by Bobby Adair
Big boys don’t cry, especially in front of teenage girls.
“I haven’t had SPAM since before,” said Amelia. “My mom used to like it. Dad hated it. Said it was food for white trash and wetbacks. Out of character for him.” Amelia laughed again. “Mom would fry it in a pan, and we’d have it with some pork ‘n beans when Dad wasn’t going to be home.”
My composure back, my sissy tears sucked up, I managed to ask, “Spam a la Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?”
“I don’t think that makes culinary sense.”
I shrugged. “It sounds like it belongs on a menu to me.”
Amelia smiled. “The orange stuff?”
I pulled out the box, and the can, and showed her.
“Sounds fantastic.” Her eyes settled on the blue can of SPAM with its photo of the pink meat-like contents emblazoned on the shiny label. “SPAM. That’s a big deal, now. That’s like gold.”
I laughed. I still had a partial and two unopened cases of the stuff under the floor panels. “I might be a millionaire, then.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I have food with me.”
I waved a dismissive hand. “There’ll be no wild berries and piss-pickled grubworms at my dinner table. Nothing but the best for my friends.”
January 8th, second entry
While the bowl was coming to a boil in the microwave, I cubed the SPAM on a plate. Amelia broke the silence. “You’re probably wondering where I’ve been.”
I nod. It’s all I’d obsessed over for weeks. “I know you’ve been making a life for yourself out there in the world.” I shrugged to make it seem like no big deal, but of course, it was.
“Remember Aunt Millie?”
That steers my thoughts straight into the gutter. “Three O’ Clubs?” Like I didn’t know for sure.
“I went to see her.”
That left me speechless. I stopped cubing the SPAM and turned to Amelia.
“She’s still alive.”
Trying to spark a mature thought out of my titty-addled brain as pictures of Miss Three O’ Clubs paraded through, I managed to say, “Oh, you’ve been there since Christmas?”
Amelia shook her head. “She lives over on the East Side. Twenty, twenty-five miles from here. I spent most of the time walking there and back.”
I stepped over to the table and sat down. “Fifty miles round trip through Houston? That’s dangerous.”
“The playing cards weren’t much of a gift. I took the trip for you.”
That throws me for a loop. “What do you mean?”
“I wanted to make sure she hadn’t gotten her crazy self killed, because I knew you’d want to go see her.”
The word ‘crazy’ slipped right past as a nothing. Aunt Millie kicked Amelia to the curb. Of course, there’d be some animosity there.
“I haven’t talked to her in a year, and I didn’t want you risking a trek to see her for nothing.”
“See her?” My mind is back in the gutter again. Aunt Millie. Three O’ Clubs. Of course, I want to meet her. Holy Crap!
“That is what you want, isn’t it?”
I dropped into the seat across from Amelia.
“She’s a little batty.” Amelia laughed at a joke only she was in on. “It could be good for you, I think. It would be good for her, too.”
Crazy? Batty?
“Good for her?” My trusty knight-in-shining-armor fantasy rolled in with my prom queen porno dreams? The post-apoc world I always knew would work out for me. That’s when optimism illuminated the future for which I was destined. Me, Amelia, sexy Auntie Millie, and others. There had to be more in Houston—normal people we’d meet on the way. We’d find a seaworthy sailboat, seek out our island, and build our Eden at the end of the world in an abandoned five-star resort on the sunny shore of an electric blue sea. “Do you have a plan? For the journey, I mean. Do you have a safe route?”
January 9th
Amelia will be back tomorrow. She didn’t admit to having anywhere to go. She told me she wanted to give me time to get my gear together for the trip, although I explained to her I didn’t need a full day to do it. She wanted me to spend some time thinking about what I needed to bring along. I offered to let her stay the night in the bunker. She declined. She didn’t say where she was going to spend her nights, just not with me.
