by Bobby Adair
December 19, I’ve lost count…
I was huffing and puffing when I got back to my street, and telling myself my morning exercise routine wasn’t cutting it. I needed to find a rowing machine or something to get some aerobic time in. As it was, if I ever had to run for my life with a handful of meat-eating fungus-heads chasing me, I was going to be in trouble.
Between gulps of air, as I stood behind the fat trunk of an oak tree across the street and three doors down from my place, I spotted M a little farther down, coming out from between two houses on my side of the block.
I stepped out from behind the tree, pasting the biggest, friendliest grin on my face, and I waved.
She froze.
I couldn’t make out anything of her expression as she looked at me from inside the shadow of the hood over her head.
“Hello!” I called, as loud as I dared. I stepped toward her, taking a cautious glance over my shoulder to see if anything else was coming up the street in my blind spot. When I looked back at her, she was running.
I yelled as loud as I could, “Wait!”
I jogged in her direction. “Wait! I won’t hurt you.”
She was already rounding the curve at the end of the street, running right out in the middle, not sprinting from shrub to shrub, not using burned out cars for cover.
The last I saw of her was a fast glance at me, and then she was gone, running right toward the Shroomheads loitering around the pool house a dozen houses down.
I ran for everything I was worth to catch her before it was too late.
How could she not know the Shroomies were down there? How could she not see them?
I was panting again when I rounded the corner, slipping on the dead grass as I came around, and skidding down to my hands and knees. I was back up in an instant, not giving a thought to the scrapes on my palms as I looked down the road.
M was gone.
A scream, or holler, or something I couldn’t make out echoed off the fronts of the houses, sounding like it was coming from three directions at once.
The Shroomheads who had been down by the pool house weren’t there anymore. Not all of them. Half were sprinting in my direction. One of them screamed that Shroom-shit jibber-jabber and the rest of the loiterers by the pool figured it out pretty quick. They dropped whatever twigs and roots they were trying to munch and decided I looked like a much better meal.
I don’t know where M went, but I knew where I was going, and it didn’t matter how winded I was. Safety was a hundred yards away, buried under the weeds in my backyard, and I had to get there before the first Shroomhead rounded the corner and saw in which direction I escaped.
December 19
For a man on the old side of middle age, I gotta tell you, I’m proud of how fast I hauled my bones and wrinkles up the street, crossed over the open asphalt, slipped between the houses, and bounded past a few downed fences to get to my yard.
Out on the street, by the curve in the road, the Shroomheads were loud and frustrated, trying to figure out where I’d disappeared to.
I reached my fake utility box, took a quick glance around to make sure no prying eyes saw me open it up, crawled inside, lifted the hatch to my bunker, slid down, and buttoned things up tight.
Safe.
I was dripping sweat when I retrieved an orange-flavored bottled sports drink from my small fridge and guzzled it down, wiping my face on my sleeve when I paused to breathe.
I tell you, there’s nothing like running for your life from a band of man-eating monkeys to tingle your ‘nads and pucker your sphincter. It reminds you how good it feels to be alive.
I laughed out loud, and quickly hushed myself down, and then giggled again, for being unable to control it.
Living!
After catching my breath, I dropped into my command console chair.
Command console.
Yeah, it’s getting to be something kinda special. I have nearly nine feet of desk space with eight wide, flat panel monitors to watch my world in full-color, full-motion video. I’ve got several feet of desk space down at the end dedicated to piecing together computer parts from machines I’ve salvaged from homes in the neighborhood. It’s not that I need a ton of computing power, but I do want to increase my capacity to record video in case I need to go back and review an event that occurred more than a day or so in the past.
And so you ask, how does an HVAC man who barely made it through high school come to know so much about computers that I can take them apart and put them together?
Eh, it’s no biggie. They’re like puzzles where all the important pieces in all the systems fit together in the same way. It’s actually kinda hard to screw it up. The difficulty comes in trying to mix and match hardware from different systems because on the software side they don’t always know how to talk to each other. You used to be able to go out on the internet and download anything you needed to make one doodad work with the other thingamajig. Now, with no internet, I stick with finding computers just like the one I own—they’re common, so it’s not super hard—that way, I’ve got all the software I need to make my hardware pieces play nice.
So, I was looking at the ‘hood from nine different views, and switching cameras on a few monitors to see parts that weren’t already visible. I have more cameras than I have monitors.
The Shroomheads were running up and down my block with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm. They started to search in groups of three or four, ranging through yards and across to other blocks. A trio of them found their way to my backyard, and the smoker caught their attention. Thankfully, one burned her fingers while touching my smoker and that was all it took to encourage the three to leave the confusing thing alone and wander on to more likely hiding places for their prey.
They didn’t notice the trampled down grass where I’d created trails through the yard on the way to and from my house. I hadn’t noticed them either until that moment, with three Shroomheads wandering around too close.
I’d need to do something about that. For anyone used to hunting critters in the wild, my trails through the grass were a sure sign that something big was around. The fact that they all terminated at the fake green utility box was a dead giveaway as to my hidey-hole for anyone with a decent dose of deductive capacity left in his brain.
