by Anselmo, Ray
Somewhere, a dog barked in reply. She’d take it.
Friday – day 33, could you believe it? – was mostly uneventful, as after her usual morning activities she returned to the houses on Admiral Drive to continue her census. But when she got to the last house on the end, 41 Admiral, she noticed something strange about it. Instead of the door being closed and secured, it was wide open. There was dirt tracked up and down the walk to the front door. And the smell … it was like sewer pipes had broken in there, or a wild animal …
… oh. Rather, uh-oh.
She went back to the Ram and got her face mask and the Mizuno before approaching the door again. She had the gun tucked in the back of her cargo pants, but that still felt like a last resort. She stepped slowly, keeping an eye on the doorway and all the windows, hoping it wasn’t the new lair of the mountain lion. “Nature reclaiming its own” took on a new meaning when Nature’s repo man was a vicious carnivore.
“Yip!”
A small wet nose emerged from the darkness of the house. The rest of Fluffy Boi was attached in the usual manner. Then it saw her, ran and hid somewhere in the dwelling’s depths.
So: a lair, yes, a mountain lion, no. This must be where the dog pack was holed up. She went inside, still being careful but a lot less worried. She’d shown them who was boss before, and they’d avoided her ever since, so it must’ve stuck. Ideally she’d have nothing to worry about here.
Looking around, she confirmed her suspicions. During high school she’d volunteered at the Humane Society of Stillwater a few times, mostly to pad her CV for college. The smell of a busy kennel was like nothing else – not necessarily bad but noxious enough to teach you once and for all that animals were messy. Here it was worse, because there were no volunteers to clean up after them.
And heavens to Betsy, did this place need mucking out now. 41 Admiral was a one-story house, and it looked like every available surface had been pooped, peed, vomited or shed on. The dogs had managed to open the fridge and cabinets, eat almost everything inside them and spill the rest onto the floor, where it had combined to form a little toxic swamp on the linoleum. The bathroom had clearly flooded at one point, and the water in the toilet was almost black. A dozen squatting crackheads couldn’t have done this much damage.
She looked around and saw the Rott mix and the cocker watching her from what was left of the living room sofa, not threateningly but worried. What is the human going to do to our place? she imagined they were thinking. “Don’t be afraid – you … you can keep this house,” she told them quietly. “Really, I don’t want it.”
She also didn’t want to play dog owner to a mixed menagerie like this. And she didn’t think she needed to – they all looked healthy and fed, if in desperate need of baths. They were probably taking care of any vermin trying to invade – it occurred to her that the store and her root cellar had been pleasantly free of mice and other rodents the last few weeks. They weren’t broken, so don’t try to fix them.
She did go around the house and open all the windows to air it out. She considered lighting a big citronella candle she spotted in a closet, but the fire risk cautioned against it. She just made some notes – about the dogs rather than the house’s contents – jotted an extra line about bringing food over from the store (she wasn’t going to eat the Alpo and Iams), and left, wiping her shoes on the lawn for a full minute.
Later, once the last house was checked, she might take a day to clean it up a little. But as far as she was concerned, that was the dog pack’s home. She even spray-painted a D for “doggos” on the still-open door instead of her usual X.
With Admiral Drive done, she moved onto Lieutenant Way and did five more houses before it was time to call it quits. Disposal, storage, dinner, bath, then up to the farm’s A/V room with a bag of caramel popcorn, more cat food and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That night, she crawled into bed about as happy as she could hope to be. Tomorrow, she’d …
Her happiness might as well have run into a brick retaining wall. Tomorrow was her day to explore eastern Marin County. She’d covered the Tam Valley area last time, so that meant either going east on 131 to Bel Aire, Belvedere and Tiburon; south on 101 to Marin City and Sausalito; or north on 101 to San Rafael, Greenbrae and Corte Madera. She’d have to take the Shoreline Highway through Tam Valley to get to any of them, since that was the only direct route.
And she didn’t want to. Going around the deserted streets of Sayler Beach was soul-dampening enough, and Sayler Beach only had about eight streets, not counting the Shoreline Highway. The bigger towns and cities on the county’s eastern side, where all the population was – had been – were another matter. Last week’s jaunt had been decidedly unencouraging, and had probably helped send her into the spiral of ennui that cost her a day in the woods to pull out of. Did she really want to go through that again?
But she needed to know. If there was anyone out there, if anybody had survived the plague besides her, she needed to find that person or those people. She could not just live the rest of her life as a hermit in an abandoned town with no one but the dog pack, the farm cats and the occasional cougar for company. She wasn’t Ms. Super Social, but she had to have some interaction if there was any to be had.
Besides, whoever was out there might need help. She was no mountain man or survivalist who could live off the land, but she’d acquired a few skills in the last month, and she could provide necessities for someone else – a lot of someone elses, especially if they were willing to pitch in. The continuation of the human race might depend on it.
Yes, she’d go tomorrow, even if her emotions took a beating. She’d bring the lamotrigine along in case she needed its help to get through it. But she’d go.
