Dusty's Diary 4: One Frustrated Man's Apocalypse Story

by Bobby Adair

  When we crawled through the gaps in a chain-link fence to get on the grounds of a massive tank farm, we stopped seeing Shroomies.

  Amelia seemed to relax when we’d walked a few hundred yards in and I could see nothing in any direction except giant, circular oil tanks. “They don’t come down here much.” She waved me to come and walk beside her.

  Wary, I kept looking around. “Why?”

  “Nothing down here to eat? No shelter. There’s nothing here they need.”

  She seemed past her combativeness from earlier, so I asked, "Why are we here?"

  “We’re headed to the ship channel.”

  “The Houston Ship Channel?”

  Amelia confirmed with a nod. “It’s just the bayou. You know that, right?”

  “I never thought about Buffalo Bayou being the Houston Ship Channel, but yeah, I guess I knew that. Why are we going there?”

  “We need to find a boat.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll be the safest way for us to get downtown. Remember all the stuff we saw along the shores over by Aunt Millie’s? The bayou is worse. The channel isn’t very wide in most places now, because so much flood debris is piled along the levees. That makes the banks dangerous to climb over. And it makes it hard to see the water from up on the levees.”

  “Assuming the ‘gators, water moccasins, and bull sharks don’t eat us first.”

  “Don’t forget the muskrats,” snarked Amelia. “The rabid ones will swallow you right up.”

  She was hard to talk to sometimes. "All I'm saying is, aren't we just trading one set of risks for another? Besides, none of this answers my question."

  Amelia stopped and turned to me. "If you want to rush off to the deep blue sea with your eyes full of hula dancers and Travel Channel wisdom, I'm not going to stop you, but you need to stop bitching about things, or I'm going to disappear into the city and let you whine the wartheads to death.”

  “I’m not whining,” I argued. “I just—” I caught my temper. “Why downtown? Why now?”

  “Since you’ve got Caribbean fever so bad, I’ve decided to help you get the information you need so you at least won’t die on the first day of your trip.”

  “You know,” I joked, “I’m one of the top survivalists in the world right now.”

  “Winning the lottery doesn’t make you a smart investor.”

  “Unless you knew the winning numbers ahead of time?”

  “What’s that even mean?” she asked.

  “It’s your analogy. I’m trying to stay on the same page with you.”

  “Whatever.”

  I shrugged. “Where are we going?”

  “The central library.”

  I was dumbstruck, yet got over it quickly. “Downtown?”

  “Yep.”

  “The same downtown that’s infested with a giant horde of the infected.”

  “It is.”

  “You’re trying to make a point.” I’ve dealt with teenage girls before. I’m down with their tricks. “You want to scare me straight.”

  Amelia turned and started walking again.

  Damn.

  She was good. I jogged to catch up. “Why are we going to the central library?”

  “Information,” she told me.

  “We’ve got branch libraries all over town and—”

  “Yeah, all over town. And do you know which ones still have books inside?”

  I was at a loss for words. Why the hell would anybody loot a library? I knew the answer to that before I even asked it. Shroomies would tear up anything for no reason at all.

  “I haven’t seen a branch library yet that’s intact,” Amelia told me. “The central library downtown, last time I went by there, was still in good shape.”

  “Why?”

  “Why anything, Bush Meat? Who the hell knows?”

  I didn’t have answers to any of that. “I don’t think going right smack dab into the center of the city is a good idea.”

  Amelia lightened up. "The bayou winds through the city. The central library is just a block off the bayou. We can pull out at Sam Houston Park. It's overgrown these days, so we can sneak through. The library is on the other side. If we're even a little bit lucky, the wartheads will never see us.”

  “And you believe this risk for a bunch of travel books is really worth it? I mean, honestly worth it?”

