by Anselmo, Ray
“What, Dad?”
“If you come back from Cal and tell me you’re not going to church anymore and you’re working to overthrow the government and this is your life partner Daquishawanda and check out your new back tattoo and whatever else … you will still be my daughter and I will still love you. Always.” And James Davis Sweeney opened his huge construction foreman’s arms. And she’d fallen into them and wept in relief.
She wept now, just thinking about it. Mom had never accepted Kelly’s decision, on that and so many other things. To Samantha Sweeney, she was always the rebel, the person who refused to conform. That she tried to conform to her mom’s worldview and couldn’t … Mom could never see it. Mom was incapable of seeing it.
And Dad had been right. At Berkeley she’d kept her faith, though strongly amended and reshaped. She’d learned about the world as it was, and how to improve it. She’d graduated with a B.A. in business administration and got sniffs from some MBA programs, but decided it would be just too stressful for her and took a job in the logistics department of Raley’s, a Sacramento-area supermarket chain. She never dated another woman despite being asked a couple of times, and never found a man she wanted to have kids with.
Most important for her long-term health, in her sophomore year she filled out a questionnaire produced by Cal’s University Health Services and, floored by the results, made an appointment with a counselor. Bipolar II disorder was the final diagnosis, a fairly mild version of it. She got counseling, and she got medications, and she got a dropped jaw from a junior year Psych professor who was amazed she’d done so well for so long without being diagnosed. She’d told that professor, “Well, what choice did I have?”
Same then as now, she thought with a laugh. The world might have come to an end. She might be the only person still kicking. She was certainly the only one still kicking in Sayler Beach. She might have to teach herself a great many things about surviving in a post-plague world, and she might fail more than she succeeded. She’d just lived through a whirlwind eleven, now twelve days like none she’d ever experienced. And now she was having to walk hours just to resupply on the medications that would help her keep doing all that and more.
Really, though, what choice did she have? And it was amazing what you could do when you didn’t really have another choice in the matter besides “curl up and die.” She had no interest in curling up and dying, or she would’ve done it long ago. Nope, not gonna happen. God was in his Heaven and all was wrong with the world, and she was going to keep right on going until she couldn’t. And then … well, maybe she’d keep on going anyway. Just to be a pain.
Kelly sighed. She hoped – and silently prayed, since she didn’t have the words – that Dad and Brad and Brad’s wife Primrose and their children and yes … yes, even Mom was all right. There was no way she could help them right now. God would have to do it for her.
She pulled a water bottle from her pack, drained half of it and kept walking down the highway.
12
DRUGS
Mercifully, the McDonald’s truck was the only vehicle that size to block the route, so Kelly had an easier time the rest of the way. There were five more accidents, most of them one-car crashes, before she reached the little Tamalpais Valley and the remnants of civilization, and she did her best to keep eyes front and not look too closely at the insides of the vehicles. Given the long walk, she didn’t have extra energy to play coroner. Another time, perhaps.
Things were a lot messier when she emerged from the wilderness and walked down the Shoreline Highway into the valley. Smoke was rising from occasional building fires, with no one to put them out. Automobiles were parked every which way or just stopped in the street. Some places had been broken into. And over everything hung the thick, choking miasma of the dead. Clearly things here had been a lot more chaotic.
She’d come equipped only to get her medications and go home, not to deal with the mess the plague had left behind. She hadn’t been thinking about corpses and broken glass and who knew what lurked in between the abandoned houses, only that she was down to one lithium capsule and needed more. If it hadn’t been so urgent, it might have occurred to her that she would be facing what she had in Sayler Beach but on an exponentially larger scale.
“Well, tough it out,” she told herself. “Get in, get what you need, go home, and the sooner the better. Ignore the feelings for now – you can deal with them tonight.”
It was still well before noon when she reached the Walgreen’s in Tamalpais Valley Junction, where a right-angle bend in the highway ran through a shopping district north of Coyote Creek and west of the San Francisco Bay’s northwest corner. She didn’t need the crowbar to get in – the front doors had been busted out of their tracks by someone even more eager to get there than she was, and left shattered on the pavement. Had that happened two or three weeks ago when the pandemic swept through, or was someone around here more recently?
Or – and here was another thing she hadn’t thought of – was someone around here right now? Maybe hoping to find another human being around … or hiding with a shotgun to take out whoever might drop by?
She shivered, gripped the softball bat in both hands and hoped she was just being paranoid, rather than somebody actually being out to get her.
There were two people in the store, both wearing company shirts and both clearly dead – one fallen behind the cashier’s counter and another in the liquor aisle. They were well into the decomposition process, and she made sure not to get too close as she looked for where the pharmacy was. Usually in the back corner … ah, there it was. She headed through the aisles to find what she –
“Ack!” There was a third body in the vitamin section, another employee. But this one wasn’t alone. She thought it couldn’t get worse than a rotting corpse, but a rotting corpse being eaten set the bar even lower.
