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

of a depression and a well-earned one – she didn’t need another. Too much to do. She made a mental note to take an olanzapine if she had to stop herself again.

But that wasn’t a reason not to start drying some food tonight. At least get a first load going before sundown.

Kelly headed back to the store, filled a cart with the remaining apples, and fired up the meat slicer in the deli. In an hour she’d sliced up the lot, filled two black garbage bags half-full (if she’d tried to put them all in one bag, she couldn’t have lifted it), tucked them into her Hyundai and was driving back to the farm. It took another half-hour to get the slices all arranged on the dehydrator racks. Then she turned them on and left, making a mental note to come back to them first thing in the morning.

Returning to the store, she thought about what could be done in the remaining daylight. She cleaned up part of the produce section and moved the remaining fruit and veg – mostly oranges, carrots and cruciform vegetables – into it, then scrubbed and sprayed the rest. When she was finished, she had another half-bag of disgusting ready to go into the dumpster. She sorted through the cheese, and most of it was still fine. The bread and pastries were mainly stale, but very little of it was moldy – she tossed what was, which finished filling up the bag.

Huck the garbage into the Bog of Eternal Stench, lock it again, lock the gate again. Back her car up to the employee entrance, fill a shopping cart with bread, roll it out, fill up the back seat. She could twice-bake or toast it all, let it air a little, bag it all up and it would keep for a while – dry, but serviceable. She took a case of sandwich bags and headed home.

She was a little gassed when she got there, but she still had a lot she wanted to do, and the sun was just hitting the water. She did take an olanzapine – safety first; she did want to sleep eventually – and started a toasting assembly line with the remaining bread and pastries that she didn’t eat for dinner (along with some cheddar cheese and an apple she’d swiped earlier). With the toaster, microwave and oven going almost constantly, she had to make sure to keep herself hydrated, and ended up polishing off a quart of orange juice too.

She had most of the bread processed and maybe half of it packed when her drooping eyelids told her enough was enough. If her eyes hadn’t, the microwave clock would’ve – 11:06. She stopped, showered and fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

The next morning, she felt a little creaky and decided that yes, she’d overdone it a little. Live and learn. She cooked some eggs and sausage and ate while packing up and toasting more of the bread, but took it slowly. “One thing at a time – don’t wear yourself out,” she told herself between bites. It helped, hearing herself – the near-silence around town was starting to feel creepy, and she needed to do something to break it. At least the sound of the freed dogs and cats punctured the stillness a little.

The first stop was back at the Zen farm, where the apple slices had dried nicely, enough that she could carry them all to her car in one bag instead of two. Those would last her a good while. “Now what to dry next?” She wasn’t sure how to dehydrate cabbages, but the broccoli and oranges should be easy enough. Maybe the frozen burger patties too. The cheese … not sure either. She’d have to look that up on –

“The internet!” She had to hit the ‘Net and print up what she needed before the power vanished – and that could be any second! “Okay, okay – first reload the dehydrators, then start Googling.” Those would be the two top-priority items for today. Don’t panic – just get things done. Deeeeeep breath.

The oranges were easy enough to cut using the meat slicer, though it did make a bit of a mess. The broccoli, though, had to be done by hand – cutting the florets off the stems. She did the cauliflower that hadn’t spoiled too, cleaned up all the juice, bagged everything up, shoved the bags in the car and returned to Holy Green with them and forty-some packages of hamburger patties. There was just enough room for all that in the dehydrators, and she turned them on, figuring she’d check them last thing in the day before going to sleep.

She went back home, stored the bag of apple slices in a spare room, started the last of the bread, then logged on to the Web and fired up the printer. Six articles from different sources on the plague, then tips on fire-building, general camping, first aid and how to siphon gas from tanks came out before the printer ran out of black ink. She searched the desk drawers and mercifully found another cartridge, swapped it in and started searching for basic food preservation tips and survival skills.

By early afternoon, she had about two hundred single-sided pages of information and some maps of Marin County to work with. More searching produced an empty binder and a three-hole punch, and soon she was essentially holding a book of Everything She Could Think Of On How To Survive Post-Apocalypse. Scratch that off the list. Now she could live without a computer if she had to, or so she hoped.

With the bread all dried out and very little of it left to pack, and the dehydrators full and running, food prep had hit a bottleneck. She raided the refrigerator for lunch, picking out sliced meat, tortillas and vegetables to clear out some of the remaining perishables. Then