Tales of the Derry Plague | Book 1 | LAST

by Anselmo, Ray

  She decided not to keep track of previous residents’ names when she couldn’t remember what the two younger children were called. The Alvarezes had mostly kept to themselves and driven their kids to some private Catholic school in San Rafael. She got the impression they’d moved to Sayler Beach so they didn’t have to interact with too many people. The craft room was for Rita, who did macramé. Kelly made a note of that, in case she needed more rope and didn’t want to go to the ranch.

  She took another look at the kitchen and realized she’d have to add a task to each house inspection: clearing out all the spoiled food. The bananas and oranges hanging in the basket by the window looked like they were ready to start a revolution. Heaven only knew what the inside of the fridge would be like. She walked back to her place, returning with the shopping cart for what hadn’t gone bad and a garbage bag for what had. After another hour, both were full.

  She tied the bag shut and put it in the bed of the Ram, then sorted through the things in the cart. Except for a few items, it would make more sense to put them in the basement root cellar that to tote them next door – she could use it all, but didn’t need to right now save for what had already been opened. “Yeah, save yourself some heavy lifting, Kel.” 90% of it she stored downstairs, then went home with the rest after spraying an X on the front door and securing it closed.

  2

  28 Commodore Avenue

  2 stories

  1st floor – liv room, kitchen/dining, bath, gym, library

  2nd floor – 3 bedrooms w/bath between 2, 3rd used for storage

  Men’s clothes – L, women’s clothes – 8-12

  Backyard – small, 3 trees (1 almond), sm. shed, sm. veg. garden

  Books – est. 400, ½ Western paperbacks

  DVD/Blu-Rays – est. 170, mostly Westerns & sports

  The Wilkinses’ was smaller, and they were retired – they rarely used the upstairs except when their children and grandchildren visited. But Henry and Clare were workout fiends, even at their age, and their gym was the converted garage. If she ever decided to get into weightlifting, she knew right where to go.

  And they had just about every classic Western film on disc, which gave her an idea. Checking the racks, she found The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which she’d heard about but never seen. “I got your Friday night movie right here,” she said, and took it with her along with the canned and dry goods when she left. She also took two more bags of garbage – the Wilkinses, she knew, did monthly shopping trips to San Rafael, and they must have just stocked up when the bug hit.

  Time for one more? Why not? 24 Commodore was home to a gay couple (their names escaped her) who both worked for the Nature Conservancy and had moved to town earlier in the year. The place was small, a starter home of sorts, one story with a teensy attic and seemingly half-empty. The men hadn’t really filled the place – a basic amount of IKEA furniture and just enough other stuff to show it was occupied. The backyard was all dug up – they must’ve planned a garden before the world went down in a handbasket.

  Looking at the disturbed ground made her sad. Young men, about her age, maybe preparing for a life together, definitely preparing a garden. And then it was all taken away from them, in a few days.

  She shook her head and went to empty the fridge. Half an hour later, she trudged home with a half-full trash bag, a lot of baking ingredients, one more mark on her map and a frown. She was definitely taking a lamotrigine with dinner before she got really dour about this.

  Besides the pill, dinner was bacon pancakes and canned pineapple – breakfast for dinner was always fun, and with two new boxes of Bisquick she needed to use it or lose it. Of course the silly song from Adventure Time got stuck in her head, and that may have improved her mood as much as the medication did. Whatever worked.

  After eating, she tossed the dirty dishrags and clothes and the laundry soap into the hamper with her bedclothes and headed down to the water. Scrubbing sheets by hand was hard work, but eventually she got through all of it and cleaned herself up besides. It was a warm evening and, because she could, she didn’t bother drying anything, including her clothes. She’d put them up on the lines when she got home.

  So it was that she was climbing up the trail from the beach, naked except for her sandals, her hands full of a hamper of wet washing, when she ran into the mountain lion.

  The thing must’ve been silent as a mouse for her not to hear it. But there it was, as long as she was tall without including the whipping tail, all muscle, teeth and attitude. It looked at her like it was drawing the markings for the cuts of meat on her skin. And here she was, wearing nothing but skin above her ankles, without even a softball bat to defend herself. Not that one was likely to help – if she got within range to use the Mizuno and didn’t score a direct head shot, she might be an entrée before she got a second attempt.

  Nothing in her education had taught her how to deal with cougars. “God, please protect me,” she prayed hastily, then did the first thing that came to mind: she roared and charged it, leading with the hamper.

  God, she later mused, really did have a soft spot for fools. At bottom, the mountain lion was a cat, and a cat will jump back and scuttle away if you run straight at it, yelling like an idiot. Seeing as it worked, she did it again, and again, and each time the big killing machine retreated. That allowed her to reach the branching path that led to Commodore Avenue and home. She backed onto it and walked backward, not taking her eye off the mountain lion until it turned tail and sauntered off, no doubt in search of less feisty prey.

  Then she broke into a sprint, not stopping until she reached her front door. Once inside, she dropped right on her rear, leaned against the closed door with the hamper in her lap and laughed hysterically until she cried just as hysterically. It took her what felt like ten minutes until she got it all out. The apocalypse: come for the loneliness, stay for the wild animal attacks!

