Dusty's Diary Box Set: Apocalypse Series (Books 1-3)

by Bobby Adair

  Amelia nodded.

  “Is that what you do?” I push on. “You move around town because you’re looking for people.” Duh, I told myself. Of course. She’s a teenager. She needs friends. “You’re not looking for people, are you?”

  Amelia didn’t respond.

  “Not normal people.” I may not be a genius, but I get there. “You’re looking for…” I search for a better way to say what I want to say but can’t come up with different words than the ones stuck at the forefront of my mind, “for people like you. Infected, but normal.”

  Amelia takes a moment before admitting to it. “Am I the only one like me?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Seven billion people on the planet?” It’s math so easy I can run the estimate. “There have to be more like you, right? Besides, it doesn’t matter, does it? There aren’t that many of us immune people left. I don’t think anyone will care that you’re a little spore-infected know-it-all once they see you’re just as normal as they are.”

  Amelia didn’t even smile at my feeble joke. “That’s not what happens.”

  “You mean that’s not what happened to you?”

  “It happened to me once.”

  The next guess was easy. “You think because Aunt Millie chased you off, everybody else will.”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  I sat up and leaned against a wall. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Amelia sniffled, and in the light, I saw rogue tears on a young girl’s face trying too hard to push her hurt into a dark place where she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore.

  “I had three daughters,” I said. “You knew that, right? They’re all through college so you wouldn’t have gone to school with any of them.”

  Amelia nodded. “Kate babysat me when I was little.”

  The memory makes me smile, like every resurfaced memory does, carrying an emotional trap with it. “I’d forgotten that. Yeah. Kate, my oldest.” And then a tear sneaked up on me and a few more followed quickly behind. And then I was the blubbering idiot sniffling snot off my sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

  “She died?” Amelia asked after giving me a moment to put my burly, hard-man mask back on.

  I nodded, because I knew if I said another word, my disguise would fall away under a cracking voice and another dangerous wave of tears.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head and managed to say, “I was the one trying to comfort you.”

  “You’ve been alone for two years. Maybe you need to tell someone.”

  And so I did. I blabbered about my three girls, how each of them had died, how Kate and her two kids had bitten it while trying to ride out the collapse in the woods of East Texas. And I cried, a lot at the beginning, a little at the end, when the tears were running dry. I felt like a big pussy about it, but I felt better, too. Like maybe, one day, the death of my children, all my friends, everybody I ever knew, even the eventual ex and her twerk-happy boyfriend, might not hurt anymore.

  After Amelia gave me enough time to come to the end of the stories piled inside my head that had been waiting for a friendly ear, and after I stared at the rusty wall long enough, she said, “Aunt Millie married a millionaire. She was a young beauty queen. He was older. She was a trophy wife before that was a thing.”

  “Trophy wives have been a thing for a long time,” I informed her.

  Amelia shrugged. “Aunt Millie got married a long time before I was born. That’s just what my mom and dad said about it.”

  “A millionaire?” I asked. “Hard to go wrong with that, unless he was a douchebag. He wasn’t, was he?”

  “Mostly not,” said Amelia. “They had a big house up in Plinko Ranch North.”

  I shivered.

  “They had a yacht they kept docked at a place they owned on a canal in Miami or somewhere down in Florida. They used to invite us to spend time there for the holidays.” Amelia laughed as one of her memories came to mind.

  “What?” I asked.

  She waved a hand as she shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just a stupid story.”

  “Tell me.”

  Amelia collected her memories for a moment, started, stopped, and then started again. “I don’t remember what holiday it was. Christmas, Thanksgiving, I don’t know. There aren’t any seasons in Miami. It’s always the same down there. Warm with a chance of rain in the afternoon. I was in the kitchen because I’m a girl. That’s the way it was. Girls do the cooking. Boys in the living room watching football or drinking beer in the backyard letting the little kids run wild.” Amelia laughed again like the funniest thing was on her mind. “Aunt Millie was making dinner for everyone, but she didn’t want to. There had to be—I don’t know—fifteen of us there. She didn’t want to spend the whole day in the kitchen. Their kitchen had this big island in the middle, and me, and my mom and a couple of the cousins were sitting around it, watching Aunt Millie as she took some cans out of the pantry and started opening them up.” Amelia laughed again.

  “Cans of what?” I asked.

  “Tamales,” she answered. “Hormel canned tamales.” She laughed again. “They had this toxic burnt-orange sauce and lumps of congealed grease. They looked so disgusting when she dumped them into a baking dish.”

  “Kind of like the SPAM of Mexican food,” I joked.

  Amelia laughed at that, too. “She made up a few dishes and heated them in the oven. When we all sat down at their big dinner table, my uncle took one bite and loved it. He went on and on about what a great cook she was and how he wanted to make sure she saved the recipe and that she should share it with the family. Aunt Millie never told him they came out of a can. None of the rest of us said anything about it, either. We just looked at each other and tried not to laugh.”

  “Were they good?” I asked.

