by Bobby Adair
Dusty’s Diary 4
One Frustrated Man’s Apocalypse Story
A novel by Bobby Adair
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Text copyright © 2019, Bobby L. Adair
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Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz
Editing & Book Formatting
Kat Kramer Adair
January 13th
The air smelled like an old gas station, one built on a mound of rotting seagrass.
Amelia pulled her paddle against the brackish water, the kind we were warned about in recent years that contained flesh-eating bacteria.
Half-assed waves slopped against the kayak and left a diesel film where the water slid away. Catfish bobbed on their backs, their tails lolling in the sickly current, offering their bloated white bellies to the flies and worms and leaving a scent in the air so oily I could taste it in the back of my throat. The current inched out of the San Jacinto River, sludged through a few miles of Bear Lake, and crawled under the I-10 overpass which spanned the narrows ahead of us.
The bridge above was heaped with rusted, hulks, packed tight, making it hard to tell one from another or even guess what most were. Escalades and Hondas, big Ford trucks and SUVs, even expensive European imports corroding like every other hunk of useless metal piled on the bridge.
I spotted the outline of a Humvee with its front end driven up on top of another car, tires burned down to the rims, steel skin crackling to rust, the ashes of somebody’s uniformed son, caked into the driver’s seat. It was just like what happened on so many bridges over natural barriers near so many cities—somebody with a pocketful of local authority tried to block the way into their community back when people believed that barricades and green zones still mattered.
The thing most wannabe-Davy Crockett dipshits never understood was that by the time anybody had a clue that a quarantine might protect anyone, it was already too late by a year or two.
The toe fungus fuckery was already everywhere.
A long line of abandoned cars and trucks clogged the eastbound lanes as far as I could see—people who had been trying to get out of Houston, cars loaded down with bottled water, sloshing gasoline cans, as much food as they could scrounge, and the kids all stuffed in the back. Another line jammed the westbound lanes, escapees from New Orleans or the ‘gator-infested swamps of the sportsman’s paradise. All of ‘em, headed to a faraway somewhere covered with greener grass, friendlier wartheads, and well-stocked 7-Elevens on every corner.
None of them counted on a local Poobah sending his gold-badged dick-wringers back across the highway, telling them to go home—shelter in place, it’ll all blow over, stay calm, let us guvment adults handle this. Translation: we got ours, now you go fuck yourself.
It’s not hard to understand the desperation of a cat-lady who’s just seen the neighbors barbeque bony Mr. Morris and all his skinny-kitty littermates. It’s not difficult to see the anxiety in the eyes of parents who had to dig up the caladium bulbs from the garden to feed the kids. But people see what they want to see. They hear mostly their own loud mouths when the yelling starts. Fold in a generous serving of guns and Molotov Cocktails, bake in the Texas sun through a long summer afternoon, and you get a five-star suburban corpse-ucopia up on the bridge clogging the lanes in both directions for as far as you can see.
And that’s the funny thing about people. Sit a modern man in front of a computer for twenty-three years, commute him an hour each way to work five days a week, stuff him with take-out grease burgers ‘n fries while he watches Wheel of Fortune on the TV with his wife, and when the shit comes down, without a hint of hesitation, he sheds every shred of civility and unlocks every violent tendency in his little ratfuck soul to grab that last chicken wing on the platter.
That’s the kind of shit right there that makes Darwin proud.
Amelia glanced back at me from the front of the kayak. “What are you looking at?”
Not wanting to explain all the dark shit running through my head, I said, “Shroomies.”
She turned and scanned the abstract silhouettes across the length of the bridge. Her face went pale. When she spoke, her voice was hushed. “Did you see one?”
“Just being careful.”
Back over her shoulder, she looked at me again. “Why’d you stop paddling, then?”
I realized that the warped board I was using for a paddle was dragging uselessly through the soupy bay. “Sorry. Shit on my mind.”
“The Caribbean again?” Amelia turned forward as I saw a flash of annoyance on her face. You know the look. It’s that one most boys are first introduced to in junior high—the one that screws up a pretty girl’s face when—horror of horrors—the gangly kid with the sloppy buzz cut and too-short jeans finally gets up the guts to talk to her. You know the one, right?
Okay, maybe that example was too personal.
Short version—sometimes Amelia’s not a nice person.
She pointed at a thin sandbar well ahead of the bridge. It just barely crested the surface, stretching twenty or thirty yards and running in the direction of the current.
“Let’s pull out up there and dump the water.”
That’s when I noticed four inches of salty yuk inside the kayak and realized our quest to find crazy Aunt Millie’s bimbo barge had ended so badly after so much pent-up horniness and so many long miles that I was having trouble keeping my head in the game.
We needed to keep moving. Aunt Millie had fired that double-barrel shoulder cannon at us, sounding like God’s dinner bell clanging down from heaven, waking every infected nitwit in a five-mile radius. Now they were out there, poking around and trying to find us, me and Amelia.
Safety meant moving upriver, but we couldn’t afford to sink.
So, we paddled.
