by Bobby Adair
I went up to sit with my back to my chimney and watch the sun rise. This time of year, the nights get cold, down in the forties mostly, which is pretty chilly for this part of the country. With most of the leaves off most of the trees, the branches all looked black, silhouetted against the reds and pinks in the eastern sky.
I’m no meditating yoga-hippie eating granola twigs and shitting paisley-shaped flower turds into my organic tulip and thyme garden. So don’t get any ideas about that. I like the solid heft of a steel gun in my hand, and when the cordite pops and the lead punches a hole through a target a hundred yards away, I don’t get a woody out of it, but I do enjoy pulling the trigger.
The peace of a quiet morning with just me and the birds, the crisp air, and the coming sun is something. There’s a magic there that got lost in the world of six-dollar coffees, hour-long commutes, and quarterly self-evaluations.
Watching the sunrise is something I need to do more often.
I’m starting my burn today. So, this might be the last time I spend outside for a while. I can’t say for sure. That’s just the way tests go. If the burn draws in too many Shroomheads, I’ll need to stay in my hole until they all disperse again.
December 19, 2nd entry
It’s late in the morning. Partly cloudy sky. Cool temps. Light breeze. The weather is perfect for spreading a good layer of smoke over a wide area.
I loaded up Glaspy’s smoker with a good mix of dry and green wood. I put in the green because I want it to smoke a lot. And I want it to smell.
Now I’m sitting in front of my bank of monitors, watching the Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and paying extra attention to the monitor I have set on the camera over at my makeshift smokestack exit above the old community pool.
Unfortunately for the entertainment value, it’s pretty anticlimactic.
For the test, that’s a good thing. Seeing nothing happen is exactly the best outcome I could hope for.
I see Shroomheads from another camera, the one pointing at the school. Some of them are sniffing the air. Nothing yet has them super interested. Maybe that means my test is pointless. Maybe they can tell the difference between straight-up wood smoke and succulent barbecued critter meat.
I’m bored.
Maybe I’ll watch a movie on DVD. Or read my book on backyard gardening.
December 19, 3rd entry.
I admit it. I dozed off.
I guess I was tired.
But now, well, things have picked up.
Most of the Shroomheads from the school are lingering down at the community pool. Several have climbed the fence and are standing at the edge, looking up at the smoke coming out of the duct. One is climbing up on the roof and trying to get a closer sniff. The rest are outside the fence, some looking up at the duct and smelling the air. Mostly the ones outside the fence are rooting around in the bushes and grass, foraging for edible roots and bitter acorns.
The back fence of the pool stands adjacent to a drainage canal a hundred feet wide. We have a lot of floodwater mitigation engineering around these parts. The topography is pretty flat. That canal runs along a creek bed that cut through this area in the years before they built all the subdivisions out and it was still a farm.
I know, I’m rambling again.
The thing is, from my camera, I can see maybe thirty more Shroomies on the far side of the canal, standing and squatting on the levee like they’re waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what. Maybe they’re waiting for the local group to clear out so they can explore the source of the smoke. Perhaps the drainage canal marks a border between two territories. I do find it curious that the two groups seem to have no interest in getting close.
More info for my useless collection effort. I wonder if I should record this in some formal way like a scientist would while studying mountain gorillas in Africa.
The surprise came about an hour into watching. It was approaching noon, and way down the street, maybe four or five blocks from the community pool, I spotted M.
I guess it was M. I can’t imagine who else it could have been.
She was in the street, looking toward the Shroomheads who were mostly interested in the smoke from the fire burning in the smoker in my backyard. She was wearing a poncho, or just a blanket with a hole cut in it and a hood pulled up over her head.
The thing that amazed me, like the day I saw her tracks on the sidewalk in the drizzle, she wasn’t hiding. She made no effort at all. She just stood there in the road like she didn’t have a fright in the world.
Her bravery made me jealous.
I would never swim with sharks while a dumbass dive master dumped chum in the water to draw them in. I would never bungee jump off a big glass building. I wouldn’t skateboard down a curvy, steep road to race to the bottom of a tall mountain, and I would never stand in the middle of the road looking like fast-food waiting to be spotted by a few dozen Shroomies just down the street.
Some things are too far on the dangerous side of stupid to be considered.
But there she was. M. Standing there for no other reason than—
DOH!
Did she want me to see her? Is that why she was taking the risk?
My local Shroomhead clan was still in and around the community pool. The ones from the territory next door were still out. I didn’t have any way to guess how many more Shroomies might be following their noses from other areas. But this was the best chance I had for contacting M.
I had to go out.
No choice.
So, Mr. Buzzy Buzz Bee archeologist, if this is my last entry, well, you’ve heard this song before. Just so you know, I’m not doing something outright stupid. I’m taking a risk for a good cause.
Wish me luck.
December 19, 4th entry
Well, that was interesting.
