Dusty’s Diary 2

One Frustrated Man’s Apocalypse Story

A novel by

Bobby Adair

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Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair

Cover Design

Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a.  187designz

Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting

Kat Kramer Adair

Foreword

After two years of losing hope, I’ll bet you never thought this would happen.  Dusty is back.  And there will be a book three, without the two-year wait.

For those of you who took the time to read the Foreword in book one, you’ll know that I was in a bit of weird emotional state when I wrote it. And the thing about writing, at least the way I do it, is that I try my best to imagine I’m in the skin—in the life—of the character I’m writing. It’s a weird sort of way to venture into someone else’s existence, to get lost in it for a while.

Another weirdness, and I think many authors probably experience it, is that when I finish a book, it’s hard to look back at it and see anything but its flaws. I took some chances with book one, especially with the rough style, purposefully poor grammar, immaturity, and crass humor of it. As more time passed, I grew embarrassed because it wasn’t my best, most polished effort. It was just too raw.

We casually watched the reviews come in on book one over the past couple of years and were surprised that it resonated with so many.  Still, I wasn’t sure if there would ever be a book two.

That’s the opinion that lived in my mind for a long time.

It wasn’t until several weeks ago, when very perceptive Kat saw some familiar frustrations bubbling under the surface, and she suggested I write another Dusty’s Diary…purely for therapy.

Without a thought, I told her, “No.” After all, she was the one who told me before I published the first Dusty’s Diary, that it would be the end of my writing career.  She wasn’t a fan.  But one night in July 2017, she turned it on in the car and started listening, and after a couple of chapters called to tell me there was a relevance she’d never completely understood, and that I needed to write another.  “It’s short,” she argued.  “You could write in within a week.”

Anyone who knows Kat knows how persistent she can be—a real pain in the ass, but extremely perceptive. So, I sat down one Friday evening and read book one for the first time since I published it two years ago.

I was shocked. It wasn’t the flaming POS I’d imagined it to be, it was raw, poignant, timely, and entertaining. At least to me it was. That’s when I gave in. Kat got her way.

So here you are, world—Dusty, opinionated, preachy, raw, raunchy, rambling, angry, lonely, and fun.

And if you like it, I’d be eternally grateful for a review if you have a moment.

—Bobby

November 12

It was a good morning in Bunker Stink.

I worked out.

I ate a bowl of multi-grain, high-fiber gruel with nothing to vary the texture except for itty bitty bits of seed things that make me think of bugs every time I got one stuck in my teeth.  I washed my clothes—plenty of extra rainwater in the cisterns, so why not?  Then I swept the place.  Tomorrow, I’ll clean the kitchen, and the little bathroom, such as it is.  One good thing about the apocalypse, there are plenty of cleaning products laying around in peoples’ houses.  Nobody thought to scrounge that kind of stuff when they finally saw where the world was headed.

Even the Shroomheads don’t care enough about containers of cleaning shit to break them open anymore.  Probably a Pavlov’s dog thing.  I’ll bet every single one of them tried to slurp up some Softsoap or scarf down a grainy handful of Tide at least once.  The Shroomhead brain isn’t smart enough to know at first sight the difference between a box of Captain Crunch and a bottle of Windex—they learn.  I know they don’t memorize all the wrappers, and they definitely can’t read, but I’ve seen ‘em give a sniff to anything they find in a house and toss away the things that aren’t food.

That’s a long way to go about saying ‘I’ve got plenty.’

If only I’d paid more attention all along to using a nice lemony-fresh disinfectant on the surfaces and floor of my underground fiberglass hidey-hole, it might not have earned its name—Bunker Stink.

Oh, that and regular use of a good deodorant.  Again, lots of that lying around in under-sink cabinets and among the discarded containers on bathroom floors.  As I said once before, Shroomheads look everywhere in a house for food.

I finished my morning chores, sat down in front of my monitor bank, and watched the screens.  It was still early, the sun was barely lighting the sky gray in the east.  I find now that I’m doing things, now that I’ve got a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I do.  Today, despite the excitement keeping me awake after last night’s success with the booby traps, I was out of bed the earliest in a long time.

Most of the cameras were waiting to power up.  I still need to scrounge some car batteries and wire them into each system to keep them running through the night.  I don’t see a glimpse of anything until I’ve got a little sun on the panels.

The one that showed the street in front of my house and the other pointed at my backyard warmed up first.  I guess because no trees block the sun between their solar panels and the horizon.  They each kind of flickered for five or ten minutes before they stayed on.

Those two cameras are the most important, I guess.  I need to know what’s going on close by outside at all times.  Yeah, not really.  I just need to know what’s out there before I risk an excursion through my hatch.

That all sounds important and shit, but truth is, I was waiting for the camera to come up at Mazzy and Rollo’s house.  I wanted to get a good look at the results of my handiwork.  With some sunlight shining in through the windows, I’d be able to get a solid count of dead Shroomies.

While I waited, I thought about hanging a whiteboard on the wall to tally my kills.  I thought about goal-setting and wondering how many was the most ever killed by a human.  Of course, that led me down an old path.

Am I the last human on earth who is still normal?

Four of my other cameras had awoken by the time I got my first flicker of life out of the one I’d mounted in Casa de Rollo.  That one showed a quick glimpse of a thin little Shroomhead standing in the shadows in the corner of the living room, back to the camera.  Then the device powered down again.

That was odd.  Not the system struggling to power up, the Shroomhead standing in the living room.

Early morning and right before the sun goes down are usually transitional times for the Infected.  Night-shift Shroomies like to be back inside before the sun comes up.  Day-shifters don’t like to roll out of bed until later in the morning.  They’re kinda lazy that way.  You usually get thirty minutes or so on either end of the day when there doesn’t tend to be a lot of them on the streets.

I stared at the blank monitor, waiting for the solar panel to generate enough amps to wake the camera back up.  You know, just another tiny bit of suspense to keep me engaged.  If the Shroomhead was gone, it was probably a Night Shift denizen and he’d headed on home.  If it stayed, then it was a Day Shifter.

That was the range of my expectations on the possibilities.  But hey, in a world where boredom is the norm, anything that provides the tiny mystery of an unknown outcome is entertainment.

When the camera powered up again, I saw something that surprised me, a pair of legs dangling out of the attic.

First off, I’d never noticed an attic access panel on the living room ceiling, though my thoughts were on other things when I was setting the traps in there.  And to be honest, back before the collapse, when I’d visited Rollo and Mazzy’s, I never looked at the ceiling.  I only had eyes for Mazzy and the way her ass fit tightly into her jeans and the way her tits seemed ready to spill out the top of any blouse she wore.

Secondly, who builds a house with an attic access panel in the living room?  I’ve never seen anything like that before.

Thirdly, Shroomheads almost never go into attics.  The exceptions happen when they see someone climb up ahead of them, or when a ladder is left in the attic access hole.  Otherwise, they’re just not smart enough to figure out that the rectangular irregularity in a ceiling isn’t just more ceiling.

The legs disappeared into the hole.  A moment later, a black blob of something dropped out onto the floor.

The camera cut off.

Dammit.

Hazy morning clouds had blocked the sun.

What the hell, I wondered, fell out of that ceiling?

I pictured it in my mind and tried to play the memory in slow motion, trying to figure out what it was.

The only thing it appeared to be was a backpack, which didn’t make any sense.  Shroomheads don’t need and don’t carry backpacks.  They prefer to face the world wearing nothing but the skin God gave ‘em.

When the camera came to life again, the front door was open, and I got half a glimpse of the thin person as they stepped out and ran into the bushes in the front of the house.  Into a blind spot for the camera I’d mounted on Rollo’s roof.

The thing that really stole my attention was on one of the walls in the living room.  Apparently, using one of the cans of spray paint I’d left in the house last night, someone had written on the wall:

FUCK YOU and your booby traps,

ASSHOLE!!

Thanks for nothing!

M.

Holy shit.

November 16

Of course, my first thoughts went to my Mazzy fantasy.

Was it her?  Could she have been over there hiding in the attic, staying quiet as a mouse while I stomped around on the roof and installed my POD—my Perfect Observation Device, for you future bug people with short memories?  Was she up there when I rooted through all the broken DVDs in her and Rollo’s bedroom searching for her homemade nudie movies?  Did she hear me setting my Shroom traps, all the while keeping quiet, not knowing who I was or what I was up to?

Hell, I don’t know.

I spent a whole day scanning for some sign of her on my video feeds.

I snuck around another day, looking for anything that would confirm for me she was real and not just an artifact of my loneliness crossbred with my jerry-rigged video surveillance system’s quirks.

I found nothing.

Now I need to get my head on straight, wrestle up some supplies, and think this whole thing through before I preoccupy myself so much with it I step into a hole full of stupid and get myself munched.

Supplies.  That’s the word of the day.  Like I told you at the end of the last diary, I ran out of paper.

I know if you’re living in your modern bumble bee buzz-buzz world with your electric cars and Cuisinart honey dispensers in the kitchen, and you have time to waste digging through the ancient world’s artifacts, you’ve got what we like to call First World problems, and running out of paper to write on isn’t one of those.  For you guys, when you need paper, you just hop in the car and zip down to BuzzMart and load up.  For me?  Not so easy.  Houston is humid.  It’s full of Shroomheads who think anything built by normal people is something they need to tear up.

Paper is getting hard to find.

Nevertheless, Lady Luck smiled on me.

I was scavenging yesterday over in Plinko Ranch—you know, those big houses on the old golf course south of the highway.  We talked about the place.  Well, in case you didn’t dig up my last diary, I’ll just tell you, after my ex hit her max-Dusty-bullshit threshold, she shacked up down there with some pink-Polo-wearing Porsche-driving wimp-stud with greasy hair and bleached teeth.

All those folks down there had money.

Or maybe like most of us back in the twenty-first century, they had bigger paychecks to indenture to the criminal credit card companies and mortgage bank butt-suckers.  So they needed bigger houses for all their shit and larger garages to cram it into when it stopped being shiny-new enough to keep in the house because it got replaced by the latest fad-crap they saw on TV.

I know, I know.

You’re thinking, “BFD, Dusty, you’re rambling again.”

Yeah, I know!

I ramble.  I repeat myself.  I’m sure I’m starting to sound like that drunk uncle nobody wants to invite to the kiddies’ birthday parties anymore.  This shouldn’t be news to you.  I told you, I’m no Shakespeare.

But the thing you gotta understand is back when the ex and I went through some hard years, meaning the money coming in the door didn’t add up enough to cover the bills being dumped in our mailbox, we used to have to buy our necessaries down at the Goodwill store.  The one with the best shit was south of here, on the other side of the highway, across the street from—you guessed it—Plinko Fucking Ranch.

When those people run out of room to store their pre-throw-away crap, they donate it to places like Goodwill so they won’t have to feel like consumer addicts who get all bonerous and drippy from hearing the zing of their plastic through a credit card reader.  Instead, they tell themselves they’ve done something special to shine up their souls for Jesus by giving their yesterday’s fashion shit to the poor.

Best of all, when they drive up to the loading dock around behind the Goodwill store to donate their pre-trash shit, the unbathed reprobate Have-Not assisting the wanly smiling Haves with their donation loads always gives them a blank (tax) voucher because he’s too lazy to fill it out and will never earn enough money to have to worry about learning how to do it for himself with his own taxes.  And then the donation quantities get fudged, because why the fuck not?  We are all just humans.  Why be honest when nobody’s going to bust you in a lie.  So all that too-good-to-throw-away shit multiplies into two or three times as much—for tax purposes only—and turns into a write-off big enough to buy a delivery truck full of next year’s shiny new shit that gets rolled down the ramp into an oversized house down in Plinko Ranch.

And the most fucked up thing is slick-hair-homie-fuck down there pays less in his taxes by scamming the donation write-off, and my tax bill goes up because the government still needs its dime.  It doesn’t care where the dime comes from, it just wants it.  Do the math.  All that shit at Goodwill that me and the eventual ex picked up for a discount is shit I already paid for once.  Sorta.

It’s fucked up.  But that’s the way it is.

I know, I know.

I’m angry again.  You future people must think the only thing the hairless monkeys of the twenty-first century were good at was hating on each other.

Maybe I was just envious.

Dealt a bad hand for living prosperously in modern times.

Thing is, I worked hard all my life, and me and the eventual ex sent our kids to college.  We were always in debt.  We lived in a modest house (that means kinda small and shitty) in a modest neighborhood, and all I had to show for it was Bunker Stink buried in my backyard.

I was never lazy.  I worked six and seven days a week.  I labored long hours when I could, when I had to, which was most of the time.  There are things I was good at, and things I wasn’t.  I never did well on my tests in school.  I wasn’t that good at learning my grammar rules, and algebra never made good sense to me.  But I could cut a straight line with a saw and build something solid and square.  I could change my brakes, pull my shocks, and yank the transmission out of my car and drop in a rebuilt one.  I suffered the snakebites and the wasp stings and the fire ants chewing up my calves.  I always did the best I could with what I had.  But I never bought a Porsche.  Never took the eventual ex to Paris.  Never lived in a mansion on a golf course.

Why?

I think about that a lot.

I sometimes hate those people.  I’m glad they all turned Shroom and I now get to root through their shit looking for the good leftovers.

Sometimes, I’m glad they’re all dead.

Most times, I’m not.

What passed for an economy, back before the Cordyceps spore destroyed everything, left people like me scraping by every day and always worrying about making enough money to cover the rent at the end of the month.  I know that’s all my skills were worth in our fine capitalist system.

I just never understood why somebody who sat behind a polished desk and pushed numbers around on a computer screen all day was worth so much more than me to all the people who paid their money into the products and services that kept our economy humming.

I always knew life wasn’t fair, but I never understood why my sweat was worth so little and their mental anguish was worth so much?

