Dusty's Diary Box Set: Apocalypse Series (Books 1-3)

by Bobby Adair

People started turning into Shroomheads. Families screamed about it in the media. They sued. The company threw up a whole shitload—

  Definition for shitload—that’s what you call a herd of dipshits. You know, like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Be careful. Shitload has lots of definitions. Here, think of it as a herd of dipshits.

  —of experts with PhDs and fancy-sounding think-tank titles claiming that Shroomheads spontaneously evolved from people who ate too much organic food. I’m not going to get too far into that cluster-fuck. The bottom line is the dipshits running the toe fungus cure company made the Shroomhead problem worse with all of their bullshit counter claims. If they’d have just, you know, sold their big shiny yachts, fired all the prostitutes in their hooker stables, took responsibility, and tried to fix the problem back when there were only a few hundred Shroomhead cases, well, I wouldn’t be hiding in the storage attic of a nail salon, writing Shroomhead history and wondering where I can get some good pornography.

  As much as I want to blame the toe fungus fuckers, I have to raise my hand as the only known living representative of still-normal humans from that time on this spheroid rock orbiting the sun—I stole that line from a show I saw—and admit that it was our fault too.

  A short time after the tinfoil hat guy at the garage sale told me about the red lumps, I saw a story on the news about a guy with deformed warts on his head who attacked a cyclist on a hike-n-bike trail in Lompoc. (Another reason not to ride a bike!) The Shroomhead was lurking under a bridge and jumped the cyclist when he whizzed by. Witnesses called the police but because we’re pretty much a society of pussies—well, sometimes I think that—the bystanders didn’t do anything to stop the Shroomhead. By the time the cops got there, the Shroomhead had eaten the cyclist’s face off. The cops plugged a dozen rounds into the Shroomhead and shipped him off to a pauper’s grave. The cops said he was a homeless guy hopped up on marijuana with a bad case of the munchies. Nobody really looked into it. As a matter of fact, the whole thing was forgotten by the weekend. You know, with playoffs going on. Football is a big deal to us twenty-first century humans.

  Unfortunately for the cyclist, medical science was able to save him. Seriously, he had no face. He ended up killing himself after his third month in the hospital. He got tired of looking at a monster in the mirror with the one lidless eye he had left.

  By Easter a dozen similar incidents were enough to get people started asking questions. Nobody believed anymore that these were cases of deformed homeless people turning cannibal. Let me take that back. The toe fungus fuckers, TFF Inc. from now on, were already selling a new version of bullshit, and the bullshit they sold smelled pretty good to most of us. They gave up on the spontaneous evolution story and went with one about deformed homeless dudes leftover from a World War II government syphilis experiment gone wrong. Over time, the spirochetes—I know, another weird word stuck in my head from my sex ed class in high school—ate away the test subjects’ brains and misshaped their heads. Never mind that spirochetes don’t deform skulls, and all the homeless dudes were born well after World War II ended. TFF Inc. said the government was keeping the Shroomheads under wraps somewhere in Arkansas, and then budget cuts closed the facility and put ‘em all on the street. Resentment for their treatment, apparently the only motivating factor that survives brain rot, caused the Shroomheads to take revenge on an electorate who voted in the dipshits who’d done the dirty deeds that turned them into Shroomheads.

  I admit. I bought the story when it passed my too-lazy-to-keep listening threshold. I didn’t think about it much after that. The Houston Texans were in spring training and Kim Kardashian was showing off her big bare ass in the supermarket magazines. I had more important things to think about.

  Well, it looks like all the Shroomheads outside have moved on. I’ll just say this last thing about the whole Shroomhead invasion—I’ll tell you more later, but right now I’ve got to get to Home Depot, do my shopping, and get back to Bunker Stink before dark. Imagine you were being chased by an angry snail. You wouldn’t be worried, right? Even when the angry snail got his pissed off little friends to help him, it wouldn’t bother you. This whole Shroomhead thing was like that. Nobody gave a shit until they realized how damn relentless snails could be.

