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

Things were a lot messier when she emerged from the wilderness and walked down the Shoreline Highway into the valley. Smoke was rising from occasional building fires, with no one to put them out. Automobiles were parked every which way or just stopped in the street. Some places had been broken into. And over everything hung the thick, choking miasma of the dead. Clearly things here had been a lot more chaotic.

She’d come equipped only to get her medications and go home, not to deal with the mess the plague had left behind. She hadn’t been thinking about corpses and broken glass and who knew what lurked in between the abandoned houses, only that she was down to one lithium capsule and needed more. If it hadn’t been so urgent, it might have occurred to her that she would be facing what she had in Sayler Beach but on an exponentially larger scale.

“Well, tough it out,” she told herself. “Get in, get what you need, go home, and the sooner the better. Ignore the feelings for now – you can deal with them tonight.”

It was still well before noon when she reached the Walgreen’s in Tamalpais Valley Junction, where a right-angle bend in the highway ran through a shopping district north of Coyote Creek and west of the San Francisco Bay’s northwest corner. She didn’t need the crowbar to get in – the front doors had been busted out of their tracks by someone even more eager to get there than she was, and left shattered on the pavement. Had that happened two or three weeks ago when the pandemic swept through, or was someone around here more recently?

Or – and here was another thing she hadn’t thought of – was someone around here right now? Maybe hoping to find another human being around … or hiding with a shotgun to take out whoever might drop by?

She shivered, gripped the softball bat in both hands and hoped she was just being paranoid, rather than somebody actually being out to get her.

There were two people in the store, both wearing company shirts and both clearly dead – one fallen behind the cashier’s counter and another in the liquor aisle. They were well into the decomposition process, and she made sure not to get too close as she looked for where the pharmacy was. Usually in the back corner … ah, there it was. She headed through the aisles to find what she –

“Ack!” There was a third body in the vitamin section, another employee. But this one wasn’t alone. She thought it couldn’t get worse than a rotting corpse, but a rotting corpse being eaten set the bar even lower.

The raccoon hissed and growled at her, trying to guard its buffet from the interloper. But Kelly had already dealt with big dogs – this little trash panda wasn’t going to get one over on her. “Get away!” she snapped at it. “Shoo!”

Another hiss. The little thief was going to be stubborn? Fine – she’d show it some stubborn. She hefted the bat and stomped around the body toward it. “Go!” she yelled and took a swing at it, just a warning to drive it back.

It dodged the bat – and went for her foot!

She swung again and this time connected, sending it flying back down the aisle the way she’d come. It screeched and ran, deciding there had to be easier meals elsewhere.

Kelly looked down at the corpse and wished she hadn’t. It was bloated and greenish and more than a little nibbled around the edges. The coon was not the only one who’d helped themselves, it looked like. She quickly walked away to the pharmacy proper, hoping that when she was done she could find another way out of this place.

The pharmacy was well secured behind a locked door, plus Plexiglas across the counter to keep out sneezes and addicts. But the pry bar made short work of the door, and she went inside to see what she could find. Bipolar disorder was common enough that almost any drugstore would keep the more common remedies in stock – she just hoped the plague hadn’t caught them between shipments.

It took a little searching, but she found what she needed. Lithium capsules for mood stabilization. Olanzapine tablets, an antipsychotic (and really, who was pro-psychotic?) for acute manic episodes. Lamotrigine tablets, an anticonvulsant, for acute depression. Lithium, olanzapine, lamotrigine. LOL. The three little fishies in her itty bitty bloodstream to keep her brain behaving like it should.

She shook her head, remembering the first time she came home from college with pill bottles. Mom liked to point out that “pharmacy” came from the Greek word pharmakon, which meant a poison or a magic spell (Heaven knew which traveling evangelist she’d picked that up from), and wouldn’t take an aspirin for a headache if she could help it. Predictably she pitched a fit, saying that she wouldn’t have such things in her house. She only backed down when Kelly said that if the pills weren’t welcome, neither was she, and threatened to return to Berkeley for the summer.

A couple of days later, Dad told her to come by the tool shed. When she did, he showed her a pill container of his own. Lexapro, no less. “Your ma doesn’t know I keep it out here. Why spoil her day?”

“I had no idea you needed … something like that.”

“I toughed it out as best I could, but these help. My doctor said if your brain cain’t make the right chemicals, there ain’t no shame in store-bought. Took me a long time to accept it, but I’m glad I finally gave in.”

“And it works?”

“I tell you, Kel – as soon as I started taking these, everyone else seemed to relax.” And they both laughed until the tears came.

She