Petroleum tanks—some tall and thin, and others enormous, squat circles—stood along one side of the shore. Two of them had burned. Steel structures collapsed in the center of an ashen smudge where nothing had grown, even three years later.
A trio of trailer homes stood half-submerged in the channel down the shore from the burned out tanks. Judging by the state of their decomposition, the chemical cocktail contained in the waves of the river had not been kind to them.
“You see those?” Amelia was staring down into the water.
Not knowing what to expect, I glanced.
We were floating over rows and rows of sunken cars. The roofs of the vehicles were just three or four feet beneath the surface, still visible through the murk. All were perfectly lined up, wheels down, glass intact, as though they’d been parked there.
“How do you suppose that happened?” she asked.
“Barge?” I shrugged and peered into the brown water, willing my eyes to see deeper.
Amelia squealed.
I looked just as a young dolphin with milky eyes floated belly-up past the boat. Its boney head was deformed with warts, much like the ones Amelia kept hidden under her hoodie. I lifted my paddle out of the water, grossed out by the idea of touching the contaminated thing. “I hate this place.”
Amelia spat into the water. “Nasty.”
Moving quickly and silently, we made our way past the submerged cars. We skirted an island of two-by-fours and plywood, still nailed to one another in walls and roof fragments. Mixed into the angular mound were appliances, couches, and mattresses—all washed out of Houston by the floods dumped on the city by hurricane squalls. Water sloshed through the jumble. Seagulls smart enough not to t
ake their rest onshore sat perched on the dry spots, painting them white with their droppings.
“What do you know about the Caribbean?” Amelia asked, bringing the subject back up as she tested the depth of the water beneath our kayak.
“Why, do you think it’s a bad idea?” We were finally closing in on the sandbar Amelia had selected.
“Can you sail?”
“I can’t not sail.”
Amelia laughed at my confidence as she lifted herself out of the kayak and stepped into the ankle-deep water.
Poking the edge of my board into the silty bottom, I dragged the kayak sideways until the keel scraped into the narrow sandbar beneath my end.
“People have been sailing for thousands of years. It’s not like we have to invent it or anything.” I heaved myself out of the kayak, feeling stiffness in my back and knees from sitting so long. “We don’t have to build a boat. We just need one that’s seaworthy and big enough to sail across the Gulf. I’m sure we can dig up some how-to books on sailing somewhere. You know, teach ourselves.”
With my feet gooped in malodorous, black mud, I dragged the kayak onto the sand until Amelia found a place that passed for ‘just-right’ in her overly-selective brain. Together we rolled it over to dump the brown water.
“If we capsize and drown?” asked Amelia. “You think there’s a how-to book on that?”
“Better than being eaten alive for staying at home.”
We turned the kayak right side up. Amelia stretched her back and surveyed the chaos on the bridge. “Let’s say we make it across the gulf without drowning, then what?”
For no reason other than the Gulf of Mexico was far south of us, I looked in that direction. “Don’t know.”
“You don’t have an island picked out?”
“There are plenty down there, right?”
“That’s not the point. We can’t just pick up a book and learn how to sail any more than we can just paddle across to Mexico and pick whatever island appeals to us.”
I yawned and wished I had a cup of coffee. “Why are you busting my balls over this?”
She turned to me and met my gaze, all serious. “Trying to understand your plan, that’s all.”
No, she wasn’t.
I knew enough about women to know that tone when I heard it. She was just as muddy and exhausted as I was and looking for someone to punish. I shoved the empty kayak back into the river and made the effort to climb into the wobbly thing unassisted. She stepped into the water and steadied it for me anyway. It took a moment to carefully lower my weight into the back seat and fold my long legs to fit.
Amelia looked me over once I settled into position and then hopped into the boat with the ease of a gymnast.
Fucking kids.
January 13th, second entry
We shoved off from the sandbar and paddled silently into the current.
I cleared my throat a little too loudly. The sound bounced off the graffiti-tattooed concrete of the bridge, frightening a single pigeon up into the cloudless sky.
“I don’t have a plan," I said, watching the rhythm of her shoulders as she paddled. Her head drooped a little. "I have an idea. That’s all. Something to think about. Completely different thing.”
She paused for a second. Her paddle dripped where it hovered above the murky water. “So, no island picked out, then?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been to the Caribbean?”
"My parents always ditched me with Aunt Millie and went by themselves. They called it ‘our time.'" Amelia tensed up but didn't look back at me. "Our time?"
“Is that why you hate it?”
She turned back to me, an accusation in her eyes. “Who said I hate it?”
“Just guessing.”
The junk caught in the bridge’s concrete legs blocked all but a single, narrow channel beneath the center span. I skipped a paddle stroke and reached for the butt of my pistol, assuring myself it was still in its holster.
Amelia and I both decided it was a good time to stop talking.
The lap of little waves echoed off the concrete supports overhead. Wood and steel on both sides creaked with the rising and falling of the water, making it impossible to distinguish an innocuous noise from something—or a bunch of toothy somethings—hiding in the debris.