  October 18, entry number 3

  Well! I’m at the Home Depot now. I’m taking a break. Why not? I’m not on the clock. And besides, I’m tired. I broke a sweat today. Too many months in the hole. The day has turned out nice. The sun is shining and the breeze is blowing. The temperature is in the perfect air-conditioned range, you know, like those days that used to give you wood for no apparent reason back in your teens. Probably some kind of genetic code buried in your brain that says, hey, it’s spring, go fuck something. There’s gonna be plenty of food for a while. Only it isn’t spring. It’s autumn, but some of those days feel the same.

  Anyways, I got me a load of what I came for: six cans of red spray paint, eighty-seven (just at Home Depot, there’s more at Lowe’s if I need them later) rat traps—yes rat traps, those big fuckers that’ll break your finger—some nails and a hammer. Actually, I put the nails and the hammer back. I’ve got a rechargeable cordless drill at home—I’ve got solar panels too, remember—and a bunch of screws.

  I know you’re thinking, what the hell is this guy up to?

  I’m not tellin’.

  It’ll be a game for both of us. You can think about it while you read some more of my journal or search around in the dirt for the next page, because after a million years, who knows where it’ll be. Or you can pray to your Honeycomb Bee God that I didn’t get munched by a Shroomhead on the way back to Bunker Stink. In which case, you won’t get another page.

  Remember when I told you that I was an HVAC guy? Yeah, you forgot, I know you did. Go look it up on page three or whatever. I’ll wait.

  Because I’m in HVAC, like most blue-collar dudes I take my work home with me. Some guys, like car mechanics, well, they’ve got cars and shit in the yard. Some of them have engines hanging on a lift chain on a tree branch. The Lay’s deliveryman has a big Frito truck parked at the curb. The mailman, well, he doesn’t take his work home, so screw him for messing up my example.

  Me, I’ve got a garage full of tools, and conduit, and jugs of Freon. I used to black-market that stuff after the government went all R22 on us—it was an ozone layer thing. I’ve also got a sweet welding rig, my soldering torches and tanks, and a shitload of copper tubing. I’m not talking about the quarter-inch shit, though I’ve got coils and coils of that. I’ve got that big stuff, fat enough to slip a sissy’s thumb inside of.

  Okay, I just had some really inappropriate thoughts. I was going to make a butthole-sissy thumb joke but I’m not. First off, I’ve got nothing against sissies. Second, by the time you translate the joke into bee-buzz, it’ll probably lose the humor. Do bees even have buttholes?

  I don’t fuckin’ know. I never saw a show about that on Animal Planet.

  Anyways, it’s the big copper tubing that I’m talking about. The question is, can you guess what I’m going to do with it?

  God, I gotta tell you, I’m cracking up over it. This is the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time. This almost makes up for me not finding a hidden porn stash in the Home Depot break room.

  Well, here’s the deal. I’m not telling. I’m taking all my shit and going home now. I’ll put it together later and let you know how it works out. Until then, you think about it.

  C’mon. Humor me.

  October 26

  Okay, I lied. I didn’t get back with you last week. I was sneaking past Best Buy on my way home from Home Depot and this amazing green goober of an idea gobsmacked me.

  I was already carrying too much crap with my rat traps and spray paint, oh, and twine. Yeah, guess I forgot to mention that. I got a spool of that, a thousand yards. Does that help you with your guess?

  I had to go back out the day after the Home Depot raid and get me several loads of stuff. In fac
t, I spent most of the sunny hours in the next two days hauling electronic crap back to my place. I actually stored a good bit of it in my old master bedroom closet. The roof on that part of the house is still holding out the weather. The kitchen leaks like a mo fo—I expect that part of the house to collapse in a couple of years. C'est la vie. I just threw that in so you’d think I’m smart. I picked the line up from an old (really old) Doris Day movie. I don’t really know what it means, maybe something like, “that’s the shit.”

  I think getting out of Bunker Stink was better for me than I imagined it could be. I think maybe I was slowly turning into a lump. I put food in one end, processed, and then dumped it out the other. I went through a routine, working out every day, reading books, watching movies, pacing around in my twelve by fifty space, at least the floor space that was available, and I tried to contact people on the short wave radio.

