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

  But the loudmouth on TV told me to despise them because they had different stickers on their cars, and they had “Vote For The Other Asshole” signs in their yards, and the dickheads down in Plinko Ranch had the same signs. Half for my team’s political asshole, half for the other one. Folks on my side, folks on theirs.

  I’m clueless without a talking head television turd telling me who my enemy is.

  My hate needs a date, and it’s got nobody to love.

  So, me and the eventual ex bought our good stuff there at the Plinko Ranch Goodwill—jeans without any holes for ten bucks, five-hundred dollar shoes for twenty, shirts to wear under my blazer to the basketball-arena-turned-TV-church on Sunday. Nobody down in Plinko buys the kind of shirts I wore to work, so there were never any of those to choose from.

  The point I’m trying to get to is I figured all those houses down there infested with rich-folks-gone-shroom were chock full of good, unused stuff, just rotting away in the humidity, waiting for Omega Man Dusty to bounce down there and collect it.

  Matter-of-fact, I was in a house yesterday—a mansion, really—where I had to wade through some faded birthday party leftovers, all pastels and pinks faded to near gray, with airless mylar balloons on the floor that might last longer than anything I ever stashed away for the benefit of you future archaeologists.

  I found some fellow’s study.

  A study—wow.

  I guess I’m in a grouchy mood after not finding M and I feel like bitching, so let me tell you future people a little something about how things are back here in the twenty-first century. If someone has a house so big they have an extra room they can call a study, well, they’re probably dipshits who scammed something outta somebody else.

  Real people work for a living and mortgage their asses for normal-sized houses and put their kids in a shared room on bunk beds because they don’t have enough money to buy a mansion in Plinko Ranch with so many rooms they need to start making up special names for ‘em.

  So when I was sitting in the dipshit’s study, looking at a wall of mahogany display cases with doors swung open and mouse turds everywhere, staring at a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of guns, some as old as my great grandpa, slowly rusting away in the humidity, it pissed me right the hell off.

  I mean, it’s gotta be my scammed tax dollars that paid for those guns, right? Shroomhead or not, the dipshit who bought those beautiful old pieces shoulda took better care of them. It nearly made me cry.

  Not really, but it torqued my ‘nads.

  Now, I can’t explain why all those guns were still in that house after all these years. Maybe the guy who lived there lasted a year or two longer than most. Maybe he put some of those guns to use shooting sticky-fingered creepers who thought they might sneak into his house, take his guns and food, and maybe rape his wife and daughters for the twisted jollies of it. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.

  There’s got to be some reason all the guns were there.

  Better yet, there had to be a good reason the closet in the room was stacked with cardboard boxes of bullets, all sagging and collapsing from the irritatingly constant moisture in the air. Thankfully, casings are made of brass, bullets are made of lead, well, sometimes cased in other metals. Point is, the cardboard was crumpled and moldy, but the bullets were all fine, just mixed up a bit.

  So, I found me an old Colt Army Model 1860. A gunslinger’s weapon from back in the cowboy and Indian days. A six-shooter, probably not nearly as good as my Desert Eagle, and just an old POS compared to the Glock I’ve taken to carrying with me everywhere, but I liked the romantic idea of a six gun on my hip, strolling the rowdy streets of apocalyptic Houston, plugging Shroomies full of lead.

  Ah. Happy thoughts.

  It’s the simple things that make life worth living, even if they are unrealistic fantasies.

  I dropped the Colt into my bag, hoping I could clean away the corrosion enough to turn it back into a usable weapon.

  Later on, as I was searching one of the upstairs rooms, a young girl’s room by the look of it—

  And I gotta stop right there, because I know what you’re thinking, “Why go into a young girl’s empty bedroom? What were you hoping to find?”

  Yeah.

  I had to ask myself that as I went in, crunching across the molded, then dried, then molded and dried again carpet.

