by Bobby Adair
At the moment, though, it was serving as a meter on my anxiety. With each tick, the Shroomheads spread a little farther, making it safer for me to venture out. Each minute that passed put M farther away on a trail that grew only colder.
It was time.
I tossed a big fuck-it into the air, took one last scan of my yard and the area around the nearby houses, marked the locations and the directions of the stalking Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and made for the ladder. I grabbed my bag, you know the one with my overnight supplies and shit, and in seconds, I was through the hatch, out of the fake utility box, and standing on one of the beat-down trails through my backyard weed farm.
I paused, and listened.
Just to double-confirm.
Then I moved.
Running. Quiet. Stopping at the front corner of my garage, I did a quick scan of the street, and then bolted across.
Quickly getting through the area I had under surveillance was key. The longer the time passed between my last visual of the Shroomies, the more time they’d have to move to an unexpected place.
I angled through backyards and over downed fences, using the dense backyard foliage to keep out of sight. I sprinted to a catty-corner street crossing at the school and leapt over a bent school-zone sign to avoid a stand of overgrown prickly pears.
It’s always good to stay away from those things. Their little thorns get under your skin and irritate for days.
I was looping around, and avoiding Shroomheads, and when I reached a corner on the far side of the elementary school, I was at the limit of my surveillance range. My neighborhood clan of Shroomies was all behind me. And I figured I still had several blocks to go, maybe all the way to the next major roadway, before I found the border of their range on the east. That’s when I had to be double-sure-careful and sneak hard to evade the Shroomheads I was likely to find over there.
At first, the whole thing felt like a lot more work than it was, with adrenaline pumping and speeding up my heart and my breathing, it was hard to know the difference between needing to rest, and just being wound up. After awhile, things settled out.
My ears were perked and listening for the sounds of anything nearby that might be bigger than a bird. My eyes were scanning and then focusing on every movement of every bare tree limb and overgrown bush.
I made my way northeast toward Greenhouse and Saums roads without spotting a single Shroomhead. I squatted behind a masonry wall and collected my thoughts and caught my breath. I don’t know how far M went. I was heading in the general direction she was moving when she passed out of my last camera’s field of view, and I had to decide how far I was willing to venture into territory I hadn’t entered since before the collapse.
December 19
It took a good part of the afternoon. The faint smell of burning wood was on the breeze. My smoker. I was a few miles from the house, and settling into the idea that I’d be staying the night away from home, so I started looking for places to bed down.
I was making my way up an alley behind a run-down strip mall. In the spots where the layer of gravel had given way to the muck underneath, some of the mud had dried back to hard dirt. Being a twenty-first-century, suburban man, the obvious sign I was searching for fell so comfortably into my outdated intuition that at first, it was invisible.
It wasn’t until I squatted beside a rusting dumpster to get a studied view of my surroundings that I realized the patterns dried into the mud were footprints—shoes—going in both directions.
I’d found the sign I was looking for.
M had passed through the alley, many times.
I made the secondary deduction that since the path was well-travelled, she had to be living nearby, probably her new home since I’d chased her out of Mazzy and Rollo’s attic.
More excited than I should have been, given that I was explicitly attempting to manage the height of my hopes, I headed north.
At a point where I reached the end of the strip mall behind a convenience store, where the asphalt was in pretty decent shape, I lost the trail. Not a showstopper.
I looked back down the alley. The back door of the convenience store hung on one hinge, leaning away from the frame. The footprints in the mud had passed that entrance more than once without any apparent turn to enter or exit. She wasn’t in there. My Indian tracking skills told me that much.
Peeking around the corner of the cinderblock wall, I spotted a drugstore dominating the parking lot, built up close to the intersection where it could be seen from traffic coming from all four directions. Its concrete walls stood twenty feet tall, and from all the time I’d spent on roofs servicing AC units up there, I knew the roof was probably three or four feet below the top edge of the outer wall. In other words, a great place from which to observe activity for a long way in every direction.
I’d been inside that drugstore before, back before the collapse, back when the public was going bonkers over what the TFF, Inc.—the Toe Fungus Fuckers—had done to us, back when I had to drop my drawers halfway down to get the latest installment of the government inoculation in my hairy butt cheek. This wasn’t the drugstore where the doe-eyed cutie pharmacist worked. That one was closer to my house. That’s the one she asked me not to return to.
Still, they were all laid out the same inside according to some corporate marketing planogram, with the entrance on one corner and the pharmacy counter on the opposite one, and in-between a gauntlet of impulse-buy As-Seen-on-TV bullshit along with every variation of sugar confection known to man wrapped in shiny titillating plastic and stacked at eye-level to convince people to pick them up.
I decided the drugstore would be a great place to hole up, and I bet myself a quarter M was in there.
December 19
I sprinted from car to car in the parking lot, and came to a stop against the back wall of the drugstore, just a few long paces from its back door, which was altogether gone. No sign of it anywhere.
