by Bobby Adair
I came to a door with a dark porthole that revealed nothing of what was inside. Slipping the pistol into the holster, I had to manhandle the door to budge it a few inches open. The hinges protested in loud, rusty squeals. The dank air from inside poured out, and I caught a mouthful of death stench that sent all the alarms in my head ringing.
I jumped back, shined my light at the crack in the door, and drew my pistol, ready to shoot. How many Shroomies could be inside? Had I found their den? What would they be doing out here in the water? How would they get to shore?
The smell in the hallway changed from algae and oil to human rot. Of course, I knew it was human and not some pile of fish. When you spend as much time around dead things as I have, you get to know which one smells like what.
I waited.
No sound echoed through the steel hull except the dull splash of lazy waves outside, and the slow slosh of water down below. Nothing else moved.
Instant plan: Draw them out. Kill ‘em one at a time coming through the door.
“Hey.”
Nothing responded.
“Hey, down there.”
All I heard were water sounds.
I called again. Three times is the magic number for everything.
Tired of hearing my voice, I stepped forward. I pushed the loud door open, followed my light and pistol inside, and gagged on the smell.
I found myself on another expanded-metal floor in a room containing a giant cylinder the size of a septic tank, the size of Bunker Stink, only standing up on end. A glimpse down revealed another metal-grate floor one level below, and yet another below that. Each walkway ringing the cylinder was barely wide enough for a man to stand between the hull and the tank.
I looked at the thing for a moment, not knowing what to make of it.
Duh.
Double fucking duh.
I’d found the jackpot.
The cylinder had to be the fuel tank. And it was huge. Then again, it had to be. Engines the size of the pair of behemoths I’d seen in the engine room had to guzzle diesel by the barrel.
Was the tank full?
I shined my light around to expose the secrets of every shadow inside the cylinder room. The beam caught on something hideous, mostly human in shape, down at the bottom of a ladder to the right of the tank. It didn’t move when the light hit it.
It took a moment for me to comprehend the shapeless mass of what I was looking at, and then I saw it. Someone, maybe Captain Jimmy Fontaine, had been going down the ladder and had slipped. He’d died with his foot caught in the rungs and his skull fractured on the metal floor below. He’d been sealed inside for two years, maybe more, with plenty of humidity to keep the bacteria busy.
So, I was alone, me and a guy who’d died of something other than the toe fungus, or having been munched by a raving warthead.
I tapped on the side of the fuel tank and tried to guess what the sound meant. I tapped again. What would it sound like when empty or full?
Reluctantly, I moved around to the side of the tank and started down the ladder, tapping with the butt of my flashlight as I descended. On my third tap, the sound changed—not much, but enough. I reached up and tapped above, then below again to make sure I didn’t imagine the difference in the clang.
Hoping it was diesel, but knowing it might be water inside, I figured the gargantuan tank had to be about eighty-percent full. I climbed quickly to the top of the ladder and all but ran down the short hall and bounded up the rusty stairs. I couldn’t wait to tell Amelia what I’d discovered.
January 14th, third entry
I burst into sunlight on the tugboat’s rear deck and noticed immediately all of the noisy birds were missing. I looked up, thinking the racket I’d made running up the stairs had frightened them off. Only, no birds were in the sky above me.
What the hell?
Movement out in the water, maybe twenty yards off our starboard, caught my eye.
It was a rowboat.
Someone sat inside—a real-live, fully-clothed person gawked at me like they had something to say but couldn’t find the words.
I waved.
“Don’t move, asshole,” said a gruff voice from behind.
I did move. Of course, I did. Not by much, but a guy I couldn’t see had just startled the shit out of me.
“I’ll blow your head right off.”
I felt cold metal prod my neck. I didn’t know then that it was a gun, yet the imagination has a way of making the leap on intuition alone. You know, that, and taking the guy’s threat into account.
The guy behind me leaned in close enough that his hiss carried a mouth-stink of three years gone without a toothbrush. “You got me?”
