Read Online How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Selina Rosen
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Is the general store still intact ?
No, but part of it’s still there and the boys just hauled over the wood stove and they found plenty of stovepipe.
Good have them put it in the middle of the church against an outside wall preferably on the south wall… No wait, it’s an old building. Look and see if there isn’t maybe a chimney that’s been covered up.
We found it.
Make sure it’s clear. Hook up the stove and get a fire going immediately. The gas isn’t going to last long if you use it to heat. If I remember right there is a small kitchen in the church with a gas cook stove. As the blankets come in hang them over all the windows. Use the wet ones; it doesn’t matter. It’s going to get cold, colder than any of us have ever seen before. Get everything you can from the store and from the other houses, wet or not—medicine, candles, all the food… Don’t leave any food out of the church; bring everything you can find in. You’re going to need it all. Candy… Anything the least bit edible… Everything. Drag up all the wood you can find. Break it up, saw it up, get as much inside as you have room for and pull the rest up outside and keep doing it till you run out of wood or strength or daylight or it gets too cold.
And then I told him about not flushing and the importance of letting the light in if the sun was shining outside and pulling the blankets closed again when it wasn’t. He said they were going to build an outhouse.
“Don’t flush?” Lucy asked at my shoulder.
“That’s right. I need to fill you in. Around here we don’t flush pee; we only flush shit. Four squares of toilet paper per job and the TP goes in a waste can and gets burned in the stove. It doesn’t go in the toilet.”
“You have rules for using the bathroom?” she said in disbelief.
“Sugar, we have rules for everything.”
Chapter 4
Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow
***
You can melt ice and snow to get water if you have a heat source. Ice takes longer to melt but you get more bang for your buck. You’re melting snow… Well it takes a lot of snow to make just a little water. Another problem with melting it on your stove is that bringing that much ice or snow in is going to cool your space, so you may want to do it in small amounts.
The snow will not necessarily be clean. It may be filled with dirt particles and may even be radioactive depending on what has happened. So boil and filter even the water you make from ice or snow. Boiling and filtering won’t take care of any radioactivity, but nothing will, so if that happens we’re all screwed anyway.
***
Just before the sun set it actually warmed up several degrees and then the snow started to fall. At first just a few flakes and then it was as if they were blowing it up against the west windows. There was so much coming down so fast that it didn’t look real. It looked like movie snow in a Christmas movie… The old one where Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer saves the day. The boys and I were all sort of psyched. We’d always liked the snow. We used to get at least a good six-inch snow every winter till climate change screwed us and all we ever got was freezing fucking rain. Snow was fun, but freezing rain just sucked for everyone, and I was glad that on top of everything else we didn’t have ice to contend with.
We were warm and cozy and I was so glad to have my boys home that I didn’t even really notice when they started fighting over who was going to cook dinner. I think Lucy was a little surprised because they weren’t arguing about who was going to have to cook dinner but who was going to get to.
“They both like to cook,” I explained.
“They don’t look alike,” she said conversationally.
“They had different fathers,” I said. I was answering blog questions. There weren’t many new ones, and I knew that meant that most people had lost the means to run their computers, but it didn’t mean they were dead. “And before you say
No, but part of it’s still there and the boys just hauled over the wood stove and they found plenty of stovepipe.
Good have them put it in the middle of the church against an outside wall preferably on the south wall… No wait, it’s an old building. Look and see if there isn’t maybe a chimney that’s been covered up.
We found it.
Make sure it’s clear. Hook up the stove and get a fire going immediately. The gas isn’t going to last long if you use it to heat. If I remember right there is a small kitchen in the church with a gas cook stove. As the blankets come in hang them over all the windows. Use the wet ones; it doesn’t matter. It’s going to get cold, colder than any of us have ever seen before. Get everything you can from the store and from the other houses, wet or not—medicine, candles, all the food… Don’t leave any food out of the church; bring everything you can find in. You’re going to need it all. Candy… Anything the least bit edible… Everything. Drag up all the wood you can find. Break it up, saw it up, get as much inside as you have room for and pull the rest up outside and keep doing it till you run out of wood or strength or daylight or it gets too cold.
And then I told him about not flushing and the importance of letting the light in if the sun was shining outside and pulling the blankets closed again when it wasn’t. He said they were going to build an outhouse.
“Don’t flush?” Lucy asked at my shoulder.
“That’s right. I need to fill you in. Around here we don’t flush pee; we only flush shit. Four squares of toilet paper per job and the TP goes in a waste can and gets burned in the stove. It doesn’t go in the toilet.”
“You have rules for using the bathroom?” she said in disbelief.
“Sugar, we have rules for everything.”
Chapter 4
Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow
***
You can melt ice and snow to get water if you have a heat source. Ice takes longer to melt but you get more bang for your buck. You’re melting snow… Well it takes a lot of snow to make just a little water. Another problem with melting it on your stove is that bringing that much ice or snow in is going to cool your space, so you may want to do it in small amounts.
The snow will not necessarily be clean. It may be filled with dirt particles and may even be radioactive depending on what has happened. So boil and filter even the water you make from ice or snow. Boiling and filtering won’t take care of any radioactivity, but nothing will, so if that happens we’re all screwed anyway.
***
Just before the sun set it actually warmed up several degrees and then the snow started to fall. At first just a few flakes and then it was as if they were blowing it up against the west windows. There was so much coming down so fast that it didn’t look real. It looked like movie snow in a Christmas movie… The old one where Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer saves the day. The boys and I were all sort of psyched. We’d always liked the snow. We used to get at least a good six-inch snow every winter till climate change screwed us and all we ever got was freezing fucking rain. Snow was fun, but freezing rain just sucked for everyone, and I was glad that on top of everything else we didn’t have ice to contend with.
We were warm and cozy and I was so glad to have my boys home that I didn’t even really notice when they started fighting over who was going to cook dinner. I think Lucy was a little surprised because they weren’t arguing about who was going to have to cook dinner but who was going to get to.
“They both like to cook,” I explained.
“They don’t look alike,” she said conversationally.
“They had different fathers,” I said. I was answering blog questions. There weren’t many new ones, and I knew that meant that most people had lost the means to run their computers, but it didn’t mean they were dead. “And before you say
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