How I Spent the Apocalypse (29 page)

“Yeah ours. Not mine any more—ours. We’ll just lay here, listen to some tunes, and talk and then later if our food settles and we have the urge maybe we’ll make love.
B
ut maybe we’ll just hold each other…”

She pushed away from me looked up and smiled. “Oh… we’re doing it, bitch.”

Chapter 13

Making the Most of What You’ve Got

***

Just because you’re short on cash doesn’t mean
you can’t be better prepared for the apocalypse. You can’t afford bottled water? Make your own. Take your empty juice bottles, or even those old liter bottles everyone tosses out, clean them and fill them with water. If you’re afraid the water will get stale—some idiots believe water goes bad I think they’re full of shit but to be on the safe side—change the water every three to six months. Keep a lot of bottled water—at least five gallons for each member of your family—this should hold you over till you figure out how to make the water you find drinkable. Store it under your bed, under your furniture, in the bottom of a closet, wherever you have room.

And people, if you’re sleeping on a waterbed guess what—hundreds of gallons of potable water—just don’t put that treatment shit in it. It turns green, who cares? A little algae never hurt anyone. Hell, some people eat the shit on purpose.

Start saving plastic bags—all those stupid little sacks you get every time you go to the grocery store, all those plastic dog and other animal feed bags. Find a place in your house or in your yard and just start collecting stuff that would normally be considered trash, stuff that could be used to fill cracks or cover holes, build a shelter. Here’s an idea—get rid of all that useless crap that you’ve been hording that fills every space in every home in America and start filling those spaces with the things you will need to survive.

Build your survival kit a piece at a time. Don’t try to buy it all at once and it won’t tax your income as much as that soda you buy every day or that candy bar you get every time you go to the store. As for food items, every time you go to the store buy a bag of dried beans, some canned food, or some jerky. Put it back and pretend you don’t have it.

As I’ve said before, start seeing everything as something else and start putting back those things that might be useful if the worst happens.

Poverty isn’t an excuse to be unprepared. Poverty is the mother of necessity, and as they say necessity is the mother of invention. Stop waiting for the government to fix things and get to work. Even if there isn’t a full-blown apocalypse, there’s a damn good chance that some disaster will hit your community and would it really hurt anyone to be prepared for that?

Stop worrying about things that don’t really matter and start worrying about what really does. Stop thinking your kids need a new video game and start thinking about putting back the stuff you’ll need to get them through the end of the world as we know it.

***

Of course the real problem is that too many
people spent most of their time trying to find ways to get other people to do their work. They wasted all their time trying to make a job easier instead of just doing the job that needed to be done. They kept waiting till they had the money to do it right, but since they never had the money to do it right they spent all their money on brightly-colored plastic crap and useless electronic bullshit and they didn’t do anything to prepare.
That’s
why so many people died.

Well that and the coldest, longest winter humans had seen since the little ice age.

It had been three weeks since the New Year dawned in the age of the apocalypse. We all stayed up till twelve and made lots of noise. The girls all cried again and I began to wonder how long it would be before we could celebrate a holiday without them just having a complete breakdown.

Lucy and I were working in the greenhouse. I was taking out some of the old lettuce and planting new seeds. The plants didn’t seem to mind that ninety-five percent of their light was artificial; they were thriving. No doubt all the CO
₂
from all the animals and six humans was helping, and of course I was still side-dressing the plants with compost I was making in a fifty-five-gallon turn-style compost bin I’d moved into the barn before the shit hit the fan. I had to keep the plants producing at peak because I was beginning to think winter might never end. The sun hadn’t penetrated the cloud cover in weeks, and the temperature just kept dropping. We’d had another small snowfall, but the big problem wasn’t more snow, it was just the lack of sunlight and the cold. I had the fake sunlight bulbs all through the house because I’d been afraid of this, and they was supposed to help keep you from getting the winter-time blues. Even that wasn’t the real problem in our house, the real problem was six people living in a house really built for three and everyone’s different personalities clashing into each other.

Of course, as is often true one person was making most of the trouble. Evelyn was the real problem. Her passive-aggressive, narcissistic, bullshit was driving me and everyone else to thoughts of homicide.

Cherry and Billy never seemed to stop talking except when they were screwing which they were doing about six times a day. Can we say Nuvo-ring? Last thing we needed was anyone getting pregnant. God, heterosexuals are a pain in the ass!

Jimmy was withdrawn and sullen and… Well, basically Jimmy.

The only one who wasn’t annoying the living piss out of me was Lucy. At that point in time I think if she’d crawled onto the middle of the kitchen table and shit I would have applauded and acted like I thought it was performance art.

We couldn’t watch a movie or eat a meal without someone snapping at somebody else and we would all get so stir crazy we made excuses to go out into the freezing waste land just to get the hell out of the house.

But everyone else I could tolerate. No one else made me want to really kill them—except Evelyn. In fact, Evelyn was the reason Lucy and I were working in the greenhouse—just so we could get away from her.

