by Bobby Adair
I kept taking my vaccines though. Gruff halitosis man injected me all the way up through number nine. After that, I had to go into the store, find the injector, and do myself for numbers ten and eleven. No vaccines came after that.
November 7
Here I am back in the bunker again today. Since those three Shroomheads spotted me, they’ve been methodically working their way up and down the blocks trying to find my hiding place. I see them on the cameras. That leaves me stuck inside until they get bored and move on. Which sucks.
Now that I’ve taken a liking to breathing fresh, outside air, feeling the sun warm my skin, hell, even getting a goddamn mosquito bite or two, being cooped up is driving me doubly crazy.
I didn’t sleep well last night. I bounced around on my bed a lot. I guess bounce isn’t the right word. My bed is a long metal shelf stuck to the wall. On it lays a thin mattress. It looked and felt comfy enough when I bought it from the bunker manufacturer. I saw the whole getup at a Self-Reliance Show down at the convention center. By Self-Reliance, what they mean is Doomsday Prepper.
It was love at first sight. There on that big shiny floor, standing tall above all those camo-clad beer guts was my baby, apocalypse salvation on a price tag I could stretch my budget to buy. I told you about the fights with the eventual ex about how I paid for it. How can I say now it wasn’t all worth it? I’m still alive when it seems most folks are dead or turned Shroom.
All the systems seem to work fine, though the ventilation could be better, hence the name Bunker Stink. I don’t know what the mattresses were made out of, but damn! They didn’t hold up at all. Seems like I’d get about a month of use out of one before it was little better than a thick blanket. Now, years into this with me losing all my body fat and sleeping on a metal shelf, I get up in the morning and the skin on my elbows and shoulder blades is red from bumping sheet metal all night long. Now I don’t know if I’m getting the red lumps, or if I just need a real goddamn mattress. I don’t feel crazy yet, so I’m hoping it’s a mattress problem. We’ll see.
One of the things I like most about my bunker is the entrance hatch. First off, it’s covered by one of those big green utility boxes you sometimes see all over the place along the roads hidden behind the landscaping. You see ‘em but never really notice. It’s my camouflage. It’s better than that though, it’s not made of the flimsy sheet metal that those utility boxes are made of. Mine’s a quarter inch thick steel. It presents a nice obstacle to anybody wanting to break in. Inside the utility cube is my security door. It’s a thick, round, steel door like you might see on a hatch in an old submarine war movie. It sits flat and opens outward, and is actually about twelve inches higher than the surrounding grass, a feature that came in real handy during that hurricane.
That hurricane hit after the Shroom-pidemic, but before we’d given up hope. There were plenty of Shroomheads around, but the world was still trying to limp forward and solve the problem. The hurricane hit Houston directly. It made a mess of downtown, flooding everywhere and breaking tons of windows on all those snooty glass towers.
Out here in Katy, we had a bunch of downed trees that never got cleaned up, you know. The city didn’t have the resources. Most folks didn’t have the tools or were too apathetic to do anything about it. Half my roof blew off as did a lot of others in the neighborhood. Now my house is rotting away and will fall down in a couple of years. Since the roof is the fill system for my cistern, that’ll be a problem I need to resolve.
November 8
Four days have passed since I caught the fancy of the Shroomheads in Mazzy and Rollo’s bedroom. I think they’ve given up looking for me. I went out this morning to get back to work on Mission Shroom Trap.
Word of the day: Careful, dumbass.
Is it cool if the word of the day is two words?
Who the fuck cares? I might be the last man on earth who knows the difference. God, I hope not.
I scanned the video feeds for an hour before heading out. The thing that I felt best about, well, maybe second best about, after there being no Shroomheads looking for their lost fast food, was that my POD, as seen from the video camera mounted on the chimney of the house behind Mazzy and Rollo’s place, appeared to be untouched, leaning against the wall right where I left it.
I headed out with my backpack full of traps and stink bait, my pistol in the holster on my hip, my AR-15, and a pretty good load of ammo. Most importantly, I kept both hands on my rifle. No fucking around today.
I made my way along the path between the houses that I’d used the last time, once on the way out, not quite carefully enough, then on the way back, running like a looter with a TV. I passed the ultra-green pool and saw its rotting occupant floating in the same place it had been before.
Very quietly, in maximum sneak mode, I slipped through the back door. I worked my way through the house with my rifle up, checking each room as I went. The house was empty. I don’t know why those three Shroomheads decided to nap in Mazzy and Rollo’s bed that particular day. I wondered if my scaring them out of there had left such a negative impression that they were now afraid to come back. I filed that thought away for use on a later day. It might be good information, you know, knowing that I could use a little negative reinforcement to train ‘em.
It occurred to me in that moment why I’d come back to Mazzy and Rollo’s room in the first place. It occurred to me as I noticed, among the other crud scattered on and growing in the carpet, dozens, no, hundreds of silvery discs, DVDs, every one broken.
No!
I stepped across the room, careful to avoid the noisy DVD collection underfoot and glanced out each of the windows. Remember the word of the day? Nothing was outside either window.
I dropped to my knees to get a closer look at the DVDs.
Crap.
I picked up half a DVD with a title written in black Sharpie. I guessed from what I could read of the title that the video was Mazzy in her birthday attire doing the kinds of things I was hoping to see her doing. I had found the pot of gold I was looking for, exactly where I thought I might find it, just not in the condition I hoped it would be. I don’t know why someone had broken all of those DVDs. I can only assume it was some kind of Shroom motivated behavior by Mazzy or Rollo as the fungus slowly twisted their thoughts. In a world running short on wankable media, it was a shameful waste!
