How I Spent the Apocalypse (11 page)

She nodded against my shoulder silently as if what I said made sense to her, and I really figured I was the only person it made any sense to because the shrink had told me that it wasn’t healthy. That I needed to deal with my grief. I don’t think he understood that was the way I was dealing with it.

“What happened to the boys’ mother?” she asked, so I guessed she had figured everything out.

“She drowned in a flood. Before you jump to conclusions, no, that wasn’t what made me crazy. I’ve always been crazy, but it sure as hell didn’t help.”

Lucy quit crying then and pushed away from me, so I let her go and turned back over onto my good sleeping-on side. “So you don’t have any problem sleeping with a queer woman?” I asked.

“Are you going to force yourself on me?” she asked, a hint of laughter in her voice.

“Not tonight. My butt’s dragging my tracks out,” I said.

“So I’m safe for tonight anyway. Besides, who’s going to talk, and if they did who would they talk to?”

***

I don’t know if I woke up because Lucy
was spooning me or because it was a little chilly. Like it wasn’t cold under the covers but my nose was cold and so was my arm where it lay out of the covers. Now, up to that time I’d never had to feed the stove during the night. In fact, I’ve always said I could damn near heat the place with a match. I peeled myself away from Lucy—who didn’t wake up—and got out of bed, grabbed a flashlight, and went into the living room to feed the stove. The living room wasn’t as chilly as my room. I opened the damper, stoked the stove, and then went to the bathroom. When I came back the stove was roaring so I shut it back down and started back for my bedroom. In the doorway I ran into something that my flashlight revealed was Lucy, but not before we both jumped and I screamed like a fucking little girl. Billy came running out of his room, and I just waved him back in for which he seemed glad. See, like I told you I’m crazy, and I have these terrible nightmares, and I have roused the whole house screaming more than a few times. I think Billy was just relieved that I hadn’t had a nightmare and wasn’t going to run around the house all freaky for thirty minutes to an hour checking all the windows and doors with my gun in my hand.

“Sorry,” Lucy said in a whisper. “You were just gone and I got worried.”

“It’s alright,” I said. “Let’s just go back to bed.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. I started to hand her the flashlight and she looked at me. “Could you go with me?”

Now I know you’re thinking I threw myself a little fit right then, but I didn’t. Any time I got woke up I have to pee, too. And for months after Cindy died I didn’t let the boys out of my sight and I went and checked on them four and five times a night.

When we got back in bed the house was already starting to warm up but when I got comfortable Lucy still wound up spooning me. I didn’t complain; it felt good. It had been a long time since I’d had anyone else in bed with me, and I was starting to think that boyfriend or not I’d been right about that gay vibe.

***

When I woke up in the morning Lucy
was still wrapped around me and the house was toasty warm. Still I wasn’t in any hurry to get out of bed.

“Mom,” Billy said from the door in a whisper. “Mom?”

“What?” I answered, also in a whisper.

“I need to charge my phone.”

“In my office on my desk,” I said. I had no idea how long the cell phones might work, even the ones with the new satellite technologies. The satellites all ran on solar power and if they didn’t get hit with space debris they’d all keep working long after we were dead, but there had to be towers and dishes down all over the planet, and they still needed those to work.

“Thanks,” he answered, and he was gone. I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten. Worried about that girl and whether she would call. I felt for him, he’d worked hard for the things he had. He’d had nice things, and now the world was all fucked up and he was back to living with his mother. He just really needed to save this girl because if he could then he wouldn’t feel like he’d lost everything.

“What’s wrong?” Lucy asked in a sleepy voice.

“Nothing, my son’s just trying to find a silver lining in this dark cloud,” I mumbled back.

“Do you… do you think everything happens for a reason?” Lucy asked, and she still wasn’t letting go of me or moving away from my back which… Well, let’s face it, the girl was just looking less and less straight by the minute.

“Not really,” I said. “Most things that seem odd aren’t even that big a coincidence when you think about it.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. I’d been on the outs with God and fate and everything else ever since Cindy died, and the end of the world certainly wasn’t warming me to them. If there was someone pulling our strings it just seemed to me that they’d have to be pretty damn sadistic to just always make bad crap happen to good people and let assholes rule and rape the world and everything on it. Then to wipe out the whole planet because you let the assholes run it into the ground… Well, that didn’t make any sense either. It made God seem like a really bad parent. You know, tell a kid not to do things, then make the kid do them, and then punish them for doing them.

Lucy was looking for answers, and she was looking in that place that way too many people looked where, in my opinion, all the trouble had started. People would live who wouldn’t deserve to and people would die. Lots of people would die that didn’t deserve to, and if there was some power that makes that sort of crap happen then not only am I not going to worship them, but I have a bone to pick with them as well.

Come on… if someone can save you without working up a sweat and they don’t do it then you’d call that person an asshole, right?

The house wasn’t cold at all now, in fact it was nice and warm. But it was still really dark and the clock said it was eight-thirty. It wasn’t hard to see why it was so dark. The window was covered with snow, and judging from how little light was coming through, it was either still snowing or really overcast.

“So you think everything that happens just happens by chance?” Lucy asked.

