Dusty's Diary 3: One Frustrated Man's Apocalypse Story Read online

  Bunker Stink is my security blanket. Going outside for a few hours or even days, that’s one kind of thing. I know shelter is never far away. Running off on a trek across Houston, with no safe base to hide in when the shit starts raining down, that could be the bad choice that finally kills me.

  December 28th

  It was cold again today. I went outside under a thick blanket of weepy clouds that seemed low enough to touch.

  I cleaned out the BBQ pit, put the ashes in a bucket, hauled them down to the culvert near the community pool, and dumped them there on the ground. I rinsed the bucket in water trickling down at the bottom of the ditch. Moving the ashes away from the house seemed like a good idea. Who knows what aromatic scents will draw in a curious Shroomhead?

  Afterward, I walked the neighborhood. Cautiously. Of course.

  The weather was shitty. Most of the Shroomies had enough sense to stay indoors, cuddling their girlfriends or playing with their dicks. I mean, I guess they do that, right? It’s hard to imagine an uninhibited Shroomhead foregoing that personal pleasure.

  Still, I kept an eye out for anyone in the hood besides me. In truth, I was looking for Amelia.

  I hadn’t seen her since she left after Christmas dinner. We said we’d do it again. Dinner, I mean. Getting together. We didn’t plan a date or anything, but I guess I figured maybe we’d make a regular thing of it. Maybe every couple of days. Maybe every day.

  I even thought I’d see her around the hood. If not in person, then on my neighborhood CCTV network.

  Nope.

  Each day passes, and I can’t help but wonder if I said something wrong. I replay the dinner in my mind. I think of the jokes I tried to make. I wonder if I offended her? I ask myself over and over again if I showed too much interest in her crazy aunt, or not enough. I even started to second-guess the Model 1860 Colt.

  I know she liked it.

  But, I doubt myself. My skills for reading peoples’ faces are rusty.

  By the time I got home, I was back in limbo again, not liking the ambiguity of my relationship with Amelia, and resenting her for having talked to me in the first place. I was doing fine all by myself in the world. I started wishing I’d never crossed paths with her.

  January 1st

  I’d hoped she would come by for the holiday. I even had a can of black-eyed peas ready. You know, for luck. I don’t even like black-eyed peas.

  Still, no Amelia.

  I killed time in the morning with an old Christmas movie. I know the season is over, but I came across one that had fallen down behind my TV cabinet. What was I doing peeking behind the cabinet at the cables and dust bunnies? No comment. Except to say that boredom and loneliness can make almost anything interesting.

  That reminds me of a story.

  I was on a tour of Alcatraz some years ago when the girls were young. The eventual ex had copped some free tickets and a four-night hotel stay from a radio contest. A story that turned out to be ninety-nine-percent bullshit. The hotel was a condo owned by her greasy fuck buddy from down in Plinko Ranch. I never figured out why he let my family use the place over a long weekend, but I don’t question it too much now. We enjoyed ourselves. We spent way too much on going out to eat. Got to ride a restored trolley and took the ferry out to Alcatraz among other touristy shit.

  Even though Bunker Stink had already been sunk in my backyard by then, I never made the connection that my life might one day end up like some of those hardened 1930s gangsters who lived in Alcatraz’s solitary confinement cells.

  There was a story about one guy, who once they slammed the door shut on the isolation cell and he was stuck there in the dark by himself, tore a button off his shirt, tossed it into the air and then proceeded to find it in the dark. Over and over, day and night. He felt like he was going crazy, until months later the door opened and he found he still had his sanity. Mostly.

  Finding the Christmas DVD was like that. Funny how dust bunnies can become a source of comfort and entertainment.

  Make sense?

  Ah, who the hell cares? It makes sense to me.

  Anyway, that was my morning.

  At noon, I tossed a bag of popcorn into the microwave and popped open an ice-cold beer—one from the dwindling stash in my dorm-sized refrigerator—and I started my New Year’s Day tradition. Unfortunately, alone.

