by Bobby Adair
Kate and her husband lived pretty close and I saw them all the time. We weren’t best pals when she was growing up. Too many arguments, you know. Her acting just like I did at that age, me acting just like my old man did. We both grew out of it eventually. She got married and popped out a couple of puppies about the time the TFF Inc. execs bought their first corporate yacht on the tax deduction dime. I hope those guys are alive and I find one of ‘em one day.
Note to self: Find a book on medieval torture techniques and devices, you know, just in case.
I tried to get my daughters to come to the bunker with me, but turns out, I should have planned better. Back when I started the thing, I built it for five. Me, the eventual ex, and the three brats. In my post-apocalyptic plan/fantasy, I didn’t figure we’d be down in the bunker longer than three or four months. My budget had a lot to do with my plan. More money pays for more eventualities. Like most folks, I had college to pay for, first cars to buy, prom dresses—holy crap those things cost—senior trips, the father of the bride thing for three girls, oh, and that divorce—ouch. In the end, you prepare for the apocalypse you can afford.
Bunker Stink is roomy for what it is, a fiberglass tube maybe the size of an RV. My backyard was barely wide enough for the hole. Did I say before that I paid for it with the fly rod money? That was kind of a lie. I just didn’t want to feel stupid again. I paid a good part of the bunker expense with the fly rod money but I took out a loan against the house to pay for the rest. We picked the house up dirt cheap after the savings & loan crash in the late ‘80s, and it was nearly paid for. The wife pitched a fit when she found out how much the bunker cost and how I financed it. Too bad for her it was already in the ground.
If the end had come then, we all would have been screwed. Having a septic tank modified to look like an RV inside is just a first step. Our place wasn’t stocked up with anything then. I kept some guns and a bunch of ammo down there but it took several years to build up my supply of dry goods and survival meals.
I know you’re thinking, wow, humans must not eat much food if I can store up several years’ worth in Bunker Stink and still have room for anything else. Well, it’s not as big a problem as you might think. If you’re a future bee, then take my word for it and skip to the next paragraph. If you’re a future person, then I’ll tell you a human could probably eat for about 5 years on a pallet load of fifty-pound bags of rice. Do the math. You’ll see.
I know you’re thinking that’s still a lot of room. Like I said, Bunker Stink is a twelve-foot diameter tube on its side. It’s got a flat floor. If you’ve got any kind of spatial imagination, you’ll know that a flat floor across the bottom of the tube leaves a bunch of awkwardly shaped empty space below. Perfect for storage—a whole lot of it.
After Shroomageddon started, like I already told you, nobody knew what was really going on for a long time. Nobody knew where it would lead though some of us got more and more certain the longer it dragged on. The ex and I went our separate ways pretty early into it; I think it was maybe around the time the first vaccines came out. Turns out, she was fucking her boss. Marriage being what it is, turns out, I didn’t give much of a shit. I didn’t hate her. Sure, the whole business hurt, we were married a long time. We were attached, but we were bored and tired of each other. I can’t fault her for looking for a little happiness. They shacked up together at his place, a condo on the golf course over in Cinco Ranch. An expensive place. He makes more money than me. At least he used to before they both shroomed out.
He went first. I remember when she called me up on the phone to tell me about it. She was upset and crying and telling me shit like she’d wished she never left me and how she was going to stay by his side because she wanted to prove to herself she was a good woman, a good person, a good girlfriend. Turns out, she already shroomed by then too, she just didn’t really know it yet.
That’s the thing about shrooming. It’s slow. It might take a few months. It might take a few years. First, you get these irritated, red scratchy patches, mostly on your scalp or along your spine. Sometimes they hit your elbows, knees, and wrists. They slowly grow into reddish bumps, all the way down into your bone. They’re solid too, just like bone.
People tried to have them removed with surgery and all, back in the day. It was a big business, people spending their life savings to have it done. Didn’t matter, though. Didn’t change anything. By the time you got the first of the red scratchies, the fungus was already in your bones, all through ‘em, slowly growing. You were already one of them, a Shroomhead. People back then always thought they had a chance. Because they weren’t crazy yet, they thought they could beat it.
Nobody did.
The more the red lumps grow on somebody, the more crazy they get. I remember my ex calling me all the time, talking dingbat shit while her old boss made ape noises in the background. To tell you the truth, it was almost hard to tell when she stopped talking ex-wife crazy and started talking Shroomhead crazy. Anyways, she got less and less coherent. The calls got fewer and fewer. Maybe six months passed between when she first told me about golf-stud’s lumps and when she stopped calling.
Needless to say, her spot in the bunker went unfilled.
Getting back to my daughter, the Kate Winslet twin, her husband had a cabin out on some hillbilly lake up along the Louisiana border. He took Kate and the two youngsters up there. Just not soon enough. They made it awhile eating berries and pinecones or however people survive out in the woods. For all I know, he had his own prepper stash, or maybe the Kroger in their neighborhood was still open. By the time they turned Shroom, the government had already pushed its fourth failed vaccine on those of us who weren’t yet tainted—still most of us in those days.
I think nearly everybody suspected that TFF Inc. had fucked us by then. The government provided the lube.
