by Bobby Adair
I climbed the ladder, lifting myself slowly between patient steps, listening for anything of any size that might be lurking in the loft to pounce on me.
Just about the time I was poking my head through the upper level and flicking on my flashlight to look around up there, the gate that separated the two parts of the stockroom clanked loudly and clicked shut.
December 19
After nearly dumping a load of warm soft-serve into my skivvies—that part of my gastronomical system not being entirely recovered from Punchy Bryan’s mac-n-cheese—I wrestled for half a second on whether to monkey climb up the ladder and try to disappear in the darkness or turn to face the coming Shroomheads with my rifle blazing, one-handed, action-hero style.
A few soft metallic clicks confused me as I looked down at a shadowy blob by the gate.
Finally, the math all added up in my dumbass brain.
The dark figure took off at a run as I all but fell down the length of the ladder, calling, “Hey! Hey! Stop! Please?”
I hit the concrete hard, and needles of pain exploded through my knees. Still, I leapt across the security cage and grabbed onto the chain-link gate, rattling it loudly as I yanked.
Not only was it closed and latched, it was pad-fucking-locked.
Motherfucker!
“M!” I shouted, trying hard to keep my frustration tamped down. “What is this? Why—”
A small voice squeaked out of the dim light down by the door. She was stopped there, her silhouette looking back. “Why are you following me?”
You’ll never know how good it is to hear a real, live human’s voice until you’ve gone a few years without, until you’ve accepted a hundred times over that you’re the last normal human on the whole planet. I gurgled a noise through some weighty emotions trying to bubble their way to the surface and said, “I just want to talk.”
“Go fuck yourself, Gomer Pyle. And leave me alone.”
Gomer Pyle?
Sure I was wearing camo and had a gun, but I’m nothing like the doofus in the old TV series.
She hadn’t run off yet, but said, “If you promise to leave me alone. I’ll tell you where the key to that padlock is. If you don’t, you can just stay inside and cry until they come and find you. Then good luck, Gomer.”
At that point, I was already thinking I could go back up to the loft, bust out through one of the skylights and get onto the roof. I’d be free in minutes.
Maybe she sensed the gears turning in my head. Maybe she knew danger was growing the longer she stayed.
I saw the shadowy silhouette of her baggy poncho step through the door, and in desperation, I shouted, “Mazzy!”
The shadow she cast on the floor froze stiff.
“Mazzy?” I called again.
She jumped back through the doorway and turned on me. “Mazzy?”
I already knew it wasn’t her. Mazzy had a sultry, luscious voice. The girl in the poncho was young, mid-teens. The angelic clarity of her mean little voice made that clear.
“How do you know that name?” she snapped.
“Mazzy?”
“You’re not a moron, are you?”
A moron? Slipping into a junior high insult-trading protocol, I told her, “You don’t have very many friends, do you?”
“You are a moron,” she responded. “We’re kind of running short on people, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m betting you don’t have any friends, either.”
Having lost my first round of the insult fight, my first since just before the eventual ex turned into an actual ex and moved in with three-under-par-golf-ball-boy, I decided to try the maturity route. I calmly asked, “How do you know Mazzy?”
“How do you?” she shot back at me. “You were rooting around in her bedroom. You set up all those traps in our house.”
Our house?
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, but I’m not an idiot, either. I ran through some quick age-based math in my head and postulated my deduction. “Mazzy was your mother?” Could M be her youngest daughter? When was the last time I saw her? “You’re Amelia?”
M took a step back toward the door and stopped.
“What’s with M?” I was grasping at anything to ask to keep her there.
“My nickname, dumbass. Mom called me M all the time.”
Doh!
“I’m Dusty,” I explained. “I live two blocks over. Rollo—your dad—and me, well, you’ve seen us together. We used to pal around. You know me.”
“You’re the one who got divorced after your last daughter went off to college.” She made it sound like an accusation.
