Dusty's Diary 4: One Frustrated Man's Apocalypse Story Read online

  I spotted it—a tugboat listing hard to starboard, stationary in water far from the shore. Looking for anything to keep my thoughts out of the dangerous pitfalls in my head, I asked, “What do you imagine island life would be like in the Caribbean?”

  “I’m not the one selling this turd,” she snapped, completely in character, of course. “Why don’t you tell me how you think this idea will work?”

  I went with the pitch I’d been perfecting in the conversation I’d been imagining over and over. “You seem to have plenty of book smarts. I have a big dose of natural DIY in my blood. I know how things work. Lots of things, and I can fix most of ‘em.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Probably, but not on purpose.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  It was hard not to let her draw me into an argument. “My point is, skipping over all the details of learning to sail, finding a boat, stocking it, and navigating across the deep blue sea, there have to be hundreds of islands out there, right?”

  “Over seven thousand.”

  That number seemed general, but weirdly specific and unrealistic at the same time. “Are you serious?”

  Amelia glanced back at me with a face I couldn’t decipher. “I don’t know why I remember that. I saw it once on a geography show on Nickelodeon when I was six.”

  Trying to guess whether she was fucking with me, I said, “You’ve got a good memory.”

  Amelia looked like there was something else there, but something she didn’t want to say.

  I told her, “You probably didn’t know how smart you were because your teachers never challenged you.”

  Amelia shook her head and she reached up to touch one of the most prominent warts hidden beneath her hoodie. “I think sometimes—”

  My laugh echoed across the lake.

  She glared at me. “If you keep that up, we’ll have to paddle all the way to New Orleans before we find a safe spot to stay the night.”

  “Sorry.” I dug my fence board deep into the water to get us moving again. “The warts make Shroomies crazy and stupid. It’s like brain damage.”

  “Maybe it made me smarter.”

  “Doubtful.”

  The tugboat slowly grew larger in front of us.

  “With seven thousand chances,” I told her, “there’s got to be islands down there with nobody left alive.”

  “Only because there’s no food or water on them. You’ve got to keep in mind, wartheads can survive anywhere we can.”

  “Okay,” I conceded the point. “I’ll bet we can find an island where there are few enough left that we can shoot ‘em.”

  “Shoot them all?” Amelia laughed in the mean girl way she does.

  “Sure. I have like forty-thousand rounds in my bunker. Hell, we could float just offshore and pick ‘em off one-by-one until they’re all dead.”

  “And they’re going to come down and let you do it?”

  “You’ve seen how they behave,” I argued. “They might. Hell, they probably would.”

  “I think they’d catch on eventually and stop coming to the shore.”

  “So, we find an island with food and water and not that many of them. We shoot as many as we can from offshore. Then, we put your big brain to use and figure out how to exterminate the rest. Voila! We’ll have a whole island where we can build a normal life. You have to admit, that'd be better than waiting around here for a horde to wander through.”

  Amelia took a moment before she answered, like she was giving the idea honest consideration. “I guess this island thing isn’t the worst idea. I can imagine about a thousand pitfalls, but hell, you might be on the right track.”

  “Maybe we’ll even find an island that’s already been cleared,” I said. “One that already has a population of normal people.”

  Amelia’s paddle stopped where she held it, dragging in the water instead of pushing against it. Her head dropped, and she started to look back at me again out of the corner of her eye.

  I haven’t been around other people for three years, yet I’m not so stupid I can’t read disappointment when I see it. I made the guess that Amelia was thinking about her warts and what other people might think of them. “Not everybody is like Aunt Millie.”

  "Yes, they are."

  January 14th

  Technically, it’s not the 14th. It’s the evening of January 13th—well, late afternoon on the 13th. Since I’m back on the night shift, and half my night will be on the 13th, and the other half will be on the 14th, and I figure since I actually write in my diary about that night before I go to bed on the morning of the 14th, it’s the 14th. You know, like anybody cares.