Not with me. Not in the sexual sense, but you know, in the bunker—the safe, warm underground apartment with running water and indoor facilities, in her own narrow bed with clean sheets and an adequate pillow. Nope. She wanted to rough it. I guess. Maybe she had a luxury pad close by she liked to spend her time in.
Possible?
Sure, I guess.
Well, now that I think about it, I know it’s got to be true. Anybody still capable of cogitating a complex concept so many years after the collapse of everything squishy, happy, and comfy, must have a place to call home where they feel secure and relaxed. For me, it’s Bunker Stink. For Amelia, I don’t know, maybe she likes living in attics. Maybe she has a penthouse fortress all prepped out in one of the glass-faced office buildings down on the highway.
You never know. I mean, the more time I spend with her, the more resourceful I see she is. And the smarter she seems. She’s not all braggy about it. She doesn’t spout out a bunch of obscure mathematical theories for no reason at all. Nothing like that. It’s just sometimes she says some shit that makes me think she’s a lot brighter than she lets on. Smarter than me, that’s for sure.
Like when we were talking about why we can’t just heist a car and drive over to Aunt Millie’s. I mean, I know the cars don’t run, and I know what a magnet a car is for the Shroomheads when they see you drive by. And I know most roads are blocked or so sprinkled with tire-flattening debris as to make them useless. Amelia slipped into telling me about chemical reactions having to do with the slow chemical oxidation of hexane molecules or some such shit. I know I’m pretty much just making that up because by word three into her explanation I was lost. She sounded like she had a Ph.D. in chemistry and she thought she was explaining petroleum degradation to a grad student.
What the hell?
I think maybe she was one of those prodigal geniuses that nobody knows about because she got into the Goth underachiever thing in junior high when a lot of girls in the ‘hood were punking out in black fashion clothes as a way to be cool. Maybe she spent all her time in her bedroom reprogramming computers or hacking into the pentagon while Rollo and Mazzy thought she was writing in her diary and pining after football players. Maybe they were so busy grab-assing the neighbors at swinger parties they didn’t know the little girl living in their back bedroom. And maybe I didn’t see it because—well let’s face it, I had enough problems raising my own girls. My blinders were never open wide enough to see my friends’ kids, too.
I unlatched the bunks hanging from the wall across from mine, and I swung them down to lay flat. On one, I emptied my overnight bag and organized the contents on the thin mattress so I could see it all at one glance. I did the same with my bug-out bag on another bunk. More stuff there, because it’s supposed to be my leave-forever bag.
When Amelia and I go tomorrow, am I leaving forever?
I don’t know.
On a third bunk—Bunker Stink was originally built for six of us—I laid the weapons I’m likely to bring with. And the ammo. The question on ammo is how much? All I can carry? I’m heading out tomorrow into the decaying urban sprawl infested with a million toothy targets who’d just love to munch my nuts.
I checked my magazines, and stacked them on the bed next to my AR-15. My tactical vest is set up for six mags. My belt holds two extra magazines for my pistol. That’s the load I usually wear when I go out for anything. I feel comfortable with it. Altogether, nearly three hundred Shroom-killing bullets.
I stared at it for a good long time—the pile of ammo on the bed.
If three hundred didn’t get the job done, would four hundred? Probably not.
I know I’m over
simplifying all the possibilities down to one cowboy-and-Indian scenario—me behind a wall, mowing down hordes of monsters.
Granted, if I park myself behind a wall and start unloading, that’s the scenario likely to evolve. Shroomheads aren’t deaf. They know the pop of a gun means person-shaped food is ringing the dinner bell.
The thing is, I know that, too. That’s why I’m still alive. I know to get my ass moving in a turbo-charged hurry if it comes to pass that I need to shoot a few baddies. My ammo load determines how many of those I can get through before I run out.
I grabbed four more thirty-round magazines for the AR-15 and put them on the bunk. I’ll drop them into the bottom of my backpack. Just in case.
