to find a vein. Hell, I was lucky I didn’t get dust. She was so out of it she didn’t even wince. I finally found one and got the drip going.

“We were fine,” Cherry explained, “till our wood supply got low and we had to start rationing what we had because every time we tried to go out and dig more up out of the snow we just damn near froze. Well we were mostly cold all the time but it was bearable… mostly, until we had to use less wood. I didn’t even realize she was sick till last night, I mean she hadn’t stopped bitching since day one so I had no idea that she really was sick… We were just so cold all the time.”

“Yesterday Cherry told me Evelyn was sick. That’s why we had to go,” Billy said.

“You didn’t, and you sure as hell didn’t have to drug Lucy and I,” I said, glaring at Billy.

“Please ma’am, don’t be mad at Billy,” Cherry said.

“Don’t worry about it, girl, and don’t call me ma’am. Key-rist makes me feel like I’m a hundred,” I said. “And don’t worry about your friend. She’s warm now. I’ll put some antibiotics in her line, we’ll get some warm chicken broth in her, and she’ll be fine.”

I didn’t know that for a fact, of course, but having her sitting around worrying about the girl wasn’t going to help either. Truth was Evelyn’s pulse was thready and her lungs were rattley. She was suffering from hypothermia and I was pretty sure she had pneumonia.

“Mom was an EMT,” Billy explained.

“Jimmy?” I called.

“Yes, Mom,” he said, running into the room eager to please, no doubt because he didn’t want any of the ass-kicking his brother had coming.

“Go in and make some dinner. We could all use a good, hot meal. Warm up some chicken broth for the girl.”

He nodded and headed for the kitchen.

“I’ll help him.” Lucy started to leave and I took her hand.

“No, you stay with me,” I said.

She smiled at me and I smiled back.

“Billy, stoke the fire and bring in more wood.”

He nodded and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.”

I smiled and patted his cheek. “No, but you will be. By God, you will be.”

He made a face and started taking care of the stove. When he was finished he headed off to get wood, no doubt glad to put some distance between him and me.

Cherry sat down on the couch with a sigh, a look of relief on her face.

“Tough time?” Lucy asked.

“Awful,” she said. “I never thought I’d be warm again. Thank you, thank you so much,” she said to me. Then she started telling us what they’d been through.

When they heard about the storms that were coming she and Evelyn had filled the tub and a bunch of jugs with water. Cherry had already cut a piece of plywood to go over the tub so she covered the tub and piled blankets and pillows on top of it.

“I felt it was going to get really bad… I just knew it. Maybe I’d read too many of your posts.” She’d managed a smile. “Anyway I didn’t just have my survival kit in there when it hit because we’d moved all of the food in the house, all of it, in there and most of our clothes, too.”

The house had been ripped apart around them, but the bathroom had been left intact. The rain had been relentless and it had leaked through the bathroom ceiling but they’d managed to cover themselves and their provisions with plastic sheeting from her survival kit and stay dry. In the morning she and Evelyn had surveyed the damage and gone to work. The bathroom was still standing and mostly whole and they had Cherry’s car. Cherry figured that it didn’t matter what happened to the car, so the first thing she did was to drive it up on the concrete slab and right up to the bathroom door, leaving only enough room between them to open the car door.

“… then it was all about rolling appliances around. We used the washer and dryer, washer on the bottom and dryer on the top, to make the wall on the north. Then we rolled the refrigerator over and used it on the south wall, using the door as the door to the outside and filling the inside of the fridge with wood. Then I started throwing two by fours over the gap between the car and the bathroom and on top of it. It wasn’t hard to find stuff to work with—it was just torn up and thrown all around us. We stuffed couch cushions and pillows and that pink insulation crap under the car and then we just started throwing old clothes and blankets and stuff over the bathroom ceiling and the car and over the roof I’d made between it. We left the windshield—which was pointing south—uncovered and cut a piece of cardboard to go in it at night. We knocked the front seats all the way down into the back seats and threw in all the dry blankets we had.”

She explained that the temperature had been dropping fast, so she’d realized there was no need in even finishing their shelter if they didn’t have heat. It was an old house and the gas stack in the wall behind the toilet was metal so she’d unscrewed it. They’d each used the toilet one last time and then flushed and removed the tank and the toilet seat and baled all the water out of the bowl. She’d made a hole in the bathroom ceiling, found a piece of tin that had a hole in it almost the right size, and forced it over the pipe and then she’d nailed it to her rafters. They’d been careful to keep the blankets and old clothes they were using for insulation away from the metal. She put the vent pipe into the tank hole but then realized it wouldn’t draft. This whole time Evelyn had been hauling bricks up. They got some mud in a bucket and stacked the bricks using the mud as mortar all around the commode till it was about a foot over the commode on the three sides and to the commode in the front then they set the toilet tank upside down on the back of the stove and connected the pipe. They found a piece of tin and used it for a top, sealing the cracks with mud and got another piece of tin to put over the door. They started a fire immediately and it drafted fine, so they were sure they were going to make it.