Putting on my Indian tracker cap, I studied the concrete sidewalk that ran around the perimeter of the building and noticed most of it was bleached pale gray, though stains from years past spread out in places, dark and ominous. My imagination spun those stains into pools of blood, and I envisioned the bodies of women and men, lying on the concrete just where my feet stood, though the bones had long been dragged off by hungry Shroomheads and nighttime scavengers.
I crept close to the open doorway and noticed curving trails of dirt on the ground. No footprints visible, but like the trampled-down weeds in my backyard led to the entry to Bunker Stink, the patterns of dirt on the sun-bleached cement told me a story of feet coming and going. Optimism more than good sense told me it was M who left the trails.
I peeked inside and saw the dim shadows of a back stockroom that ran the width of the building. Down at the far end, part of the stockroom was separated from the rest by a metal fence, bolted into the walls, with a gated entrance. Probably the area where they stored the drugs or whatever expensive shit they wanted to keep out of minimum wage employees’ sticky-finger range.
Inside, on the dark concrete floor, it was impossible to make out any dirty smudge trails. Still, I made my guess and chose my direction in about two seconds. Up came my rifle to point the way.
Careful about where I placed my feet, not wanting to crunch any of the scattered apocalypse trash on the floor, I stayed on what seemed to me to be a narrow path through. Fat brown rat turds were scattered everywhere. The smell of their piss told me one thing for sure, they liked living in the drugstore.
“Hello?” I called, not wanting to surprise M, not wanting to be startled myself by waking a gaggle of sleeping Shroomies.
No answer came back.
“Hello?” I repeated. “If you’re in here. I just want to talk. I don’t mean you any harm.” Seriously, doesn’t every creep in every murder-thriller movie say something just like that?
Ugh.
“There aren’t many of us left,” I called. “Normal people, I mean.”
My optimism waned. I couldn’t think of a good reason M wouldn’t respond if she were inside the ransacked drugstore.
Twenty paces from the doorway, walking the length of the back stockroom, my eyes were adjusting to the dim light. The deep shadows were still obscured behind mounds of rotting boxes and whatever used to be inside before the moisture seeped in and the varmint-sized critters set up housekeeping. I flicked on the flashlight mounted to my rifle barrel and swept it across the inky hiding places.
Spying a ladder leading up to a storage loft, I stepped through the gate on the security cage. “Hello?” I called again. “If you’re in here, M, I just want to talk. I only have my rifle for protection. You know how it is.” Why does everything sound like a lie when you’re in a weird situation?
I heard nothing but the skitter of little clawed feet running through some crackly something way up near the roof.
I figured I was alone in the drugstore. Just me and the rats.
I sighed and lowered my rifle, and decided to give the place a good look around. I might find some things I could use, especially overlooked drugs that would come in handy one day despite their expiration dates. That, and I figured I might scope the loft out for a potential campsite for the night. Using the drugstore as a base, I could probably spend another day or two scouting out the area.
I climbed the ladder, lifting myself slowly between patient steps, listening for anything of any size that might be lurking in the loft to pounce on me.
Just about the time I was poking my head through the upper level and flicking on my flashlight to look around up there, the gate that separated the two parts of the stockroom clanked loudly and clicked shut.
December 19
After nearly dumping a load of warm soft-serve into my skivvies—that part of my gastronomical system not being entirely recovered from Punchy Bryan’s mac-n-cheese—I wrestled for half a second on whether to monkey climb up the ladder and try to disappear in the darkness or turn to face the coming Shroomheads with my rifle blazing, one-handed, action-hero style.
A few soft metallic clicks confused me as I looked down at a shadowy blob by the gate.
Finally, the math all added up in my dumbass brain.
The dark figure took off at a run as I all but fell down the length of the ladder, calling, “Hey! Hey! Stop! Please?”
I hit the concrete hard, and needles of pain exploded through my knees. Still, I leapt across the security cage and grabbed onto the chain-link gate, rattling it loudly as I yanked.
Not only was it closed and latched, it was pad-fucking-locked.
Motherfucker!
“M!” I shouted, trying hard to keep my frustration tamped down. “What is this? Why—”
A small voice squeaked out of the dim light down by the door. She was stopped there, her silhouette looking back. “Why are you following me?”
You’ll never know how good it is to hear a real, live human’s voice until you’ve gone a few years without, until you’ve accepted a hundred times over that you’re the last normal human on the whole planet. I gurgled a noise through some weighty emotions trying to bubble their way to the surface and said, “I just want to talk.”
“Go fuck yourself, Gomer Pyle. And leave me alone.”
Gomer Pyle?
Sure I was wearing camo and had a gun, but I’m nothing like the doofus in the old TV series.
She hadn’t run off yet, but said, “If you promise to leave me alone. I’ll tell you where the key to that padlock is. If you don’t, you can just stay inside and cry until they come and find you. Then good luck, Gomer.”
At that point, I was already thinking I could go back up to the loft, bust out through one of the skylights and get onto the roof. I’d be free in minutes.
Maybe she sensed the gears turning in my head. Maybe she knew danger was growing the longer she stayed.