  Anyways, Amelia and I slept through the day on the sloping floor of the tugboat’s wheelhouse with windows opening up an unbroken view in every direction. I woke well before the sun had gone down, while Amelia was still asleep. I laid there thinking about nothing, listening to the gulls squawking over more nothing, watching the light slowly change color in the sky. I found myself staring at the crisscross of steel I-beams on the ceiling. They’d all been painted white and were clean at one time. Now, rust lined most of the seams, and the welds were blossoming to bright orange as the paint flaked away.

  On the bulkhead over the helm, painted in six-inch gold letters using an old-timey font, was the name, Captain Jimmy Fontaine. This must have been his boat. I wondered about the day the name was painted up there, how proud Jimmy must have been? I wondered if captaining his very own tugboat had been his dream, the highpoint of his life? Did he take his wife and kids for a ride down the ship channel to show off his new toy? Did his business do well? Did he have trouble paying his mortgage? Was his wife a pretty young thing, or a snaggle-toothed harpy who ran him down in front of the in-laws when he had to work late and miss a birthday party? Did Jimmy love his kids, go to their soccer games, PTA meetings, and dentist appointments?

  I wanted to believe Jimmy’s life had been perfect, and his future shiny-bright. I don’t know why that was important to me in that moment, but it was, even as visions of Jimmy’s button-nosed tykes turned into wart-headed little gargoyles gnawing on the neighbors’ cat.

  For no reason I could deduce, I started to worry about the kayak. I had no cause to believe it would go anywhere. I mean, who’d swim out and steal it? It might sink, though, so I fretted over the length of half-rotten rope tied to the kayak’s bow and wrapped around a cleat on the tugboat’s gunwale. Would it break from the pull of the tide? Would I have to swim through that festering cold water to get to shore, and then walk all night with wet shoes?

  My thoughts turned to Amelia and what she’d said that morning about Aunt Millie kicking her off the barge because of a few warts. It didn’t matter to Millie that Amelia hadn’t been showing any sign of madness or mental debility. Their blood relationship hadn’t swayed Millie to mercy, not in the slightest.

  I wondered how I’d feel in that situation, how I'd react. For a girl of Amelia's age to be tossed into a world where she surely had to believe she was going to be murdered, no wonder her defenses were so formidable. No wonder she had such a difficult time trusting.

  I needed to keep that in mind the next time her sharp words set to work grinding down my ego and turning me toward harsh judgments and silent decisions. She was still just a kid, the daughter of one of my friends. At the very least I owed it to Rollo to look after her.

  She was snoring softly, maybe dreaming of school dances and Friday night football games with her friends. Perhaps there'd been a cute boy on the third row in geometry class. Maybe there was a song stuck in her head, one of those by that dancy chick with the twerky butt and the big voice. I hoped that was the stuff of her dreams—that, or fantasies about the future she should have been living out in the suburbs, the one the Toe Fungus Fuckers ruined while we responsible adults were busy giving each other the stink-eye at Walmart and shitting all over each other on Facebook.

  It’s no secret, I get a bug on my balls over that kinda shit
.

  And maybe all my bitchin’ about it will help me to one day get over it.

  I don’t know.

  Right now, my reality is simple—I live in a world of bones and monsters. It stinks, and it wants to kill me. And sometimes, I’ll admit, I want to let it.

  All those long months in Bunker Stink, going through the motions of staying alive—it did things to me. I think I learned something valuable. Probably a couple of things, but the biggest was the importance of hope. People need it like they need air and water. When it’s gone, it doesn’t kill you, not right away. The best parts of you die, and after a while, so does what’s left.

  I’d so wanted Miss Three ‘O Clubs to be real.

  I pulled in a deep breath and blinked away that sentimental shit before I had a big sissy moment.

  I stopped staring at Amelia and instead looked up at the color of the sky through the glass. It wouldn’t do me any good for Amelia to wake up and see me watching her with puppy eyes, not knowing that all I was thinking about was how things used to be, how they should have been. This day marked the first time she’d been asleep while I was awake. It meant, despite the gulf between us, she was starting to trust me. I didn’t want to ruin that.

