Tales of the Derry Plague , Anselmo, Ray [fun to read txt] 📗

It wasn’t even noon. But Kelly was comprehensively done with the day. She just hoped it was done with her.

5

ALONE

Kelly didn’t do much that evening. The comedown from a big project was always rough, and she’d learned to take a little time in the aftermath to ride it out. And a funeral pyre for an entire municipality was the biggest she’d ever tackled, she realized as she looked back on it. Certainly with the biggest emotional load, one she couldn’t even take the measure of yet.

So she was lazy. She showered. She watched the Matchicks’ Criterion DVDs of Parasite and Secrets & Lies – once again, taking advantage of the electricity while she had it. Lunch was skipped. Dinner was a bag of potato chips, several celery stalks and a tub of onion dip. Sleep was heavily interrupted by bad dreams, but eventually she got enough. Getting herself back to a good mental balance – or as good as she ever got.

But she never could keep laziness up for long. She had always been too responsible, too active, too damaged, too unbalanced, and they all reinforced each other. And they all kept her moving. Short of a major leg or back injury, she’d never get fat. Short of dying, she’d probably never slow down for too long. That was why that bout of what she now was sure wasn’t the flu was so surprising – it wiped her out for a week. It took a planetwide plague to do that.

Saturday, she got out of bed at nine, got dressed, made herself scrambled eggs with peppers and some toast, and …

She stared at her empty plate. And what? She no longer had jobs because, as far as she knew, she no longer had employers or customers. No jobs meant no schedule. No schedule meant she could do whatever she wanted. So what did she want to do?

She had no idea. Except for sleep, meals and crying, she’d gone Mach 3 with her hair on fire from Monday morning to Friday morning. Then the Friday afternoon crash into Oscar bait and Ruffles to even the scales. She usually had things planned for every coming day, whether she was working or not, but first the plague and then the body collection had devoured her life. There were no future plans to fall back on, unless she made some.

But … what plans could she make?

She couldn’t make plans with anyone, obviously. No lunch with LaSheba or Sarah. No trip to the movies with Rav, as she was the only person in the area he knew who would watch a Bollywood flick. No non-date date with Pablo. No paperwork to catch up on at SBN&N. No one she could call, since no one she knew was answering.

Furthermore, she had no projects she wanted to pursue, and no hobbies to speak of. Work, sleep, eat, and find something innocuous to fill in the other hours – that was her life. Trying to add anything more had usually resulted in undue stress, so she just didn’t. It wasn’t a problem until now.

Kelly shuddered and stood up. “Okay, don’t just sit here – do something,” she told herself. “Anything. You can do anything you want. Run naked in the backyard. Steal a car and race up and down the streets. Scream and shout and let it all out. No one’s going to stop you. Just …”

No one’s going to stop you. But that also meant no one would join you. No one would cheer you on. No one would know. There was no one to know.

She sat back down and put her face in her hands. She didn’t weep, just sighed over and over. You watched those post-everything-went-pear-shaped movies with one man wandering the wilderness, and they never showed time spent wishing they had someone to discuss last weekend’s football game with. In the interest of grounding the story in reality, you think they would include that.

“Gah,” she finally said and stood up again. She was lonely, of course she was. She’d just built a funeral pyre for everyone else in a mile radius. She hadn’t had a conversation with anyone but herself in five – no, scratch that, twelve days. Since she got sick. The most socially inept introvert would be lonely in this mess. You’d have to be a hermit not to be. “So what are you going to do about it, Kel?” she grumbled sardonically.

Well … what she always did. Work, sleep, eat, and find something innocuous to fill in the other hours. She’d just eaten, and she wasn’t sleepy, but she could make some work for herself and fill time. And plan – she could plan. Plan what to do when the electricity and running water went. Plan how to live as the sole resident in an isolated hamlet. Plan where to go if she decided not to stay here.

Back to the legal pads in the office. Saul Matchick, despite being a techie, scoffed at the idea of a paperless office. He preferred scribbling things out first, said it helped him clear his head before he did the actual work on the computer. Kelly was much the same – sometimes you had to see things in front of you to sort them out. Besides, soon she wouldn’t have computers to work with, not unless someone decided to keep the electrical and telephone grids going. As always, if there was a someone out there who could.

She sat on the couch with pad and pen and started writing:

Things I Can Do

Then she had to think about it. Did anything need doing? Rephrase: did she need anything done? No one else here did …

She needed another minute of sighing before she could continue. Dang. She underlined Things I Can Do, then realized there was something left over from the previous