  Amelia shrugged. “What you’d expect, but Uncle Amon sure loved those tamales.” She laughed again, and that slowly went away as she nodded at another memory. “He hadn’t turned yet when I went to stay with them.”

  “Both Amon and Millie were still fine, then?”

  “Yeah. Uncle Amon kept talking about arranging a flight to Miami. He wanted to take us out on the yacht and stay there until everything blew over.” Amelia shivered.

  “What?”

  “His yacht was gorgeous. I don’t know how long it was, but it slept ten people, easy. He had a captain and a lady—the captain’s wife, I think—who cooked and made the beds and stuff.” Amelia’s voice turned soft then, like she was telling a family secret. “He had pictures up behind the bar in the main salon—if that’s what you call it—three pictures, big poster-sized prints of Aunt Millie from her Playboy days.”

  “Wait.” That was unexpected. “He had nude pictures of your aunt hanging on the wall in the yacht?”

  Amelia nodded. “He was proud. He wanted everyone who came on the boat to know he married a Playboy centerfold.”

  “And a cheerleader.”

  “He had her cheerleader pictures on the wall of his office at the house in the Woodlands.”

  “That seems a little weird.”

  Amelia agreed. “Mostly Uncle Amon was good to Aunt Millie, but I saw the way he looked at mom when he thought nobody was watching.”

  That makes me feel guilty. “Like me?”

  “No,” Amelia shook her head. “A lot worse than you. It worried me enough that I stopped going to visit them if Mom and Dad would let me stay home. He looked at me, too, in the same way he looked at mom.”

  I shudder. “He’s gone now?”

  “Dead,” said Amelia. “They didn’t come out and admit it, but I think he was already infected by the time they took me in. No planes were flying. Crossing state lines was impossible. Everything was quarantined by then.”

  “That’s why you stayed in Texas?” I asked.

  Amelia nodded. “I think Uncle Amon’s yacht captain stole his boat and sailed off to wherever. As Uncle Amo
n got worse, he complained about it sometimes when he was ranting for no reason at all. He complained about a lot of things.”

  “How long ago did he die?”

  “Nearly two years ago,” said Amelia. “Not long after I moved in. Just after we left Plinko North.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Some of Uncle Amon’s friends bought or stole some barges anchored in the Houston ship channel, or somewhere along there. Uncle Amon figured if he couldn’t get to his yacht then he’d ride out the pandemic on an island made of barges.”

  “Just the three of you?” I asked.

  Amelia answered with a shake of her head. “There were nearly twenty of us at the beginning. I think four or five were already infected. Once that came to light, they were voted off the island.”

  “Evicted?”

  “For those who’d go, the men rowed them to shore. For those who wouldn’t, they were thrown overboard.”

  Trying to imagine how easy it might be to board a barge from the water, I asked, “Couldn’t they climb up the anchor chain or something?”

  Amelia shook her head. “Before we got there, some of the men had mounted big disks on the anchor chains. There was no way for someone to climb up the chain and get past the disk.”

  “Like the ones they use for rats on cruise ships?” I asked.

  “That’s what they called them, rat traps or something. Bigger, though. And the sides of the barges were straight up and down. No way to climb up from the water.”

  “And boats?” I asked. “Did you have trouble with people trying to come aboard? Thieves, or whatever?”

  “Some,” said Amelia. “Individuals. Some groups. Never many at once. I think five was the most that ever tried to board. Usually, a few gunshots or a warning to stay away was all that was needed.”

  “And the adults, the men who bought these barges didn’t accept any, I don’t know, refugees?”

  “No. They didn’t see people that way. Other people were disease-carriers and moochers. The ones who paid for the barges stocked them with food, water, and ammunition for their families and friends. For their survival. Not for anyone else.”

  My thoughts ran pretty quickly to judgment as I imagined how hard it would be to turn away a pair of frightened parents with small children or any stranger looking for a hand, but I realized, I did pretty much the same thing when I hid Bunker Stink in my backyard and then locked down the hatch when things turned bad. I’d shut out the entire world. What did that choice make me? “So when you turned, you were evicted, too?”

  “Not right away. It got so people would try to hide it when they got the lumps, but nobody could for long. Their behavior always gave them away when their minds started to go.”

  “But not yours? You stayed rational.”

  “I think I got smarter. I can’t explain it, but I understand things now I couldn’t before.”

  “You’re getting older,” I told her. “You were probably already a genius, you just didn’t know it.”

  “You think I’m a genius?”

  I shrugged. “You say things sometimes that make me think you’re pretty smart. Too bad this spore came along, I’ll bet you’d have grown up to be a rich doctor or lawyer or something.”

  Amelia smiled weakly.

  “How’d they find you out?”

  “It was just me and Aunt Millie at the end. She’d taken to wearing her gas mask by then. Never taking it off, not even to eat.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “She used to mash her food and suck it through a straw she tucked under the edge.”

  I shuddered, and hoped Aunt Millie at least took off the mask to brush her teeth. On the back of the three ‘o clubs, she had a beautiful smile. “I wonder if she’s immune like me? Or do you think the mask saved her from the spore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she ask you to leave? Or did she make you go?”

