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

try and figure out how the thing worked, preferably without shooting herself.

It turned out to be relatively simple, as befitted a pistol one gave to teenaged recruits. You loaded the bullets into the magazine (it held eight) and slid it in until it clicked. This was the safety, which she put on immediately. That was the hammer you cocked to fire, and that was the trigger. The bullet came up here and went out there, while the casing flew out thataway.

She couldn’t resist. She had to take this outside and try it.

Fittingly enough, there was a target in Willard’s backyard, one of those ones with a vaguely human outline like in police firing ranges on TV, secured to a pallet that looked like it was made of railroad ties. She stood about twenty feet away from it, flicked off the safety with her thumb, held it like she’d seen the actors do (left hand on right wrist to brace it), cocked it, pulled the trigger –

She sat there for a minute where the recoil had knocked her on her rear, her ears ringing, birds going nuts in the trees above her. The brass casing bounced and rolled in the grass a couple of feet away. A fresh tear had appeared at the top of the target – the bullet must’ve just grazed the paper. “Okay …” She stood up, rubbed her ears and her hindquarters and tried not to laugh at herself. Good thing no one else was around. “Let’s try that again.”

This time she went back into the house first and found a pair of those protective headphones she’d also seen on the TV firing ranges. Returning, she adopted a different stance, left foot half a pace ahead of the right, knees slightly bent to absorb the recoil. She wasn’t a big man like Willard had been – she needed to respect this thing’s power. Left hand on right wrist, elbows locked, aim a bit lower, safety off, hammer cocked, trigger …

The second time was better. She didn’t fall over, though the Colt tried its best, and the bullet slammed into the target’s … well, where its right eye would be if it had eyes. She was aiming for a chest shot, though – the kick was really throwing off her aim. But it was something. The next cougar or Rott or wolf or bear or escaped zoo animal had better watch out.

For now, she finished her notes on the place, including a list of all arms and ammunition. She took with her the garbage, usable food (not much – the man seemed to have lived on frozen dinners), the Colt, two boxes of .45 bullets and the knowledge that she’d need to be very careful and to practice as much as she could without using up all her ammo. Hopefully she’d never need to use the gun, but like car insurance it was good to have just in case.

Even taking a leisurely lunch break, she still got six houses done that day, and found another box of .45 ammunition in the process. She put away all the good food, dumped all the rotten (the Bog hadn’t ignited yet, good), went home for dinner, ate, bathed, then nabbed a bag of Pirate’s Booty popcorn from the store shelves and strolled over to the farm as the sun approached the horizon.

It was a treat to watch a film again, even – or especially – when she couldn’t do it often. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance lived up to its reputation. She enjoyed the subtle interplay between Jimmy Stewart as the squeaky clean politician and John Wayne’s swaggering loner, the rivalry they both tried to avoid addressing, how each had ended up the way they did. It wasn’t High Noon (still her favorite of the genre), but it wasn’t far behind.

And when she was about to leave after turning everything off, walking home by flashlight, she saw the cats had cleaned the plate of the two cans of food she’d left on it. She’d left the rest of the case in the A/V room, so she got two more cans and dumped them out for the kitties before heading home. She had the flashlight in her left hand, the Mizuno in her right, the Colt tucked in the back of her pants. She would’ve almost felt safe walking through San Francisco on a busy Saturday night. Here, now, it was close to overkill.

Saturday, she woke early, ready to hit the road to the other side of the county. Breakfast, journal, siphon the Land Rover until it was dry, pour the result into the Ram’s gas tank (it was close to full now), then hit the road. It certainly was a change from her first trip – instead of walking for hours and maneuvering around accidents, she reached the Tam Valley Junction Walgreen’s in twenty minutes. And this time, she arrived better prepared, in the fire suit with plenty of trash bags.

She didn’t spend a lot of time cleaning up bodies – there were just too many on the populated side of the peninsula, and she wouldn’t know where to stop. But the three Walgreen’s clerks … conscience demanded she at least take care of them, or what was left of them after a month of decomposition and raccoon depredations. She did, depositing their remains in the dumpster behind the drugstore for lack of a better solution.

“Will it ever end?” she wondered afterward. She could go the rest of her life without finding a corpse and be just fine with it. But this was the state of the world right now. It was either live with it or not live at all, and she’d made her decision on that.

She spent most of the day driving slowly around Tamalpais Valley and Almonte and Sycamore Park and Mill Valley and Alto and Strawberry and the other residential areas that