by Anselmo, Ray
Scrub dehydrators, siphon gas – those were next on the list, and could be done at the same place. There were a few cars parked up at the Zen farm. She swung by the store for more jugs, the siphoning tubes and some cleaning supplies (there were more there than at home), them down to the farm. With the windows rolled down and the air filled with the smell of summer grasses slowly browning, the air was a tonic, and she hummed tunelessly, just enjoying the moment.
Thankfully the dehydrators were made to be easy to clean, but she’d used them a lot and hadn’t done much in between loads besides a basic wiping down. A lot of former food was solidly baked on now, and the tools at hand would not get them back to their previous condition without more elbow grease than she’d planned on. “My own darn fault,” she muttered to herself. “These will have to soak.” Which meant filling a large tub with water for the shelves. She could use a bathtub at the farm, but she’d have to get the water into it.
And the non-removable interiors of the dehydrators … elbow grease was the only solution.
No running water meant a well or a water tower to pull from, or hauling the water well uphill from the ocean. She’d only brought a gallon of drinking water with her, and now shook her head at her short-sightedness. “Well, no point chastising yourself over it, Kel. Figure it out. Take the time you need. You probably won’t need the machines until … October? If you try harvesting the farm’s crops? Or you decide to go berry picking or …”
She let it go and started thinking through processes. She could do some scrubbing of the shelves and interiors, using the big sink in the room, get some of the crud off. Leaving the interiors damp might loosen some of the rest for tomorrow. As for the shelves … what if she took them down to the ocean where she’d bathed Tuesday, strung a loop of twine through them, tied it to a post or a rock and left them in the water overnight? The waves might knock them around a little, but they shouldn’t break.
She sighed. Any problem would yield if you gave it enough thought. She piled the shelves by the sink, used scrub pads, dish soap and a bowl of water to work over the dehydrators’ insides and found she got most of the drips, crusts and splatters off without straining. Then she went over them again, removed half the rest and let them air-dry. The shelves were actually tougher – all those gaps – but she soon got them clean enough she could probably use them right then if pressed to. She wouldn’t – she’d toss them in the car and try her ocean plan first.
By the time that was finished it was past 4:30, and she debated whether to skip the siphoning for today. At eight minutes a gallon, filling two five-gallon containers meant she wouldn’t get home until after six, and sunset was before eight. But … she was up there already, with all the equipment, and the only other things on her list could be done sitting at home by candlelight. Why not?
She picked out a late-model Honda Civic – a car that small wouldn’t have more than ten gallons in it unless its former owner had just filled it up – and got to work. The afternoon was hot and she took lots of water breaks, but before 6:00 the tank was as empty as a reality show star’s head and she had nine gallons of internal combustion juice. “Not a bad day’s work,” she told herself as she loaded it into the trunk and headed to the store to stow it away.
Back home, she was getting the twine to secure the dehydrator shelves in the Pacific when she glanced at the pill bottles on her side table. She hadn’t thought about her prescriptions in a few days other than to take the odd pill. How was her supply? Better check. She had about a dozen olanzapine and twenty lamotrigine, but … uh-oh. Down to two lithium, one for tonight and one for tomorrow. She needed to resupply and fast.
A second’s fear quickly yielded to knowledge. She had a list of all the pharmacies in Marin County, didn’t she? Sure enough, right in the same drawer as all those now-worthless fast-food coupons – and the nearest one, the Walgreen’s in Tamalpais Valley Junction, was only six miles away, a more or less straight shot on the Shoreline Highway!
She checked the watch again: 6:17. An hour and a half of daylight, easily. She could drive down to the water with the dehydrator shelves, tie them up properly – she knew just the place – head up to the highway and take the fifteen-minute … no, ten-minute trip to the drugstore since there wasn’t any traffic, and as long as she could break into the place, she’d be home comfortably before the sun was down.
“Hot diggity!” she chirped as she cut off a few lengths of twine and returned to her car.
By 6:40 the shelves were soaking in the Pacific, secured to both a protruding rock with one length of cord and to a sapling with another. Provided no aquatic creature bit through both lines or major quake struck, she could retrieve them in the morning and scrub them clean. To the highway she returned for the final major task of the day.
Or she tried. Later, she realized she hadn’t been more than a mile and a half from town in the eighteen days since she got sick, and thus didn’t know what condition the rest of the world was in. More pertinently, she didn’t know what condition the rest of State Highway 1 was in. Now she found out.
She thought she’d run across bad smells that month – corpses, burning corpses, spoiling produce. But a McDonald’s eighteen-wheeler full of foodstuffs for North Coast franchisees, jackknifed on the highway, tipped over and left in the hot sun for two weeks or so with its driver dead in the cab and rotting away … well, that was a whole new level. To add insult to injury, it was blocking the road so thoroughly that she couldn’t have gotten a bicycle past it, let alone her Hyundai.
She stopped, backed up, looked for a way around, but there was nothing leading off that stretch of road except hiking trails. She couldn’t think of a route around it off the top of her head – if you wanted to get to or from Sayler Beach, you used the Shoreline Highway. It was the only route that made sense. And …
“Well, if that don’t beat all!”
