by Bobby Adair
“What then? How would you find safety? How would you rebuild? Would you stay in Texas?”
“I’d head northeast,” said Amelia. “Up where the spring rains are dependable. Where the dirt is black and rich, where the winter gets cold enough to kill the mosquitoes.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I’d find a place far from the cities. Maybe an old farm. And if I could get some help, I’d find some heavy machinery, some tractors and concrete trucks and stuff, and I’d build a wall. A tall wall. Ten or twenty feet, and I’d encircle an area big enough that I could live with my new friends and build a little town, and keep our livestock and till our fields in safety. No fungus. No monsters. No droughts. No volcanoes or hurricanes. Nothing but blue skies and green grass forever.”
I liked the sound of that, but my attention was on the heap of debris clogging the channel.
Amelia took great care to paddle quietly.
I reached down for my rifle, making sure I could snatch it up if something pounced out at us.
Nothing did. We passed the clog without any trouble and continued up the canal.
When we’d gone far enough that I was about to start asking if we’d gone the wrong way, we came upon a long warehouse built right at the edge of the canal with half of the tin sheets torn off the walls.
“Just up here on the left.” Amelia nodded toward a cutout in the left bank, large enough for a few barges to dock within, but currently jammed up with the wreckage of three sleek boats.
As the overhanging trees parted, I looked up to see the factory Amelia had pointed out when we were in the cab of the gantry crane. One tower stood ten stories tall, constructed of red brick that looked to be a hundred years old but probably wasn't. Additions had been built, with smokestacks and chimneys, silos and tanks, some made of brick, others slapped together with metal siding, some looking like long warehouses, others like production facilities. The old Purina factory had grown through the decades with no apparent long-term plan.
That’s when I spotted a familiar logo on a sign falling down near the water’s edge. It was Punchy Bryan’s Hazmat Hamburger logo, and this place was the old dog food factory refitted to crank out Punchy Bryan’s indestructible meals.
January 16th, fourth entry
With the canoe tied off, we crossed a paved parking lot and loading zone scattered with burned-out police cars, wrecked pickups, a few Humvees, and a military-looking armored car, scorched down to the rims.
“Careful where you walk.” Amelia pointed at the tarnished brass bullet casings tinkling under my feet.
I looked down to see thousands of shell casings lying on the asphalt, piled against rims, and rolled into cracks. “Jesus, it looks like there was a war here.”
“Yeah,” answered Amelia. “Wait until you see inside.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“I stumbled on this place a few years ago. When you gave me that disgusting protein bar the other day, I noticed the logo and made the connection.”
“After you ate that bar,” I asked, “is that when you decided this place needed to burn?”
“It was while I was chewing the first bite.”
I tried not to laugh.
We climbed the concrete steps beside a loading dock that spanned the backside of one of the connected buildings. Many of the metal doors were still rolled down, though most of those had bullet holes—some a handful, others a hundred or more. The concrete walls were all pitted from bullet strikes, and in some places, the concrete was blasted through. Black streaks from old fires and explosions colored the masonry, metal, and concrete everywhere I looked.
“Some of Punchy’s customers must have wanted a refund,” I joked.
Amelia politely chuckled as she led me through an opening where one of the roll-up steel doors had been destroyed. She turned on her flashlight.
“Is that wise?” I asked.
“The wartheads don’t come in here.”
“Why?”
Amelia shrugged. “I’ve never seen one here before.”
“How many times have you been here?”
She decided that was another question not worthy of an answer.
I made the intuitive leap. “Still, we should be careful, right?”
Amelia agreed, and we proceeded across a warehouse floor that looked as much like a battlefield as the parking lot outside. We silently passed through a pair of fire doors blown off their hinges, and headed into a stairwell at the base of the old tower structure.
My curiosity meter was pegged on max overload as I stepped over more brass casings and saw hundreds of pits in the bricks and holes in the wood. “I’ve never seen this much—” I didn’t know the right word. “Fighting? What was going on here to cause all this? Don’t tell me this was over Punchy’s food.”
I followed Amelia up the stairs past the second floor. “I don’t know why they were shooting, but I know what they were fighting over.”
“You’re doing a good job of building the suspense.”
Amelia turned to me and rolled her eyes.
We finished the climb in silence and passed through another pair of blasted fire doors on the third floor.
Looking across the space, I saw moonlit Houston through banks of windows that ran the width of all four walls. At least half the glass panes were broken out. Thick wooden pillars stood at regular intervals across the floor supporting the upper level. All bore the scars of the gun battle. Barricades stood in several places on the floor, each set in position to defend against enemies coming up from the stairs. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the building, though.
Amelia crossed the wide creaky floor to what I first thought was a bank of elevators, but when I saw office doors blown off the hinges, I realized I was wrong. As I followed her, I noticed something else strange among the shell casings on the floor—paper money, American bills—tens, twenties, hundreds, and fives. Some were torn, others were burnt. Rodents and bugs had chewed the edges of many bills and shredded others entirely.
The scattering of bills grew into a leafy, paper carpet the farther in we went.