“…till then I just didn’t think we had a chance. I was mostly just working because if we didn’t try we didn’t have a chance in hell, but once we had fire I knew we could make it, so we just started working faster and harder.”

They had thrown plywood scraps on their roof over the top of the two by fours and stacked bricks and mud up to the bottom of the refrigerator door they were going to use to get in and out. They covered their whole shelter with the plastic sheeting she’d had in her survival kit and held the edges down all the way around with bricks. Then they threw some more two by four scraps on the plastic to help hold it down if there was wind.

“Then we just started hauling pieces of wood small enough that it would work in our stove or that we could cut up with my hand saw without much trouble. It wasn’t hard to find—the twister had just flat shredded stuff. We just kept getting wood. We filled every space in the shelter and then we just kept stacking it outside the front door till it was too dark and we were too cold to go on. Then we went in the shelter, closed the door, and lit a couple of candles. When we heard from you… When I knew we weren’t alone… I knew we could make it. But then when Evelyn got sick…”

“She’s going to be fine,” I said. Again I still didn’t know that for a fact. Prolonged exposure, not enough food—once the body starts breaking down it can sometimes be hard to get it to stop cannibalizing its own organs and work right again.

Over dinner Jimmy and Billy told us about the group holed up at the high school. Seemed like they weren’t nearly as inventive as Cherry. They were mostly some teachers and students who’d been working on getting the school ready for a dance when the storm hit. Other people had joined them, seeing that it was one of the only places standing, and they’d all brought supplies. They’d spent the morning after the storm finding everything they could and moving it all into the home-ec room. Amazingly, most of the high school complex had been left intact.

“It looked like someone had rolled the chain link fence up and the activity center looked like it had exploded. Everything else was whole. They made a stove in their shop, but they didn’t get much wood. I think they thought it was a lot till they had to start burning it. They were having trouble running their wood stove, so they’ve just been scrounging for gas and running generators to run a few electric space heaters, so it’s cold in there. I told them how to build a damper and how to keep the fire going. I had to explain it like I was talking to some idiot. When I told the guy who has put himself in charge that they could use the tools in their shop to rape the rest of the building to make themselves more comfortable, that they could tear desks and shelves and stuff apart and cut them up to heat with if they ran low on wood, it was pretty obvious that he had never even thought of it.”

“You shouldah seen this guy’s face, Mom.” Jimmy laughed. “You would have thought Billy made him eat a turd. They hadn’t even thought of burning the text-books.”

“They were surely glad for the supplies, and when I hauled out that bag of chocolate I liked to thought I was going to have to shoot them to keep them back,” Billy said.

It had been a dangerous thing to do. You’d think bringing people like that some food they wouldn’t likely try to do anything but thank you, but likely as not if the boys hadn’t been heavily armed they would have had some sort of trouble. See, people always want more. We gave them something when we didn’t have to give them anything, but they had to know that meant we had more, and human nature seems to never be happy till they have it all.

“The new super center was mostly intact, too,” Jimmy said. “Stuff all over outside, though, and only a few cars in the parking lot. Didn’t see any people.”

“Let’s hope some of the survivors were smart enough to go there to get supplies.”

The government and the news had been calling it looting and the National Guard—where it had been able to be deployed—had been told to shoot to kill. Stupid. The fucking government couldn’t think outside the box. They knew, they had to know, what was about to hit. What they should have done was order stores to give ten items to each customer who walked in, but NO, they never believed it would be as bad as it was. They couldn’t because if they did they had to admit that the all-important corporate America was going to fall apart. Since no one acted to control them, the corporations had upped the prices on basic items. Then the government sent out what sparse National Guard troops we had—not to help the people to prepare, but to stop them from looting.

God Bless America. Of course if more of the troops had been here when the shit hit the fan there might have been some hope for people trapped in the cities, but probably not much. Most of the bases got wiped out one way or the other, too. See, just because you’re in uniform doesn’t mean you can’t die from mundane things like flood and ice and fire. People expected police and firemen and the military to risk life and limb to save them no matter what was happening. It never dawned on them to learn to take care of themselves. Civil servants have families, too, and when the shit hit the fan the smart ones left their posts and went to take care of their own business. It’s not disloyal to save yourself and yours first. Further you have to wonder about the real integrity of someone who would actually shoot looters at a department store instead of taking care of their own families.

Let’s face it, when the world fell apart the military did what it could to help people up till they realized just what was happening, and then like every other sane person they worked on saving themselves and those they cared about. After all, they’d all had survival training.

“Huge sections of Fort Smith and Van Buren are still on fire,” Billy said. “Broken gas lines I guess.”

“Or people trying to get warm. Hell if I were stuck there I’d be real tempted to just start lighting all those damaged houses, stay by one till it burned out then move to the next one,” I said.

I shifted in my chair; my ribs were starting to protest all the ways I’d twisted them while I’d been having marathon sex with Lucy.

Lucy got up from the table and when she came back she had a bottle of ibuprofen that she put on the table in front of me.