… and there was another accident blocking the road uphill, about a quarter-mile past this one. It looked like a three-or-four-car pileup – hard to tell at this distance.
Message received loud and clear. There was no way to get to any pharmacy from here except by horse or walking. She didn’t have a horse, and she didn’t have enough daylight to walk it tonight. The decision had been made for her.
She drove home grumbling to herself, but it wasn’t exactly a tragedy, was it? Just an inconvenience, albeit a big inconvenience with a big stench. She’d gotten a ton done today without overdoing it. She felt good, strong. She still had a lithium for tonight and one for tomorrow, so she wouldn’t have to skip a dose. This was just one more thing to do, and it was a Thing She Could Do. It would just take time, is all. And she had time.
“Well, I’ve done enough today,” Kelly decided as she pulled up to the curb. “Dinner, rest up, and tomorrow …” Tomorrow, she had an awful lot of walking to do.
11
HIKE
Kelly got to bed, and to sleep, so quickly that she ended up waking while it was still dark – no mean feat for summertime. “Which is fine,” she mumbled as she got out of bed. An early start for what looked to be a long Friday sure beat a poke in the eye. Change her tampon. Have a quick breakfast of bacon, stale pastry and one of the few remaining apples. Dress in a long-sleeved T-shirt, cargo pants, thick socks and hiking boots – she needed protection more than comfort on this long a hike.
She saw sunlight peeking in around the window blinds. Time to start packing.
She had a backpack that she’d used on and off since college, made of good sturdy canvas. She dug it out of the closet and began laying out what she needed. Two tampons, an extra pair of undies, a windbreaker if things got chilly, and a ball cap to protect her face from sunburn. Sunglasses too. A tube of triple antibiotic, some gauze, a Swiss Army knife and a box of band-aids for scrapes and blisters. The Mizuno as walking stick and angry-dog repellent. A couple of cloth shopping bags to carry home her finds. The crowbar for various things.
She looked it over, then put the undi
es, windbreaker, first aid items, bags and crowbar into various sections of the backpack. (One end of the crowbar stuck out of the top – it couldn’t be helped.) She still had room for four bottles of water, which she set on top. The tampons went into a pocket in her pants. The cap and shades went on her face. All she was missing was food, but she could get some there if she had to. But there was still the nagging feeling she’d forgotten something …
“Oh. The dehydrator shelves.” Those were still floating on their lines in the ocean. And while she had felt okay leaving them out there for one night, two might be pushing her luck. She left the backpack, grabbed two towels, a bottle of dish soap and a scrubbing brush and headed for the car. Do that first, then she could start the big journey.
As it turns out, the overnight soak made them really easy to clean – maybe the floating sand had acted as a gentle abrasive. An hour’s work made them as close to factory-new as anyone could hope for – if she needed them again, they’d be ready. Maybe she’d take them back to the farm before …
“Hey, that’s a thought.” If she did drive up to the farm, and then to where the accident blocked the road, that would cut almost two miles off the trip each way! Suddenly a twelve-mile hike would be reduced to eight or eight-and-a-half, and she could start with what might be the toughest part – getting around the Mickey D’s rig – while she still had all her energy. “Kel, you’re a genius!”
She piled the shelves into the car, started it to head for home, and noticed her gas gauge was getting low – she had maybe a quarter-tank left. But since she was driving partway anyway, she could stop at the store, grab a jug and pour it in. One less thing she had to worry about later. Despite the initial delay – partly because of it, really – the day was already looking up.
Back home. Grab backpack and Mizuno. Add a cloth mask to the ensemble, giving it a spritz of lavender essential oil to block the scents she’d run across. Back to the car. Up to the store. Pour five gallons of gas into the tank with a funnel. Grab half a dozen energy bars and two fiber bars for eating on the way, filling more pockets in the cargo pants. To the farm, where she stacked the shelves in the dehydrator room – she’d continue cleaning the machines tomorrow or Sunday. Down the highway. Park fifty feet before the semi.
And now came the hard part, now discounted over 30% due to her quick thinking. But which way should she go around the big rig? That whole section of the highway was built on steep mountainsides. To the left was a tough uphill climb to get over the jackknifed cab and the front end of the trailer. To the right was an equally sharp dip down to get around/under the back end. Which way should she go?
“Worst case scenarios,” she told herself. “If I go around the back and slip, I could go quite a way down.” She went over and looked – probably a two-hundred foot slide over brush-covered ground, though if she could use the foliage to stop herself it wouldn’t be so bad. “If I go around the front, maybe twenty feet up, but it’s steeper, and that’s where the driver’s body is. And if I slip, I could get stuck between the hill and the truck …” She walked over to that end.
Actually, there was no likelihood of getting stuck unless the truck shifted or she broke something. After two weeks there, it had probably shifted all it was going to. She’d dealt with dead bodies now, though not in as bad a condition as that poor fellow was. And twenty feet sure beat a potential two hundred. Uphill and to the left it was.
