by Bobby Adair
Green?
Maybe it was an easy mistake in translation. What do I know?
I was sorting through the packages, trying to find the biggest one, trying to guess whether the sound of an electric inflator would draw more Shroomies than an eight-foot happy snowman would frighten away. Or would it have to be thirty feet tall?
“A-tisket, a-tasket, Amelia finds a basket.”
I looked across the aisle intersection to where Amelia was smiling at me, apparently having found a prize while rooting around the remains of Grandma White’s Homemade Soups booth. That booth covered a square the size of four normal-sized vendor booths. I was familiar with Grandma White, and I despised her the way only a working man on a budget can.
Grandma White was a netherworld succubus who lured in many ‘o unsuspecting housewife with her charade of soupy-warm love for women grasping at an illusion of having her shit together by putting a home-cooked meal on the table once a week. You know, the modern-family equivalent of the unachievable Leave-it-to-Beaver dream. Multiple packets displayed in a clear plastic shopping bag was some sort of weird status symbol among the housewife shoppers.
I overheard Grandma talking once to another vendor about how she recently had a slow weekend in one of her five booths in statewide shows—it only brought in forty thousand bucks.
What the eventual ex never realized when she queued up—and yeah, there was always a line—to drop a hundred bucks on packets of soup mix that would ring in at eight bucks a pop, was that she wasn’t buying what she’d just been given a mouthful of. She’d just been scammed, and she never caught on to it.
She was a true believer, and that blinded her.
Grandma White’s big square booth was built like an ancient fortress. A tall square table ran around the perimeter like a stone wall. It was lined with three dozen crock pots, each bubbling with ladle-fulls of her own grandmother’s family recipe of heartwarming, rib-sticking, creamy, chunky, wholesome, healthy, homemade, family love. Fucking soup.
Stone soup. That’s what I called it.
Each crockpot was manned by a happy black man wearing a crisply ironed white shirt and bowtie—It sounds like BS, but I swear to God, you can’t make this shit up. I saw it with my own eyes. It was like it came from an era sixty years earlier, and that she was daring the world to say something. It made me uncomfortable, but every Scamarama Saturday, there they’d be, strapping, young black men making minimum wage at Grandma White’s Soup Plantation.
Damn, they were a friendly bunch, though, always smiling and all but shoving samples into your hands, urging you to luxuriate in aromas that smelled like your own granny’s kitchen, seducing unsuspecting housewives to let that creamy love flow over their lusty tongues.
And it worked.
The eventual ex loaded up a grocery bag full of packets of seasonings and dehydrated vegetables—with a big maybe on the veggie part. To make the soup, you simply had to plop the thirty-five cents worth of seasoning that you just paid eight bucks for into a pot with butter you bought somewhere else, chicken stock you purchased at the grocery store, chicken or ground beef you bought at your neighborhood market, a pound of cheese, cream, a gallon of milk, and fresh veggies. All things you had to add yourself.
I argued with the Double-E about that one time, asking, you know, ‘What the fuck?’ She had all those seasonings in the spice cabinet at home already. She could download a recipe off the Internet. And why was the damn packet so expensive if you had to add all those other ingredients yourself? Hell, for the final cost of a few steaming bowls, I could have taken her to the Outback Steakhouse and bought a couple of steaks instead of having fucking soup for supper.
“But, that makes it homemade,” she told me. All those ingredients she added. That’s what she meant. It’s like the argument that biscuits made with Bisquick are homemade. Horse shit.
Ugh!
Double fucking ugh!
Maybe Grandma Whitey is still around. I need to add her to my list of dipshits along with the Toe Fungus Fuckers who I hope to run into during my apocalyptic travels. I’d love to stomp her dentures on the asphalt and stick the broken pieces up her ass.
“Are you paying attention?” asked Amelia.
“What?” That’s such a useful word when you’ve been daydreaming and need to get back in the game. “What’d you say? There’s an echo in here.” I waved a hand at the metal roof twenty-five feet overhead.
Amelia looked around like I was maybe a little off-kilter. “I found a package of soup mix.”
January 13th
Amelia stashed a few handfuls of Grandma White’s soup packets in her bag. Out of spite, given my strained financial relationship with Grandma White, I passed on the offer to take my share. Amelia stashed the rest of the box in a steel-doored utility closet that appeared to be one of her remotely located pantries. There looked to be enough food inside to sustain her for a few months.
The more time I spent with her, the more it seemed she was going to do well in the twilight of humanity’s dominion. Following on that, it occurred to me that staying with Amelia wasn’t just about the company, she was a survivor, good at this shit. Together, we’d both live longer. If I couldn’t convince Aunt Millie to take her back in, a new choice was going to come up for me.
Well, maybe in my mind it was like that. I was completely discounting the fact that Amelia so far hadn’t said anything about wanting to stay with me long-term. And who knew what Aunt Millie was going to want? Amelia said Millie was alone, but maybe she’d already baited her honey trap and caught a burly neanderthal stud bred for survival in a rough-and-tumble world of apocalyptic monsters.
