I hopped on and moved to a seat with an open window. Outside Hannes was having an argument with the parking meter I had been hanging on to moments before. At least I knew that it was a parking meter.

I wanted the bus to get going but the driver sat behind the wheel trying to light a wet stub of a cigar, and outside Hannes had now turned his vitriol on a fire hydrant. Hannes wasn’t right in his mind from a stroke he had. Once he split his pants and I saw he was wearing aluminum foil underwear.

Mickey and me live kind of far out, and when I got off the bus the sidewalks were extra slick. I unlocked the iron gate surrounding the house and struggled up the incline to the front door. I could hear the low rumble of the diesel generator.

There were three access portals to the shelter, all sealed with blast-proof doors. There was one in the basement, another in Mickey’s shed, and the third out in the field covered with thorny blackberry bushes. Mickey called it “hiding in plain sight.”

He was down in the basement shoring up a section of a narrow tunnel. He crawled out and wiped the grime off his face and hands with a clean rag. He was sweating in spite of the cold.

I asked him why he had the generator going.

“Air movement,” he said. “I just put in a backup filter. Now we got two.”

A strong current of air came out from the tunnel, which was constructed with a lot of ninety-degree turns designed to block the forward path of nuclear radiation.

“As long as the generator is going,” I said, “I’ll go do twenty minutes of my show. I don’t feel like it, but I’ll do it anyway.”

“Have you sketched out a script?”

I shook my head no. “I know what I’m going to do.” He shrugged his shoulders. I knew he wanted to get back to his project. I went to the radio shack, where I had a hidden six-pack of lime Diet Coke. I had been sneaking one too many only to pay the piper on the ultrafilters. Back at the bus stop I swore up and down I would never do such a thing again. But I was so thirsty I guzzled an entire can and opened another.

I put on the radio headset and adjusted the microphone.

“Good evening, all and sundry. Welcome to another fabulous hour of Bomb Shelter Radio. This is Doomgirl and you are dialed in at 147.859 MHz. Hang on to your hats; this is going to be a truly fantastic show.”