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

packed up a year’s supply of lithium and hundred-tablet bottles each of the others. Lithium was an everyday dose – the olanzapine and lamotrigine were as needed. She’d taken a lot more when she was first diagnosed, but good therapists had helped her enough to knock the amounts down. She’d known people who had to gulp down a lot more just to get through the day, and considered herself fortunate that she didn’t.

Should she do something about the bodies? She’d like to – she felt bad just leaving them to the raccoons – but wasn’t sure how to go about it. They’d been lying there for over two weeks, most likely, and had gotten kind of … liquid. They would be hard to move, hard to clean up after, and there was no logical place to put them. And if no one was around – and she hadn’t seen or heard any sign of living people – there wasn’t much point. She’d let them be for now, give it some thought, and if she came up with a good idea she’d come back.

With a shrug and a sigh, she walked outside and looked around. This section of the highway was nothing but stores. Several coffee shops. A couple of beer gardens. A pet supply shop and a dog kennel. Places that had sold motorcycle parts and surfing gear and sporting goods and health food and pizza. A gym to work off all the pounds from the coffee and beer and pizza. To her right, farther down the street, Coyote Creek flowed out to the nearby bay.

But the creek and her were the only things moving. Even the birds seemed to have abandoned the place. The sense of isolation, of alone-ness, was oppressive, like she was an alien that had landed on an uninhabited planet. In a way, she was.

“Get a grip, Kel, before you need a lamotrigine just to get home.” She ducked back into the Walgreen’s, emerging with a bag of cheddar kettle chips as a treat. She carefully ripped open the bag and headed north, back to Sayler Beach and her comfort zone, snacking as she went. She still felt like she was handling this awfully well, given her own biochemical struggles. But the degree of difficulty was just so high …

The four-plus miles back was easier. She’d seen all the shocking things she was going to – seeing them again wasn’t as shocking. Once she got out of the residential area it was easier going. It was very early in the afternoon, she still had decent energy – helped by the ready supply of carbohydrates – and she’d accomplished the one goal she’d set for herself.

As she reached the first (or last, on the way over) of the seven accidents cluttering up the highway between the Tamalpais Valley and home, she got an idea. She might not be in a position to deal with the body in the driver’s seat, but she could at least get the car out of the way, and it was right by one of the little dirt turnouts that had been placed every half-mile or so along Highway 1 so folks could let the lead-footed drivers behind them pass. It would be a simple enough thing to move it over.

Simple in concept, at least. In practice it meant reaching over a rotting corpse to put the vehicle in neutral, removing his hands from the steering wheel and using the driver’s-side door to push it fifty feet – slightly uphill in this case – to the turnout. It took a good ten minutes and left her gasping for breath and feeling itchy, especially since she learned quickly that breathing through her nose was a bad idea. But she got it moved, got the parking brake on and the door closed. “Rest in peace, Dodge Neon driver. Maybe I can give you a proper sendoff later.”

Doing it the first time gave her pause when she reached accident  #2, which involved two cars, one of them a Ford El Camino. But she’d already done it once, and already decided she’d give herself a comprehensive scrubbing when she got home, so why not? This time, the El Camino wasn’t ten feet from the turnout and the driver had fallen face-first into the passenger seat, so the toughest part was turning the steering wheel hard enough to get it over there.

But the other, an Acura TLX, was facing across the road, to where the hill dropped off. The driver, a typical soccer mom, was still sitting up straight. And there were children in the back. Kelly had to turn away and settle her stomach before even thinking of dealing with it. But she gritted her teeth, opened the passenger door – she wasn’t sure she could get past the mom – shifted the car into neutral, then stood back to get a couple breaths of fresh air.

At which point the car started moving without her.

“No!” she yelped, taking a few steps toward the TLX in hope of catching up. But it picked up sped fast and careened off the road, rolling down the hillside for a hundred feet before stopping with a sickening crunch.

She stood there in shock, looking down where the car and its late passengers had disappeared into the foliage. She wished she’d done better, but … well, the sedan was off the road. The passengers, however they’d suffered before, sure didn’t care now. It had a sort of gallows humor to it, though it didn’t seem funny right now.

And she still had to get home, past or around five more road accidents. So she started walking again.

Number three, one Smart Fortwo, very small and a good thing too, since it was a two-hundred foot push to the next turnout. Number four, another one-car accident, a Fiat who’d nosed into the hill and whose driver was nowhere to be found –