Smooth at both ends, the Mizuno wasn’t much as a hiking stick, and she finally shoved it under her arm so she had both hands free. She managed to get up, over and past the truck in two attempts, and the first one was arrested when her foot slipped and she slid six feet until her boot hit one of the cab’s thick tires. It was easy enough to recover from there. Five minutes later she was back on the road on the other side, having suffered nothing worse than an adrenalin rush.
Five minutes after that, she reached the next accident – a four-car pileup, sure enough. From the looks of it, the first driver had died in harness, the Ford Focus had rolled up the hillside and dropped onto the driver’s side. Later on, three other drivers had come around the tight turn a hundred feet behind the Focus and hit it before they could react. They came off worse than driver #1, dying of their injuries rather than the disease (or maybe of both).
Once again, she was glad she had trouble puking. She walked around the mess on the downhill side of the road, mumbling a generic prayer for the dead. Four hundred feet farther on, she realized she was repeating “may light perpetual shine upon them” over and over like it was a mantra, shook and stopped herself. Was this what the Black Death was like? You were walking down the road and suddenly came upon the dead?
“Kel. Kel. Stop being so morbid. It doesn’t help. Later – deal with it later.” She took a deep breath, two, and kept walking. Maybe she should make a list of long-term projects to tackle, like “clear the highway” and “harvest the farm’s crops” and “find a horse and learn to ride it.” She decided to save that for later too. For now, she needed to go get her meds.
Her meds. That had been one of the major discoveries of her life. As a child, she’d alternated between hyperactive and zombified, and both brought on her mother’s wrath. “Why can’t you be normal? Your brother is normal – why can’t you be more like him? Oh, I pray to God every day that you would straighten up!”
Brad wasn’t normal – in her parents’ eyes, he was a superhero. Brad Sweeney was the star linebacker and basketball guard with the 3.5 GPA who was a leader in the youth group at church and dated the valedictorian. (He did more to the valedictorian than that, but they didn’t know and wouldn’t have believed it if Kelly had told them.) He was recruited all over the place but chose to stay home and attend Oklahoma State. He never caused them a day’s grief that they caught him at.
At last check, he was still in Stillwater, married with kids, teaching P.E. at the same high school he’d attended and still going to the same church. A torn knee ligament his junior year at OSU had scotched any pro football hopes, that and his failure to grow past 5’11”. But he was there, and he behaved exactly as his parents wanted, and he was the yardstick by which his little sister had been measured and found lacking.
She tried to be normal, at least normal as Mom defined it. Dad put a lot less pressure on her – even though he backed Mom’s every demand, in private he would tell her to find her own path and build a life that made her happy and ride Mom’s drama out. She worked at that. She worked at her education too, putting in hours beyond her peers, taking AP classes and doing her best to burrow through her emotional highs and lows. And when Mom said “jump,” she didn’t bother asking how high, she just sprang and hoped it was enough. It rarely was.
She was a puzzle to Mom, a puzzle to her church who didn’t understand her inconsistent moods, an unsolvable puzzle to the few boys she dated (they usually gave up after one try). But she was smart and she could grind, and she ended up salutatorian three years after Brad graduated, with a 4.17 that despite her lack of athletic prowess – Mom hadn’t let her go out for sports because it “isn’t ladylike – they’re all a bunch of dykes” – was a milkshake that brought enough colleges to the yard.
The day she announced she’d gotten a full ride to Cal-Berkeley was the only time she ever saw Dad shut Mom’s act down. Mom went off like a pager about how Berkeley was a pit of iniquity and she would NEVer let her daughter attend that place of FILTH and why couldn’t she be a GOOD daughter who stayed home and went to State and married a good man and had babies and didn’t cause her so much GRIEF all the time –
“Samantha!”
Dad snapped that word out, and she might as well have hit Mom with a clawhammer. Kelly thought she might keel over on the spot.
“Samantha,” Dad had repeated, more softly but with an undertone of absolute law, “our daughter just got accepted with a full scholarship to study at one of the five best schools in the country. Any parent would be proud of her, and I know she will excel there and make somethin
g of herself. If you can’t rejoice with her over this extraordinary achievement, then she’s not the one with the problem. Now apologize to Kelly, or I will be very angry.”
It took Mom a full minute to spit out “I’m sorry.” Then she stormed off to some other part of the house.
Dad frowned toward where she departed, then turned back to Kelly. “Your mother loves you.”
Kelly remembered biting back the words she’s got a funny way of showing it. “I know. I guess.”
Dad nodded. “It can be hard to tell sometimes. But she does, and she wants you to have a good life. She just … she thinks there’s only one way of doing that, the way she was taught to. You and I, we know it’s not quite that simple.”
“You’re, um … you’re not worried I’ll go to Berkeley and become an atheistic Communist dyke?”
Dad snorted. “Not really. But let me tell you a few things. Any faith that can get destroyed by truth isn’t a faith worth having. Same with political opinions or anything else in your head or heart. I trust God can keep you just as well in California as he can here. And you know what else?”