  I have a DVD of the 2005 Longhorn-USC Rose Bowl, the college championship. Only the greatest football game ever played. Yeah, I’ve seen the game at least a couple dozen times now. I know how it ends. I memorized the bad calls. I’ve felt the highs and the lows, but when Vince Young carries that ball across the goal line with seconds left to win the game, I gotta be honest, it tingles my toddlers every time. That’s one-hundred-percent, red-blooded American, hardcore excitement right there.

  I holler every time.

  Even this year. Even though I was alone.

  After the game, I sat on the couch, finished the cold remains of my styrofoamy popcorn, and watched the TV go black. I listened to the sounds of Bunker Stink. It creaks like an old house. I think as the water content of the soil it’s buried in changes, the tank shifts. It moves as the winter temperatures slowly seep down through the soil. I hear the soft whir of the ventilation fan motor, and the soft rhythm in the air from an imbalance on the fan. Dust collects there and throws it off. I’ll need to clean that soon. I should have done it already. I’m behind on my maintenance chores. Not good for a man who wants to die of old age one day.

  I wonder what the hell happened with Amelia?

  What did I do?

  Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

  Back to loneliness.

  January 6th

  Wallowing in tears is for sissies and soon-to-be-dead people.

  STB dead.

  STBD.

  STD. Ouch. Probably not.

  I’m looking for something to take my mind off things.

  I sucked up my whiney ways and put ‘em back in the suitcase. I tried to read through my books on planting a backyard garden. They were boring. I couldn’t concentrate. Half the time I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over again, the words forming in my head to ensure I was really reading, but I couldn’t keep my attention on the page. It wanders back to Amelia. I don’t even think of Aunt Millie much. She’s a far-off fantasy. Might as well be Bo Derek on a unicorn, come to fly me off to Fairyville, where I’ll while away my golden years popping gummy bear Viagras and sipping wine at sunset.

  Amelia was real. For a minute that idea flaked to the floor with my Christmas tree’s pine needles.

  I went outside. Maybe a little dangerously, but I felt like I swallowed a big dose of Fuck-it, and it hasn’t worn off yet. Matter of fact, it’s settling in for the long haul.

  I have fantasies of getting drunk on some Fuck-it, loading up my mags into my tactical vest and going out to Rambo my way around the ‘hood.

  Something to do.

  We’ve got a huge football stadium over by the high school. Big-ass thing. Built it in a muddy cow field the school district annexed across the street from campus. When the school board went stomping around trying to convince everybody to vote for the bond, I was against it.

  Lots of reasons for that.

  For one, spending eighty million on a high school football stadium seemed to me like just about the stupidest expenditure of educational dollars my community could make. Seriously? Eighty million. I know folks love high school football, but we could have built a whole ‘nother goddamn school for that. Besides, none of my daughters played football. They weren’t cheerleaders. Not one of them was on the drill team. A couple played softball. They had no use for the West Harris County Megalith.

  That, and Amanda Cox, the president of the school board, was a slimy bat covered in a thick layer of powdery fake-up. Her brother-in-law owned a giant construction company that everyone knew would bid on the project. Nobody doubted he’d win it—they’d underbid to get the contract, knowing they could make it up one way or anot
her. That was just how biz got done back in the day.

  And that’s what happened. Just like everybody knew it would.

  The cost overruns drove the price tag on that concrete concussion shrine to nearly a hundred million. Once you’ve sunk eighty into the project, what’s another twenty? Every voter in the district figured that extra twenty was just graft money shared out among the right folks sitting behind the right desks with balls big enough to put their hands out and demand it.

  Not a one of us liked it.

  Still, nobody ever took the time to dig through the school board records and whistle-blow the whole project down the shitter. I mean, how does a regular guy who’s workin’ sixty hours a week find the time to do something like that? Where does he start? I couldn’t just skip an afternoon’s business and pop over to the records department and ask for the Evidence of Corruption files.

  They built that fuckin’ concrete monstrosity in the muddy cow field, and in the winter, when the leaves fell off the trees, I could see it standing tall over the roofs of the houses between my place and there.

