by Bobby Adair
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 choice.
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.
God, I miss people.
December 1
It’s cold again.
The Shroomies are holed up in the elementary school.
I haven’t killed a single one since the booby traps I set in Rollo and Mazzy’s house schwacked a dozen of them in the living room. When it all went down, I was giddy with what I’d done. As the days passed, I just felt guilty about it. It started to feel less like self-defense, and more like some kind of murder.
I’m not a murderer, mind you. These are monsters, and they’d kill me given half a chance. But they were people once.
I don’t think I’ll kill them for sport anymore. However, I won’t hesitate to shred them with my AR-15 if they come at me. Just so we’re clear on that point.
Trying to work myself out of my mood, I’ve been keeping myself busy.
That thing I talked about with tracking all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood? Well, I appropriated an inkjet printer from down at the Best Buy. New, still in the box. It was stacked up with some others on a high shelf. Ignored by the Shroomies when they came in to ransack and destroy, ignored by looters who knew the closest it could come to being handy in the apocalypse was to print pretty pictures of the food they didn’t have in their pantries.
The printer works just like new. I even managed to find all the ink cartridges I’m ever likely to need. Paper was hard to come by, but I found a case of plastic-wrapped bundles, pristine as a prom queen’s panties. Well, at the beginning of the night, anyway.
I’ve taken to capturing images of all the Shroomies in the neighborhood. I have a few face shots, and a pic or two of their full bodies. Each Shroomy profile takes up a full printed sheet with a name printed across the top, hanging on the empty wall above my computer monitors.
It’s weird now that I’ve named them, comforting in a way I can’t explain. They’re my enemies, yet at the moment, they’re my family, too.
Rollo’s in charge. At least I think he is. When I watch them going out in search for something to eat, they all follow him. Another one, I named Hairy Potter. He seems to live a charmed life. In general, Shroomheads have it hard, always getting bumped and scraped, often going days without a bite to eat. Not so for Hairy Potter, he always seems to find something to satisfy his hunger. He never gets hurt. And I’ll be damned if he’s not nearly as hairy as a monkey.
On the opposite end of the scale, there’s a bumbler who never does the smartest thing. When most of the Shroomheads walk around a patch of sand burrs in the grass, he’ll walk through and get them stuck to his feet. When they stroll into a house and duck below a broken limb hanging across their way, the rest all duck. He always bumps his head. I named him Mo.
Another one who seems to want to hump everything he sees, and not just other Shroomheads—I saw him going after a half-rotten pillow last Friday—I named him Curly.
There’s a Ginger, Gilligan, and Mary Ann, a Mulder and Scully, and some others.
The names make them easier to keep track of.
The other thing I started doing again was spending time on my shortwave radio. I fixed the antenna so now it’s standing up by the house, thirty feet tall. I get on there a time or two every day and surf through the static, listening for anything that sounds like a voice, or music, or anything. I talk to it, too. I started out telling my anonymous audience I was in Katy, Texas and I’d be happy to meet up with them anywhere. I got no responses, and I got tired of saying that over and over again. Now mostly, I just talk about the weather and the state of the neighborhood—the news, I guess.
Talking on the radio isn’t a cure for loneliness and the pointlessness of staying alive, but it’s something.
Last of all, I figured out where that ball-sack raccoon lives, and I’ve decided I’m going to eat it.
Microwaved varmint meat doesn’t appeal to me, so I need to figure out how to cook the thing before I trouble myself to catch it.
December 2
Project Raccoon!
My ex used to do this thing with a chicken.
Stop. I know what you’re thinking.
I’m talking about food here.
It was pretty easy, really. She rubbed the skin with Cajun seasoning, used a can opener to cut the top off a beer can, and then sat the can on the smoker outside in the backyard. The chicken, lucky it’s dead already, it gets the pleasure of sitting upright on the grill with the open beer can shoved up its ass. Beer-in-the-butt chicken I used to call it. Spicy and moist. Damn, that was good stuff.