And all the while, there was always some loudmouth asshole on TV telling me that my financial problems, my crappy house, and my broken down car weren’t my fault.  It was them.  Those bastards who voted for the other asshole were to blame for everything bad that ever happened to me.

Yeah, I know.  Total shit.

But goddamn.  After hearing that for years, after looking at the greener grass on the other side of the hill and knowing you can never climb the fence to feel it between your toes, it makes you feel cheated.  It makes you want to hate somebody.

Back before the collapse, there were plenty of people around my neighborhood who seemed to be just like me. I saw ‘em at the PTA meetings and involved in their kids’ lives, trying to get the best possible education for their kids, just like me. I saw them at the park watching the fireworks and waving flags on the Fourth of July and heard ‘em sing the national anthem, just like me. I saw them at the grocery story pinching pennies to afford that cruise for the missus, just like me.

But the loudmouth on TV told me to despise them because they had different stickers on their cars, and they had “Vote For The Other Asshole” signs in their yards, and the dickheads down in Plinko Ranch had the same signs.  Half for my team’s political asshole, half for the other one.  Folks on my side, folks on theirs.

I’m clueless without a talking head television turd telling me who my enemy is.

My hate needs a date, and it’s got nobody to love.

So, me and the eventual ex bought our good stuff there at the Plinko Ranch Goodwill—jeans without any holes for ten bucks, five-hundred dollar shoes for twenty, shirts to wear under my blazer to the basketball-arena-turned-TV-church on Sunday.  Nobody down in Plinko buys the kind of shirts I wore to work, so there were never any of those to choose from.

The point I’m trying to get to is I figured all those houses down there infested with rich-folks-gone-shroom were chock full of good, unused stuff, just rotting away in the humidity, waiting for Omega Man Dusty to bounce down there and collect it.

Matter-of-fact, I was in a house yesterday—a mansion, really—where I had to wade through some faded birthday party leftovers, all pastels and pinks faded to near gray, with airless mylar balloons on the floor that might last longer than anything I ever stashed away for the benefit of you future archaeologists.

I found some fellow’s study.

A study—wow.

I guess I’m in a grouchy mood after not finding M and I feel like bitching, so let me tell you future people a little something about how things are back here in the twenty-first century.  If someone has a house so big they have an extra room they can call a study, well, they’re probably dipshits who scammed something outta somebody else.

Real people work for a living and mortgage their asses for normal-sized houses and put their kids in a shared room on bunk beds because they don’t have enough money to buy a mansion in Plinko Ranch with so many rooms they need to start making up special names for ‘em.

So when I was sitting in the dipshit’s study, looking at a wall of mahogany display cases with doors swung open and mouse turds everywhere, staring at a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of guns, some as old as my great grandpa, slowly rusting away in the humidity, it pissed me right the hell off.

I mean, it’s gotta be my scammed tax dollars that paid for those guns, right?  Shroomhead or not, the dipshit who bought those beautiful old pieces shoulda took better care of them.  It nearly made me cry.

Not really, but it torqued my ‘nads.

Now, I can’t explain why all those guns were still in that house after all these years.  Maybe the guy who lived there lasted a year or two longer than most.  Maybe he put some of those guns to use shooting sticky-fingered creepers who thought they might sneak into his house, take his guns and food, and maybe rape his wife and daughters for the twisted jollies of it.  I don’t know.  I’m just guessing.

There’s got to be some reason all the guns were there.

Better yet, there had to be a good reason the closet in the room was stacked with cardboard boxes of bullets, all sagging and collapsing from the irritatingly constant moisture in the air.  Thankfully, casings are made of brass, bullets are made of lead, well, sometimes cased in other metals.  Point is, the cardboard was crumpled and moldy, but the bullets were all fine, just mixed up a bit.

So, I found me an old Colt Army Model 1860.  A gunslinger’s weapon from back in the cowboy and Indian days.  A six-shooter, probably not nearly as good as my Desert Eagle, and just an old POS compared to the Glock I’ve taken to carrying with me everywhere, but I liked the romantic idea of a six gun on my hip, strolling the rowdy streets of apocalyptic Houston, plugging Shroomies full of lead.

Ah.  Happy thoughts.

It’s the simple things that make life worth living, even if they are unrealistic fantasies.

I dropped the Colt into my bag, hoping I could clean away the corrosion enough to turn it back into a usable weapon.

Later on, as I was searching one of the upstairs rooms, a young girl’s room by the look of it—

And I gotta stop right there, because I know what you’re thinking, “Why go into a young girl’s empty bedroom?  What were you hoping to find?”

Yeah.

I had to ask myself that as I went in, crunching across the molded, then dried, then molded and dried again carpet.

I sat on the bed and looked at the dresser, painted in pastel colors with mismatched yellow and pink knobs.  A mural with a fairy castle and talking stuffed animals was peeling off the wall.  A pair of little pink tennis shoes sat beside the dresser after years spent waiting for some ten-year-old to come and slip them on before going outside to play.

It reminded me of my oldest daughter Kate’s room way back when she was young.

It made me think about a lot of things from a world that spasmed through its death throes while I was hiding in Bunker Stink, and hoping a tomorrow was waiting for me that would be something like all my yesterdays.

It wasn’t.

There was only that mansion and a million like it, crumbling museums, memorials to trivial lives that meant nothing to nobody except the people who lived them, and the families who loved them.

And then me, sitting on a little dead girl’s bed like a down-n-out troll.

It made me feel empty.

All three of my girls are dead.  The two grandkids, the same.

I live alone in Bunker Stink.  Two years inside without seeing blue sky and only the static on my shortwave radio to hear every day and remind me just how alone I am in the world.  And now I’m out.  I’ve seen the Shroomheads, and killed plenty of ‘em.  But I’ve yet to find another living, thinking, normal human being.

Maybe it’s just me, getting used to being alone.

And mostly, I am.  Used to it, I mean.

Sometimes, loneliness falls on me like a cinderblock, and I make the mistake of letting that emotional shit sink in and then my eyes turn all blurry with tears and it’s not just my girls, and the kid who lived in this room, and the dipshit who owned this house who didn’t take care of those fine antique weapons downstairs.  It’s everybody who seemed so intent on fucking up the mundane, drudge-soaked, paycheck-mongering life of football games and barbecues, late rent, and past-due credit cards.  My world.

But in that shit, there was always someone to talk to, and most times there was someone somewhere who liked you enough to share a pizza with, and even hug you once in a while, and say they loved you.

I sniffled up my bullshit and wiped my eyes.

Sometimes, I’m just a big sissy.

That’s when I saw it, the corner of it, really, sticking out from beneath a rat’s nest pile of clothes.  A cloth-bound pink book with some kind of artsy-fartsy colorful kiddy drawings on it.

Kicking the old junk out of the way, I spied an actual diary, labeled as such in big rainbow letters with a puffy-cute unicorn prancing happily across the front.

I stared at it for a long time before I knelt down to pick it up, not wanting to see the tentative cursive documenting some cute little girl’s life that ended long before it should have.

That’s not what I found.

When I brushed away the roach-egg casings and opened it, I saw the diary was empty, not one word written there, except for an inscription:

For Hannah,

I hope all your dreams come true.

I hope your life is full of love and smiles.

May your most precious memories live in here forever!

Happy Birthday!

Love, Mom

Well, Hannah never got a chance to have any memories.  Her party downstairs came to an early end.  She died in some horrific way.  Her bones gnawed down to dust by some Shroomhead who used to be one of the neighbors.  Her parents died in a pool of tears or turned Shroom themselves and killed all their children for a warm meal on a cold Saturday night.

Life at the end of the world is fucked up.

November 16, 2nd entry

I feel like I should say just a little more.

So, Hannah and Hannah’s mom, thank you.

The diary means a lot to me.

With no one to talk to, at least I have myself.

Oh, and whatever amphibious insect creatures in the future dig this up, and read it to learn what life was like for the previous owners of this fair planet—a bunch of hairless monkey bipeds known as humans.  I speak for us all.

Yeah, I know, being the only writer left on the planet, the historian to a dead race, I’m starting to take some poetic liberties with my prose.

Goddamn, sometimes I write some smart-sounding shit.  Maybe I missed my calling.

November 17

I spent a lot of time staring at the bunk above mine last night.

I know, you’re thinking, “Hey, man, you live in a sausage-shaped septic tank turned into a doomsday bunker buried in your backyard.  Isn’t it like, you know, pitch black in there at night?”

Well yeah.  Pretty much every time I button the place up and hunker down for the night, it’s just exactly that.

The thing is, I keep a nightlight on, a couple actually.  Always.  They don’t put out much of a glow, just enough.  I hate pitch black just as much as the next guy.  And I live in a world where I’ll never run out of bulbs.  I took the opportunity to stock up on them in the early days of Shroomageddon before I went down for my two-year bit.

That, and I have all the power I need from my rooftop solar array.  Hell, I could probably power two or three bunkers just like mine.  It’s just me down here.  I’d planned for four more people.

I keep other lights on a timer that dims them at night and slowly brightens them in the morning.  I manually adjust the timers once a week or so to match the day and night cycle outside.  It’s one of the tricks that keeps me sane.

Back to me staring at the bunk above mine.

You know what I’m going to say so I don’t have to write it, but I will anyway.  The enigmatic M.

Mazzy, I unrealistically hope.

By the coincidenciest coincidence, the slim woman—I’m guessing on the sex because of her slight build—was living in Mazzy and Rollo’s attic.  Lots of people back in the early days of the epidemic and the slow-motion collapse that followed took to hiding out in their attics.  A totally shitty idea for the unprepared.  The Shroomheads, as I’ve already told you, don’t ever think to look at those square holes in the ceiling covered with a layer of sheetrock that matches the rest of the ceiling.  They never climb up on anything to poke their noses through.  Their rotted brains just don’t ever make that imaginative leap.

The downside for an attic-hider is that it gets damn hot up there.  Lots of people died of heatstroke after spending the night in the attic after a particularly riotous evening in their neighborhoods, and then not coming down soon enough the next day.

If the attic of a house is going to be a hiding place, precautions need to be taken.  It needs to be ventilated.  It needs to be well-stocked with water.

If somebody’s going to live up there, well, then it needs a whole lot more stuff.  And that makes my next goal.  Now that I’ve got writing material enough to document my stupidity for posterity, I’m going out on my Arthurian quest.  I seek the mysterious M.

I’ll try not to get my hopes up too high.

November 18

Activity over by the elementary school—the herd of Shroomheads who lives there—was running a little too hot for me all day yesterday.  So, I watched my monitors, scanned the neighborhood, and as much as I wanted to follow my Johnson off to do something two grades below my standard stupid level, I didn’t.  I stayed put in Bunker Stink.

The morning’s powdered eggs and jerky bacon weren’t sticking to my ribs as well as I’d hoped they would.  Besides, I was bored, so I dug into my heaping stash of Punchy Bryan’s Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals and decided to pagan sacrifice a foil-packed, just-add-hot-water dinner of beef stroganoff—the Slavic word for baby shit, I’m sure—to Neptune, the god of the oceans and Vulcan, the god of fire and other crap.

Maybe.

Hell, I don’t know—I was trying to sound smart again.

I took a Greek mythology class in high school once, a long, long time ago, because you got an English credit for it, but it was right after lunch period, and I came to class with a righteous buzz more often than not.  Thankfully, my teacher was an ex-hippie, so she never ratted me out, though a week before school ended for the year, she offered to upgrade my D to an A if I hooked her up with my weed connection.

Done deal, Monty Hall!

My old lady—that’s a phrase that can mean mother or wife, depending on the context and what part of the country you’re from, in this case, my mom—was surprised when she saw my report card.  I’d never earned more than a B in English, not in eleven years of schooling.  With the unrealistic optimism peculiar to mother types, she thought I’d finally found my calling, and spent the whole summer after that reading mythology books and asking me questions about Olympic gods all in an effort to nurture my nascent interest.

Parents do funny things for their kids.

She should have just asked me what happened.  I’d have given her some watered down version of the truth and saved her a bunch of trouble.  But she didn’t, so I didn’t.

Life goes on.

Well, for one of us, anyway.

I poured some water in a cup and heated it in the microwave.  Not quite fire, but close enough.  The hot water went into my foil pouch.  Stir the goo and you’re ready for yum!

That’s called sarcasm.  Do you bee people have that in the future?

One thing I need to keep in mind next time I’m preparing for an apocalypse, I need to taste some of the survival meals before I purchase them by the discount pickup truckload.

You’d think that if you’re starving and the world has come to an end, anything would taste good.

Well, the thing is, I’m never actually starving down here.

Like I said, I planned for five—me, the eventual ex, and the three girls.

I’ve got plenty of food, and none of it tastes like what anybody would call good.  Maybe that’s the main reason I lost so much weight.  Maybe before Punchy Bryan decided to make his riches in the Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals business by running his smiling happy ass in all those commercials every time there was a high school shooting or some foreign dictator had to bolster his poll numbers by badmouthing Americans, he should have checked first that he had taste buds.

I don’t think he did.

Or maybe his old lady—mother or wife in this context, either works—couldn’t cook for shit.  You never know.

Because of all that, I crave real food.  Any kind of real food.

And I sometimes pray for a piece of luck from my Greek god friends that one day I’ll meet Punchy Bryan and his chef so I can beat the shit out of them, and ask them to answer one honest question—do people actually shit in these bags before they freeze-dry them?

Back to what I was saying before I distracted myself with Zeus and his Olympian buddies.  I don’t know if it was them or just Mother Nature doing her usual random thing,  but a front is blowing in from the north, and it’s turning cold.  The sky is covered in soft, gray lumps, you know the way the clouds blanket the world sometimes in November.  The wind is blowing out of the north and the drizzle is starting.

Shroomheads don’t wear clothes, so you can see why they’d prefer to spend their time indoors snuggling with their fungal love when the sky turns gray, and the wind has a cold bite in it.

Good for me.

