by Bobby Adair
God, I miss people.
December 1
It’s cold again.
The Shroomies are holed up in the elementary school.
I haven’t killed a single one since the booby traps I set in Rollo and Mazzy’s house schwacked a dozen of them in the living room. When it all went down, I was giddy with what I’d done. As the days passed, I just felt guilty about it. It started to feel less like self-defense, and more like some kind of murder.
I’m not a murderer, mind you. These are monsters, and they’d kill me given half a chance. But they were people once.
I don’t think I’ll kill them for sport anymore. However, I won’t hesitate to shred them with my AR-15 if they come at me. Just so we’re clear on that point.
Trying to work myself out of my mood, I’ve been keeping myself busy.
That thing I talked about with tracking all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood? Well, I appropriated an inkjet printer from down at the Best Buy. New, still in the box. It was stacked up with some others on a high shelf. Ignored by the Shroomies when they came in to ransack and destroy, ignored by looters who knew the closest it could come to being handy in the apocalypse was to print pretty pictures of the food they didn’t have in their pantries.
The printer works just like new. I even managed to find all the ink cartridges I’m ever likely to need. Paper was hard to come by, but I found a case of plastic-wrapped bundles, pristine as a prom queen’s panties. Well, at the beginning of the night, anyway.
I’ve taken to capturing images of all the Shroomies in the neighborhood. I have a few face shots, and a pic or two of their full bodies. Each Shroomy profile takes up a full printed sheet with a name printed across the top, hanging on the empty wall above my computer monitors.
It’s weird now that I’ve named them, comforting in a way I can’t explain. They’re my enemies, yet at the moment, they’re my family, too.
Rollo’s in charge. At least I think he is. When I watch them going out in search for something to eat, they all follow him. Another one, I named Hairy Potter. He seems to live a charmed life. In general, Shroomheads have it hard, always getting bumped and scraped, often going days without a bite to eat. Not so for Hairy Potter, he always seems to find something to satisfy his hunger. He never gets hurt. And I’ll be damned if he’s not nearly as hairy as a monkey.
On the opposite end of the scale, there’s a bumbler who never does the smartest thing. When most of the Shroomheads walk around a patch of sand burrs in the grass, he’ll walk through and get them stuck to his feet. When they stroll into a house and duck below a broken limb hanging across their way, the rest all duck. He always bumps his head. I named him Mo.
Another one who seems to want to hump everything he sees, and not just other Shroomheads—I saw him going after a half-rotten pillow last Friday—I named him Curly.
There’s a Ginger, Gilligan, and Mary Ann, a Mulder and Scully, and some others.
The names make them easier to keep track of.
The other thing I started doing again was spending time on my shortwave radio. I fixed the antenna so now it’s standing up by the house, thirty feet tall. I get on there a time or two every day and surf through the static, listening for anything that sounds like a voice, or music, or anything. I talk to it, too. I started out telling my anonymous audience I was in Katy, Texas and I’d be happy to meet up with them anywhere. I got no responses, and I got tired of saying that over and over again. Now mostly, I just talk about the weather and the state of the neighborhood—the news, I guess.
Talking on the radio isn’t a cure for loneliness and the pointlessness of staying alive, but it’s something.
Last of all, I figured out where that ball-sack raccoon lives, and I’ve decided I’m going to eat it.
Microwaved varmint meat doesn’t appeal to me, so I need to figure out how to cook the thing before I trouble myself to catch it.
December 2
Project Raccoon!
My ex used to do this thing with a chicken.
Stop. I know what you’re thinking.
I’m talking about food here.
It was pretty easy, really. She rubbed the skin with Cajun seasoning, used a can opener to cut the top off a beer can, and then sat the can on the smoker outside in the backyard. The chicken, lucky it’s dead already, it gets the pleasure of sitting upright on the grill with the open beer can shoved up its ass. Beer-in-the-butt chicken I used to call it. Spicy and moist. Damn, that was good stuff.
I’m thinking my ball-sack buddy would work out just fine cooked that way. Real meat. Fresh-killed, fresh-cooked.
That’s the goal.
And now, I’m thinking it’s December. Spring is around the corner. Maybe I need a vegetable garden. Maybe I could grow me a crop of corn, too.
The idea of fresh food suddenly seems like the most appealing thing in the world. Whatever Punchy Bryan did to make his food potable through the ages may or may not have worked. I won’t truly have the answer on that one for a few more centuries. What I do know for a fact is that Punchy Bryan has the magic talent of sucking every ounce of flavor out of any calorie that passed through is pickled turd factory.
A host of obstacles stands between me and my new number-one goal. I’ve never grown anything in my life except a green lawn, so I’ll need to write up a do-list and draw out a plan. And I need to calculate if the payoff will be worth the effort.
Oh, who am I kidding? If I plan to stay around long-term, I’ll eventually need to figure out how to live off the land. Better to make all my inevitable mistakes and suffer my crop failures now, while I still have several years of supplies hoarded in Bunker Stink.
