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

by Bobby Adair

  That struck me as odd.

  I pulled my boots out of the clingy vines bushed up around the base of the pole and dropped down on my hands and knees to look closely at what was left of the nearest prints. They were definitely geometric. They had to have come from a shoe.

  All doubt poofed away like a shy genie. It had to be M.

  I made a guess about the general direction she’d been heading, and I searched the streets and bushes and houses in that direction. It was slow, frustrating work, until nearly six blocks from the school, I saw something that knocked my socks off.

  November 19, 2nd entry

  Jesus. Sorry about that.

  I had a Shroomhead taking an interest in the entrance to Bunker Stink. He was nosing around outside like he knew I was down here. Being a reasonably intelligent human being with a strong interest in not ending up on a Shroomy’s dinner plate, I had to re-prioritize my activities.

  I checked everything in the bunker for noise and light leaks. At least all I could from the inside. I’ll have to go out tomorrow and again in the evening to check. Any noise, lights, or smells, picked up from outside, could get me in trouble.

  Anyway, the Shroomhead eventually wandered away. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know if he lives in the neighborhood. He might be a rogue. He might have friends somewhere. I only know that his sudden arrival bothers me.

  Thinking what to do about it, I need to give some thought to maybe using my cameras to snap a pic of all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood. I’m guessing the crests and warts on their heads, as alien as they are to me, probably make them easy to identify as individuals.

  I’m starting to have second thoughts about killing all the locals, especially now that I think one of them is Rollo. The problem puts the whole Shroom extermination plan on dubious moral ground for me.

  For the moment, inspiration tells me that taking some time to catalogue the locals will help me understand which ones are which. It could help me learn about their behavior, and it’ll help me notice when new ones come around. Letting my local Shroomhead clan live might make me safer in the long run.

  Maybe.

  Okay, now that all that’s behind me, let’s pick up where we were when I so rudely closed the diary and refocused on the live muncher on my front porch.

  The thing I mentioned before, the thing that knocked my socks off, had nothing to do with the footprints I’d found on the sidewalk. It was something strange, pale and nearly hairless, except for some wiry sprigs here and there across its wrinkly curves. In fact, it looked like a ball sack, a twenty-pound pinkish scrotum sitting up on meaty haunches as it worked its creepy little hands around a piece of shiny silver plastic wrapper, sniffing with its pointy snout and biting with its sharp little teeth.

  After ball sack, I thought hairless rat. But it was way too big to be a rat. It was the size of a beagle.

  Some kind of geriatric raccoon?

  That was my best guess. And as fascinating and freaky as it was to see it busily interested in that wrapper, it was that piece of shiny foil that pinned my attention.

  I shot it with a beam from my flashlight just to be sure the dark wasn’t playing tricks with my eyes.

  It wasn’t.

  The four-legged ball sack was digging into the crevices of that wrapper to get at the last flavorful crumbs of goodness. That meant the wrapper had to have been recently opened. It was full of fresh goodies, or the nosy critter wouldn’t have been interested. Any wrapper two years old would have long since been licked clean by a rat or scoured by the local ants. Any silver lining would have aged itself dull and probably flaked away under the harsh Texas sun.

  I moved in for a closer inspection of the evidence.

  When I neared, it became clear enough that the creature had once been a fluffy-cutesy raccoon. But everybody knows raccoons have a mean streak. So, with what I deemed sufficient caution, I found a long stick and poked at it until it grew irritated enough to run off.

  It was my turn to look closely at the wrapper and survey the scene of the crime.

  The wrapper was coated in plenty of varmint spit, but it was as fresh and crispy as any I’d ever torn off a protein bar back in the day when such semi-flavorful delicacies could be acquired at the corner quickie-mart for a dollar or two more than they were worth.

  In the gray light, I stood in the dead brown grass and looked at the porch of the abandoned house. A beat-up patio chair, crusty with oxidizing plastic, stood upright just to the right of the door. The dust on it had been rubbed away to leave a butt-shaped print in the seat and elbow drags marked the arms. A clean outline of the sideways chair left an imprint on the porch, the place where it had lain for years before being stood back up to a useful position.

  M had put it there and sat in it while she ate her snack. The discarded wrapper had to be hers.

  And kiddies, that’s what hard work and persistence will get you when you grow up. It’s called success. And it tastes like candy-coated happiness wrapped around a full-tongue kiss from a hot chick in a too-tight bikini on a perfect summer day with the wind blowing in off the surf and the gulls floating on the breeze squawking their taunts at you, “Grab some, buddy! Squeeze those naughty parts!”

  Sorry, my mind wanders.

  But never forget. Gulls are bastards. They’re greedy, and they never have anything nice to say.

  With success fantasies burning sugar trails across my taste buds, I stayed out searching until much later than I should have. While I dug through bushes and looked for more signs of M, another thought tickled my trigger for something to obsess over.

  The raccoon.

  Besides the skinny black dog I’d seen a few times, no other animal larger than a rat has trotted through the neighborhood.

  Had the Shroomheads chased them all down and eaten them?

  Maybe.