Water. One canteen—full. And a filter bottle full of drinkable water. Houston is a pretty wet city. We’ll cross dozens of creeks, retention ponds, and bayous on our way. I can fill the filter bottle from any of them, wait patiently, and then pour the clean output into my canteen. Perfectly healthy. No risk of disease.
So water won’t slow me down.
Socks and skivvies. A change of each. A few layers of clothing. A poncho. A tent won’t be necessary. We’ll be in an urban environment the whole way. There’ll always be a better place to spend the night than in a tent.
Lighters. Knife. Extra knife. Flashlight. Batteries. Rope. Punchy Bryan’s freeze-dried bug-out meals. They taste like colored chalk dust but adding some purified water will turn them into edible calories. And they don’t weigh much. I can carry several days worth without being dragged down by the weight.
A dozen miscellaneous things on my bug-out checklist. A thumb drive with pics of my kids. It’s one of several copies I keep. If I don’t ever come back to Bunker Stink, it’s the one thing I think I can’t live without. The only thing in this world left of my daughters are the digital images on that drive. I won’t abandon it.
‘Nuff said on that.
Oh, almost forgot. A gas mask.
I don’t need one. I’m immune to the red spore. But if Aunt Millie wears one—as Amelia said she did—well, she might not trust me if I don’t bring one along.
January 10th
Jesus, it was cold out this morning.
I geared up, dressed out, and stood in my boots in the backyard, trying to blow smoke rings into the frost before the sun was up.
Amelia showed up at sunrise as promised, wearing what she always wore, a poncho with everything hidden underneath.
As usual, she snuck up on me and I didn’t know she was in the yard behind me until I heard her laugh.
“What?” I asked, looking down to make sure I didn’t accidentally put my underwear on the outside.
“You’re bringing all that ammo?” She crossed the yard, pointing at the rows of magazines mounted across my chest.
“Yeah.”
“How many Shroomies do you want to kill on this trip? All of them?”
That’s about how long it took me to figure out she was being mean. “I have the gear I need.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. “You’re better off leaving most of that.”
I shrugged her off and looked at the sky, like maybe I was divining some information about the weather for the next few days. “We should get moving. The cold will do us good.”
“Seriously?” she asked. “You should leave most of that here. You’re better off weighing less so you can run, rather than hauling thirty pounds of bullets.”
“It’s not thirty pounds,” I argued. “And I can run just fine.”
“You lumber like a club-footed moose.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Amelia sighed then, one of those dramatic, sarcastic things, ballooned with a dozen nasty little digs. “We can go as slow as you need. I’m in no hurry.”
“Twenty-five miles,” I bragged, sounding every bit as foolish as I felt, “we can make it by sundown if we hurry.”
“Hurry?” She stepped up in front of me, looking up but disarming me with her hard eyes. “Please tell me you know we can’t speed walk twenty-five miles.”
Trying to find a path to backtrack, I said something that wasn’t worth remembering.
“We have to be careful,” she told me. “We’ll take it slow. Mostly we want to stay out of sight. Got it? Haste will get us killed. Well, you probably. Not me.” She flipped her poncho hood back to emphasize the warts growing out of her scalp. She was one of them. I was hot lunch on the hoof.
January 10th, second entry
By noon, the air was still brittle and cold. As we snuck from place to place, I kept slipping out of the shadows to walk in the light, trying to grab warmth however I could. Amelia scolded me for it more than once. The shadows didn’t offer much in the way of concealment, but something is always better than nothing.
She was quite the little commandant, and when she set her mind to her way of doing something, she wasn’t one to brook dissent. Considering I used to drink with her pops, lust after her mother, and knew her from a time when she was still learning how to color with the fat crayons, it didn’t sit well with me. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to assert my righteous male independence, she kept making choices better than any I could come up with.
We’d been paralleling Interstate 10 all morning. Not getting up on its raised concrete lanes for every Shroomhead to see, not even walking down the access roads, but working our way circuitously down the maze of side roads through the subdivisions, skirting the shopping centers where the empty square footage left by all the big-box victims was being gentrified into eateries serving fast-casual foofy-frou and microbrews named with random words pulled from some metrosexual’s hairy ass.
