by Bobby Adair
“Crazy?” she asked. “Stupid?”
“You’re not very nice,” I managed to say. “But you seem normal.”
“Because I am.”
“How?” I asked.
“Does it matter? It’s not like we’re going to be able to find a doctor to explain it, right? Like everybody else, the doctors are all dead, or turned Shroom. Or they’re floating on their yachts out in the gulf waiting for the world to un-fuck itself.”
“Are there any others like you?” I asked, a thousand other questions stacking up behind that one, desperate to get out. “Is this how all of you turn out?”
“All of us?” she asked, taking offense. “Like I’m an expert.”
“Sorry.”
Maybe something in my eyes, maybe something about the expression on my face, finally dulled Amelia’s edge, because she decided to apologize, too. “Sorry.”
“Listen,” I softly asked, “are you going to leave me in here? I’d feel better if the gate was unlocked.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“If I meant you harm,” I patted the rifle on my sling, “I do have this. I could have just shot you if that was my plan.”
She looked down at the gun as though she’d forgotten it was there. “I suppose.” She pointed toward the shadowy corner. “Under that yellow bucket over there, you’ll find a key for the lock. Put it back after you let yourself out.” She turned and started to walk away.
“Wait,” I begged, not moving from the mound of plastic-wrapped pads I was sitting on. “Please, don’t go.”
“Why?” she asked, spinning on me, the venom back in her voice. “You’re a human. I’m a Shroomy. What do you imagine happening here?”
“Before you go,” I told her, grasping for any way to bridge the chasm between us, “do you know what today is?”
It was her turn to get knocked off balance. “What?”
“The day? You know it’s December 19th, right?”
“So?”
“It’s almost Christmas.”
She shook her head dismissively. “What does that have to do with anything anymore?”
“I built a smoker,” I told her. “I have my eye on a raccoon I found living a few blocks over from my house. I’ve never tasted raccoon before, but I was thinking of maybe convincing him to come over for Christmas dinner and smoking him overnight. It’s been a long time since I tasted fresh-cooked food. I have plenty of other stuff, canned fruits and veggies, seasoning, even some soda, beer, and wine. I don’t know if the beer is any good. No pressure, but if you want to come over to my place for Christmas, I’d love to have you. I’ll cook. You don’t need to bring anything.”
She stared at me like I was crazy.
And maybe she was right. It might have been the craziest thing I’d ever said, maybe the stupidest thing I ever proposed, inviting a talking Shroomhead into my underground home, not considering all the danger I was opening myself up to. “You know where I live, right? If not, you’ll smell the smoke. Just follow the duct. You’ll find the smoker in my backyard. I have surveillance cameras out so I can see most everything for a few blocks around. There’s no doorbell, but I’ll know you’re outside.”
She pursed her lips, and then she stepped away to head for the door.
“Think about it,” I called again as she disappeared on silent feet.
December 19
I sat on the stack of pads, staring into the dark storeroom for a long time that day.
Talking Shroomheads? WTF?
The world wasn’t what I thought it was. Maybe it had never been.
I made my way home, careful as usual. I was stunned but not stupid.
I climbed down the ladder into Bunker Stink, and I sulked. I thought about whether I’d made a mistake. I gave a thought to moving out of my bunker home and losing myself in the decaying urban sprawl. I cleaned my favorite hunting rifle and put some thought into going after for every dangerous Shroomhead I could find.
Every five minutes, as I sat in the dark and listened to the ventilation fan spin and echo through the HVAC system, I imagined another scenario that might play out.
December 20
Another day.
I woke up this morning as the lights came up. I dragged myself through my calisthenics and quit halfway through, filling my head with excuses about being sore and tired and doing the smart thing by listening to what my body was telling me. After all, I’m no spring chicken. I’m pushing into the age range where I can’t pretend anymore that I’m a young stud bachelor at the peak of my prime.