  But that raccoon had made it. So far. And the more I thought about him squatting there with only the most meager sprigs of hair across his back, the more my memory makes his pimply pink skin look like one of those fat turkeys stacked in the refrigerator section at the grocery store before the holidays.

  The question that tingled my taste buds after that was, what do raccoons taste like? And if I caught it, how would I cook it without creating a cloud of yummy kitchen smells wafting through my neighborhood and drawing in every Shroomy in a ten-block radius?

  And if I figured that problem out, then what other varmints might be around that would taste better than Punchy Bryan’s foil-packed Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals? Not really ready to eat, by the way. You almost always had to add microwave-heated water to bring out their textured baby-pooh goodness.

  What about that dog?

  Could I bring myself to eat a canine?

  No.

  Just no.

  Tasty Korean stir-fry sauce notwithstanding, I’d owned plenty of pups through the years. Often, they were better friends to me than the eventual ex or the guys at work. No. Dogs were off the menu. They’d taste too much like barbecued guilt.

  I could suffer through a lot of baby-shit flavored stroganoff before I’d consider eating a dog.

  But cats?

  I’ll bet cats taste like chicken.

  November 30

  Eleven days and no entries.

  Sorry about that.

  I got into one of my moods. I was so excited about M. I just knew she was Mazzy. My hopes were up. But even if she wasn’t, you know, if she was just somebody I could talk to that would have meant so much, a real live living human being who could tell me to fuck off and leave her alone or maybe invite me over for dinner to yak about the weather or the last book she read.

  Two years in Bunker Stink listening to the world crumble outside was easy in a way. I knew what I was getting into when I sealed the hatch. I made my choice. In a lot of ways, in pretending that I was saving myself for a future of green grass and sunny rainbows, I was giving up my last hope. Torquing down the screws to keep the hatch se
aled tight, I was telling the world it was going to die. So was I, but I was going to outlast it.

  I guess I never gave any real thought to the weight of the loneliness that would come.

  Not while I was in the bunker, not when I stopped scanning the white noise on my shortwave set, not even after I first made my grand re-emergence.

  It wasn’t until I saw M climbing out of that attic over at Casa de Rollo that I even considered I might really talk to another person besides you, future archeologist of some evolved bee species or some up-jumped gecko people.

  Now, having let myself get all surprised by allowing hope to splash me cold in the face, M is all I think about. And every day when I go out there and search for her, every day when I don’t find her, it puts me in a blacker and blacker mood and makes me hate the world. Not just the way it is now—the place it used to be.

  We had so much. We literally could have turned our beautiful blue and green planet into heaven where no baby ever had to go to bed hungry, and every dream could be chased by anyone willing to run.

  We didn’t do that.

  We never built heaven.

  We got so hung up on mine versus yours, us against them, and all-for-me so go fuck yourself, that we couldn’t help but flush it all down the crapper.

  And now my daughters are just scattered bones that didn’t even get a burial. You’ll never find a grave marker, Mr. Future Buzz Bug. You’ll never puzzle over the runes carved into the stone and wonder what kind of human you found or what kind of life they lived. It’ll be as if Kate and her two sisters only ever walked this world for a single bleak millisecond of geological time just to cry over the loves they’d lost and to feel the agony of a brutal death.

  I’m now a father with no children, a husband with no wife, a man with no people, a solitary hairless monkey in a world of monsters, alone to witness the decay while I listen to all we ever built slowly crumble into the dirt.

  I told you. Black.

  I had a cousin. We grew up together, like brothers almost. Our families always lived close. Our parents took turns ditching me and him on the other’s parents so they could get away for a weekend or have a night to themselves to screw with the sheets on the floor while they screamed loud orgasms at God up in the clouds and they could pretend, at least for a night, like there was still some romance left in their lives.

  I guess everybody likes to wax nostalgic for how things used to be.

  Like most people, me and my cousin blasted through our twenties just hoping to get laid and trying to figure out life. It’s a lot harder than it looks from the high school perspective when you can be all judgmental about people earning a living at a shit job while you’re getting free room and board from your parents.

  We bounced into our thirties, scraping to make a buck, buy a house, pay for some kids, save for a nebulous future.

  And by the time we reached our forties, I don’t know, maybe it’s a thing that happens to people when they finally have a minute to look up from working two jobs and a side-gig hawking overpriced scent warmers at church craft shows to pay the mortgage and trying to help kids with their homework and constantly worrying about how to pay the medical bills and praying the transmission in the car lasts until you get your tax return in the spring.

  So you find yourself plopped on the couch after work, tired of watching the same old tired actors make the same old tired jokes in this season’s brand-new version of last year’s hit sitcom, and you flip to the news your dad used to watch because why the fuck not? And the loudmouth there starts spewing shit about why everything wrong with your life is that other guy’s fault, and how you’re never going to get ahead, because that other guy is fucking you over at the ballot box, on your check stub, at tax time, and if only you’d vote for the dipshit behind door number one, he could fix it all, and the magic fairy of prosperity would float down and shit green grass all over your lawn and your bank account would overflow with pretty copper-coated zinc pennies and you’d never have to worry about getting fucked over again.

