by Bobby Adair
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 t
o 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 an
d 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.