by Anselmo, Ray
… don’t think about after that. There lay monsters.
9. Raid pharmacies (see list).
She wrote down the addresses of all the drugstores in Marin County (almost all of them on the east side of the peninsula, while she was inconveniently on the west side) so she’d have them when her phone died. She was sure she could dig up a paper road map somewhere.
Soon enough, the dryer was done. She unloaded the fire suit, threw the second washload into the dryer, stripped her bed and put the sheets and accompaniments in the washer, started both machines, dressed in the fire suit, grabbed the rake and the lighter fluid and drove over to the beach to check on the cremation site.
She was surprised to find some embers still glowing, and the storage section of the truck had collapsed. The smell was … she didn’t have a word for it, and hoped to never find one. She gritted her teeth and poked through the carnage a little, but everything – and everyone – seemed to have completely burned or melted. She sprayed a little charcoal lighter around anyway and stirred up the ashes and detritus, just for caution’s sake.
One of those fold-up aluminum beach chairs was sitting abandoned about fifty feet away, and she went and sat in it, staring at the pyre. All her friends in Sayler Beach were in there, bodies burned to husks. All her customers from the store. All her neighbors. She was all cried out from the mourning of the previous five days, but grief didn’t require tears. She shook her head and sighed and shrugged. What else could she do?
She needed someone to talk to, she knew that. There wasn’t anyone. Maybe there wouldn’t be anyone ever again.
She let herself slump in the chair as the pyre softly crackled and shifted. This was hopeless. She was alone, isolated, and so inadequate to the task of surviving in an empty world. She might as well throw herself in the ocean and be done with it, or slit her wrists. Let it all go, stop beating her brains out about it. What was the point of life when no one else was living?
No.
NO!
No, she’d been through this kind of depression before, too many times to count. Each time, she’d weighed the costs and benefits and had found it was worth it to keep on going. Why would this time be any different? If she’d made it, she was sure others had too. It was just a matter of finding them, and of staying alive and sane until she did. She could do this. It was the ultimate, the foundational Thing She Could Do, and she had plenty of practice.
She stood, folded up the chair and took it with her back to the parking lot. It might come in handy, and it wasn’t doing anyone any good just sitting there waiting for seagulls to crap on it. (The gulls, she noticed, were avoiding the burned-out truck and its cargo. Hopefully they’d keep avoiding it.) She shoved it in the trunk and drove home. Tasks 1. and 5. accomplished, tasks 2. and 4a. begun – not bad for a Saturday morning.
“You can do it,” she told herself as she pulled up to the curb at the Matchicks’. “You are stronger and smarter than the depression. You are stronger and smarter than almost anything you’ll have to face. You are still here, you have all your needs met, and you will prevail. Your record for getting through bad days is still 100%. Just keep it up.”
Kelly smiled. She’d found someone to talk to. Even if it was just herself.
6
TALK
Ironic. Kelly had talked to herself a lot, ever since childhood. Mom used to get all over her case for it (though frankly, there weren’t too many things Mom didn’t get all over her case for). “People will think you’re crazy,” she scolded. To be fair, some people did think she was nuts, so Mom wasn’t wrong. Those people weren’t necessarily wrong either.
But now, surrounded by an unpopulated town in the midst of what might be an unpopulated county (state? country? world?!), talking to herself – especially pep-talking herself – might be just the thing to keep her sane. “You go, guuuuurl!” she said out loud as she entered the Matchicks’ house, then laughed. Her first laugh in almost two weeks. It might be silly, but it felt good. She’d have to make a point to laugh, to chop through the despondency inherent in her current position.
She remembered reading about a practice at funerals in New Orleans – the “Second Line.” You went up to the coffin, sad for the loss of your friend or family member. But then you turned away and danced back down the aisle, celebrating their life and that you were still living. That’s what she needed to do, to balance the grief – Second Line the heck out of the situation. Don’t passively deal with it a la Marie Kondo, asking if this or that sparked joy. Make it spark joy! Beat it until the joy came pouring out.
Hm. Maybe do it cautiously, selectively. She didn’t need a serious manic episode any more than she needed a depressive one.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. what next?” she asked, looking over the kitchen and the produce she’d left on the counter. “What’s … hmmm … what’s the most urgent?”
That was a toughie when you had no idea what would happen next. But she could do triage on the assumption that tomorrow would be much like today, and likewise the day after and the one after that. She brought out the Things I Can Do list and went through it, marking it up as needed:
1. Check the pyre – relight if necessary. *
2. Analyze needs for future – food, clothing, shelter, transportation, MEDICINE, personal defense.
Food – see 4a.
Water – rain barrels? B4 rain, use bottled?
Clothing – not a concern. Shelter – not a concern
Transport – car, siphon/drain other cars, find a bike?
Medicine – see 9.
Defense –
3. Find books on roughing it/survival (or print off internet?).
4. Find other needed things – stockpile.
4a. Pull from SBN&N first. *
Need to toss refrig. foods or use b4 lights go out
Sort produce
Use frozen foods – toss 24 hrs. after elec. gone
4b. Then house to house?