I’m going to give them an hour or so to settle in, then I’m heading out to see if I can find some sign of my mystery lady.

November 18, 2nd entry

Made it back!

I was out the rest of the day.  I mean, all of it.

By the time I buttoned up the hatch when I got home, it was full-on dark outside.  With overcast skies, and no moon glow to speak of, I was fumbling in the dark, trying to find my way home by feel.  Mostly.

I have a red filter for my flashlight.  I clicked it on and off from time to time to illuminate my way back.  Dangerous shit, that is.  A light out in this kind of dark will draw the attention of any night-shift Shroomhead who’s dumb enough to be sitting on the porch freezing his ‘nads and staring at the dark.

Luckily, none were.  Or they were too lazy to come after me.

Either way, I made it home, scolding myself the whole way for venturing so far from home and not leaving myself enough time to get safely back to Bunker Stink before sundown.

Note to self: Round up some night vision goggles.

I don’t know where I’ll find those, but there’s got to be some lying around somewhere.  The military was all into setting up perimeters and manning roadblocks for awhile there as Houston was lurching day-by-day into chaos.  Maybe I can find one of their vehicles, maybe a few of them.  And, as morbid as it sounds, soldiers’ bodies, fatigues and bones by now, draped in their equipment, intact where they died, hiding under a tank or something.

You never know.

I mean I saw something up on Interstate 10 when I was going to down to Plinko Ranch the other day, but that highway scares me.  It looks like a battlefield.  Burned-out cars.  Wrecks.  Disconnected bones.  Suitcases, disgorged of their contents.  Anything you can name with wheels.  Anything anybody might have found in a Walmart or a living room before the crash.  All of it, scattered and broken, with weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete.  Most of it demolished by the Shroomheads with their addiction to destruction.

But I’m rambling.

After getting out today and working my way to my destination, I started my search in Rollo and Mazzy’s front yard.

They had a dense hedge of red-tipped photinias they used to keep trimmed up all nice and square in front of their house.  Now the hedge has grown to near twelve feet tall with branches pointing out every which way like it wanted nothing more than for me to stand behind it and hide.  It was easy to peer through the gaps in the shrubs and spy on the elementary school across the street, knowing nobody over there could see me.  Hell, I could have been wearing a neon-mango reflective roadside work vest, and I’d have been invisible.

The weirdest thing happened while I was in there, looking out.  Mostly, the school looked abandoned, though I know there are at least twenty Shroomheads still living inside.  One of them came out to stretch his legs and sniff the air, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like Mazzy’s husband, Rollo, my old HOA pain-in-the-ass buddy and drinking pal.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Yeah, right.”

But I’m serious.

I’m not saying I know it was him.  Not for sure.

The Cordyceps gets in your bones and grows into red lumps that break through the skin in big, boney warts.  On the ones who’ve had the fungus a long time, they sprout bumps on their elbows and knees, breaking out all up the skin on their backs where the fungus has rooted into their spinal bones.  They especially get growths on their heads where the skin is so thin over the skull.

That makes most of the Shroomheads into ugly monsters, unrecognizable for the people they used to be.

So, if it was Rollo across the street, I wouldn’t have been able to make a positive ID.

The thing about Rollo, though, is he was unusual looking when he was a normal human.  He had that oatmeal-colored skin you see on some folks from South Texas.  Not brown, but pale.  Not anything really, I guess.  It’s just one of those things that used to set him apart from other people.  Rollo was a big guy.  Not as tall as me, but he had these big pigeon-toed feet, and he sported a round, balloon-shaped gut that gave the impression of an overinflated circus clown.  He had the biggest head I’ve seen, a huge watermelon of a thing, covered in thick, wavy black hair.  And he was always smiling, with endless rows of white teeth behind puffy pink lips that seemed a little too cartoonish to be on the face of a real live person.

Like I said, he was unique.

As a matter of fact, Mazzy and Rollo’s relationship never made any sense to me in the attractiveness compatibility department.  She looked like a MILFy bikini model, and he looked like a toad.

It makes me wonder if maybe when they met and she was young, a long time before Rollo packed on the pounds sitting behind a desk all day adding up the tax cheaters’ deductions, if maybe he was handsome.  Maybe when they met, Mazzy was one of those skinny, awkward kind of girls who hadn’t blossomed into her beauty yet.  Maybe they were a good match then, but as she only got prettier through the years, Rollo sagged out of his handsomeness, leaving the two mismatched in everything except their desire to explore their pervy swinger appetites.

Anyways, that Shroomhead across the street had the Rollo shape, mostly.  He wasn’t as portly as my friend used to be—nobody is anymore.  I guess.  He had the right skin color and the dangling Johnson, the same one I saw that time at the pool party.  The Cordyceps lumps on his head grew out through thick sprouts of hair, but his face was too distorted to make out anything recognizable except for that puffy-lipped smile.

He stood there in front of the school, ignoring the cold, pissing on the flagpole and grinning like a West Texas oilman admiring a new derrick.

I decided it was Rollo.

He went back inside the school after he got his fill of the weather.

Makes me think.

November 19

I microwaved something that was supposed to be eggs, and made me a reconstituted room-temperature smoothie to go along with ‘em—Punchy Bryan’s favorite fruit berry mix packed with antioxidants, more than twice as many essential vitamins as I’d get out of a slice of Wonder Bread, and plenty of complex carbs to keep me peppy and sharp for dodging terrorists’ bullets in the post-apoc world.

I guess with all that goodness packed in, there wasn’t any room left for flavor.

That was breakfast.

I’m watching my monitors while I eat, and I’m thinking.  As I was writing last night and babbling on about my old buddy Rollo, I never got around to telling you how my Mazzy hunt went.

Sorry ‘bout that.  You’ve been reading my diaries for a while.  You know how I am.

One thing I need to tell you before I get into the story of my quest to find Mazzy is, I’m no Indian tracker.  I mean, I’ve been hunting plenty of times, but hunting is nothing like what you’d see in the movies.  At least not the way me and my buddies did it.  You see, we shared a deer lease.

Ugh.

I just realized, I need to do some explaining.

A deer lease.  Hmm.  Basically, some guy who owns a bunch of land he’s not doing anything with rents the right to hunt on it for deer to other guys, guys like me who don’t own anything but a gun and have a noisy eventual ex at home they want a good excuse to get away from in the autumn.  So, we take turns going out to the deer lease all year long.  We have a feeder out there, and we keep it filled with corn kernels from the local Buc-ee’s mega convenience store—some things really are bigger in Texas.  The feeder is nothing but a 50-gallon barrel stood up on a metal framework six feet tall.  It’s got a timer built in and once or twice a day a little mechanism spins around and spreads the kernels across the ground.  The deer love the corn and get in the habit of coming by for breakfast and dinner.

When deer season comes ‘round, we set up a deer blind, basically a little hiding place where we can sit quietly and watch the feeder.  When the deer show up for breakfast, we shoot ‘em.

Hunting.

As far as Indians go, maybe I’ll tell you about those people later.

Back to Mazzy.

Going out and finding her wasn’t anything like deer hunting.  I had to hike through the ‘hood, look for clues in the landscape, and search.

I snuck my way up and down the street, thinking whoever it was I saw up in that attic would have had to work their way through from hiding spot to hiding spot as they made their escape.  I did the same thing, moving from the cover of overgrown bushes to a spot behind a rusting car, and then behind a tree trunk or whatever was there next.  Walking in plain sight with hungry Shroomheads around was never a good idea.

While I did my sneaking, I looked for shoeprints in the mud behind the bushes.  Shroomies aren’t fans of functional footwear, so any shoeprint I found would have to have been left there by the mysterious M.

They call me Sherlock!

I looked for things freshly knocked over, though there’s nothing conclusive about that kind of clue.  Anything can knock something over, but it tells me something passed by.  I looked for things that might have been dropped by a survivalist in a hurry.  An empty water bottle.  A bullet casing.  A dead battery.  Anything manufactured by real live human people in one of the factories that are now decaying under two years of dust and mud.

It went slower than I hoped, mostly because nothing was obvious.

I spent a lot of time in the thorny shrubs and weeds.  I checked backyards.  I looked in houses, searching for footprints in the dust on the floors.  It all added up to pretty much nothing, and I was getting discouraged by the time I finished, or thought I was.

I felt like I needed a clue on that one block between Rollo’s house and the elementary, because without that, the chances of me finding her sank quickly to nothing.  To start with, leaving Rollo’s house, she could have gone right or left.  Two choices.  At the end of the block, one was a T-intersection, the other was a regular cross street, meaning if I didn’t find a clue there, then I had to go and search five different blocks.  After that, the problem grew at each intersection by two or three more choices.  So my one-block problem turned into a five-block problem and turned into a twelve-block problem.

You can see where a man might get discouraged.

As it turned out, it was an accident I finally found something, and not anywhere near where I expected it to be.

I was making my way down the ninth street in my search grid, but still just two blocks over from the school, looking up and down for signs of Shroomheads before crossing over to the other side, when I noticed an odd pattern on the sidewalk.  It looked like a partial shoe tread pattern marked in mud and smeared by the drizzle in the air.

Crouching beside a broken utility pole, I scanned down the length of the sidewalk to a place where it looked like a heavy truck had driven off the road and cracked the concrete under its weight.  Large pieces of cement were mashed into the sandy dirt below, leaving muddy puddles on the surface.  A single footprint, a right shoe, marked the sidewalk at regular intervals from there all the way to my hiding place, each track a bit lighter than the one before.

I’m not good enough at the tracking business to know whether M was running or walking when she left those marks, but my first impression was that the footprints weren’t urgent.  She wasn’t sneaking or sprinting.  She’d just been strolling down the sidewalk.

That struck me as odd.

I pulled my boots out of the clingy vines bushed up around the base of the pole and dropped down on my hands and knees to look closely at what was left of the nearest prints.  They were definitely geometric.  They had to have come from a shoe.

All doubt poofed away like a shy genie.  It had to be M.

I made a guess about the general direction she’d been heading, and I searched the streets and bushes and houses in that direction.  It was slow, frustrating work, until nearly six blocks from the school, I saw something that knocked my socks off.

November 19, 2nd entry

Jesus.  Sorry about that.

I had a Shroomhead taking an interest in the entrance to Bunker Stink.  He was nosing around outside like he knew I was down here.  Being a reasonably intelligent human being with a strong interest in not ending up on a Shroomy’s dinner plate, I had to re-prioritize my activities.

I checked everything in the bunker for noise and light leaks.  At least all I could from the inside.  I’ll have to go out tomorrow and again in the evening to check.  Any noise, lights, or smells, picked up from outside, could get me in trouble.

Anyway, the Shroomhead eventually wandered away.  I don’t know where he went.  I don’t know if he lives in the neighborhood.  He might be a rogue.  He might have friends somewhere.  I only know that his sudden arrival bothers me.

Thinking what to do about it, I need to give some thought to maybe using my cameras to snap a pic of all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood.  I’m guessing the crests and warts on their heads, as alien as they are to me, probably make them easy to identify as individuals.

I’m starting to have second thoughts about killing all the locals, especially now that I think one of them is Rollo.  The problem puts the whole Shroom extermination plan on dubious moral ground for me.

For the moment, inspiration tells me that taking some time to catalogue the locals will help me understand which ones are which.  It could help me learn about their behavior, and it’ll help me notice when new ones come around.  Letting my local Shroomhead clan live might make me safer in the long run.

Maybe.

Okay, now that all that’s behind me, let’s pick up where we were when I so rudely closed the diary and refocused on the live muncher on my front porch.

The thing I mentioned before, the thing that knocked my socks off, had nothing to do with the footprints I’d found on the sidewalk.  It was something strange, pale and nearly hairless, except for some wiry sprigs here and there across its wrinkly curves.  In fact, it looked like a ball sack, a twenty-pound pinkish scrotum sitting up on meaty haunches as it worked its creepy little hands around a piece of shiny silver plastic wrapper, sniffing with its pointy snout and biting with its sharp little teeth.

After ball sack, I thought hairless rat.  But it was way too big to be a rat.  It was the size of a beagle.

Some kind of geriatric raccoon?

That was my best guess.  And as fascinating and freaky as it was to see it busily interested in that wrapper, it was that piece of shiny foil that pinned my attention.

I shot it with a beam from my flashlight just to be sure the dark wasn’t playing tricks with my eyes.

It wasn’t.

The four-legged ball sack was digging into the crevices of that wrapper to get at the last flavorful crumbs of goodness.  That meant the wrapper had to have been recently opened.  It was full of fresh goodies, or the nosy critter wouldn’t have been interested.  Any wrapper two years old would have long since been licked clean by a rat or scoured by the local ants.  Any silver lining would have aged itself dull and probably flaked away under the harsh Texas sun.

I moved in for a closer inspection of the evidence.

When I neared, it became clear enough that the creature had once been a fluffy-cutesy raccoon.  But everybody knows raccoons have a mean streak.  So, with what I deemed sufficient caution, I found a long stick and poked at it until it grew irritated enough to run off.

It was my turn to look closely at the wrapper and survey the scene of the crime.

The wrapper was coated in plenty of varmint spit, but it was as fresh and crispy as any I’d ever torn off a protein bar back in the day when such semi-flavorful delicacies could be acquired at the corner quickie-mart for a dollar or two more than they were worth.

In the gray light, I stood in the dead brown grass and looked at the porch of the abandoned house.  A beat-up patio chair, crusty with oxidizing plastic, stood upright just to the right of the door.  The dust on it had been rubbed away to leave a butt-shaped print in the seat and elbow drags marked the arms.  A clean outline of the sideways chair left an imprint on the porch, the place where it had lain for years before being stood back up to a useful position.

M had put it there and sat in it while she ate her snack.  The discarded wrapper had to be hers.

