How I Spent the Apocalypse (40 page)

We had work to do, and with the daytime temperatures climbing into the fifties it was plenty warm enough to do it. We just wore muck boots and tried to stay out of the low areas as much as possible. The high spots were mostly dry, but the low areas… Well in the right spots you could sink in damn near to your knees. That’s what freeze/thaw does to the ground—turns it into mush.

I put the windmill and solar panels back on line, which was good because we needed most of the methane to run our four wheelers which we were using all the time. There were trees down everywhere and they had to be cut into firewood-sized pieces and hauled back to be stacked beside the houses.

One afternoon I had grabbed Lucy and gone off to see how the old house was doing. Mainly checking to see if it was going to be good enough for the boys and their mates to move into right away or if we were just going to have to put up with them a few more months while we repaired it.

From the outside the house looked fine, no bottles broken, no concrete cracked. The top of a tree was down on part of it, but when I checked even that didn’t seem to have done any real damage—just a question of cutting it and hauling it off.

I’ll admit I spent a lot longer looking at the outside of the house than I really needed to because I was more than a little apprehensive about taking Lucy into the house I’d built with my first wife. The house that was mostly exactly the way it was when Cindy died. It was one of those things you knew was going to happen and that you just needed to have done, but there is just this dread.

The worst thing I could see from the outside was that the garage floor was muddy. Of course that would be because there were no doors on the garage and the snow had blown in and then melted. Nothing a little dry weather wouldn’t take care of.

Finally I opened the front door. The house smelled a little stale and it was colder than it was outside because… Well, the house is well insulated and it had been really cold for a long time and there hadn’t been any heat in here the whole cold-assed winter.

The first thing I did was start a fire in the heater. All I had to do was open the door and put a match to the fire I’d already built there God alone knew how long ago. In just minutes the living room was warming up.

“It’s… Well it’s mostly like the other house,” Lucy said, a little surprised.

“This one was the prototype. When we bought the property there was an old house place on it that had a hand-dug well on what used to be the back porch. So we knocked down what was still here and we built this on the old cement floor, pushed the dirt up around the outside. Turns out it would have been just as good as our house. Which is good because it means the boys can winter here next year, no problem.”

Of course it wasn’t as set up as we were—no greenhouse, no connecting buildings—but it had its own solar cell banks and windmill, which I had installed when I installed the ones on my house. Though it didn’t have huge cisterns full of water underneath the house, it did have the well, which had a pump in it that fed a fifty-gallon tank so that the house had gravity-fed water. Of course I’d drained all the water lines years ago, so the whole system would have to be primed and put back on line.

“You’re in a hurry to have them out of the house?” Lucy asked. She was looking at an afghan Cindy had made that was lying on the back of the couch. Then she moved to look at the pictures hanging all over the walls.

“Aren’t you? Christ, we’ve never gotten to be alone. I’d like to do it just once and have it not be the topic of someone else’s conversation.”

Lucy sighed. “Yes, that would be nice.”

“They’ll probably still be around a lot more than we want them to be.”

“Cherry’s really starting to show.”

“Yeah, I told her to stop eating so much. Last thing I need is to try to deliver some forty-pound baby,” I said.

“It’s a really nice house,” Lucy said. There was a hint of wistfulness to her voice.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing, it’s just that it’s the same basic floor plan as your house but it feels more like a home and less like a bunker. I love your home, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just sort of bare necessities—all functionality. This place is well… decorated.”

“It’s our house, not just mine anymore. If you want to decorate it then by all means do so as long as you don’t move the shit I need and it doesn’t get in my way—go for it.”

See, that kind of shit is something important that I didn’t even think of. Everything doesn’t have to be functional. You need a little whimsy in your life. I understood the importance of celebrations and music and art as things to pass the time, but I didn’t understand how important a simple thing like decorating your house or putting on special clothes was until that night Lucy had gotten all dressed up and it made something we did all the time seem so different, even more special.

I sat down in my old recliner, which was close to the wood stove, which wasn’t nearly as nice as ours but was still a good one. Lucy walked over and sat in my lap and she wrapped her arms around my neck. “I have to tell you that I thought I’d feel weird coming in here because the boys told me you hadn’t changed anything since their mother died. I was sure I’d feel like an interloper, that it would make me feel like the boys do when I can tell they’re looking at me and thinking ‘she’s not my mother’…”

“Baby, you aren’t old enough to be their mother,” I said with a laugh.

“You know what I mean, Kay.”

I did, so I just nodded silently.

“But I feel good here, like I can tell that this is where a family lived. You were happy here with her and with them. I don’t feel threatened by that.”

“The boys had never lived in the new house till after the apocalypse… You know we need to think of something besides ‘the apocalypse’ to call it because that’s a big word and I get tired of saying it all the time. But what else can we really call it? Just saying ‘the shit hit the fan’ or ‘the end of the world as we knew it,’ well that’s just as long and I’m just as tired of saying those things, too.”

“I know what you mean. What about we abbreviate it? How about TP short for the apocalypse,” Lucy suggested.