I’m not one to cry that often, but damned if I didn’t feel a tear well up.
Okay, enough with the emotional shit.
I checked outside each window again.
I spent ten or fifteen minutes shuffling my hands through the mess on the floor hoping to find just one DVD in one piece.
No such luck.
The porn quest had failed.
Oh, how I longed for the olden-pre-internet days when adult bookstores sat along the highway just outside the city limits of nearly every town. Most of those were out of business long before the Shroompocalypse.
I hauled my disappointment out into the backyard.
I pumped myself back up with a few big breaths and told myself the post-apocalyptic world would be no fun at all if every one of my little quests worked out on the first try.
Many adventurous days lay in my future. Other porn stashes were out there to be found.
Hell, porn might not even be needed. I might still find my post-A goddess somewhere in Houston, wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes, a push-up bra, and brandishing a big-ass machine gun.
I stacked the old patio furniture against the back of the house. It made a pretty good ladder for climbing up on the roof. Most of the houses in our neighborhood are single-story with low roofs. It doesn’t take much of a boost to get up there anyway.
Lucky for me, the crest of Mazzy and Rollo’s roof ran parallel to the street. The chimney was built at the peak. What that meant for me was that I could move around on the back half of the roof without being seen from the road, or to put a fine point on it, I could not be seen from the elementary school across the street.
It didn’t take long, as I had experience with the other PODs, to get it set up with cameras mounted on the chimney to give me views of the school as well as up and down the road. Sweet.
Fun time began.
I went back down to the house, checked it again to make sure it was still empty. Careful.
I took to setting up my traps. No rocket science involved. I had to punch—quietly—several holes in the sheetrock as my design required it. I mounted my traps on one side of an interior wall so they could shoot through to kill whatever was on the other side. I mounted a few eye-screws on the wall and ceiling so I could run a string from each trap’s catch to the tail of one of my stink bait rats that I hung from the ceiling at eye level. Any Shroomhead tempted by the smell who came in and grabbed the rat, would spring the trap, the shotgun would fire, and the Shroomhead would get a full load of lead shot at point-blank range, making an attractive noise and temptingly bloody mess for other hungry Shroomheads. They’d of course come to the house to investigate. They’d feast, and they always feast noisily, drawing in others. The house would get crowded, and more traps would spring as Shroomheads found more bait. That was the plan. I set five traps. I hoped to kill at least a dozen of the bastards.
Last step: I spray painted a message on the wall in case any normal humans were still around. DON’T TOUCH THE RATS. BOOBY TRAP!
November 8, entry number 2
I’ve been in Bunker Stink for most of the afternoon, watching the video feed from Mazzy and Rollo’s house. Oh, by the way, did I mention I set up a few of the wireless cameras inside the house? Some of my cameras record sound as well as video. I’ve got a live view with audio of all five traps.
I await entertainment.
On the camera facing the school, I see some Shroomheads across the street, sniffing the air. They smell the rats. They just aren’t sure where the appetizing odor is coming from.
C’mon, dimwits.
Two hours pass.
It’s getting near dark, and I’m starting to worry. I know my main purpose is to rid my neighborhood of Shroomheads by killing them with my—would it be too much of a stretch to say Shrooby traps?
Fuck you, you humorless bumble bee. It cracked me up.
What I’m trying to say is that as much as Mission Shroom Trap has put a tingle in my trousers, I find that I’m really, really looking forward to the video of the payoff, that moment when the Shroomheads figure out what happens when they yank on a stinky rat.
Oh wait.
Wait.
Here they come!
Shroomheads are crossing the streets. Now wandering closer. One is brave, he’s hurrying up the driveway. He thinks he’s onto something. The smell has to be getting stronger. He’s actually salivating. He’s making an “oof” sound.
Maybe that’s Shroomspeak for, “I’m happy.”
From an interior camera, I see him coming in the front door. He sees the stink-rat hanging from the ceiling just inside.
Boom.
Ack.
Splat.
God, how I scream and laugh!
Yes, I am that twisted.
Still laughing.
Oh my God. You can’t tell that took a little bit, but let me tell you what happened.
The boom was obvious, that was the shotgun shell going off. The ack, I can’t describe what sound those fuckers make when they’re surprised, but that’s the closest description I can think of. The splat, well the Shroomhead reached and pulled the rat as he was stepping close, not quite close enough for an immediate kill, but he was in effective range. Most of the Shroomhead’s arm hit the wall and splatted on the floor. The Shroomhead howled again and fell down by his arm, writhing and I guess, trying to figure out what just happened.
The Shroomheads across the street all turned stone still, staring at the house. Then, on some silent cue, they ran.
After that, it took maybe ten minutes for the house to fill up with Shroomheads and Boom, ack, splat, repeated four more times, each just as funny as the first.
I think I killed or mortally wounded eleven. They were all in there feeding on their downed comrades when the sunlight grew too weak to power the cameras.
All in all, a good day.
I’ve got myself a good start on clearing the vermin out of my neighborhood and maybe making myself a little safe place in the chaos of Shroomageddon.
Anyways, I’m out of writing materials so this is all I’ve got to say. I’ll search the post-apocalyptic ruins of this great city—sorry, I had the urge to wax poetic—for more paper and stuff. If I get munched by a Shroomhead during the search, well, you can just carry the guilt of knowing it was your fault. Otherwise, I’ll leave you with an immortal quote from the greatest warrior-philosopher of my era, Arnold Schwarzenegger: Hasta la vista, baby.
Dusty’s Diary, Book 2 : 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.