How I Spent the Apocalypse (8 page)

“And the whole time we were traveling it was getting colder,” Jimmy said. “It was colder when we left the house than it had been when we got up, and it just got progressively colder all day long. Just now when we came in, the thermometer in the air lock said it was thirteen degrees.” I had a little weather station out there—everything with sensors outside. It was more like a mudroom than an air lock, but the boys liked to call it that because it had two doors and had all that high-tech equipment in it. Yet they thought they weren’t kids anymore. Thirteen degrees—explained why it had been so cold in the greenhouse before I stoked the fire up. It was getting cold quick and we were running out of time.

“Listen up and listen up good. All indications, everything I’ve heard, all that I know from my own instruments says that it’s about to get a lot colder very quickly all over the US and Canada, so find a place and hunker down. Don’t waste a minute. You don’t have shelter? Find or start making it wherever you are and start gathering food from wherever you can. If you can’t make yourself warm in the next few hours you won’t make it through the night. Right now we have to get ready ourselves. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

I fed the boys a hearty meal and then we all got dressed as warm as we could and walked outside.

I hadn’t been outside since the storm, and I wasn’t really ready for the devastation. My trees… So many of them were just destroyed, bent and twisted, broken and uprooted. It made me sick, so I ignored it. The perimeter fence had held. It was made of concrete block laid so that there were six-inch holes every foot—sort of checkerboard style. I’d had a footing poured and I’d had a six-foot T-post stuck into the holes in the blocks every four foot and cement poured into it to the top. The blocks went to four foot and then on top of that we strung barbed wire up the T-posts every two inches so it was a six-foot fence. It had taken a crew of ten men six months to build, but it was worth it because all me and the boys had to do was dress warm, run around on the four-wheelers, and fix a couple of holes in the wire part of the fence. We also fixed the gate and I padlocked it. This was it. If anyone wanted in now they were going to have to ask for entry, crawl over or cut the fence, and they’d better not do that.

Lucy had insisted on going with us, so we’d given her warm clothes. She’d mostly stood around right in my way and crowded me on the four-wheeler, freezing her ass off until we had finished. I made a mental note of where big trees were down. If things got really bad we might be digging them out of the snow and cutting them for fire wood later.

At one point Billy pointed to the six sets of metal doors seemingly buried in the side of a hill that was covered in what was new grass. “What’s that?” he asked. Which was a good question because it hadn’t been there the last time he’d been on this part of the property. It was, in fact, a fairly new addition.

“Insurance,” was all I said. “Go on back to the house. We’re done.” Billy and Jimmy headed back up to the house and Lucy and I headed for the “Insurance.” I got off the four wheeler and started checking the doors, just making sure they were all still closed and locked.

“What sort of insurance?” Lucy asked while I was checking the latches.

“When I realized it was going to happen at any time I still had nearly two million dollars in the bank.” Lucy looked a little shocked. “Turns out there was all sorts of money in the crazy-doomsday-lady business. Who knew? Any way, I bought six brand new inter-mobile cargo containers. Had a small hill knocked down. Had the boxes put here and then I had them covered in rebar and steel mesh and covered them with six inches of fibered concrete, leaving only the doors free. Then I had the bulldozer come back in and cover it with the dirt from the hill we moved. Now do you want to stand around out here in the cold or get back to the house?”

I got on and she got on behind me but screamed in my ear as I took off, “But what’s in them?”

“Insurance.”

I let Jimmy and Billy put my four-wheeler away and Lucy and I went in the front door. The thermometer in the “air lock” read ten degrees, and it was nowhere near dark yet.

Lucy immediately ran to the fire to try to get warm. The boys standing next to the stove shucking their outer layers of clothing. I headed to my bedroom to do the same. I turn around as I’m taking off the last of my outside clothes and there’s Lucy, still dressed for the outside, and I had to tell her, “You’ll get warm quicker if you take off your coat and all the shirts and extra socks you’re wearing.” She started peeling off layers, and I didn’t even ask her why she was still following me around even though the boys were there to pester all piss out of. I decided it was like some take on Stockholm Syndrome and tried to just ignore her. “You should strip by the stove.”

We warmed up by the fire, and then I went to check the computer. As you might have guessed Lucy had followed me. I had a text message. At first I thought it was from the mayor of Rudy asking for my help, and I damn near deleted it. Then I saw the “junior” after the name and knew it was his son.

Why did I damn near delete it? Because the mayor of Rudy had never done anything but make fun of me and glare at me like he thought if I looked at small children they’d wind up wall-eyed or hump-backed. Hell, once he’d even called the cops and tried to have me hauled in because he said I threatened him. All I did was tell him if he wasn’t ready he was going to die with everyone else, and I wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t insist on telling me that I was crazy. If that old son of a bitch wasn’t dead, he should be, and I sure wasn’t going to do anything to save him.