Kate called me when the twins got the red lumps, both about the same time. They were maybe two years old then. The fungus works slower on the kids most of the time, and that was the case with Kate’s family. While the kids were still lumpy, she and the husband both got it. They turned pretty quick. First, came the tears. Then came the denial. Acceptance rolled into town when the first few lumps broke the skin.
She used to send me pics of all of ‘em. Ick. Kate got it the worst. She was turning the fastest.
Then the crazy-talk phone calls and emails started.
The last I heard was from the husband in an email. He said he came home from deer hunting—not for sport by then, for food—to find Kate in the bedroom, covered in the blood of the two tykes. She killed them and was gnawing on a leg when he shot her. That was the last I heard from him.
I guess he either killed himself after that or finished turning Shroomhead. I suppose I would have shot myself.
October 29
I just read through my last entry. Depressing stuff.
You may be wondering why I’m not all emotional about it. I used to be. In Dusty time, it all happened a long time ago. I’ve had a lot of dark, quiet nights to think about it, you know, what I coulda done, what I couldn’t have. Second guessing. I think maybe in those unrelenting, tedious days sitting in Bunker Stink all by myself it occurred to me that life moves on, like that angry snail I talked about earlier. Sometimes you can see where it’s going and can try to do something about it. Sometimes, maybe most times, you can’t. The worst part is that in hindsight, everything looks so clear.
The more you think about the past, the clearer it becomes. So clear in fact that you forget that looking forward from back there, everything was just as black and confused by old emotions as the future is today.
For all I know, me going out later this morning to start installing my wireless neighborhood surveillance network will get me killed. When you—future man, or future bee, or whatever the fuck you are—find this diary and realize you just read the last page, you’ll say, “Hey, that dipshit should have stayed home.” And you’ll be right.
One day, I pretty much guar
antee, you will be right.
I live in a suburb of Houston. Six million people lived within thirty miles of me before they started turning Shroom and killing each other. I don’t know how many of them are out there now. I do know there is a bunch, and every single one of them would kill me and feed me to his friends if he had half a chance. I roll the dice every time I go outside.
I…
I was going to write, one day the dice will come up and say, “Dusty, you’re Shroom meat today.”
That might be any day. I don’t know if I can change that. What I can change is the odds. If I live through the expansion of my surveillance system, then I weight the dice in my favor by a little bit.
I’ll be outside a good part of the day. Talk to you later unless my number comes up.
October 31
It’s Halloween. BFD.
Definition of BFD—Big Fucking Deal. It’s sarcasm. It really means nobody gives a shit.
Good day. I’m back in Bunker Stink. Speaking of Bunker Stink, good God, it’s like the body odor has permeated the fiberglass, and now it outgases between cleanings. No matter how much I scrub, the smell of the bleach water only lasts until the ventilation cycles. Then it’s back to the same, farts and armpits.
I started working up on my roof two days ago. The work didn’t go fast because of the nature of trying to do anything when Shroomheads are under foot. For every little bit of work I did, I had to stop and look around to make sure I didn’t catch the attention of the locals. A little more work. A lot more looking. A little more work. You get the picture.
I know you’re probably thinking I was up on my roof replacing shingles or something, but I wasn’t. I set up a prototype—yeah, I sound like I’m some kind of mad scientist now with my prototypes and shit. Fuck it, I feel pretty smart about it too. I set up a solar panel, a small one cannibalized from a guy’s house a few blocks over. I monkeyed a lot with the wiring. I won’t bore you with the details, but getting the voltage and amperage right was a trick. I built a little box, well, not little exactly, but it’s a box I can mount on the roof. In one end, I plug a solar panel. Out of the other end, I plug a Wi-Fi signal amplifier, a hub. I also power a couple of cameras—thanks Best Buy for the products.
Now, in daylight, I can sit in Bunker Stink and on my growing wall of surveillance monitors, I can see anything that would be visible from the top of my chimney. So, pretty much all the neighboring yards, and up and down the street. Not bad. It’s a far cry from being blind in the bunker, which is exactly the situation I was in last year after my camera cable broke. Now, I’ve got the yard, the house, and the immediate vicinity under surveillance.
It took most of the day to get that first one hooked up and to get the bugs worked out of the system.
Yesterday I went to the house across the street and set up a similar system but with just one camera which showed the front of my house from over there. Handy shit to have, I think. More importantly, the amplifier sends my Wi-Fi signal as far as the house on the next block over where I installed another solar panel, black box, camera, and Wi-Fi hub. I need an acronym or a name for this thing. I’m not going to hand write all that crap out every time I refer to it.
Fuck it. I’m not that imaginative. It’s a POD.
I got PODs installed on my roof and two other roofs. I have great visibility on my street now and the next block over, leapfrogging toward my goal.
POD—Perfect Observation Device.
Maybe I’m not as much of a dumbass as I thought.
November 1
Today I got a POD installed on the roof of the house behind me. That gave me a view of the street over there. My view of the world around me has grown from Bunker Stink, to the weed farm (my yard) to three full blocks—at least on the streets—around me. During the day, nobody can come close without me seeing them.
