by Bobby Adair
“Do you move around a lot?”
Amelia checked the cot’s mattress for nesting rodents and biting insects. “As much as I need to.”
January 10th, seventh entry
I lay along a wall beneath the front-facing gun slits. Pieces of glass duct-taped in place over the openings let the light in but kept the wind out. I adjusted my backpack, trying to find a soft spot for my head. “You’re sure we’re safe here?”
“They don’t come to this place,” said Amelia, rolling to her side on the cot to look at me. “Almost never.”
“Somebody cleared out the bodies.” How long the battle raged between humans and monsters, maybe normal people against other normals, or bandits, or however bad people labeled themselves, I could only guess at.
“They’ll do almost anything when they’re hungry,” said Amelia. “Now there’s no food. They avoid it. I think a lot of them were killed here. In their way, they probably think it’s bad mojo.”
I wasn’t comfortable on the floor. I missed my thin mattress back in Bunker Stink.
Misinterpreting my squirming, Amelia said, “We have three exits. The door we came in through, another leading to the roof over the strip mall, and one down into the interior offices. Even if they come for us, they seldom coordinate in groups big enough or smart enough to cover all the exits. We’re safe here.”
“I saw one of those big hordes last fall after I first came out.”
“You’re gay?”
“I didn’t come out of the closet,” I told her before seeing her smile and understanding she’d just made a joke. “When I first came out of the bunker.”
“How many,” she asked.
“Thousands. Moving through.”
“The rogue herds are pretty big, but you don’t see them like you used to. Food is getting too scarce to support groups that big. Mostly they’ve settled into territorial clans like the ones that live in the elementary school across from my parents’ house.”
“So it’s that way everywhere?”
“Mostly.” Amelia’s face told a different story.
“What aren’t you saying?”
“The downtown area is different. I haven’t been able to make sense of the Shroom social structure. Thousands and thousands live there. They aren’t divided into territories. I can’t figure out how they sustain themselves. I can’t imagine they’re still scavenging food from grocery stores. Those have been empty for years.”
“And we have to cross through that?”
“We’ll skirt the area as much as we can,” she told me, “but the downtown horde ranges out into the suburbs when they get the urge to do it. So, you never know when you’re going to come across them. That’s one of the reasons we’re going to try and cross in the dark, to avoid contact.” Amelia took one of her slow diagnostic looks at me again. “You should try and sleep.”
“I am trying.”
“We have a long night ahead of us. We’ll go slower, but when we stop in the morning, we want to be as far from downtown as possible.”
I rolled onto my side and closed my eyes, coaxing the fatigue of the morning’s efforts to turn into slumber. Every gust of wind against the bunker’s creaky steel brought to mind visions of hungry monsters, scratching to get inside. Each passing thought turned to counting the howls of hungry Shroomheads chasing us through the suburbs. Light shining through the gun slits was too bright. I saw its glow through my closed eyelids.
A question came to mind, so I asked it. “How many times have you been through downtown since the collapse?”
“When was the collapse?” asked Amelia.
“You know.”
“Was it when the first case was reported? When the TV stopped broadcasting? When the radios turned to white noise? When the water stopped running? When the police disappeared?”
“You’re being mean,” I told her. “Let’s say, the last two years.”
“A couple times a year.”
“To check on your aunt?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
Amelia didn’t answer, so I rolled over again and looked at her. “Is it the same reason you have safe houses on every corner?”
“You exaggerate.”
“You evade.”
Amelia sat up, fluffed her thin pillow, and leaned against the wall, obviously wanting to avoid answering.
“What is it you don’t want to tell me?”
“I’m looking,” she blurted.
“For?”
The first hint of vulnerability showed in her eyes, and she turned away from me.
Crap.
I raised three girls through high school. I’d seen the look before. I’d stepped on too many mines not to know when I’d trodden into the land of tender feelings and secret anxieties. Mostly with my girls it had to do with a boy or some social thing with the other girls at school. On academics, they kept level heads. In that, they were each more pragmatic than me. Dad mode came out of habit. “Do you want to talk about it?”
In the sideways light, I saw tears glassed over Amelia’s usually hard eyes. She asked, “Do you ever think about what’s out there?”
“Besides a crumbling world full of monsters?” It was an obvious question with an obvious answer. Amelia didn’t give me an answer, though. So, I told her, “I’ve spent two years alone in my bunker. I’ve been out for maybe five months now. I’ve thought about it a lot. What’s out there, I mean. Are you asking about other people?”
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 Amon 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.”
