by Bobby Adair
The weirdest thing happened while I was in there, looking out. Mostly, the school looked abandoned, though I know there are at least twenty Shroomheads still living inside. One of them came out to stretch his legs and sniff the air, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like Mazzy’s husband, Rollo, my old HOA pain-in-the-ass buddy and drinking pal.
I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Yeah, right.”
But I’m serious.
I’m not saying I know it was him. Not for sure.
The Cordyceps gets in your bones and grows into red lumps that break through the skin in big, boney warts. On the ones who’ve had the fungus a long time, they sprout bumps on their elbows and knees, breaking out all up the skin on their backs where the fungus has rooted into their spinal bones. They especially get growths on their heads where the skin is so thin over the skull.
That makes most of the Shroomheads into ugly monsters, unrecognizable for the people they used to be.
So, if it was Rollo across the street, I wouldn’t have been able to make a positive ID.
The thing about Rollo, though, is he was unusual looking when he was a normal human. He had that oatmeal-colored skin you see on some folks from South Texas. Not brown, but pale. Not anything really, I guess. It’s just one of those things that used to set him apart from other people. Rollo was a big guy. Not as tall as me, but he had these big pigeon-toed feet, and he sported a round, balloon-shaped gut that gave the impression of an overinflated circus clown. He had the biggest head I’ve seen, a huge watermelon of a thing, covered in thick, wavy black hair. And he was always smiling, with endless rows of white teeth behind puffy pink lips that seemed a little too cartoonish to be on the face of a real live person.
Like I said, he was unique.
As a matter of fact, Mazzy and Rollo’s relationship never made any sense to me in the attractiveness compatibility department. She looked like a MILFy bikini model, and he looked like a toad.
It makes me wonder if maybe when they met and she was young, a long time before Rollo packed on the pounds sitting behind a desk all day adding up the tax cheaters’ deductions, if maybe he was handsome. Maybe when they met, Mazzy was one of those skinny, awkward kind of girls who hadn’t blossomed into her beauty yet. Maybe they were a good match then, but as she only got prettier through the years, Rollo sagged out of his handsomeness, leaving the two mismatched in everything except their desire to explore their pervy swinger appetites.
Anyways, that Shroomhead across the street had the Rollo shape, mostly. He wasn’t as portly as my friend used to be—nobody is anymore. I guess. He had the right skin color and the dangling Johnson, the same one I saw that time at the pool party. The Cordyceps lumps on his head grew out through thick sprouts of hair, but his face was too distorted to make out anything recognizable except for that puffy-lipped smile.
He stood there in front of the school, ignoring the cold, pissing on the flagpole and grinning like a West Texas oilman admiring a new derrick.
I decided it was Rollo.
He went back inside the school after he got his fill of the weather.
Makes me think.
November 19
I microwaved something that was supposed to be eggs, and made me a reconstituted room-temperature smoothie to go along with ‘em—Punchy Bryan’s favorite fruit berry mix packed with antioxidants, more than twice as many essential vitamins as I’d get out of a slice of Wonder Bread, and plenty of complex carbs to keep me peppy and sharp for dodging terrorists’ bullets in the post-apoc world.
I guess with all that goodness packed in, there wasn’t any room left for flavor.
That was breakfast.
I’m watching my monitors while I eat, and I’m thinking. As I was writing last night and babbling on about my old buddy Rollo, I never got around to telling you how my Mazzy hunt went.
Sorry ‘bout that. You’ve been reading my diaries for a while. You know how I am.
One thing I need to tell you before I get into the story of my quest to find Mazzy is, I’m no Indian tracker. I mean, I’ve been hunting plenty of times, but hunting is nothing like what you’d see in the movies. At least not the way me and my buddies did it. You see, we shared a deer lease.
Ugh.
I just realized, I need to do some explaining.
A deer lease. Hmm. Basically, some guy who owns a bunch of land he’s not doing anything with rents the right to hunt on it for deer to other guys, guys like me who don’t own anything but a gun and have a noisy eventual ex at home they want a good excuse to get away from in the autumn. So, we take turns going out to the deer lease all year long. We have a feeder out there, and we keep it filled with corn kernels from the local Buc-ee’s mega convenience store—some things really are bigger in Texas. The feeder is nothing but a 50-gallon barrel stood up on a metal framework six feet tall. It’s got a timer built in and once or twice a day a little mechanism spins around and spreads the kernels across the ground. The deer love the corn and get in the habit of coming by for breakfast and dinner.
When deer season comes ‘round, we set up a deer blind, basically a little hiding place where we can sit quietly and watch the feeder. When the deer show up for breakfast, we shoot ‘em.
Hunting.
As far as Indians go, maybe I’ll tell you about those people later.
Back to Mazzy.
Going out and finding her wasn’t anything like deer hunting. I had to hike through the ‘hood, look for clues in the landscape, and search.
I snuck my way up and down the street, thinking whoever it was I saw up in that attic would have had to work their way through from hiding spot to hiding spot as they made their escape. I did the same thing, moving from the cover of overgrown bushes to a spot behind a rusting car, and then behind a tree trunk or whatever was there next. Walking in plain sight with hungry Shroomheads around was never a good idea.