And kiddies, that’s what hard work and persistence will get you when you grow up.  It’s called success.  And it tastes like candy-coated happiness wrapped around a full-tongue kiss from a hot chick in a too-tight bikini on a perfect summer day with the wind blowing in off the surf and the gulls floating on the breeze squawking their taunts at you, “Grab some, buddy! Squeeze those naughty parts!”

Sorry, my mind wanders.

But never forget.  Gulls are bastards.  They’re greedy, and they never have anything nice to say.

With success fantasies burning sugar trails across my taste buds, I stayed out searching until much later than I should have.  While I dug through bushes and looked for more signs of M, another thought tickled my trigger for something to obsess over.

The raccoon.

Besides the skinny black dog I’d seen a few times, no other animal larger than a rat has trotted through the neighborhood.

Had the Shroomheads chased them all down and eaten them?

Maybe.

But that raccoon had made it.  So far.  And the more I thought about him squatting there with only the most meager sprigs of hair across his back, the more my memory makes his pimply pink skin look like one of those fat turkeys stacked in the refrigerator section at the grocery store before the holidays.

The question that tingled my taste buds after that was, what do raccoons taste like?  And if I caught it, how would I cook it without creating a cloud of yummy kitchen smells wafting through my neighborhood and drawing in every Shroomy in a ten-block radius?

And if I figured that problem out, then what other varmints might be around that would taste better than Punchy Bryan’s foil-packed Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals?  Not really ready to eat, by the way.  You almost always had to add microwave-heated water to bring out their textured baby-pooh goodness.

What about that dog?

Could I bring myself to eat a canine?

No.

Just no.

Tasty Korean stir-fry sauce notwithstanding, I’d owned plenty of pups through the years.  Often, they were better friends to me than the eventual ex or the guys at work.  No.  Dogs were off the menu.  They’d taste too much like barbecued guilt.

I could suffer through a lot of baby-shit flavored stroganoff before I’d consider eating a dog.

But cats?

I’ll bet cats taste like chicken.

November 30

Eleven days and no entries.

Sorry about that.

I got into one of my moods.  I was so excited about M.  I just knew she was Mazzy.  My hopes were up.  But even if she wasn’t, you know, if she was just somebody I could talk to that would have meant so much, a real live living human being who could tell me to fuck off and leave her alone or maybe invite me over for dinner to yak about the weather or the last book she read.

Two years in Bunker Stink listening to the world crumble outside was easy in a way.  I knew what I was getting into when I sealed the hatch.  I made my choice.  In a lot of ways, in pretending that I was saving myself for a future of green grass and sunny rainbows, I was giving up my last hope.  Torquing down the screws to keep the hatch sealed tight, I was telling the world it was going to die.  So was I, but I was going to outlast it.

I guess I never gave any real thought to the weight of the loneliness that would come.

Not while I was in the bunker, not when I stopped scanning the white noise on my shortwave set, not even after I first made my grand re-emergence.

It wasn’t until I saw M climbing out of that attic over at Casa de Rollo that I even considered I might really talk to another person besides you, future archeologist of some evolved bee species or some up-jumped gecko people.

Now, having let myself get all surprised by allowing hope to splash me cold in the face, M is all I think about.  And every day when I go out there and search for her, every day when I don’t find her, it puts me in a blacker and blacker mood and makes me hate the world.  Not just the way it is now—the place it used to be.

We had so much.  We literally could have turned our beautiful blue and green planet into heaven where no baby ever had to go to bed hungry, and every dream could be chased by anyone willing to run.

We didn’t do that.

We never built heaven.

We got so hung up on mine versus yours, us against them, and all-for-me so go fuck yourself, that we couldn’t help but flush it all down the crapper.

And now my daughters are just scattered bones that didn’t even get a burial.  You’ll never find a grave marker, Mr. Future Buzz Bug.  You’ll never puzzle over the runes carved into the stone and wonder what kind of human you found or what kind of life they lived.  It’ll be as if Kate and her two sisters only ever walked this world for a single bleak millisecond of geological time just to cry over the loves they’d lost and to feel the agony of a brutal death.

I’m now a father with no children, a husband with no wife, a man with no people, a solitary hairless monkey in a world of monsters, alone to witness the decay while I listen to all we ever built slowly crumble into the dirt.

I told you.  Black.

I had a cousin.  We grew up together, like brothers almost.  Our families always lived close.  Our parents took turns ditching me and him on the other’s parents so they could get away for a weekend or have a night to themselves to screw with the sheets on the floor while they screamed loud orgasms at God up in the clouds and they could pretend, at least for a night, like there was still some romance left in their lives.

I guess everybody likes to wax nostalgic for how things used to be.

Like most people, me and my cousin blasted through our twenties just hoping to get laid and trying to figure out life.  It’s a lot harder than it looks from the high school perspective when you can be all judgmental about people earning a living at a shit job while you’re getting free room and board from your parents.

We bounced into our thirties, scraping to make a buck, buy a house, pay for some kids, save for a nebulous future.

And by the time we reached our forties, I don’t know, maybe it’s a thing that happens to people when they finally have a minute to look up from working two jobs and a side-gig hawking overpriced scent warmers at church craft shows to pay the mortgage and trying to help kids with their homework and constantly worrying about how to pay the medical bills and praying the transmission in the car lasts until you get your tax return in the spring.

So you find yourself plopped on the couch after work, tired of watching the same old tired actors make the same old tired jokes in this season’s brand-new version of last year’s hit sitcom, and you flip to the news your dad used to watch because why the fuck not?  And the loudmouth there starts spewing shit about why everything wrong with your life is that other guy’s fault, and how you’re never going to get ahead, because that other guy is fucking you over at the ballot box, on your check stub, at tax time, and if only you’d vote for the dipshit behind door number one, he could fix it all, and the magic fairy of prosperity would float down and shit green grass all over your lawn and your bank account would overflow with pretty copper-coated zinc pennies and you’d never have to worry about getting fucked over again.

The thing is, my cousin, he started watching the noisy, prolapsed sphincter on another channel.  And that fucker told him the same damn thing except he was supposed to vote for the dipshit behind door number two.

I gotta be honest.  That’s some powerful shit to hear when you’re two months behind on your credit cards, and your bills are stacking up while your income isn’t growing, and all the while they keep telling you that some fuckers from Bumfuckistan on the other side of the world want to kill you and your kids and all the grandchildren you might one day have, and the only way you can stop them is not only to vote for the dipshit behind door number one, but maybe to hate the dipshit behind door number two enough that you can wrestle up enough blood-red passion to throw a rope over a branch and give him an old-fashioned neck swing.

That kind of rage, when it’s coursing through your veins, makes you feel like you’re doing something to change all the shit that’s wrong, all the shit that makes you have to work twelve sweaty hours a day, six days a week, even though it’s barely enough to cover the mortgage, while down in Plinko Ranch, those dipshits are buying expensive German cars, gifting their wives bigger diamonds, vacationing in Hawaii, and trying to one-up each other on the high-falutin’ colleges their kids are going to attend in the fall.

I get wound up when I think about that kind of shit.

But that was the whole point.  Looking back, I’m sure of it now.  The loudmouth turd-pellet, his twinkle-eyed news-floozies, and his expert conmen helper-elves on TV wanted me that way.  Probably because he knew once all that anger disconnected my brain from everything good inside my heart and especially the billfold in my pocket, I was more likely to not be thinking straight when I saw fast-talking, grinning Punchy Bryan’s commercial for his Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals available in pallet-sized bulk for your family’s security.  Order today for fourteen easy payments of too much money and receive a three-months’ supply of dehydrated breakfast smoothies for free.  You pick the flavor.

I did.

I paid my payments while getting another month behind on my mortgage.

I decided one day it was those fuckers down in Plinko Ranch who were to blame for all my troubles.  But the angry weevil in my oatmeal turned out to be something else entirely.

I used to work on those peoples’ air conditioners.  A lot of them were my customers.  We exchanged Christmas cards every year.  I watched football with a bunch of ‘em on Sundays at that little hot wing joint down on the highway.  Everybody was good people when we weren’t talking politics.  It seemed like we were all on the same side.

That never made sense to me.

But my cousin, me and him, used to talk about our votes and our country and our dipshit choices.  Then we started to argue about it.  Holidays would come and go.  And we didn’t sit on the back porch swatting mosquitoes and drinking cold longnecks, talking about all the stupid shit we did when were kids anymore.  We talked about why our political dipshit was better than the other one.  And why the other one was on a warpath to destroy our sacred capitalist democracy.

Like I really even gave a shit about what our governmental or economic system was.  I just knew I was supposed to love it and my cousin wanted to destroy it.  That’s what the sharp-tongued shithead on TV told me every night.

Long story short, it got so holidays and birthdays were so ugly with all the arguments and recriminations, we stopped doing them together.  A little at first, and then most of the time.

I woke up one day and realized I hadn’t talked to my cousin in years, and I didn’t feel bad about it.  In my mind, he’d stopped being the kid I grew up with.  He stopped being the young man who believed in the same things I did, who wanted the same things out of life for him and his kids as me.  He became just one thing, a supporter of the other dipshit.  We’d both chosen our life-teams.  We stopped being us, me and him, and turned into red people and blue people.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I hated him for his choice.

Yet I convinced myself I didn’t hate him in my heart.

At least that’s how the Christians that used to come to my door with their white shirts and their bicycles would tell it.  As long as I didn’t feel the hate for him in my heart, as long as I didn’t label that complex jumble of emotions with that unmentionable word, I could pretend it was something else.

But I know, when I’m not disposed to lie to myself, hate isn’t about the label you stick on it, it’s not about the emotion you hide from yourself, it’s about what you do.  If you decide to push someone out of your life by the default of not inviting them over to share a Thanksgiving turkey, if you stop talking to your brother because of his chosen dipshit affiliation, that’s action.  That’s real, tangible hate, no matter what you call it.

No matter how much I wanted to hide all that shit from myself under layers of self-righteous bullshit, I had to admit I was a shitty person, just like everybody I liked to blame for all the world’s problems.

Our country divided into red people and blue people and we hated each other so damned much that when the end finally came, the Toe Fungus Fuckers, TFF Inc., were able to play us against one another long enough to avoid the blame for what they’d done, long enough for that goddamned fungus they created to destroy the world.

And now, I’d give anything if I could sit in a lawn chair in the backyard and talk to any one of them, drinking beer and swatting mosquitoes, remembering how good we used to have it back in the day when every one of us had air conditioning, five-hundred channels of shit on the TV to choose from, paved roads, safety to walk down the street, and the luxury of not having to worry about how we were going to feed ourselves when the refrigerator ran empty.

When the end finally came, my cousin and me hadn’t spoken in years. And now, with only a dead ten-year-old’s unicorn diary to keep me company, I know I should have called my cousin and apologized for all the shit I ever said that pushed him out of my life, and I should have invited him over on a Sunday afternoon to smoke a brisket and have a real talk about all the things that made us the same, the important things, the things we never should have forgotten in the first place.

God, I miss people.

December 1

It’s cold again.

The Shroomies are holed up in the elementary school.

I haven’t killed a single one since the booby traps I set in Rollo and Mazzy’s house schwacked a dozen of them in the living room.  When it all went down, I was giddy with what I’d done.  As the days passed, I just felt guilty about it.  It started to feel less like self-defense, and more like some kind of murder.

I’m not a murderer, mind you.  These are monsters, and they’d kill me given half a chance.  But they were people once.

I don’t think I’ll kill them for sport anymore.  However, I won’t hesitate to shred them with my AR-15 if they come at me.  Just so we’re clear on that point.

Trying to work myself out of my mood, I’ve been keeping myself busy.

That thing I talked about with tracking all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood?  Well, I appropriated an inkjet printer from down at the Best Buy.  New, still in the box.  It was stacked up with some others on a high shelf.  Ignored by the Shroomies when they came in to ransack and destroy, ignored by looters who knew the closest it could come to being handy in the apocalypse was to print pretty pictures of the food they didn’t have in their pantries.

The printer works just like new.  I even managed to find all the ink cartridges I’m ever likely to need.  Paper was hard to come by, but I found a case of plastic-wrapped bundles, pristine as a prom queen’s panties.  Well, at the beginning of the night, anyway.

I’ve taken to capturing images of all the Shroomies in the neighborhood.  I have a few face shots, and a pic or two of their full bodies.  Each Shroomy profile takes up a full printed sheet with a name printed across the top, hanging on the empty wall above my computer monitors.

It’s weird now that I’ve named them, comforting in a way I can’t explain.  They’re my enemies, yet at the moment, they’re my family, too.

Rollo’s in charge.  At least I think he is.  When I watch them going out in search for something to eat, they all follow him.  Another one, I named Hairy Potter.  He seems to live a charmed life.  In general, Shroomheads have it hard, always getting bumped and scraped, often going days without a bite to eat.  Not so for Hairy Potter, he always seems to find something to satisfy his hunger.  He never gets hurt.  And I’ll be damned if he’s not nearly as hairy as a monkey.

On the opposite end of the scale, there’s a bumbler who never does the smartest thing.  When most of the Shroomheads walk around a patch of sand burrs in the grass, he’ll walk through and get them stuck to his feet.  When they stroll into a house and duck below a broken limb hanging across their way, the rest all duck.  He always bumps his head.  I named him Mo.

Another one who seems to want to hump everything he sees, and not just other Shroomheads—I saw him going after a half-rotten pillow last Friday—I named him Curly.

There’s a Ginger, Gilligan, and Mary Ann, a Mulder and Scully, and some others.

The names make them easier to keep track of.

The other thing I started doing again was spending time on my shortwave radio.  I fixed the antenna so now it’s standing up by the house, thirty feet tall.  I get on there a time or two every day and surf through the static, listening for anything that sounds like a voice, or music, or anything.  I talk to it, too.  I started out telling my anonymous audience I was in Katy, Texas and I’d be happy to meet up with them anywhere.  I got no responses, and I got tired of saying that over and over again.  Now mostly, I just talk about the weather and the state of the neighborhood—the news, I guess.

