Dusty's Diary 3: One Frustrated Man's Apocalypse Story Page 6

  “With nothing.”

  “No food. No weapon. No clothes. Not a thing. She didn’t ask me if I was okay. Nothing. She saw the lumps, and that was it.”

  January 11th

  Amelia woke me in the dark.

  “What time is it?” I asked, seeing the billows of my breath condensing in the air between us.

  “Nearly eight o’clock.”

  I pulled myself up to sitting, feeling stiff all over, feeling my knees ache. “Did you just wake up?”

  Amelia shook her head.

  “You should have gotten me up when you woke up.”

  She smiled. “You needed the sleep.”

  I stretched and yawned. “Thanks. Do you think we can make it through downtown? Should we try to go wide, maybe take the long way around?”

  “Let’s see what kind of pace we can keep.”

  I rolled up to my knees and started checking my gear. “I can be ready to go in five minutes. You?”

  “I’m ready now. Don’t rush. A few minutes won’t make a difference.”

  January 11th, second entry

  Even with the sun down, it didn’t feel as frigid outside as it did when we started the journey. Houston never stays cold for long.

  With most of a moon overhead to light the way, and a cold fog obscuring the world, I was able to see a hundred feet. We made our way to highway 10 and made good progress hiking its paved lanes. Given the conditions, it was the safest path. There was no good reason for any Shroomhead to be on the highway. What remained of any corpse trapped in a car had long been picked clean. Every abandoned automobile and overturned truck had been ransacked a thousand times over by people making their escape from the great city on foot.

  Nothing remained but metal car bodies and frames, waiting for the paint to flake away so they could rust back into the soil.

  For a regular Joe born in the twentieth century, a guy who learned to drive on American’s modern highway system, walking on I-10 was painfully slow. It seemed to run in an endless straight line. When it did turn, the curve was gradual, fading into the fog as to make me wonder sometimes if we’d been trapped by a mean-ass God and set to walk through the night in endless circles.

  Not really. But it did cross my mind.

  On the rosy side of things, walking at a steady pace on the smooth concrete was easier on my knees than all the squatting and sneaking that made the first leg of the journey suck so much. And the highway designation signs painted in the traffic lanes, ten feet long and eight wide, served to remind us at regular intervals we were on the right path, Eastbound I-10.

  Keeping our tactical silence as we trekked for hours and miles, I completely missed downtown. The tall buildings mostly south of the highway were obscured by the fog and the dark. It wasn’t until Amelia stopped for a drink that she pointed and said, “The old fairgrounds should be over there.”

  “What?” I didn’t believe it. “We already passed downtown?”

  “The worst of it’s behind us.”

  I checked my watch. “Still plenty of dark left.”

  She insisted. “I have a place in one of the exhibition buildings down there. It’s a good place to stop.”

  “Lead the way.”

  January 12th

  I woke up to gray afternoon light shining in through a row of skylights. This one of Amelia’s safe houses had been an office for accountants or clerks or people doing esoteric, oddly-named jobs, the kind that make no sense to anyone outside the industry. The office room was one of six lined up on the second floor of a small administrative building inside an expansive show barn that spanned enough dirt-floored acres for old Sam Walton to build a few of his discount marts inside.

  The office wasn’t large, so it didn’t take much effort to notice Amelia was gone. That didn’t worry me. Not at that moment. I figured if she’d decided to abandon my slow ass I couldn’t blame her. The more likely guess was that she was out searching for a meal, or just rummaging through the acres and acres of craft booths still standing in rows down on the main floor.

  I gathered up my stuff and stepped out of the office, double-checking that the latch clicked home to keep the door closed. Locking wasn’t necessary, but a closed door kept the larger varmints out.

  A metal-grate catwalk made up the hallway behind the six upstairs offices and led to a steel stairway down to the main event floor. In the other direction, a doorway led to a staircase outside. Halfway down, the catwalk had a T-intersection leading to a wall and a ladder that ran up through a roof hatch.