The night’s hike wasn’t bad. The temps had settled out on the cold side, cold enough to make hiking long miles comfortable. The fog thinned out the closer we came to dawn. We didn’t look for shelter, though. We exited the highway, which had proved an excellent route for nighttime travel, and made our way south following Old River through neighborhoods of shitty little houses that had the crap beat out of them in the last hurricane. Flooding had left debris piles as tall as me. Cars and boats lay scattered across the land when the water receded. Tank farms, possibly still brimming with petroleum in various states of refinement, stood at the waters edge. When our path took us close to the river, I spied rows of barges, some safely at anchor where they’d been stored after their last use. Others had run up on the land, carried by the storm surge and dropped when the winds grew too tired to torment.
One item we came across was a two-seat plastic kayak, yellow on the bottom, sun-bleached white on top. The plastic seemed brittle to the touch and I had my doubts when Amelia suggested we pick it up and take it with us.
“It’ll probably sink,” I told her.
“You can swim, right?”
Of course. I nodded.
“Then who cares?”
With the height difference, it turned out it was easier for me to carry the kayak myself than to share the load with her. Still, I knew we weren’t far from our destination, otherwise we’d have had to make other arrangements. Carrying that heavy hunk of plastic for a mile wasn’t something I had the stamina for. Luckily, she also found a broken canoe paddle and a warped, gray board that would serve the purpose. We didn’t have far to go.
Reaching shore near a small tank farm where Old River dumped into the Houston Ship Channel, we found a sheltered place among a grove of wind-tortured oaks and stopped. Amelia directed me to put the kayak in the water. I tied a ragged rope to a tree and let the plastic turd drift in the current.
“It’s nice out here in the winter,” she said, as the sky was finally starting to shed its dark mantle. “No mosquitoes.”
Listening to the sound of the water lap on the rocks. I agreed. “Not many Shroomheads out this way? I don’t hear any.”
Amelia pointed back toward the highway. “A group of twenty or so lives up there in a warehouse. Another small clan stays across the highway. They’re both daytime clans.”
&nbs
p; “I guess they’re not up yet.”
As the light grew in the sky, I saw the Battleship Texas anchored across the channel, a hundred year-old dreadnought that served in two world wars, ending its utility to the humans who made it by giving tourists a watered-down taste of war as it rusted its way into the silt. Standing a hair taller than the Washington Monument, the obelisk of the San Jacinto Monument stood tall in the sky at the center of a park on the far shore. In between, the ship channel was littered with boats and barges, some anchored in the deep water in the middle, others aground on the shore. More than a few had sunk in the shallows, and one was standing in the deeper water—bow down, stern up with a row of pelicans perched across its transom.
Amelia pointed across the channel. “Those two barges there. That’s where we’re going.”
“Weren’t there four?” I asked, sure she’d told me that.
Amelia showed me a barge stuck on a sandbar far from the pair she’d pointed out. “That’s one of the original four. It broke off and drifted away.” She stood up and surveyed the other floating hulks. Each was distinct in its own way, but uniform and interchangeable at the same time. How she told one from the other, I couldn’t guess. “I don’t see the fourth.”
I shrugged. No big deal, for sure.
“We’ll wait until she’s up and around,” said Amelia. “We don’t want to surprise her.”
“Makes good sense,” I agreed. No sense in showing up like a burglar.
“You can paddle out and talk your bullshit at her then.”
“I can paddle?”
Amelia pointed at the broken canoe paddle and the board. “One of those should work for you.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I guided you here. That was my deal.”
Not the way I remembered it. “You should come,” I told her. “I’m not going to abandon you.”
“Oh, it’s the hero thing, isn’t it? I’ve done fine on my own. I’ll be okay without you watching over me, Batman.”
“I don’t doubt that,” I argue. “We can make this work. You, me, and Aunt Millie, we’re the last three normal people left in the world.”
“Normal?” asked Amelia, pushing her hood back to display her warts.
“Those don’t matter. If you don’t come with me, I’m not going.” Miss Three O’ Clubs danced through my imagination, bouncing her tits and caressing her curves, reminding me how stupid my ultimatum was. She was what I’d be giving up. “We can hike back to Katy and maybe I’ll build my farm on the football field. Others will come along. There have to be more who survived. We don’t need Aunt Millie.”
“You’re an idiot.”
January 13th, second entry
Sometimes obstinance pays off.
With Amelia using the half-length canoe paddle in the bow, and me pushing the warped board through the water at the stern, we had the leaky kayak sloshing toward Aunt Millie’s barges. We knew she was up, having caught a few glimpses of movement. We didn’t intend to board. Instead, we planned to come in close enough that we could call out to her, and hopefully—fingers crossed, rabbit foot rubbed, four-leaf clover plucked—she’d invite us aboard. Past that, I had no plan.
The pelicans lined up on the boat stern watched us push clumsily through the cold, brown water, not the least bit spooked. Gulls flew overhead, coming in for a close look, and laughing as they flew off. At least that’s what their squawks sounded like to me. Snarky fuckers.