But it was his son who was asking for my help, which meant the old son of a bitch was probably dead, which served him right. The boy wasn’t his father, thought, any more than my boys are me, so I took a deep breath and read his message.

Katy,

Thirty-four of us have made it through the storm last night. I am trying to get them to work together, and they are trying, but none of us really knows what to do. Can you help us?

Please,

Roy Cockrun JR.

A guy like this kid’s dad should have a name like Cockrun. Though Running Cock would have suited him better, but then he wasn’t an Indian.

I was hoping the kid was a nice guy who didn’t deserve the name.

I guessed he had a satellite phone. Everything else would have likely been useless already.

Where are you now?
I asked and was surprised when he answered right away.

We are in the old Baptist church. It didn’t take much damage.

It was an old rock building, not too big, with a full basement. Less than a hundred feet from a big hill—that would have protected it. My mind worked quickly.

Send five people to gather up all the blankets, clothes, and mattresses you can. Doesn’t matter if they are wet now; they’ll dry. Send five to gather all the food you can. Everyone should dress in layers and take turns being inside. Find a wood stove. There was one in the general store. Get it. Send ten people to start gathering wood. Get all the wood you can gather—pieces of houses and fences—anything that will burn. Drag everything up close. Worry about cutting it later. Stack the stuff that will go in a stove now in one pile and the long stuff in another. Get them started, but you stay here. I’m not done yet.

“What’s going on?” Lucy asked at my back.

“Thirty-four people are holed up in Rudy; I’m trying to get them lined out.”

Roy
’s message came back,
Done.

Josh Wintery had all those blue plastic barrels for sale. He got them from the baby food plant and all they had in them was banana purée. Send five people to collect as many as they can find. Do you still have water?

Yes, in the tower, but I don’t know for how long it’s running out of broken lines everywhere.

Have your barrel brigade find some hoses and hook them up somewhere. Put the barrels in the basement and fill them with water. Did the town ever win their bid to get on natural gas?

No.

I remembered the church had a huge propane tank.

Turn the gas heater on in the church and start warming it up now. Send someone out and tell them to turn off all the tanks they can find before anything has a chance to make a spark and blow one up. Is the general store still intact
?

No, but part of it’s still there and the boys just hauled over the wood stove and they found plenty of stovepipe.

Good have them put it in the middle of the church against an outside wall preferably on the south wall… No wait, it’s an old building. Look and see if there isn’t maybe a chimney that’s been covered up.

We found it.

Make sure it’s clear. Hook up the stove and get a fire going immediately. The gas isn’t going to last long if you use it to heat. If I remember right there is a small kitchen in the church with a gas cook stove. As the blankets come in hang them over all the windows. Use the wet ones; it doesn’t matter. It’s going to get cold, colder than any of us have ever seen before. Get everything you can from the store and from the other houses, wet or not—medicine, candles, all the food… Don’t leave any food out of the church; bring everything you can find in. You’re going to need it all. Candy… Anything the least bit edible… Everything. Drag up all the wood you can find. Break it up, saw it up, get as much inside as you have room for and pull the rest up outside and keep doing it till you run out of wood or strength or daylight or it gets too cold.

And then I told him about not flushing and the importance of letting the light in if the sun was shining outside and pulling the blankets closed again when it wasn’t. He said they were going to build an outhouse.

“Don’t flush?” Lucy asked at my shoulder.

“That’s right. I need to fill you in. Around here we don’t flush pee; we only flush shit. Four squares of toilet paper per job and the TP goes in a waste can and gets burned in the stove. It doesn’t go in the toilet.”

“You have rules for using the bathroom?” she said in disbelief.

“Sugar, we have rules for everything.”

Chapter 4

Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow

***

You can melt ice and snow to get water
if you have a heat source. Ice takes longer to melt but you get more bang for your buck. You’re melting snow… Well it takes a lot of snow to make just a little water. Another problem with melting it on your stove is that bringing that much ice or snow in is going to cool your space, so you may want to do it in small amounts.

The snow will not necessarily be clean. It may be filled with dirt particles and may even be radioactive depending on what has happened. So boil and filter even the water you make from ice or snow. Boiling and filtering won’t take care of any radioactivity, but nothing will, so if that happens we’re all screwed anyway.

***

Just before the sun set it actually warmed up
several degrees and then the snow started to fall. At first just a few flakes and then it was as if they were blowing it up against the west windows. There was so much coming down so fast that it didn’t look real. It looked like movie snow in a Christmas movie… The old one where Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer saves the day. The boys and I were all sort of psyched. We’d always liked the snow. We used to get at least a good six-inch snow every winter till climate change screwed us and all we ever got was freezing fucking rain. Snow was fun, but freezing rain just sucked for everyone, and I was glad that on top of everything else we didn’t have ice to contend with.