Saturday morning, over cereal, milk and dried tangelo slices, she wrote her concerns in the journal. Imagining herself driving through all those depopulated streets was not helping her resolve. If only she could check someplace that wouldn’t be quite as daunting, it might help. But again, the eastern side was the most logical place if she wanted to find people.
She sat up straight as the idea hit. The most logical place, yes – but not the only one. There were a lot of little towns up the coast, popping up along Highway 1 like beads on a string. They mostly relied on tourists to survive and were full of stores and restaurants and antique shops. And in between were long stretches of forest and beach and wetlands, where she could relax. She could go up the west side of Marin, cover a lot of ground, and ease herself back into exploration.
“Bingo,” she said around a mouthful of Rice Chex. That’s where she’d go.
A little digging turned up a AAA map of the coast, but it probably wouldn’t be needed – the highway would be guide enough, since none of the towns extended more than a few blocks from it. She’d take it just in case. Another trip to the beach parking lot let her siphon a GMC pickup enough to fill the Ram’s tank; she left the rest for another time. The morning was barely half gone when she headed north, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be too much of a downer.
Off she went with the windows rolled down and a personal selection of CDs – Coldplay, Taylor Swift, Jars of Clay, Alicia Keys, Trisha Yearwood, Arcade Fire – curated to let anyone listening know she was there but not freak them out. She played them a little louder than usual, figuring that someone might hear it and the engine and take a look. The combined sound should be suitably non-threatening. Besides, it was fun to cruise up the road singing “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” at the top of her lungs.
A two-car accident at the south edge of Stinson Beach forced her to pull over. Mask on, gloves on, reach across the now very degraded bodies to put the cars into neutral and push them off the road. That was something she’d never get used to, at least not until the bodies collapsed into bonepiles and no more. How long would that take, exactly? Maybe by spring …
The thought of still having to clear roads of auto accidents over six months from now did not fill her with glee. And
if the corpses got any ickier, she might decide to push the vehicles out of the way with the Dodge and never leave the cab. Enough was enough.
She drove around Stinson Beach, making notes of what she saw and what could be scavenged. For a moment she thought she had a decision to make – continue north on the highway or duck left along the coast to Bolinas – then realized there was no direct road to Bolinas. A little spit of land extended that way, then ended before reaching the little town. The entrance to Bolinas Lagoon wasn’t bridged, so to get there would mean driving north a mile on the highway, then south another mile on a rural road.
She might not have bothered except for two things. One was that she had plenty of time. The other was a little green marker on the map that said “Bolinas Quail Refuge.” For some reason it intrigued her. Eh, why not? She took to the highway, and a mile later took the detour.
Bolinas and its surroundings were a jewel, adorned with hippie-ish murals and decorations and rustic houses, like Sayler Beach only more so. And it wasn’t just a refuge for quail – of which she saw plenty – but honeybees and foxes and uncountable flocks of seabirds. It was beautiful and fulfilling, and she wrote plenty of notes as she wound up and down the narrow roads. After a half-hour or so, she turned back and headed for the highway again.
Woodville. Five Brooks. Olema. Point Reyes Station. Bivalve. Millerton. Most of the towns were barely names on maps, or were just a few houses and a small store or gas station. Marconi. Reynolds. Marshall. The highway went up the inland side of Tomales Bay, where a finger of the Pacific separated the Point Reyes National Seashore from the mainland like a referee between two fighters. McDonald. Blakes Landing. Vincent Landing. The highway veered north while the coast continued northwest. Tomales. Fallon. Valley Ford.
A few miles farther, Kelly pulled over in Bodega Bay to stretch and look around. Bodega Bay was no bigger than Sayler Beach, but far better known, since it catered to visitors coming up from the Bay Area. Imagine Cannery Row in Monterey, the restaurants and touristy places along the coast, but without the city behind it – you wouldn’t quite have Bodega Bay, but you’d be close. A nice place to visit, and she had, several times.
Seeing it now, depopulated, not a single response to her speakers blaring “How Do I Live,” gave her the rampaging creeps. “It shouldn’t be like this,” she said aloud, and she was right. It was a Saturday afternoon – there should be families on the beach soaking up the sun while they could before the autumn cold set in. The restaurants on the water should be getting ready for the dinner rush. People should be puttering around the harbor on jetskis or hiking the trails around Campbell Cove or South Salmon Beach.
“It shouldn’t be like this,” she repeated. But it didn’t change anything. It was like this.
She couldn’t bear it. She’d gone far enough and found no one. She wanted to go home and cry. She settled for just going home.
But not directly. There was one more stop she wanted to make, even though she was now pretty sure she wouldn’t see a live human being there. She needed to see it, though, for herself. To make up for the desolation, she needed some concentrated natural beauty, and she knew just the place to find it.
Just south of Point Reyes Station, she turned right onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, which wasn’t a boulevard, just a country road with no shoulders. The road curved north, then west, then south in a huge arc, finally turning west once more toward the famous lighthouse at the end of the continent. It was a place she’d found quiet comfort numerous times, after a rough work week or a nasty phone call from Mom or just a day when her meds weren’t quite doing the job.