With a hundred yards to go, maybe a bit more, I saw the form of a thin person come out of one of several shacks built on the upper deck of the barge. I squinted, realizing suddenly that my eyes weren’t quite as good as they once were. As I watched, a naked, thin person in a gas mask, I assumed Aunt Millie, sauntered to the starboard side of the barge and turned around. Unfortunately, my vision at that distance being a tad blurry, coupled with my unfamiliarity with the jerry-rigged purpose of the different things onboard, left me at a loss to guess what was coming next. Too bad about that. On reaching the rail, she spun around, seated herself on a board suspended over the side of the barge, and relieved herself into the brown water ten feet below.
I was too shocked to turn away. I heard the tinkle of her piss echo, and I heard a dull plop-splash, followed by a second.
Ack!
Just like that, Aunt Millie was off the board and headed back inside her shack.
Double Ack!
Sure, it’s natural. Of course it is, but damn, it wasn’t the kind of thing I ever wanted to see. Never. Not once.
Amelia looked over her shoulder at me, a big grin on her face. “Aunt Millie.” She giggled as she turned to face forward, digging the paddle into the water to move our little boat toward the goal.
“Be careful, where you put that paddle,” I warned, because it was the only smart-assy thing I could come with up through my mortification. “I’m not going to clean it off if you get it soiled.”
January 13th, third entry
At twenty yards, Amelia suggested we stop. “Any closer, and she might hit us if she comes out shooting.”
“If she does shoot,” I suggest, “swim for it. I saw it on a show once. Bullets can’t travel that far through water.”
“I know.”
I rolled my eyes.
Amelia glanced at me, took a deep breath, and called, “Aunt Millie!”
Millie heard. She moved around noisily inside one of the shacks on the deck.
“Aunt Millie?”
Quiet followed.
“Please, Aunt Millie. I found someone. He’s normal.” Amelia hesitated and then added, “Like you.”
I expected it, but still, it startled me when a thing burst from a door and ran—and I hesitate to use that particular word, because there’s no verb I can think of that explains just how it clickity-clacked its way across the deck to brandish a shotgun over the railing. But that wasn’t even the worst of it, not by far.
It was wearing a gas mask. It had a pair of pink kiddie sunglasses with white polka dots affixed over the eyeholes. A scraggly main of gray hair stuck out impossibly far from its scalp in every direction. I think something in my head popped a fuse trying to match up voluptuous Miss Three O’ Clubs from the back of that card with the ancient spider skeleton draped in wrinkled grandma skin waving a gun at me.
My God, it has to be a thousand years old!
“I told you,” its mean, thin voice rasped over the water, “get the fuck out of here and don’t come back!”
“Aunt Millie,” Amelia pleaded. “I’m fine. I told you.”
That’s Aunt Millie? For real?
“Who’s that retarded hillbilly? You fuckin’ him? You like ‘em old, don’t you, you little sniffy cunt? I always knew you and Amon were humpin’ like rabbits in the washroom when you thought I was asleep.”
Retarded hillbilly?
“He looks mean,” Millie cackled on.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I’m…normal.”
To Amelia, I whispered, “Please tell me that isn’t Aunt Millie. It isn’t, is it?”
Amelia looked at me like maybe I did have a learning disability. “You couldn’t get that from the context?”
Millie shouted at us. “What are you whispering, you little bitch?”
That didn’t stop me from asking Amelia, “What happened to her? I thought you said she was my age.”
She looked at me, and then glanced back at Aunt Millie. “Aren’t you?”
“What?” I shouted, as my ego shriveled down to the size of a desiccated rat testicle. Millie had to be at least thirty years older than me. “How can she be your aunt?”
“I never said she was my aunt.” Amelia shrugged. Small misunderstanding. No biggie. “She was my mom’s aunt. I just always called her Aunt Millie because that’s what my mom called her.”
“If you think you’re going to play pokey-pokey with me,” shouted Millie, “you’ve got another thing coming.” She pointed the wavering barrel of the shotgun at us.
I pu
shed my board through the water, pulling the kayak back.
“You better go,” Millie shouted. “I’ll shoot you so full of holes—” That’s where she lost me. She screeched a string of word-like babbles I couldn’t decipher. The shotgun boomed across the water. A thousand water birds jumped out of their roosts and flapped into the air. Even the disinterested pelicans decided it was a good time to go.
Luckily, the shot didn’t splash the water anywhere near the kayak. Neither me nor Amelia felt the need to dunk ourselves in the frigid water. We did double our efforts to put some distance between us and Aunt Millie’s pleasure barge.
Aunt Millie shouted insults at us and fired the shotgun a few more times as we retreated. We didn’t try talking to her again.
When we neared the shore, Amelia said, “We probably shouldn’t pull out here. The infected will be coming. The shotgun will have them interested and out looking for breakfast.”
With water pooling a few inches deep in the bottom of the boat, I reluctantly agreed. “Where to, then?”
“Not to Aunt Millie’s,” Amelia laughed.
I couldn’t help but laugh, too. As much as my post-apoc princess dreams hinged on Miss Three O’ Clubs, I couldn’t help but see the stupid venture across Houston for what it was, a unicorn chase. Maybe it was time for a new plan. “Have you ever been to the Caribbean?”
Dusty will return.
CLICK HERE FOR DUSTY’S DIARY, BOOK THREE.
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