When we reached the walled offices in the center of the floor, Amelia stopped at a Mr. Kelvin’s door and shined her light inside. She peeked for herself, and then waved for me to take a look.
I cautiously leaned in to see. “Holy shit.”
Amelia giggled. “I know.”
I stepped inside. The bricked-in, central office area had at one time been walled to create six interior offices. Those walls had been mostly torn away. The office furniture removed. In place of all that were stacks of cash. Pallet-sized stacks. Piles of it. Most of it a mess. The smell told me that rats and other critters had been inside, nesting, or rooting around for nesting materials.
It looked like the biggest pile of unrealized dreams I’d ever seen. My throat went unexpectedly dry. “There must be a billion dollars in here.”
“I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”
I’d spent so much of my life grubbing for tiny piles of paper money and digits to add to my bank account, being jealous of all the things money bought for those uppity snoots down in Plinko Ranch, forever wishing for that one winning lotto ticket to transform my life. I couldn't take my eyes off the pile. I had the terrible urge to stuff my backpack full, though I couldn't come up with a single rational reason why I should.
“All worthless.” It’s like Amelia was reading my thoughts, the rational ones, anyway.
I kicked at the brass casings on the floor, trying to guess how many thousands—maybe tens of thousands—littered Punchy Bryan’s factory. “How many people do you think died for that pile of money?”
“Hundreds?” guessed Amelia. “More?”
I stepped out of the office to shake the mesmerizing dazzle out of my eyes, to pull my irrational needs away from its heroine-habit siren song. “So stupid. But why?”
“This place was long picked-over by the time I first found it. Most of the
bones had been dragged away."
“You think they were stealing all this money back during the collapse?” I guessed. “Like things were going to magically get better and leave them rich?”
Amelia headed across the open floor toward the windows that faced downtown. “The money must have still been valuable when they went to war over it. Otherwise, why? What was the point?”
I took up a spot by the windows with Amelia, and looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight.
Amelia said, “I figure a dry match or two will set this whole place ablaze.”
“Do we burn it now? Do we have enough time to get to the library from here?”
Amelia shook her head. “I think we stay the night and then burn it late tomorrow afternoon. That way we can pull in the day shift and the night shift Shroomheads all at once. We might empty out the whole of downtown for twelve to forty-eight hours.”
“That’ll be enough time?” I asked. “To do our research?”
“Should be.”
January 17th
It was a cold day, and Houston's humidity put a bite in the air that made me shiver every time I stood by the windows on the north side of the office to look out. The sun was sinking toward the horizon. I guessed we had an hour and a half, maybe a little more, before sunset, before shift change in the Shroomy community.
I had a little fire burning on top of a piece of tin that lay across several bricks I’d found. I didn’t want to chance the fire igniting the wooden floor below. On the fire, I had my little mess kit plate filled with water, and in the water simmered two of Punchy Bryan’s foil packets.
Amelia had just finished her morning personal business and was crossing over to our little campsite in front of the offices that held Houston’s paper wealth. “What are you doing?”
I'd used a broken-legged office desk to set up a table about eighteen inches off the ground, and I was sitting at the table cross-legged, Japanese-style. "Dinner."
Amelia eyed the table with the right degree of apprehension. “Did you clean this?”
I waved a hand over the surface. “I can’t do anything about the bullet holes, but I scrubbed away the rat pellets and roach turds. All is good in the Punchy Bryan dining room on the last day of table service."
Amelia rolled her eyes, as they settled on the foil packets sitting on her side of the table. “If you’re expecting me to—”
I stopped her with a raised palm. “I’ll be the first to admit that Punchy’s mother’s recipes are bottom-of-the-barrel disgusting, but—” I caught her eye to emphasize the importance of what was to come next, “—this is the product that started it all for Punchy, the Hazmat Hamburger.”
“With a name like that—” said Amelia as she shivered.
“I know,” I replied. I tore open one of the packets and removed two dough-colored discs and sat them on top of the packet as I laid it back on the table. “I ate one of these at Punchy’s booth at the survivalist show they have in the convention center every October.”
“You ate some of Punchy’s food, and you still stocked your bunker with it?"
"As I said, this is the product that started it all. It's where the company logo came from."
“You’re a Punchy fanboy, aren’t you?”
I shook my head. “Maybe I was a fanboy back when I bought that pallet of food-like calorie substitute. Not now that I’ve eaten so much of it...” I tried not to gag on the memories.
Amelia had stopped looking at me, she was transfixed by the two discs sitting on her foil packet. They were slowly inflating into hamburger-bun shapes. “I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be mean. Punchy perfected a process to pull all the air and moisture out of the bread so he could vacuum seal it to preserve it. It slowly rises as the air seeps back in. “
“Sound delicious.”
I shrugged. “The bun is a little dry—once you get the burger put together, you don’t notice.”
“I’m sure.”
I handed her a small tube and kept one for myself. With mine, I tore the top off and squeezed the contents into a swirl between my expanding burger buns.
“That looks like shit.”
“I know.”
“No, seriously. That looks just like shit. What are those lumps?”