“Yes. I mean, no. It wasn’t like that. She ran off with some dude.” I caught myself. “Why am I explaining this to you?”
“What do you want?” she asked again. “Why are you following me?”
“Well, like you said, there aren’t many of us around anymore. You know, normal people. Have you been living in the attic of your house this whole time?”
Amelia paused, clearly thinking about whether to continue the conversation.
“Please.” I didn’t mean for it to sound so pitiful, but sometimes the shit you say betrays you whether you like it or not. “I just want someone to talk to. Do you know of anyone else who’s still around? I mean, if you made it this far and I made it, there have to be more, right?” In truth, I was hoping she was going to tell me Mazzy was alive and well and hiding nearby. And why not throw in something about her pining for me all these years?
Hoping.
Maybe Amelia read my mind, but she got right to the heart of my hopes. “I remember, you used to come over sometimes to pick up my dad to go drinking. You were always staring at my mother with old-man-pervert eyes. You’re gross.”
“Wait!” Taken aback, I started to come up with lies to defend myself. I wondered how she even knew I’d been staring at her mother. I thought I’d been careful with my lascivious thoughts. In the end, I decided to go with honesty. “You know what, you’re right. I did look at your mother. I gawked at her. I lusted. She was maybe the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I never did it in front of Rollo. I never told anyone about it, and I never acted on my inappropriate thoughts. I was never that kind of husband and I sure as hell wasn’t that kind of friend.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Didn’t you get enough of her at those swinger parties they used to throw when they dumped me at my aunt’s house for the weekend?”
“No!” That accusation stung. “I never, I mean, I walked into the backyard once, accidentally. I saw them around the pool—your dad, your mom, a bunch of people from the neighborhood. But I wasn’t, I mean, me and my wife weren’t into that.”
“But you wanted to be.”
“What are we talking about here?” I asked. “None of that is important anymore. My wife turned Shroom, her and her penny-loafer boyfriend both. Rollo turned, and I suppose Mazzy did, too. Why are we arguing about this?”
“So, what are you thinking?” she asked, acid in her tone. “With Mazzy gone, maybe you’ll turn your old-man-perv on her daughter? Maybe get you some young stuff?”
“No.” Ick! “I’d never do that. Talk about gross.”
Amelia’s shadow stomped toward me through the clutter, snorting angry breaths all the way up.
Inexplicably intimidated by a girl half my size with twice my temper, I stepped back from the gate.
Once in front of me, she threw her hood back and said, “There. Is that what you want, you dirty old man? You want your wrinkly old dick to fall off? Well, whip it out and let’s get on with it.”
As I stared, trying to take it in, trying to put the discordant pieces together in my brain, she added, “That’s right, Gomer. I’m one of them.”
In the dim light, it took a moment, but I realized the misshapen dollops that had been beneath her hood weren’t mounds of badly groomed hair, they were red lumps.
She sealed it tight with, “I’m a Shroomhead.”
December 19
&n
bsp; Sometimes, the thoughts in your head hit you so hard they take your breath away and loosen your grip on the world.
I took another step back and dropped down to sit on a comfy stack of disintegrating Poise pads. “What? I don’t understand.”
“It’s not hard, Gomer.”
I looked at her, as my head slowly shook, the thoughts not wanting to settle in, like logic wouldn’t let them fit anywhere.
“The fungus infected me,” she explained. “The lumps grew.”
“But—” It still didn’t make sense to me. “You’re not—”
“Crazy?” she asked. “Stupid?”
“You’re not very nice,” I managed to say. “But you seem normal.”
“Because I am.”
“How?” I asked.
“Does it matter? It’s not like we’re going to be able to find a doctor to explain it, right? Like everybody else, the doctors are all dead, or turned Shroom. Or they’re floating on their yachts out in the gulf waiting for the world to un-fuck itself.”
