How I Spent the Apocalypse (41 page)

I’ll beat the dead horse if I want to!

We spent three full days just dragging in human and animal bodies and throwing them in the pit Billy had dug on the south side of town before we decided we’d done enough. We’d cleaned enough of our area that we should be safe, and the truth was I don’t think any of us had the heart to just keep looking. It was like a really morbid Easter-egg hunt. Billy pushed the dirt back over the hole and we didn’t even bother to mark where. It was it wasn’t likely anyone was going to forget any time soon.

The number of dead animals had been staggering. I found myself wishing I’d thought to keep some ducks, some sheep, that some horses had made it to Matt’s. It felt like the only animals that had lived through the BS did so at mine or Matt’s place, and for our part of the world at least that was true. Matt and his wife had a pair of Welsh Corgis that they’d kept all through the BS and as far as we knew those were the only dogs that made it through the BS in our entire area.

There was a lot to be done and no one bitched much about the work because we were all just so glad not to be stuck inside stacked on top of each other any more.

I was of course still talking to the little groups I was in contact with all over the world, helping them through whatever problems they were facing and answering any questions, but for the most part I was worried about making sure me and mine continued to thrive. For some odd reason Matt and his family and those people in Rudy had all become mine, too, so I was pretty damned busy.

For a couple of days after we finished getting rid of the dead we all just needed to be busy and do something positive, so we all went to the other house, cleaned it up and got everything running. Then we moved the boys and girls from our house into theirs.

Did I think they’d all get along and live well together? No, I fully expected that Evelyn would make them all nuts and that Jimmy and Billy would keep right on fighting about everything, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t going to have to listen to it.

I also expected that as soon as things calmed down one of the boys would build another home and move out. Billy would probably be more than willing to help Jimmy build just to get rid of him and fly girl. Of course I was sure that as soon as he could find a way to ditch her Jimmy was going to shake her off like you shake shit off your boot and hook up with anyone who wasn’t her. Maybe that was just me hoping.

Now the truth is that first night it was just Lucy and I alone in the house I think we both felt a little strange. Like we just didn’t know what to do with so much space, so much privacy, and so much quiet. But after we had done the newscast for the evening and eaten dinner we made a point of just running around naked and making love in every room in the house. Sort of like you might do a cleansing ritual with sage and cedar to get the evil spirits out of the house, only we just had great sex all over to disperse the image of having four nosey-assed, idiot adult children in the house.

Those first couple of weeks after the kids moved into the other house was really the first time I’d ever been with someone that I didn’t have to worry about anyone else.

Oh I’m not saying that I didn’t still worry about my sons, or that I wasn’t still worried about the coming grandchild and everything that could go wrong. But Lucy and I were able to just be alone together and not have to get a kid to sleep first or step over and around them all the time. I didn’t have to spend every waking minute thinking how I was going to save myself and my sons from the BS. It had come, we were alive, the snow had melted, and there was now no doubt in my mind that we could and would make it and do well. So I was just sort of relaxed, like all the stress I’d ever had was suddenly gone and even when the boys and their girls were around and they were bitching about this that or the other thing it didn’t matter because when I got tired of hearing their shit I told them all to go home and then… the world was quiet again and Lucy and I had the whole house to ourselves and life was amazingly sweet and good.

We cut and stacked enough wood from trees that had fallen just on our property to heat both houses for three more winters just like the one we’d just had and our winters were going to be bad for a few years but not like that one. I had reseeded the whole property as soon as it was dry enough to do so. Even as I was doing this I noticed that the grass was starting to come back up. See it just
looked
dead, it wasn’t actually dead. The snow protected the plants from most of the serious cold and kept them alive. They’d gone dormant but they were coming back fast. I’d planted flower bulbs and garlic all over the place over the many years I’d lived there, and I could even see the hint of these plants breaking the surface of the ground.

Our orchard had taken some damage from the wind but we’d only completely lost two trees. While some of them had to be cut back pretty far just to save them I was sure it would be back in full production given a year or two to recover. By the time we’d finished clearing the debris and trimming up the damage I could see buds starting to form on the ends of some of the branches. Life was returning to the land.

As soon as the water had receded and the creek was down closer to its normal banks—we knew it was likely it would be higher indefinitely—we took the dozer and pushed the old bridge around to make a new bridge. Now the bridge was a rough ride in a truck, but we didn’t plan to run a lot of them over it any time soon, and it was perfectly good for tractors and four-wheelers.

The snow levies still hadn’t melted completely and the small airfield I hoped to turn into a community garden for the Rudyites was mostly still a couple of feet of mud. So we worked on taking everything—and I do mean
everything
—from the old railroad damage store. We took all the merchandise, the buildings, the freezers—everything.

Now some of the others had thought this was ridiculous. They didn’t understand why we couldn’t just go up and get what we needed when we needed it. Some of them even wanted to all just move up there. I explained that the store had been on a main road. We didn’t want to be on a main road. That there was no readily-available water supply and that Rudy still had a viable water tower and a running creek.

They wanted to know why it would be bad to be on the main road because… as I’ve said before people are stupid! Like I was talking to kindergarteners I told them that we weren’t likely to be the only people looking to scavenge for stuff—and some of the people, likely all of the people who went hunting for stuff—would be armed. We were. And we weren’t the only ones knew the store was there. I also explained that there wasn’t going to be any way for us to just manufacture the things we needed for a long time so we needed to get all there was to get and horde it.