She parked, sat on the edge of a hill, and looked out at the lighthouse, the sun dappling on the ocean, the gulls swooping and squawking. She didn’t feel sad so much as frustrated, like when she couldn’t make the till balance after a day at the store. By all rights someone else should still be alive. There was no reason she would’ve made it when no one else did. But where were they?!?
That was the question she couldn’t answer, the thought that plagued her days and interrupted her dreams at night. Driving all this way up the Pacific Coast hadn’t solved the puzzle. She was starting to wonder if anything would. Or could.
Kelly watched the sea and the seabirds and the sand until she risked having to drive home in the dark, then got back in the truck and pointed it south down the highway. “God, I know we don’t talk as much as we should,” she prayed. “As I should. But I want to tell You something. I promise I won’t take Vivi Fifi’s way out. You want to kill me, You go ahead and do that. When it’s my time to go, You do what You have to, but I promise I won’t jump the gun and do it myself. You have my word.”
She sighed before continuing. “But I’d like to ask something – not as a trade or anything, just as a favor. If there is anyone else out there, anyplace … could you let me know? Send a sign or something, or have them show up where I am, or move me to where they are, or … I don’t know, whatever. But please, fill me in, because the not knowing is really starting to chew me up.”
She had nothing more to say. God, as usual, didn’t say a thing. She kept driving toward home as the sun went down.
20
SIGN
September passed, a day at a time. Every morning, Kelly got up, ate and wrote in the journal. She kept siphoning gas until she ran out of containers, then periodically thereafter when she emptied one into the Hyundai or the Ram. It took eleven more days to finish checking every house, apartment and other building in town, including those on the horse ranch and the two on the Nature Conservancy grounds. They were all catalogued in her little ledger for future reference.
And just in the nick too, because now she needed the time to harvest the crops over at Holy Green. Her original plan had been to pick crops for an hour or two a day, figuring that it would be too physically taxing for her to do more. But while it did take a toll on her back and her joints, the combination of milder weather and the psychological relief of no longer going through people’s houses made it easier than she expected. With sufficient sunscreen and bug repellent applied, it was almost relaxing.
After a few days, she rewrote her schedule. Now she put in an hour or two after siphoning, harvesting carrots and kale and collards in the morning. She’d pack a lunch and a DVD in the morning, eat while watching a movie in the A/V room, then go out and spend a couple more hours on the crops. Sweaty from the work, she’d bathe and do washing before dinner.
And since she was catching a film several days a week, she found another use for Friday evenings. That became Dog Day. Between dinner and sunset, she’d throw on the fire suit, grab a bag of kibble and a gallon of water from the store and head over to 41 Admiral Drive for some housekeeping and diplomacy.
Over a month of Fridays, she managed to clean up the floors, lay down some newspapers from the store to keep them that way, strip the beds and cover them in newsprint (the bedcovers had to go into the dumpster at the Spinnaker Inn – there was no salvaging them) and brush off the furniture. She found a large roasting pan, poured the kibble into it, and filled a deep baking dish with fresh water. She scrubbed marks off the walls. She left the doors and windows open.
The pack was still wary of her but seemed to appreciate her efforts, and eventually stopped growling at her. The Chihuahua even started greeting her with panting and a wagging tail when she arrived, though if she took a step toward it, it ran for the farthest room. She still counted it as progress.
The one task on the schedule she skipped for a couple of weeks was the Saturday trip to look for other people and check what had happened to the rest of the county. After the North Coast trek had been such a bust, she had trouble facing the prospect of more empty neighborhoods and hopeless searching. The next two Saturdays, she spent house-checking. But then there were no more houses to check – even the horse ranch and the Nature Conservancy had been canvassed and marked off.
The following Saturday, her arms and back needed a rest from picking crops,
so she packed up her weapons, binoculars and music and hit the road again, hoping she didn’t regret it. Back to the east county – Bel Aire and Belvedere-Tiburon. If she got done with it quickly and still had emotional reserves left, she’d check out the bay coast toward Sausalito. If she didn’t, she’d go home. At worst, she knew one more place not to bother with. At best …
She tried not to think about best-case scenarios. Why get her hopes up?
That turned out to be the right move once she got to the place. Marin County was just one large peninsula, like San Francisco and San Mateo on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. But unlike its neighbor to the south, it had a lot of little sub-peninsulas – Point Reyes, Point Bonita, Point San Pedro and on and on. Belvedere and Tiburon were twin towns at the end of one of them, with yet another, the prosaically named Peninsula Point, jutting off of that. And southeast of it sat Angel Island, a square mile of state park surrounded by the bay.
She didn’t bother with Angel Island – it was too far to swim given the cold bay water, and she didn’t want to try learning how to drive a boat on short notice. Besides, if someone was going to settle anywhere, it would be more likely in a house on the mainland than in a wilderness on an island.