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

anything home (or at least to the Alvarezes’), how would she do it without a car? Then she realized the question itself was erroneous: there were plenty of shopping carts, and since SBN&N had never had a major problem with theft, they’d never gotten the modern kind that locked if you tried to take them past the parking lot.

She laughed again and continued on, humming Duran Duran’s “Pressure Off.” She felt a little guilty that a side effect of the world’s worst pandemic which had taken all her friends was that her stress levels were dropping through the floor, but emotions were funny things and tended to go wherever they liked. She knew that better than most. Let the helpful ones ride, medicate the unhelpful ones into submission, keep walking – that’s what she’d had to learn over the decades.

What she had to do at SBN&N was clear – all that cheese. Probably a couple hundred pounds that had been sitting unattended for about two weeks, while she was first ill and later busy with other things. The whole point of cheese was that it was still useful once it spoiled (provided it spoiled in exactly the right way), and it was all hermetically sealed in plastic, but … had it remained edible?

Darn, she should’ve thought to look that up on the internet while she had access. For that matter, she should’ve used the deli slicer while she had electricity. But should’ve wouldn’t help her now. She looked it over and … it all looked fine, even the bleu cheese and other kinds with iffier appearances. All of it was securely sealed. It had been out of refrigeration for less than a day and a half. And cheese was an item that if it went bad, it was obvious – if not by sight, then (like milk) by smell and taste.

Well … soonest begun, soonest done. She grabbed a cart, loaded all the cheese into it along with a few boxes of gallon-sized plastic zip-close bags, took it to the back, picked a good sharp knife and got to slicing.

Not all of it needed to be sliced – some of it already was before being entombed in plastic, others like the Babybels were in smaller portions, and feta and bleu cheeses simply crumbled. Cream cheese, she left in its blocks for the moment. And she had no idea what to do with the ricotta, so she set it aside to toss into the dumpster with all the empty wrappers. The hard cheeses were the real work, but soon she was averaging a minute per block to reduce them to smaller, dryable pieces.

Only when she was almost finished did she remember that she hadn’t siphoned any more gas to run the dehydrators – and she hadn’t brought her car. Oh, and that soft cheeses would make a mess in the dehydrators if she didn’t do something about it. “And I’d been doing so well,” she whined. After all she’d been through, she’d earned a whine, right?

But Kelly determined to keep it at one. Too much to do, and who knew how much time? So.

She finished the slicing and sorted all the cheese into the gallon bags, took the wrappers and the ricotta to the Bog of Eternal Stench, and walked home to get her car, trying to think of what to put on the dehydrator shelves to keep melting cheese from dripping everywhere. Plastic wrap would melt too. So would the wax on wax paper. Aluminum foil? Wait – parchment paper, that should do it! And she knew there were several rolls at the store.

One problem resolved, she reached her car, where she thankfully still had her siphon tubes and a couple of five-gallon jugs in the trunk. She made a mental note to put those somewhere else – she’d heard of gasoline spontaneously combusting just by getting warm, and didn’t want that to happen inside her vehicle – drove back to the store and spent the next couple of hours swiping the contents of a Lincoln Navigator’s tank. She filled both jugs, leaving plenty in the SUV, but deciding to drain the rest once the dehydrators were running again.

Back to the farm. Fill up the generator. Lay parchment paper in the dehydrators. Unwrap and lay the cheese on the parchment paper – plenty of room for the lot with one shelf left over. Crank ‘em all up. Time: 2:31 p.m. Long sigh of relief. Return to the store to check the inventory. Nothing left that needed freezing, refrigeration or immediate preservation, though the potatoes had to be dealt with. Another sigh of relief plus a smile. She’d check on the dehydrators before she went to bed at night, refilling the generator’s gas tank as needed.

As planned, she finished decanting the Navigator, filling one more five-gallon jug and most of another. She left the jugs in the back of the store – better they cause trouble there than at home. Then she went to attack the other major project of the day, cleaning up Keith Alvarez’s woodworking room to use as the new root cellar.

She soon realized she should’ve probably done that first and dealt with the cheese later. With all the running around and the cutting, she was just too tired to be shoving heavy wood-shaping equipment around. She dragged a couple of them into corners, shook her head and concluded that the rest would have to wait until she got her strength back. She had enough energy to sweep the floor, though, and collected half a kitchen garbage bag’s worth of chips and shavings for later fire-starting.

Dinner was a dessicated hamburger patty, two dessicated slices of toast and two comparatively juicy carrots, plus a bottle of room-temperature Sprite. Not gourmet by a long shot, but suitable fuel for the furnace. She chose to relax for the rest of the evening, since the only thing she needed