  We had three escape routes. That was something I figured I could learn from Amelia—how to select a place to crash for the night when out in the wild, definitely a place with multiple exits.

  I walked down the catwalk hall and came to a lounge area, really just a section of the second floor that had never been walled in. A microwave sat in a cupboard built against the next office wall. A table stood empty with no chairs beside it. There were two couches along the railing where the missing wall opened up a view of the dirt show floor under the endless metal roof.

  Wading through shredded foam on the floor, torn by mice and rats from the cushions on the couches, I took up a spot leaning on the rail for a view over the show barn interior.

  Most of that bare dirt was lined with booths owned by people who’d still been optimistic enough to think customers would show up to the Semiannual Americana Scamarama Craft Show—not the real name, but what the fuck—despite the way the world was turning into Shroomageddon outside.

  So many acres. So many dreams. So many wasted dollars.

  I’m kind of an ass about it. Unfairly, I know. Plenty of real artists sold actual, real, attractive shit they’d crafted themselves. Maybe if the eventual ex had scraped our bank accounts of the last of our disposable dollars to buy that kind of stuff, I might have had different feelings about the place.

  But that’s not what happened. Ever.

  Before she’d set up housekeeping with Mr. Golfyballs Glimmer-Teeth, she used to drag me on her pilgrimage to the Scamarama in the spring, when the temps were already in the nineties, and the dirt floor was at least fifty-percent farm animal shit from the last blue-ribbon pig festival, or whatever the hell they used the show barn for. The place smelled like scented candles, candied pecans, and sweaty goat assholes.

  Me and Miss Double-E—eventual ex for those you not keeping up—would stay all damn day. Hell, it cost ten bucks to get in unless she had a buy-one-get-one coupon out of the paper. It felt like you were cheating yourself if you left early. Kind of a wicked joke when you think about it, because the longer you stayed, the more of your money stayed, too. We always remained long enough for my clothes to steep in that smell, and then it would get in my car on the hour-long drive home and every time I got in to go somewhere for the next week, the baking funk would make me think I’d stepped in a pile of shit left by some hipster chick’s foofy purse-pooch.

  And that was just the spring event.

  By the look of the booths with signage and decorations still up, I was gazing down on the Thanksgiving show, the one with all the Christmas crap. An extra handful of real artists showed up for that one every year, but so did twice as many kitchen-table entrepreneurs evangelizing multi-level-marketing dupe-bait, and the real go-getters who’d geniused their way through a Google search and discount-bulk-purchased-nickel-a-piece whatchamathingees they’d found on a Chinese plastics manufacturer’s website on the way to fulfilling their 10,000%-return-on-investment dreams.

  Five bucks each, or three for ten. Slap Rudolph on the ass and pull that moving van. We’re buying a big house in Plinko Ranch. Yippee-ki-yay, Santa Claus!

  Nutmeg-scented, stripper-dust glittered pinecone crucifix sculptures stood mostly undisturbed at the end of the nearest aisle below me. Past that, living room-sized wall art framed in recycled cedar fence boards showed colorful Christmas elves dancing across black & white photos of famous European cityscapes. The third booth must have been stocked with a tasty treat
of some sort. It had long since been obliterated, sorted through, and re-sorted by starving scavengers. Most of the booths had been more than rummaged through, they’d been vandalized by frustrated hands, looking for something that might give them one more day of life in a world that didn’t seem to like people much anymore.

  Life gets hard when God turns off the Starbucks spigot.

  The bottle cap necklace booth went relatively unscathed. Everything near the network-marketing mushroom coffee-and-opportunity booth looked to be in order, like maybe the smell was enough to keep all creatures at bay. The singing Christmas tree booth halfway up the aisle looked to have fared well. Most of the trees were still standing. It made me wonder if those worthy gifts were just as ignored by shoppers when the show was still open.

  And there was Amelia moving through the debris down one aisle, just past the caroling trees.