Talking on the radio isn’t a cure for loneliness and the pointlessness of staying alive, but it’s something.

Last of all, I figured out where that ball-sack raccoon lives, and I’ve decided I’m going to eat it.

Microwaved varmint meat doesn’t appeal to me, so I need to figure out how to cook the thing before I trouble myself to catch it.

December 2

Project Raccoon!

My ex used to do this thing with a chicken.

Stop.  I know what you’re thinking.

I’m talking about food here.

It was pretty easy, really.  She rubbed the skin with Cajun seasoning, used a can opener to cut the top off a beer can, and then sat the can on the smoker outside in the backyard.  The chicken, lucky it’s dead already, it gets the pleasure of sitting upright on the grill with the open beer can shoved up its ass.  Beer-in-the-butt chicken I used to call it.  Spicy and moist.  Damn, that was good stuff.

I’m thinking my ball-sack buddy would work out just fine cooked that way.  Real meat.  Fresh-killed, fresh-cooked.

That’s the goal.

And now, I’m thinking it’s December.  Spring is around the corner.  Maybe I need a vegetable garden.  Maybe I could grow me a crop of corn, too.

The idea of fresh food suddenly seems like the most appealing thing in the world.  Whatever Punchy Bryan did to make his food potable through the ages may or may not have worked.  I won’t truly have the answer on that one for a few more centuries.  What I do know for a fact is that Punchy Bryan has the magic talent of sucking every ounce of flavor out of any calorie that passed through is pickled turd factory.

A host of obstacles stands between me and my new number-one goal.  I’ve never grown anything in my life except a green lawn, so I’ll need to write up a do-list and draw out a plan.  And I need to calculate if the payoff will be worth the effort.

Oh, who am I kidding?  If I plan to stay around long-term, I’ll eventually need to figure out how to live off the land.  Better to make all my inevitable mistakes and suffer my crop failures now, while I still have several years of supplies hoarded in Bunker Stink.

I’ll root around in the Home Depot next time I’m down that way, and see if I can find some how-to books on planting a garden.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some seed packets, too.

Of course, fresh veggies implies a secondary need—canning.  I’ll need to learn how to preserve them.  I probably have a few books down in the bunker that cover the topic pretty well.  I never read any of those.  I always figured if I reached that point in my apocalyptic survival situation, I’d have plenty of time to sit around and do it then.

Well, here I am.

First things first, though.  I need to smoke that ball sack, which means I need to find a way to pipe the smoke a long way from where me and my roasting raccoon will be.

December 3

Well, after a long career of moving cold air around through ducts inside hot attics, I figure moving some hot smoke to somewhere down the block should be a snap.

An exaggeration, but easily done.

I’ve worked with the materials.  I can scrounge some squirrel-cage fans and blower motors out of some of my neighbors’ AC systems.  I can dig up some more solar panels.  The tricky part will be commandeering enough ducting from the HVAC wholesale supply three miles west of here and then finding a way to haul it all back here unseen by curious Shroomies.

I gave half a thought to also pulling the ductwork out of my neighbor’s AC systems, but I nixed that idea.  All old AC systems are coated inside with years of dust, and that doesn’t even take into consideration how many of my furry little rat buddies might have made a home in there, dragging their balls around and pissing scent trails, because like it or not, that’s what they do.  And the roaches—don’t get me started.  Result?  Blowing hot smoke through one of those galvanized steel tubes might be a fast way to start a fire.  That would, of course, flare up at the worst possible moment in the worst possible place.

Murphy’s law, motherfuckers.  Learn it.  Live it.  Love it!

But then again, maybe yanking out sections of ducting and cleaning them one at a time would be easier than hauling several truckloads a few miles across infested suburbia.

I don’t know if that’s the best solution, but it’s the part of the solution that lets me see the full path from where I am now to where I want to be.  I know how to make each step along the way work.  I only need to be careful and quiet.

Mr. Raccoon Wrinkleface, your days are numbered.

December 7

Pearl Harbor Day.

It makes me wonder if you buzzy-buzz bee people in the future will still have war.  What if you’re all a bunch of gecko-men instead of insects?  Will geckos with one color of spots wake up one morning and decide to bomb the shit out of a bunch of geckos with a different color of spots?

Is state-sanctioned murder just a human thing?

Is it still glorious for young men to dream about war?  Is it horrible for old men to lose sleep over nightmares of their dead buddies haunting them and asking them the endless why?

Maybe not.

Maybe one of the species that eventually evolves to rule the earth will get it right.

I remember watching a thing on TV about a bunch of baboons waging a primitive war against another baboon tribe over access to a grove of mango trees or some such shit.  Maybe every species that figures out how to band together for safety eventually figures out how to hate the monkeys next door because they have more food in their bellies.

I don’t know.

Just the kind of shit you think about when you have too much time, with plenty of work to keep your hands busy, but not enough complexity to keep your brain occupied.

My grandpa died at Pearl Harbor, killed by a Japanese bomb.

I never knew him.  My grandma eventually married a man who treated me like I was his own grandkid, but sometimes I’d see her when she thought she was alone, crying for my real grandpa.  That’s what December 7th always meant to me.

That attack dragged our country into a war—one we probably would have ended up in anyway—that killed so many people we had to guess the count.  Forty to sixty million.  My God.  So many dead fathers and brothers, and families unlucky enough to be trampled into the mud by humanity’s heartless steel machines of war.

Maybe the end of our world was inevitable.  Maybe human destiny was always racing to a day when there’d be just one soul left.

Maybe, that really is me.

I wonder what happened to M.

December 10

I’m sorry.  I’m not writing a lot lately.  I’m working on my smoker.  I’m staying busy.  But my mood is getting the best of me these days.

I don’t know what to do about it.

I want to smile at the sunshine.  And some mornings when I come out, and the frost has frozen the grass into a crunchy brown carpet, and the air is brittle and pure, and the sky is blue and pink and red and orange, and the earth feels like the most wonderful place in the universe, I feel good.

But the world is empty, too.

Maybe I’m wasting my time hiding safely in my hole and spending my days building a raccoon smoker.  Maybe I need to stock up on supplies and go on the road and find somebody.  Maybe life is still out there somewhere.

Surely I can’t be the last person on this whole goddamn planet.

December 15

It’ll be Christmas in ten days.  I hope I’m done with the smoker before that.  It would be nice to celebrate the holiday with a big roasted raccoon feast.

Right now, I’m eating mac-n-cheese, microwaved orange mush, really.  I don’t know where the picture on the front came from because it’s not at all representative of what’s inside.  It kinda tastes like cheesy lumps, but not really.  It almost smells like dirty feet, but only when the steam coming out of the pouch hits your nose just right.

In glowing quotes, in blue block letters right there on the front, Punchy Bryan tells us this is one of his favorite entrées in his line of fine products, his own lovely mother’s family recipe.

I think his mother secretly hated him.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll have plain boiled rice.  It’s not a taste treat, but at least I know what’s in it.

All in all, it’s been a good day.

I went out this morning to gather more aluminum tape to finish the seals on my smoke duct.  It’s assembled, and runs from the smoker in my backyard, up to the roof of my neighbor’s house, and then down the row, all the way to the end of the block, following the curve of the road.  Another dozen houses down, I had the genius idea to run it to the community pool building.  The last galvanized tube extends off the roof of the manager’s office and out over the half-full pool, where it’ll empty the smoke into the air.  It’ll probably be cool by then.  That’s a long distance for the smoke to run, and I had to install six fans along the path to make sure to keep it flowing.

After I get it all sealed up, I’m going to give it a test.  I even extended my POD network with a camera near the pool so I could sit in the safety of my bunker and watch how many Shroomheads were drawn in by the tantalizing smells floating through the air.  If too many show up, I’ll have to abort the project.

I hope I don’t have to.

One of the benefits that came to mind as I was stealing Glaspy’s two-thousand-dollar smoker from two doors down and across the street—so much better than the rusty thing I owned—was the original purpose for smokers.  Assuming I can find more than just the one raccoon a few blocks over, maybe some rabbits and even some birds, I could hunt them and smoke their meats, drying them out into jerky.  If I could make that work, then I might never have to worry about running out of food, and I might one day dump all of Punchy Bryan’s foil-pouched-apocalypse puke in a hole and bury it.

But I’m off the point I was trying to make.

When I went out to find the aluminum tape, I came across a craft store.  It was one of those places the eventual ex used to go when she got the wild hair to explore her creativity to make up for the general emptiness in her life.  Our lives.  She tried beading for a while.  She painted abstract water colors one spring but stopped when she had to explain to me they were figurative—an actual, real world thing—and not abstract.  Oops.  She ran through a half-dozen other hobbies.  Each new creative outlet cost me what seemed like a week’s pay.  But what do you do?  You gotta try to keep the wife happy.

Anyways, I was in there and came across a bin of corrugated plastic board, basically frosty, translucent, quarter-inch sheets.  It’s the kind of stuff realtors, panhandlers, and get-rich-quick scammers used to make their signs out of.  Spotting them, and knowing there had to be hundreds of bottles of paint and whatnot laying in the rubbage on the floor, an inspiration sproinged into turgid happiness in my brain.

I’ll let you know all about it tomorrow night if it works out.

One thing I can tell you now, is it’s got me fired up a little, but I’m trying to manage my expectations because I don’t want to ride that roller coaster of hope up and then crash again.

Crashing is hard.

One other weird thing I should mention.

I’ve been doing my half-best to keep up with my Shroomhead identification effort.  I think there are eighteen of them left living in the elementary school.  They’re the day-shift bunch.  On the night-shift band, I’m not sure of the count.  I’m guessing ten or so.  I still don’t have my nighttime cameras working because I haven’t installed the batteries.  Too many projects.  Not enough time.  And what I used to think was a tolerant sharing of the neighborhood between the two groups isn’t.  From what I’ve seen on some video clips taken near dusk a time or two, the groups get belligerent toward each other when one group doesn’t stick to its sunny or dark part of the day.  I don’t know why.  I’m not entirely sure it’s true.  I might be misinterpreting their behavior.  But that’s my best guess so far.

Now that weird thing I was going to tell you about.

I don’t record much of this video, and what I do record, I rewrite over most days to save hard drive space.  Well, I noticed while I was having an early dinner that four of the day-shift Shroomheads from the school finished their day by sitting under the bare tree in Rollo and Mazzy’s front yard and staring at the house.  I say staring, because that’s really all I can tell they were doing.  But the longer they sat there, the more it looked like they were grieving.  Rollo was among the four.  I think he was crying.

December 16

I think Punchy’s mamma’s mac-n-cheese recipe gave me the shits.  Every time I turned around today, I had to squat and squirt.  My ass feels like it’s on fire and my guts have been cramping all day.  I don’t know if I’ll eat anything for a day or two.  Maybe just clear liquids and vitamins.

Maybe for three days.

If it’s some kind of stomach bug, that’ll help to clear it out.

On the bright side, I cut up my corrugated plastic, collected a bunch of old realtor sign frames rusting in the grass in front of the houses around the neighborhood, and I painted me a bunch of signs.

Why not advertise?

One said,

Hello, M.

I’d like to talk, if you want to.

Another said,

Hi, I’m Dusty.

Glad to meet you.

I got bored after a few, started channeling my inner fifteen-year-old, and wrote shit like,

Neener, neener,

I have a big wiener.

I figured it didn’t matter what I wrote, so long as I wrote something.

I put the signs in yards all through the neighborhood.  I don’t know if M is still around.  Maybe she’s long gone.  But if she or any other normal person comes across the signs, they’ll see that they are new.  They’ll know they aren’t alone.  And maybe, they’ll hang around long enough to contact me.  And maybe have a beer.

Fingers crossed.

December 19

I climbed up on my roof this morning.  It’s been a while since I’ve done that.  My foot broke through a rotten spot, so I need to be careful when I go there from now on.

I went up to sit with my back to my chimney and watch the sun rise.  This time of year, the nights get cold, down in the forties mostly, which is pretty chilly for this part of the country.  With most of the leaves off most of the trees, the branches all looked black, silhouetted against the reds and pinks in the eastern sky.

I’m no meditating yoga-hippie eating granola twigs and shitting paisley-shaped flower turds into my organic tulip and thyme garden.  So don’t get any ideas about that.  I like the solid heft of a steel gun in my hand, and when the cordite pops and the lead punches a hole through a target a hundred yards away, I don’t get a woody out of it, but I do enjoy pulling the trigger.

The peace of a quiet morning with just me and the birds, the crisp air, and the coming sun is something.  There’s a magic there that got lost in the world of six-dollar coffees, hour-long commutes, and quarterly self-evaluations.

Watching the sunrise is something I need to do more often.

I’m starting my burn today.  So, this might be the last time I spend outside for a while.  I can’t say for sure.  That’s just the way tests go.  If the burn draws in too many Shroomheads, I’ll need to stay in my hole until they all disperse again.

December 19, 2nd entry

It’s late in the morning.  Partly cloudy sky.  Cool temps.  Light breeze.  The weather is perfect for spreading a good layer of smoke over a wide area.

I loaded up Glaspy’s smoker with a good mix of dry and green wood.  I put in the green because I want it to smoke a lot.  And I want it to smell.

Now I’m sitting in front of my bank of monitors, watching the Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and paying extra attention to the monitor I have set on the camera over at my makeshift smokestack exit above the old community pool.

Unfortunately for the entertainment value, it’s pretty anticlimactic.

For the test, that’s a good thing.  Seeing nothing happen is exactly the best outcome I could hope for.

I see Shroomheads from another camera, the one pointing at the school.  Some of them are sniffing the air.  Nothing yet has them super interested.  Maybe that means my test is pointless.  Maybe they can tell the difference between straight-up wood smoke and succulent barbecued critter meat.

I’m bored.

Maybe I’ll watch a movie on DVD.  Or read my book on backyard gardening.

