How I Spent the Apocalypse (2 page)

Our government at that time was made up of two kinds of people. The first were rich idiots who used the ultra religious to get them into power so that they could hand the world over to mega corporations. These same corporations somehow managed to pay huge bonuses to executives who had apparently run their companies and the country into bankruptcy but were still considered by the CEOs of their companies to be the BEST people for the job. The second type were rich idiots who talked a good game about making things more fair and who were all for throwing money at problems but who never gave up their big houses or cars or quit jetting all over. They looked down on everyone who wasn’t wealthy even as they said they wanted to help those less fortunate. They made it clear that they thought we “less fortunate” got that way because we were uneducated and uninformed. In other words, they thought we were just too stupid to dig out of poverty and better our lives without their help. They never understood—how could they when most of them were born to money, privilege or both—that some people just weren’t as fortunate. That it had
nothing
to do with being uneducated or stupid, and
everything
to do with the fact that so many of us were just handed a big shit sandwich. They really thought you could make everyone happy and… You can never do that, not when everyone has been brainwashed to think that success is measured in how much shit you own.

And all the while it was getting either hotter or colder depending upon where you were in on the globe, and everything was crazy and… No one seemed to give a damn as long as they could drive their cars as big as houses and live in there houses as big as churches and go to their church that was as big as a stadium. They just watched sitcom reruns on their seventy-inch plasma screen TVs and sucked down their micro-waved, processed food packets in their climate-controlled homes and ignored all the warning signs.

Yuppies and religious morons are equally responsible for the destruction of the world, make no doubt about that. Everyone having to have more than everyone else and not caring about the cost to the environment or whether our people were being sent to fight a war against terrorism that never would have started in the first place if we’d never allowed ourselves to become so reliant on oil. We played right into those idiot religious zealots in the middle East’s hands who, like the radical Christians wanted Armageddon because they all thought it would be a happy thing. Well they all got what their wish, didn’t they?

I wonder if any of them got sucked up into that heaven they were always talking about. If not, Armageddon wasn’t what they thought it was going to be.

I didn’t get to go to college. In fact, I barely made it through high school because as I said my parents kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen and I had to fend for myself. Of course with my family I’d always had to fend for myself anyway, so no big difference except that I had to put a roof over my head and buy a car. That meant working every night and weekend at a quick mart. And like I said before, the time I was supposed to be studying I spent reading all about everything that people should never know if they don’t just want to make themselves as crazy as… Well, as I turned out to be.

Now you might be asking yourself how I can say that I’m so smart and all-seeing since I didn’t have any
high-falutin’
education and I keep admitting I’m crazy. Well I’ve read a lot—and not stupid shit, the important stuff, the stuff you need to know to survive through any disaster. I read about history, what we did wrong, what we did wrong. You study enough history you find out two truths. First, it’s absolutely true that humans are so God-damned dumb that history ALWAYS repeats itself! Second, anything that ever got done that was worth doing or wasn’t worth doing was done by some super-smart, crazier-than-shit person just like me.

Crazy Katy. Folks started calling me that back when I started building what people called The Bunker. It’s not a bunker; it’s my house. Alright, it’s a really secure house, but it’s not a bunker.

Though considering everything that’s happened, it wouldn’t have been so crazy if I was building a bunker.

Those stupid fucks! You ever just wish you could get super-famous and rich so that everyone who had ever put you down had to eat shit and die? Well everyone who was a real thorn in my side and tried to cause me any real trouble, they all died in the global disaster.

Everyone that is except for Lucy Powers.

***

I was way busy getting ready for the
coming apocalypse. I was also trying to talk my sons into giving up on riding it out in my son Billy’s home in Fort Smith and come home. I had my cell phone in one hand and a stack of wood in the other. See, you keep getting ready right up to the point you can’t any more once you know a storm or disaster is imminent. You never say,
Well that’s enough
, and stop because what if that last arm load of wood is the difference between living and dying? Then you’re going to be feeling really stupid—and cold—while you’re dying.

My oldest son, Billy Ray, sighed that sigh I knew meant he was just trying to shut his crazy mother up. Then he said, “Mom… I’ve got my survival kit and plenty of toilet paper, dried beans, rice, and enough kerosene to last a week all in the basement. Jimmy Dean…” My youngest son. Don’t blame me; I didn’t name them. “…is on his way over here right now.”

There was no sense in arguing with him, and the truth was I just flat didn’t have time to waste trying to convince him that this time I was sure. I’d hauled those boys into storm shelters and run them through drills so many times that they no longer even got upset. They thought I was full of shit, and the youngest one… Well, he’d given up long ago even pretending to have a survival kit or any extra food or fuel put back. He’d told me to my face that I was a nut job and that I had ruined their childhood scaring the shit out of them that at any minute the world as we knew it was going to vanish.

My son Jimmy Dean is often quoted these days as saying, “Just because Mom is crazy doesn’t mean she isn’t right.”

Ah vindication, sort of makes me understand why all the religious idiots kept working for the end of the world. I would have just looked really stupid to everyone, and my sons never would have really respected me if the apocalypse hadn’t actually come.