I’m thinking my ball-sack buddy would work out just fine cooked that way. Real meat. Fresh-killed, fresh-cooked.
That’s the goal.
And now, I’m thinking it’s December. Spring is around the corner. Maybe I need a vegetable garden. Maybe I could grow me a crop of corn, too.
The idea of fresh food suddenly seems like the most appealing thing in the world. Whatever Punchy Bryan did to make his food potable through the ages may or may not have worked. I won’t truly have the answer on that one for a few more centuries. What I do know for a fact is that Punchy Bryan has the magic talent of sucking every ounce of flavor out of any calorie that passed through is pickled turd factory.
A host of obstacles stands between me and my new number-one goal. I’ve never grown anything in my life except a green lawn, so I’ll need to write up a do-list and draw out a plan. And I need to calculate if the payoff will be worth the effort.
Oh, who am I kidding? If I plan to stay around long-term, I’ll eventually need to figure out how to live off the land. Better to make all my inevitable mistakes and suffer my crop failures now, while I still have several years of supplies hoarded in Bunker Stink.
I’ll root around in the Home Depot next time I’m down that way, and see if I can find some how-to books on planting a garden. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some seed packets, too.
Of course, fresh veggies implies a secondary need—canning. I’ll need to learn how to preserve them. I probably have a few books down in the bunker that cover the topic pretty well. I never read any of those. I always figured if I reached that point in my apocalyptic survival situation, I’d have plenty of time to sit around and do it then.
Well, here I am.
First things first, though. I need to smoke that ball sack, which means I need to find a way to pipe the smoke a long way from where me and my roasting raccoon will be.
December 3
Well, after a long career of moving cold air around through ducts inside hot attics, I figure moving some hot smoke to somewhere down the block should be a snap.
An exaggeration, but easily done.
I’ve worked with the materials. I can scrounge some squirrel-cage fans and blower motors out of some of my neighbors’ AC systems. I can dig up some more solar panels. The tricky part will be commandeering enough ducting from the HVAC wholesale supply three miles west of here and then finding a way to haul it all back here unseen by curious Shroomies.
I gave half a thought to also pulling the ductwork out of my neighbor’s AC systems, but I nixed that idea. All old AC systems are coated inside with years of dust,
and that doesn’t even take into consideration how many of my furry little rat buddies might have made a home in there, dragging their balls around and pissing scent trails, because like it or not, that’s what they do. And the roaches—don’t get me started. Result? Blowing hot smoke through one of those galvanized steel tubes might be a fast way to start a fire. That would, of course, flare up at the worst possible moment in the worst possible place.
Murphy’s law, motherfuckers. Learn it. Live it. Love it!
But then again, maybe yanking out sections of ducting and cleaning them one at a time would be easier than hauling several truckloads a few miles across infested suburbia.
I don’t know if that’s the best solution, but it’s the part of the solution that lets me see the full path from where I am now to where I want to be. I know how to make each step along the way work. I only need to be careful and quiet.
Mr. Raccoon Wrinkleface, your days are numbered.
December 7
Pearl Harbor Day.
It makes me wonder if you buzzy-buzz bee people in the future will still have war. What if you’re all a bunch of gecko-men instead of insects? Will geckos with one color of spots wake up one morning and decide to bomb the shit out of a bunch of geckos with a different color of spots?
Is state-sanctioned murder just a human thing?
Is it still glorious for young men to dream about war? Is it horrible for old men to lose sleep over nightmares of their dead buddies haunting them and asking them the endless why?
Maybe not.
Maybe one of the species that eventually evolves to rule the earth will get it right.
I remember watching a thing on TV about a bunch of baboons waging a primitive war against another baboon tribe over access to a grove of mango trees or some such shit. Maybe every species that figures out how to band together for safety eventually figures out how to hate the monkeys next door because they have more food in their bellies.