An Apocalypse of Our Own (Novella #5) Read online

  "An Apocalypse of Our Own"

  By: Jeff Strand

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Burt took the paddle out of the drawer, Missy realized that it was official: they were no longer “making love.” Not that she’d expected him to worship her body like they were in a holy temple instead of his brother’s apartment, but it already bothered her that she’d had to ask him to take off his baseball cap.

  Nor had she expected to hear him whisper sweet, romantic things to her in an exotic accent. All she wanted was a middle ground between her fantasy of “Milady, your beauty is like that of the stars in the heavens above!” and the reality of “Oh, yeah, baby, take it, take it hard.”

  Had he not been so incredibly hot, she never would have allowed this, even on their third date. But he was, and she did. At least he’d asked his brother to leave for a while, though Missy was certain that they’d high-five after she went home.

  “What are you doing with that?” Missy asked.

  Burt grinned and gently slapped the paddle against his palm. “You want this, right? 50 Shades of Burt.”

  Seriously? His name didn’t even rhyme with “grey.” Maybe, maybe, if he were “Jay” or “Ray” it would have been an acceptable comment. “Did that come from an actual Ping-Pong table?” she asked.

  Burt shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s Joey’s, not mine.”

  “Why don’t we put that away?”

  “It hasn’t been on the floor or anything. As far as I know, it’s only been used to hit butts.”

  “Sorry, but no.”

  “Really? I mean, I guess I can go wash it if that will make you feel better.”

  Missy shook her head. “How about we go back to what we were doing? That was nice, right? Everybody felt good, nobody had to get spanked…”

  “I’m just trying to spice things up in the bedroom.”

  “It’s our first time. We don’t need props yet.”

  “Second.”

  “What the hell do you mean, second?”

  “Oh, wait, no, you’re right. I was thinking about somebody else.” Burt opened the drawer and dropped the paddle back in, next to a bag of potato chips.

  He had a fantastic body, a charming smile, and a way-above-average endowment that had not lost any of its structural integrity during this discussion. But, still, Missy didn’t think there was any way she could resume the sex without hating herself in the morning.

  “I have to go,” she said, sliding her legs off the bed.

  “Huh? What? Huh? Why?”

  “This isn’t working out.”

  “But…but…we’re both naked!” Burt gestured to his penis. “You’re going to finish me off, right?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “That’s not cool.” Burt pouted for a moment. “Do you at least want to watch while I finish myself off?”

  Missy actually did, kind of, but no, the hourglass of her self-respect was quickly running out of sand. She got out of bed and looked on the floor for her thong, which was nowhere to be found. (It was a very tiny thong.) After a moment she decided to abandon the search and picked up her jeans.

  “What did I do wrong?” Burt asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Missy, sticking her right leg into the jeans. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “C’mon, don’t go. I’m sorry about the paddle. I thought all chicks these days wanted to be handcuffed and dominated and stuff.”

  Missy got both legs into the jeans, and tried to pull them up. She really wished that she hadn’t worn her tightest jeans. It had taken no small amount of effort to get them over her thighs while getting ready for their date this evening, and they were giving her even more trouble now.

  “You don’t have to apologize. It’s okay.”

  “Remember our first date, when you said your favorite scent was lavender? I bought lavender candles for later. I was going to drip hot lavender-scented wax on your nipples.”

  For a split second Missy thought, Aw, that’s so sweet. Unfortunately, her favorite scent was cinnamon.

  She tugged and tugged, trying to be discrete about it, but the goddamn jeans wouldn’t pull up.

  “Need some help?” Burt asked.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “I’ve got some lube in the drawer.”

  The door opened. Joey walked in, a hand over his eyes. “I’m not looking, I’m not looking,” he insisted, even though his fingers were apart and his eyes were open. He hurried around the bed and opened the drawer. “Just gotta get something really quick. Sorry to interrupt.” He took out the paddle. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Trying to get a game going downstairs.” He left the room, not closing the door behind him all the way.

  Missy resumed her tugging. From this day forward, she vowed only to wear sweatpants.

  She could tell that Burt was admiring the way her breasts were bouncing. She didn’t want him enjoying any visual stimulation right now, so she gave up on the jeans for a moment and put on her blouse, not bothering with the bra.

  She tugged on the jeans even harder, not caring if he saw her straining. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already seen her extra padding.

  “I’m just going to go ahead and whack it a little bit while you get dressed,” Burt said.

  “No! Please do not do that!”

  Missy gave the jeans one last mighty tug. The sense of victory she felt over successfully getting them over her thighs was significantly diminished by the loud rip.

  “Do you want to borrow some duct tape?” Burt asked.

  Missy declined his offer and left the apartment as quickly as possible.

  * * *

  “That’s a pretty big rip,” said Kevin.

  Missy tossed the jeans into the garbage. “Can you believe that? My first date in almost a year where I’m gonna get laid, and it’s a disaster. Do I even count him in my number? Am I up to fourteen now? I don’t know.”