  I sat on the bed and looked at the dresser, painted in pastel colors with mismatched yellow and pink knobs. A mural with a fairy castle and talking stuffed animals was peeling off the wall. A pair of little pink tennis shoes sat beside the dresser after years spent waiting for some ten-year-old to come and slip them on before going outside to play.

  It reminded me of my oldest daughter Kate’s room way back when she was young.

  It made me think about a lot of things from a world that spasmed through its death throes while I was hiding in Bunker Stink, and hoping a tomorrow was waiting for me that would be something like all my yesterdays.

  It wasn’t.

  There was only that mansion and a million like it, crumbling museums, memorials to trivial lives that meant nothing to nobody except the people who lived them, and the families who loved them.

  And then me, sitting on a little dead girl’s bed like a down-n-out troll.

  It made me feel empty.

  All three of my girls are dead. The two grandkids, the same.

  I live alone in Bunker Stink. Two years inside without seeing blue sky and only the static on my shortwave radio to hear every day and remind me just how alone I am in the world. And now I’m out. I’ve seen the Shroomheads, and killed plenty of ‘em. But I’ve yet to find another living, thinking, normal human being.

  Maybe it’s just me, getting used to being alone.

  And mostly, I am. Used to it, I mean.

  Sometimes, loneliness falls on me like a cinderblock, and I make the mistake of letting that emotional shit sink in and then my eyes turn all blurry with tears and it’s not just my girls, and the kid who lived in this room, and the dipshit who owned this house who didn’t take care of those fine antique weapons downstairs. It’s everybody who seemed so intent on fucking up the mundane, drudge-soaked, paycheck-mongering life of football games and barbecues, late rent, and past-due credit cards. My world.

  But in that shit, there was always someone to talk to, and most times there was someone somewhere who liked you enough to share a pizza with, and even hug you once in a while, and say they loved you.

  I sniffled up my bullshit and wiped my eyes.

  Sometimes, I’m just a big sissy.

  That’s when I saw it, the corner of it, really, sticking out from beneath a rat’s nest pile of clothes. A cloth-bound pink book with some kind of artsy-fartsy colorful kiddy drawings on it.

  Kicking the old junk out of the way, I spied an actual diary, labeled as such in big rainbow letters with a puffy-cute unicorn prancing happily across the front.

  I stared at it for a long time before I knelt down to pick it up, not wanting to see the tentative cursive documenting some cute little girl’s life that ended long before it should have.

  That’s not what I found.

  When I brushed away the roach-egg casings and opened it, I saw the diary was empty, not one word written there, except for an inscription:

  For Hannah,

  I hope all your dreams come true.

  I hope your life is full of love and smiles.

  May your most precious memories live in here forever!

  Happy Birthday!

  Love, Mom

  Well, Hannah never got a chance to have any memories. Her party downstairs came to an early end. She died in some horrific way. Her bones gnawed down to dust by some Shroomhead who used to be one of the neighbors. Her parents died in a pool of tears or turned Shroom themselves and killed all their children for a warm meal on a cold Saturday night.

  Life at the end of the world is fucked up.

  November 16, 2 nd entry

  I fe
el like I should say just a little more.

  So, Hannah and Hannah’s mom, thank you.

  The diary means a lot to me.

  With no one to talk to, at least I have myself.

  Oh, and whatever amphibious insect creatures in the future dig this up, and read it to learn what life was like for the previous owners of this fair planet—a bunch of hairless monkey bipeds known as humans. I speak for us all.

  Yeah, I know, being the only writer left on the planet, the historian to a dead race, I’m starting to take some poetic liberties with my prose.

  Goddamn, sometimes I write some smart-sounding shit. Maybe I missed my calling.

  November 17

  I spent a lot of time staring at the bunk above mine last night.

  I know, you’re thinking, “Hey, man, you live in a sausage-shaped septic tank turned into a doomsday bunker buried in your backyard. Isn’t it like, you know, pitch black in there at night?”

  Well yeah. Pretty much every time I button the place up and hunker down for the night, it’s just exactly that.

