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  DUSTY’S DIARY

  One Frustrated Man’s Zombie Apocalypse Story

  by

  Bobby Adair

  http://www.bobbyadair.com

  http://www.facebook.com/BobbyAdairAuthor

  Cover Design & Layout

  Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz

  Editing & Proofreading

  Kat Kramer Cathy Moeschet

  Linda Tooch Rob Melich

  Margaret Ferguson

  Technical Consultants & Research

  John Cummings: Military

  Kat Kramer: Construction, Geography

  eBook & Print Layout

  Kat Kramer – www.katkramer.com/publishing

  Preface

  I hate to have to do this, but let me start with a WARNING. This is a short book. If you’re on the inter-webs and peeking at the sample before you spend your $0.99 (or whatever that converts to in the local currency) then you’re reading this, so please keep the length in mind. If it bothers you to spend $0.99 on a short book, thanks for looking, but you might move along to your next choice. You can buy a lot more words in some other books for the same price. (Though, personally, I do feel it’s worth your time AND investment!)

  Moving right along.

  I know, if you’re a reader of my other books, you’re either saying “What? Another series?” or “Yippee! Another series!”

  Well, funny story about that. After the release of The Last Survivors, readers started asking, “What happened? How did the world get to that place three hundred years in the future where everything had gotten so different?” Dusty’s Diary was conceived to be a novella-length attempt to answer that question. Unfortunately, I started writing it with this character Dusty in mind, and everything took off on a path of its own.

  While Dusty’s Diary attempts to explain those years when society was collapsing and people were turning into the monsters that live in The Last Survivors, it also—because sometimes my imagination just won’t behave—developed this character Dusty who, quite frankly, upstaged the rest of the story. He decided that his stupid little rants and his quirky humor were just as important—possibly more important—than explaining the history of the disease and the slow process of society’s disintegration.

  Of course, after a few chapters I was on board and having a blast with the writing. Characters with no propriety filter on their thoughts are fun. So be careful with your expectations when you download a copy of this book. In tone and style, it isn’t anything like The Last Survivors; in fact, it’s much more similar to the Slow Burn series, with a bit more raunchy, twisted humor folded in.

  I don’t know whether I will spin this book off into a series or not. Frankly, that depends. If it sells well and gets good reviews, what can I say? I’m a sucker for compliments and royalties. If you’d like to see the story continue, tell a friend about it, leave a review with the retailer where you bought it, sign up for my mailing list, or leave me a message on my Facebook page.

  In closing, I’d like to say that Dusty’s Diary is a bit of a reaction to the weighty problems facing the characters at the end of Ebola K, Book 2. I literally started writing Dusty’s Diary the day after I completed Ebola K. I think I needed something to lighten my mood, something to have fun with. This book did the trick. It was a blast to write, as I channeled my inner “dipshit.”

  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  — Bobby Adair

  Dusty’s Diary:

  October 11

  Yeah, I know I wrote the title Dusty’s Diary on the front, but this isn’t a diary, not really. I mean, it isn’t one of those little books with a brass key and a lock that gets hidden under a mattress and scribbled in every day; not one of those seventh-grade girl’s googly-eyed crush storybooks.

  I guess maybe this is a history. Sort of. My contribution to the future if anybody is around to read it.

  I never thought I’d write any of this down. I ain’t that type of guy, you know? I didn’t do that well in school. I hated to read back in those days—high school, I mean. I didn’t read most of what they told me to, and I turned in just enough homework to get by. I got plenty of poontang, smoked lots of weed, and had a lot of fun.

  You never know how good you have it when you’re that age.

  My point is, this ain’t gonna be literature. Whoever digs this up a hundred or a thousand or a million years from now, if you’ve already dug up some Shakespeare and read it, don’t compare this to that. They say Shakespeare was a great play writer—whatever. I can’t even understand what he’s talking about.