  Amelia scanned the shadows around the oil tanks for any sign of lingering Shroomies. "I'm not going to stop you from going to the Caribbean if that's the big stupid idea you've married yourself up to. Unfortunately, you're the most normal human I've come across in over a year, and I want to make sure you have the right information, so you don't kill yourself because of a bad choice."

  “I think you’re making a big deal about nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Amelia laughed a little too rudely, a little too loudly.

  I scanned the darkness around us and listened for interested monsters. Not hearing anything to worry me at that moment, I urged Amelia to start walking again. “Why’s this information worth the risk? Sell me on it?”

  “How are you going to pick which island to land on? Assuming you don’t sink the boat on the first day of your trip.”

  I looked across the dark ground around us. I didn’t like being out in the open where so many hidden eyes could see me. I stepped up close to Amelia and made an effort to keep my voice low. “I told you, we could—”

  “Not we.”

  I huffed. “I could sail by real close, maybe anchor off the beach and—”

  “Anchor off the beach?” Amelia laughed.

  “Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

  "You think every island is ringed with a wide, sandy beach, don't you? Just like in those resort commercials, they used to show on TV."

  Yes. I believed that. Mostly. “I’m not stupid enough to think every island is surrounded by a beach.”

  Amelia shook her head. “Some islands have rocky shores. The ones where you’d want to live, the best ones, are surrounded by coral reefs, which you’d have to avoid so you wouldn’t rip out the bottom of your boat.”

  “What if I didn’t want a coral reef?” I argued. “Because I wouldn’t want to risk my boat.”

  “Islands with reefs offshore have the most plentiful fish.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Tell me, Dusty, would you rather row out a few hundred yards to catch all the fish you want in an hour or would you rather row a few miles out to sea and spend all day hoping something bites?”

  “I’ve been fishing before.”

  “Deep sea fishing?” Amelia asked.

  “It’s not like you’ve ever been deep-sea fishing,” I told her. “You said your parents never took you to the Caribbean.”

  “It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.”

  “With everybody dead,” I argued, “I’ll bet the ocean is full of fish.”

  “Really, Scientist Dusty? How long does it take for a fishery to reestablish after the boats stop scouring it clear with gill nets?”

  “I don’t need to know that kind of stuff.”

  “Months? Years?” Amelia was merciless when she thought she was right. “Decades? What’ll you eat while you’re waiting for the fish to come back? Papayas? Iguanas?”

  I forced a laugh because things were getting too tense. “I’d eat an iguana. I’ll bet they taste better than Punchy Bryan’s…uh…uh…anything. Besides, verified by Mythbusters, everything tastes like chicken.”

  “Which islands have iguanas?”

  I clamped my jaw shut on that one. Was it a trick question?

  “You don’t know,” said Amelia. “You don’t know which ones have native turtle populations. You don’t know which ones are likely to have plenty of banana trees or lime trees or mango trees. You don’t know which ones might have established farms where you might luck into finding some peas or Brussels sprouts or anything to keep you healthy when you realize you can’t just eat Punchy Bryan’s poop
-sicles the rest of your life.”

  “Punchy Bryan’s tastes better than Brussels sprouts.”

  “And when you run out of Punchy’s hermetically sealed crap?”

  “I have enough ammo to shoot a couple of sea chickens every day for the rest of my life, and those damn birds are everywhere. So, I’m not going to starve.”

  “You’re going to live on seagull meat?”

  “If I have to.” I felt like I was walking into a trap.

  “I guess nobody will be around to tell you how much you stink so you’ll never know.”

  “Oh yeah,” I mocked, “because everybody know that eating seagulls make you smell bad.”

  “Or you’ll just hallucinate your post-apoc porn queen.”

  “Whatevs.”

  “Whatevs?” asked Amelia. “What the hell is that?”

  “I’m down with the hipster lingo.”

  “Nobody says whatevs.”

  “Because nobody’s alive but us. I think I’m safe to make the claim that we all say it. Everybody in Houston.”

  Amelia snorted.