“Yes,” I gagged.
“Over there.” The gun barrel nudged me toward the stern.
Some other ass nugget of a man stepped out from behind the central ventilation housing. He held a big Bowie knife with a rough edge in one hand, and a poorly maintained pistol in the other. I'm not one to judge—well, maybe I am a little bit—but the man's ragged appearance made me think the freckles of rust on his dirty gun were his fault. He hadn’t salvaged it in that condition. He was a sloppy ass nugget with no respect for his shit. That kinda pissed me off.
I know, weird things to think about when some prison-bitch salad-tosser is holding a gun at the back of your neck.
Raising the knife toward me like it was the most dangerous thing in the world, Ass Nugget smirked, stopped to think about things for a second, and then tucked the poorly-maintained pistol in his belt—you know, the way dumbasses do, with the barrel aimed right at their dicks. With his empty hand, he reached over to take my Glock.
I knocked his hand away.
Mister Big behind me didn’t like that. He poked me again with the barrel of whatever he was holding, and said, “Let go.”
Trying to spin up enough confidence to pull some action-hero shit, I did nothing while Ass Nugget reached in, took my pistol, and stepped out of bare-knuckle range.
“Over there,” said Mister Big. “By the rail. Turn around.”
I moved toward the bird shit-covered rail while Nugget fumbled incompetently with my pistol. He didn’t stop until he lucked into ejecting the magazine, which he quickly examined before hillbilly-whooping loud enough to wake all the second-shift Shroomies napping onshore. He told the other guy, “Full load.”
Careful not to trip on a rack where I guessed a lifeboat had once been tied down, I slowly turned and put my back to the rail. That’s when I saw the weapon Mister Big had used to get the drop on me. It was a shotgun, now pointed at my face. At the other end of that shotgun, a wild-haired man with a rancid mouth and an alcoholic’s yellow eyes, looked to have no qualms about killing.
Ass Nugget popped my magazine back into my Glock, held it close to his body, and pointed it at me. He raised the big ugly knife and started to look itchy about putting it to use.
Mister Big said, “Looks like you got a good layer of winter fat, old man.”
Old? I’m not that goddamn old!
I didn’t say that. I went with, "Sorry, is this your boat? I didn't know." Of course, I knew it wasn't his boat, but I had to say something, right?
Lowering the shotgun to his hip, but keeping it pointed at me with a casual menace, Mister Big said, “Where’s your food?”
I glanced at my backpack, as though giving away the secret. I shrugged my shoulders to slip the bag off my back.
Mister Big flinched, stepped away, and shouted, “Don’t!”
“Just taking off my pack,” I told him. “I have food inside. Stuff I scrounged.” I wasn’t about to tell those dumbasses about my horde back in Bunker Stink. “You guys are immune?”
Ass Nugget answered for the both of them, “Does it look like we got the warts, asshole?”
“Just making conversation,” I told him. “You’re the first people I’ve seen in, I don’t know, two years.”
“You saw that crazy old bitch on the barge,” countered M
ister Big. “We heard her shootin’ that shotgun at you this mornin’.”
“All the way down in Black Duck Bay,” added Ass Nugget.
Mister Big glared at Ass Nugget like he’d just given away the nuclear codes.
“Hey!” shouted the woman in the rowboat. You know, the one I’d totally forgotten about, with the guns and knives threatening me.
We all looked over at her.
A gun boomed.
Mister Big’s head split open across the scalp.
Another boom, a fraction of a second after the first, turned Mister Big’s head into a puff of red and splattering gore.
I dove for the deck while Mister Big’s body was still trying to figure out why the messages from upstairs weren’t coming anymore.
Another boom turned Ass Nugget’s chest into a fountain of red, and sent him tumbling over the rail.
Mister Big’s hands somehow managed to drop his shotgun over the side as his body collapsed beside me.
A final shot finished off the wench in the rowboat.
It all happened so fast, I was still on my hands and knees. I hadn’t even had time to get flat on the deck yet.