December 19, 3rd entry.

I admit it.  I dozed off.

I guess I was tired.

But now, well, things have picked up.

Most of the Shroomheads from the school are lingering down at the community pool.  Several have climbed the fence and are standing at the edge, looking up at the smoke coming out of the duct.  One is climbing up on the roof and trying to get a closer sniff.  The rest are outside the fence, some looking up at the duct and smelling the air.  Mostly the ones outside the fence are rooting around in the bushes and grass, foraging for edible roots and bitter acorns.

The back fence of the pool stands adjacent to a drainage canal a hundred feet wide.  We have a lot of floodwater mitigation engineering around these parts.  The topography is pretty flat.  That canal runs along a creek bed that cut through this area in the years before they built all the subdivisions out and it was still a farm.

I know, I’m rambling again.

The thing is, from my camera, I can see maybe thirty more Shroomies on the far side of the canal, standing and squatting on the levee like they’re waiting for something to happen.  I don’t know what.  Maybe they’re waiting for the local group to clear out so they can explore the source of the smoke.  Perhaps the drainage canal marks a border between two territories.  I do find it curious that the two groups seem to have no interest in getting close.

More info for my useless collection effort.  I wonder if I should record this in some formal way like a scientist would while studying mountain gorillas in Africa.

The surprise came about an hour into watching.  It was approaching noon, and way down the street, maybe four or five blocks from the community pool, I spotted M.

I guess it was M.  I can’t imagine who else it could have been.

She was in the street, looking toward the Shroomheads who were mostly interested in the smoke from the fire burning in the smoker in my backyard.  She was wearing a poncho, or just a blanket with a hole cut in it and a hood pulled up over her head.

The thing that amazed me, like the day I saw her tracks on the sidewalk in the drizzle, she wasn’t hiding.  She made no effort at all.  She just stood there in the road like she didn’t have a fright in the world.

Her bravery made me jealous.

I would never swim with sharks while a dumbass dive master dumped chum in the water to draw them in.  I would never bungee jump off a big glass building.  I wouldn’t skateboard down a curvy, steep road to race to the bottom of a tall mountain, and I would never stand in the middle of the road looking like fast-food waiting to be spotted by a few dozen Shroomies just down the street.

Some things are too far on the dangerous side of stupid to be considered.

But there she was.  M.  Standing there for no other reason than—

DOH!

Did she want me to see her?  Is that why she was taking the risk?

My local Shroomhead clan was still in and around the community pool.  The ones from the territory next door were still out.  I didn’t have any way to guess how many more Shroomies might be following their noses from other areas.  But this was the best chance I had for contacting M.

I had to go out.

No choice.

So, Mr. Buzzy Buzz Bee archeologist, if this is my last entry, well, you’ve heard this song before.  Just so you know, I’m not doing something outright stupid.  I’m taking a risk for a good cause.

Wish me luck.

December 19, 4th entry

Well, that was interesting.

Like I tend to do these days—whenever I load my backpack for an excursion that might last more than a few hours, you know, anytime I venture more than a block or two from the house, because you just never know what’s going to happen, whether you’re going to have to hole up in an attic or a storeroom for a day or two while things outside chill out—I packed my diary.  It’s part of my life.  I try to write whenever I can.  If nothing else, it keeps me busy when I find myself stuck somewhere in do-nothing mode.

So, I brought it along.  It’s not my bug-out bag, that’s a whole different deal.  In this one I have food enough for a few days.  Water for one, and some chlorine tablets to make more.  A warm jacket.  Extra batteries.  You know, my basic short-term survival load.  I’m not moving out of Bunker Stink, just being prepared for an uncertain world.

I took a circuitous route, walking/sneaking a mile and a half to come up behind M, who, as the crow flies, wasn’t more than a quarter mile from my house.

Fortunately, I didn’t come across a single Shroomy, and that did a lot to bolster my new theory of Shroomhead clan territoriality.

Ha!

God, I sound like one of those narrators on Animal Planet.

When I reached the corner house and peeked out past a stand of pine trees trying to grow up in the partial shade of a dead willow, I looked to the spot in the street I’d seen from a different angle on my video camera.  It was the place M was standing boldly, only the road was empty.

I looked both ways, and all I saw were weeds growing up through the seams between the street’s concrete slabs.  That, and junked cars left on the road.

Shit.

I was disheartened.

I was tired of letting hopelessness win.

I think that’s what kills most people when the tornadoes are spinning and the turds are screaming in the wind, something logical in their heads tells them how hopeless things are, and maybe even asks, “Why suffer?  Why drag it on?  Why not just call it quits?”

That’s the shit I’ve been wallowing in a lot lately.  It’s a sticky trap that’s hard to pull free from.  But it’s one that leads to being dead.

I didn’t go into debt to dig a hole in my backyard, suffer the ridicule of my neighbors, and sit in Bunker Stink for two years just to give up when the carnival ride started to squeak.

Sometimes, I think I missed my calling.  If only I could condense my nuggets of inspiration into catchy aphorisms—that’s a smart-person word for witty-wisdom shit.  My cousin used to use words like that.  Maybe I could have been a motivational poster poet.  I’ll bet that was a cushy job back when there were still enough people around with shitty jobs who needed to read that kind of crap hanging on the wall above the time clock.

I guess that’s a long way to go about saying, when I noticed M had moved away from her spot in the street, I didn’t hang my head and go home.

I wasn’t hot on her heels, yet I was closer than I ever expected to be again.

So:

Guess number 1—she probably had no idea I was there looking for her and just went about her business of doing weird shit for no apparent reason.

Guess number 2—she probably figured where the smoke was coming from and she was following the pipes back to their source.  Like me, she would have to give the Shroomheads a wide berth.

I liked number 2.

I headed back to my place.

Throwing caution to the wind, I ran.

December 19, I’ve lost count…

I was huffing and puffing when I got back to my street, and telling myself my morning exercise routine wasn’t cutting it.  I needed to find a rowing machine or something to get some aerobic time in.  As it was, if I ever had to run for my life with a handful of meat-eating fungus-heads chasing me, I was going to be in trouble.

Between gulps of air, as I stood behind the fat trunk of an oak tree across the street and three doors down from my place, I spotted M a little farther down, coming out from between two houses on my side of the block.

I stepped out from behind the tree, pasting the biggest, friendliest grin on my face, and I waved.

She froze.

I couldn’t make out anything of her expression as she looked at me from inside the shadow of the hood over her head.

“Hello!” I called, as loud as I dared.  I stepped toward her, taking a cautious glance over my shoulder to see if anything else was coming up the street in my blind spot.  When I looked back at her, she was running.

I yelled as loud as I could, “Wait!”

I jogged in her direction.  “Wait! I won’t hurt you.”

She was already rounding the curve at the end of the street, running right out in the middle, not sprinting from shrub to shrub, not using burned out cars for cover.

The last I saw of her was a fast glance at me, and then she was gone, running right toward the Shroomheads loitering around the pool house a dozen houses down.

I ran for everything I was worth to catch her before it was too late.

How could she not know the Shroomies were down there?  How could she not see them?

I was panting again when I rounded the corner, slipping on the dead grass as I came around, and skidding down to my hands and knees.  I was back up in an instant, not giving a thought to the scrapes on my palms as I looked down the road.

M was gone.

A scream, or holler, or something I couldn’t make out echoed off the fronts of the houses, sounding like it was coming from three directions at once.

The Shroomheads who had been down by the pool house weren’t there anymore.  Not all of them.  Half were sprinting in my direction.  One of them screamed that Shroom-shit jibber-jabber and the rest of the loiterers by the pool figured it out pretty quick.  They dropped whatever twigs and roots they were trying to munch and decided I looked like a much better meal.

I don’t know where M went, but I knew where I was going, and it didn’t matter how winded I was.  Safety was a hundred yards away, buried under the weeds in my backyard, and I had to get there before the first Shroomhead rounded the corner and saw in which direction I escaped.

December 19

For a man on the old side of middle age, I gotta tell you, I’m proud of how fast I hauled my bones and wrinkles up the street, crossed over the open asphalt, slipped between the houses, and bounded past a few downed fences to get to my yard.

Out on the street, by the curve in the road, the Shroomheads were loud and frustrated, trying to figure out where I’d disappeared to.

I reached my fake utility box, took a quick glance around to make sure no prying eyes saw me open it up, crawled inside, lifted the hatch to my bunker, slid down, and buttoned things up tight.

Safe.

I was dripping sweat when I retrieved an orange-flavored bottled sports drink from my small fridge and guzzled it down, wiping my face on my sleeve when I paused to breathe.

I tell you, there’s nothing like running for your life from a band of man-eating monkeys to tingle your ‘nads and pucker your sphincter.  It reminds you how good it feels to be alive.

I laughed out loud, and quickly hushed myself down, and then giggled again, for being unable to control it.

Living!

After catching my breath, I dropped into my command console chair.

Command console.

Yeah, it’s getting to be something kinda special.  I have nearly nine feet of desk space with eight wide, flat panel monitors to watch my world in full-color, full-motion video.  I’ve got several feet of desk space down at the end dedicated to piecing together computer parts from machines I’ve salvaged from homes in the neighborhood.  It’s not that I need a ton of computing power, but I do want to increase my capacity to record video in case I need to go back and review an event that occurred more than a day or so in the past.

And so you ask, how does an HVAC man who barely made it through high school come to know so much about computers that I can take them apart and put them together?

Eh, it’s no biggie.  They’re like puzzles where all the important pieces in all the systems fit together in the same way.  It’s actually kinda hard to screw it up.  The difficulty comes in trying to mix and match hardware from different systems because on the software side they don’t always know how to talk to each other.  You used to be able to go out on the internet and download anything you needed to make one doodad work with the other thingamajig.  Now, with no internet, I stick with finding computers just like the one I own—they’re common, so it’s not super hard—that way, I’ve got all the software I need to make my hardware pieces play nice.

So, I was looking at the ‘hood from nine different views, and switching cameras on a few monitors to see parts that weren’t already visible.  I have more cameras than I have monitors.

The Shroomheads were running up and down my block with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm.  They started to search in groups of three or four, ranging through yards and across to other blocks.  A trio of them found their way to my backyard, and the smoker caught their attention.  Thankfully, one burned her fingers while touching my smoker and that was all it took to encourage the three to leave the confusing thing alone and wander on to more likely hiding places for their prey.

They didn’t notice the trampled down grass where I’d created trails through the yard on the way to and from my house.  I hadn’t noticed them either until that moment, with three Shroomheads wandering around too close.

I’d need to do something about that.  For anyone used to hunting critters in the wild, my trails through the grass were a sure sign that something big was around.  The fact that they all terminated at the fake green utility box was a dead giveaway as to my hidey-hole for anyone with a decent dose of deductive capacity left in his brain.

Funny how mistakes sit invisible right in front of you sometimes, until somebody stumbles by and kicks a turd in your face.

December 19

The Shroomheads moved on, and I turned my attention to figuring out what happened to M.

I sorted my videos, searched by timestamp, and came across the one from a house down near the curve in the road that showed her briefly running around the corner.

That was good, because it told me exactly what time of day to look for her on the feeds from the camera I had mounted down by the exit point for my smoke duct.  Five minutes later, I was watching M run past the community pool.

Because of the angle, I didn’t see M pass any Shroomheads going the other way, so I’m at a total loss as to how she evaded them.

The mystery of the whole thing, like you haven’t guessed it already, even with your little bee-sized brain, is why the hell didn’t the Shroomies chase M?  Was it that weird scream I heard?  Did it frighten them away from her?  Was there something about that baggy poncho she wore that confused them so much about what she was that they didn’t see her as food?  Maybe to them, she looked like an empty garbage bag blowing in the wind.

I know, it sounds kind of stupid, but I don’t have a better explanation.

All I know for absolute certain is that she seems to have figured out a way to walk/run right past them and not stir up enough of their interest for them to give chase.  She’s discovered the secret to Shroom stealth.  And that explains a lot about her odd behavior, the footprints I found on the sidewalk, her standing in the road just down the street from my smoke duct exit point, without the slightest worry about the carnivores a hundred yards away.

I’ve whined a bazillion times about how much I want M’s company, and maybe a thousand times how much I’d love it if M turned out to be my promiscuous Mazzy with the luscious tits.  There’s one thing I know for sure, she possesses a piece of knowledge that’ll make my life completely different, and will probably save me one day.  She knows how to make herself invisible to the Shroomheads.

I need to find M more urgently than ever.

December 19

Anxiously, I eyed the hunting Shroomheads and listened to the tick of the clock on the wall—yeah, I still have an old-fashioned, battery-operated clock the size of a dinner plate that softly ticks each time its big hands pass another minute.  The clock is a comfort I can’t explain.

At the moment, though, it was serving as a meter on my anxiety.  With each tick, the Shroomheads spread a little farther, making it safer for me to venture out.  Each minute that passed put M farther away on a trail that grew only colder.

It was time.

I tossed a big fuck-it into the air, took one last scan of my yard and the area around the nearby houses, marked the locations and the directions of the stalking Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and made for the ladder.  I grabbed my bag, you know the one with my overnight supplies and shit, and in seconds, I was through the hatch, out of the fake utility box, and standing on one of the beat-down trails through my backyard weed farm.

I paused, and listened.

Just to double-confirm.

Then I moved.

Running.  Quiet.  Stopping at the front corner of my garage, I did a quick scan of the street, and then bolted across.

Quickly getting through the area I had under surveillance was key.  The longer the time passed between my last visual of the Shroomies, the more time they’d have to move to an unexpected place.

I angled through backyards and over downed fences, using the dense backyard foliage to keep out of sight.  I sprinted to a catty-corner street crossing at the school and leapt over a bent school-zone sign to avoid a stand of overgrown prickly pears.

It’s always good to stay away from those things.  Their little thorns get under your skin and irritate for days.

