How I Spent the Apocalypse (42 page)

The roofs were a simple lean-to job. They were constructed by laying steel across the whole thing then laying the joists out on top of that. We had plenty of wood to work with. There was torn and blown pink insulation everywhere you looked so we “harvested” this and we would fill the spaces between the joists completely full of it and then lay another layer of steel over that. When we had finished the shell of the house as a community, the individual families went in and put in the interior walls and fixed it the way they wanted it. This included putting in a floor, which most of them did out of bricks—because we had loads of those—but a couple of people did theirs out of stone.

To figure out who got digs first they all put their names into a hat and they built the houses for the families in the order they drew them out of the hat. There was more than enough building materials between what was left of the steel buildings we’d salvaged at the railroad damaged place and all of the materials that could be scavenged from the trashed houses the tornado had left behind in Rudy and the surrounding area. Eventually they wound up gathering up everything else that was useful as they cleaned and stacked and covered it to use later.

I have to give Roy and those other people there in Rudy credit. They got their water system up and running themselves using the town’s huge storage tank and all the old plumbing. They all busted their asses that first summer and just and worked at working well together. By the middle of summer—with our help of course—they had not only put in and tended the huge community garden and built a barn and pens for livestock which they’d be getting from me and from Matt, but they’d also all built their own homes and had managed to clean up most of the wreckage of their town. They made the church into a recreation center. They put the pews back and they were still watching movies there, but they were also getting together to play instruments and sing together and they were talking about trying to do a play. So far no one has talked about starting a church, thank God.

They salvaged what they could and put both the baseball field and the playground back together.

Oh we still had lots that needed to be done and lots we wanted to do but even if winter slammed us early and hard we’d all be alright. We helped Matt fix up some stuff on his place and rigged him up with a windmill. We were working on a hydroelectric plant for Rudy. For the time being we still had plenty of gas to run generators—and more generators than we’d ever be able to use—to run power tools, chain saws and such. But eventually even I would run out of gas, and I had a bigger tank than the one that had sat damn near under the store.

You don’t wait till you’re down to your last gallon of gas to work on alternate energy. You do it when you have the time to screw up a couple of times before you get it right.

That’s something we learned the hard way.

Eventually everything would need to run on electricity created by the wind, sun or water. Things like trucks and four wheelers and tractors would have to be converted over to run on methane.

We had all the stuff to do it with. We just had to get it done.

It had always been my experience that a good snow in the winter meant good crops in the summer, but I’d never seen plants grow before or since like they did that summer. Matt said the same thing. No doubt all of that crap that had been in the air and had fallen to earth helped the plants grow. I checked and… Well, it wasn’t radioactive and no one died from eating the food so it must have been alright.

One night Matt and Jenny had come over on the tractor to trade us some sweet potatoes for some chicks. He’d built him a hen house and said he was ready for them.

See, I’d hooked that incubator up and me and those Silkies were just cranking out chickens. The town needed at least three dozen chickens of their own, Matt and his family needed four hens, and there were a couple of other groups I was talking to that were close enough to trade with who wanted some, too.

We’d had dinner together and then all walked outside to sit in some lawn chairs in the gazebo by the pond.

“No fish in the creek,” Matt said, no doubt seeing a fish jump in the pond.

“I noticed. There were a lot of dead ones in all my ponds, but a few lived, and I re-stocked them from the river in the house. I get back up where I need to be fish-wise and I’ll sling some in the creek,” I said.

“No mosquitoes?” Matt said.

“A few, not many. Not many flies either,” I said. “Enough they’ll come back. Can’t hardly get rid of bugs. They were here before us and they’ll be here after us, though I haven’t seen a tick or had a single chigger bite yet, so hope springs eternal.”

“Bees seem to have done just fine,” Matt said. He looked some puzzled. “I mean bees were in trouble before the BS and now they’re everywhere all over my crops. Which I’m glad about, but I don’t get it.”

“They’re my bees,” I explained. “They’ve already swarmed twice this year. I’ve started two more hives—one between my place and yours and one down in Rudy.”

“Bees. How the hell did you keep bees through all that shit?”

It was a good question. Years ago I went in this honey shop down in Van Buren and this guy had a beehive in his wall. It had little tubes to the outside that the bees came in and out of and he had this glass door and you could watch the bees. I built a similar hive between the cement walls of my dome. I used the door from an apartment-sized refrigerator on the outside. The bees actually have two access tubes into the hive—one that goes to the outside and one that goes to the greenhouse. When the BS happened I stuck a cork in the tubes to the outside. The bees got sluggish and went into a near-hibernation state that bees go into when the weather is cold, but every once in awhile you’d see one or more of them in the greenhouse getting nectar from one of the blooms on the plants or getting a drink of water. The minute it warmed up they were all over the greenhouse, and when Lucy got stung I went outside and took the cork out. They’d gone crazy ever since. I’d put back a bunch of hives and when they started to swarm I’d just put on my gear, smoked their asses good, and put them in a new hive with a new queen. When I was sure we had enough hives to keep the Rudyites in honey I’d just let the swarms start filling the woods.