  I heaved a sigh and decided to get myself moving. It was usually an excellent way to get my mind out of the shitty bleak holes it sometimes fell into.

  As quiet as I could, I got up on my feet, feeling my old knees creak and grind. I pulled my pack up on my back. Post-apoc American Express—never leave home without it.

  I gave my rifle a long stare. I was planning on rummaging around on the tugboat. If I found something, the backpack was a good place to carry it. The rifle, though, would only get in my way. However, I did double check the Glock—in its holster, rounds in the mag. Knife in the sheath. Flashlight. Matches. Sturdy boots.

  I was ready to rock the apoc.

  Too bad there was no way to get a t-shirt.

  I crossed over to the door at the back of the wheelhouse. The steel door had four locking handles to keep it battened tight when the big waves came pounding. I’m sure they have some nautical name, but whatever. There aren’t any sailors left to teach me the lingo.

  Three of the handles turned smoothly. One of them creaked loud enough to startle the nearby gulls. Their racket spread across the roosting flock, sending them all into a noisy frenzy as they flapped into the air. An eye-stinging breeze of ammonia stench wafted past me into the wheelhouse as I turned to see if I’d awakened Amelia.

  Nope. She slept right through it, so I made my way out onto the platform behind the wheelhouse.

  The steep stairs down were splotched with dry droppings and wet puddles of whitish yellow, each with a raisin-sized black lump at the center. The wall behind me was streaked with the stuff, and the handrail was thoroughly painted. Every time I grabbed it to keep my balance—it seemed—one of those fat squawkers had just dumped his morning load there.

  Once at the landing, I wiped my hands on my pants and realized I’d just made a mistake. Now the stink was going to stick with me until I had a chance to wash them.

  Ugh.

  Some of the gulls were settling back down on the rails, glaring at me and laughing.

  I wondered if they tasted like chicken. Seagulls aren’t part of the traditional American cuisine, but hey, it’s a new day. New rules. Could I smoke and salt gull meat into tasting like bacon?

  I didn’t know, which told me I needed to find reading material on techniques for smoking meat for preservation. I didn’t have anything like it in my insufficient prepper library back in Bunker Stink.

  I found an open door leading to the tugboat’s hidden innards. Peeking in, I saw a staircase zigzagging down to a narrow hall a deck below me. A lot more of the tugboat lay below the waterline than I had guessed, Most of it, in fact.

  Before going inside, I scanned across the surface of the lake, checking for potential dangers—habit.

  Nothing out there but flat water and obnoxious birds. I clicked my flashlight on and stepped through the bulkhead, setting my soles down as quietly as I could on crackly paint flaked up from the rust growing beneath.

  Good!

  That’s what I told myself. Those big, crunchy flakes under my boots meant no feet had been that way in a long time. Still, I drew my pistol. Better to have it ready and not need it than the other alternative. You know, getting munched by an unexpected bitey-bastard jumping out of a shadow.

  Water had pooled along one side of the short hallway, there because the tug sat at an angle on the sandbar that had stranded it. The water wasn’t deep, maybe a few inches, right against the wall. The floor was dry along the other side. Still, water inside a boat was never a sign of anything good.

  At the end of the hall, another stairway cut down through the floor. No sign hung on the wall to tell me what was down there. No map of the boat’s interior told me what to expect. That kind of shit existed in the realm of glitzy Hollywood action fables—you know, the exact doodad thingy the hero needs, always inexplicably at hand.

  I sighed.

  I was no Hollywood hero. I wasn't even stuck in a long-ass nightmare. Just real life, and the crappy side of Murphy’s law regulating my reality.

  I followed the stairs down.

  January 14th, second entry

  I found my feet on a steel mesh platform looking down into the boat’s dark engine room, breathing oily air rich with the metallic undertones of a salt mine and old decay.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the water stood ankle-deep on the port side, knee-deep on the starboard. I didn't spy any snappy crabs and there was no foul-tempered lobster. The water sloshed in the most subtle way from one wall to the other as the tug rocked on its keel with the push of the tide.