The raccoon hissed and growled at her, trying to guard its buffet from the interloper. But Kelly had already dealt with big dogs – this little trash panda wasn’t going to get one over on her. “Get away!” she snapped at it. “Shoo!”
Another hiss. The little thief was going to be stubborn? Fine – she’d show it some stubborn. She hefted the bat and stomped around the body toward it. “Go!” she yelled and took a swing at it, just a warning to drive it back.
It dodged the bat – and went for her foot!
She swung again and this time connected, sending it flying back down the aisle the way she’d come. It screeched and ran, deciding there had to be easier meals elsewhere.
Kelly looked down at the corpse and wished she hadn’t. It was bloated and greenish and more than a little nibbled around the edges. The coon was not the only one who’d helped themselves, it looked like. She quickly walked away to the pharmacy proper, hoping that when she was done she could find another way out of this place.
The pharmacy was well secured behind a locked door, plus Plexiglas across the counter to keep out sneezes and addicts. But the pry bar made short work of the door, and she went inside to see what she could find. Bipolar disorder was common enough that almost any drugstore would keep the more common remedies in stock – she just hoped the plague hadn’t caught them between shipments.
It took a little searching, but she found what she needed. Lithium capsules for mood stabilization. Olanzapine tablets, an antipsychotic (and really, who was pro-psychotic?) for acute manic episodes. Lamotrigine tablets, an anticonvulsant, for acute depression. Lithium, olanzapine, lamotrigine. LOL. The three little fishies in her itty bitty bloodstream to keep her brain behaving like it should.
She shook her head, remembering the first time she came home from college with pill bottles. Mom liked to point out that “pharmacy” came from the Greek word pharmakon, which meant a poison or a magic spell (Heaven knew which traveling evangelist she’d picked that up from), and wouldn’t take an aspirin for a headache if she could help it. Predictably she pitched a fit, saying that she wouldn’t have such things in her house. Sh
e only backed down when Kelly said that if the pills weren’t welcome, neither was she, and threatened to return to Berkeley for the summer.
A couple of days later, Dad told her to come by the tool shed. When she did, he showed her a pill container of his own. Lexapro, no less. “Your ma doesn’t know I keep it out here. Why spoil her day?”
“I had no idea you needed … something like that.”
“I toughed it out as best I could, but these help. My doctor said if your brain cain’t make the right chemicals, there ain’t no shame in store-bought. Took me a long time to accept it, but I’m glad I finally gave in.”
“And it works?”
“I tell you, Kel – as soon as I started taking these, everyone else seemed to relax.” And they both laughed until the tears came.
She packed up a year’s supply of lithium and hundred-tablet bottles each of the others. Lithium was an everyday dose – the olanzapine and lamotrigine were as needed. She’d taken a lot more when she was first diagnosed, but good therapists had helped her enough to knock the amounts down. She’d known people who had to gulp down a lot more just to get through the day, and considered herself fortunate that she didn’t.
Should she do something about the bodies? She’d like to – she felt bad just leaving them to the raccoons – but wasn’t sure how to go about it. They’d been lying there for over two weeks, most likely, and had gotten kind of … liquid. They would be hard to move, hard to clean up after, and there was no logical place to put them. And if no one was around – and she hadn’t seen or heard any sign of living people – there wasn’t much point. She’d let them be for now, give it some thought, and if she came up with a good idea she’d come back.
With a shrug and a sigh, she walked outside and looked around. This section of the highway was nothing but stores. Several coffee shops. A couple of beer gardens. A pet supply shop and a dog kennel. Places that had sold motorcycle parts and surfing gear and sporting goods and health food and pizza. A gym to work off all the pounds from the coffee and beer and pizza. To her right, farther down the street, Coyote Creek flowed out to the nearby bay.
But the creek and her were the only things moving. Even the birds seemed to have abandoned the place. The sense of isolation, of alone-ness, was oppressive, like she was an alien that had landed on an uninhabited planet. In a way, she was.
“Get a grip, Kel, before you need a lamotrigine just to get home.” She ducked back into the Walgreen’s, emerging with a bag of cheddar kettle chips as a treat. She carefully ripped open the bag and headed north, back to Sayler Beach and her comfort zone, snacking as she went. She still felt like she was handling this awfully well, given her own biochemical struggles. But the degree of difficulty was just so high …
The four-plus miles back was easier. She’d seen all the shocking things she was going to – seeing them again wasn’t as shocking. Once she got out of the residential area it was easier going. It was very early in the afternoon, she still had decent energy – helped by the ready supply of carbohydrates – and she’d accomplished the one goal she’d set for herself.
As she reached the first (or last, on the way over) of the seven accidents cluttering up the highway between the Tamalpais Valley and home, she got an idea. She might not be in a position to deal with the body in the driver’s seat, but she could at least get the car out of the way, and it was right by one of the little dirt turnouts that had been placed every half-mile or so along Highway 1 so folks could let the lead-footed drivers behind them pass. It would be a simple enough thing to move it over.