I’m just a lonely man turning old in a tricked-out septic tank buried in his backyard, with a smoldering anxiety as I ruminate over all my missteps. My life could have turned out so differently if only I’d done this or that or the other thing the other way.
Thoughts about all the people I’d wronged, accidentally on purpose, or just through plain old self-centered callousness, haunted their way through my empty head.
I was never a mean person. Least ways, I never saw myself like that. I was nearly always the biggest guy around, but never a bully. I never beat my wife or my kids. I was never mean to waiters or dogs. I even braked for cats and those fucking dumbass squirrels when they ran across the road in front of my truck.
I always tried. I worked hard.
Like everybody else, I fudged on my taxes when I needed the money and figured I could get away with it, but I was an honest person. I never cheated my customers, never sold them more than they needed, never fixed shit that wasn’t broken, not even the douchebags who talked down to me because I had dirt under my fingernails and grease smudges on my clothes.
I never went to church that much, mostly when the eventual ex dragged me there on Sundays, but I always dropped a few bucks in the plate to help the poor…or the preacher finance his new ski boat. I did my part for the Lord. At least all I could afford.
I sent my daughters to Sunday school every week. I taught them to be nice to people. I paid for their college so they could one day sit behind a desk and push numbers around on a screen and make twice as much money as me for working half as many hours and be able to raise a family and take their kids to Disney World and have a nice honeymoon in Fiji and buy a big house down in Plinko Ranch and look down on people like me.
I think I did everything a man was supposed to do. At least I did it the best I could with what God gave me.
All kinds of things bother me when I get down, and I can’t help but carry the blame for all the shit that I did wrong, all the times when I guess I could have worked harder to make things turn out better.
But in the end, the world was so busy fucking itself on a bed of hate and lies, none of my mistakes would have made any difference, except that maybe I’d have had the girls and the eventual ex down here in Bunker Stink with me.
I hate to sound like a grandma’s greeting-card plushy pet, but if we’d all just spent a little more time thinking of our neighbors like real people, you know, people just like us, if we’d spent less time tuned into the 24-hour loudmouth channels screaming hemorrhoid-popping snark hate at us, if we’d spent less time looking for some moron to blame for all the world’s problems and instead took a long uncomfortable stare at the dipshit in the mirror, you know, the one who voted all the assholes into office, if maybe we’d insisted on believing only what was true instead of what felt good to the angry ogre that lived in our hearts, then maybe things would have turned out different.
Maybe when the Toe Fungus Fuckers pulled their profit-sucking shit on us, instead of pointing our favorite bugger fingers at each other, we would have been able to work together, and fixed the problem before it got out of hand.
Maybe we would have stopped looking for excuses to nuke North Korea. And maybe they would have stopped hating on us and started growing rice for their starving people instead of throwing all of their cash into building ICBMs.
Maybe the Russians would have stopped guzzling vodka by the gallon and changed their fucked-up political mistakes
and stopped hacking every software system in our country and others and turning our machinery against us.
Maybe the Chinese would have stopped trying to genetically engineer big-brained superbabies to take over the world and maybe they’d have just loved the smiling little toddlers God gave them.
But we didn’t do any of that.
We decided that lies tasted so good, all we could do was ask for seconds.
The thing we never understood with all of our doomsday tech on the table and us rolling the dice and dancing with the Devil, was that one day that horned bastard was going to step on our feet, the dice were going to come up snake eyes, and we’d wake up in the morning with his big red pecker stuck up our butts.
So, be careful, buzzy-buzz bee people of the distant future.
If the sun ever comes up in a world where the truth has died because your stink-fuck political types and the screamy-faced pundits of every stripe have killed it, it won’t be the Toe Fungus Fuckers who do you in, they’ll be long dead by then. But it’ll some bunch of corrupt maggot boners who are willing to trade the world for a handful of gold nuggets. That’s when you’ll need to dig a hole in the backyard and let your neighbors laugh at you while you sweat, because a day is coming when all of that bullshit will erupt into your apocalyptic nightmares, and everyone you ever knew and everything you ever loved will die. Then the best you can hope for is to pull your family close and hide in your bunker until all the shit blows past. Maybe then you’ll have a chance to try again. Maybe you’ll learn the hard lesson that bigmouths who build their power on mountains of hate are doing nothing more than running up a debt burden on your society that will come due in a hail of bullets, pestilence, and horror.