I looked up. Amelia was standing at the rail behind the wheelhouse, smoke dribbling in lazy curls from the barrel of her Colt. She said, “I like this gun.”
January 14th, fourth entry
I slowly got to my feet.
Mister Big Scary Hair was on his back, legs bent in a way that would have been painful if he were alive. His trigger finger twitched, and blood spurted out of his head in rhythm with his still-beating heart. Most of the contents of his skull were in the water beside the tugboat, and still, he wheezed. His stained teeth, though, came through the trauma unscathed. With lips pulled up, like maybe caught mid-yelp, I saw them all. I’m not sure why, but I found myself wishing one of Amelia’s lead slugs had blasted him through the mouth. There was something satisfying about the thought of those nasty, stained teeth sinking into the muck at the bottom of the channel.
That’s when the second-guessing came to pay me a visit. Had Amelia done the right thing? Would those guys have killed me? Really? Or were they playing it cautious?
Seagulls were squawking and swooping down for a taste of the brain bits bobbing in the bay.
I looked up at Amelia. “Thanks.”
She smiled in return—not a real smile. It was kind of the same one a girl puts on after she turns you down for a date and doesn’t want you to try again. She raised her empty hand and pointed starboard.
I looked out at the woman in the rowboat, not dead, but struggling to lift a paddle.
Amelia’s antique pistol boomed again.
The woman’s body jerked with the impact, and the rowboat rocked. She slumped for the last time—one more corpse.
I stared, with my heart racing from my apparent brush with death, yet at the same time wrestling with the question of whether Amelia had done the right thing. Everything had happened so fast. I was in danger. Ass Nugget and Mister Big were bad people.
At least, they looked the part.
And acted it.
I asked myself what I’d have done different if Amelia had been the one under the gun and I’d had to make the choice of whether to shoot those stinky fuckers down. Would I have asked questions, gave them a warning?
A heavy plastic thud hit the back of the tugboat.
I glanced over the stern, not sure what I expected to see.
Half full of water, our kayak bounced against the tugboat’s hull. “I should have pulled it onboard when we got here. That’s probably how they found us.”
“Yeah.” Amelia didn’t care.
I bent down to lift Mister Big’s body. His wheeze was starting to get to me, and I wanted to throw him overboard and put it to an end.
“Leave him,” Amelia told me as she came down the ladder to the main deck. She crossed over to where we had the kayak’s rope tied off. “You’ll need to help me with this.”
I was still looking down at Mister Big.
“Forget him.” Amelia was pulling on the kayak’s rope. “There’s too much water in it for me to lift. I can’t dump it by myself.”
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. What I was doing, or wasn’t, or the thoughts racing through my head. I think I was in some kind of post-traumatic daze. Something unexplained. Or maybe it was the hopes I’d carried with me from Bunker Stink all the way across forty miles of hostile Houston, crashing into reality and shattering to shitty wisps of what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-Dusty?
I learned a long time ago, there was no such thing as Santa Claus. No Easter Bunny. No sneaky nighttime Tooth Fairy. Puppy love didn’t last forever. Even marrying that woman who’d infatuated me from balls to boners, who accepted me for who I was, who put her name on the county clerk’s contract and swore her eternal love before the preacher man and a handful of our relatives, that was a lie she didn’t even know she was telling. Not at the time. And I told it right along with her.
All of that was a long time ago. My lessons had been learned.
After two years in the bunker, I’d had a conversation with just one person—Amelia. I’d hitched my hopes to her and a dream of Aunt Millie’s antique nudie pics somehow materializing into my apocalyptic princess. But she was a rancorous wrinkled loon, and now I’d traded a few belligerent words with Mister Big and Ass Nugget, and they were dead, too.
The rollercoaster of hope was hard to ride.
I knelt down to search for places to put my hands beneath Mister Big where his draining blood wouldn’t get all over me.
“What are you doing?” snapped Amelia. “Stop.”
“I can’t leave him.”