“I see them,” Lucy said, excitedly pointing down into the water. I knew what she was talking about. A bunch of fish had hatched about a week ago. I’d been trying to show them to her but this was when she admitted that she was a little near sighted and that she’d lost her contacts running to my house and her glasses had been in her purse in the car that had been sucked up and blown… Well God alone knew where.

I walked over to look and saw about twenty of the little fuckers. We’d already gone ahead and eaten about fifteen of the bigger fish. “We’re going to have to eat five more fish if those all make it. The canal only supports about a hundred fish, so if twenty get born, well we get to eat twenty. If nothing else, if we don’t get rid of some of the big ones they won’t give the little ones a chance to grow.” There wasn’t a lot of fear of that, though, because the nursery is well planted with dense foliage, which gives them plenty of places to hide, and as I’ve said before the fish get plenty to eat. Cherry was doing the breakfast dishes and as we watched a piece of egg floated by. One of the little guys snagged it.

“Did you see that? It was nearly as big as he was,” Lucy said. She smiled at me and her whole face seemed to glow. We were happy, or we could have been if we didn’t have to live with my sons and those girls.

Mostly we all could have been happy if we didn’t have to put up with Evelyn. Compared to her, even Jimmy seemed like a pretty even-tempered, easy-going guy.

Of course Jimmy was still trouble.

From the living room I heard Jimmy scream at his brother, “I’m sick of your shit!”

“Fuck you, Jimmy. It’s your turn to get the wood. Get off your lazy ass and go do it.”

“Make me!” Oh yes, so mature my boys.

Billy laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? Boy I will fuck you completely up.” Billy had a point; Jimmy is half his size. I heard someone smack someone, and I took off before the idiots could tear the reinforced concrete house down. I grabbed hold of Jimmy as he ran at his brother, who had obviously thrown him back onto the couch. Of course when I grabbed Jimmy the inertia of him moving knocked us both into the floor where I realized my ribs weren’t quite as healed as I thought they were and my back popped out again. Jimmy jumped up and ran at his brother. Billy just sort of held his hand on Jimmy’s head and held him at bay, which just seemed to infuriate Jimmy even more.

Lucy ran in the room, ran over to me, and put down a hand to help me up. She could tell I was hurt and there was still scuffling behind her so she yelled out, “Knock it off!”

With Lucy’s help I got to my feet barely.

Jimmy shoved away from his brother and turned on Lucy. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You ain’t no one to me, lady, just some bimbo who’s fucking my Mama to stay out of the cold. We all know you wouldn’t be with her in a million years if you weren’t stuck here. Hell, you probably aren’t even queer and…”

“Shut up right now, Jimmy!” I screamed, standing to my full height even though it damn near killed me to do it. “You’ve already said way too fucking much.
Way
too much. You ever talk to her like that again or you ever talk about me like I ain’t standing here again, and I will rip your head off and shit in the hole. This is my house,
mine!
You are
all
living here because I say you can, but all this willful crap is going to stop right now. Things need to be done around here. Everyone’s going to pull their own weight. No one is going to sit around and watch movies all day. No one is going to use up supplies and contribute nothing, and I’m tired of having to tell people to do things. You’re all grown people; I shouldn’t have to treat you like little kids.”

“You’ve always treated me like a kid. I’m so tired of Billy always being the perfect one and me always getting treated like a bastard. I’m the one you and Mom made.”

“That’s right, dumbass, you were always mine, but Billy doesn’t go out of his way to piss me off most of the time and you do.”

“I don’t have to stay here and put up with this shit. I’m going to go to Rudy and live with them.”

“Have a nice walk, ’cause you ain’t taking one of my four-wheelers, and I’m pretty sure right now your brother ain’t gonna let you have his.”

“Fine!” he screamed.

“Fine!” I screamed back. I started for our room and Lucy helped me. She helped me into bed, and then she fixed my back. The whole time I could hear Billy mumbling and Jimmy yelling he was going.

“You should go talk to him,” Lucy said as she continued to rub my back. My ribs were alright—just a momentary twinge for which I was thankful.

“Why? Fuck him!”

“He’s your son.”

“Tell him that. He has always treated me like the devil’s own sperm. I’m sorry about what he said to you, Lucy.”

She kissed my ear and whispered, “He was mostly using me to yell at you.” Lucy’s pretty smart. “He wanted to hurt you and he figured what he said would do that. But you know he’s wrong, right?”

I didn’t, not really. I mean Lucy was a lesbian, no doubt about that, but Jimmy was right that if the world hadn’t gone to hell in a hand basket she never in a million years would have been with me. That was just the truth and played right into my insecurities. You want to believe that the person you love loves you and would no matter what the scenario… or is that just me?

“Why did he want to hurt me? What the fuck did I do to him?”

“I don’t have a clue. Most likely just stir crazy like the rest of us, and from what little I have seen he has a very father/son-type relationship with you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Only that men seem to have a complex relationship with their fathers, always slipping between wanting their approval and rebelling against everything they stand for. He never had a father, so you fill that niche. That’s all I’m saying.”