When I’d explained all that to Matt he’d just laughed and said, “You had the whole thing figured out didn’t you?”

“She’s extremely clever,” Lucy said. She reached over and took my hand. I have to tell you I blushed a little.

“I miss the birds. There are so few of them now,” Jenny said sadly.

“Most of the ones I’m seeing I think came out of our birdhouse,” I said. “Of course every time we go out there I think a new batch of birds has hatched. The birds will come back slow, but they will come back. The bees will come back, too, and in time there will be fish in the creek again. The world will repair itself.”

“You’ll just help it out a bit,” Matt said with a laugh.

 Jenny smiled then and shrugged. “We’re the only ranch I know of that has zebras, llamas and buffalo.”

“Yeah, our llamas come up to the house the other day and they had a calf,” Matt said. “Is that what they call the little ones?”

I just shrugged.

“Act mostly like cows the lot of them, if you ask me.” Matt told me.

“Yeah, I have deer that act more like goats.”

“You see any wild ones?” Matt asked.

“Only the dead ones we picked up when we were looking for dead stuff. Too cold too long and nothing to eat. No time to adapt.”

“I’ve been wondering about breeding the dogs,” Matt said. See, he and Jenny for as long as I had known them had raised cattle and Welsh Corgis. The pups had gone for five-hundred dollars apiece. “I mean, there aren’t no dogs except ours that I’ve seen alive but maybe we don’t need dogs…”

“You know what, Matt? Breed the dogs. They’re small stock dogs. They don’t eat much and you have plenty to feed them. Most people are going to keep small stock because that’s mostly what made it through, so you’ll be able to trade them.”

Matt nodded, seeming pleased that the dogs he and his wife loved so much they’d kept them in the one room they were sharing with their two sons for the whole cold-assed winter might still be worth something.

“It all happened so quick none of us really had time to adapt,” Jenny said. Then she added to Lucy, “I sometimes miss my old life, so I know you’ve got to miss yours.”

Lucy was quiet for just a minute but she didn’t let go of my hand and then she said, “I miss my family and my friends, but I don’t miss my old life at all. I like it here being close to the earth, being with Kay. Sometimes you don’t know what you want till you have it. All my life… I was never really happy. I was always looking for something that would make me feel complete. I always felt like there was something I should be doing that I wasn’t. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Yep, I had it alright then. Everything was absolutely perfect.

Now hold that thought.

Chapter 17

I Hate It When That Happens

***

People are stupid. That’s why it’s all going
to end and that’s why so many people are going to die. People will watch the weather. They’ll hear that there is going to be a record-breaking cold front and that it has busted main water lines in some small town that isn’t theirs. What do they do?

Nothing.

They don’t do anything. That isn’t their town so they think they’re safe.

Would it kill them to fill a couple of bottles so they have drinking water, fill the tub so they have water to flush the commode with, do a load of laundry so that if the water lines freeze they have clean clothes?

Knowing that people can freeze to death they will live someplace and have only one source of heat. Your house is all-electric and the power goes down because of ice. Guess what? You have no heat. How smart is that?

Look, you live someplace prone to flooding you ought to be moving right now. If you don’t want to move just on the chance I’m right that the world’s going to fall into catastrophe then at least have an escape plan mapped out. All over the country there are remote areas that have small cabins in the mountains by a lake or a running stream. Make plans to pack your survival kit, get in your car and go there. And don’t wait till the last minute, either. The second you think there might be trouble—go. What’s the worst that will happen? You’ll miss a couple of days work and have a nice vacation.

These cabins are small which makes them easy to heat. Try to find one that advertises fireplaces or wood stoves. They’re secluded, away from big cities, and comfortable.

You can’t leave your brain at the door and think you will survive this apocalypse.

Do you know why I never say anything about surviving fire? Because you can’t. You just have to run away from the flames. Every kid learned in school about not opening doors, crawling on the ground, stop drop and roll. If there is a catastrophe that includes fire you have only one course of action—run away from the fire. I shouldn’t have to say it because it should be obvious to anyone, but if I don’t it’s a sure bet someone will run into instead of out of the fire and then as they’re burning to death scream out that they didn’t know.

People are going to die by the millions not because there is no hope of surviving the apocalypse but because they’re stupid. Don’t be stupid; make a plan. If you’re someplace you don’t want to be then try to ride out the worst of it and then move on. But move on to someplace you already planned to go and make sure you can actually get there.

***

Lucy and I were up early for no apparent
reason, so we’d decided we might as well have sex. Which we did until we needed a nap—which I would have taken, but then I heard the radio.