Don’t buy the shit like we did.
Do life the hard way. The right way. The good is never easy, and it’s never cheap.
December 23
Another morning.
I was awake early, staring at the bunk above in the glow of my nightlight bulbs, thinking.
I’m no Buddha, no Marcus Aurelius. My thoughts don’t run that deep, but you know that. You’ve read the shit I write. I’m just a simple man. But all the bullshit swirling in my head has finally convinced me of one thing, and it all turned crystal clear.
I rolled out of bed before my morning timer lit Bunker Stink in sync with the rising sun. I sweated through my workout, scarfed some of Punchy Bryan’s swamp-mud-flavored oatmeal, and climbed out into the world, eagerly hurrying up to my roof to watch the dawn spread over the world through the winter-bare trees.
The birds too lazy to fly south made a racket, and the fucking blabbermouth squirrels chattered across the street.
Off in the distance, a Shroomhead howled, maybe sharing his morning wood with his ugly girlfriend, and feeling the joy of being alive even if he can’t form a thought more than two syllables long.
But that’s life, I guess.
It’s what you make it.
Last night in the dark, I decided to stop wallowing. At least to try and stop it. Some habits die hard. I have a to-do list and a ball sack to catch.
December 25, Christmas
Fucking Christmas.
My cards are on the table. I’m taking my chance today on hope.
If it turns to shit. If Amelia doesn’t show, then so be it. I’d love it if she would come and visit me on this glorious day, but one thing I know for certain now is that I’m not the only person left on the planet. I’m one of many, and I’ve decided it’s my job to rebuild.
I’m starting this morning with hope that I can put together one relationship and do it right.
Yesterday, I caught the ball sack—the raccoon. I don’t think he was diseased, certainly not with the Cordyceps. That only infects humans, as far as I know. I think the raccoon was just old, really old. Maybe. Either way, he’s on my smoker. He’s been out there since last night with a beer can stuffed up his ass, God’s golden nectar evaporating and keeping the meat moist while the smoke cooks him ever so slowly.
I don’t know what raccoon tastes like—probably chicken, everything tastes like chicken—but he smells delicious.
I dug into the stash of apples that I found on a tree when I first came out of the bunker a few months back. Apples don’t typically do well growing in Texas. They tend to be tough and not very sweet. I was hoping these might turn that way if I let them sit in my pantry for a few months. Now, they’re in a pie tin swimming in a sugary cinnamon sauce in a crust I made myself. I followed my grandma’s apple pie recipe. The only wildcard is the smoker. The only oven I have down here in Bunker Stink is the microwave. So, I had to bake the pie up top. I figure, another forty-five minutes before it’s done.
As for the ball sack, I can probably take him off anytime. He’s done, but I’m waiting until Amelia arrives. Or until dark, whichever comes first.
I have some instant mashed potatoes, still in the box, ready to mix up. I’m going to round out the meal with some canned green beans and cranberry sauce. Who knows, cranberry sauce on raccoon might taste pretty good.
Punchy Bryan wasn’t invited.
I ransacked one of the houses down the street for a frilly Christmas-pattern china set. The table is draped with a cloth I found in the same house. I had to wash it several times to get the mold stains out, mostly. I have a vase. No flowers, but I have some pine branches stuffed in with a few red ornaments dangling.
Linus would be proud.
To top it all off, I strung some Christmas lights and gave the bunker a scrubbing to clear out the last vestiges of man-stink.
