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

to do before sleeping was to check the dehydrators and refill the generator (where she’d left a full jug of fuel earlier).

It was a beautiful evening, not too warm or cold with a breeze coming off the ocean, so once again she decided to walk, this time to the farm. By the time she left home it was night, but without electricity to block them, the moon and stars gave her sufficient light to see by. She found herself grinning at the beauty of nature, the lights above and the smells and sounds around. Disaster or no disaster, they fed her soul, or at least that was how it felt.

The cheese was nowhere near done, but she expected that. She turned off the generator, refilled its reservoir and started it up again, knowing it had more than enough gas to run well into the morning. She left again, wondering if she should dry the potatoes too, or would they keep well enough without it. Potatoes were supposed to be good for that, but some in the store were starting to sprout, and she wasn’t sure …

She heard a noise behind her, a mumble or something. She looked, saw nothing, kept on walking home.

Another sound – a growl.

She turned and squinted into the dark. Eyes – two pairs, three. What … were coyotes or wolves coming into town? Was there a difference between coyotes and wolves, or were they just different names for the same animal, like cougars and pumas? And more importantly, could she escape either one?

The eyes approached, and she almost laughed. Five pet dogs – a cocker, a golden Lab, a Chihuahua, a corgi or Pomeranian or other fluffy breed, and a mutt of some nature. None of them too big or scary – she’d probably set them all free during the Great Corpse Scavenger Hunt of the previous week. “Oh, who’s good bois?” she cooed at them. “Who’s a handsome pack of doggos?”

The cocker spaniel snarled at her. Then so did a sixth dog, a German Shepherd that came out of the night behind the others. That’s when she noticed that none of them looked friendly, not even the fluffy boi. These were pets, she remembered – pets whose owners had died about two weeks ago and saw no one else alive until she came along, tossed them out of their homes – and didn’t do anything else, like feed them. Had any of them eaten recently?

She began walking backwards toward home, scanning her surroundings for a stick, a pole, anything that could be a weapon in a pinch. The dogs followed her, stalked her. “Oh, dear,” she muttered, and heard the quake in her voice. She had nothing on her but the clothes she wore, not even a flashlight. And while she could probably outrun Fluffy and the Chihuahua, she didn’t like her odds against the rest of the mixed-breed gang. She didn’t want to hurt them, but if one of them charged …

None of them did. She kept backing up, and they trailed her, growling all the while, keeping a safe distance but making it clear that they didn’t consider her a dominant predator so much as large prey. The dance continued until she saw she was at her front walk. She retreated slowly to her door, opened it, ducked inside …

… fell back against the door and began crying hysterically. The barking and howling that began outside did her nerves no favors. If one of them, especially the Shepherd or the Lab, had gone for her, her chances would’ve been zero. The last person on Earth(?), killed and eaten by puppers turned feral. That morning, she’d thought she hadn’t needed to defend herself from anything. That showed what she knew. Nature wasn’t just warn sunshine and starlight. It was red in tooth and claw, and baying on her doorstep.

Kelly didn’t stop crying or shaking until she was almost asleep an hour later. And that night, she woke at every howl and yip.

9

BLOOD

The morning did not improve things. Kelly got up, bleary-eyed and aching, tired from dreams full of wagging tails and gnashing teeth. Then she looked down to see a red spot the size of a salad plate on the bedsheet.

Great. Exhausted muscles, feral dogs, and now “the manner of women” (as her mom used to quote from Genesis) was upon her.

For the first time in years, it had taken her by surprise. It wasn’t so much that her periods were “regular” as that she usually had advance warning courtesy of a day’s worth of PMS. That feeling of being one huge exposed nerve always let her know the flow was coming, so she could grit her teeth and get ready for it. And so that others could get ready for it – if she found herself getting snappish, she could just say “sorry, PMS day” and everyone at SBN&N knew she wasn’t actually angry at them.

This time, no alert. She’d probably been so busy/suppressing her emotions/in shock that the PMS couldn’t break through. Or something. She wasn’t sure of anything other than she needed to get herself and the bed cleaned up before anything else. And that would now be much more difficult because this time, no running water – not in the house, at least.

A bottle of Aquafina, a washcloth and a tampon took care of the most immediate need. Mom had been dead set against tampons in a manner she usually reserved for Satan and rap music, insisting that her daughter should never put anything inside her until she had a husband. Her freshman year at college, someone introduced her to Tampax and it was like discovering the eighth wonder of the world. Mom, being Mom, had started all kinds of drama when she came home the following summer, but she’d never looked back.

Her clothes and bedding required another swim in the