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

  Dusty’s Diary 2

  One Frustrated Man’s Apocalypse Story

  A novel by

  Bobby Adair

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  Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L. Adair

  Cover Design

  Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz

  Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting

  Kat Kramer Adair

  Foreword

  After two years of losing hope, I’ll bet you never thought this would happen. Dusty is back. And there will be a book three, without the two-year wait.

  For those of you who took the time to read the Foreword in book one, you’ll know that I was in a bit of weird emotional state when I wrote it. And the thing about writing, at least the way I do it, is that I try my best to imagine I’m in the skin—in the life—of the character I’m writing. It’s a weird sort of way to venture into someone else’s existence, to get lost in it for a while.

  Another weirdness, and I think many authors probably experience it, is that when I finish a book, it’s hard to look back at it and see anything but its flaws. I took some chances with book one, especially with the rough style, purposefully poor grammar, immaturity, and crass humor of it. As more time passed, I grew embarrassed because it wasn’t my best, most polished effort. It was just too raw.

  We casually watched the reviews come in on book one over the past couple of years and were surprised that it resonated with so many. Still, I wasn’t sure if there would ever be a book two.

  That’s the opinion that lived in my mind for a long time.

  It wasn’t until several weeks ago, when very perceptive Kat saw some familiar frustrations bubbling under the surface, and she suggested I write another Dusty’s Diary…purely for therapy.

  Without a thought, I told her, “No.” After all, she was the one who told me before I published the first Dusty’s Diary, that it would be the end of my writing career. She wasn’t a fan. But one night in July 2017, she turned it on in the car and started listening, and after a couple of chapters called to tell me there was a relevance she’d never completely understood, and that I needed to write another. “It’s short,” she argued. “You could write in within a week.”

  Anyone who knows Kat knows how persistent she can be—a real pain in the ass, but extremely perceptive. So, I sat down one Friday evening and read book one for the first time since I published it two years ago.

  I was shocked. It wasn’t the flaming POS I’d imagined it to be, it was raw, poignant, timely, and entertaining. At least to me it was. That’s when I gave in. Kat got her way.

  So here you are, world—Dusty, opinionated, preachy, raw, raunchy, rambling, angry, lonely, and fun.

  And if you like it, I’d be eternally grateful for a review if you have a moment.

  —Bobby

  November 12

  It was a good morning in Bunker Stink.

  I worked out.

  I ate a bowl of multi-grain, high-fiber gruel with nothing to vary the texture except for itty bitty bits of seed things that make me think of bugs every time I got one stuck in my teeth. I washed my clothes—plenty of extra rainwater in the cisterns, so why not? Then I swept the place. Tomorrow, I’ll clean the kitchen, and the little bathroom, such as it is. One good thing about the apocalypse, there are plenty of cleaning products laying around in peoples’ houses. Nobody thought to scrounge that kind of stuff when they finally saw where the world was headed.

  Even the Shroomheads don’t care enough about containers of cleaning shit to break them open anymore. Probably a Pavlov’s dog thing. I’ll bet every single one of them tried to slurp up some Softsoap or scarf down a grainy handful of Tide at least once. The Shroomhead brain isn’t smart enough to know at first sight the difference between a box of Captain Crunch and a bottle of Windex—they learn. I know they don’t memorize all the wrappers, and they definitely can’t read, but I’ve seen ‘em give a sniff to anything they find in a house and toss away the things that aren’t food.

  That’s a long way to go about saying ‘I’ve got plenty.’

  If only I’d paid more attention all along to using a nice lemony-fresh disinfectant on the surfaces and floor of my underground fiberglass hidey-hole, it might not have earned its name—Bunker Stink.

  Oh, that and regular use of a good deodorant. Again, lots of that lying around in under-sink cabinets and among the discarded containers on bathroom floors. As I said once before, Shroomheads look everywhere in a house for food.

  I finished my morning chores, sat down in front of my monitor bank, and watched the screens. It was still early, the sun was barely lighting the sky gray in the east. I find now that I’m doing things, now that I’ve got a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I do. Today, despite the excitement keeping me awake after last night’s success with the booby traps, I was out of bed the earliest in a long time.

  Most of the cameras were waiting to power up. I still need to scrounge some car batteries and wire them into each system to keep them running through the night. I don’t see a glimpse of anything until I’ve got a little sun on the panels.

  The one that showed the street in front of my house and the other pointed at my backyard warmed up first. I guess because no trees block the sun between their solar panels and the horizon. They each kind of flickered for five or ten minutes before they stayed on.

  Those two cameras are the most important, I guess. I need to know what’s going on close by outside at all times. Yeah, not really. I just need to know what’s out there before I risk an excursion through my hatch.

  That all sounds important and shit, but truth is, I was waiting for the camera to come up at Mazzy and Rollo’s house. I wanted to get a good look at the results of my handiwork. With some sunlight shining in through the windows, I’d be able to get a solid count of dead Shroomies.