Like I tend to do these days—whenever I load my backpack for an excursion that might last more than a few hours, you know, anytime I venture more than a block or two from the house, because you just never know what’s going to happen, whether you’re going to have to hole up in an attic or a storeroom for a day or two while things outside chill out—I packed my diary. It’s part of my life. I try to write whenever I can. If nothing else, it keeps me busy when I find myself stuck somewhere in do-nothing mode.
So, I brought it along. It’s not my bug-out bag, that’s a whole different deal. In this one I have food enough for a few days. Water for one, and some chlorine tablets to make more. A warm jacket. Extra batteries. You know, my basic short-term survival load. I’m not moving out of Bunker Stink, just being prepared for an uncertain world.
I took a circuitous route, walking/sneaking a mile and a half to come up behind M, who, as the crow flies, wasn’t more than a quarter mile from my house.
Fortunately, I didn’t come across a single Shroomy, and that did a lot to bolster my new theory of Shroomhead clan territoriality.
Ha!
God, I sound like one of those narrators on Animal Planet.
When I reached the corner house and peeked out past a stand of pine trees trying to grow up in the partial shade of a dead willow, I looked to the spot in the street I’d seen from a different angle on my video camera. It was the place M was standing boldly, only the road was empty.
I looked both ways, and all I saw were weeds growing up through the seams between the street’s concrete slabs. That, and junked cars left on the road.
Shit.
I was disheartened.
I was tired of letting hopelessness win.
I think that’s what kills most people when the tornadoes are spinning and the turds are screaming in the wind, something logical in their heads tells them how hopeless things are, and maybe even asks, “Why suffer? Why drag it on? Why not just call it quits?”
That’s the shit I’ve been wallowing in a lot lately. It’s a sticky trap that’s hard to pull free from. But it’s one that leads to being dead.
I didn’t go into debt to dig a hole in my backyard
, suffer the ridicule of my neighbors, and sit in Bunker Stink for two years just to give up when the carnival ride started to squeak.
Sometimes, I think I missed my calling. If only I could condense my nuggets of inspiration into catchy aphorisms—that’s a smart-person word for witty-wisdom shit. My cousin used to use words like that. Maybe I could have been a motivational poster poet. I’ll bet that was a cushy job back when there were still enough people around with shitty jobs who needed to read that kind of crap hanging on the wall above the time clock.
I guess that’s a long way to go about saying, when I noticed M had moved away from her spot in the street, I didn’t hang my head and go home.
I wasn’t hot on her heels, yet I was closer than I ever expected to be again.
So:
Guess number 1—she probably had no idea I was there looking for her and just went about her business of doing weird shit for no apparent reason.
Guess number 2—she probably figured where the smoke was coming from and she was following the pipes back to their source. Like me, she would have to give the Shroomheads a wide berth.
I liked number 2.
I headed back to my place.
Throwing caution to the wind, I ran.
December 19, I’ve lost count…
I was huffing and puffing when I got back to my street, and telling myself my morning exercise routine wasn’t cutting it. I needed to find a rowing machine or something to get some aerobic time in. As it was, if I ever had to run for my life with a handful of meat-eating fungus-heads chasing me, I was going to be in trouble.
Between gulps of air, as I stood behind the fat trunk of an oak tree across the street and three doors down from my place, I spotted M a little farther down, coming out from between two houses on my side of the block.
I stepped out from behind the tree, pasting the biggest, friendliest grin on my face, and I waved.
She froze.
I couldn’t make out anything of her expression as she looked at me from inside the shadow of the hood over her head.
“Hello!” I called, as loud as I dared. I stepped toward her, taking a cautious glance over my shoulder to see if anything else was coming up the street in my blind spot. When I looked back at her, she was running.
I yelled as loud as I could, “Wait!”
I jogged in her direction. “Wait! I won’t hurt you.”
She was already rounding the curve at the end of the street, running right out in the middle, not sprinting from shrub to shrub, not using burned out cars for cover.
The last I saw of her was a fast glance at me, and then she was gone, running right toward the Shroomheads loitering around the pool house a dozen houses down.
I ran for everything I was worth to catch her before it was too late.
How could she not know the Shroomies were down there? How could she not see them?
I was panting again when I rounded the corner, slipping on the dead grass as I came around, and skidding down to my hands and knees. I was back up in an instant, not giving a thought to the scrapes on my palms as I looked down the road.
M was gone.
A scream, or holler, or something I couldn’t make out echoed off the fronts of the houses, sounding like it was coming from three directions at once.
The Shroomheads who had been down by the pool house weren’t there anymore. Not all of them. Half were sprinting in my direction. One of them screamed that Shroom-shit jibber-jabber and the rest of the loiterers by the pool figured it out pretty quick. They dropped whatever twigs and roots they were trying to munch and decided I looked like a much better meal.
I don’t know where M went, but I knew where I was going, and it didn’t matter how winded I was. Safety was a hundred yards away, buried under the weeds in my backyard, and I had to get there before the first Shroomhead rounded the corner and saw in which direction I escaped.