I got up and started to get dressed, still not wanting to have this conversation. “Yes, mostly. And mostly when you check out even the most bizarre coincidences… Well they aren’t all that bizarre at all.”

“Mom!” Billy came screaming into the room while I’m standing there in my bra and boxers trying to pull my thermal underwear on, and I damn near fall over. “Sorry but,” he held out his phone, “it’s Cherry, Mom. On the phone. It’s Cherry.”

Lucy gave me a smug look. I won’t pretend to know why.

I took the phone from my son. “How are you?”

“Fine. Long story short, after talking to Billy at the Waffle Hut one day I looked up your website and me and my room mate Evelyn are hold up in my car. We made it into an igloo. We have water and heat and food, but… I don’t know how long the food will last, and we aren’t really warm.”

“I’ll tell you what… You have the charger line for your car?”

“Yes.”

“You can keep your phone charged off your car battery. As soon as there is a break in the weather me and Billy will come get you. In the meantime you need anything you can call and I’ll try to talk you through it. You even just need to talk, you call. If you don’t leave the phone on more than five minutes a day that car battery ought to last a long time. Is there anyone else around? Anyone that you could pool stuff with who maybe has a better shelter?”

“My part of town is just gone. We didn’t see anyone, and I mean no one. the whole time we were putting up our shelter and gathering food and stuff. I heard a chainsaw going, but that was way in the distance. When we came out of my bathroom yesterday morning, my bathroom and a couple of closets were the only things standing as far as the eye could see, just rubble… a couple of bodies.” Her voice was a little choked as she said that last bit, something about seeing dead people just reminded people how close they’d come themselves. “Everything here is just a tangle of wires and wood and brick and cars. It took the garage off clean and Evelyn’s car was just gone, but mine was still sitting there not a scratch on it. Really…” Her voice was choked again. “I don’t know what happened to all the people.”

“Billy said a lot of people were leaving town.” I gave the phone back to Billy. “Don’t keep her on the phone too long.”

Billy nodded and left the room nearly floating on air. “Stupid-assed people. If they’d all just stayed put, worked with what they had,” I mumbled, and finished putting on my thermal underwear bottoms. Lucy was just looking at me. “Everyone is so pathetic. They were just looking to get someplace with electricity and running water because they can’t even begin to imagine how you can live without it.”

“So… that’s just a coincidence?” Lucy says.

“That people are fucking idiots?” I ask.

“Your son’s girlfriend?”

I turn to look at her, some annoyed by her willful ignorance because I know the bitch isn’t stupid. “Listen… Arkansas is one of the safest places in the country, except for the damned tornados. That’s why I’m here. Billy met this girl. He talked about his crazy mother with the bunker and the multi-million-dollar-making web-site because let’s face it, if you had a crazy mother who kept preaching the end is near that’s what you’d talk about, too. So she looked the web-site up and read it and she’s using what she learned. There isn’t anything mystical about that.”

“Come on I’m sure your son has dated other girls. What are the odds?”

“He didn’t date this one, which means she has a brain. Someone with a brain looks at the web-site. They may not have bought the whole thing, but they at least do like Billy did and they get a survival kit together and pick out the safest place in the house and put it there. Shit starts happening so she gathers water and food and brings it in that hole with her and when the coast is clear she takes an idea she read on my site and she does it.

“The brain is a computer. It logs in items and then uses the data when it needs to. No magic, no giant puppet master in the sky pulling our strings. If there is a God—and believe it or not I usually think that there is—then he’s not this guardian, father, punisher, the Bible-thumping idiots have created. God doesn’t make things happen. God creates and then walks away. Otherwise, if I believe God can hear prayers, then why doesn’t he answer them? If God is everything the zealots think he is, then he sits on his throne and passes judgment, decides who deserves help… saving, and who doesn’t. And it’s all arbitrary because assholes get everything they want and nice guys finish last and they always have. He tests us? What the fuck is up with that? If that’s the way God really is then fuck’em. And if fate guides our destiny then why do we even bother to get up in the morning? Won’t the same thing happen whether we get up or lie in bed and do nothing?”

I finished dressing quickly and stomped out.

See I told you I didn’t want to have that freaking conversation.

I was taking care of the animals when I realized Lucy hadn’t followed me, no doubt because she had to get dressed or she was just that pissed off by my little speech. Here’s the thing with me, don’t ask the question unless you’re ready to hear the answer.

Billy came out and just started helping me, his brother was probably still in bed. Jimmy would rather sleep than eat or get laid. He was lazy. On top of every other flaw that boy had, he was so damn lazy he thought rolling over was a work out.

“Thanks, Mom. Cherry says she wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for you,” Billy said. He pulled a couple of books of hay out and stuffed them into the goat feeders. “She said she can’t wait till we can come and get her.”

“Yeah,” is all I say because I know it’s a bad idea to go get a couple of more people, and I just seemed to be working really hard at doing all of the things I’d so carefully told everyone else not to do in this situation for years.

Being a nice guy sucks. And yeah I know I’m a chick but in my head I’m a guy, alright? Not a man trapped in a woman’s body, not a man at all, but a
guy
.