I saw the shadowy silhouette of her baggy poncho step through the door, and in desperation, I shouted, “Mazzy!”
The shadow she cast on the floor froze stiff.
“Mazzy?” I called again.
She jumped back through the doorway and turned on me. “Mazzy?”
I already knew it wasn’t her. Mazzy had a sultry, luscious voice. The girl in the poncho was young, mid-teens. The angelic clarity of her mean little voice made that clear.
“How do you know that name?” she snapped.
“Mazzy?”
“You’re not a moron, are you?”
A moron? Slipping into a junior high insult-trading protocol, I told her, “You don’t have very many friends, do you?”
“You are a moron,” she responded. “We’re kind of running short on people, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m betting you don’t have any friends, either.”
Having lost my first round of the insult fight, my first since just before the eventual ex turned into an actual ex and moved in with three-under-par-golf-ball-boy, I decided to try the maturity route. I calmly asked, “How do you know Mazzy?”
“How do you?” she shot back at me. “You were rooting around in her bedroom. You set up all those traps in our house.”
Our house?
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, but I’m not an idiot, either. I ran through some quick age-based math in my head and postulated my deduction. “Mazzy was your mother?” Could M be her youngest daughter? When was the last time I saw her? “You’re Amelia?”
M took a step back toward the door and stopped.
“What’s with M?” I was grasping at anything to ask to keep her there.
“My nickname, dumbass. Mom called me M all the time.”
Doh!
“I’m Dusty,” I explained. “I live two blocks over. Rollo—your dad—and me, well, you’ve seen us together. We used to pal around. You know me.”
“You’re the one who got divorced after your last daughter went off to college.” She made it sound like an accusation.
“Yes. I mean, no. It wasn’t like that. She ran off with some dude.” I caught myself. “Why am I explaining this to you?”
“What do you want?” she asked again. “Why are you following me?”
“Well, like you said, there aren’t many of us around anymore. You know, normal people. Have you been living in the attic of your house this whole time?”
Amelia paused, clearly thinking about whether to continue the conversation.
“Please.” I didn’t mean for it to sound so pitiful, but sometimes the shit you say betrays you whether you like it or not. “I just want someone to talk to. Do you know of anyone else who’s still around? I mean, if you made it this far and I made it, there have to be more, right?” In truth, I was hoping she was going to tell me Mazzy was alive and well and hiding nearby. And why not throw in something about her pining for me all these years?
Hoping.
Maybe Amelia read my mind, but she got right to the heart of my hopes. “I remember, you used to come over sometimes to pick up my dad to go drinking. You were always staring at my mother with old-man-pervert eyes. You’re gross.”
“Wait!” Taken aback, I started to come up with lies to defend myself. I wondered how she even knew I’d been staring at her mother. I thought I’d been careful with my lascivious thoughts. In the end, I decided to go with honesty. “You know what, you’re right. I did look at your mother. I gawked at her. I lusted. She was maybe the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I never did it in front of Rollo. I never told anyone about it, and I never acted on my inappropriate thoughts. I was never that kind of husband and I sure as hell wasn’t that kind of friend.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Didn’t you get enough of her at those swinger parties they used to throw when they dumped me at my aunt’s house for the weekend?”
“No!” That accusation stung. “I never, I mean, I walked into the backyard once, accidentally. I saw them around the pool—your dad, your mom, a bunch of people from the neighborhood. But I wasn’t, I
mean, me and my wife weren’t into that.”
“But you wanted to be.”
“What are we talking about here?” I asked. “None of that is important anymore. My wife turned Shroom, her and her penny-loafer boyfriend both. Rollo turned, and I suppose Mazzy did, too. Why are we arguing about this?”
“So, what are you thinking?” she asked, acid in her tone. “With Mazzy gone, maybe you’ll turn your old-man-perv on her daughter? Maybe get you some young stuff?”
“No.” Ick! “I’d never do that. Talk about gross.”
Amelia’s shadow stomped toward me through the clutter, snorting angry breaths all the way up.
Inexplicably intimidated by a girl half my size with twice my temper, I stepped back from the gate.
Once in front of me, she threw her hood back and said, “There. Is that what you want, you dirty old man? You want your wrinkly old dick to fall off? Well, whip it out and let’s get on with it.”
As I stared, trying to take it in, trying to put the discordant pieces together in my brain, she added, “That’s right, Gomer. I’m one of them.”
In the dim light, it took a moment, but I realized the misshapen dollops that had been beneath her hood weren’t mounds of badly groomed hair, they were red lumps.
She sealed it tight with, “I’m a Shroomhead.”
December 19
Sometimes, the thoughts in your head hit you so hard they take your breath away and loosen your grip on the world.
I took another step back and dropped down to sit on a comfy stack of disintegrating Poise pads. “What? I don’t understand.”
“It’s not hard, Gomer.”
I looked at her, as my head slowly shook, the thoughts not wanting to settle in, like logic wouldn’t let them fit anywhere.
“The fungus infected me,” she explained. “The lumps grew.”
“But—” It still didn’t make sense to me. “You’re not—”