  Funny thing about the project was that the bid was placed for a new kind of super sports field, generations better than AstroTurf, and better than real grass by a mile. So they said anyway. I forget how much money was written into the bid for it, but when the stadium opened, the field was covered in cheap-ass real grass.

  There was a big stink when that came out. Some fellow made a lot of noise in the local paper. A couple dozen good country folks lined up to discredit him and tell the rest of us this newspaper fellow was full of shit, just trying to make his name on a scandal he was creating, and besides, he was probably a fag.

  How could they know? Why was it relevant? In southeast Texas, the slur was enough.

  Soon enough some sparkle-eyed Hollywood hunk got caught with his dick in a hooker’s dog collar. Two of those four reality star sisters—you know, the ones not really famous for anything—were knocked up by basketball players or rap music dudes they’d only known a few months. And the President pointed his little cruise missile cock at Bumfuckistan and snuffed a noisy peasant terrorist who was sitting in the outhouse behind his goat farm fantasizing about American centerfold titties. The voters forgot about the missing super turf. Slimy Amanda Cox and her bat-fucker husband slipped off to Hawaii on a chartered jet. Her brother-in-law bought a new place on the beach in Belize.

  My property tax bill went up. I ran my credit cards into a deeper ditch to pay the unexpected commitment I had nothing to do with.

  Status quo.

  I know, I know. You’re thinkin’, what the hell does this have to do with anything?

  Yeah, I’m getting to that.

  I spent a good part of yesterday scoping out that stadium. Turns out, the physical requirements for keeping sneaky high school kids without overpriced tickets from seeing their football team play are pretty much the same for keeping Shroomheads out.

  That stadium is a fortress.

  And what’s better than a concrete fortress with heavy steel-bar gates? One with a big grassy field in the middle, all fertilized up with the best black loam graft-money can buy, just waiting to be tilled up and planted with corn and green beans and pumpkins and whatnot.

  It’s gonna be the most secure goddamn farm in the western hemisphere.

  January 6th, second entry

  Flies in the bug juice?

  Sure.

  The stadium sits across four lanes of asphalt and a previously landscaped median from my neighborhood. It’s not just a road, it’s a territorial boundary. Rollo’s clan of Shroomies doesn’t cross it. The clan over there doesn’t come over here. They aren’t like Rollo’s bunch. Matter of fact, they make Rollo’s gang seem a little bit lazy and civilized. There’s a lot more of them, too.

  I was up in the sky boxes—yeah, that’s right, a high school stadium with fuckin’ sky boxes—scoping them out for security, thinking I might be able to make the move out of Bunker Stink into a couple of them. I could knock doorways through a few walls and join them up into a nice living room, a bedroom, storeroom, etcetera, all with a wall of windows for me to see the sun in the sky and for me to watch my crops thrive down on the fifty-yard line. I could rig up my solar panels. Set up my escape routes. Secure the whole place. I was thinking it might make the perfect post-apoc mansion.

  I was standing by one of the light poles at the top edge of the bleachers, looking west past the school, when I saw what I’m going to call the Stadium Clan.

  It was the squeal that caught my attention at first. A little herd of feral pigs came running around the corner of the gymnasium, bolting at full-speed for the student parking lot. My first thought was glorious, crispy bacon.

  Seriously! Fucking bacon, right there.

  You have no idea how bleak the future can look with no bacon in it, and then to see five or six pre-bacons squealing across the ground maybe a hundred yards away. Well, I’m not going to make it all pervy, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel a little tingle in my trousers.

  That ended as soon as I spotted the first of the Stadium Clan Shroomies chasing my beautiful breakfast friends. They rounded the corner just seconds after the pigs. A few at first, but I heard many more.

  Before the pigs made it down the length of the building, another bunch of hunters ran around a corner in front of the swine, blocking their path to the student parking lot.