  “She caught me showering.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “We had a shower set up in a stall on the deck of one of the barges. We put water in a black plastic barrel above it to warm it up in the sun. Aunt Millie just walked in one day and saw my lumps. She freaked out.”

  “Freaked out?”

  “Literally. She had a rifle, and she tried to shoot me.”

  “Inside the shower? She didn’t let you get your things together and leave in peace?”

  “She had the safety on when she pulled the trigger the first time. It confused her for a second. That was my break. I ran and dove over the side. She shot at me in the murky water. She’s not a very good shot. At least not with the gas mask on. I guess it messed up her aim. Or she knocked it cockeyed when she raised the rifle. I don’t know. I got away.”

  “With nothing.”

  “No food. No weapon. No clothes. Not a thing. She didn’t ask me if I was okay. Nothing. She saw the lumps, and that was it.”

  January 11th

  Amelia woke me in the dark.

  “What time is it?” I asked, seeing the billows of my breath condensing in the air between us.

  “Nearly eight o’clock.”

  I pulled myself up to sitting, feeling stiff all over, feeling my knees ache. “Did you just wake up?”

  Amelia shook her head.

  “You should have gotten me up when you woke up.”

  She smiled. “You needed the sleep.”

  I stretched and yawned. “Thanks. Do you think we can make it through downtown? Should we try to go wide, maybe take the long way around?”

  “Let’s see what kind of pace we can keep.”

  I rolled up to my knees and started checking my gear. “I can be ready to go in five minutes. You?”

  “I’m ready now. Don’t rush. A few minutes won’t make a difference.”

  January 11th, second entry

  Even with the sun down, it didn’t feel as frigid outside as it did when we started the journey. Houston never stays cold for long.

  With most of a moon overhead to light the way, and a cold fog obscuring the world, I was able to see a hundred feet. We made our way to highway 10 and made good progress hiking its paved lanes. Given the conditions, it was the safest path. There was no good reason for any Shroomhead to be on the highway. What remained of any corpse trapped in a car had long been picked clean. Every abandoned automobile and overturned truck had been ransacked a thousand times over by people making their escape from the great city on foot.

  Nothing remained but metal car bodies and frames, waiting for the paint to flake away so they could rust back into the soil.

  For a regular Joe born in the twentieth century, a guy who learned to drive on American’s modern highway system, walking on I-10 was painfully slow. It seemed to run in an endless straight line. When it did turn, the curve was gradual, fading into the fog as to make me wonder sometimes if we’d been trapped by a mean-ass God and set to walk through the night in endless circles.

  Not really. But it did cross my mind.

  On the rosy side of things, walking at a steady pace on the smooth concrete was easier on my knees than all the squatting and sneaking that made the first leg of the journey suck so much. And the highway designation signs painted in the traffic lanes, ten feet long and eight wide, served to remind us at regular intervals we were on the right path, Eastbound I-10.

  Keeping our tactical silence as we trekked for hours and miles, I completely missed downtown. The tall buildings mostly south of the highway were obscured by the fog and the dark. It wasn’t until Amelia stopped for a drink that she pointed and said, “The old fairgrounds should be over there.”

  “What?” I didn’t believe it. “We already passed downtown?”

  “The worst of it’s behind us.”

  I checked my watch. “Still plenty of dark left.”

  She insisted. “I have a place in one of the exhibition buildings down there. It’s a good place to stop.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Jan
uary 12th

  I woke up to gray afternoon light shining in through a row of skylights. This one of Amelia’s safe houses had been an office for accountants or clerks or people doing esoteric, oddly-named jobs, the kind that make no sense to anyone outside the industry. The office room was one of six lined up on the second floor of a small administrative building inside an expansive show barn that spanned enough dirt-floored acres for old Sam Walton to build a few of his discount marts inside.

  The office wasn’t large, so it didn’t take much effort to notice Amelia was gone. That didn’t worry me. Not at that moment. I figured if she’d decided to abandon my slow ass I couldn’t blame her. The more likely guess was that she was out searching for a meal, or just rummaging through the acres and acres of craft booths still standing in rows down on the main floor.

  I gathered up my stuff and stepped out of the office, double-checking that the latch clicked home to keep the door closed. Locking wasn’t necessary, but a closed door kept the larger varmints out.

  A metal-grate catwalk made up the hallway behind the six upstairs offices and led to a steel stairway down to the main event floor. In the other direction, a doorway led to a staircase outside. Halfway down, the catwalk had a T-intersection leading to a wall and a ladder that ran up through a roof hatch.

  We had three escape routes. That was something I figured I could learn from Amelia—how to select a place to crash for the night when out in the wild, definitely a place with multiple exits.

  I walked down the catwalk hall and came to a lounge area, really just a section of the second floor that had never been walled in. A microwave sat in a cupboard built against the next office wall. A table stood empty with no chairs beside it. There were two couches along the railing where the missing wall opened up a view of the dirt show floor under the endless metal roof.

  Wading through shredded foam on the floor, torn by mice and rats from the cushions on the couches, I took up a spot leaning on the rail for a view over the show barn interior.