Amelia squatted beside a potato chip delivery truck with broken windows and doors wrenched off the hinges. I didn’t admit it, but my legs were tired from walking and jogging and sprinting and squatting. My knees felt swollen and promised to punish me if I dropped down again to hide behind something for a peek. I stayed back, away from the windows, using the panel van’s tall sides to keep me hidden.
“Three more,” she said, not looking back at me. The trio she was looking at were the fifth bunch of Shroomies we’d seen in the last hour. She’d seen. She was the scout. She was young and nimble. Perfectly disguised as one of them, well except for the clothes. But those didn’t seem to be a problem for her. She led the way, made sure each street crossing was clear, and each block was empty of predators before she waved me to follow.
I felt older and more useless with each painful step.
“They’re starting to come out,” she said. “Hungry. Bored.”
“They don’t stay out long, right?”
She shook her head as she watched the three down the road. I couldn’t see them with the potato chip truck blocking my view.
“We should find a place and rest until dark.”
Suspecting I’d given away the pain in my knees with one of the groans I’d tried to hide, I said, “I’m good. We can keep going.”
“It’ll be safer if we find a place to rest.” Amelia glanced back at me. “You look like you could use it.”
“I told you I’m—”
“It’s about safety,” she repeated. “We should crash this afternoon. Get some sleep and travel by night.”
“Is that what you do when you’re alone?” I asked.
“I’m not alone,” she clarified, as though I needed help with understanding it. “I can get out of most trouble by showing them what I am. I have some wiggle room. You don’t.”
“What about night-shift Shroomheads?”
Amelia shrugged. “Fewer at night. We’ll be harder to see in the dark. It’ll be colder so there won’t be as many out. Every advantage goes to us.” She glanced back at me again, evaluating. “We’ll have to go through downtown at night either way. I never go through during the day. Too dangerous.”
Guessing the question I didn’t want to voice, Amelia told me, “We’re making good progress. If we crash this afternoon, maybe we can get through downtown by mor
ning. Unless you peter out.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I told her, hoping the anxiety in my voice didn’t undermine my assertion.
January 10th, third entry
Amelia led me to a Walgreens drug store, this one with a back door intact, but missing the knob. She pulled the door open and walked softly into the deep shadows, signaling me to stay put while she drew the Colt from its holster.
I watched as her dark silhouette turned mannequin stiff, barely breathing, evaluating the situation.
After satisfying herself that it was safe, she snuck deeper into the darkness of the stockroom at the back of the store. Damn, she was silent.
As I started to get nervous, standing in the sunlight against the nondescript back wall, Amelia whispered, “I think it’s empty. Come in. Be ready.”
I took a last glance around for any watching eyes and bobbing Shroomheads before stepping inside. Trying my best to emulate Amelia’s gliding hush, I lowered my AR-15 and unholstered my pistol, flipping the safety off and chambering a round.
It was hard to make out anything inside. It was much darker than the Walgreens where I met Amelia. I was barely able to see her form stepping through the debris on the floor as she moved toward the security gate at the far end.
I shuffled my feet lightly, not wanting to commit to a full step and trip on something unseen, not wanting to crunch down on a noisy can or empty plastic container.
“Shit,” whispered Amelia, just as the stockroom security gate clanged softly.
I stopped, not understanding what had rankled her.
Amelia bumped into me, having come back a handful of steps before I could react.
“What?” I whispered in the softest voice I could manage.
From up in the attic above the gated storeroom, I heard a sound that I’d have laughed at under different circumstances—a loud, trumpeting fart. That’s when I saw Amelia’s wide eyes, and I understood. Shroomheads were up in the storeroom.
Wasting not a breath, I turned toward the door just as a shadow blocked the light coming through. Two Shroomies stepped inside and stopped, silhouetting their lumpy heads against the industrial tan color painted on the dirty wall behind.