4.5 - Dusty's Diary

by Bobby Adair

  I didn’t mind that part so much. I think my local Walgreens pharmacist is (was) hot. Because I’m a guy, you know, always thinking with the wrong parts, I figured once she saw my big hairy ass with my pants down, she’d somehow decide that she needed a man like me to protect her when times got tough in the days ahead. I even told her I used to be a wrestler so, you know, I can pretty much kick anybody’s ass.

  At least pretend you’re surprised when I tell you that she just said, “Next,” and injected the person in line after me. Then she put on the sweetest, big smile and sparkled her blue doe eyes at me and asked if I’d be kind enough to see my personal physician or another Walgreens pharmacist when my next vial in the vaccine series arrived in the mail.

  Damn.

  Enough about my problems with the cuties.

  It turns out that some enterprising med students decided to analyze the vials the government sent them. Surprise! It was simple saline—basically salt and water. You can inject it into your veins and it does absolutely nothing.

  The med students started making noise on the internet. Everybody accused them of being anti-vaxxers. They got death threats. They had to go into hiding. Then the strangest thing happened. Other people confirmed that their vials were the same thing, saline placebos.

  Placebos! Are you fucking kidding me?

  It was the fastest-growing political shit storm I ever saw. Next thing you know, the President, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority leader are all standing shoulder to shoulder on TV with the head of the CDC. They’re telling folks that they just got this vaccine invented—or whatever word they use for that sort of shit—and they didn’t have enough time to manufacture enough for everybody. They randomized the mailouts, mixing in the good samples with the placebos, thinking it would at least make folks feel better about things if they thought they were taking something.

  Okay, now that didn’t sit well with folks, but they accepted it and grumbled. I did. Sometimes there’s just not enough pie for everybody to get a slice. Life’s not fair.

  It was when people started stealing vials allocated to important folks—rich people, politicians, movie stars and the like—and they tested those and found out that almost all of those vials contained something more—a lot more—than saline.

  Holy shit!

  Every blue collar Joe in the country got pissed. The way we all saw it was, we just got fucked by our government. People were in the streets rioting before you could say Jiminy Cricket has a cricket dick.

  If you’ve never seen a riot, or worse, been in the middle of one, you don’t know what kind of animal frenzy comes over people. It’s manic, peer-pressure, crowd-condoned hate in a way that can only be felt from the inside, in the mob. No words can ever come close. People—good people—do things in a riot when the animal takes over that they’d never, ever do alone, on their own. It’s like you stop being yourself so much and become an appendage controlled by a swarm mind. It’s the weirdest, scariest fucking thing.

  I thought they—I mean we, I was in it with my shotgun and my Molotov cocktails—were going to burn the whole country down, starting with the big mansions and the Mercedes and Lexuses. What is the plural of “Lexus,” anyway?.

  I don’t know how things work in future Bee World, but back in these days, beehives have a queen who gets laid and makes babies all day. She’s got a bunch of drones who have sex with her and don’t do much else. All the rest of the bees do all the work, making honey, building the combs, generally working themselves to death. Just for your reference, if bees drove cars, the queen would have a Mercedes and the drones would each have a Lexus.

  It took a couple of weeks before everyone burned off enough rage for things to settle down. I don’t remember how many people got killed. Lots of rich folks got it. Lots of cops took one for the team. Nobody counted the regular folks.

  After that, the Army was almost always on the streets. The whole country looked like Fallujah.

  On the second round of vaccines—delayed by a full month—they mailed them on the same date, everybody got the same thing, real vaccine, or at least something that tested to be something other than saline. Nobody trusted the government by then. Sixty percent—or so it was later reported, and I’ll get to that in a bit—of the vaccine vials were either thrown out by the people who received them or they were sold to Canadians and Mexicans on eBay.

  November 3

  Didn’t I just talk about getting smug and sloppy?

  I mean, didn’t I?

  Needless to say—wait, that’s an expression. Of course, I need to say. No, I guess I choose to say—you don’t know what time of day it is right now, in Dusty time. You’re reading this like a million years from now. By the way, how long does petrified paper last? Maybe I should go round up some stone tablets and learn how to carve.