  “He definitely counts.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I mean, yeah, if he was inside you, that’s pretty much the baseline.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  Missy gave Kevin a hug. “Thank you for listening and not laughing at me.”

  Kevin Jerrod dutifully served the role of her gay best friend, despite not being remotely gay. They’d been friends for almost twenty years, since they were six, and when people asked why they’d never gotten together, Kevin and Missy would laugh and say that it would be totally weird. They were like brother and sister!

  Privately, Kevin agreed that it might be weird, but not weird enough not to do it. He was extremely confident in his ability to sleep with Missy and not feel as if incest were occurring.

  A couple of times during her dry spell of the past few months, he’d “jokingly” suggested that they should take care of each other’s needs, strictly on an ad-hoc basis. She had, disappointingly, completely taken it as a joke. He’d tried to push the joke a bit further, but she continued to treat it as a source of light comedy, and he could never quite bring himself to reveal that he was slightly serious. He didn’t want to ruin their friendship.

  So he listened to the details of her sexual escapades, and shared his (much less frequent) tales with her. If she noticed his propensity for dating curvy brunettes with glasses, she never said anything. He did often point out that, despite her disdain for unintelligent superficial jocks, she did tend to date a lot of unintelligent superficial jocks, and she had no good counter-argument for that.

  “Want to go to a movie this afternoon?” Missy asked, taking a diet soda and a regular
soda out of the refrigerator and handing Kevin the diet one. “They’re showing the 2-D version of Mad Cow 3-D.”

  “Can’t. I’m going to see my Uncle Jake.”

  “Whack-Job Uncle Jake?”

  “Yep.”

  “You didn’t tell me he was in town. I’ve always wanted to meet him.” She’d heard many Uncle Jake stories over the years, most of which ended with “and he was never invited back again.”

  “He lives here now. Know when I found that out? About fifteen minutes before I left for your place. He wants me to set up wireless Internet in his bomb shelter.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’s really got a bomb shelter?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “If a bomb dropped, would we even have wireless Internet?”

  “I think it’s in case of diseases and stuff, too.”

  “I’ve never been in a bomb shelter. Can I come with you? Would he be okay with that?”

  “I’m not sure. The reason he’s having me do it is that he doesn’t want the Verizon people to know he’s got it. But maybe he won’t mind. I’ll call him first, to make sure you don’t get chased away with a shotgun.”

  * * *

  Uncle Jake had asked Kevin to provide Missy’s full name and social security number, so he could do some screening before she arrived, but he was otherwise fine with the idea of her joining them. Missy had always envisioned a toothless, wrinkled, wild-eyed man with Albert Einstein hair, which is exactly what he was.

  “Come on in!” he said, meeting them at the door of his surprisingly small house, barely more than a shack. They were about fifteen miles out of Tampa, in an area that could politely be described as “very rural” but also as “a shithole.” The dirt road had no other homes for at least a mile, and it was the kind of area where, if Kevin’s car had broken down, Missy felt certain that they’d provide sustenance for a family of cannibals.

  “Hi, Uncle Jake!” said Kevin, shaking his hand. “This is my friend, Missy.”

  Uncle Jake nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Melissa Sandrin. Born in Providence but moved to Orlando when you were only five. Employed as an insurance underwriter at Metropolitan Life, since graduating from the University of Central Florida, where you majored in Dance because apparently you never expected to become an insurance underwriter. After your last medical checkup, Dr. Timothy Velasco gave you a clean bill of—”

  “Okay, she gets the idea,” said Kevin. “You promised you wouldn’t be creepy.”

  “Being well-informed is not creepy.”

  “Actually, yeah, the way you’re doing it, it is.”

  “It’s fine,” said Missy, smiling at Uncle Jake and shaking his hand. “I’m glad to finally meet you. Kevin has told me so much about you.”

  Uncle Jake gave Kevin a concerned look, as if to say What does she mean, you’ve told her so much about me? What information have you divulged?

  They followed Uncle Jake into his home, which was extremely cluttered but much cleaner than Missy would have expected from the outside. There was a bearskin rug in the center of the floor, which looked like the bear had been killed with a cannon.

  “Can I get you anything?” Uncle Jake asked.

  “Nope, we’re just anxious to see the bomb shelter,” Kevin told him.

  “It’s not a bomb shelter. It’s an all-purpose disaster preparedness shelter.”

  “Even better.”

  “Show me somebody who thinks our only path to doomsday is a bomb, and I’ll show you a fool.”

  “Got it.”

  Uncle Jake reached down and grabbed the end of the rug. He pulled the bear aside, revealing a circular metal hatch. He knelt down and punched in a four-digit code. Something whirred, then something clicked, then something beeped, and then he turned the handle and raised the hatch.

  “The climb down is a little snug,” he warned them, “but you’ll be impressed by what you see.”

  After Missy and Kevin climbed down the ten-foot ladder, Uncle Jake followed them and pulled the hatch closed. There was a buzz, a click, and a whirr.

  “Did it just lock us in?” Kevin asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Why do you need to lock people inside the shelter?”