I’ll root around in the Home Depot next time I’m down that way, and see if I can find some how-to books on planting a garden. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some seed packets, too.
Of course, fresh veggies implies a secondary need—canning. I’ll need to learn how to preserve them. I probably have a few books down in the bunker that cover the topic pretty well. I never read any of those. I always figured if I reached that point in my apocalyptic survival situation, I’d have plenty of time to sit around and do it then.
Well, here I am.
First things first, though. I need to smoke that ball sack, which means I need to find a way to pipe the smoke a long way from where me and my roasting raccoon will be.
December 3
Well, after a long career of moving cold air around through ducts inside hot attics, I figure moving some hot smoke to somewhere down the block should be a snap.
An exaggeration, but easily done.
I’ve worked with the materials. I can scrounge some squirrel-cage fans and blower motors out of some of my neighbors’ AC systems. I can dig up some more solar panels. The tricky part will be commandeering enough ducting from the HVAC wholesale supply three miles west of here and then finding a way to haul it all back here unseen by curious Shroomies.
I gave half a thought to also pulling the ductwork out of my neighbor’s AC systems, but I nixed that idea. All old AC systems are coated inside with years of dust, and that doesn’t even take into consideration how many of my furry little rat buddies might have made a home in there, dragging their balls around and pissing scent trails, because like it or not, that’s what they do. And the roaches—don’t get me started. Result? Blowing hot smoke through one of those galvanized steel tubes might be a fast way to start a fire. That would, of course, flare up at the worst possible moment in the worst possible place.
Murphy’s law, motherfuckers. Learn it. Live it. Love it!
But then again, maybe yanking out sections of ducting and cleaning them one at a time would be easier than hauling several truckloads a few miles across infested suburbia.
I don’t know if that’s the best solution, but it’s the part of the solution that lets me see the full path from where I am now to where I want to be. I know how to make each step along the way work. I only need to be careful and quiet.
Mr. Raccoon Wrinkleface, your days are numbered.
December 7
Pearl Harbor Day.
It makes me wonder if you buzzy-buzz bee people in the future will still have war. What if you’re all a bunch of gecko-men instead of insects? Will geckos with one color of spots wake up one morning and decide to bomb the shit out of a bunch of geckos with a different color of spots?
Is state-sanctioned murder just a human thing?
Is it still glorious for young men to dream about war? Is it horrible for old men to lose sleep over nightmares of their dead buddies haunting them and asking them the endless why?
Maybe not.
Maybe one of the species that eventually evolves to rule the earth will get it right.
I remember watching a thing on TV about a bunch of baboons waging a primitive war against another baboon tribe over access to a grove of mango trees or some such shit. Maybe every species that figures out how to band together for safety eventually figures out how to hate the monkeys next door because they have more food in their bellies.
I don’t know.
Just the kind of shit you think about when you have too much time, with plenty of work to keep your hands busy, but not enough complexity to keep your brain occupied.
My grandpa died at Pearl Harbor, killed by a Japanese bomb.
I never knew him. My grandma eventually married a man who treated me like I was his own grandkid, but sometimes I’d see her when she thought she was alone, crying for my real grandpa. That’s what December 7th always meant to me.
That attack dragged our country into a war—one we probably would have ended up in anyway—that killed so many people we had to guess the count. Forty to sixty million. My God. So many dead fathers and brothers, and families unlucky enough to be trampled into the mud by humanity’s heartless steel machines of war.
Maybe the end of our world was inevitable. Maybe human destiny was always racing to a day when there’d be just one soul left.
Maybe, that really is me.
I wonder what happened to M.
December 10
I’m sorry. I’m not writing a lot lately. I’m working on my smoker. I’m staying busy. But my mood is getting the best of me these days.
I don’t know what to do about it.
I want to smile at the sunshine. And some mornings when I come out, and the frost has frozen the grass into a crunchy brown carpet, and the air is brittle and pure, and the sky is blue and pink and red and orange, and the earth feels like the most wonderful place in the universe, I feel good.
But the world is empty, too.
Maybe I’m wasting my time hiding safely in my hole and spending my days building a raccoon smoker. Maybe I need to stock up on supplies and go on the road and find somebody. Maybe life is still out there somewhere.
Surely I can’t be the last person on this whole goddamn planet.
December 15
It’ll be Christmas in ten days. I hope I’m done with the smoker before that. It would be nice to celebrate the holiday with a big roasted raccoon feast.
Right now, I’m eating mac-n-cheese, microwaved orange mush, really. I don’t know where the picture on the front came from because it’s not at all representative of what’s inside. It kinda tastes like cheesy lumps, but not really. It almost smells like dirty feet, but only when the steam coming out of the pouch hits your nose just right.
In glowing quotes, in blue block letters right there on the front, Punchy Bryan tells us this is one of his favorite entrées in his line of fine products, his own lovely mother’s family recipe.
I think his mother secretly hated him.