I was looping around, and avoiding Shroomheads, and when I reached a corner on the far side of the elementary school, I was at the limit of my surveillance range.  My neighborhood clan of Shroomies was all behind me.  And I figured I still had several blocks to go, maybe all the way to the next major roadway, before I found the border of their range on the east.  That’s when I had to be double-sure-careful and sneak hard to evade the Shroomheads I was likely to find over there.

At first, the whole thing felt like a lot more work than it was, with adrenaline pumping and speeding up my heart and my breathing, it was hard to know the difference between needing to rest, and just being wound up.  After awhile, things settled out.

My ears were perked and listening for the sounds of anything nearby that might be bigger than a bird.  My eyes were scanning and then focusing on every movement of every bare tree limb and overgrown bush.

I made my way northeast toward Greenhouse and Saums roads without spotting a single Shroomhead.  I squatted behind a masonry wall and collected my thoughts and caught my breath.  I don’t know how far M went.  I was heading in the general direction she was moving when she passed out of my last camera’s field of view, and I had to decide how far I was willing to venture into territory I hadn’t entered since before the collapse.

December 19

It took a good part of the afternoon.  The faint smell of burning wood was on the breeze.  My smoker.  I was a few miles from the house, and settling into the idea that I’d be staying the night away from home, so I started looking for places to bed down.

I was making my way up an alley behind a run-down strip mall.  In the spots where the layer of gravel had given way to the muck underneath, some of the mud had dried back to hard dirt.  Being a twenty-first-century, suburban man, the obvious sign I was searching for fell so comfortably into my outdated intuition that at first, it was invisible.

It wasn’t until I squatted beside a rusting dumpster to get a studied view of my surroundings that I realized the patterns dried into the mud were footprints—shoes—going in both directions.

I’d found the sign I was looking for.

M had passed through the alley, many times.

I made the secondary deduction that since the path was well-travelled, she had to be living nearby, probably her new home since I’d chased her out of Mazzy and Rollo’s attic.

More excited than I should have been, given that I was explicitly attempting to manage the height of my hopes, I headed north.

At a point where I reached the end of the strip mall behind a convenience store, where the asphalt was in pretty decent shape, I lost the trail.  Not a showstopper.

I looked back down the alley.  The back door of the convenience store hung on one hinge, leaning away from the frame.  The footprints in the mud had passed that entrance more than once without any apparent turn to enter or exit.  She wasn’t in there.  My Indian tracking skills told me that much.

Peeking around the corner of the cinderblock wall, I spotted a drugstore dominating the parking lot, built up close to the intersection where it could be seen from traffic coming from all four directions.  Its concrete walls stood twenty feet tall, and from all the time I’d spent on roofs servicing AC units up there, I knew the roof was probably three or four feet below the top edge of the outer wall.  In other words, a great place from which to observe activity for a long way in every direction.

I’d been inside that drugstore before, back before the collapse, back when the public was going bonkers over what the TFF, Inc.—the Toe Fungus Fuckers—had done to us, back when I had to drop my drawers halfway down to get the latest installment of the government inoculation in my hairy butt cheek.  This wasn’t the drugstore where the doe-eyed cutie pharmacist worked.  That one was closer to my house.  That’s the one she asked me not to return to.

Still, they were all laid out the same inside according to some corporate marketing planogram, with the entrance on one corner and the pharmacy counter on the opposite one, and in-between a gauntlet of impulse-buy As-Seen-on-TV bullshit along with every variation of sugar confection known to man wrapped in shiny titillating plastic and stacked at eye-level to convince people to pick them up.

I decided the drugstore would be a great place to hole up, and I bet myself a quarter M was in there.

December 19

I sprinted from car to car in the parking lot, and came to a stop against the back wall of the drugstore, just a few long paces from its back door, which was altogether gone.  No sign of it anywhere.

Putting on my Indian tracker cap, I studied the concrete sidewalk that ran around the perimeter of the building and noticed most of it was bleached pale gray, though stains from years past spread out in places, dark and ominous.  My imagination spun those stains into pools of blood, and I envisioned the bodies of women and men, lying on the concrete just where my feet stood, though the bones had long been dragged off by hungry Shroomheads and nighttime scavengers.

I crept close to the open doorway and noticed curving trails of dirt on the ground.  No footprints visible, but like the trampled-down weeds in my backyard led to the entry to Bunker Stink, the patterns of dirt on the sun-bleached cement told me a story of feet coming and going.  Optimism more than good sense told me it was M who left the trails.

I peeked inside and saw the dim shadows of a back stockroom that ran the width of the building.  Down at the far end, part of the stockroom was separated from the rest by a metal fence, bolted into the walls, with a gated entrance.  Probably the area where they stored the drugs or whatever expensive shit they wanted to keep out of minimum wage employees’ sticky-finger range.

Inside, on the dark concrete floor, it was impossible to make out any dirty smudge trails.  Still, I made my guess and chose my direction in about two seconds.  Up came my rifle to point the way.

Careful about where I placed my feet, not wanting to crunch any of the scattered apocalypse trash on the floor, I stayed on what seemed to me to be a narrow path through.  Fat brown rat turds were scattered everywhere.  The smell of their piss told me one thing for sure, they liked living in the drugstore.

“Hello?” I called, not wanting to surprise M, not wanting to be startled myself by waking a gaggle of sleeping Shroomies.

No answer came back.

“Hello?” I repeated.  “If you’re in here.  I just want to talk.  I don’t mean you any harm.” Seriously, doesn’t every creep in every murder-thriller movie say something just like that?

Ugh.

“There aren’t many of us left,” I called.  “Normal people, I mean.”

Still no answer.

My optimism waned.  I couldn’t think of a good reason M wouldn’t respond if she were inside the ransacked drugstore.

Twenty paces from the doorway, walking the length of the back stockroom, my eyes were adjusting to the dim light.  The deep shadows were still obscured behind mounds of rotting boxes and whatever used to be inside before the moisture seeped in and the varmint-sized critters set up housekeeping.  I flicked on the flashlight mounted to my rifle barrel and swept it across the inky hiding places.

Spying a ladder leading up to a storage loft, I stepped through the gate on the security cage.  “Hello?” I called again.  “If you’re in here, M, I just want to talk.  I only have my rifle for protection.  You know how it is.” Why does everything sound like a lie when you’re in a weird situation?

I heard nothing but the skitter of little clawed feet running through some crackly something way up near the roof.

I figured I was alone in the drugstore.  Just me and the rats.

I sighed and lowered my rifle, and decided to give the place a good look around.  I might find some things I could use, especially overlooked drugs that would come in handy one day despite their expiration dates.  That, and I figured I might scope the loft out for a potential campsite for the night.  Using the drugstore as a base, I could probably spend another day or two scouting out the area.

I climbed the ladder, lifting myself slowly between patient steps, listening for anything of any size that might be lurking in the loft to pounce on me.

Just about the time I was poking my head through the upper level and flicking on my flashlight to look around up there, the gate that separated the two parts of the stockroom clanked loudly and clicked shut.

December 19

After nearly dumping a load of warm soft-serve into my skivvies—that part of my gastronomical system not being entirely recovered from Punchy Bryan’s mac-n-cheese—I wrestled for half a second on whether to monkey climb up the ladder and try to disappear in the darkness or turn to face the coming Shroomheads with my rifle blazing, one-handed, action-hero style.

A few soft metallic clicks confused me as I looked down at a shadowy blob by the gate.

Finally, the math all added up in my dumbass brain.

The dark figure took off at a run as I all but fell down the length of the ladder, calling, “Hey! Hey! Stop! Please?”

I hit the concrete hard, and needles of pain exploded through my knees.  Still, I leapt across the security cage and grabbed onto the chain-link gate, rattling it loudly as I yanked.

Not only was it closed and latched, it was pad-fucking-locked.

Motherfucker!

“M!” I shouted, trying hard to keep my frustration tamped down.  “What is this?  Why—”

A small voice squeaked out of the dim light down by the door.  She was stopped there, her silhouette looking back.  “Why are you following me?”

You’ll never know how good it is to hear a real, live human’s voice until you’ve gone a few years without, until you’ve accepted a hundred times over that you’re the last normal human on the whole planet.  I gurgled a noise through some weighty emotions trying to bubble their way to the surface and said, “I just want to talk.”

“Go fuck yourself, Gomer Pyle.  And leave me alone.”

Gomer Pyle?

Sure I was wearing camo and had a gun, but I’m nothing like the doofus in the old TV series.

She hadn’t run off yet, but said, “If you promise to leave me alone.  I’ll tell you where the key to that padlock is.  If you don’t, you can just stay inside and cry until they come and find you.  Then good luck, Gomer.”

At that point, I was already thinking I could go back up to the loft, bust out through one of the skylights and get onto the roof.  I’d be free in minutes.

Maybe she sensed the gears turning in my head.  Maybe she knew danger was growing the longer she stayed.

I saw the shadowy silhouette of her baggy poncho step through the door, and in desperation, I shouted, “Mazzy!”

The shadow she cast on the floor froze stiff.

“Mazzy?” I called again.

She jumped back through the doorway and turned on me.  “Mazzy?”

I already knew it wasn’t her.  Mazzy had a sultry, luscious voice.  The girl in the poncho was young, mid-teens.  The angelic clarity of her mean little voice made that clear.

“How do you know that name?” she snapped.

“Mazzy?”

“You’re not a moron, are you?”

A moron?  Slipping into a junior high insult-trading protocol, I told her, “You don’t have very many friends, do you?”

“You are a moron,” she responded.  “We’re kind of running short on people, in case you haven’t noticed.  I’m betting you don’t have any friends, either.”

Having lost my first round of the insult fight, my first since just before the eventual ex turned into an actual ex and moved in with three-under-par-golf-ball-boy, I decided to try the maturity route.  I calmly asked, “How do you know Mazzy?”

“How do you?” she shot back at me.  “You were rooting around in her bedroom.  You set up all those traps in our house.”

Our house?

I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, but I’m not an idiot, either.  I ran through some quick age-based math in my head and postulated my deduction.  “Mazzy was your mother?” Could M be her youngest daughter?  When was the last time I saw her?  “You’re Amelia?”

M took a step back toward the door and stopped.

“What’s with M?” I was grasping at anything to ask to keep her there.

“My nickname, dumbass.  Mom called me M all the time.”

Doh!

“I’m Dusty,” I explained.  “I live two blocks over.  Rollo—your dad—and me, well, you’ve seen us together.  We used to pal around.  You know me.”

“You’re the one who got divorced after your last daughter went off to college.” She made it sound like an accusation.

“Yes.  I mean, no.  It wasn’t like that.  She ran off with some dude.” I caught myself.  “Why am I explaining this to you?”

“What do you want?” she asked again.  “Why are you following me?”

“Well, like you said, there aren’t many of us around anymore.  You know, normal people.  Have you been living in the attic of your house this whole time?”

Amelia paused, clearly thinking about whether to continue the conversation.

“Please.” I didn’t mean for it to sound so pitiful, but sometimes the shit you say betrays you whether you like it or not.  “I just want someone to talk to.  Do you know of anyone else who’s still around?  I mean, if you made it this far and I made it, there have to be more, right?” In truth, I was hoping she was going to tell me Mazzy was alive and well and hiding nearby.  And why not throw in something about her pining for me all these years?

Hoping.

Maybe Amelia read my mind, but she got right to the heart of my hopes.  “I remember, you used to come over sometimes to pick up my dad to go drinking.  You were always staring at my mother with old-man-pervert eyes.  You’re gross.”

“Wait!” Taken aback, I started to come up with lies to defend myself.  I wondered how she even knew I’d been staring at her mother.  I thought I’d been careful with my lascivious thoughts.  In the end, I decided to go with honesty.  “You know what, you’re right.  I did look at your mother.  I gawked at her.  I lusted.  She was maybe the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.  I never did it in front of Rollo.  I never told anyone about it, and I never acted on my inappropriate thoughts.  I was never that kind of husband and I sure as hell wasn’t that kind of friend.”

She wasn’t convinced.  “Didn’t you get enough of her at those swinger parties they used to throw when they dumped me at my aunt’s house for the weekend?”

“No!” That accusation stung.  “I never, I mean, I walked into the backyard once, accidentally.  I saw them around the pool—your dad, your mom, a bunch of people from the neighborhood.  But I wasn’t, I mean, me and my wife weren’t into that.”

“But you wanted to be.”

“What are we talking about here?” I asked.  “None of that is important anymore.  My wife turned Shroom, her and her penny-loafer boyfriend both.  Rollo turned, and I suppose Mazzy did, too.  Why are we arguing about this?”

“So, what are you thinking?” she asked, acid in her tone.  “With Mazzy gone, maybe you’ll turn your old-man-perv on her daughter?  Maybe get you some young stuff?”

“No.” Ick! “I’d never do that.  Talk about gross.”

Amelia’s shadow stomped toward me through the clutter, snorting angry breaths all the way up.

Inexplicably intimidated by a girl half my size with twice my temper, I stepped back from the gate.

Once in front of me, she threw her hood back and said, “There.  Is that what you want, you dirty old man?  You want your wrinkly old dick to fall off?  Well, whip it out and let’s get on with it.”

As I stared, trying to take it in, trying to put the discordant pieces together in my brain, she added, “That’s right, Gomer.  I’m one of them.”

In the dim light, it took a moment, but I realized the misshapen dollops that had been beneath her hood weren’t mounds of badly groomed hair, they were red lumps.

She sealed it tight with, “I’m a Shroomhead.”

December 19

Sometimes, the thoughts in your head hit you so hard they take your breath away and loosen your grip on the world.

I took another step back and dropped down to sit on a comfy stack of disintegrating Poise pads.  “What?  I don’t understand.”

“It’s not hard, Gomer.”

I looked at her, as my head slowly shook, the thoughts not wanting to settle in, like logic wouldn’t let them fit anywhere.

