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

Time for one more? Why not? 24 Commodore was home to a gay couple (their names escaped her) who both worked for the Nature Conservancy and had moved to town earlier in the year. The place was small, a starter home of sorts, one story with a teensy attic and seemingly half-empty. The men hadn’t really filled the place – a basic amount of IKEA furniture and just enough other stuff to show it was occupied. The backyard was all dug up – they must’ve planned a garden before the world went down in a handbasket.

Looking at the disturbed ground made her sad. Young men, about her age, maybe preparing for a life together, definitely preparing a garden. And then it was all taken away from them, in a few days.

She shook her head and went to empty the fridge. Half an hour later, she trudged home with a half-full trash bag, a lot of baking ingredients, one more mark on her map and a frown. She was definitely taking a lamotrigine with dinner before she got really dour about this.

Besides the pill, dinner was bacon pancakes and canned pineapple – breakfast for dinner was always fun, and with two new boxes of Bisquick she needed to use it or lose it. Of course the silly song from Adventure Time got stuck in her head, and that may have improved her mood as much as the medication did. Whatever worked.

After eating, she tossed the dirty dishrags and clothes and the laundry soap into the hamper with her bedclothes and headed down to the water. Scrubbing sheets by hand was hard work, but eventually she got through all of it and cleaned herself up besides. It was a warm evening and, because she could, she didn’t bother drying anything, including her clothes. She’d put them up on the lines when she got home.

So it was that she was climbing up the trail from the beach, naked except for her sandals, her hands full of a hamper of wet washing, when she ran into the mountain lion.

The thing must’ve been silent as a mouse for her not to hear it. But there it was, as long as she was tall without including the whipping tail, all muscle, teeth and attitude. It looked at her like it was drawing the markings for the cuts of meat on her skin. And here she was, wearing nothing but skin above her ankles, without even a softball bat to defend herself. Not that one was likely to help – if she got within range to use the Mizuno and didn’t score a direct head shot, she might be an entrée before she got a second attempt.

Nothing in her education had taught her how to deal with cougars. “God, please protect me,” she prayed hastily, then did the first thing that came to mind: she roared and charged it, leading with the hamper.

God, she later mused, really did have a soft spot for fools. At bottom, the mountain lion was a cat, and a cat will jump back and scuttle away if you run straight at it, yelling like an idiot. Seeing as it worked, she did it again, and again, and each time the big killing machine retreated. That allowed her to reach the branching path that led to Commodore Avenue and home. She backed onto it and walked backward, not taking her eye off the mountain lion until it turned tail and sauntered off, no doubt in search of less feisty prey.

Then she broke into a sprint, not stopping until she reached her front door. Once inside, she dropped right on her rear, leaned against the closed door with the hamper in her lap and laughed hysterically until she cried just as hysterically. It took her what felt like ten minutes until she got it all out. The apocalypse: come for the loneliness, stay for the wild animal attacks!

But, Kelly realized, she’d been the wild animal who attacked, hadn’t she? “I’m the dominant predator around here, mother-scratcher!” she declared to the absent puma. “Don’t believe me? Just ask the doggos!”

Just then, a dog began barking in the distance, and she started cackling all over again.

17

BANG

Kelly did eventually put on underwear and pajamas, hang up the wet laundry in the backyard, and have a snack of cheese and bread before going to bed. But she tossed and turned from the adrenalin rush before finally settling down. And she made one more decision – tomorrow she was going to find a gun and learn how to use it, because the next time something big and dangerous caught her unawares, she might not get so lucky.

Thursday morning, she dressed comfortably, had breakfast, wrote a journal entry for day 25, then hopped into the Ram and headed up to the store for the siphoning equipment and to toss the trash from yesterday’s search. The Bog of Eternal Stench wasn’t as full as she remembered, and she guessed the stuff on the bottom must be composting under the weight. That was fine – she’d need the extra room to put more garbage.

Then she recalled that composting produced heat, which could lead to combustion. The last thing she needed was a literal dumpster fire on top of the figurative one that was the apocalypse. Correction: the last thing she needed was a literal dumpster fire next to the building where she was storing months’ worth of food and gasoline.

Hypothesis: she needed to move the dumpster away from the store. Added hypothesis: she needed to find a separate, non-flammable place to store the gasoline. “Well, the only thing left on the sked for this morning is siphoning,” she commented. “Let’s deal with these.”

Moving the dumpster was easy enough with the Ram on hand. Using the rope from the horse ranch, she was able to drag