  The thing is, I keep a nightlight on, a couple actually. Always. They don’t put out much of a glow, just enough. I hate pitch black just as much as the next guy. And I live in a world where I’ll never run out of bulbs. I took the opportunity to stock up on them in the early days of Shroomageddon before I went down for my two-year bit.

  That, and I have all the power I need from my rooftop solar array. Hell, I could probably power two or three bunkers just like mine. It’s just me down here. I’d planned for four more people.

  I keep other lights on a timer that dims them at night and slowly brightens them in the morning. I manually adjust the timers once a week or so to match the day and night cycle outside. It’s one of the tricks that keeps me sane.

  Back to me staring at the bunk above mine.

  You know what I’m going to say so I don’t have to write it, but I will anyway. The enigmatic M.

  Mazzy, I unrealistically hope.

  By the coincidenciest coincidence, the slim woman—I’m guessing on the sex because of her slight build—was living in Mazzy and Rollo’s attic. Lots of people back in the early days of the epidemic and the slow-motion collapse that followed took to hiding out in their attics. A totally shitty idea for the unprepared. The Shroomheads, as I’ve already told you, don’t ever think to look at those square holes in the ceiling covered with a layer of sheetrock that matches the rest of the ceiling. They never climb up on anything to poke their noses through. Their rotted brains just don’t ever make that imaginative leap.

  The downside for an attic-hider is that it gets damn hot up there. Lots of people died of heatstroke after spending the night in the attic after a particularly riotous evening in their neighborhoods, and then not coming down soon enough the next day.

  If the attic of a house is going to be a hiding place, precautions need to be taken. It needs to be ventilated. It needs to be well-stocked with water.

  If somebody’s going to live up there, well, then it needs a whole lot more stuff. And that makes my next goal. Now that I’ve got writing material enough to document my stupidity for posterity, I’m going out on my Arthurian quest. I seek the mysterious M.

  I’ll try not to get my hopes up too high.

  November 18

  Activity over by the elementary school—the herd of Shroomheads who lives there—was running a little too hot for me all day yesterday. So, I watched my monitors, scanned the neighborhood, and as much as I wanted to follow my Johnson off to do something two grades below my standard stupid level, I didn’t. I stayed put in Bunker Stink.

  The morning’s powdered eggs and jerky bacon weren’t sticking to my ribs as well as I’d hoped they would. Besides, I was bored, so I dug into my heaping stash of Punchy Bryan’s Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals and decided to pagan sacrifice a foil-packed, just-add-hot-water dinner of beef stroganoff—the Slavic word for baby shit, I’m sure—to Neptune, the god of the oceans and Vulcan, the god of fire and other crap.

  Maybe.

  Hell, I don’t know—I was trying to sound smart again.

  I took a Greek mythology class in high school once, a long, long time ago, because you got an English credit for it, but it was right after lunch period, and I came to class with a righteous buzz more often than not. Thankfully, my teacher was an ex-hippie, so she never ratted me out, though a week before school ended for the year, she offered to upgrade my D to an A if I hooked her up with my weed connection.

  Done deal, Monty Hall!

  My old lady—that’s a phrase that can mean mother or wife, depending on the context and what part of the country you’re from, in this case, my mom—was surprised when she saw my report card. I’d never earned more than a B in English, not in eleven years of schooling. With the unrealistic optimism peculiar to mother types, she thought I’d finally found my calling, and spent the whole summer after that reading mythology books and asking me questions about Olympic gods all in an effort to nurture my nascent interest.

  Parents do funny things for their kids.

  She should have just asked me what happened. I’d have given her some watered down version of the truth and saved her a bunch of trouble. But she didn’t, so I didn’t.

  Life goes on.

  Well, for one of us, anyway.

  I poured some water in a cup and heated it in the microwave. Not quite fire, but close enough. The hot water went into my foil pouch. Stir the goo and you’re ready for yum!

  That’s called sarcasm. Do you bee people have that in the future?