While I did my sneaking, I looked for shoeprints in the mud behind the bushes. Shroomies aren’t fans of functional footwear, so any shoeprint I found would have to have been left there by the mysterious M.
They call me Sherlock!
I looked for things freshly knocked over, though there’s nothing conclusive about that kind of clue. Anything can knock something over, but it tells me something passed by. I looked for things that might have been dropped by a survivalist in a hurry. An empty water bottle. A bullet casing. A dead battery. Anything manufactured by real live human people in one of the factories that are now decaying under two years of dust and mud.
It went slower than I hoped, mostly because nothing was obvious.
I spent a lot of time in the thorny shrubs and weeds. I checked backyards. I looked in houses, searching for footprints in the dust on the floors. It all added up to pretty much nothing, and I was getting discouraged by the time I finished, or thought I was.
I felt like I needed a clue on that one block between Rollo’s house and the elementary, because without that, the chances of me finding her sank quickly to nothing. To start with, leaving Rollo’s house, she could have gone right or left. Two choices. At the end of the block, one was a T-intersection, the other was a regular cross street, meaning if I didn’t find a clue there, then I had to go and search five different blocks. After that, the problem grew at each intersection by two or three more choices. So my one-block problem turned into a five-block problem and turned into a twelve-block problem.
You can see where a man might get discouraged.
As it turned out, it was an accident I finally found something, and not anywhere near where I expected it to be.
I was making my way down the ninth street in my search grid, but still just two blocks over from the school, looking up and down for signs of Shroomheads before crossing over to the other side, when I noticed an odd pattern on the sidewalk. It looked like a partial shoe tread pattern marked in mud and smeared by the drizzle in the air.
Crouching beside a broken utility pole, I scanned down the length of the sidewalk
to a place where it looked like a heavy truck had driven off the road and cracked the concrete under its weight. Large pieces of cement were mashed into the sandy dirt below, leaving muddy puddles on the surface. A single footprint, a right shoe, marked the sidewalk at regular intervals from there all the way to my hiding place, each track a bit lighter than the one before.
I’m not good enough at the tracking business to know whether M was running or walking when she left those marks, but my first impression was that the footprints weren’t urgent. She wasn’t sneaking or sprinting. She’d just been strolling down the sidewalk.
That struck me as odd.
I pulled my boots out of the clingy vines bushed up around the base of the pole and dropped down on my hands and knees to look closely at what was left of the nearest prints. They were definitely geometric. They had to have come from a shoe.
All doubt poofed away like a shy genie. It had to be M.
I made a guess about the general direction she’d been heading, and I searched the streets and bushes and houses in that direction. It was slow, frustrating work, until nearly six blocks from the school, I saw something that knocked my socks off.
November 19, 2 nd entry
Jesus. Sorry about that.
I had a Shroomhead taking an interest in the entrance to Bunker Stink. He was nosing around outside like he knew I was down here. Being a reasonably intelligent human being with a strong interest in not ending up on a Shroomy’s dinner plate, I had to re-prioritize my activities.
I checked everything in the bunker for noise and light leaks. At least all I could from the inside. I’ll have to go out tomorrow and again in the evening to check. Any noise, lights, or smells, picked up from outside, could get me in trouble.
Anyway, the Shroomhead eventually wandered away. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know if he lives in the neighborhood. He might be a rogue. He might have friends somewhere. I only know that his sudden arrival bothers me.
Thinking what to do about it, I need to give some thought to maybe using my cameras to snap a pic of all the Shroomheads in the ‘hood. I’m guessing the crests and warts on their heads, as alien as they are to me, probably make them easy to identify as individuals.
I’m starting to have second thoughts about killing all the locals, especially now that I think one of them is Rollo. The problem puts the whole Shroom extermination plan on dubious moral ground for me.
For the moment, inspiration tells me that taking some time to catalogue the locals will help me understand which ones are which. It could help me learn about their behavior, and it’ll help me notice when new ones come around. Letting my local Shroomhead clan live might make me safer in the long run.
Maybe.
Okay, now that all that’s behind me, let’s pick up where we were when I so rudely closed the diary and refocused on the live muncher on my front porch.
The thing I mentioned before, the thing that knocked my socks off, had nothing to do with the footprints I’d found on the sidewalk. It was something strange, pale and nearly hairless, except for some wiry sprigs here and there across its wrinkly curves. In fact, it looked like a ball sack, a twenty-pound pinkish scrotum sitting up on meaty haunches as it worked its creepy little hands around a piece of shiny silver plastic wrapper, sniffing with its pointy snout and biting with its sharp little teeth.
After ball sack, I thought hairless rat. But it was way too big to be a rat. It was the size of a beagle.
Some kind of geriatric raccoon?
That was my best guess. And as fascinating and freaky as it was to see it busily interested in that wrapper, it was that piece of shiny foil that pinned my attention.
I shot it with a beam from my flashlight just to be sure the dark wasn’t playing tricks with my eyes.