“Good idea but I don’t think TP. I mean that’s also short for toilet paper.” I thought for a minute. “I’ve got it! We’ll call it BS cause that’s when everything took a big shit and it was all caused by a bunch of stupid bullshit which then caused all of us to deal with bullshit, so BS fits.”

So in case you wanted to know that’s why everyone now calls the apocalypse the BS. That’s also why everything before the end of the world is referred to as BB—before bullshit—and everything that’s happened since the apocalypse is ABS—for after bullshit.

When we got back to the house the last of the kids had been born. I was sort of disappointed because all four does had normal births, which didn’t really let me test my skills as a midwife at all. I was some worried they’d have trouble giving birth or that the kids would be malformed just because they’d been cooped up for their entire pregnancies, but every doe had twins—which is sort of normal—they were all giving good milk, and all the kids were perfectly normal. The only thing to bitch about was the doe to buck ratio. We needed to be able to repopulate at least our part of the planet with livestock and of the eight kids we’d gotten only three does—the rest were bucks. The folks in Rudy would take one of my old does and two of the young ones and a buck for their herd. The rest of the bucks would be weathered, fattened up, and butchered for food. But I didn’t tell Lucy or the girls that when they were feeding them with bottles and talking baby talk to them.

We managed to get through all of April and May without any bad weather. The usual tornado season seemed to have given the whole country a break—well except for New Mexico which just seemed to get pounded by just about everything. The people who had decided New Mexico was a good place to hunker down and ride out the BS had long since decided they’d taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Many of them had gotten out while the getting was good and taken up with groups in west Texas and Oklahoma.

That’s what happened when the winter finally ended. People who’d barely hung on where they were or who were all alone were moving into groups that were well-established somewhere else or getting together and forming their own groups in places they felt could sustain them better. Most of my time on the radio was spent putting this group or individual in touch with that group or individual, guiding people to places like old army camps, parks and schools that they would be able to turn into communities.

By mid-May it was still really muddy in the low places but all our fences had been fixed and I’d noticed the deer running around the property with three new fawns. Now that the snow was gone they couldn’t clear the fences so they were ours—not that they seemed like they were in any hurry to go anywhere—and I figured if the deer thought it was alright to be out I could let the goats out, too.

We moved the billy goat to his pen first. He looked lonely in that big pen without his rooster, but we’d get him a new one soon enough. At least he could actually run for the first time in months—which he did so much I began to worry he was going to keel over from a heart attack if he didn’t calm down. Then just before I was going to go get him and pen him up again he just went up to his shelter, found a wall in the sun, and stood there sunning himself.

I closed the top of the barn door between the solarium and the barn so that the barn was once again closed off from the house. I then opened the barn door to the outside and let the does and guineas out. The kids stayed in the kid pen in the barn where it was warm. Now I have a big door that I load hay into the barn through, but the goat door is only two feet by four feet. When I first opened it there was a big push for who was going to get out first. There was no grass yet, but there were lots of downed trees and they wasted no time going and chewing on the tips of the limbs and the softer bark towards the tops. The whole world was just sort of brown and gray till sunset. That first year after the BS the sunrises and sunsets were just vivid and gorgeous. I let the chickens into their respective runs outside and they went crazy digging and scratching and running around even though there was nothing but dead grass in their pens. The guineas just ran out—they normally only come in the barn to roost and spend their days just flying and running around the property eating bugs, there weren’t any bugs, so they were mostly just flying around making that ungodly noise they make and causing me seriously wonder why I’d let them live. There was still ice on the ponds, but there was water at the edges and when one of the does found this water she drank it like it was the greatest thing she had ever had in her mouth.

I knew as soon as I was able to release the animals that it was time to start hunting up the dead. There were no vultures circling, so I knew vultures hadn’t made it through the BS—at least not here. Animals tended to run from bad weather when they could find places where it wasn’t so bad—some place where there was food and shelter. Like the deer and wild animals and the birds that knew about it had all come into our old barn, and the llamas and zebras and buffalo had gone to Matt’s hay barn. The problem was for most there would have been no place to go. Even if they could have found some place there wouldn’t have been anything to eat, and even animals that hibernated… Well the winter would have been too long and too cold for most of them, too.

Cherry and Lucy stayed with the kids in Rudy and the rest of us all loaded onto four wheelers and tractors with trailers and we headed out in different directions deciding that we’d all steer clear of the old Burkholder place just in case there were mines planted out there. Now that the snow had cleared we could see where houses used to be and clearly see where dead animals lay… and people. I had insisted that Evelyn help because I thought it would be good for her to see death up close and personal. She acted like everything that had happened had only happened to her. It might do her some good to be reminded what lay under all that pretty white snow.

Of course the first time we came up on human remains—it was still getting cold enough at night that most of them were still frozen in the core so no rot which was good—she had a complete melt down, blubbering and whaling and… useless. So I sent her home because I figured the last thing those kids needed was to listen to her retell her horror over and over again. No way she was smart enough to not say anything in front of them. Like I told you, as far as Evelyn is concerned everything is about her—always.

A whole country full of Evelyns—that’s what had screwed the pooch. Everyone just trying to get everything they could for them and NEVER thinking about anyone or anything but their own personal desires.