Maybe the biggest thing I did, the most important thing I thought to do, was I took that 1860 Model Colt Army I found down in Plinko Ranch, and I cleaned it up and ran a test fire on it. Damn thing works as well as the day it was made. It’ll be a big gun for Amelia but if she walks down the street with that sexy beast in a holster on her hip, nobody will fuck with her. It’s wrapped with a few boxes of slugs in some shiny foil paper I found when I was scrounging through a craft store over off Fry Road.
It looks like Christmas in Bunker Stink, like real Christmas.
I figure I’ll finish cooking everything after Amelia arrives, and then I’ll give her the gift while we’re making small talk and trying to figure out how to speak to a real person again, and maybe contemplating how to be happy in a world that has changed so much.
December 25, 2nd entry
The first time I realized I was obsessing over my watch, it was just past noon, and I’d run out of preparations. My anxiousness was getting the best of me, so I sat down at my control center and watched my monitors. On a last-minute inspiration, I thought to put an old Christmas CD on the sound system, and I hit the repeat button.
That made things perfect.
I watched the monitors, mostly keeping an eye on the community pool camera. That’s where the local Shroomheads were congregating again, trying to figure out the yummy smoke thing. Across the floodway, the neighboring clan was out, sniffing the air, and wanting to cross the territorial border, but not daring to.
Hoping to see Amelia down there as she started to make her way toward my place, I was taken by surprise when the metallic sound of something banging my utility box up top startled me so hard I nearly jumped out of my chair.
Turning to look at the camera facing my backyard, I saw Amelia’s familiar poncho lingering outside.
She’d snuck up on me. She was better at being out in the world than I was, that was for sure.
I laughed and rushed to the ladder.
I climbed the steps in a flash, opened the hatch, crawled through, and swung the utility box door open from the inside. “Merry Christmas, Amelia. I’m so glad you made it.”
She smiled, and handed me a small gift-wrapped box. “Merry Christmas, Dusty.”
Wearing the sudden grin of a ten-year-old on Santa’s lap, I accepted it, and she followed me inside.
Dusty’s Diary, Book 3 : December 26th
Amelia spent only a few hours in Bunker
Stink.
We ate.
We stared awkwardly at the roasted raccoon on our plates while casting silent glances at each other over my fold-down dining table. We shopped for timeworn small talk to prime the conversational pump while skirting horrid memories that haunted their way around everything we said.
We talked about my bunker in such dreadful detail I even bored myself, but for some reason she showed an interest when I first mentioned it so just kept yakking away about it, thinking that if I stopped, the post-Christmas boredom would set in and she’d bolt for the door. Kinda like holidays at the in-laws’ house, I guess.
Or even at Mom’s when Dad was still alive.
At least when us kids grew out of our PJ-wearin’ years and figured out that the fun was going to end as soon as Dad got blitzed and opened up the vast thesaurus of gook slurs he picked up in Korea and ‘Nam. And Mom would peck at him more and more with each passing minute—I told you not to use all that Scotch tape, when did you water the tree, it’s dying, I don’t think that string of lights is working, when’s your sister coming, I told you two o’clock, why can’t anybody be on time—
Ack!
It seemed like normal shit when we were kids. Ten minutes to gorge yourself in a gifty fantasy hoping the next thing you open is that expensive sumpin-sumpin you wanted but know your parents can’t afford—knowing it’s not that thing—but hoping just the same. Mom screeching about the paper and bows. Your brother leaving the kitchen door open after he fed the dogs and there’s a cold draft in the house. And grandma cooking bacon and eggs and yeast rolls in the kitchen, but coming out just long enough to watch us grandkids in our homemade flannel pajamas mainlining our first joy-gasmic rush of never-enoughism.
There was a time, lots of years ago, before I knew about anything in the world past the cracked concrete curb in front of my house, when I still believed in Santa Claus, when I glued myself to a three-channel, black-and-white TV in the living room to see stop-motion, puppet-animation Rudolph save everybody’s shit on the Island of Misfit Toys, that I thought Christmas was the most glittery-special time on God’s happy earth.