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

it to an open spot in the middle of the store parking lot and leave it there. Now five yards from the building, it could go off if it wanted and shouldn’t affect the inventory inside.

Finding a safe spot for the gasoline might be a more difficult task. She couldn’t immediately think of a place that would work better than where she had it. With most of the buildings in town being either all or partly wooden, they wouldn’t do to store such highly volatile material. And she wanted to store as much as she could, because who knew when there would be refineries and tanker trucks again? A concrete building, ideally, not near trees or grass, with decent ventilation … in this town? But surely there was one like that.

She was heading back down to Commodore to start siphoning and searching when she spotted it – the public bathrooms by the beach parking lot. Of course! Concrete with steel doors, not near anything important, a good twenty feet from the nearest tree branch, separated from the town itself by a big stretch of pavement and a couple of small hills, and ventilated within an inch of its life. It would be as close to perfect as she could hope for. And she could focus on draining the dozen or so cars there now that she’d cleaned out the ones at the store.

She went around, back to the store, and loaded every full jerrican and jug into the back of the Ram, though it meant unloading most of the empties into the store. When she reached the bathrooms, she hauled them all out and plied them into the nearest men’s room, stacking them two high when she could. Her arms were aching when she finished – a full five-gallon jerrican weighed over fifty pounds, more than a third what she did, and “lifting with your legs” only helped so much.

It was tempting to just cut out at that point, but she figured she’d be fine if she just didn’t do anymore heavy lifting, so she decided to hold off on siphoning (she’d have to lug the container afterward) until later that day if not the next. Instead she went home – or rather, three doors down from it at 20 Commodore Avenue to start her cataloguing again. She did 20 and 16, broke for lunch, then managed 12, 8 and 2 to check off most of that side of the street.

With plenty of sunshine to work with – the watch said 4:08 – and no activity set for the evening, there was no reason not to cross the avenue and keep going. By sunset around 7:30, she’d checked, cleaned out (as much as she needed to at present), documented, secured and marked 5 and 9 Commodore, hauled all the garbage and non-perished foods up to the store (she was running out of room in the root cellar), returned to the beach parking lot and sucked five gallons out of the Land Rover she’d gotten the bodies off the beach with weeks ago.

Weeks ago … it felt like months. But no – it was only fourteen days since she finished filling up the delivery truck with bodies, thirteen since she put it to the torch. Just thinking about how much she’d done since made her head spin. So did the gasoline fumes and her leaden arms, when she put the latest jugful in the bathroom stall. She needed dinner and rest and lithium, so she went home and got them.

Friday was another day in the salt mines, and the day she found another treasure. 15 Commodore, the next house to search, was the former home of George Willard, a retired Army drill sergeant who liked to air his political views. He felt generals would run the country better than the government and that Donald Trump was a borderline socialist, so she’d always done her best not to respond when he was declaiming in the checkout line. She often wondered why he’d chosen to settle amidst Marin County’s sparkling rainbow of wacky liberals.

But now, surrounded by Mr. Willard’s ideological furniture, she remembered something she wanted that he would most surely have.

He had both a safe and two display cabinets, and she looked the latter over with nervous fascination. The man owned a lot of guns. The issue was that she didn’t know which gun or guns would be best for her needs. She wasn’t going to try hunting until she absolutely needed to – she’d much rather watch deer browse than kill, skin and eat them. She needed something to defend herself if she couldn’t scare away the next mountain lion or large dog. Easy to handle, load and carry, but still big enough to stop whatever she pointed it at.

“This looks promising.” She tried opening the cabinet door, but it was locked. Searching a nearby desk produced a ring of keys, and the sixth one unlocked it. She reached in and picked up the pistol, hefting it. Not too heavy, two or three pounds. The little card where it had been read:

COLT M1911A1

Vietnam 1967-69

“Must’ve been his service pistol,” she mused. She felt around it until she figured out how the ammunition clip came out, and popped it. It wasn’t loaded, which was smart – you’d figure an Army vet, no matter how trigger-happy, would keep his weapons safe. But it was no good to her without bullets.

The third key she tried on the safe opened it up, and there they were – ammo for probably every gun in those cabinets. Mercifully given her lack of gun knowledge – most of what she had was derived from films and thus of dubious accuracy – one box was labeled .45 ACP ROUND POINT FOR M1911A1 – 100 ROUNDS. She took that box, locked up the safe and the cabinet, returned the keys to the desk and sat down to