"Okay." I understood the trepidation. "I felt the same way the first time I saw it. The lumps are bacon bits. The rest of it is a mixture of mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, and a veggie paste containing pickles, tomatoes, and lettuce."
“You have got to be kidding. It looks like poop-flavored toothpaste.”
I put a dab on my finger and tasted it. "Yum." I reached out to put a tiny dollop on Amelia's finger.
She recoiled with a grimace.
“Seriously. Close your eyes and try it. Please. Trust me.”
She huffed and reached out her hand.
I dabbed her finger.
“Put it in your mouth. Just don’t look at it.”
After several tries to put her finger to her mouth, she finally tasted a speck of the goop. “Hmm,” she said.
“See?”
She put the rest of the dab in her mouth. “Except for the texture, I have to admit. It tastes like ketchup and pickles and stuff.”
“Squeeze the tube on your bun.” I fished the two packets out of the water pot and juggled them in my hands over to the table. I dropped one beside my prepared burger and slid the other across the table to her, the Hazmat Hamburger logo facing up. “That’s the patty. Nice and hot.” I opened my packet and slid my patty out onto my bun.
Amelia sniffed. “That actually smells like a hamburger.”
I nodded, proud. “If Punchy had just put as much care into making the rest of his products taste good.”
Amelia put her patty on the fully expanded bun.
My burger fully prepared, I took a big bite. Not concerned with manners, I said, “It’s not a Big Mac, but it’s not bad.”
“This little science experiment frightens me, but I guess they haven’t killed you yet.” Amelia finished building her burger. She took a deep breath, chomped her first bite, and chewed.
“Well?”
“Best burger I’ve had in years.”
January 17th, second entry
I gathered up my things while Amelia stared through one of the windows. I didn't put the dinner fire out. Not wanting to waste a precious match—actually, I’d lit it with my lighter. Still, the fire represented one flick of my Bic, one tick toward the depletion of a non-renewable resource. Sure, at the moment, finding perfectly operable lighters still wasn’t very hard, but a day would come.
I tested the temperature of the metal sheet I’d built my fire on and figured I could pick it up in gloved hands and hold onto it long enough to toss it through the door to the money room. “Hey Amelia, what time do you want to—”
Amelia gasped and ran down to look through a different window.
I jumped to my feet, pulling my backpack on and looking around for any of my stuff I might have missed. “What?”
Amelia didn’t answer.
“What?” I insisted, patting my empty holster, and missing my Glock. I checked the magazine on my AR-15. “Amelia?”
She turned away from the window, ran toward the stairwell doors, stopped, looking very distressed and at a loss for words.
“What’s wrong?”
"The warehouse," she said it like she was making something up. "It's full of packaging. Paper. Boxes. You know. We need to burn it, too."
I wasn’t sure which of the attached buildings she meant. In fact, I had no idea. “Why?”
Amelia looked at her watch. “Give me ten minutes before you light the money.” She headed for the stairs.
“Wait!” I kept my eyes on her as I moved over to pick up my sheet of metal with the small fire on top. “I’ll light this now and—”
“No!”
I stopped. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll light the warehouse. Give me ten minutes.” She look
ed at her watch and tapped it. “Ten minutes. Light it up and head for the canoe. I’ll meet you there.” She turned and ran.
With my feet frozen to the floor by my surprise, I stood there with my mouth open while she disappeared into the stairwell. Ten minutes? What the hell? I heard her footsteps pounding down the stairs in an un-Amelia fashion.
Ten minutes. I marked the time in my head and jogged over to the windows to see what had spooked her. I wasn’t convinced that we suddenly had to burn the packaging warehouse. Something else was going on. That’s when it occurred to me, she was protecting me from something. Or more accurately, she was mothering me, protecting me from myself. She saw something out there she thought I’d react stupidly to.
The last window she’d looked through was facing into the glare of the setting sun. The overgrown battleground three floors down lay in the shadows of trees and buildings, dappled with splashes of slanted light. I scanned, looking for what had spooked Amelia. Could it be more cannibals? Bandits?
Other people like me?
Could that be it?
Shit!
My mind was winding through a thousand guesses that grew crazier with each spin of the wheel.
I turned and ran for the stairs, stopped halfway there, cursed myself, and turned back toward the windows.
What if she was telling the truth? Did we need to burn the warehouse, too? Would it not catch fire from the one I was about to set?
I didn’t know.
I checked my watch. Seven minutes to go.
Amelia was so secretive and stand-offish. She liked to keep me at a prickly distance. She didn’t trust me. But she had risked her life to guide me across Houston to meet her Aunt Millie. She was taking another big chance by helping me get the information I’d need to pick the best island in the Caribbean to start rebuilding the world.
I rushed back to the window. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything, at least nothing that sounded like hungry Shroomies coming to get me. They were out there, no doubt, hollering and howling in the distance, Houston's new ambient noise, replacing the hum of tires, honk of horns, and growl of diesel engines.
I hurried over to look out the windows on the other side of the tower. To the east, down by the dock, our canoe still sat there, undisturbed. North and south, I searched and scanned, yet saw nothing.
