Free How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen Page A

like a baby, which was sort of making all the animals a little jumpy.
    “Oh baby,” I patted his back, “What’s wrong?”
    He looked at me like I was crazier than I am, “What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong? The world’s coming apart. People are just dead everywhere and more of them are going to die in this cold, aren’t they? I remember, Mom. I remember what you said. Watch out for rising water, fire and cold. Everyone was trying to leave the city, Mom, everyone trying to get to relatives' or friends' houses. Cars were mostly useless. I killed a guy, Mom. I killed a man who was just trying to get out of there like everyone else was.”
    “He would have killed you and your brother…”
    “And maybe we’d be better off. Who wants to live like this in a damn bunker? No one wants to live like this except you.”
    And this is my good kid, so again I say… Why do people think they have to have kids?
    “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” He stood up and hugged my neck. Spot kicked the milk bucket over, wasting a lot of milk and making a God-awful mess, but I just held my boy who dwarfed me and patted his back. “You were right. I think I’m mad because you were right. I was happy. Life was good. I liked my house, Mom. I know you always thought it was a waste, but I loved it and all my stuff, and now they’re just a huge pile of crap and… Well you were right and living like that destroyed the world and now everyone’s paying because I wanted a seventy-inch plasma screen TV.”
    So they do eventually learn. Of course it took the apocalypse, but there you go.
    “You know what I keep thinking about, Mom? There was this girl named Cherry who worked at the Waffle Hut. She was nice and always friendly and I really liked her, but you know how I get around girls I really like…”
    Did I ever. Both of my boys suffered from a not-so-rare malady of young men I like to call penile stupidia, in which the victim can look across a room full of attractive, intelligent young women and fall hopelessly and completely in love with the one truly psychotic bitch there. Billy was always with some trampy-assed, drug-addicted or alcoholic psycho bimbo because he didn’t have any trouble talking to them or picking them up because they were nothing but trash. But a nice girl with a job and brains? Well he could talk to them all day but he couldn’t bring himself to ask them out.
    “… So I never went out with her and I don’t even have her number and I have no idea where she lives and… Well I called the Waffle Hut when the shit started to hit the fan to tell her to come over, but she wasn’t at work and they wouldn’t give me her home number, so if she isn’t dead already she will be and…”
    I pushed away from him. I let the goat out of the head gate and put her out of the milk room. “Come on.” I took his hand and lead him back into the office.
    “What are you doing, Mom?” Billy asked.
    “I have equipment that can crawl up a gnat’s ass in Detroit. If that girl's out there, we can find her.”
    In the office Lucy was still trying to call people, tears running down her face. But her people were in Atlanta, and this girl Billy couldn’t quit thinking about was in Fort Smith. If she had hunkered down somewhere she might still be alive and she could make it if she really was smart. Since he’d never fucked her I figured she probably was, because if she was some brain-dead piece of trailer-trash he would have already screwed her and she would have taken a bunch of his money and slept with his best friend and hocked his sound system to buy crank… like the last one had.
    And he’s the keeper. Remember that when you get to thinking that you just have to start repopulating the world.
    If she had a cell phone and if it was on we might be able to reach her and if I could reach her I could talk her through this thing.
    “What’s her last name?” I asked Billy, ignoring Lucy.
    “Summers.”
    I gave