  Not wanting to call out, I slipped my knife from its sheath and tapped the back of the blade lightly on the metal rail three times. It wasn’t a loud sound, and it wasn’t the kind of sound that would attract a Shroomy, but it carried through the space, echoing off the vast sheet-metal roof.

  Amelia looked up, saw me, and waved me down.

  January 12th, second entry

  Shuffling through the debauched Christmas market, I couldn’t help but think how much it looked like a Walmart the morning after Black Friday. All in my imagination, of course. I haven’t been to a Black Friday sale in over twenty years. Maybe since before they even called it Black Friday. I mean seriously, waiting in line overnight to wrestle-mania my way through a horde of grabby shoppers trying to be the first to reach the $299 wall-sized flat screen TV in the ad, knowing there’s only one there, and knowing it’s hidden somewhere in the back of the store behind the double-priced toaster ovens or some such shit, but believing the store is a trove of price-saving treasures, anyway. Nope, not for me. I’d rather stick my dick in a light socket.

  “Hey, Mr. Grumpy Gills.”

  I looked up from the mess on the floor. A little bit offended. “You’re the surly one.”

  “Whatever.” Punctuated with an eye roll.

  Teenagers. Ugh!

  “Find anything?”

  Amelia kicked her way through boxes of remote-control cars. All still packaged up. Most of them, anyway. “Nothing yet.”

  “You sleep alright?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  I drew a long comfortable sigh and admitted to both of us, “Yes. Yes indeed.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m feeling a little antsy about sleeping in the wild so far from home.”

  Amelia kneeled down to examine a piece of jewelry she found beneath a box. “You get used to it.” She looked up at me. “I guess.”

  “Yeah.” My eyes followed my curiosity across the floor and into the booths nearby, looking at all the stuff, and trying to figure out what it was about everything that seemed off. “This place.”

  “Yeah?” Amelia stood up and went back to shuffling through. “What?”

  “It doesn’t give me the creeps or anything. But something’s not right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I spotted a stepladder and waded through the wares on the floor of a booth to get to it. I climbed up two steps. Adding that to my substantial height, I was able to see across the endless floor, remembering what the market looked like when it was thrumming wall to wall with shoppers hunting for that most special of special dick-socket deals.

  Nothing moved. Not even one of the eye-popping trees in a double booth on the next aisle over. They were covered with so many ornaments, all handmade by Maggie Brown and her “Secret Elves,” that you could barely see the fake green pine needles on the branches underneath.

  I said, “I can’t quite—”

  “What?”

  That’s when it occurred to me. The place looked to have been scavenged, more than once, but not by Shroomheads. I hopped off the ladder. “That’s weird. Every house I’ve been in. Every store. It’s like Shroomies like to tear stuff up. They shit everywhere. Piss on things. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear none of them have been in here. This doesn’t look like their doing.”

  “It’s not,” Amelia told me. “It’s why I chose this place.”

  I looked toward a bank of metal doors on one wall, all closed, thinking of the old carnage outside the Target where we’d stayed the day before. “Outside last night. I don’t remember seeing any signs of a battle. Was there one here, too, that makes the Shroomies afraid to revisit?”

  Amelia shook her head. “I don’t know, but I have a guess.”

  “About a big fight?”

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t think anyone made their stand here, but I wondered the same thing when I found this place. Why wasn’t it destroyed by the infected? There was no battle. Nothing I could think of except for something ridiculous.”

  That piqued my curiosity. “What?”

  “You’ll say it’s stupid.”

  I spread my arms wide to take in the acres of the unexplained. “This has to be this way for some reason, right?”

  Amelia stomped away from the boxes she was rummaging through and said, “C’mon.”

  January 12th, third entry

  Amelia led me to the door we’d entered through the night before. It was one of only a few that weren’t locked. That was a surprising fact all by itself. Shroomies hated doors. In my experience, they liked to break each one they came across—usually. No rule ever seemed to stand fast in the spore-twisted mind.