December 19
For a man on the old side of middle age, I gotta tell you, I’m proud of how fast I hauled my bones and wrinkles up the street, crossed over the open asphalt, slipped between the houses, and bounded past a few downed fences to get to my yard.
Out on the street, by the curve in the road, the Shroomheads were loud and frustrated, trying to figure out where I’d disappeared to.
I reached my fake utility box, took a quick glance around to make sure no prying eyes saw me open it up, crawled inside, lifted the hatch to my bunker, slid down, and buttoned things up tight.
Safe.
I was dripping sweat when I retrieved an orange-flavored bottled sports drink from my small fridge and guzzled it down, wiping my face on my sleeve when I paused to breathe.
I tell you, there’s nothing like running for your life from a band of man-eating monkeys to tingle your ‘nads and pucker your sphincter. It reminds you how good it feels to be alive.
I laughed out loud, and quickly hushed myself down, and then giggled again, for being unable to control it.
Living!
After catching my breath, I dropped into my command console chair.
Command console.
Yeah, it’s getting to be something kinda special. I have nearly nine feet of desk space with eight wide, flat panel monitors to watch my world in full-color, full-motion video. I’ve got several feet of desk space down at the end dedicated to piecing together computer parts from machines I’ve salvaged from homes in the neighborhood. It’s not that I need a ton of computing power, but I do want to increase my capacity to record video in case I need to go back and review an event that occurred more than a day or so in the past.
And so you ask, how does an HVAC man who barely made it through high school come to know so much about computers that I can take them apart and put them together?
Eh, it’s no biggie. They’re like puzzles where all the important pieces in all the systems fit together in the same way. It’s actually kinda hard to screw it up. The difficulty comes in trying to mix and match hardware from different systems because on the software side they don’t always know how to talk to each other. You used to be able to go out on the internet and download anything you needed to make one doodad work with the other thingamajig. Now, with no internet, I stick with finding computers just like the one I own—they’re common, so it’s not super hard—that way, I’ve got all the software I need to make my hardware pieces play nice.
So, I was looking at the ‘hood from nine different views, and switching cameras on a few monitors to see parts that weren’t already visible. I have more cameras than I have monitors.
The Shroomheads were running up and down my block with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm. They started to search in groups of three or four, ranging through yards and across to other blocks. A trio of them found their way to my backyard, and the smoker caught their attention. Thankfully, one burned her fingers while touching my smoker and that was all it took to encourage the three to leave the confusing thing alone and wander on to more likely hiding places for their prey.
They didn’t notice the trampled down grass where I’d created trails through the yard on the way to and from my house. I hadn’t noticed them either until that moment, with three Shroomheads wandering around too close.
I’d need to do something about that. For anyone used to hunting critters in the wild, my trails through the grass were a sure sign that something big was around. The fact that they all terminated at the fake green utility box was a dead giveaway as to my hidey-hole for anyone with a decent dose of deductive capacity left in his brain.
Funny how mistakes sit invisible right in front of you sometimes, until somebody stumbles by and kicks a turd in your face.
December 19
The Shroomheads moved on, and I turned my attention to figuring out what happened to M.
I sorted my videos, searched by timestamp, and came across the one from a house down near the curve in the road that showed her briefly running around the corner.
That was good, because it told me exactly what time
of day to look for her on the feeds from the camera I had mounted down by the exit point for my smoke duct. Five minutes later, I was watching M run past the community pool.
Because of the angle, I didn’t see M pass any Shroomheads going the other way, so I’m at a total loss as to how she evaded them.
The mystery of the whole thing, like you haven’t guessed it already, even with your little bee-sized brain, is why the hell didn’t the Shroomies chase M? Was it that weird scream I heard? Did it frighten them away from her? Was there something about that baggy poncho she wore that confused them so much about what she was that they didn’t see her as food? Maybe to them, she looked like an empty garbage bag blowing in the wind.
I know, it sounds kind of stupid, but I don’t have a better explanation.
All I know for absolute certain is that she seems to have figured out a way to walk/run right past them and not stir up enough of their interest for them to give chase. She’s discovered the secret to Shroom stealth. And that explains a lot about her odd behavior, the footprints I found on the sidewalk, her standing in the road just down the street from my smoke duct exit point, without the slightest worry about the carnivores a hundred yards away.
I’ve whined a bazillion times about how much I want M’s company, and maybe a thousand times how much I’d love it if M turned out to be my promiscuous Mazzy with the luscious tits. There’s one thing I know for sure, she possesses a piece of knowledge that’ll make my life completely different, and will probably save me one day. She knows how to make herself invisible to the Shroomheads.
I need to find M more urgently than ever.
December 19
Anxiously, I eyed the hunting Shroomheads and listened to the tick of the clock on the wall—yeah, I still have an old-fashioned, battery-operated clock the size of a dinner plate that softly ticks each time its big hands pass another minute. The clock is a comfort I can’t explain.