Dusty's Diary 2: One Frustrated Man's Apocalypse Story

by Bobby Adair

  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 t
he 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.

  I went up to sit with my back to my chimney and watch the sun rise. This time of year, the nights get cold, down in the forties mostly, which is pretty chilly for this part of the country. With most of the leaves off most of the trees, the branches all looked black, silhouetted against the reds and pinks in the eastern sky.

  I’m no meditating yoga-hippie eating granola twigs and shitting paisley-shaped flower turds into my organic tulip and thyme garden. So don’t get any ideas about that. I like the solid heft of a steel gun in my hand, and when the cordite pops and the lead punches a hole through a target a hundred yards away, I don’t get a woody out of it, but I do enjoy pulling the trigger.

  The peace of a quiet morning with just me and the birds, the crisp air, and the coming sun is something. There’s a magic there that got lost in the world of six-dollar coffees, hour-long commutes, and quarterly self-evaluations.

  Watching the sunrise is something I need to do more often.

  I’m starting my burn today. So, this might be the last time I spend outside for a while. I can’t say for sure. That’s just the way tests go. If the burn draws in too many Shroomheads, I’ll need to stay in my hole until they all disperse again.

  December 19, 2 nd entry

  It’s late in the morning. Partly cloudy sky. Cool temps. Light breeze. The weather is perfect for spreading a good layer of smoke over a wide area.

  I loaded up Glaspy’s smoker with a good mix of dry and green wood. I put in the green because I want it to smoke a lot. And I want it to smell.

  Now I’m sitting in front of my bank of monitors, watching the Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and paying extra attention to the monitor I have set on the camera over at my makeshift smokestack exit above the old community pool.

  Unfortunately for the entertainment value, it’s pretty anticlimactic.

  For the test, that’s a good thing. Seeing nothing happen is exactly the best outcome I could hope for.

  I see Shroomheads from another camera, the one pointing at the school. Some of them are sniffing the air. Nothing yet has them super interested. Maybe that means my test is pointless. Maybe they can tell the difference between straight-up wood smoke and succulent barbecued critter meat.

  I’m bored.

  Maybe I’ll watch a movie on DVD. Or read my book on backyard gardening.

  December 19, 3 rd entry.

  I admit it. I dozed off.

  I guess I was tired.

  But now, well, things have picked up.

  Most of the Shroomheads from the school are lingering down at the community pool. Several have climbed the fence and are standing at the edge, looking up at the smoke coming out of the duct. One is climbing up on the roof and trying to get a closer sniff. The rest are outside the fence, some looking up at the duct and smelling the air. Mostly the ones outside the fence are rooting around in the bushes and grass, foraging for edible roots and bitter acorns.

  The back fence of the pool stands adjacent to a drainage canal a hundred feet wide. We have a lot of floodwater mitigation engineering around these parts. The topography is pretty flat. That canal runs along a creek bed that cut through this area in the years before they built all the subdivisions out and it was still a farm.

  I know, I’m rambling again.

  The thing is, from my camera, I can see maybe thirty more Shroomies on the far side of the canal, standing and squatting on the levee like they’re waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what. Maybe they’re waiting for the local group to clear out so they can explore the source of the smoke. Perhaps the drainage canal marks a border between two territories. I do find it curious that the two groups seem to have no interest in getting close.

  More info for my useless collection effort. I wonder if I should record this in some formal way like a scientist would while studying mountain gorillas in Africa.

  The surprise came about an hour into watching. It was approaching noon, and way down the street, maybe four or five blocks from the community pool, I spotted M.

  I guess it was M. I can’t imagine who else it could have been.

  She was in the street, looking toward the Shroomheads who were mostly interested in the smoke from the fire burning in the smoker in my backyard. She was wearing a poncho, or just a blanket with a hole cut in it and a hood pulled up over her head.

  The thing that amazed me, like the day I saw her tracks on the sidewalk in the drizzle, she wasn’t hiding. She made no effort at all. She just stood there in the road like she didn’t have a fright in the world.