  “So really,” I asked, “are you trying to tell me people get high from eating seagull meat?”

  “My God, Bush Meat, sometimes you amaze me.”

  “I take it you don’t mean that in a good way.”

  “You’ve heard of beriberi, right? And scurvy?”

  “Argh. Aye, Matey!”

  “Is that supposed to be a pirate joke?”

  I chuckled. Of course it was. “They’re pirate diseases.”

  Amelia groaned. “They’re caused by vitamin deficiencies. Scurvy in particular, if you decide to have the iguana, seagull, and trash fish mixed grill for dinner every night—within months, your body will start to break down. Your gums will putrefy. You’ll start to stink. You’ll have hallucinations—not the fun kind—and your capillaries will break down. Old wounds will open up, and you’ll probably stroke out one morning when you’re trying to get your morning masturbation rhythm going.

  I shivered. “That’s scurvy?”

  “With no vitamin C, a body can’t produce collagen and can’t maintain what it has, and everything falls apart. You need your vegetables.” Amelia repressed a gag. “Or Punchy’s vitamin-packed pseudo-food.”

  I felt like I was getting jawboned by my ex, and it boiled up a lot of old anger in me. Still, Amelia seemed so sure about all that shit. How the hell could she know so much?

  After some of the steam seeped out of the argument, Amelia said, “You’ve lived here in Houston most of your life, am I right?”

  No. But telling her I grew up in Detroit wasn’t going to help my case. I knew she was setting me up for another trap that would end with her slapping me with another fat dose of my ignorance. “Why are you convincing me to stay?”

  “Convincing you to stay?” she nearly shouted. “You’re so stupid! You don’t listen to anything.” She turned and stomped away.

  I stood there for a time, watching her go, thinking about turning north, getting back up on the highway, and seeing myself all the way back to Bunker Stink. The thought of sitting in the septic tank all by myself, watching the Shroomies on my closed-circuit video system, felt ominous. It felt like a choice to give up on the Caribbean. It felt like a choice to die alone.

  Damn, Amelia was hardheaded.

  I jogged to catch up.

  January 15th, fourth entry

  As I came up alongside Amelia, I said, “Sorry.”

  “Who gives a shit? If you don’t, I don’t.”

  “I do. You’re right. I need to know what I’m doing.”

  “My god, wasn’t me just saying that enough?”

  "Because you're a teenager who knows too much about everything for no reason I can explain, and I'm old enough to be your father, plus a few years, and you make me feel stupid."

  Amelia huffed. “Sorry. I didn’t intend to.”

  That was as close to détente as we were going to get, so I asked, “Can we really get in and out of the central library alive?”

  “I’ve done it.”

  “Can I?”

  “I’ll get you in and out.”

  “Promise?” I smiled widely.

  “I’ll do the best I can.”

  And that was the most I was going to get. “What kind of information are we looking for once we’re there? I mean, we can’t just steal all the books we need and tote them out, right?”

  “Geography, for one.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Think about an island like Aruba.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would you like to settle there?”

  “I know people who’ve gone. They liked it.”

  “Besides being ten miles off the coast of Venezuela, meaning it might have been a refuge for South Americans looking to escape the carnage on the continent, hence teeming with Shroomheads, it’s also one of the most arid islands in the Caribbean. It only gets twenty inches of rain a year. It’s mostly desert. It would be hard to grow crops there. So what happens when you suffer through a few years of drought?”

  Drought? In the Caribbean. Never crossed my mind. “How do you know this stuff?”

  “How do you not?”

  “No, seriously, that’s a lot of detail about a place I’ve only seen in travel ads. How do you know all that?”

  Amelia examined the shadows again. “I pay attention. I remember things.” She turned and waved me to start walking with her again. “Aruba is out.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “So we need info on geography and weather. “What about Jamaica? That place is beautiful. I saw a Travel Channel thing about it.”

  “Do you have two point eight million bullets?”

  “What?”