“The fungus infected me,” she explained.  “The lumps grew.”

“But—” It still didn’t make sense to me.  “You’re not—”

“Crazy?” she asked.  “Stupid?”

“You’re not very nice,” I managed to say.  “But you seem normal.”

“Because I am.”

“How?” I asked.

“Does it matter?  It’s not like we’re going to be able to find a doctor to explain it, right?  Like everybody else, the doctors are all dead, or turned Shroom.  Or they’re floating on their yachts out in the gulf waiting for the world to un-fuck itself.”

“Are there any others like you?” I asked, a thousand other questions stacking up behind that one, desperate to get out.  “Is this how all of you turn out?”

“All of us?” she asked, taking offense.  “Like I’m an expert.”

“Sorry.”

Maybe something in my eyes, maybe something about the expression on my face, finally dulled Amelia’s edge, because she decided to apologize, too.  “Sorry.”

“Listen,” I softly asked, “are you going to leave me in here?  I’d feel better if the gate was unlocked.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“If I meant you harm,” I patted the rifle on my sling, “I do have this.  I could have just shot you if that was my plan.”

She looked down at the gun as though she’d forgotten it was there.  “I suppose.” She pointed toward the shadowy corner.  “Under that yellow bucket over there, you’ll find a key for the lock.  Put it back after you let yourself out.” She turned and started to walk away.

“Wait,” I begged, not moving from the mound of plastic-wrapped pads I was sitting on.  “Please, don’t go.”

“Why?” she asked, spinning on me, the venom back in her voice.  “You’re a human.  I’m a Shroomy.  What do you imagine happening here?”

“Before you go,” I told her, grasping for any way to bridge the chasm between us, “do you know what today is?”

It was her turn to get knocked off balance.  “What?”

“The day?  You know it’s December 19th, right?”

“So?”

“It’s almost Christmas.”

She shook her head dismissively.  “What does that have to do with anything anymore?”

“I built a smoker,” I told her.  “I have my eye on a raccoon I found living a few blocks over from my house.  I’ve never tasted raccoon before, but I was thinking of maybe convincing him to come over for Christmas dinner and smoking him overnight.  It’s been a long time since I tasted fresh-cooked food.  I have plenty of other stuff, canned fruits and veggies, seasoning, even some soda, beer, and wine.  I don’t know if the beer is any good.  No pressure, but if you want to come over to my place for Christmas, I’d love to have you.  I’ll cook.  You don’t need to bring anything.”

She stared at me like I was crazy.

And maybe she was right.  It might have been the craziest thing I’d ever said, maybe the stupidest thing I ever proposed, inviting a talking Shroomhead into my underground home, not considering all the danger I was opening myself up to.  “You know where I live, right?  If not, you’ll smell the smoke.  Just follow the duct.  You’ll find the smoker in my backyard.  I have surveillance cameras out so I can see most everything for a few blocks around.  There’s no doorbell, but I’ll know you’re outside.”

She pursed her lips, and then she stepped away to head for the door.

“Think about it,” I called again as she disappeared on silent feet.

December 19

I sat on the stack of pads, staring into the dark storeroom for a long time that day.

Talking Shroomheads?  WTF?

The world wasn’t what I thought it was.  Maybe it had never been.

I made my way home, careful as usual.  I was stunned but not stupid.

I climbed down the ladder into Bunker Stink, and I sulked.  I thought about whether I’d made a mistake.  I gave a thought to moving out of my bunker home and losing myself in the decaying urban sprawl.  I cleaned my favorite hunting rifle and put some thought into going after for every dangerous Shroomhead I could find.

Every five minutes, as I sat in the dark and listened to the ventilation fan spin and echo through the HVAC system, I imagined another scenario that might play out.

December 20

Another day.

I woke up this morning as the lights came up.  I dragged myself through my calisthenics and quit halfway through, filling my head with excuses about being sore and tired and doing the smart thing by listening to what my body was telling me.  After all, I’m no spring chicken.  I’m pushing into the age range where I can’t pretend anymore that I’m a young stud bachelor at the peak of my prime.

I’m just a lonely man turning old in a tricked-out septic tank buried in his backyard, with a smoldering anxiety as I ruminate over all my missteps.  My life could have turned out so differently if only I’d done this or that or the other thing the other way.

Thoughts about all the people I’d wronged, accidentally on purpose, or just through plain old self-centered callousness, haunted their way through my empty head.

I was never a mean person.  Least ways, I never saw myself like that.  I was nearly always the biggest guy around, but never a bully.  I never beat my wife or my kids.  I was never mean to waiters or dogs.  I even braked for cats and those fucking dumbass squirrels when they ran across the road in front of my truck.

I always tried.  I worked hard.

Like everybody else, I fudged on my taxes when I needed the money and figured I could get away with it, but I was an honest person.  I never cheated my customers, never sold them more than they needed, never fixed shit that wasn’t broken, not even the douchebags who talked down to me because I had dirt under my fingernails and grease smudges on my clothes.

I never went to church that much, mostly when the eventual ex dragged me there on Sundays, but I always dropped a few bucks in the plate to help the poor…or the preacher finance his new ski boat.  I did my part for the Lord.  At least all I could afford.

I sent my daughters to Sunday school every week.  I taught them to be nice to people.  I paid for their college so they could one day sit behind a desk and push numbers around on a screen and make twice as much money as me for working half as many hours and be able to raise a family and take their kids to Disney World and have a nice honeymoon in Fiji and buy a big house down in Plinko Ranch and look down on people like me.

I think I did everything a man was supposed to do.  At least I did it the best I could with what God gave me.

All kinds of things bother me when I get down, and I can’t help but carry the blame for all the shit that I did wrong, all the times when I guess I could have worked harder to make things turn out better.

But in the end, the world was so busy fucking itself on a bed of hate and lies, none of my mistakes would have made any difference, except that maybe I’d have had the girls and the eventual ex down here in Bunker Stink with me.

I hate to sound like a grandma’s greeting-card plushy pet, but if we’d all just spent a little more time thinking of our neighbors like real people, you know, people just like us, if we’d spent less time tuned into the 24-hour loudmouth channels screaming hemorrhoid-popping snark hate at us, if we’d spent less time looking for some moron to blame for all the world’s problems and instead took a long uncomfortable stare at the dipshit in the mirror, you know, the one who voted all the assholes into office, if maybe we’d insisted on believing only what was true instead of what felt good to the angry ogre that lived in our hearts, then maybe things would have turned out different.

Maybe when the Toe Fungus Fuckers pulled their profit-sucking shit on us, instead of pointing our favorite bugger fingers at each other, we would have been able to work together, and fixed the problem before it got out of hand.

Maybe we would have stopped looking for excuses to nuke North Korea.  And maybe they would have stopped hating on us and started growing rice for their starving people instead of throwing all of their cash into building ICBMs.

Maybe the Russians would have stopped guzzling vodka by the gallon and changed their fucked-up political mistakes and stopped hacking every software system in our country and others and turning our machinery against us.

Maybe the Chinese would have stopped trying to genetically engineer big-brained superbabies to take over the world and maybe they’d have just loved the smiling little toddlers God gave them.

But we didn’t do any of that.

We decided that lies tasted so good, all we could do was ask for seconds.

The thing we never understood with all of our doomsday tech on the table and us rolling the dice and dancing with the Devil, was that one day that horned bastard was going to step on our feet, the dice were going to come up snake eyes, and we’d wake up in the morning with his big red pecker stuck up our butts.

So, be careful, buzzy-buzz bee people of the distant future.

If the sun ever comes up in a world where the truth has died because your stink-fuck political types and the screamy-faced pundits of every stripe have killed it, it won’t be the Toe Fungus Fuckers who do you in, they’ll be long dead by then.  But it’ll some bunch of corrupt maggot boners who are willing to trade the world for a handful of gold nuggets.  That’s when you’ll need to dig a hole in the backyard and let your neighbors laugh at you while you sweat, because a day is coming when all of that bullshit will erupt into your apocalyptic nightmares, and everyone you ever knew and everything you ever loved will die.  Then the best you can hope for is to pull your family close and hide in your bunker until all the shit blows past.  Maybe then you’ll have a chance to try again.  Maybe you’ll learn the hard lesson that bigmouths who build their power on mountains of hate are doing nothing more than running up a debt burden on your society that will come due in a hail of bullets, pestilence, and horror.

Don’t buy the shit like we did.

Do life the hard way.  The right way.  The good is never easy, and it’s never cheap.

December 23

Another morning.

I was awake early, staring at the bunk above in the glow of my nightlight bulbs, thinking.

I’m no Buddha, no Marcus Aurelius.  My thoughts don’t run that deep, but you know that.  You’ve read the shit I write.  I’m just a simple man.  But all the bullshit swirling in my head has finally convinced me of one thing, and it all turned crystal clear.

I rolled out of bed before my morning timer lit Bunker Stink in sync with the rising sun.  I sweated through my workout, scarfed some of Punchy Bryan’s swamp-mud-flavored oatmeal, and climbed out into the world, eagerly hurrying up to my roof to watch the dawn spread over the world through the winter-bare trees.

The birds too lazy to fly south made a racket, and the fucking blabbermouth squirrels chattered across the street.

Off in the distance, a Shroomhead howled, maybe sharing his morning wood with his ugly girlfriend, and feeling the joy of being alive even if he can’t form a thought more than two syllables long.

But that’s life, I guess.

It’s what you make it.

Last night in the dark, I decided to stop wallowing.  At least to try and stop it.  Some habits die hard.  I have a to-do list and a ball sack to catch.

December 25, Christmas

Fucking Christmas.

My cards are on the table.  I’m taking my chance today on hope.

If it turns to shit.  If Amelia doesn’t show, then so be it.  I’d love it if she would come and visit me on this glorious day, but one thing I know for certain now is that I’m not the only person left on the planet.  I’m one of many, and I’ve decided it’s my job to rebuild.

I’m starting this morning with hope that I can put together one relationship and do it right.

Yesterday, I caught the ball sack—the raccoon.  I don’t think he was diseased, certainly not with the Cordyceps.  That only infects humans, as far as I know.  I think the raccoon was just old, really old.  Maybe.  Either way, he’s on my smoker.  He’s been out there since last night with a beer can stuffed up his ass, God’s golden nectar evaporating and keeping the meat moist while the smoke cooks him ever so slowly.

I don’t know what raccoon tastes like—probably chicken, everything tastes like chicken—but he smells delicious.

I dug into the stash of apples that I found on a tree when I first came out of the bunker a few months back.  Apples don’t typically do well growing in Texas.  They tend to be tough and not very sweet.  I was hoping these might turn that way if I let them sit in my pantry for a few months.  Now, they’re in a pie tin swimming in a sugary cinnamon sauce in a crust I made myself.  I followed my grandma’s apple pie recipe.  The only wildcard is the smoker.  The only oven I have down here in Bunker Stink is the microwave.  So, I had to bake the pie up top.  I figure, another forty-five minutes before it’s done.

As for the ball sack, I can probably take him off anytime.  He’s done, but I’m waiting until Amelia arrives.  Or until dark, whichever comes first.

I have some instant mashed potatoes, still in the box, ready to mix up.  I’m going to round out the meal with some canned green beans and cranberry sauce.  Who knows, cranberry sauce on raccoon might taste pretty good.

Punchy Bryan wasn’t invited.

I ransacked one of the houses down the street for a frilly Christmas-pattern china set.  The table is draped with a cloth I found in the same house.  I had to wash it several times to get the mold stains out, mostly.  I have a vase.  No flowers, but I have some pine branches stuffed in with a few red ornaments dangling.

Linus would be proud.

To top it all off, I strung some Christmas lights and gave the bunker a scrubbing to clear out the last vestiges of man-stink.

Maybe the biggest thing I did, the most important thing I thought to do, was I took that 1860 Model Colt Army I found down in Plinko Ranch, and I cleaned it up and ran a test fire on it.  Damn thing works as well as the day it was made.  It’ll be a big gun for Amelia but if she walks down the street with that sexy beast in a holster on her hip, nobody will fuck with her.  It’s wrapped with a few boxes of slugs in some shiny foil paper I found when I was scrounging through a craft store over off Fry Road.

It looks like Christmas in Bunker Stink, like real Christmas.

I figure I’ll finish cooking everything after Amelia arrives, and then I’ll give her the gift while we’re making small talk and trying to figure out how to speak to a real person again, and maybe contemplating how to be happy in a world that has changed so much.

December 25, 2nd entry

The first time I realized I was obsessing over my watch, it was just past noon, and I’d run out of preparations.  My anxiousness was getting the best of me, so I sat down at my control center and watched my monitors.  On a last-minute inspiration, I thought to put an old Christmas CD on the sound system, and I hit the repeat button.

That made things perfect.

I watched the monitors, mostly keeping an eye on the community pool camera.  That’s where the local Shroomheads were congregating again, trying to figure out the yummy smoke thing.  Across the floodway, the neighboring clan was out, sniffing the air, and wanting to cross the territorial border, but not daring to.

Hoping to see Amelia down there as she started to make her way toward my place, I was taken by surprise when the metallic sound of something banging my utility box up top startled me so hard I nearly jumped out of my chair.

Turning to look at the camera facing my backyard, I saw Amelia’s familiar poncho lingering outside.

She’d snuck up on me.  She was better at being out in the world than I was, that was for sure.

I laughed and rushed to the ladder.

I climbed the steps in a flash, opened the hatch, crawled through, and swung the utility box door open from the inside.  “Merry Christmas, Amelia.  I’m so glad you made it.”

She smiled, and handed me a small gift-wrapped box.  “Merry Christmas, Dusty.”

Wearing the sudden grin of a ten-year-old on Santa’s lap, I accepted it, and she followed me inside.

Dusty will return.

CLICK HERE FOR DUSTY’S DIARY, BOOK THREE.

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Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair & Beezle Media, LLC

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties.  Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

This book is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.