  While I waited, I thought about hanging a whiteboard on the wall to tally my kills. I thought about goal-setting and wondering how many was the most ever killed by a human. Of course, that led me down an old path.

  Am I the last human on earth who is still normal?

  Four of my other cameras had awoken by the time I got my first flicker of life out of the one I’d mounted in Casa de Rollo. That one showed a quick glimpse of a thin little Shroomhead standing in the shadows in the corner of the living room, back to the camera. Then the device powered down again.

  That was odd. Not the system struggling to power up, the Shroomhead standing in the living room.

  Early morning and right before the sun goes down are usually transitional times for the Infected. Night-shift Shroomies like to be back inside before the sun comes up. Day-shifters don’t like to roll out of bed until later in the morning. They’re kinda lazy that way. You usually get thirty minutes or so on either end of the day when there doesn’t tend to be a lot of them on the streets.

  I stared at the blank monitor, waiting for the solar panel to generate enough amps to wake the camera back up. You know, just another tiny bit of suspense to keep me engaged. If the Shroomhead was gone, it was probably a Night Shift denizen and he’d headed on home. If it stayed, then it was a Day Shifter.

  That was the range of my expectations on the possibilities. But hey, in a world where boredom is the norm, anything that provides the tiny mystery of an unknown outcome is entertainment.

  When the camera powered up again, I saw something that surprised me, a pair of legs dangling out of the attic.

  First off, I’d never noticed an attic a
ccess panel on the living room ceiling, though my thoughts were on other things when I was setting the traps in there. And to be honest, back before the collapse, when I’d visited Rollo and Mazzy’s, I never looked at the ceiling. I only had eyes for Mazzy and the way her ass fit tightly into her jeans and the way her tits seemed ready to spill out the top of any blouse she wore.

  Secondly, who builds a house with an attic access panel in the living room? I’ve never seen anything like that before.

  Thirdly, Shroomheads almost never go into attics. The exceptions happen when they see someone climb up ahead of them, or when a ladder is left in the attic access hole. Otherwise, they’re just not smart enough to figure out that the rectangular irregularity in a ceiling isn’t just more ceiling.

  The legs disappeared into the hole. A moment later, a black blob of something dropped out onto the floor.

  The camera cut off.

  Dammit.

  Hazy morning clouds had blocked the sun.

  What the hell, I wondered, fell out of that ceiling?

  I pictured it in my mind and tried to play the memory in slow motion, trying to figure out what it was.

  The only thing it appeared to be was a backpack, which didn’t make any sense. Shroomheads don’t need and don’t carry backpacks. They prefer to face the world wearing nothing but the skin God gave ‘em.

  When the camera came to life again, the front door was open, and I got half a glimpse of the thin person as they stepped out and ran into the bushes in the front of the house. Into a blind spot for the camera I’d mounted on Rollo’s roof.

  The thing that really stole my attention was on one of the walls in the living room. Apparently, using one of the cans of spray paint I’d left in the house last night, someone had written on the wall:

  FUCK YOU and your booby traps,

  ASSHOLE!!

  Thanks for nothing!

  M.

  Holy shit.

  November 1 6

  Of course, my first thoughts went to my Mazzy fantasy.

  Was it her? Could she have been over there hiding in the attic, staying quiet as a mouse while I stomped around on the roof and installed my POD—my Perfect Observation Device, for you future bug people with short memories? Was she up there when I rooted through all the broken DVDs in her and Rollo’s bedroom searching for her homemade nudie movies? Did she hear me setting my Shroom traps, all the while keeping quiet, not knowing who I was or what I was up to?

  Hell, I don’t know.

  I spent a whole day scanning for some sign of her on my video feeds.

  I snuck around another day, looking for anything that would confirm for me she was real and not just an artifact of my loneliness crossbred with my jerry-rigged video surveillance system’s quirks.

  I found nothing.

  Now I need to get my head on straight, wrestle up some supplies, and think this whole thing through before I preoccupy myself so much with it I step into a hole full of stupid and get myself munched.

  Supplies. That’s the word of the day. Like I told you at the end of the last diary, I ran out of paper.

  I know if you’re living in your modern bumble bee buzz-buzz world with your electric cars and Cuisinart honey dispensers in the kitchen, and you have time to waste digging through the ancient world’s artifacts, you’ve got what we like to call First World problems, and running out of paper to write on isn’t one of those. For you guys, when you need paper, you just hop in the car and zip down to BuzzMart and load up. For me? Not so easy. Houston is humid. It’s full of Shroomheads who think anything built by normal people is something they need to tear up.

  Paper is getting hard to find.

  Nevertheless, Lady Luck smiled on me.

  I was scavenging yesterday over in Plinko Ranch—you know, those big houses on the old golf course south of the highway. We talked about the place. Well, in case you didn’t dig up my last diary, I’ll just tell you, after my ex hit her max-Dusty-bullshit threshold, she shacked up down there with some pink-Polo-wearing Porsche-driving wimp-stud with greasy hair and bleached teeth.

  All those folks down there had money.