  Let me tell you a little bit about where this all takes place. I live in Houston, Texas. Well, not exactly Houston. A little suburb called Katy out on I-10 east of the city. Urban sprawl pretty much makes it all one big blob of houses and buildings near the southeast corner of Texas. I’m not going to go to the trouble to explain all that. If you found this book, then I’m sure you found other books or stuff that people left, pictures maybe. You might have even found some DVDs. If you figured out how to play a DVD, then you’ll see what our cities looked like. Those will make more sense than anything I can explain to you. Besides, it’s not like I’ve got all the time in the world to write this crap down.

  I live in a bunker in my back yard. Ooh. Ah. “Bunker” sounds like some kind of reinforced concrete box with machine gun ports and ejector seats and shit. It’s more like a fiberglass septic tank with some bunk beds. Yeah, it’s tricked out a little. I’ve got some electronics, some supplies, and a shortwave radio. And yeah, it was pretty expensive back when money was still a thing.

  I haven’t been outside in two years.

  I don’t know why that’s important to say. I feel like it is.

  I should also tell you, it’s dangerous outside.

  Why?

  Long story.

  Yeah, that brings up something else. I’m not a scientist. Remember, I said I barely finished high school. I always knew I wasn’t the college type so I didn’t much apply myself to the high school gig outside of my previously mentioned social habits.

  After school, I found my place in the world working in HVAC. That’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (look it up). AC is the best goddamn thing man ever invented, especially if you live in Houston where the air drips with humidity, and it’s always hot. What I’m trying to say is that I’ll explain all this as best I can, but it’s not gonna be scientifically accurate. Okay? Don’t sue me over it.

  Another thing I’ll tell you. This is a weird time to be alive. I say that, but maybe I don’t know. Seems like things were simpler when I was a kid growing up back home in Michigan (that’s a place way up north where it gets cold as a bitch in the wintertime, and the wet nasty snow comes by Christmas and never seems to leave until spring. Sucks!) Anyways, back then you never had to wonder what was going on, you know, with the news I mean. There were just three channels and the local paper. If they all said the president was a douchebag, well, he was. If they all said we needed to get the hell out of Vietnam, then we probably did.

  Nowadays, one channel says we need to get out of Iraq while another channel says it’s a damn good thing we did conquer Iraq, and maybe we need to invade Saudi Arabia too. And why did God give those camel fuckers all the oil anyway? It’s our soldiers that keep it secure from the other camel fuckers who are pissed because nobody shares the profits with them.

  My point is, you never know anymore what’s what. Seems like everybody who knew how to sound smart and authoritative and looked good doing it had a nightly news show selling his own fucktard version of reality. Most of it boiled down to hate under a veneer of big words.

  I’ll admit, I’ve done my share of hating people because they didn’t agre
e with me. You know, they watched a different guy on the news than me. Now I’ve figured out that most of what I saw on TV—back when we still had TV— was all bullshit of one sort or another. The truth got left out.

  The reason I bring this up is, I think that was part of the problem when the red lumps came. Nobody knew the truth. Nobody knew what to do about it. And our government? Oh, my God, give me a break with those dipshits. They were so busy trying to win elections and steal our tax money they never were able to do anything to save us.

  We The People were on our own.

  Maybe we always were, and I just didn’t know it.

  Let me tell you the story now the way I saw it happen. I’ll try to leave out the bullshit parts that I got from the news.

  The first time I heard about the red lumps I was at a garage sale with my soon-to-be ex-wife. We went to garage sales on Saturdays and Sundays in those days looking for things to buy for nickels and sell for a million bucks. We had lots of TV shows about that back then. That whole fantasy was pretty stupid, by the way. Nobody ever really finds first edition Dickens novels worth a million bucks in a garage sale in Katy, Texas. We knew that. Just like we knew we were never gonna win the Powerball drawing. For us, it was just fun to pretend that we might. Cheap entertainment, you know?

  Turned out we eventually did build a little business out of the garage sale thing by buying things we knew something about and selling those for higher prices, mostly.