  Eh, thoughts for another day.

  Anyways, I’m back in Bunker Stink early today.

  I got up this morning, all gung ho and full of piss, ready to go out and set my first trap. I got enough PODs set up so I can get a signal to Mazzy and Rollo’s house, across from the elementary school. I was thinking I’d bring along a POD when I went out, set it up on Rollo’s roof, go down inside the house, set my traps, and wait for the fun to begin.

  Well, it didn’t quite work out that way.

  I ate my breakfast this morning and took care of my necessary functions. You know. During all of this, well the breakfast part anyway, I was watching my monitors. I’ve got six of them mounted on the wall. Several have screens split into four video windows. The developers wrote the software that way to control the camera PODs. I’ve got room to expand my video feeds with the monitors I already have set up, but I’ll need to go back to Best Buy eventually and get more.

  I did my morning workout. I built up a good sweat. I feel like now that I’m out of jail, so to speak, I’ve got some motivation to push myself. I feel good. I feel strong. The point is, I went through all my morning routines, all the while watching the monitors, and I didn’t see anything moving on. I saw some squirrels and some birds. I even saw that dog again. No cats though. Either they all got ate by the Shroomheads or they went back to their roots, hunting at night and sleeping in the day when they can avoid most of the Shroomheads.

  Shroomheads are weird about day and night. It’s like they work in shifts. Most of ‘em, like regular folks, prefer being out in the daytime. They do all their business when the sun is up and then they go home—like the bunch over at the elementary school—and sleep and hump and whatever they do at night. Others, they tend to form their little gangs or herds or whatever you call a bunch of Shroomheads—I’ll need to make up a word for it—they sleep during the day and go out to do their business at night. You know, second shift. The two groups don’t mix. The night crawlers in our neighborhood have a little Shroomhead commune over at the rec center. It’s not a whole bunch of ‘em, but enough to cause me trouble if I’m not careful.

  I headed out carrying my POD, thinking the neighborhood was pretty clear, my ripe rat stink-bait and my Shroomhead traps in my backpack. I had my AR-15 over my shoulder and my Desert Eagle in hand. Nothing happened at first, which is exactly what I expected (hoped for). I crossed the street and snuck between the houses, the downed trees, and crumbling plastic playscapes. A lot of fences in the neighborhood are knocked over because of the hurricane a few years back, the same one that shredded the roof over my kitchen. Did I tell you about the hurricane? I can’t remember. I’ll have to go back and look over what I wrote. That hurricane worried me, I ain’t ashamed to tell you.

  I crossed a bunch of yards, and I got to where I was going, almost. I crossed through a backyard with a downed tree full of weeds growing up through it, and I had to work my way through to get onto Rollo’s property. Once there, before I even saw it through the overgrown bushes, I smelled Mazzy and Rollo’s pool, the one that naked Mazzy stood above on that diving board that day, naked, glowing like a porn angel. Now the pool is nasty. It smells
worse than my ripe rats. When I got out of the bushes and onto the deck by the pool, I saw why.

  For starters, the pool was full to the brim. It rains a lot in Houston so we’re never short on water—and those damn mosquitoes. God, I hate mosquitoes. I was standing there on the pool deck, almost fascinated by the stench of the swimming pool turned stink pond. A layer of some kind of algae like a not-quite fuzzy carpet in the most brilliant spring green color you can imagine covered the pool. In a way, it was pretty. If I’d had a camera with me, I would have taken a shot for my collection—hobby of mine, pictures of the end of the world. At least I used to take a lot of pics before I closed the hatch on Bunker Stink two years back. If you find the pictures along with my stuff, you’ll see what all these things I’m talking about look like. If you’re a bee with your compound eyes and it all looks like shit on a computer monitor, don’t blame me. Blame God, evolution, or whatever you believe in your future insect world.

  Anyways, I didn’t have my camera. You know, too many other items on the morning to-do list.