In silent consent, we paddled faster.
Once in the bridge’s shadow, out of the breeze, mosquitoes swarmed us.
I dug deep in the water with each stroke, driving the kayak faster while pushing it off course. It veered closer to the junk piled to our left.
“Fucking—,” snorted Amelia, paddling hard to right our course, as the bow of the kayak floated out of the bridge's shade.
I switched sides, and after a few more strokes, we were past the bridge. I realized I was panting.
Amelia looked back at me. She didn’t have anything mean to say, laying her paddle across her lap to catch her breath instead. “I guess we felt the same way about that.”
I nodded, and took a few moments to rest before I started paddling again at my regular pace. “You got a place picked out up here?”
“There’s a tugboat stuck on a sandbar.”
“Close to shore?” I asked.
“Out in the lake pretty far. It’s safe.”
“One of your places?”
“I’ve never stayed there.” Amelia pointed across the water.
I looked to see the far shore was crowded with barges and industrial junk. “Things sure went to shit down here. Which boat is it?”
“Way up past that toppled oil rig. Out there in the water. Like I said.”
I scanned across the lake. All I saw was junk ringing the mucky brown water. Nothing stood out.
“I’ve checked it out before,” she told me. “Seagulls and pelicans roost there. The pilothouse is clean and dry. Plenty of room for us both.”
“Spend the day?” I asked. “Leave at sunset? Is that the plan?”
"It worked for us on the way here." She took to paddling at a pace in rhythm with my strokes, and we slowly pushed our way into the wind blowing across the water.
After a long while, as I was settling into a comfortable silence and starting to have nervous thoughts about how exposed I was to be out under God’s oversized sky in the middle of a lake where anyone or anything could spot me from miles away, Amelia said,”You know it’s not how it looks on those travel shows—beachside bungalows, tanned titty-skanks, margaritas, and coconuts?”
“I’m not seven years old.”
Amelia turned and gave me a stern look. She was good at it, like maybe too many years of solitude had aged her sweet teen heart into a bitter granny’s soul. “Mosquitoes and centipedes,” she explained. “Malaria. Zika. Dengue Fever. It’s tropical. The bugs don’t die off in the winter.”
“Are you used to talking to stupid people?”
As she turned her insulted back to me, she said, “I’m not used to talking to anybody.”
The vulnerability of her honesty triggered my instinct to wrap her in a hug and protect her from a world brimming with abrasive cruelty. It made me miss my daughters, spritzed tiny tears of sissy juice in my eyes, and threatened to turn me into a blubbering buffoon.
Fuck.
I dug deep in the water and paddled through my emotional shit.
My thoughts wouldn't stay silent, though. They tormented me with my anger over how the world had turned into a turd-sprinkled Shroomy zoo, where every dream I’d ever had the gall to entertain didn’t have the slightest wispy hope of coming true. And let’s not get started on the fantastical shit I’d always figured was waiting in the future—cutsey lubed sex bots, personal-sized Captain Nemo subs, Star Trek holodecks, flying cars and—
Fucking flying cars!
Why the hell didn’t we ever get flying cars?
Fuck George Jetson, and fuck all the industrious nerd-geeks who could have built them for us instead of betting their careers and stock options on genetically enginee
ring that goddamned toe fungus bullshit.
“What’s got you riled up?” asked Amelia.
“Nothing.”
“You seem mad.”
“I’m just—” It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I stopped paddling, leaned back, and looked up at the sky. All those bleak, desperate thoughts from back in the bunker, from those last days before I opened the hatch, washed over me in a riptide wave, and I wondered if going to all the trouble to keep my big ass alive had been a dipshit move.
Was Amelia a mistake? Was she too damaged to hitch my emotions to? Was she the final stark smudge of proof the universe had been trying to pound through my thick skull my whole life long?
Maybe that was it.
The earth had tried to get it right with the prehistoric fish things, with the dinosaurs, then with the Neanderthals, and now with us, Homo-Fucking-Sapiens. She’d sat back and watched while we shat all over our beautiful green world, killed one another on such a horrific scale in war after war after war, until we’d finally figured out a way to fuck ourselves all to hell for the sake of the quarterly bonuses of some bunch of rich assholes in the boardroom of Toe Fungus Fucker, Inc. And that’s where it was. Where I was. The last of the humans on the planet, cursed to watch the world die in the company of a surly little twat with a smart mouth and a pair of mean eyes.
In a million years humans would be nothing but fossils and rust stains in the rock. Just another mystery for a distant tomorrow’s curious mind to obsess over, and nothing I did today, tomorrow, or until the moment I finally breathed my last breath would make a diddley-squat of a difference.
I felt so lonely.
I felt like crying out loud, and to hell with whatever the prickly, twat-mouthed sprog had to say about it.
But I didn’t.
I rubbed my eyes to hide the shame of letting all that bubbling shit find its way to the surface.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I just need to rest a minute.”
January 13th, third entry
After giving me a few minutes of silence and peace, Amelia pointed across the brackish brown water. “There. That one.”