  The things I planned to spend my time on, learning Spanish maybe, figuring out all of those shortwave radio manuals old Winston Cherito gave me, reading about agriculture—well, I kind of just stopped. I’d planned to learn a lot of stuff. I’ve got all kinds of college books down there. I wasn’t learning. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t dreaming and I wasn’t hoping. I was just wasting away.

  Now, I’m doing something and I feel more alive than I’ve felt in a very, very long time.

  What have I been up to with all this renewed zest for life?

  I pulled all the insulation out of the attic in my house. It’s that thick pink fuzzy shit that comes in wide, long strips. It’s been up there a while. I laid the pink stuff over the old blown-in crap about seven years ago to reduce my electricity bill. Anyways, I pulled out what wasn’t too moldy to salvage and I used my staple gun in my garage to cover the walls in thick layers of it. The thing about fiberglass insulation is that it insulates not just heat, but sound. Now, I could open up a disco in my garage and no Shroomhead walking down the street would hear a single thump.

  Mind you, I’m not going to open a disco. Who would come?

  What I’ve got out there is a shop. I can drill and cut and hammer until my heart’s content. No Shroomhead will ever know.

  October 28

  I admit it. I didn’t invent this shit. I just improved it a bit. I got this idea from something I saw on TV one Sunday morning when I was doing something else. It caught my attention, I watched for a few minutes, and then I got back to doing whatever it was I was already doing. I didn’t forget though.

  Here’s the basic deal.

  I told you I got those rat traps. Well, I put some of them to use for their original purpose, catching rats. This is harder than you think. Those little fuckers are smart. You gotta be patient if you want to win. I set out a couple of dozen in the houses close by and I eventually got me some fat juicy ones. Rats love the apocalypse, by the way. Them and the roaches. Well, roaches did at first. The damn things were everywhere. Now, not so much. They’re just back to being regular bugs trying to make an honest bug living without getting eaten by a bird or whatever naturally eats roaches. Hell, maybe it’s rats for all I know. Anyways, now that they don’t have a load of human trash in every house to freeload off of, the balance of nature has been restored. The circle of life is spinning. Cue the Disney music.

  I caught me a half dozen rats. I put each of them in a Ziploc bag with a half a cup of water to boot, you know, just to give the stinkifying bacteria a little extra juice to grow in. I sealed them up—mostly. I left a little hole—I don’t know what bacteria need to grow—and I hung them out on the wall on the back of my house where the nasty little surprises could rot away until they were nice and ripe.

  That’s my bait.

  Are you curious yet? I’ll bet you thought I was using the traps to catch the little bastards so I could eat ‘em. Ick. I’m not that desperate yet. I’ve still got a couple years’ worth of vacuum pouch survival meals that look like baby shit and kinda smell like it, too. Why would I want to eat a rat?

  My prototype Shroomhead trap was what I worked on while I was harvesting the neighborhood rodents. That’s the surprise I’ve been cooking on the back burner.

  It really was pretty easy to make. It worked on the first try.

  First, I pulled out a few boxes of those shotgun shells we talked about. Turns out, they fit—not perfectly—into the copper pipe I had stored in my garage. Think rifle barrel. Well, sort of. You wouldn’t want to use one of those copper pipes that way if you wanted to keep your hands stuck to the ends of your arms.

  I cut off lengths of that pipe about four inches long, and measured the shells I planned to use. They were all three inches long. I figured the extra inch was enough to get my shotgun blast going in the right general direction. The shell slides into the pipe and the lip on the back of the shell keeps it from sliding through. You know, kind of like a shotgun when you crack it open and slip the shell into both barrels.

  Note to future bee people: I’ll see if I can find a picture and leave it in my journal for you. Pictures of all this would help so much.