Anyway, my son Billy was pretending to take me seriously while telling me they could ride it out in town, which I knew was a crock, and I was trying to get the door open so that I could put the wood away. That was when the alarm went off telling me someone had opened the front gate. I jumped, dropped the wood, and damn near shoved the phone right through my head, so I was already in a mood when I saw what had become the bane of my existence—a freaking news team—coming through the front gates. I could have kicked my sons’ asses because if it wasn’t for them I would have had the front gates locked down tight already.

How did I know it was a news team? Because it was a shiny new car. I didn’t have many friends left, and the few friends I’d actually managed to keep over the years didn’t drive anything that wasn’t at least ten years old

“Fucking beautiful,” I mumbled.

“What?” Billy Ray asked.

“Not you son,” I said. “Fucking news crew is here.”

Billy chuckled. “What do you expect, Mom? You got on your podcast two days ago and this time no
maybe
, no
might be
, this time you flat-assed announced the end of the world. You should have known they’d show up.”

“Yeah… Well I know you think I’m just crying wolf once again, but this is it, Billy. Don’t you forget that, and don’t you or your stupid brother forget everything I taught you. I love you; I have to go.”

It sucks when you can’t get your kids to do what you need them to. Sucks when they won’t listen to you when you’re right and they’re… Well, stupid. Still I wasn’t too worried about my boys. They did know how to survive, they were only about twenty minutes away from me, and I had purposely moved to the hell which was Northwest Arkansas because it was one of the safest places in the country to be. All we had to worry about were tornados and ice storms as natural disasters went. We’re too far north for hurricanes or the people fleeing them to reach us. Too far south to get really hammered by a bad blizzard. Just out of reach of both a Yellow Stone Caldara eruption and the New Mandarin Fault. That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to get bad here; it just meant that we had a better shot at survival than most people.

I looked down at the scattered pieces of wood. I had too much to do to waste time dealing with these idiot yuppie scum.

I watched as the girl and her cameraman got out and then frowned, trying to think how to get rid of them the quickest. There’s a lot to do when you’re just minutes away from the end of the world. This time it was just the girl and a cameraman; I usually got inundated with a full news crew. I assumed that because of all that was happening they were spread a little thin.

I knew the reporter. It wasn’t the first time she’d been here, and she’d never once masked her obvious disdain for me and all I stood for. I also knew she had to be really bitter about being sent to talk to the crazy woman instead of getting a “real” assignment.

Of course as much as Lucy annoyed me, and as much as I did NOT want to see her right then, she was at least in part responsible for my “success.” You see, I didn’t come by the over three million listeners by accident. When I started out I probably had only a handful of listeners. Then of course they told others and pretty soon there were a few hundred. Few of those donated, though, so the income mostly just kept up my computer equipment at best. I guess what really opened it up, what got me all the loyal followers who gladly donated enough money for me to finish building, stocking and fortifying my home the way I wanted to, was the news coverage.

See, when the second of the mega hurricanes hit the gulf coast and several of the survivors explained that they had survived because of what they’d learned on my podcast, my audience just grew overnight. Then, three months later a family that made it through a group of three F4 twisters that tore up greater Memphis and killed thousands of people said that their survival was completely due to the fact that they listened religiously to my podcast and took my advice. That was the first time the news people came. Of course the fact that I was on the news just got even more people listening.

After that… Well the weather got progressively worse, didn’t it? When flood survivors, fire, hurricane, and tornado survivors all started saying my podcast was the reason they were alive, the number of listeners kept growing and the donations kept rolling in and getting bigger. Some of them gave me a butt-load of money. There was a lesbian couple owned a bed and breakfast and a natural gas well who sent me thousands of dollars. Do the math people. You have three million listeners. If only a third of them give you a dollar and some of them give you butt loads… It’s a lot of money.

But you know what? It takes a lot of money to build what I built, and it takes a lot of money to set up the system that I set up.

Every time I would sound any sort of alarm like telling one area of the country or another to hunker down or get out, whether I wound up being right or being wrong, here came this sexy little tight-assed reporter to ask ole Crazy Katy questions—her tongue all but poking a hole right in her cheek.

“Too busy. Can’t talk,” I said, waving my arms in front of me. The camera was already rolling, and no matter what I said these dick heads would discount it. I think she lived for the sole intent and purpose of making me look like the biggest nut job in all of North America. “Listen… End of the world as we know it is coming and I’ve got a lot of crap to do, so…” I waved my hand dismissively, which… Well she might have been a grade A yuppie bitch, but she was hot as hell and me? Well I’m as queer as they come and had been mostly single for years, so the fact that I was in such a big-assed hurry to get rid of her tells you just how sure I was that the world was about to go boom.

“Ms. Sanders, always before you have said ‘maybe’ in your reports. You’ve pointed to this area or to that, and…”

“Are we live?” I asked.

“We can be,” she assured me as I went to take the windmill down. It’s really cool by the way. I just undo the cables and belts, push a couple of buttons, and it goes right into a hole in the ground. Then I push a button and the steel door closes over the top of it. I had just got them closed and locked when the camera guy said…

“Going live in three...two…one…”

“I’m Lucy Powers reporting from just outside Rudy, Arkansas. I’m here with Katy Sanders, the owner and operator of
Living Through The End dot com
…”