  “To the right!” I rooted for the pigs. “You can make it!” Unfortunately, my bacon telepathy wasn’t wired in right, and the lead pig, instead of veering right and making for the student parking lot and the empty fields beyond, cut left into a gap between the vocational wing and the freshman classrooms. What I knew—because my three daughters went to this school—and the pigs were about to find out, was that gap came to a dead-end at a hallway connecting the two wings.

  The pigs disappeared from view. The Stadium Clan’s two groups of chasers met up at the entrance, trapping the pigs as they ran in to seize their prey. It looked like seventy or so vicious Shroomies in the clan, but I was still rooting for the pigs. I mean, feral pigs aren’t like their cuddly, pink cousins waddling through a factory farm on the way to the grocery store’s refrigerator section. Feral pigs are fast as hell on their short legs. They’re strong, and they’re mean, especially the ones with those tusks. Those bastards will rip your guts right out.

  Maybe an exaggeration. Maybe not.

  A hunting guide told me that once when I went hunting Russian boar hogs on a ranch outside of Crockett. I think those big bastards came down from a strain that had never been domesticated. Most of the ones I saw were bigger than me, and would chase you down and gore you if they got wind of you. They were fearless. The one I shot that day topped four hundred pounds.

  That’s a long way to get around to saying that I figured that bunch of Shroomies didn’t know what they were in for. Sure, they might concoct a way to tackle one of the smaller pigs. They’d probably even kill it. Plenty of ‘em would get gored in the process, and most of that bacon would slip away. I hoped into my neighborhood, where a well-placed shot from my rifle would be worth the risk for the bounty of pork I’d get.

  That’s not how it went, though.

  I watched and watched. No pigs came running back out from between the buildings. The Stadium Clan made a hell of a racket, and then pigs started a different kind of squealing. Those Shroomies had caught a couple of ‘em. And from the sounds of it, they ripped ‘em open with their fingers and teeth. The sound of something screaming while it’s being eaten alive has a kind of inter-species universality to it. You don’t need to speak pig to understand.

  I stayed up in the bleachers, freezing my nads and watching for a good long while. No pigs came out. Those Shroomies had killed every one. They feasted on the flesh and innards, and eventually most of ‘em waddled out, headed back to their den with bulging bellies and bloody smiles.

  The Stadium Clan was smart enough to trap those pigs and mean enough to kill them without
a weapon. I don’t know how they pulled that off, but if I didn’t think they were a dangerous bunch before, I know it now.

  January 8th

  I spent most of yesterday preoccupied with that stadium. A good thing, I think. Better that then ruminating over Amelia. Maybe she got munched. I wondered that about a dozen times, but it doesn’t make sense. She’s too wily.

  Maybe she wandered through the wrong neighborhood, and a prepper with a long rifle caught her in his scope and popped her from two blocks away. How many like me are around? If I made it—if Aunt Millie survived—at least a year past the collapse, there’s got to be more of us, right? Dozens, probably hundreds of us in Houston.

  A thousand?

  Could be.

  Hell, for all I know they all commandeered a boat and skipped off to a Caribbean island they could cleanse of Shroomheads, a place with blue water and solar panels and bananas and coconuts and fertile soil and all the fish filets and tasty crabs you could ever want to eat. No more Punchy Bryan’s recycled donkey buttholes extruded into Salisbury Steak form. Always with the dubious brown gravy. Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

  You know all about sarcasm, right? I explained that already, right?

  People back in the twenty-first century don’t eat donkey buttholes on purpose, unless they’ve been processed into maybe a hotdog or a fast-food burger. And who knows what the fuck those are really made of? Salty, pink goo squished into a patty-shaped mold, crisped on a hot grill until it’s just one shade darker than floating corpse meat, and then served on a bun by a colorful clown. Get yourself a franchise to sling that shit at the neighborhood kiddies and watch them turn into pear-shaped waddlers while you shop for a big house down in Plinko ranch and charter a boat to go deep sea fishing on the weekends. That’s the American dream, motherfuckers!

  I digress.

  Back to my island fantasy for a moment.