  I searched out power tools, fishing poles, and shit like that. Back in the early days of our garage sale shopping, it was easy money. Not get rich quick money, but steady income. We’d go to garage sales, and I’d pick up an old Skilsaw or maybe a drill for a couple of bucks, clean ‘em up, and sell ‘em on the internet for thirty or forty bucks, maybe more. It’s when I learned about antique fly rods that I really started to bring home some cash. Nobody knew what those were at the time, and for sure nobody knew what they were worth. I remember I picked up my first old fly rod in this nice wooden case. I didn’t think much of it at the time. The dude said the rod belonged to his mother’s father. He’d informally inherited it out of his grandpa’s garage after the old man died, because he liked the woodwork on the case. I pretty much picked it up for the same reason. The case was nice. Turns out, the rod was nice. It made me nostalgic for handcrafted, American-made stuff that lasted forever. The America that made that kind of stuff was gone long before the red lumps came. By then, the only things America made better than anybody else were rich bankers, lots of Walmart greeters, and a shrinking bunch of us trying to hold onto our place in the gap in between.

  Anyways, the guy was tired of toting the fly rod and all of his other garage crap around, moving it from duplex to duplex every time the economy hiccupped, he lost his job, and got evicted. I bought it for something like twelve bucks. I dusted the rod off, lubricated all the metal parts, and made sure it worked. I polished up the wooden case, snapped a few decent pics, and threw it up on eBay. To my surprise, some Japanese businessmen got in a bidding war over it, and I sold the rod for almost two thousand dollars.

  You future people probably don’t know anything about our monetary system, but take my word for it, two grand is a month’s take-home pay to the average American, a lot of money.

  The Japanese businessmen were going nuts for antique American fly rods. Some kind of fad over there, I guess. I started searching the fly rods out at garage sales and estate sales. It seemed like nobody besides me was in the business, at least nobody around Houston. I used to pick up rods for next to nothing, maybe twenty or thirty dollars. I regularly sold them for over a thousand. Yeah, I know! Crazy, huh?

  I put my girls through college doing that.

  In that fly rod deal, I’d like to think I was a business genius. I wasn’t. I stumbled into a sweet spot in an underserved market. Underserved market, that’s MBA talk. A friend of my ex’s douchebag boss said that to me one day at a barbecue on the douchebag’s deck overlooking the golf course. That was before she turned from wife into ex. I was trying not to seem like a blue-collar dumbass, there hobnobbing with dudes whose cars cost more than my house. So, I bragged to the douchebag’s buddy about my fly rod business. Mistake! The guy stole my idea and became my competition. Eventually he made it damn near impossible to make a profit.

  By that time, I’d made enough money to buy the “tornado” shelter in my backyard and the solar panels connected to it. My neighbors thought I was nuts. I tried to tell ‘em it was a septic system, but our neighborhood was on city water and sewer so nobody believed the story. Then the HOA got involved. If you’re in the future reading this, and you don’t know what an HOA is, well, imagine that whatever devil you believe in has some greedy, petty-minded little brats, and they grow up to live in your neighborhood, they’re always trying to make you do things you don’t want to do. We call that an HOA.

  In the end, I won my battle with the HOA. I just stuck to my tornado shelter story. We don’t get many tornadoes in Houston, but out in West Texas they’re a big deal. It was an easy sell from that perspective. I just told the HOA I grew up in West Texas, and everybody out there had one. That’s the thing about HOAs. They’re not smart. They looked at me from behind their table in that meeting, all squinty-eyed and shit. They didn’t believe me. I talk more like a Canadian than a cowboy from West Texas. But what could they do?

  I guess I got off my point. I tend to ramble. Maybe I smoked too much weed when I was in school. Maybe I drank too much beer in my twenties. Maybe I watch too much TV and have a short attention span. Maybe Twitter and the internet made me incapable of holding a thought in my head longer than a hundred and forty characters. Maybe I’m just stupid.