Funny how mistakes sit invisible right in front of you sometimes, until somebody stumbles by and kicks a turd in your face.
December 19
The Shroomheads moved on, and I turned my attention to figuring out what happened to M.
I sorted my videos, searched by timestamp, and came across the one from a house down near the curve in the road that showed her briefly running around the corner.
That was good, because it told me exactly what time of day to look for her on the feeds from the camera I had mounted down by the exit point for my smoke duct. Five minutes later, I was watching M run past the community pool.
Because of the angle, I didn’t see M pass any Shroomheads going the other way, so I’m at a total loss as to how she evaded them.
The mystery of the whole thing, like you haven’t guessed it already, even with your little bee-sized brain, is why the hell didn’t the Shroomies chase M? Was it that weird scream I heard? Did it frighten them away from her? Was there something about that baggy poncho she wore that confused them so much about what she was that they didn’t see her as food? Maybe to them, she looked like an empty garbage bag blowing in the wind.
I know, it sounds kind of stupid, but I don’t have a better explanation.
All I know for absolute certain is that she seems to have figured out a way to walk/run right past them and not stir up enough of their interest for them to give chase. She’s discovered the secret to Shroom stealth. And that explains a lot about her odd behavior, the footprints I found on the sidewalk, her standing in the road just down the street from my smoke duct exit point, without the slightest worry about the carnivores a hundred yards away.
I’ve whined a b
azillion times about how much I want M’s company, and maybe a thousand times how much I’d love it if M turned out to be my promiscuous Mazzy with the luscious tits. There’s one thing I know for sure, she possesses a piece of knowledge that’ll make my life completely different, and will probably save me one day. She knows how to make herself invisible to the Shroomheads.
I need to find M more urgently than ever.
December 19
Anxiously, I eyed the hunting Shroomheads and listened to the tick of the clock on the wall—yeah, I still have an old-fashioned, battery-operated clock the size of a dinner plate that softly ticks each time its big hands pass another minute. The clock is a comfort I can’t explain.
At the moment, though, it was serving as a meter on my anxiety. With each tick, the Shroomheads spread a little farther, making it safer for me to venture out. Each minute that passed put M farther away on a trail that grew only colder.
It was time.
I tossed a big fuck-it into the air, took one last scan of my yard and the area around the nearby houses, marked the locations and the directions of the stalking Shroomheads in the ‘hood, and made for the ladder. I grabbed my bag, you know the one with my overnight supplies and shit, and in seconds, I was through the hatch, out of the fake utility box, and standing on one of the beat-down trails through my backyard weed farm.
I paused, and listened.
Just to double-confirm.
Then I moved.
Running. Quiet. Stopping at the front corner of my garage, I did a quick scan of the street, and then bolted across.
Quickly getting through the area I had under surveillance was key. The longer the time passed between my last visual of the Shroomies, the more time they’d have to move to an unexpected place.
I angled through backyards and over downed fences, using the dense backyard foliage to keep out of sight. I sprinted to a catty-corner street crossing at the school and leapt over a bent school-zone sign to avoid a stand of overgrown prickly pears.
It’s always good to stay away from those things. Their little thorns get under your skin and irritate for days.
I was looping around, and avoiding Shroomheads, and when I reached a corner on the far side of the elementary school, I was at the limit of my surveillance range. My neighborhood clan of Shroomies was all behind me. And I figured I still had several blocks to go, maybe all the way to the next major roadway, before I found the border of their range on the east. That’s when I had to be double-sure-careful and sneak hard to evade the Shroomheads I was likely to find over there.
At first, the whole thing felt like a lot more work than it was, with adrenaline pumping and speeding up my heart and my breathing, it was hard to know the difference between needing to rest, and just being wound up. After awhile, things settled out.
My ears were perked and listening for the sounds of anything nearby that might be bigger than a bird. My eyes were scanning and then focusing on every movement of every bare tree limb and overgrown bush.
I made my way northeast toward Greenhouse and Saums roads without spotting a single Shroomhead. I squatted behind a masonry wall and collected my thoughts and caught my breath. I don’t know how far M went. I was heading in the general direction she was moving when she passed out of my last camera’s field of view, and I had to decide how far I was willing to venture into territory I hadn’t entered since before the collapse.
December 19
It took a good part of the afternoon. The faint smell of burning wood was on the breeze. My smoker. I was a few miles from the house, and settling into the idea that I’d be staying the night away from home, so I started looking for places to bed down.
I was making my way up an alley behind a run-down strip mall. In the spots where the layer of gravel had given way to the muck underneath, some of the mud had dried back to hard dirt. Being a twenty-first-century, suburban man, the obvious sign I was searching for fell so comfortably into my outdated intuition that at first, it was invisible.
It wasn’t until I squatted beside a rusting dumpster to get a studied view of my surroundings that I realized the patterns dried into the mud were footprints—shoes—going in both directions.