  But, Kelly realized, she’d been the wild animal who attacked, hadn’t she? “I’m the dominant predator around here, mother-scratcher!” she declared to the absent puma. “Don’t believe me? Just ask the doggos!”

  Just then, a dog began barking in the distance, and she started cackling all over again.

  17

  BANG

  Kelly did eventually put on underwear and pajamas, hang up the wet laundry in the backyard, and have a snack of cheese and bread before going to bed. But she tossed and turned from the adrenalin rush before finally settling down. And she made one more decision – tomorrow she was going to find a gun and learn how to use it, because the next time something big and dangerous caught her unawares, she might not get so lucky.

  Thursday morning, she dressed comfortably, had breakfast, wrote a journal entry for day 25, then hopped into the Ram and headed up to the store for the siphoning equipment and to toss the trash from yesterday’s search. The Bog of Eternal Stench wasn’t as full as she remembered, and she guessed the stuff on the bottom must be composting under the weight. That was fine – she’d need the extra room to put more garbage.

  Then she recalled that composting produced heat, which could lead to combustion. The last thing she needed was a literal dumpster fire on top of the figurative one that was the apocalypse. Correction: the last thing she needed was a literal dumpster fire next to the building where she was storing months’ worth of food and gasoline.

  Hypothesis: she needed to move the dumpster away from the store. Added hypothesis: she needed to find a separate, non-flammable place to store the gasoline. “Well, the only thing left on the sked for this morning is siphoning,” she commented. “Let’s deal with these.”

  Moving the dumpster was easy enough with the Ram on hand. Using the rope from the horse ranch, she was able to drag it to an open spot in the middle of the store parking lot and leave it there. Now five yards from the building, it could go off if it wanted and shouldn’t affect the inventory inside.

  Finding a safe spot for the gasoline might be a more difficult task. She
couldn’t immediately think of a place that would work better than where she had it. With most of the buildings in town being either all or partly wooden, they wouldn’t do to store such highly volatile material. And she wanted to store as much as she could, because who knew when there would be refineries and tanker trucks again? A concrete building, ideally, not near trees or grass, with decent ventilation … in this town? But surely there was one like that.

  She was heading back down to Commodore to start siphoning and searching when she spotted it – the public bathrooms by the beach parking lot. Of course! Concrete with steel doors, not near anything important, a good twenty feet from the nearest tree branch, separated from the town itself by a big stretch of pavement and a couple of small hills, and ventilated within an inch of its life. It would be as close to perfect as she could hope for. And she could focus on draining the dozen or so cars there now that she’d cleaned out the ones at the store.

  She went around, back to the store, and loaded every full jerrican and jug into the back of the Ram, though it meant unloading most of the empties into the store. When she reached the bathrooms, she hauled them all out and plied them into the nearest men’s room, stacking them two high when she could. Her arms were aching when she finished – a full five-gallon jerrican weighed over fifty pounds, more than a third what she did, and “lifting with your legs” only helped so much.

  It was tempting to just cut out at that point, but she figured she’d be fine if she just didn’t do anymore heavy lifting, so she decided to hold off on siphoning (she’d have to lug the container afterward) until later that day if not the next. Instead she went home – or rather, three doors down from it at 20 Commodore Avenue to start her cataloguing again. She did 20 and 16, broke for lunch, then managed 12, 8 and 2 to check off most of that side of the street.

  With plenty of sunshine to work with – the watch said 4:08 – and no activity set for the evening, there was no reason not to cross the avenue and keep going. By sunset around 7:30, she’d checked, cleaned out (as much as she needed to at present), documented, secured and marked 5 and 9 Commodore, hauled all the garbage and non-perished foods up to the store (she was running out of room in the root cellar), returned to the beach parking lot and sucked five gallons out of the Land Rover she’d gotten the bodies off the beach with weeks ago.

  Weeks ago … it felt like months. But no – it was only fourteen days since she finished filling up the delivery truck with bodies, thirteen since she put it to the torch. Just thinking about how much she’d done since made her head spin. So did the gasoline fumes and her leaden arms, when she put the latest jugful in the bathroom stall. She needed dinner and rest and lithium, so she went home and got them.

  Friday was another day in the salt mines, and the day she found another treasure. 15 Commodore, the next house to search, was the former home of George Willard, a retired Army drill sergeant who liked to air his political views. He felt generals would run the country better than the government and that Donald Trump was a borderline socialist, so she’d always done her best not to respond when he was declaiming in the checkout line. She often wondered why he’d chosen to settle amidst Marin County’s sparkling rainbow of wacky liberals.

  But now, surrounded by Mr. Willard’s ideological furniture, she remembered something she wanted that he would most surely have.

  He had both a safe and two display cabinets, and she looked the latter over with nervous fascination. The man owned a lot of guns. The issue was that she didn’t know which gun or guns would be best for her needs. She wasn’t going to try hunting until she absolutely needed to – she’d much rather watch deer browse than kill, skin and eat them. She needed something to defend herself if she couldn’t scare away the next mountain lion or large dog. Easy to handle, load and carry, but still big enough to stop whatever she pointed it at.