Food preservation? (Canning, dehydration?)
4c. Check Green Gulch Farm before houses?
5. Wash clothes esp. fire suit while you have use of washer/dryer. *
6. Find way to secure bldgs for future use/scavenging.
7. Make list of poss. places to go if new location needed or to find others.
8. Read LaSheba’s journal, esp. last week’s entries.
8a. Start journaling?
9. Raid pharmacies (see list).
She’d make sure to wash her current clothing, used dishrags and the fire suit tonight before going to bed, but otherwise 5. was taken care of for now. Worse came to worse, she could wash clothes in the Pacific and dry them on the rocks or set up a clothesline. 1. was more or less done as well, but she’d check it in a few days to make absolutely sure. She added a note:
1a. Make a marker for pyre?
It felt right to do, even if it might be busy work. She’d fit it in when she fit it in. There was no rush since she was the only mourner, but maybe someday someone, human or alien, would find it and know they’d been there. So what looked like it should be tackled first?
“Everything that needs electricity,” she said. That meant cooking and other food prep, water, and the internet. She tore another sheet off the pad and started brainstorming.
Everything in fridge/freezer at Matchicks – prepare so it will keep *
Fridge at SBN&N – dump all into dumpster *
Frozen, produce at SBN&N – prepare all you can
Kinds of food prep:
Cook until dry
Dehydrate
Canning Salting
Spicing
Water – take all bottles from store *
Fill all empty bottles
How much ¼ tsp bleach/gallon to keep pure, 1 tbsp per gallon to sanitize
Fill bathtub(s) *
Supplement w/bottled juice/soda for drinking
Alcohol?
Internet – what do you need to print? **
Last items on plag
ue – might figure something out
How to build fire
How to preserve food
Basic first aid?
Maps?
How to siphon gasoline
Basic survival skills
Lots of heavy duty flashlights/batteries
Actually, batteries in general sounded good. So did a watch, for when she couldn’t use her phone anymore – preferably an automatic or mechanical one, so she wouldn’t have to worry about a battery for it. She wrote those down and looked the list over. “Hmmm … I might actually get pretty good at this survivalist thing.” So long as she didn’t have to fight off roving gangs – she was no General Furiosa or whatever her name was.
At the least, she had ideas on what she could and couldn’t do on short notice. Canning would probably be too much work with too big a learning curve for too little result. She’d never liked drinking alcohol, but it might be useful for first aid, washing out cuts and the like. The ‘Net had answered the bleach question. Everything else would keep her rather busy for a few days minimum, busier still once the power grid belly-flopped.
“All right … first, the store. That’s likely to take all afternoon. The evening I can spend cooking.”
Back to the car. Back to SBN&N. Open the gate to the fence around the dumpster, unlock the container and flip open the lid – ugh! She hadn’t recalled that the garbage company wouldn’t have picked it up for over two weeks. “Woof!” she cried as she dove for the back door, unlocked it and scrambled inside. Yuck – this wouldn’t make the day any more fun. The first thing she did after getting the reek out of her nose was to find a face mask and squirt lemon juice onto it before putting it on.
Once properly protected with mask and plastic gloves, she got a shopping cart and began loading all the meat from the refrigerated section into it. The prepackaged cheese might still be good – she’d check – but the plastic wrapped cuts of beef and chicken and the like were goners after going untouched for at least a week and a half. It took a few trips to get them all to the Bog of Eternal Stench she now mentally referred to the dumpster as, but it wasn’t too difficult. And it was kind of fun to Frisbee the packets into the container.
Next, she cleaned out the tiny deli counter, followed by going through the prepackaged items. Most of the latter were fine for now. Vegetables were another story – the vast majority of them were spoiled or close, and had to get them to the Bog quickly before they contaminated the rest. Same with softer fruits, about half of the citrus and any fruit in plastic bags. The apples that weren’t bagged were largely recoverable, provided she sliced and dried them quickly. Which made it all the more urgent that she find a dehydrator.
Since she had a couple hours of daylight to go, she decided to take a trip up to Holy Green, where – sure enough! – they had some big dehydrators for all the organic produce they sold. Better still, they had a gas-powered generator, so she could use the machines after the power failed. Should I start right away?” she wondered, then, “Yeah, why not? Other than not really knowing what I’m doing, what’s there to stop me?”
She caught herself, took a deep breath, held it, heeeeeeeld it … let it out slowly. There was being enthusiastic, and there was slipping into a manic episode. And that always led to a crash, and a deep depression. Balance – they key was balance. She’d just come out of a depression and a well-earned one – she didn’t need another. Too much to do. She made a mental note to take an olanzapine if she had to stop herself again.
But that wasn’t a reason not to start drying some food tonight. At least get a first load going before sundown.