It wasn’t.
The four-legged ball sack was digging into the crevices of that wrapper to get at the last flavorful crumbs of goodness. That meant the wrapper had to have been recently opened. It was full of fresh goodies, or the nosy critter wouldn’t have been interested. Any wrapper two years old would have long since been licked clean by a rat or scoured by the local ants. Any silver lining would have aged itself dull and probably flaked away under the harsh Texas sun.
I moved in for a closer inspection of the evidence.
When I neared, it became clear enough that the creature had once been a fluffy-cutesy raccoon. But everybody knows raccoons have a mean streak. So, with what I deemed sufficient caution, I found a long stick and poked at it until it grew irritated enough to run off.
It was my turn to look closely at the wrapper and survey the scene of the crime.
The wrapper was coated in plenty of varmint spit, but it was as fresh and crispy as any I’d ever torn off a protein bar back in the day when such semi-flavorful delicacies could be acquired at the corner quickie-mart for a dollar or two more than they were worth.
In the gray light, I stood in the dead brown grass and looked at the porch of the abandoned house. A beat-up patio chair, crusty with oxidizing plastic, stood upright just to the right of the door. The dust on it had been rubbed away to leave a butt-shaped print in the seat and elbow drags marked the arms. A clean outline of the sideways chair left an imprint on the porch, the place where it had lain for years before being stood back up to a useful position.
M had put it there and sat in it while she ate her snack. The discarded wrapper had to be hers.
And kiddies, that’s what hard work and persistence will get you when you grow up. It’s called success. And it tastes like candy-coated happiness wrapped around a full-tongue kiss from a hot chick in a too-tight bikini on a perfect summer day with the wind blowing in off the surf and the gulls floating on the breeze squawking their taunts at you, “Grab some, buddy! Squeeze those naughty parts!”
Sorry, my mind wanders.
But never forget. Gulls are bastards. They’re greedy, and they never have anything nice to say.
With success fantasies burning sugar trails across my taste buds, I stayed out searching until much later than I should have. While I dug through bushes and looked for more signs of M, another thought tickled my trigger for something to obsess over.
The raccoon.
Besides the skinny black dog I’d seen a few times, no other animal larger than a rat has trotted through the neighborhood.
Had the Shroomheads chased them all down and eaten them?
Maybe.
But that raccoon had made it. So far. And the more I thought about him squatting there with only the most meager sprigs of hair across his back, the more my memory makes his pimply pink skin look like one of those fat turkeys stacked in the refrigerator section at the grocery store before the holidays.
The question that tingled my taste buds after that was, what do raccoons taste like? And if I caught it, how would I cook it without creating a cloud of yummy kitchen smells wafting through my neighborhood and drawing in every Shroomy in a ten-block radius?
And if I figured that problem out, then what other varmints might be around that would taste better than Punchy Bryan’s foil-packed Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals? Not really ready to eat, by the way. You almost always had to add microwave-heated water to bring out their textured baby-pooh goodness.
What about that dog?
Could I bring myself to eat a canine?
No.
Just no.
Tasty Korean stir-fry sauce notwithstanding, I’d owned plenty of pups through the years. Often, they were better friends to me than the eventual ex or the guys at work. No. Dogs were off the menu. They’d taste too much like barbecued guilt.
I could suffer through a lot of baby-shit flavored stroganoff before I’d consider eating a dog.
But cats?
I’ll bet cats taste like chicken.
November 30
Eleven days and no entries.
Sorry about that.
I got into one of my moods. I was so excited about M. I just knew she w
as Mazzy. My hopes were up. But even if she wasn’t, you know, if she was just somebody I could talk to that would have meant so much, a real live living human being who could tell me to fuck off and leave her alone or maybe invite me over for dinner to yak about the weather or the last book she read.
Two years in Bunker Stink listening to the world crumble outside was easy in a way. I knew what I was getting into when I sealed the hatch. I made my choice. In a lot of ways, in pretending that I was saving myself for a future of green grass and sunny rainbows, I was giving up my last hope. Torquing down the screws to keep the hatch sealed tight, I was telling the world it was going to die. So was I, but I was going to outlast it.
I guess I never gave any real thought to the weight of the loneliness that would come.
Not while I was in the bunker, not when I stopped scanning the white noise on my shortwave set, not even after I first made my grand re-emergence.
It wasn’t until I saw M climbing out of that attic over at Casa de Rollo that I even considered I might really talk to another person besides you, future archeologist of some evolved bee species or some up-jumped gecko people.
Now, having let myself get all surprised by allowing hope to splash me cold in the face, M is all I think about. And every day when I go out there and search for her, every day when I don’t find her, it puts me in a blacker and blacker mood and makes me hate the world. Not just the way it is now—the place it used to be.
We had so much. We literally could have turned our beautiful blue and green planet into heaven where no baby ever had to go to bed hungry, and every dream could be chased by anyone willing to run.
We didn’t do that.
We never built heaven.
We got so hung up on mine versus yours, us against them, and all-for-me so go fuck yourself, that we couldn’t help but flush it all down the crapper.
