by Bobby Adair
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.
Not
e 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 w
ater 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.