How I Spent the Apocalypse (20 page)

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She kissed me on the cheek, my face turned bright red, and she sat down.

Jimmy and Billy exchanged a look and giggled.

“Fuck you boys!” I said angrily. “It isn’t any of your damn business what I do. If you don’t stop riding me I’m going to grab you and kiss you right on the mouth and you know damn good and well what I’ve been doing.”

“God,” Jimmy said, holding his hands over his ears. “I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get that image out of my head.”

Billy just looked at me, his face blank.

“What?” I demanded.

“I can’t believe you said that,” Billy said, making a face. “I’m pretty sure that your mom isn’t supposed to say things like that.”

Lucy laughed, and I just kept eating. About the only way to stop those fuckers from teasing the living shit out of me when I have a girlfriend is to say something that will just completely gross them out. To tell the honest truth I don’t think the boys have ever been comfortable with me being with anyone who wasn’t their mother.

When they were younger they’d just flat tell me they didn’t like… Well anyone I dated. As they got older and their own hormones started running their bodies I think they realized that I was never going to be happy unless I had a woman, but it still made them uncomfortable. They wanted to be alright with it because they knew it was stupid to expect me to be celibate, but part of them was always going to feel like I was cheating on their mom so they teased me and teased whoever I was with because to them that said they were alright with it.

“So, did you wind up sleeping in the car or in the bathroom?” I asked Cherry, changing the subject as I downed four of the ibuprofen.

“The stove worked good, but it smoked pretty bad, so we slept in the car wrapped around our rocks and each other right up till our wood started getting low and we realized we couldn’t stay out in the weather long enough to get enough wood to make it worth getting that cold. Then we moved into the bathroom and of course the smoke wasn’t as bad only because we couldn’t afford to burn much wood to make smoke. The last few days have really sucked and then Evelyn got sick and it’s…” Her voice broke. “If they didn’t come get us we wouldn’t have made it.”

And this was no doubt why Billy had insisted on going today. And here was the thing—Cherry had used her head. She’d worked hard and done everything right. There just hadn’t been enough time to get enough wood to carry them through. And this was here where it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was up north. Other places might not have had tornados, but there was no area of the country that hadn’t been hit with something, and now there was this blizzard, this cascade of ice and snow. A lot of people who did everything right still wound up dead because—short of spending your whole life getting ready like I had—you just couldn’t be prepared for something like a winter that will not stop.

And we weren’t done with the winter weather, not by a long shot. The alarm went off and we all jumped. Someone was at the gate.

Chapter 9

The Barter System

           
***

In the post-apocalyptic world. paper money
won’t be worth shit and all those people that hedged with gold or precious stones might as well have collected river rocks and turds. The only things that are going to have value are the things people really need—the things that will help them survive.

Food, matches, hand tools, nails, screws, bolts, generators. If you know someone has extra of something you need, don’t try to take it by force. Find something they might need that you have and offer to make a trade. Then everyone is happy. Make allies not enemies.

That will be the new world, a world run on the value of an egg and a hammer head—necessities not bullshit.

The generation of people who always cared more about the way things looked than the way things really are, well they will have been wiped completely out and ALL that’s going to matter are things that are exactly what they seem to be.

***

I went to the monitor and there was Matt
Peters on his tractor.

“Jimmy, it’s Matt. Gear up and go down to the gate and let him in. Take your gun just in case. Bring him round to the front door.”

Jimmy grumbled some but turned on his heel and started for his coveralls and the four-wheeler in the shop.

“How can you tell who it is?” Lucy asked, looking at the image of the bundled up man on the monitor.

“Honey round here you know a man by three things his truck, his dog or his tractor.”

Billy went back to the table to finish eating. “So… are they going to be alright with… us?” Lucy asked at my shoulder, I didn’t pretend I didn’t know who she was talking about.

“They’re fine.” I wasn’t about to tell her what I just told you. Besides let me tell you something. People pretend to be alright with something long enough they wind up really being alright with it and it didn’t matter anyway. I wasn’t going to quit having sex with Lucy just because it made the boys a little uncomfortable. In fact the way I felt about the little shit heads right in that moment that just made it all the more appealing.

“What’s he want?” Lucy asked, and while she didn’t come right out and say it, you could hear in her voice that she hoped it wasn’t to live here. It was a small house and with today’s additions I was already starting to feel the squeeze. Even if I was it’s for sure that Lucy was

“He’s not staying,” I said, and she let out a sigh of relief. “I like him, but not that much.” I watched as Jimmy let him in the gate then kept him on camera till they got to the house. I grabbed my gun, stuck it in my pocket, and went to the front door. Lucy followed. “All this crap is sort of ruining our honeymoon isn’t it?”

Lucy laughed. “It’s a little annoying, but after all you are the king of the world now.”