  The weird thing I noticed was that the pool’s ultra-green surface wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t level. A big lump of something was floating in the middle. It took me a minute to understand what I was seeing because it wasn’t quite the shape it was supposed to be, but mostly it was. A Shroomhead—I assume—body was floating there, covered in a layer of green fuzz, fouling the pool, and stinking up the whole yard. Disgusting. Fascinating, but still disgusting.

  I wondered as I looked at it if it was Mazzy, and the thought bummed me out.

  I stared at the lump for a while, thinking about Mazzy and thinking about loneliness. I thought about all those naked people around the pool that day. Then a thought occurred to me. With Mazzy and Rollo being swingers and all, they probably had pretty liberal ideas about lots of things sexual. I figured, they probably had a collection of pornographic movies on DVD somewhere around their house and I was willing to bet they even had some homemade movies stored on DVD or a hard drive. When I say homemade, I’m not talking about Rollo’s blubbery ass; I’m talking about smokin’ hot Mazzy doing things that would make her mommy blush.

  I set my POD down by the back door and went inside the house. No door in the neighborhood is locked. Shroomheads hate doors. They break ‘em down whenever they see ‘em. I guess they figure every locked door has delicious people behind it. I don’t know. The house, like most houses nowadays, was a mess. The Shroomheads fuck up everything. It’s like the parts of their brain that control abstract spatial relationships—damn that sounded smart—don’t work quite right anymore. The dimwits look inside of cabinets for edible people, in dresser drawers and under mattresses. Pretty much anything with any size space inside. Result, everything was a mess. I know I mentioned this before, they don’t know how to go outside to take a crap. They just drop their little presents wherever they happen to be standing at the time.

  Which, looking back, was a big clue that just didn’t quite click. I was preoccupied as my turgid Johnson was dragging me through the house past a few fresh piles of Shroom turds, looking for Mazzy porn. The bedroom was the logical place to store porn. Why not? The bed was in there. They probably had a big TV in there too. It makes sense, right?

  Well, I bounced on down the hallway with an image of Mazzy on my mind, swung open the bedroom door, and nearly shit my pants. Three Shroomheads were sleeping all curled up together on the bed. When that door hit the wall, the Shroomheads all jumped up and screamed.

  And here’s a thing about Shroomheads that I didn’t tell you yet. They are jumpy motherfuckers. Like cats in a way. They startle easy and they always overreact when it happens.

  The three Shroomheads on the bed were up and jumping through the windows before they finished their first scream. I suppose they might have said the same thing about me except I spun around—probably screaming—and ran back up the hallway, out the back door, and through the jumble of branches on that downed tree before I even spent a moment of thought on whether I really did shit my pants or not.

  The other thing about Shroomheads, they know what people taste like. We are delicious to them. They’re generally too skittish to try and chase you down and munch you all on their own. When they’ve got a few buddies with them, they’re downright brave. The only reason those three in the bedroom ran away was because I startled them. It wasn’t going to take them long to realize that I was a Happy Meal on foot. Then they’d figure out there were plenty of them to chase me down and have me for lunch. I wanted to be back in Bunker Stink before that happened.

  Definition time. Happy Meal: Imagine your larvae are squawking about dinner, and you don’t feel like spending fifteen minutes whipping up a pan full of Hamburger Helper to feed ‘em. You’ve had a long day in the honeycomb factory, and all you want is for them to shut up so you can veg in front of the TV for a while and watch a basketball game. So, you spend fifteen minutes getting the brats all wrangled up and seat-belted into the SUV, then drive another twenty-five minutes round trip to the local Mickey D’s to spend too much money on little boxes of crappy Crisco-flavored sandwiches and French fries that’ll turn ‘em all diabetic before they get out of high school, and somehow you think this is all a time-saving, easier way to feed them than cooking at home. But the reason you think all this stupid shit is because you’ve been brainwashed your whole life by a creepy redheaded clown, telling you every thirty seconds on TV that you need to pay him bargain basement prices for his grease-mush food and that if you do, you’ll get a big red perma-smile on your face, just like his.

  Everybody wants to smile.