  Next, I pulled the hammer back (yes, I’m now an expert on rat trap engineering). The hammer is that thick, rigid wire that the spring slams down on the rat’s neck when he stops by to get a bite of cheese. Did I say the metal and the spring on a rat trap are strong enough to break your finger? Well they are. Be careful with these things. Anyway, I marked where the hammer comes down on the platform and that’s where I drilled a hole big enough for my length of copper tube. The platform is made of wood, so easy enough to cut through. I soldered a short piece of wire on the hammer so it would land in the center of the hole—a homemade firing pin. I checked my copper tube and voila, it fit as snug as a finger in a… Well, let’s say nostril.

  I attach the rat trap platform to my prototype test apparatus—the fence. It’s stuck on there with a screw. Remember the cordless drill and the boxes of screws? Yeah, a nail and a hammer would have put that thing on the fence in seconds but the banging would have attracted the Shroomheads from over by the elementary school. No hammers for me.

  Note to bee people: don’t confuse the hammer (part of the rat trap) with the hammer (hand tool) for driving nails. Same word. Different things. Look at the pics.

  The shotgun shell goes in the copper tube. The copper tube goes in the hole in the platform of the rat trap, held there by snugness only. Just for simplicity’s sake, I lined the copper tube up to stick through a knothole in the fence. For clarity, I’ve got the rat trap stuck to this fence board with the hammer and all the little rat trap hardware where I can see it. The back end of the shotgun shell is facing me, on my side of the fence. The copper tube and the business end of the shotgun shell are sticking through the platform and through the knothole.

  You can see where this is going now, right?

  I took a section of fallen-down fence and stood it up against some patio furniture about five feet on the other side of the fence, in front of the business end of my little Shroomhead booby trap. I did the same on my side of the fence. When the rat trap hammer comes down on the shell’s primer, kapow. I hope most everything flies out the business end. This isn’t a closed-breach weapon I’ve built here. I expect I’ll get some nasty metal bits flying out the back end too.

  I set the rat trap. With a lengthy bit of twine attached to the rat trap catch, I went around the corner of my house. I’m thinking I’m far enough away with enough two-by-fours and siding to protect me from what’s going to be relatively low-velocity lead and shrapnel.

  I yanked the twine and got my kapow.

  It worked on the first attempt.

  Yeah, I’m that good. Go blue-collar dudes.

  Time suddenly became very limited. I needed to run over, assess the damage, and then hide back down in Bunker Stink before the Shroomheads showed up.

  Well, the fence boards in my yard took a beating. I splintered one board and a few bits of the hammer are stuck in the wood. Good! The rat trap itself and the screwed-on board were obliterated. I don’t have
time to look around for where all the pieces went or what they look like.

  As I’m peeking over the fence though to see what my target boards look like, I hear Shroomheads screaming like hungry maggots—well, I know maggots don’t scream (do they?) but I felt like dropping in an imaginative metaphor—at least I liked it. The screaming Shroomheads tell me my time is short.

  What happened to my target board on the other side of the fence? Let’s just say I love the smell of splintered cedar board in the morning. It smells like fuck-you-Shroomheads.

  October 28, entry number 2

  It’s dark now. I’m in the bunker. As expected, the Shroomheads came, smelled the cordite, I guess, and figured they found the place where the noise came from. They shit all over my yard. Some of ‘em ran a train on a female Shroomhead and they went home, back to the elementary school I guess.

  Note to self: Prepare my traps in clusters. Shroomhead friends might show up.

  I just finished watching a Kate Winslet movie. Kate always reminds me of my first daughter. Don’t know why. Watching any Kate movie in my collection leaves me feeling bad about how it all went down—unfortunately, the movies where Kate nudes up are a little weird for me.

  I miss my kids, even though they aren’t—weren’t—kids anymore. You know you’re old when your oldest kid is in her thirties—she was the Kate Winslet. The second girl was getting close to thirty. The youngest, the unplanned one, was still in college.

  Kate and her husband lived pretty close and I saw them all the time. We weren’t best pals when she was growing up. Too many arguments, you know. Her acting just like I did at that age, me acting just like my old man did. We both grew out of it eventually. She got married and popped out a couple of puppies about the time the TFF Inc. execs bought their first corporate yacht on the tax deduction dime. I hope those guys are alive and I find one of ‘em one day.