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll have plain boiled rice. It’s not a taste treat, but at least I know what’s in it.
All in all, it’s been a good day.
I went out this morning to gather more aluminum tape to finish the seals on my smoke duct. It’s assembled, and runs from the smoker in my backyard, up to the roof of my neighbor’s house, and then down the row, all the way to the end of the block, following the curve of the road. Another dozen houses down, I had the genius idea to run it to the community pool building. The last galvanized tube extends off the roof of the manager’s office and out over the half-full pool, where it’ll empty the smoke into the air. It’ll probably be cool by then. That’s a long distance for the smoke to run, and I had to install six fans along the path to make sure to keep it flowing.
After I get it all sealed up, I’m going to give it a test. I even extended my POD network with a camera near the pool so I could sit in the safety of my bunker and watch how many Shroomheads were drawn in by the tantalizing smells floating through the air. If too many show up, I’ll have to abort the project.
I hope I don’t have to.
One of the benefits that came to mind as I was stealing Glaspy’s two-thousand-dollar smoker from two doors down and across the street—so much better than the rusty thing I owned—was the original purpose for smokers. Assuming I can find more than just the one raccoon a few blocks over, maybe some rabbits and even some birds, I could hunt them and smoke their meats, drying them out into jerky. If I could make that work, then I might never have to worry about running out of food, and I might one day dump all of Punchy Bryan’s foil-pouched-apocalypse puke in a hole and bury it.
But I’m off the point I was trying to make.
When I went out to find the aluminum tape, I came across a craft store. It was one of those places the eventual ex used to go when she got the wild hair to explore her creativity to make up for the general emptiness in her life. Our lives. She tried beading for a while. She painted abstract water colors one spring but stopped when she had to explain to me they were figurative—an actual, real world thing—and not abstract. Oops. She ran through a half-dozen other hobbies. Each new creative outlet cost me what seemed like a week’s pay. But what do you do? You gotta try to keep the wife happy.
Anyways, I was in there and came across a bin of corrugated plastic board, basically frosty, translucent, quarter-inch sheets. It’s the kind of stuff realtors, panhandlers, and get-rich-quick scammers used to make their signs out of. Spotting them, and knowing there had to be hundreds of bottles of paint and whatnot laying in the rubbage on the floor, an inspiration sproinged into turgid happiness in my brain.
I’ll let you know all about it tomorrow night if it works out.
One thing I can tell you now, is it’s got me fired up a little, but I’m trying to manage my expectations because I don’t want to ride that roller coaster of hope up and then crash again.
Crashing is hard.
One other weird thing I should mention.
I’ve been doing my half-best to keep up with my Shroomhead identification effort. I think there are eighteen of them left living in the elementary school. They’re the day-shift bunch. On the night-shift band, I’m not sure of the count. I’m guessing ten or so. I still don’t have my nighttime cameras working because I haven’t installed the batteries. Too many projects. Not enough time. And what I used to think was a tolerant sharing of the neighborhood between the two groups isn’t. From what I’ve seen on some video clips taken near dusk a time or two, the groups get belligerent toward each other when one group doesn’t stick to its sunny or dark part of the day. I don’t know why. I’m not entirely sure it’s true. I might be misinterpreting their behavior. But that’s my best guess so far.
Now that weird thing I was going to tell you about.
I don’t record much of this video, and what I do record, I rewrite over most days to save hard drive space. Well, I noticed while I was having an early dinner that four of the day-shift Shroomheads from the school finished their day by sitting under the bare tree in Rollo and Mazzy’s front yard and staring at the house. I say staring, because that’s really all I can tell they were doing. But the longer they sat there, the more it looked like they were grieving. Rollo was among the four. I think he was crying.
December 16
I think Punchy’s
mamma’s mac-n-cheese recipe gave me the shits. Every time I turned around today, I had to squat and squirt. My ass feels like it’s on fire and my guts have been cramping all day. I don’t know if I’ll eat anything for a day or two. Maybe just clear liquids and vitamins.
Maybe for three days.
If it’s some kind of stomach bug, that’ll help to clear it out.
On the bright side, I cut up my corrugated plastic, collected a bunch of old realtor sign frames rusting in the grass in front of the houses around the neighborhood, and I painted me a bunch of signs.
Why not advertise?
One said,
Hello, M.
I’d like to talk, if you want to.
Another said,
Hi, I’m Dusty.
Glad to meet you.
I got bored after a few, started channeling my inner fifteen-year-old, and wrote shit like,
Neener, neener,
I have a big wiener.
I figured it didn’t matter what I wrote, so long as I wrote something.
I put the signs in yards all through the neighborhood. I don’t know if M is still around. Maybe she’s long gone. But if she or any other normal person comes across the signs, they’ll see that they are new. They’ll know they aren’t alone. And maybe, they’ll hang around long enough to contact me. And maybe have a beer.
Fingers crossed.
December 19
I climbed up on my roof this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. My foot broke through a rotten spot, so I need to be careful when I go there from now on.
