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

clustered near the bay, between San Rafael to the north and Sausalito to the south. She could see the areas starting to look rundown – lawns unmowed, trash uncollected, animals walking more boldly in the streets and yards. Nature reclaiming what it had lost to civilization.

She didn’t see any sign of continued human activity, didn’t hear or smell any either. Marin County wasn’t exactly crowded, not by California standards – it’d had about a quarter of a million people, over a third of which were in San Rafael and its nearest suburbs. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that someone besides her would’ve beaten the plague, survived and done something with their environs like she had.

But if someone had, she thought as she parked the truck and got out to stretch, there was nothing to indicate it, not where she’d been so far. If there was someone, anyone left besides her, where were –

A loud report echoed down the deserted street. Before she could think, she’d turned toward it and pulled the Colt from behind her, flipped the safety off and was pointing it toward where she thought the sound had come from, left hand on right wrist, left foot half a pace forward, ready to fire on …

BAM!

… the screen door of a single-family house in Harbor Point, unlatched and swinging in the breeze.

Her shoulders slumped as her arms fell. She felt stupider than she had in a long time. “A screen door. A flipping screen door.” She kept grumbling that to herself as she secured the gun and put it back. If the Colt caused her to be more paranoid, she might be better off without it. But maybe it wasn’t the pistol. Maybe three weeks of being the only living person in the world, or at least in her world, was messing with her mind. Really, it would mess with anyone’s, wouldn’t it? Hers just happened to be more susceptible.

She looked up and saw the sun was getting low in the west. “Yeah, maybe I should head home.” It wasn’t like she was looking for anything specific besides signs of life. Maybe next week she’d drive up to San Rafael and Greenbrae, or south to Waldo and Sausalito. You never knew where somebody might be hiding out, perhaps as unnerved as she was, worried they might be the last person on Earth.

Kelly forced a smile as she drove out of Harbor Point toward Strawberry Manor, figuring she could take 101 to the Shoreline Highway and be home in less than a half-hour. She sure hoped there was someone out there. If there wasn’t, all the meds in the world might not keep her from going bananas.

18

ENNUI

On Sunday, day 28, Kelly rested. She didn’t really feel like she needed to, but she worried if she didn’t she’d regret it. So no house searching, no gas swiping, no cooking. She snacked, she read, she napped. She put on her bathing suit, an unadorned navy blue one-piece, and played in the ocean for a while. She brought home an abalone shell she found. She took her capsule and went to sleep.

On Monday, she woke up feeling like cold death on burnt toast. Oh, no – had she contracted the plague again and this time it was going to finish the job? But an hour after she got up she felt fine. Breakfast, journal, over to the beach parking lot to decant the next vehicle – it turned out to be the next two, since the first, a Beetle, only had two gallons left. The gleanings went right into the Ram. Then on to the next house on Commodore. She finished the street that day and moved on to Captain Street.

Tuesday, she was slow getting out of bed again, worrying if she was ill again, fine after breakfast again. She took a lamotrigine too, to be on the safe side. Journal, drain another car (that can went into storage), back to Captain Street. Lunch and eight (!) houses later, she had dinner, took the dirty dishes to the ocean, washed them, washed herself, brought them home, lithium, pajamas, nighty-night.

Wednesday afternoon, as she finished 201 Captain Street and was about to turn onto Admiral Drive, it finally hit her. She wasn’t ill, and she clearly wasn’t tired. She was bored!

Which made a load of sense. Day 31, now comfortably into September, and she’d been doing the same things for most of the last several days. She’d had no interactions with other people – obviously. She’d been eating from roughly the same limited menu. Before, she’d felt a little lost without a schedule. But now she’d slid to the opposite extreme, and the schedule was everything. Balance. She needed to balance it.

And underneath that was another, more sinister issue: was it worth doing any of this at all? What was the point if she was the only person left? Who was she preserving and documenting and sorting all this for?

She knew she was on shaky ground thinking about that – that kind of process had led to suicidal ideations in the past. Granted, she’d never gone so far as to attempt suicide, not even in her lowest days in high school when she had no meds to fall back on and Mom was nattering at her up one wall, across the ceiling and down the other about why couldn’t she be normal. She’d always worried that if she attempted it, she might succeed. She didn’t want to die – she just wanted the stress to stop.

And why did she never hear the word “ideation” except in connection to suicide? It was like “ensuing” – the only things that ever ensued were chaos, hilarity and kickoffs. Why didn’t anyone ever have hopeful ideations or constructive ideations?

Okay, she’d veered off-topic. Back to the boredom, the ennui. That was another word you could have fun with, ennui, because