  One thing I need to keep in mind next time I’m preparing for an apocalypse, I need to taste some of the survival meals before I purchase them by the discount pickup truckload.

  You’d think that if you’re starving and the world has come to an end, anything would taste good.

  Well, the thing is, I’m never actually starving down here.

  Like I said, I planned for five—me, the eventual ex, and the three girls.

  I’ve got plenty of food, and none of it tastes like what anybody would call good. Maybe that’s the main reason I lost so much weight. Maybe before Punchy Bryan decided to make his riches in the Armageddon-on-a-Budget® Ready-to-Eat Survival Meals business by running his smiling happy ass in all those commercials every time there was a high school shooting or some foreign dictator had to bolster his poll numbers by badmouthing Americans, he should have checked first that he had taste buds.

  I don’t think he did.

  Or maybe his old lady—mother or wife in this context, either works—couldn’t cook for shit. You never know.

  Because of all that, I crave real food. Any kind of real food.

  And I sometimes pray for a piece of luck from my Greek god friends that one day I’ll meet Punchy Bryan and his chef so I can beat the shit out of them, and ask them to answer one honest question—do people actually shit in these bags before they freeze-dry them?

  Back to what I was saying before I distracted myself with Zeus and his Olympian buddies. I don’t know if it was them or just Mother Nature doing her usual random thing, but a front is blowing in from the north, and it’s turning cold. The sky is covered in soft, gray lumps, you know the way the clouds blanket the world sometimes in November. The wind is blowing out of the north and the drizzle is starting.

  Shroomheads don’t wear clothes, so you can see why they’d prefer to spend their time indoors snuggling with their fungal love when the sky turns gray, and the wind has a cold bite in it.

  Good for me.

  I’m going to give them an hour or so to settle in, then I’m heading out to see if I can find some sign of my mystery lady.

  November 18, 2 nd entry

  Made it back!

  I was out the rest of the day. I mean, all of it.

  By the time I buttoned up the hatch when I got home, it was full-on dark outside. With overcast skies, and no moon glow to speak of, I was fumbling in the dark, trying to find my way
home by feel. Mostly.

  I have a red filter for my flashlight. I clicked it on and off from time to time to illuminate my way back. Dangerous shit, that is. A light out in this kind of dark will draw the attention of any night-shift Shroomhead who’s dumb enough to be sitting on the porch freezing his ‘nads and staring at the dark.

  Luckily, none were. Or they were too lazy to come after me.

  Either way, I made it home, scolding myself the whole way for venturing so far from home and not leaving myself enough time to get safely back to Bunker Stink before sundown.

  Note to self: Round up some night vision goggles.

  I don’t know where I’ll find those, but there’s got to be some lying around somewhere. The military was all into setting up perimeters and manning roadblocks for awhile there as Houston was lurching day-by-day into chaos. Maybe I can find one of their vehicles, maybe a few of them. And, as morbid as it sounds, soldiers’ bodies, fatigues and bones by now, draped in their equipment, intact where they died, hiding under a tank or something.

  You never know.

  I mean I saw something up on Interstate 10 when I was going to down to Plinko Ranch the other day, but that highway scares me. It looks like a battlefield. Burned-out cars. Wrecks. Disconnected bones. Suitcases, disgorged of their contents. Anything you can name with wheels. Anything anybody might have found in a Walmart or a living room before the crash. All of it, scattered and broken, with weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete. Most of it demolished by the Shroomheads with their addiction to destruction.

  But I’m rambling.

  After getting out today and working my way to my destination, I started my search in Rollo and Mazzy’s front yard.

  They had a dense hedge of red-tipped photinias they used to keep trimmed up all nice and square in front of their house. Now the hedge has grown to near twelve feet tall with branches pointing out every which way like it wanted nothing more than for me to stand behind it and hide. It was easy to peer through the gaps in the shrubs and spy on the elementary school across the street, knowing nobody over there could see me. Hell, I could have been wearing a neon-mango reflective roadside work vest, and I’d have been invisible.