I’d found the sign I was looking for.
M had passed through the alley, many times.
I made the secondary deduction that since the path was well-travelled, she had to be living nearby, probably her new home since I’d chased her out of Mazzy and Rollo’s attic.
More excited than I should have been, given that I was explicitly attempting to manage the height of my hopes, I headed north.
At a point where I reached the end of the strip mall behind a convenience store, where the asphalt was in pretty decent shape, I lost the trail. Not a showstopper.
I looked back down the alley. The back door of the convenience store hung on one hinge, leaning away from the frame. The footprints in the mud had passed that entrance more than once without any apparent turn to enter or exit. She wasn’t in there. My Indian tracking skills told me that much.
Peeking around the corner of the cinderblock wall, I spotted a drugstore dominating the parking lot, built up close to the intersection where it could be seen from traffic coming from all four directions. Its concrete walls stood twenty feet tall, and from all the time I’d spent on roofs servicing AC units up there, I knew the roof was probably three or four feet below the top edge of the outer wall. In other words, a great place from which to observe activity for a long way in every direction.
I’d been inside that drugstore before, back before the collapse, back when the public was going bonkers over what the TFF, Inc.—the Toe Fungus Fuckers—had done to us, back when I had to drop my drawers halfway down to get the latest installment of the government inoculation in my hairy butt cheek. This wasn’t the drugstore where the doe-eyed cutie pharmacist worked. That one was closer to my house. That’s the one she asked me not to return to.
Still, they were all laid out the same inside according to some corporate marketing planogram, with the entrance on one corner and the pharmacy counter on the opposite one, and in-between a gauntlet of impulse-buy As-Seen-on-TV bullshit along with every variation of sugar confection known to man wrapped in shiny titillating plastic and stacked at eye-level to convince people to pick them up.
I decided the drugstore would be a great place to hole up, and I bet myself a quarter M was in there.
December 19
I sprinted from car to car in the parking lot, and came to a stop against the back wall of the drugstore, just a few long paces from its back door, which was altogether gone. No sign of it anywhere.
Putting on my Indian tracker cap, I studied the concrete sidewalk that ran around the perimeter of the building and noticed most of it was bleached pale gray, though stains from years past spread out in places, dark and ominous. My imagination spun those stains into pools of blood, and I envisioned the bodies of women and men, lying on the concrete just where my feet stood, though the bones had long been dragged off by hungry Shroomheads and nighttime scavengers.
I crept close to the open doorway and noticed curving trails of dirt on the ground. No footprints visible, but like the trampled-down weeds in my backyard led to the entry to Bunker Stink, the patterns of dirt on the sun-bleached cement told me a story of feet coming and going. Optimism more than good sense told me it was M who left the trails.
I peeked inside and saw the dim shadows of a back stockroom that ran the width of the building. Down at the far end, part of the stockroom was separated from the rest by a metal fence, bolted into the walls, with a gated entrance. Probably the area where they stored the drugs or whatever expensive shit they wanted to keep out of minimum wage employees’ sticky-finger range.
Inside, on the dark concrete floor, it was impossible to make out any dirty smudge trails. Still, I made my guess and chose my direction in about two seconds. Up came my rifle to point the way.
Careful about where I placed my feet, not wanting to crun
ch any of the scattered apocalypse trash on the floor, I stayed on what seemed to me to be a narrow path through. Fat brown rat turds were scattered everywhere. The smell of their piss told me one thing for sure, they liked living in the drugstore.
“Hello?” I called, not wanting to surprise M, not wanting to be startled myself by waking a gaggle of sleeping Shroomies.
No answer came back.
“Hello?” I repeated. “If you’re in here. I just want to talk. I don’t mean you any harm.” Seriously, doesn’t every creep in every murder-thriller movie say something just like that?
Ugh.
“There aren’t many of us left,” I called. “Normal people, I mean.”
Still no answer.
My optimism waned. I couldn’t think of a good reason M wouldn’t respond if she were inside the ransacked drugstore.
Twenty paces from the doorway, walking the length of the back stockroom, my eyes were adjusting to the dim light. The deep shadows were still obscured behind mounds of rotting boxes and whatever used to be inside before the moisture seeped in and the varmint-sized critters set up housekeeping. I flicked on the flashlight mounted to my rifle barrel and swept it across the inky hiding places.
Spying a ladder leading up to a storage loft, I stepped through the gate on the security cage. “Hello?” I called again. “If you’re in here, M, I just want to talk. I only have my rifle for protection. You know how it is.” Why does everything sound like a lie when you’re in a weird situation?
I heard nothing but the skitter of little clawed feet running through some crackly something way up near the roof.
I figured I was alone in the drugstore. Just me and the rats.
I sighed and lowered my rifle, and decided to give the place a good look around. I might find some things I could use, especially overlooked drugs that would come in handy one day despite their expiration dates. That, and I figured I might scope the loft out for a potential campsite for the night. Using the drugstore as a base, I could probably spend another day or two scouting out the area.