  November 4

  I’m back in the hole with nothing much to do today. You know, the Mazzy porn plan kinda didn’t go as I’d hoped. I can’t tell you how much that sucks. At least I got back to Bunker Stink with all of my bodily pieces intact.

  I guess I’ll tell you guys how that whole vaccine thing worked out. It’s mostly a boring story, I think. You know, after the rioting not much vaccine related excitement followed. At least not until just after vaccine number four hit the streets. By then, it seemed like you could always buy a dose on eBay. The prices were high. Most of it was probably fake, but given what the government and the Pharma companies were doing with the real thing, it probably didn’t matter.

  One thing the CDC said they were trying to do was to inoculate everybody right before a bloom. A bloom, you ask. What the hell is that?

  I guess I’ll tell you that too.

  First off, let me tell you about this hike me and my brother-in-law took up in the mountains one time. We were probably up around ten or eleven thousand feet, getting close to the tree line, when we came across some weird mushrooms. Hey, it’s not that kind of story, we didn’t eat them. My point is these big mushrooms were maybe the size of an upturned salad bowl. They were bright orange-red with funky weird-shaped white splotches. They looked like something you’d find on one of those seventies black light posters. I didn’t know mushrooms like that really existed. I thought all the real ones were that icky light brown color like artificial limb rubber.

  Getting back to Shroomheads now, the ones who had the red lumps the longest started to grow the lumps on their head and face. Some of ‘em, maybe most of ‘em, eventually grew these big crests across their head. The weird thing is, the crests look kinda like somebody took one of those big mountain mushrooms, sliced it in half, and glued it across their skull. One side of the crest even has those little louver looking things, kind of a like a dirty air filter on your car. A couple of times a year those louvers shed spores. The spores infect other people. That’s how the Shroomheads were spreading the word, so to speak. That’s what the CDC was hoping to vaccinate everyone against.

  Somewhere along the lines, with everybody pissed about vaccinations and arguing about what they were or weren’t doing, the numbers of infected got lost. I remember reading on the interwebs or seeing on the news or hearing rumors all in the same day of numbers ranging from three to thirty millio
n infected Americans, somewhere between 1 out of a hundred and one out of ten. Anything in that range could have been right. Like I said before, turning from person to Shroomhead, from basic Shroomhead to cannibal was a slow progression. The number of Shroomhead cannibals was maybe a third of the total of people with red lumps. The problem of what to do with the Shroomhead cannibals they rounded up was turning into a big question that had folks riled up as hell. Half the country wanted to just shoot ‘em. The other half wanted to put them in big pens out in West Texas or Kansas. Like everything else in this country, we did a little of both with a lot of stupid in between.

  Maybe I’ll talk more about all of that stupid shit later. I’m not in the mood to deal with it right now. Besides, I’ve got vaccines on my mind and that still kinda pisses me off.

  So here goes.

  After vaccine number four, I took mine just like I was supposed to, except at a different Walgreens, from a gruff bastard with halitosis shooting me in the ass. I sure do miss my sparkly-eyed honey at the Walgreens by the house.

  A group of scientists out of—you know what, I don’t remember where they were out of, and I guess it doesn’t matter—out of wherever, were doing studies on spore infection rates. The basic question: How likely was a random person to get the red lumps over a six-month period? Somewhere along the way these guys got the genius idea to compare infection rates of people who’d been taking their vaccines with those who weren’t. That’s where my pissed-off part comes in. The infection rate for people taking their vaccines was fifty percent higher than for people that didn’t.

  You can probably guess where things went after that.

  Well, maybe you can’t. I’m thinking you’re guessing riots, and you’d be right, mostly. This time around though, the rioting was limited. It was like people wanted to riot. They wanted to go out and hate on the government. They were just too tired of it all. They were tired of all the bad news, tired of trying to keep their Shroomhead teenager from eating his little sister, tired of demented people wandering into traffic and getting run down, tired of the stories of a justice system that couldn’t change fast enough to deal with the question of how a family is supposed to handle a murderous cannibal living in the back bedroom. The riots fizzled out inside of a week. The price of vaccines for sale on eBay dropped to nothing. You couldn’t give that shit away.