Simple in concept, at least. In practice it meant reaching over a rotting corpse to put the vehicle in neutral, removing his hands from the steering wheel and using the driver’s-side door to push it fifty feet – slightly uphill in this case – to the turnout. It took a good ten minutes and left her gasping for breath and feeling itchy, especially since she learned quickly that breathing through her nose was a bad idea. But she got it moved, got the parking brake on and the door closed. “Rest in peace, Dodge Neon driver. Maybe I can give you a proper sendoff later.”
Doing it the first time gave her pause when she reached accident #2, which involved two cars, one of them a Ford El Camino. But she’d already done it once, and already decided she’d give herself a comprehensive scrubbing when she got home, so why not? This time, the El Camino wasn’t ten feet from the turnout and the driver had fallen face-first into the passenger seat, so the toughest part was turning the steering wheel hard enough to get it over there.
But the other, an Acura TLX, was facing across the road, to where the hill dropped off. The driver, a typical soccer mom, was still sitting up straight. And there were children in the back. Kelly had to turn away and settle her stomach before even thinking of dealing with it. But she gritted her teeth, opened the passenger door – she wasn’t sure she could get past the mom – shifted the car into neutral, then stood back to get a couple breaths of fresh air.
At which point the car started moving without her.
“No!” she yelped, taking a few steps toward the TLX in hope of catching up. But it picked up sped fast and careened off the road, rolling down the hillside for a hundred feet before stopping with a sickening crunch.
She stood there in shock, looking down where the car and its late passengers had disappeared into the foliage. She wished she’d done better, but … well, the sedan was off the road. The passengers, however they’d suffered before, sure didn’t care now. It had a sort of gallows humor to it, though it didn’t seem funny right now.
And she still had to get home, past or around five more road accidents. So she started walking again.
Number three, one Smart Fortwo, very small and a good thing too, since it was a two-hundred foot push to the next turnout. Number four, another one-car accident, a Fiat who’d nosed into the hill and whose driver was nowhere to be found – she backed that one up to the same spot as the Fortwo. Number five, a Ford Flex and a Scion xB, two oversized toasters who’d hit head-on and killed their pilots instantly or close to it. The Flex she got to the hill side of the road; the Scion went over the down side to join the TLX in verdant oblivion.
She was pretty tired when she reached the four-car pileup and pondered just going around it. But as she turned and looked behind her, she froze. A family of deer – buck, doe, two little ones – had come down the hill and were browsing on the late-summer greenery by the side of the road. They didn’t seem to notice her, just snacked as they went, seeming utterly at peace in this new, quieter world.
She felt her heart fill at the sight, the natural beauty of it. She’d always been a city girl, granted that sometimes the “cities” were small unincorporated towns. Nature was a novelty or a danger, depending on the circumstances. She’d experienced both in the last week – the novelty of sitting naked on a rock while the sun radiated on her skin, the danger of the dog pack.
But this, this was something else – this was joy at the persistence of life, at the grace and elegance of the delicate yet swift animals. This had been their habitat since before the road was graded through the hills, probably before humans had come over the Bering Strait land bridge fifteen or twenty millennia ago. Now they were walking through it again, undisturbed by road traffic or hunters or any man-made noise and stress.
She must have stood there watching them for fifteen minutes, afraid to spook them by so much as breathing too loud, soaking in the sight as if it was pure happiness. Finally they wandered across the empty highway and down the hill on the other side, grazing and walking until they were out of sight.
She exhaled, and felt the weight of the world drop from her shoulders. She’d been telling herself things would be all right, but hadn’t remotely believed it. Now she more than believed it – she knew, knew the way she knew the sun would rise or a chair would hold her. It was simply the way it was.
Strengthened by the little revelation, she got two of the four wrecks moved to the roadside, sent the other two off the hill a
nd into the brush, and moved on. That left only the eighteen-wheeler on its side farther up. She had no way of shifting it, though – at least no way she could manage with the equipment at hand. She ended up climbing uphill around and past it, mentally adding it to the possible list of future projects. Surely someone in Sayler Beach had a forklift or a bulldozer or … even a big pickup truck might do it.
She reached her own car, and got a good whiff of herself once she was inside and closed the door. Yuck – she not only needed a bath, she’d need to wash the backpack and Lysol the Hyundai’s interior. Too much time around decomposition had given her an odor that could kill a goat. “Well, that’s the price you pay for not dying – you have to smell yourself,” she said ruefully but with humor as she started the car.
Once home, she emptied the backpack, grabbed soap and towel and went straight to the water to wash herself, her clothes and the pack. After, she sat on that same rock in the altogether, relaxing and letting her outfit dry. You had to take the bad with the good in nature, just as you had to with anything else. But this, this moment of freedom and rest, was quite good indeed.