  “This looks promising.” She tried opening the cabinet door, but it was locked. Searching a nearby desk produced a ring of keys, and the sixth one unlocked it. She reached in and picked up the pistol, hefting it. Not too heavy, two or three pounds. The little card where it had been read:

  COLT M1911A1

  Vietnam 1967-69

  “Must’ve been his service pistol,” she mused. She felt around it until she figured out how the ammunition clip came out, and popped it. It wasn’t loaded, which was smart – you’d figure an Army vet, no matter how trigger-happy, would keep his weapons safe. But it was no good to her without bullets.

  The third key she tried on the safe opened it up, and there they were – ammo for probably every gun in those cabinets. Mercifully given her lack of gun knowledge – most of what she had was derived from films and thus of dubious accuracy – one box was labeled .45 ACP ROUND POINT FOR M1911A1 – 100 ROUNDS. She took that box, locked up the safe and the cabinet, returned the keys to the desk and sat down to try and figure out how the thing worked, preferably without shooting herself.

  It turned out to be relatively simple, as befitted a pistol one gave to teenaged recruits. You loaded the bullets into the magazine (it held eight) and slid it in until it clicked. This was the safety, which she put on immediately. That was the hammer you cocked to fire, and that was the trigger. The bullet came up here and went out there, while the casing flew out thataway.

  She couldn’t resist. She had to take this outside and try it.

  Fittingly enough, there was a target in Willard’s backyard, one of those ones with a vaguely human outline like in police firing ranges on TV, secured to a pallet that looked like it was made of railroad ties. She stood about twenty feet away from it, flicked off the safety with her thumb, held it like she’d seen the actors do (left hand on right wrist to brace it), cocked it, pulled the trigger –

  She sat there for a minute where the recoil had knocked her on her rear, her ears ringing, birds going nuts in the trees above her. The brass casing bounced and rolled in the grass a couple of feet away. A fresh tear had appeared at the top of the target – the bullet must’ve just grazed the paper. “Okay …” She stood up, rubbed her ears and her hindquarters and tried not to laugh at herself. Good thing no one else was around. “Let’s try that again.”

  This time she went back into the house first and found a pair of those protective headphones she’d also seen on the TV firing ranges. Returning, she adopted a different stance, left foot half a pace ahead of the right, knees slightly bent to absorb the recoil. She wasn’t a big man like Willard had been – she needed to respect this thing’s power. Left hand on right wrist, elbows locked, aim a bit lower, safety off, hammer cocked, trigger …

  The second time was better. She didn’t fall over, though the Colt tried its best, and the bullet slammed into the target’s … well, where its right eye would be if it had eyes. She was aiming for a chest shot, though – the kick was really throwing off her aim. But it was something. The next cougar or Rott or wolf or bear or escaped zoo animal had better watch out.

  For now, she finished her notes on the place, including a list of all arms and ammunition. She took with her the garbage, usable food (not much – the man seemed to have lived on frozen dinners), the Colt, two boxes of .45 bullets and the knowledge that she’d need to be very careful and to practice as much as she could without using up all her ammo. Hopefully she’d never need to use the gun, but like car insurance it was good to have just in case.

  Even taking a leisurely lunch break, she still got six houses done that day, and found another box of .45 ammunition in the process. She put away all the good food, dumped all the rotten (the Bog hadn’t ignited yet, good), went home for dinner, ate, bathed, then nabbed a bag of Pirate’s Booty popcorn from the store shelves and strolled over to the farm as the sun approached the horizon.

  It was a treat to watch a film again, even – or especially – when she couldn’t do it often. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance lived up to its reputation. She enjoyed the subtle interplay between Jimmy Stewart as the squeaky clean politician and John Wayne’s swaggering loner, the riv
alry they both tried to avoid addressing, how each had ended up the way they did. It wasn’t High Noon (still her favorite of the genre), but it wasn’t far behind.

  And when she was about to leave after turning everything off, walking home by flashlight, she saw the cats had cleaned the plate of the two cans of food she’d left on it. She’d left the rest of the case in the A/V room, so she got two more cans and dumped them out for the kitties before heading home. She had the flashlight in her left hand, the Mizuno in her right, the Colt tucked in the back of her pants. She would’ve almost felt safe walking through San Francisco on a busy Saturday night. Here, now, it was close to overkill.

  Saturday, she woke early, ready to hit the road to the other side of the county. Breakfast, journal, siphon the Land Rover until it was dry, pour the result into the Ram’s gas tank (it was close to full now), then hit the road. It certainly was a change from her first trip – instead of walking for hours and maneuvering around accidents, she reached the Tam Valley Junction Walgreen’s in twenty minutes. And this time, she arrived better prepared, in the fire suit with plenty of trash bags.

  She didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning up bodies – there were just too many on the populated side of the peninsula, and she wouldn’t know where to stop. But the three Walgreen’s clerks … conscience demanded she at least take care of them, or what was left of them after a month of decomposition and raccoon depredations. She did, depositing their remains in the dumpster behind the drugstore for lack of a better solution.