“King of the world… I think I like that.” I made Lucy stay inside when I went to open the air lock door. When I did Matt came lumbering in. “Leave your rifle and your gun here,” I told him. The part that was his head sort of nodded and he put the rifle down as I closed the airlock door. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear through the layers of scarf he had wrapped around his head and then he took off one of his gloves, pulled his gun out of his pocket, and laid it on a shelf there. I saw he’d worn sunglasses to keep from getting snow blind and felt some better about what I’d paid for those fog-proof goggles when I saw he actually had frost on his glasses—and remember this was the warm day. “Come on in and strip by the stove.”

People have a tendency to want to strip gear that’s snow or ice covered outside so that it doesn’t get all over the house or because they figure it isn’t doing them any good and they’ll be warmer without it. WRONG! You expose already cold skin to super-cold air and it’s a good way to destroy several layers of skin immediately.

He started stripping layers and when he got his head clear he said, “Looks like you’ve got a full house.”

“Yep, no more room in the inn.”

“What’s she got?” he asked, pointing at Evelyn.

“Don’t worry. Its exposure, nothing catching,” I said. “So how’d you fair?”

“House didn’t take a lick of damage. Neither did the barn. Fact my place didn’t get hit as bad as yours did and me and my boys spent that whole first day cutting wood and stacking it in the boys’ bedrooms—my wife just pitching a living fit the whole time she was helping us do it.

“I have an insane amount of hay because… Well, who’s going to come buy it now?” Matt cut hay and had supplied every feed store in the area for years. “I’m missing a bunch of cows and I know some are dead because we’ve already found and butchered some but I think some just might have run off. I’ve got fences down everywhere. Damndest thing though…” He laughed; he’s a big guy with a good sense of humor. “…I’ve picked up five zebras, two llamas, and four buffalo. Guess from up there on the road. They’re mostly as tame as my cattle and they are just hanging around there with them eating hay. Took the cows a couple of days to get used to them but now they’re just all laying around the feed lot together like it’s normal. Drink a lot and I have to fill the water in the barn every day, but there’s plenty of water in the well and it’s good for me and the boys to pull water out of the well. Only takes us about thirty minutes a day to get enough water for us and all the animals and… Well it’s about the only exercise we get and… Well if we run out of beef before the weather clears I figure we can eat those critters just as well and if not… Well might not hurt to have our new world have some of those critters in it.”

There had been a guy with about eighty acres all under six-foot chain link with barbed wire on the top who had kept all sorts of exotic animals. I don’t think there was any doubt that this was where Matt’s refugees had come from.

“I’ve got all the cattle we had to butcher just cut up and sitting in bags in our garage, even with the door closed they are all frozen solid, so the garage makes a damn good freezer.”

“So what can I do for you?” I asked.

“Well we’re running low on human provisions… except for meat. When we heard you saying on the radio yesterday that there was going to be a break in the weather Jenny made a list and told me to get over here and see if you wouldn’t trade me a butchered cow for it. The beef is in the trailer behind my tractor.”

“Sure. What you need?”

He handed me the list. It all made sense. Sugar, flour, corn meal, salt, eggs, milk, cheese, floor. Then there was the last entry, “Gloves,” written in someone else’s hand in big block letters. Matt must have seen me smile when I read it because he said, “My oldest boy put that there. He has some jersey gloves but that really isn’t enough in this.”

“Not a problem, anything else you can think of that I might have that you might need?”

“Snow shovel,” he said with a shrug.

“Done… Boys!”

Jimmy grumbled something about never getting to finish his dinner. Then there was a slapping sound and he let out a yelp and then Billy was muttering something about not making me mad because they were in enough trouble as it was.

Billy and Jimmy walked in the room, Jimmy rubbing his arm and staring holes in his brother’s back.

“Boys get the beef out of Matt’s trailer and put it in the cold room.” It is what it sounds like—it’s a small room I built into the north side of the storage room. It has an old freezer door to get into it. Inside is my freezer and there is a two-foot hole that is covered in screen and steel bars two feet off the ground that goes into a tunnel that goes to the outside of the complex mound where it catches wind. The room is always cool, the idea being that freezers have thermostats and the colder it is the less they work. My freezer, well it’s on a switch and any time the temperature in that room drops below twenty degrees it shuts it off altogether. “Just put it in the room on top of the freezer. Then fill this order.” I handed Billy the list. “Give them four pairs of the good, heavy gloves and a snow shovel as well.”

Billy nodded and the boys took off grumbling at each other till I couldn’t hear them any more.

“Matt Peters, this is Lucy Powers.” They shook hands. He was looking at her like he thought she was familiar and couldn’t quite place her.

“So how have you been really?” I asked.

“We’re good, all mostly living in just the living room. Boys are fighting all the time so… About like you all,” he said with a smile.

Lucy laughed and then patted me on the ass and went to the kitchen, no doubt to finish eating her dinner.

“That’s new since I was here last,” Matt said, warming his hands over the stove as he nodded his head towards Lucy’s fine, departing ass.