  Or you know what? Maybe I’m just normal, and I feel like I need to apologize for writing in my own God damned diary just how I feel like writing because some bunch of dipshits wants me to feel stupid for not writing as clearly as they do, and another group of dipshits wants me to be pissed about it, and another group of dipshits wants to profit from my fears by making me vote for the dipshits that steal my tax money.

  They all fuckin’ steal my tax money!

  Sorry, I’ve got frustrations.

  Anyways, like I said, I was at this garage sale one Saturday morning when some guy I met starts talking to me about the red lumps. I thought he was crazy at first. He seemed like a real tinfoil hat paranoid type. I didn’t think that much about it.

  The ex and I finished up by lunch—all the good stuff at garage sales gets sold before noon, so there’s no point in making a full day of it. We went out for some barbecue at a little joint near our house. One of those places where the walls are turning black from the smoke, and the floor is sticky from old grease, but you eat there anyway because it tastes so damn good. I ate too much. I had a few beers. When I got home, I wasn’t up for mowing the lawn. Food coma. I laid on the couch and watched TV until I got so bored I got up and went over to my desk to start surfing around on the internet.

  I looked up the thing about the red lumps.

  Did I say I’m not a scientist? I think I did. So, I’ll try and explain this as best as I can.

  Turns out the anti-GMO crowd and the anti-vaxers were whining up a storm about the red lumps. I don’t like any of those people so I didn’t think there was any truth to what I was reading. It was entertaining as hell seeing those folks get all worked up. I checked the status of all the stuff I had for sale on eBay and went to reading blogs.

  Blog definition: a computer-based way to listen to your neighbor rant a bunch of bullshit at you over the fence. Only there’s no fence, and the ranting dude isn’t your neighbor.

  The consensus story on the blogs seemed to be that some company was making an anti-fungal nose spray that turned out to have some unexpected effects. The anti-fungal was supposed to target other fungi that grow beneath toenails and turn them yellow.

  That’s another thing. What the hell is up with that? I went my whole life without worrying about the color of my toena
ils. All of a sudden, I started seeing commercials on TV telling me I needed a new drug to kill the fungus under my toenails so they’d turn the perfect pinkish color.

  Who the hell cares? I always wear socks and shoes.

  The toenail fungus company started playing around with the genetics of something called Cordyceps. It’s apparently a fungus itself. Blah, blah, blah. They engineered this Cordyceps fungus to float through the air in a nasal spray. It was supposed to get into the blood and kill the target fungus under the toenails. At that point, all of the blog posts started to run off in different directions.

  One story said that this new, genetically modified fungus evolved and decided to make itself into something that needed a little more fertile ground to grow in, namely us.

  Another story said it was terrorists. Hell, what wasn’t blamed on terrorists back in those days? The thing most people don’t understand, and the thing that happens with every new technology, is that it always starts out to be really specialized and expensive. Nobody has it because nobody knows how to build it. Think back to the days of spears. Sure, everybody has them because they’re easy to make and easy to understand. Then one day a guy invents a bow and arrow, and now he’s more badass than the spear tossers so he’s the new king. Pretty soon everybody’s making bows and arrows, even better ones. Then there are long bows that can shoot like a half mile, and crossbows that can shoot through armor (I watched the history channel a lot, so I know some stuff). The thing is, the guy who made the first bow thought he was special. He didn’t know that everybody else was special too and pretty good at copying each other.

  It was that way with guns. It was that way with tanks. It was that way with airplanes, and televisions, and smartphones. Yeah, pretty much everything that anybody ever invented.

  When the dipshits decided genetic engineering was their own little thing and they could do spiffy, expensive things with it, you know, like making corn that grows in a desert, doesn’t need any pesticides and doesn’t get eaten by rodents, well, that was pretty special. Genetic engineering was open to everybody who liked to spend their time doing their homework rather than chasing poon and smoking weed. Know what I mean?