Kelly headed back to the store, filled a cart with the remaining apples, and fired up the meat slicer in the deli. In an hour she’d sliced up the lot, filled two black garbage bags half-full (if she’d tried to put them all in one bag, she couldn’t have lifted it), tucked them into her Hyundai and was driving back to the farm. It took another half-hour to get the slices all arranged on the dehydrator racks. Then she turned them on and left, making a mental note to come back to them first thing in the morning.
Returning to the store, she thought about what could be done in the remaining daylight. She cleaned up part of the produce section and moved the remaining fruit and veg – mostly oranges, carrots and cruciform vegetables – into it, then scrubbed and sprayed the rest. When she was finished, she had another half-bag of disgusting ready to go into the dumpster. She sorted through the cheese, and most of it was still fine. The bread and pastries were mainly stale, but very little of it was moldy – she tossed what was, which finished filling up the bag.
Huck the garbage into the Bog of Eternal Stench, lock it again, lock the gate again. Back her car up to the employee entrance, fill a shopping cart with bread, roll it out, fill up the back seat. She could twice-bake or toast it all, let it air a little, bag it all up and it would keep for a while – dry, but serviceable. She took a case of sandwich bags and headed home.
She was a little gassed when she got there, but she still had a lot she wanted to do, and the sun was just hitting the water. She did take an olanzapine – safety first; she did want to sleep eventually – and started a toasting assembly line with the remaining bread and pastries that she didn’t eat for dinner (along with some cheddar cheese and an apple she’d swiped earlier). With the toaster, microwave and oven going almost constantly, she had to make sure to keep herself hydrated, and ended up polishing off a quart of orange juice too.
She had most of the bread processed and maybe half of it packed when her drooping eyelids told her enough was enough. If her eyes hadn’t, the microwave clock would’ve – 11:06. She stopped, showered and fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.
The next morning, she felt a little creaky and decided that yes, she’d overdone it a little. Live and learn. She cooked some eggs and sausage and ate while packing up and toasting more of the bread, but took it slowly. “One thing at a time – don’t wear yourself out,” she told herself between bites. It helped, hearing herself – the near-silence around town was starting to feel creepy, and she needed to do something to break it. At least the sound of the freed dogs and cats punctured the stillness a little.
The first stop was back at the Zen farm, where the apple slices had dried nicely, enough that she could carry them all to her car in one bag instead of two. Those would last her a good while. “Now what to dry next?” She wasn’t sure how to dehydrate cabbages, but the broccoli and oranges should be easy enough. Maybe the frozen burger patties too. The cheese … not sure either. She’d have to look that up on –
“The internet!” She had to hit the ‘Net and print up what she needed before the power vanished – and that could be any second! “Okay, okay – first reload the dehydrators, then start Googling.” Those would be the two top-priority items for today. Don’t panic – just get things done. Deeeeeep breath.
The oranges were easy enough to cut using the meat slicer, though it did make a bit of a mess. The broccoli, though, had to be done by hand – cutting the florets off the stems. She did the cauliflower that hadn’t spoiled too, cleaned up all the juice, bagged everything up, shoved the bags in the car and returned to Holy Green with them and forty-some packages of hamburger patties. There was just enough room for all that in the dehydrators, and she turned them on, figuring she’d check them last thing in the day before going to sleep.
She went back home, stored the bag of apple slices in a spare room, started the last of the bread, then logged on to the Web and fired up the printer. Six articles from different sources on the plague, then tips on fire-building, general camping, first aid and how to siphon gas from tanks came out before the printer ran out of black ink. She searched the desk drawers and mercifully found another cartridge, swapped it in and started searching for basic food preservation tips and survival skills.
By early afternoon, she had about two hundred single-sided pages of information and some maps of Marin County to work with. More searching produced an empty binder and a t
hree-hole punch, and soon she was essentially holding a book of Everything She Could Think Of On How To Survive Post-Apocalypse. Scratch that off the list. Now she could live without a computer if she had to, or so she hoped.
With the bread all dried out and very little of it left to pack, and the dehydrators full and running, food prep had hit a bottleneck. She raided the refrigerator for lunch, picking out sliced meat, tortillas and vegetables to clear out some of the remaining perishables. Then she went to work cooking the few frozen items that were left, so she hopefully wouldn’t have to toss them later.
Back to SBN&N in mid-afternoon, where the frozen foods awaited. A lot of them were hopeless – things like Hot Pockets, TV dinners and cream pies wouldn’t keep without electricity. She could dehydrate the tater tots and other potato products, she thought, and the frozen vegetables and breakfast meats and waffles, but everything else was likely to be a loss no matter what she did. She set aside a frozen pizza and a banana cream pie for dinner, then started moving much of the rest to the Bog of Eternal Stench.
Since she was smart and took it easy, it was sundown when she finished. She went home, baked the pizza, ate it and half the pie – she’d burned a lot of energy the past few days, which did wonders for her appetite – then returned to the store in darkness, loaded up everything she thought she could dehydrate and went to the Zen farm again. The oranges, broccoli and cauliflower were done, so she bagged them up again and put in all the frozen veggies, formed potatoes and pre-breaded fish.