That brings up two drawbacks. I don’t have a way yet to see at night. Half the cameras I’ve picked up can see just fine in the dark in those hues of green and black. I need to rig up a battery, maybe several car batteries on each system so they can charge through the day and run all night. I’ll need to work that out but I’m thinking I can add a battery onto each POD later after I figure out how to make it all work. Right now, I’m kind of anxious to get my first Shroom trap set up.
You know, it’s what I’m excited about right now and it’s been so long since I was excited about anything. I’d like to surf the good feeling for as long as it lasts.
I also need to figure out some kind of motion activation alarm for my video system. Right now, I can see what’s happening outside when I’m looking at the monitors, which might really be all I ever need. I mean, I can just look before I go out, and I should be good. The only downside of that is with the possibility of some Shroomheads sneaking around when I’m not looking and taking a nap behind a bush or in somebody’s garage or something. Then I could go hiking down the street, searching for poontang and porn, feeling safe in my ‘hood that looks quiet through the monitors, only to get jumped by a Shroomhead that I never saw hide there.
It would be easy to get smug and sloppy.
I’ll have to upgrade as I go along.
Epiphany: I’m going to be stuck in Bunker Stink a good long time.
I need to start thinking long-term. I’ll eventually need to plant crops, build a fence—a real fence—and expand the bunker—eek, shovel and pick work—you know, in case I do find some other people.
It would be nice to find other people, not just a hot chick to indulge my carnal needs, but you know, anybody I could have a conversation with. God that would be nice.
I spend a lot of time wondering these days if there’s anyone else out there who is still normal.
I wonder if any of those vaccines worked.
Oh yeah, I didn’t tell you about those yet. It’s late, I’m tired. But you know, in a way, writing all this crap is kinda like talking to somebody. I have to laugh when I think about the irony of it. I do all the talking and you don’t respond, which of course you can’t, because you’re not going to be born or hatched until a million years after I’m dead and you speak in bee-buzz talk and I of course speak like a human.
The irony I’m talking about is that my ex, well, she said she talked to me all the time and I never said much in return, like she was talking to a wall—that’s a cliché back in these days—or writing in her diary. Yeah, I know, ironic, isn’t it?
Anyway, she went off to fuck golf course condo boy who could talk about his feelings until he started making monkey sounds. I got stinky Shroomheads for neighbors. I guess you and I are stuck with each other for now.
November 2
How about a history lesson today?
Somewhere along the road on TFF Inc.’s disinformation campaign, enough people got sick with the red lumps that the half dozen cases that showed up by Easter turned into thousands by Independence Day. Everybody was talking about it at work, on Facebook, Twitter, everywhere. By Labor Day, the numbers were in the tens of thousands and it seemed like everyone you talked to had a story about how they saw, or their friend saw, or their cousin’s friend saw a Shroomhead rip some guy’s throat out with his teeth. Pictures and videos were all over the internet. People were demanding action from the government.
Do you remember how I said the government was run by dipshits?
Yeah, I’m sure you do. I probably said it a hundred times by now.
Anyways, nothing really happened for a good long while, except endless hearings on Capitol Hill with TFF Inc. selling their bullshit, with congressmen wrapping fresh tortillas around the turds and asking for seconds.
It took about a year, from one Easter to the next for the Shroomhead count to hit a million just in the US. I think that was the tipping point. Something about that particular number seems really big to folks. It kind of made everyone start demanding that the bullshit end and that something be done about the problem. People were scared.
It wasn’t long after that when the govern
ment released Vaccine Number One.
Oh my God, the fallout from that one was the closest this country has ever come to armed class-warfare.
The government and all the propaganda channels—we call ‘em news—made a big deal about the vaccine coming to save all of our asses from the Shroom scourge. Of course, the fine print that nobody ever really caught or discounted out of hand was that the vaccines were going to be coming from the government in quarterly batches and that everybody would need to get on the program to get each vaccine when it came out. Kind of a subscription to the Pharma companies, with all the heavy lifting done by the government on the taxpayer dime. Unfortunately, when all you can think about from sun up to sun down is how much you’re afraid of turning Shroom, you’re not in the best negotiating position. The Pharma company says, “Hey, I wanna fuck you over,” and all you can really say is, “Here, fuck my sister too.”
Pharma companies—I know I haven’t given you a definition in a while. I’m hoping you’ll pick a lot up from context. Basically, if you sorted through your dipshits and found the greediest bunch of hateful, sneaky, grannyfuckers, and put them in charge of a company (full of people otherwise trying to do good) that always says “We’re helping you. We’re making life better. We’re providing necessities.” while at the same time financially ruining half the country, well, that’s a Pharma company.
Anyways, I got my vaccine like everybody else did. You see, you had to sign up on a government website to get your vial mailed to you. Supposedly, to make sure every American got his and nothing got black-marketed off to Mexico to make some corrupt bureaucrats rich.
Well, it turns out the vials got mailed. Everyone took his or her vial to the doctor or pharmacist (not to be confused with Pharma—different things in kinda the same business). The pharmacist lady at the local Walgreens took the vial, put it into some kind of air gun thingy, and shot the vaccine into your ass.