It’s amazing how fast a group of people can get things done when they are motivated by survival. We stripped the entire All ‘n More complex down to the concrete slabs in a little over a week. In Rudy we used what we’d scavenged from those buildings to build several warehouses to house all the stuff we got there. Billy cleared the old general store and the damaged buildings next to it to the slabs with the dozer and we built three huge warehouses there. In one we put the foodstuff that was still viable. In another we put all the paper goods and cleaning products. And in the last one we put all the tools and fasteners we’d gotten from their tool store. We built another one at the end of what used to be Main Street, well away from all the others, and we put all the combustibles in there.

The whole time I’d been scavenging the place I’d wondered where the people who owned the place were. See, their house had been right in the big middle of the complex and like I said the tornado had missed them. Let’s face it; they never would have run out of supplies. Hell, we’d had to fill their semi truck—hey we’d cleared the roads so why not use the big truck once Billy got it started—
twice
just to haul off all the cans of Coleman fluid, kerosene, and thousands of bottles of lighter fluid, lamp oil, and so many candles it was crazy.

In short they could have lived fifty years easy without breaking a sweat… Or you know starving or freezing to death. Their house hadn’t lost but maybe two shingles off the roof. It didn’t make any sense until I noticed a tree had blown over in the back yard. It was a big one, and when I went to take a closer look I realized that the trunk was lying across the door of their storm shelter. I’d called Lucy over to me and pointed.

“There’s the answer to the question ‘where the hell are the owners’? Harsh irony—their home and all the dozens of buildings that made up their business were basically untouched.”

“The roofs on all the big buildings caved in,” Lucy pointed out.

“But that was the snow, baby, not the tornado. And if those buildings hadn’t been so quickly and cheaply shucked together they would have been fine.”

“Are you sure they’re in there?” Lucy asked.

“Would you like me to get the crew over here with some chain saws to see?”

Lucy shook her head no.

“Where else would they be? They ran in their storm shelter to get away from the storm and the only damage from the storm that I can see is that damn tree blew over on top of the door to the storm shelter, trapping them inside.”

Lucy got that look on her face—the one I’ve come to expect will be followed by her saying... “But you don’t believe in fate.”

“Christ Lucy,” I said. I started walking away to go back to work moving boxes of something or tearing something down so that it could be rebuilt somewhere else. I don’t really remember what I was doing at the time only that Lucy followed me so that she could go on and on with her rant about fate.

“We find my car and my glasses, and everything else I had with me might as well have been stuck in some time capsule they were so pristine. That’s not fate. These people had everything. If they had lived they could have been the king of everything instead of you. We sure as hell couldn’t just come here and take everything. It’s got to mean something.”

I laughed. “Yeah, it means they had some really shitty luck. That’s what it means.”

She stomped off to do something away from me because she was pissed off that I wouldn’t just agree with her stupid-assed fate bullshit. I just didn’t get it. I was the crazy, irrational one. Wasn’t she the investigative reporter? Wasn’t she supposed to be all-logical and crap? If anyone was going to believe in fairytale bullshit it should have been me. She was creeping onto my turf insisting that things were meant to be and happened for a reason and such utter crap as that.

When we left for the last time having taken everything from furniture—which was the last load and got left in the truck—to sporting goods that we thought might be remotely useful I looked at the main house that we’d left intact… and that tree on the top of the storm cellar.

As if reading my mind Lucy said, “You can’t just explain that away even in your own mind can you, Kay?”

“I already did. Now shut up and get on the four wheeler,” I ordered. But I was smiling when I said it.

As soon as we were all through salvaging stuff, I had Billy take the dozer blade, tilt it, and rip a six-foot ditch in the middle of the road. See I was still worried about survivalists. We ditched every road, paved or dirt, coming into Rudy in the same way. If we wanted out we could take the dozer and smooth it out for the day. Otherwise we were closed off.

I drew up plans of simple, one-family homes the Rudyites could build using the best storm cellars they could find as a base. See the idea was to still have that ’fraidy hole because… Well, all of those who had made it through the storm had done so in their storm cellars. I figured that if they each built small, efficient homes over storm cellars, they would never have to run outside if a storm headed our way. It also meant the storm cellars were much less likely to fill with water. The houses were built to hold no more than four small rooms and a bathroom. A wood stove went in the middle of each house.

The plans were simple: two steel walls were held up with metal posts—usually metal T-posts every two feet, then the space between was filled with a layer of brick, rock, or other such hard, broken debris six inches deep, then six inches of dirt was thrown on top of that and pounded down. Up to six foot. We had lots of windows because while a lot got broken just as many didn’t. Hell, at the time we started building the new homes there were still houses that had that weird tornado look where the whole house was gone but this one wall with a window still intact. Three feet of windows—or as close as what we could find would allow—two thick, were set on top of the south wall, framed out, and topped with a good, strong header. We made shutters that accordioned on either side of the windows made from the metal shelving we’d taken from All ‘n More. Close the shutters when a storm was coming and I was fairly sure the houses were more or less tornado proof.