“Are there any others like you?” I asked, a thousand other questions stacking up behind that one, desperate to get out. “Is this how all of you turn out?”
“All of us?” she asked, taking offense. “Like I’m an expert.”
“Sorry.”
Maybe something in my eyes, maybe something about the expression on my face, finally dulled Amelia’s edge, because she decided to apologize, too. “Sorry.”
“Listen,” I softly asked, “are you going to leave me in here? I’d feel better if the gate was unlocked.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“If I meant you harm,” I patted the rifle on my sling, “I do have this. I could have just shot you if that was my plan.”
She looked down at the gun as though she’d forgotten it was there. “I suppose.” She pointed toward the shadowy corner. “Under that yellow bucket over there, you’ll find a key for the lock. Put it back after you let yourself out.” She turned and started to walk away.
“Wait,” I begged, not moving from the mound of plastic-wrapped pads I was sitting on. “Please, don’t go.”
“Why?” she asked, spinning on me, the venom back in her voice. “You’re a human. I’m a Shroomy. What do you imagine happening here?”
“Before you go,” I told her, grasping for any way to bridge the chasm between us, “do you know what today is?”
It was her turn to get knocked off balance. “What?”
“The day? You know it’s December 19th, right?”
“So?”
“It’s almost Christmas.”
She shook her head dismissively. “What does that have to do with anything anymore?”
“I built a smoker,” I told her. “I have my eye on a raccoon I found living a few blocks over from my house. I’ve never tasted raccoon before, but I was thinking of maybe convincing him to come over for Christmas dinner and smoking him overnight. It’s been a long time since I tasted fresh-cooked food. I have plenty of other stuff, canned fruits and veggies, seasoning, even some soda, beer, and wine. I don’t know if the beer is any good. No pressure, but if you want to come over to my place for Christmas, I’d love to have you. I’ll cook. You don’t need to bring anything.”
She stared at me like I was crazy.
And maybe she was right. It might have been the craziest thing I’d ever said, maybe the stupidest thing I ever proposed, inviting a talking Shroomhead into my underground home, not considering all the danger I was opening myself up to. “You know where I live, right? If not, you’ll smell the smoke. Just follow the duct. You’ll find the smoker in my backyard. I have surveillance cameras out so I can see most everything for a few blocks around. There’s no doorbell, but I’ll know you’re outside.”
She pursed her lips, and then she stepped away to head for the door.
“Think about it,” I called again as she disappeared on silent feet.
December 19
I sat on the stack of pads, staring into the dark storeroom for a long time that day.
Talking Shroomheads? WTF?
The world wasn’t what I thought it was. Maybe it had never been.
I made my way home, careful as usual. I was stunned but not stupid.
I climbed down the ladder into Bunker Stink, and I sulked. I thought about whether I’d made a mistake. I gave a thought to moving out of my bunker home and losing myself in the decaying urban sprawl. I cleaned my favorite hunting rifle and put some thought into going after for every dangerous Shroomhead I could find.
Every five minutes, as I sat in the dark and listened to the ventilation fan spin and echo through the HVAC system, I imagined another scenario that might play out.
December 20
Another day.
I woke up this morning as the lights came up. I dragged myself through my calisthenics and quit halfway through, filling my head with excuses about being sore and tired and doing the smart thing by listening to what my body was telling me. After all, I’m no spring chicken. I’m pushing into the age range where I can’t pretend anymore that I’m a young stud bachelor at the peak of my prime.
I’m just a lonely man turning old in a tricked-out septic tank buried in his backyard, with a smoldering anxiety as I ruminate over all my missteps. My life could have turned out so differently if only I’d done this or that or the other thing the other way.
Thoughts about all the people I’d wronged, accidentally on purpose, or just through plain old self-centered callousness, haunted their way through my empty head.
I was never a mean person. Least ways, I never saw myself like that. I was nearly always the biggest guy around, but never a bully. I never beat my wife or my kids. I was never mean to waiters or dogs. I even braked for cats and those fucking dumbass squirrels when they ran across the road in front of my truck.