  The thing is, my cousin, he started watching the noisy, prolapsed sphincter on another channel. And that fucker told him the same damn thing except he was supposed to vote for the dipshit behind door number two.

  I gotta be honest. That’s some powerful shit to hear when you’re two months behind on your credit cards, and your bills are stacking up while your income isn’t growing, and all the while they keep telling you that some fuckers from Bumfuckistan on the other side of the world want to kill you and your kids and all the grandchildren you might one day have, and the only way you can stop them is not only to vote for the dipshit behind door number one, but maybe to hate the dipshit behind door number two enough that you can wrestle up enough blood-red passion to throw a rope over a branch and give him an old-fashioned neck swing.

  That kind of rage, when it’s coursing through your veins, makes you feel like you’re doing something to change all the shit that’s wrong, all the shit that makes you have to work twelve sweaty hours a day, six days a week, even though it’s barely enough to cover the mortgage, while down in Plinko Ranch, those dipshits are buying expensive German cars, gifting their wives bigger diamonds, vacationing in Hawaii, and trying to one-up each other on the high-falutin’ colleges their kids are going to attend in the fall.

  I get wound up when I think about that kind of shit.

  But that was the whole point. Looking back, I’m sure of it now. The loudmouth turd-pellet, his twinkle-eyed news-floozies, and his expert conmen helper-elves on TV wanted me that way. Probably because he knew once all that anger disconnected my brain from everything good inside my heart and especially the billfold in my pocket, I was more likely to not be thinking straight when I saw fast-talking, grinning Punchy Bryan’s commercial for his Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals available in pallet-sized bulk for your family’s security. Order today for fourteen easy payments of too much money and receive a three-months’ supply of dehydrated breakfast smoothies for free. You pick the flavor.

  I did.

  I paid my payments while getting another month behind on my mortgage.

  I decided one day it was those fuckers down in Plinko Ranch who were to blame for all my troubles. But the angry weevil in my oatmeal turned out to be something else entirely.

  I used to work on those peoples’ air conditioners. A lot of them were my customers. We exchanged Christmas cards every year. I watched football with a bunch of ‘em on Sundays at that little hot wing joint down on the highway. Everybody was good people when we weren’t talking politics. It seemed like we were all on the same side.

  That never made sense to me.

  But my cousin, me and him, used to talk about our votes and our country and our dipshit choices. Then we started to argue about it. Holidays would come and go. And we didn’t sit on the back porch swatting mosquitoes and drinking cold longnecks, talking about all the stupid shit we did when were kids anymore. We talked about why our political dipshit was better than the other one. And why the other one was on a warpath to destroy our sacred capitalist democracy.

  Like I really even gave a shit about what our governmental or economic system was. I just knew I was supposed to love it and my cousin wanted to destroy it. That’s what the sharp-tongued shithead on TV told me every night.

  Long story short, it got so holidays and birthdays were so ugly with all the arguments and recriminations, we stopped doing them together. A little at first, and then most of the time.

  I woke up one day and realized I hadn’t talked to my cousin in years, and I didn’t feel bad about it. In my mind, he’d stopped being the kid I grew up with. He stopped being the young man who believed in the same things I did, who wanted the same things out of life for him and his kids as me. He became just one thing, a supporter of the other dipshit. We’d both chosen our life-teams. We stopped being us, me and him, and turned into red people and blue people.

  I’m ashamed to admit it, but I hated him for his choi
ce.

  Yet I convinced myself I didn’t hate him in my heart.

  At least that’s how the Christians that used to come to my door with their white shirts and their bicycles would tell it. As long as I didn’t feel the hate for him in my heart, as long as I didn’t label that complex jumble of emotions with that unmentionable word, I could pretend it was something else.

  But I know, when I’m not disposed to lie to myself, hate isn’t about the label you stick on it, it’s not about the emotion you hide from yourself, it’s about what you do. If you decide to push someone out of your life by the default of not inviting them over to share a Thanksgiving turkey, if you stop talking to your brother because of his chosen dipshit affiliation, that’s action. That’s real, tangible hate, no matter what you call it.

  No matter how much I wanted to hide all that shit from myself under layers of self-righteous bullshit, I had to admit I was a shitty person, just like everybody I liked to blame for all the world’s problems.

  Our country divided into red people and blue people and we hated each other so damned much that when the end finally came, the Toe Fungus Fuckers, TFF Inc., were able to play us against one another long enough to avoid the blame for what they’d done, long enough for that goddamned fungus they created to destroy the world.

  And now, I’d give anything if I could sit in a lawn chair in the backyard and talk to any one of them, drinking beer and swatting mosquitoes, remembering how good we used to have it back in the day when every one of us had air conditioning, five-hundred channels of shit on the TV to choose from, paved roads, safety to walk down the street, and the luxury of not having to worry about how we were going to feed ourselves when the refrigerator ran empty.

  When the end finally came, my cousin and me hadn’t spoken in years. And now, with only a dead ten-year-old’s unicorn diary to keep me company, I know I should have called my cousin and apologized for all the shit I ever said that pushed him out of my life, and I should have invited him over on a Sunday afternoon to smoke a brisket and have a real talk about all the things that made us the same, the important things, the things we never should have forgotten in the first place.