  Her bravery made me jealous.

  I would never swim with sharks while a dumbass dive master dumped chum in the water to draw them in. I would never bungee jump off a big glass building. I wouldn’t skateboard down a curvy, steep road to race to the bottom of a tall mountain, and I would never stand in the middle of the road looking like fast-food waiting to be spotted by a few dozen Shroomies just down the street.

  Some things are too far on the dangerous side of stupid to be considered.

  But there she was. M. Standing there for no other reason than—

  DOH!

  Did she want me to see her? Is that why she was taking the risk?

  My local Shroomhead clan was still in and around the community pool. The ones from the territory next door were still out. I didn’t have any way to guess how many more Shroomies might be following their noses from other areas. But this was the best chance I had for contacting M.

  I had to go out.

  No choice.

  So, Mr. Buzzy Buzz Bee archeologist, if this is my last entry, well, you’ve heard this song before. Just so you know, I’m not doing something outright stupid. I’m taking a risk for a good cause.

  Wish me luck.

  December 19, 4th entry

  Well, that was interesting.

  Like I tend to do these days—whenever I load my backpack for an excursion that might last more than a few hours, you know, anytime I venture more than a block or two from the house, because you just never know what’s going to happen, whether you’re going to have to hole up in an attic or a storeroom for a day or two while things outside chill out—I packed my diary. It’s part of my life. I try to write whenever I can. If nothing else, it keeps me busy when I find myself stuck somewhere in do-nothing mode.

  So, I brought it along. It’s not my bug-out bag, that’s a whole different deal. In this one I have food enough for a few days. Water for one, and some chlorine tablets to make more. A warm jacket. Extra batteries. You know, my basic short-term survival load. I’m not moving out of Bunker Stink, just being prepared for an uncertain world.

  I took a circuitous route, walking/sneaking a mile and a half to come up behind M, who, as the crow flies, wasn’t more than a quarter mile from my house.

  Fortunately, I didn’t come across a single Shroomy, and that did a lot to bolster my new theory of Shroomhead clan territoriality.

  Ha!

  God, I sound like one of those narrators on Animal Planet.

  When I reached the corner house and peeked out past a stand of pine trees trying to grow up in the partial shade of a dead willow, I looked to the spot in the street I’d seen from a different angle on my video camera. It was the place M was standing boldly, only the road was empty.

  I looked both ways, and all I saw were weeds growing up through the seams between the street’s concrete slabs. That, and junked cars left on the road.

  Shit.

  I was disheartened.
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  I was tired of letting hopelessness win.

  I think that’s what kills most people when the tornadoes are spinning and the turds are screaming in the wind, something logical in their heads tells them how hopeless things are, and maybe even asks, “Why suffer? Why drag it on? Why not just call it quits?”

  That’s the shit I’ve been wallowing in a lot lately. It’s a sticky trap that’s hard to pull free from. But it’s one that leads to being dead.

  I didn’t go into debt to dig a hole in my backyard, suffer the ridicule of my neighbors, and sit in Bunker Stink for two years just to give up when the carnival ride started to squeak.

  Sometimes, I think I missed my calling. If only I could condense my nuggets of inspiration into catchy aphorisms—that’s a smart-person word for witty-wisdom shit. My cousin used to use words like that. Maybe I could have been a motivational poster poet. I’ll bet that was a cushy job back when there were still enough people around with shitty jobs who needed to read that kind of crap hanging on the wall above the time clock.

  I guess that’s a long way to go about saying, when I noticed M had moved away from her spot in the street, I didn’t hang my head and go home.

  I wasn’t hot on her heels, yet I was closer than I ever expected to be again.

  So:

  Guess number 1—she probably had no idea I was there looking for her and just went about her business of doing weird shit for no apparent reason.

  Guess number 2—she probably figured where the smoke was coming from and she was following the pipes back to their source. Like me, she would have to give the Shroomheads a wide berth.

  I liked number 2.

  I headed back to my place.

  Throwing caution to the wind, I ran.