I always tried. I worked hard.
Like everybody else, I fudged on my taxes when I needed the money and figured I could get away with it, but I was an honest person. I never cheated my customers, never sold them more than they needed, never fixed shit that wasn’t broken, not even the douchebags who talked down to me because I had dirt under my fingernails and grease smudges on my clothes.
I never went to church that much, mostly when the eventual ex dragged me there on Sundays, but I always dropped a few bucks in the plate to help the poor…or the preacher finance his new ski boat. I did my part for the Lord. At least all I could afford.
I sent my daughters to Sunday school every week. I taught them to be nice to people. I paid for their college so they could one day sit behind a desk and push numbers around on a screen and make twice as much money as me for working half as many hours and be able to raise a family and take their kids to Disney World and have a nice honeymoon in Fiji and buy a big house down in Plinko Ranch and look down on people like me.
I think I did everything a man was supposed to do. At least I did it the best I could with what God gave me.
All kinds of things bother me when I get down, and I can’t help but carry the blame for all the shit that I did wrong, all the times when I guess I could have worked harder to make things turn out better.
But in the end, the world was so busy fucking itself on a bed of hate and lies, none of my mistakes would have made any difference, except that maybe I’d have had the girls and the eventual ex down here in Bunker Stink with me.
I hate to sound like a grandma’s greeting-card plushy pet, but if we’d all just spent a little more time thinking of our neighbors like real people, you know, people just like us, if we’d spent less time tuned into the 24-hour loudmouth channels screaming hemorrhoid-popping snark hate at us, if we’d spent less time looking for some moron to blame for all the world’s problems and instead took a long uncomfortable stare at the dipshit in the mirror, you know, the one who voted all the assholes into office, if maybe we’d insisted on believing only what was true instead of what felt good to the angry ogre that lived in our hearts, then maybe things
would have turned out different.
Maybe when the Toe Fungus Fuckers pulled their profit-sucking shit on us, instead of pointing our favorite bugger fingers at each other, we would have been able to work together, and fixed the problem before it got out of hand.
Maybe we would have stopped looking for excuses to nuke North Korea. And maybe they would have stopped hating on us and started growing rice for their starving people instead of throwing all of their cash into building ICBMs.
Maybe the Russians would have stopped guzzling vodka by the gallon and changed their fucked-up political mistakes and stopped hacking every software system in our country and others and turning our machinery against us.
Maybe the Chinese would have stopped trying to genetically engineer big-brained superbabies to take over the world and maybe they’d have just loved the smiling little toddlers God gave them.
But we didn’t do any of that.
We decided that lies tasted so good, all we could do was ask for seconds.
The thing we never understood with all of our doomsday tech on the table and us rolling the dice and dancing with the Devil, was that one day that horned bastard was going to step on our feet, the dice were going to come up snake eyes, and we’d wake up in the morning with his big red pecker stuck up our butts.
So, be careful, buzzy-buzz bee people of the distant future.
If the sun ever comes up in a world where the truth has died because your stink-fuck political types and the screamy-faced pundits of every stripe have killed it, it won’t be the Toe Fungus Fuckers who do you in, they’ll be long dead by then. But it’ll some bunch of corrupt maggot boners who are willing to trade the world for a handful of gold nuggets. That’s when you’ll need to dig a hole in the backyard and let your neighbors laugh at you while you sweat, because a day is coming when all of that bullshit will erupt into your apocalyptic nightmares, and everyone you ever knew and everything you ever loved will die. Then the best you can hope for is to pull your family close and hide in your bunker until all the shit blows past. Maybe then you’ll have a chance to try again. Maybe you’ll learn the hard lesson that bigmouths who build their power on mountains of hate are doing nothing more than running up a debt burden on your society that will come due in a hail of bullets, pestilence, and horror.