  Stepping outside, I paused. The sky was still lost in the mist above me. It was an hour or two before sunset. Fog still blanketed the land. Visual details in the distance faded to gray. Way out across the endless asphalt, some cars sat, lonesome and dusty. A few windows were broken, yet they hadn’t been mauled like most others parked in driveways or abandoned on roadways. Through the chain-link fence on the other side of the parking lot, and out on the road, across the street and in the trees and bushes, I didn’t see a thing moving.

  “It’s okay,” Amelia told me. “It’s not just the show barn. They don’t come into the parking lot. They don’t climb the fence. They don’t cross the road to this side of the street. They avoid this whole area.”

  “Why?” I asked, sure that I’d see something out there, maybe a Humvee with a fifty-cal mounted up top and a mountain of spent casings piled around it, evidence that a slaughter had happened. Maybe a big, burned spot in the parking lot, the remains of a pyre where the infected bodies had been torched, leaving a perma-stink on the place that kept the Shroomies away. But nothing like that. It might as well have been a Sunday morning at the fairgrounds on a weekend with no events planned. Just a huge, empty space, waiting for people to show up.

  “That’s what I think it is,” said Amelia.

  I turned to see her pointing at a thirty-foot-tall fiberglass Santa Claus standing in the parking lot just outside the entrance on this side of the building. It was layered with a few years of dust. The paint was chipped and faded. Nothing unusual about that. It always looked that way. Every year I saw it here with the eventual ex tugging me past to pay our ten bucks at the ticket window for the privilege of going inside. The only time Santa looked jolly and clean was the season after a fresh coat of paint, which happened every five or six years.

  Amelia said, “There’s a snowman this big by the entrance around the corner, and an elf on the other side of the building and—”

  “And a giant Rudolph on the other,” I finished. “You think the Shroomies are afraid of Santa and his helpers?” I laughed out loud. Too loud, considering we were out in the open in Indian country.

  Amelia stomped past me to get back through the door. “Asshole.”

  I grabbed her by the arm and immediately let go as she swatted my hand away with a karate move and spun around to glare at me.

  “No,” I told her. “I’m not laughing at your theory. I’m laughing because if you’re right, you
gotta admit, it’s funny as hell.”

  Amelia surveyed the parking lot quickly and softened as she said, “We should get back inside.”

  I followed her in. “You really think that’s it?”

  “I don’t have any other explanation.”

  January 12th, fourth entry

  I’d found a booth that was in pretty good shape, which as I’d learned in an hour of scavenging, usually meant everyone who’d come before me knew at a glance how worthless the contents were. The banner pinned above declared:

  HOMER’S CHRISTMAS CAVERN

  HOME OF THE ORIGINAL INFLATABLE YARD DECORATION

  WE LEAVE THE CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS

  I had no guess as to what Homer’s cavern had to do with the holiday season, and found his claim to being the Home of the Original Inflatable Yard Decoration to be dubious at best. But you never know. Homer might have been a consumer products genius. The Made in China labels on every package made me doubt it. Maybe he was just a flea market conman looking for an angle.

  Oh, and I didn’t see an inflatable Jesus. Maybe Homer was sold out of those.

  On the pagan side of the scoreboard, I found inflatable Santas, and elves, and trees, and presents. A sleigh, beach-ball-sized tree ornaments, various reindeer—some lit from the inside, others not. And an out-of-place rubber chicken with a Close-out Sale! sign on it. Homer had boxes of electric air pumps, all rated for outdoor use. Not an Underwriters Labs label anywhere to be seen. Plenty of Chinese small print on the boxes, though. And odd descriptions like:

  HOLIDAY FUN MAKE REINDEER TOY.

  OUTDOOR FOR YOU ABODE TODAY FUN HAVE FOR CHILDREN SMILE.

  DOG ANTLER PET.

  FUNNY SHRILLING YARD CHICKEN.

  HOLIDAY!

  All written in big letters, right on the front of a box over the face of a Rudolph with a glowing, green nose.