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

machines tomorrow or Sunday. Down the highway. Park fifty feet before the semi.

And now came the hard part, now discounted over 30% due to her quick thinking. But which way should she go around the big rig? That whole section of the highway was built on steep mountainsides. To the left was a tough uphill climb to get over the jackknifed cab and the front end of the trailer. To the right was an equally sharp dip down to get around/under the back end. Which way should she go?

“Worst case scenarios,” she told herself. “If I go around the back and slip, I could go quite a way down.” She went over and looked – probably a two-hundred foot slide over brush-covered ground, though if she could use the foliage to stop herself it wouldn’t be so bad. “If I go around the front, maybe twenty feet up, but it’s steeper, and that’s where the driver’s body is. And if I slip, I could get stuck between the hill and the truck …” She walked over to that end.

Actually, there was no likelihood of getting stuck unless the truck shifted or she broke something. After two weeks there, it had probably shifted all it was going to. She’d dealt with dead bodies now, though not in as bad a condition as that poor fellow was. And twenty feet sure beat a potential two hundred. Uphill and to the left it was.

Smooth at both ends, the Mizuno wasn’t much as a hiking stick, and she finally shoved it under her arm so she had both hands free. She managed to get up, over and past the truck in two attempts, and the first one was arrested when her foot slipped and she slid six feet until her boot hit one of the cab’s thick tires. It was easy enough to recover from there. Five minutes later she was back on the road on the other side, having suffered nothing worse than an adrenalin rush.

Five minutes after that, she reached the next accident – a four-car pileup, sure enough. From the looks of it, the first driver had died in harness, the Ford Focus had rolled up the hillside and dropped onto the driver’s side. Later on, three other drivers had come around the tight turn a hundred feet behind the Focus and hit it before they could react. They came off worse than driver #1, dying of their injuries rather than the disease (or maybe of both).

Once again, she was glad she had trouble puking. She walked around the mess on the downhill side of the road, mumbling a generic prayer for the dead. Four hundred feet farther on, she realized she was repeating “may light perpetual shine upon them” over and over like it was a mantra, shook and stopped herself. Was this what the Black Death was like? You were walking down the road and suddenly came upon the dead?

“Kel. Kel. Stop being so morbid. It doesn’t help. Later – deal with it later.” She took a deep breath, two, and kept walking. Maybe she should make a list of long-term projects to tackle, like “clear the highway” and “harvest the farm’s crops” and “find a horse and learn to ride it.” She decided to save that for later too. For now, she needed to go get her meds.

Her meds. That had been one of the major discoveries of her life. As a child, she’d alternated between hyperactive and zombified, and both brought on her mother’s wrath. “Why can’t you be normal? Your brother is normal – why can’t you be more like him? Oh, I pray to God every day that you would straighten up!”

Brad wasn’t normal – in her parents’ eyes, he was a superhero. Brad Sweeney was the star linebacker and basketball guard with the 3.5 GPA who was a leader in the youth group at church and dated the valedictorian. (He did more to the valedictorian than that, but they didn’t know and wouldn’t have believed it if Kelly had told them.) He was recruited all over the place but chose to stay home and attend Oklahoma State. He never caused them a day’s grief that they caught him at.

At last check, he was still in Stillwater, married with kids, teaching P.E. at the same high school he’d attended and still going to the same church. A torn knee ligament his junior year at OSU had scotched any pro football hopes, that and his failure to grow past 5’11”. But he was there, and he behaved exactly as his parents wanted, and he was the yardstick by which his little sister had been measured and found lacking.

She tried to be normal, at least normal as Mom defined it. Dad put a lot less pressure on her – even though he backed Mom’s every demand, in private he would tell her to find her own path and build a life that made her happy and ride Mom’s drama out. She worked at that. She worked at her education too, putting in hours beyond her peers, taking AP classes and doing her best to burrow through her emotional highs and lows. And when Mom said “jump,” she didn’t bother asking how high, she just sprang and hoped it was enough. It rarely was.

She was a puzzle to Mom, a puzzle to her church who didn’t understand her inconsistent moods, an unsolvable puzzle to the few boys she dated (they usually gave up after one try). But she was smart and she could grind, and she ended up salutatorian three years after Brad graduated, with a 4.17 that despite her lack of athletic prowess – Mom hadn’t let her go out for sports because it “isn’t ladylike – they’re all a bunch of dykes” – was a milkshake that brought enough colleges to the yard.

The day she announced she’d gotten a full ride to Cal-Berkeley