  “That’s how many people lived in Jamaica before the collapse. There won’t be that many now, but if your plan is really to shoot every monster in your island paradise, you should probably pick one with a smaller population.”

  “Two point eight million? How do you know that?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “Jamaica is out.”

  “See,” said Amelia, “it’s not hard. We can rule out most of the islands before you sail down there. If we go through the information we find at the library, we can probably come up with five or ten great candidates for you.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take us?” I was thinking of my backpack. I only had enough food for four more days.

  “We can rule out most of them pretty quickly. There are probably only a few hundred that are even big enough to consider. Probably less than that. The rest are too small or too risky.”

  “What other kinds of risks are you thinking about?”

  “Low elevation. Not good when a hurricane comes with a big tidal surge.”

  “I thought about that,” I told her. “I figured the Florida Keys were out.”

  “That’s good. What about volcanoes, you can’t forget those. Remember Montserrat? You were barely even an old guy when that happened.”

  “I’m not as old as you seem to think I am.” I did remember something about it in the news years ago. “Were you even born when that happened?”

  “I told you, I pay attention. That volcano wiped out half the island.”

  Feeling defeated, I admitted, “Volcanoes never crossed my mind.”

  “You'd have come across it if you were doing your research alone."

  What was that? Kindness? I didn’t know how to respond. Mostly, I didn’t want to jinx it. I deliberately trudged in the direction of the ship channel. “I hope there aren’t any big ‘gators in the bayou.”

  January 15th, fifth entry

  Even at night, everything I hated about the Houston Ship Channel festered its way up my nostrils and down my throat.

  Every time a Shroomie took a dump in the street anywhere from Baytown to Katy, the next rainfall washed the turd into a storm drain that fed into the Bayou. That was downtown Houston, most everything ins
ide the 610 loop, and countless ‘burbs. Six and a half million people used to live in that sprawl. How many wartheads were left, who knew? Buffalo Bayou was their sewer, and it smelled like it.

  Then there was the garbage. Just like the turds, Styrofoam cups, plastic milk jugs, and every bit of crap in between that wasn’t biodegradable was pushed up in mounds on the levees and in the water. And anything else one of the floods might have washed into the channel over the past few years—cars, shopping baskets, shipping containers, and televisions. It looked every bit like a meandering landfill with a toxic river flowing through it.

  The busy hands of underpaid workmen plugged the holes and kept the volatile fluids flowing through the infrastructure. Without the workers, fertilizer plants, petroleum tank farms, chemical factories, and refineries were corroding away all along the shore, leaking everything into the bayou.

  Amelia and I were on a concrete walkway, or dock, or whatever the hell the industrial nautical people liked to call it. It was a straight section of the channel where barges had once pulled alongside to load and unload. Big, rusty cleats were set into concrete. Deteriorating rubber bumpers the size of water heaters hung over the side. No ships were tied up, though, and no debris had collected in the water in front of the dock. The water was probably too deep there, the wall too straight.

  “Let’s take a break,” said Amelia, not waiting for me to agree. She sat herself on the wall and dangled her feet over the filthy water six feet below.

  I carefully scanned the dark water across the wide channel, but didn’t see anything moving.

  It’d had been a long night of looking for a boat with nothing to show for it. Dawn was only an hour or two away, and I was tired. So I sat beside Amelia. I didn’t dangle my legs, though. I’d already had one too many experiences with wide jaws and chompy teeth coming out of the water after me. “Maybe we should have used that lifeboat we saw awhile back.”

  “It was too big,” answered Amelia.

  Big enough to keep the ‘gators out. I didn’t say that, though.

  “It would have worn us out trying to row it. And steering? Forget about it. It wasn’t made for this kind of stuff.”

  She was right, but I didn’t want to admit that, either.

  Amelia took a bottle of water from her bag for a drink.

  I watched the carcass of an unidentifiable animal bob in the channel. “This water is foul.”