Free How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen

neither of them looks like me—they aren’t biologically mine.”
    She nodded as if to say she had guessed that, but I could tell by the puzzled look on her face that she hadn’t.
    The arguing from the kitchen had reached a crescendo, so I yelled, “Jimmy, you cook dinner! Billy, why don’t you go take care of the animals?”
    There was a moment of triumph from Jimmy as Billy grumbled something about the size of his brother’s penis and went off to the barn. Of course Lucy just sat there as I answered e-mails.
    Wireless communications… satellites… well there were just enough booster towers to keep that going indefinitely if you could keep your system charged. Of course I was reaching a lot more people and they were reaching me by radio. I couldn’t be getting the satellite images I was getting without the super high-tech equipment I had. Of course I almost wished I couldn’t. It didn’t look or sound good. From what I was getting from the few people still talking and what I could see with the satellite images, hurricanes had wiped out most of the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Tornados had torn up Arizona and New Mexico and torn holes all through the south. A tidal wave and then strong straight-line winds had pounded the Pacific coast. I didn’t even bother to look and see what was happening to the rest of the planet, but I doubted they were faring much better.
    See, the planet is all connected, and all of these faults and volcanoes… Well they have been rumbling and not going off and a big one could happen at any minute and… Dominos. People seem to forget that the world is all connected. That when you’re talking fault lines or major volcanic eruptions… Well islands have been born or died all the way across the globe from major geological events. You get more than one started by man-made stupidity, and you’ve got instant Armageddon. It was going to take the Earth a while to settle from this, and even I didn’t know how long it might take or even when the dominos might stop falling.
    Suddenly Lucy was franticly digging through my left pocket.
    “What the fuck!” I said, making an off key stroke that had me telling someone to shit tight.
    “Can I use your phone?” Lucy asked, as she fished it from my pocket.
    “Yeah, but I think you need to kiss me now,” I mumbled, and fixed the whole shit problem.
    Lucy started hitting numbers. She must have realized that cell phones would still work for a while and that she knew people she could try to call. I half watched her as I worked. No one was answering. That was obvious because she was either saying nothing or leaving messages and giving out my number. Every time she looked a little closer to absolute panic.
    See? That’s what grief does to you. It’s not about the dead person. It’s about you, what you’ve lost, and that feeling that you’re all alone in the world. That’s what Lucy was finding out as she went through those numbers of people she called so much she had their numbers memorized. I’d had no friends like that in years. I hated my family because they hated me, but when Cindy died… Well let’s just say I knew how she must be feeling calling people who weren’t answering and probably weren’t ever going to.
    The world was coming to an end, and we might survive—in fact I was pretty sure we would—but the world would never be the same again. It was all sort of surreal then, me just going through what I’d planned to do for years. Fixing what had to be fixed, staying warm, trying to help those who could still be reached. Billy was taking care of the stock, Jimmy was cooking, and everyone and everything I really cared about in the whole world was there with me. But I knew how she felt. That’s why I turned into a total coward, mumbled some lame-assed thing about checking on Billy, and took off.
    Of course I ran away from Lucy’s grief and right into Billy’s because when I got to the barn Billy was milking Spot and crying