“Why?” she laughed. “It’s not like we’re ever coming back here.”
“We will.”
She snorted.
“Then I will.”
“Why?”
I told her about the diesel tank below deck. “There’s got to be thousands of gallons in it.”
With an eye roll and a huff, Amelia stomped toward the doorway that led down into the ship.
I heaved Mister Big up and dropped his body into the brown water.
He floated there for a moment before ever so slowly sinking out of view. I took a long hard look at the rowboat woman. The lump of her body hadn’t stirred since Amelia’s second shot. She needed no more assistance into the afterlife.
Looking myself up and down, I had blood on my pants and shirt, on my boots, and all over my hands. I wiped them on my jeans, and leaned on my well-worn coping strategy—keep moving to keep breathing.
With Amelia still below, double-checking the results of my earlier search, I turned my efforts to the kayak. One tug on the slimy rope made it clear that it now weighed at least twice as much as limp Mister Big. The only way I was going to be able to deal with it was to roll it over in the water and dump it before pulling it onboard.
I tugged on the slippery rope, and couldn’t believe how heavy it was.
Leaning over the stern, I grabbed the rope closer to the bow of the kayak, and pulled harder.
After wrestling with it for a moment, the kayak seemed to slip suddenly free of the water's grip, and I jerked backward. Just then, a giant crocodile jumped out of the water and snapped its jaws close to where my head had been an eye-blink before, so close, in fact, its cold snout nearly touched my nose.
With the snap of his jaws fresh in my ears, the croc slipped back into the water as I fell on my ass in the boat.
“Holy shit!”
"Are you okay?" asked Amelia, just coming back onto the deck behind me.
“Did you see that big fuckin’ croc?”
“It was an American alligator,” she told me. “Their range has—”
“Alligator? Croc?” I know I sounded hysterical, yet at the moment, it seemed like the most proper tone of voice. “It damn near bit my head off!”
Amelia was kneeling by my side before I knew she’d crossed the deck. One of her cold little hands was
on my face, examining me for wounds. “I can’t believe it.”
“Me either.”
"From over there. I swear, it looked like—”
“Like he bit my goddamn face off,” I finished. “I know. That’s what it looked like to me, too.”
“You’re fine.” She stood up as her eyes roved over the water’s dirty surface. “If I thought we’d see one, I’d have told you.”
“Told me?”
“Before Aunt Millie kicked me out, we’d been seeing more and more ‘gators in the channel.”
I stabbed a finger at the deadly water. “And we’ve been out there in a plastic kayak? And you thought that was a good idea?”
“They don’t attack boats.”
“You mean you haven’t seen it happen. That’s what you’re telling me, right? You’re not a ‘gator expert all of a sudden, are you?”
Amelia shook her head. “You’re making too big a deal of this.”
“I just checked a giant fucking ‘gator for cavities. I think I can make as big a deal as of this I want.”
“It wasn’t that big.”
“Maybe not from where you stood.” And then I felt ashamed, because she was a teenage girl and I was a big strong man, and she didn't seem at all afraid of the ‘gator, and I was whining like, well, a girl.
Shit.
I glanced out to the tug’s starboard side to see how far the rowboat with the dead woman had drifted. That rowboat was a lot bigger than our toy kayak. It had an aluminum hull. It looked safe. Yet there was no way I was going to swim across twenty yards of ‘gator-infested water—check that, man-eating, ‘gator-infested water—to get it. We were stuck with a leaky plastic kayak that somebody’s grandpa bought for them at Toys ‘R Us, and the nearest dry land lay three hundred yards away.
Amelia went to work pulling on the kayak’s slimy rope.
“It’s too heavy,” I told her, pretending right along with her that the ‘gator attack we’d both just witnessed was an anomaly which wouldn’t repeat. “Let me do it.”
And I did, all the while staring at the cesspool of the lake for any hint that the ‘gator might be coming back.
As I hefted our plastic toy boat into the tug, Amelia told me, "It's not diesel."