  Or maybe like most of us back in the twenty-first century, they had bigger paychecks to indenture to the criminal credit card companies and mortgage bank butt-suckers. So they needed bigger houses for all their shit and larger garages to cram it into when it stopped being shiny-new enough to keep in the house because it got replaced by the latest fad-crap they saw on TV.

  I know, I know.

  You’re thinking, “BFD, Dusty, you’re rambling again.”

  Yeah, I know!

  I ramble. I repeat myself. I’m sure I’m starting to sound like that drunk uncle nobody wants to invite to the kiddies’ birthday parties anymore. This shouldn’t be news to you. I told you, I’m no Shakespeare.

  But the thing you gotta understand is back when the ex and I went through some hard years, meaning the money coming in the door didn’t add up enough to cover the bills being dumped in our mailbox, we used to have to buy our necessaries down at the Goodwill store. The one with the best shit was south of here, on the other side of the highway, across the street from—you guessed it—Plinko Fucking Ranch.

  When those people run out of room to store their pre-throw-away crap, they donate it to places like Goodwill so they won’t have to feel like consumer addicts who get all bonerous and drippy from hearing the zing of their plastic through a credit card reader. Instead, they tell themselves they’ve done something special to shine up their souls for Jesus by giving their yesterday’s fashion shit to the poor.

  Best of all, when they drive up to the loading dock around behind the Goodwill store to donate their pre-trash shit, the unbathed reprobate Have-Not assisting the wanly smiling Haves with their donation loads always gives them a blank (tax) voucher because he’s too lazy to fill it out and will never earn enough money to have to worry about learning how to do it for himself with his own taxes. And then the donation quantities get fudged, because why the fuck not? We are all just humans. Why be honest when nobody’s going to bust you in a lie. So all that too-good-to-throw-away shit multiplies into two or three times as much—for tax purposes only—and turns into a write-off big enough to buy a delivery truck full of next year’s shiny new shit that gets rolled down the ramp into an oversized house down in Plinko Ranch.

  And the most fucked up thing is slick-hair-homie-fuck down there pays less in his taxes by scamming the donation write-off, and my tax bill goes up because the government still needs its dime. It doesn’t care where the dime comes from, it just wants it. Do the math. All that shit at Goodwill that me and the eventual ex picked up for a discount is shit I already paid for once. Sorta.

  It’s fucked up. But that’s the way it is.

  I know, I know.

  I’m angry again. You future people must think the only thing the hairless monkeys of the twenty-first century were good at was hating on each other.

  Maybe I was just envious.

  Dealt a bad hand for living prosperously in modern times.

  Thing is, I worked hard all my life, and me and the eventual ex sent our kids to college. We were always in debt. We lived in a modest house (that means kinda small and shitty) in a modest neighborhood, and all I had to show for it was Bunker Stink buried in my backyard.

  I was never lazy. I worked six and seven days a week. I labored long hours when I could, when I had to, which was most of the time. There are things I was good at, and things I wasn’t. I never did well on my tests in school. I wasn’t that good at learning my grammar rules, and algebra never made good sense to me. But I could cut a straight line with a saw and build something solid and square. I could change my brakes, pull my shocks, and yank the transmission out of my car and drop in a rebuilt one. I suffered the snakebites and the wasp stings and the fire ants chewing up my calves. I always did the best I could with what I had. But I never bought a Porsche. Never took the eventual ex to Paris. Never lived in a mansion on a golf c
ourse.

  Why?

  I think about that a lot.

  I sometimes hate those people. I’m glad they all turned Shroom and I now get to root through their shit looking for the good leftovers.

  Sometimes, I’m glad they’re all dead.

  Most times, I’m not.

  What passed for an economy, back before the Cordyceps spore destroyed everything, left people like me scraping by every day and always worrying about making enough money to cover the rent at the end of the month. I know that’s all my skills were worth in our fine capitalist system.

  I just never understood why somebody who sat behind a polished desk and pushed numbers around on a computer screen all day was worth so much more than me to all the people who paid their money into the products and services that kept our economy humming.

  I always knew life wasn’t fair, but I never understood why my sweat was worth so little and their mental anguish was worth so much?

  And all the while, there was always some loudmouth asshole on TV telling me that my financial problems, my crappy house, and my broken down car weren’t my fault. It was them. Those bastards who voted for the other asshole were to blame for everything bad that ever happened to me.

  Yeah, I know. Total shit.

  But goddamn. After hearing that for years, after looking at the greener grass on the other side of the hill and knowing you can never climb the fence to feel it between your toes, it makes you feel cheated. It makes you want to hate somebody.

  Back before the collapse, there were plenty of people around my neighborhood who seemed to be just like me. I saw ‘em at the PTA meetings and involved in their kids’ lives, trying to get the best possible education for their kids, just like me. I saw them at the park watching the fireworks and waving flags on the Fourth of July and heard ‘em sing the national anthem, just like me. I saw them at the grocery story pinching pennies to afford that cruise for the missus, just like me.