  Sci-fi horror memories of krakens and black lagoon creatures kept my feet dry on the platform.

  Two diesel engines, monster-strong hunks of machinery, each the size of a car, crouched in their mounts, corroding in the salt water. On the outside, anyway. Inside, I figured they were coated with motor oil and diesel—unless they'd sprung a leak.

  There was no reason both engines shouldn’t run, I guessed.

  Yeah, I know, so many assumptions were wrapped into that guess it was laughable.

  I had no idea what circumstances led to Captain Jimmy running his tugboat aground on a sandbar in brackish Bear Lake. Could it be that Jimmy docked it one day after work and got munched by a Shroomy while stopping for a loaf of bread on the way home to the missus? Maybe the tug sat undisturbed at the dock until one of the storms tore it away from its moorings and left it stranded on the sandbar, waiting with full tanks of diesel fuel for me to arrive and chug off to my tanned-titty Caribbean paradise.

  Clearly, that was the most optimistic set of circumstances. Any one of a thousand possibilities would mean the fuel tanks had been drained. The engines wouldn’t run. And the hull would leak just enough that even if everything else magically worked, I’d sink three hundred miles out in the Gulf, far enough I’d have no chance of making it back to shore, not even in a lifeboat.

  Oh yeah, there wasn’t a lifeboat up on deck, not one that I saw, anyway. Not a deal-killer. I figured any attempt to scavenge one would meet with success. It’s not like the damn things all sunk. Lifeboats are kinda designed to do pretty much one thing—to not sink, right? My bet was I could find ‘em washed up on the shore of the bay, or even still strapped down on the decks of hundreds of ships anchored in the channel. The inflatable kind were probably all shit by now. The big ones they tied onto the sides of cruise ships weren’t for me. The ones that looked like rectangular donuts of foam wrapped in canvas with a nylon web bottom, those things had to be everywhere.

  No, a lifeboat would not be a problem.

  Still reluctant to wade through the black water, I stayed on the stairs and shined my light around the engine room. I didn't spot any horny mer-men waiting to gang rape me. No hungry piranha were peeking out of the dark water.

  Thinki
ng in sequence of what I’d need to fire those big engines up, I didn't see anything that looked like a bank of batteries. I admit, though, I didn't know what I was looking for. The image of a car battery was in my mind, with a positive and negative post, with a black and red cable leading to a starter. But the batteries to kick off the starters for big diesel engines like the pair I was looking at? Holy crap, how big would those puppies have to be? The size of a couch, maybe? Or perhaps Captain Jimmy had a bunch of car batteries stacked in a cabinet all wired up in series?

  Nothing like that showed in my light.

  Fuel? Where the hell did that come from? I didn't see a tank in the engine compartment, none overhead. Some lines led forward. Others trailed aft. Which were which? No idea. Ducting overhead sucked out heat, more ducts funneled away exhaust.

  That was about all I was able to learn from my dry perch as my Mr. Fixit superpowers felt like they were abandoning me.

  I headed back up the stairs and decided to search out the aft section of the tugboat first. Maybe my automobile intuition led me that way. Every car I’d ever owned had a gas tank in the rear. Well, except for that damn VW that never ran worth a shit.

  The L-shaped hallway leading aft took me to a bunkroom with narrow, stacked bunks for six sleepers. It reminded me of Bunker Stink. A desk stood against one wall, and appeared—as far as I could tell—to be the place where Skipper Jimmy handled the admin tasks of running his tugboat business.

  I found the head—that’s how boat people say commode—and a small RV-style galley with a fridge I declined to open. A quick search of the cabinets yielded no food. The boat had likely been ransacked long ago.

  Back up through the hall above the engine room, I headed forward, getting comfortable with the darkness and the certainty that I was alone. And then I stopped and reminded myself not to let complacency be the cause of my death. Wariness was my friend. The infected could be hiding anywhere.

  REMINDER TO DUSTY: You’re a cheeseburger. Act like it!

  It sucks losing your place at the pinnacle of the food chain.

  Flashlight to illuminate my way, and pistol at the ready, I moved again, cautiously.