  Uncle Jake hopped off the final rung of the ladder. “You think people stay sane in the apocalypse? All it takes is one panicky person to get claustrophobia, and, wham, you’ve got yourself a shelter full of plague. Believe me, you don’t want that.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “So what do you think?”

  Missy looked around the shelter, which was smaller than her college dorm room. No wonder he was worried about people losing their minds.

  “It’s cozy,” said Missy.

  “It’s no Motel 6, but it’ll keep you alive.” Uncle Jake gestured to the steel walls. “I’ll probably hang a picture or two, but it’s more about functionality than comfort.”

  There wasn’t much down here. A single bed, a desk with a laptop computer, a sink, a few metal shelves filled with canned food and gallon-sized jugs of water, a toilet, and a treadmill.

  “How long could you survive down here?” Missy asked.

  “Five years.”

  “That long? Really?”

  Uncle Jake nodded. He slid a panel on the wall, revealing deep shelves with even more jugs of water. “Plenty of rations. Compost toilet, incinerator, air ventilation…I’d need some books and a deck of cards for Solitaire, but yeah, I could do half a decade down here, no problem.”

  “This looks like it took a lot of work,” said Kevin. “Will you be disappointed if the apocalypse doesn’t happen?”

  Uncle Jake glared at him. “Do you think I’m some sort of psychopath?”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Only a monster would wish for the end of the human race. I pray that day never comes. I’m just being prepared.”

  “Again, I was kidding.”

  “If I do get stuck in here for five years, trust me, I will shed a tear each and every day for all that we’ve lost.”

  “Kidding, Uncle Jake. That’s what I was doing.”

  “Well, don’t make jokes about me being some madman bent on world destruction. It hurts my feelings. And I want you to know that both of you are welcome to join me down here, even though you’d cut our longevity by two-thirds.”

  “Thanks,” said Missy. “We appreciate that.”

  * * *

  On the drive home, Missy turned to Kevin. “So, he’s really not a madman bent on world destruction, right?”

  “Nope. Total joke.”

  “Good. Well, it’s nice to know that if the bomb does drop, we’ve got a place to hang out.”

  “Yep. Of course, there’s only one bed.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Seven months later, as several of her co-workers bled from multiple orifices, Missy raced down the hallway. The world had gone insane. Explosions, thick green smoke, people shrieking, alarms blaring…she didn’t know what the hell was happening, but she knew she had to get out of there.

  Phillip, a middle-aged man who worked in the mailroom, staggered toward her. Had she not seen blood start to spontaneously flow from people’s eyes, ears, and noses minutes ago, she would have thought he’d suffered a severe head laceration.

  “Help me,” he said, creating a major moral quandary at a time when she wanted things to be as straightforward as possible. She didn’t try to walk past him, exactly, but she didn’t slow down as much as she would have under normal circumstances.

  He grabbed her arm.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” she asked.

  Phillip shook his head.

  “I don’t, either. It’s like an attack or something. Come on, I’ll lead you out of here, but we have to hurry.”

  “Thank you,” Phillip said, seconds before deepening the moral quandary by falling to his knees. Missy couldn’t just leave him, right? Only horrible, horrible human beings left o
thers behind to perish. But she also didn’t want to be a kind-hearted but stupid dead person.

  She pulled on his arm. “Come on, Phillip. You’ve got to get up. We have to find someplace safe.”

  Phillip stood up, and then fell down again, this time landing flat on his face. Missy really didn’t think that her conscience could handle the idea of her running off without him, but if he wanted to say “Leave me! Save yourself!” she wouldn’t argue.

  “Don’t leave me!” he wailed, grabbing her by the ankle.

  A door swung open and Tanya, an overweight receptionist who wasn’t bleeding, ran out. “What’s the matter with you? Just leave that fucker!” Tanya said, pushing past Missy and hurrying around the corner.

  Using both hands, Missy pulled Phillip to his feet once more. “You have to stop falling down,” she told him. “You’re going to kill us both if you don’t.”

  “I won’t fall again, I swear, just help me, please.”

  They began to rush through the hallway, the same way Tanya had gone. Phillip was definitely slowing Missy down, but that was okay, they’d get through this.

  Not that she even knew if they were heading for anything remotely resembling safety. They might be better off barricading themselves in a conference room. Except, of course, that she’d been in a conference room, suffering through an interminable meeting, when this started to happen. Yes, she’d prayed for the meeting to end, but having everybody else just start bleeding, screaming, and fleeing the room in a panic was not the way she’d wanted it to adjourn.

  Her cell phone rang. Oh, thank God. She’d tried to call both Kevin and her parents, and neither of them had answered. Her parents were across the country, in Nevada, but they might be watching the news and be frightened for her safety. She glanced at the display.

  “Kevin?” she answered.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You’re not bleeding?”

  “No, but almost everybody else is! There was this green smoke, and then people just started bleeding all over the place. I don’t know what’s going on!”

  Phillip fell to the floor again. This was becoming problematic.

  “You’re at work, right?” Kevin asked.