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

tasted better when she got back, and her bath was more refreshing – not to mention soothing, since she’d forgotten insect repellent and her hands and neck were festooned with bug bites. Next time, she’d slather some on. Because there would absolutely be a next time, when she needed it. Humanity save for her might be toast, but the rest of the world was ticking along, and watching it do so made her feel better. Life, uh, finds a way, as Jeff Goldblum put it. She was alive; she’d find a way too.

19

POINT

The day off in the great outdoors worked – Kelly woke up Friday ready to give the world a smile and a hearty “heigh-ho.” In fact, she felt silly enough that she actually did – she walked to her front door, opened it, smiled and waved and yelled, “HEIGH-HO!”

Somewhere, a dog barked in reply. She’d take it.

Friday – day 33, could you believe it? – was mostly uneventful, as after her usual morning activities she returned to the houses on Admiral Drive to continue her census. But when she got to the last house on the end, 41 Admiral, she noticed something strange about it. Instead of the door being closed and secured, it was wide open. There was dirt tracked up and down the walk to the front door. And the smell … it was like sewer pipes had broken in there, or a wild animal …

… oh. Rather, uh-oh.

She went back to the Ram and got her face mask and the Mizuno before approaching the door again. She had the gun tucked in the back of her cargo pants, but that still felt like a last resort. She stepped slowly, keeping an eye on the doorway and all the windows, hoping it wasn’t the new lair of the mountain lion. “Nature reclaiming its own” took on a new meaning when Nature’s repo man was a vicious carnivore.

“Yip!”

A small wet nose emerged from the darkness of the house. The rest of Fluffy Boi was attached in the usual manner. Then it saw her, ran and hid somewhere in the dwelling’s depths.

So: a lair, yes, a mountain lion, no. This must be where the dog pack was holed up. She went inside, still being careful but a lot less worried. She’d shown them who was boss before, and they’d avoided her ever since, so it must’ve stuck. Ideally she’d have nothing to worry about here.

Looking around, she confirmed her suspicions. During high school she’d volunteered at the Humane Society of Stillwater a few times, mostly to pad her CV for college. The smell of a busy kennel was like nothing else – not necessarily bad but noxious enough to teach you once and for all that animals were messy. Here it was worse, because there were no volunteers to clean up after them.

And heavens to Betsy, did this place need mucking out now. 41 Admiral was a one-story house, and it looked like every available surface had been pooped, peed, vomited or shed on. The dogs had managed to open the fridge and cabinets, eat almost everything inside them and spill the rest onto the floor, where it had combined to form a little toxic swamp on the linoleum. The bathroom had clearly flooded at one point, and the water in the toilet was almost black. A dozen squatting crackheads couldn’t have done this much damage.

She looked around and saw the Rott mix and the cocker watching her from what was left of the living room sofa, not threateningly but worried. What is the human going to do to our place? she imagined they were thinking. “Don’t be afraid – you … you can keep this house,” she told them quietly. “Really, I don’t want it.”

She also didn’t want to play dog owner to a mixed menagerie like this. And she didn’t think she needed to – they all looked healthy and fed, if in desperate need of baths. They were probably taking care of any vermin trying to invade – it occurred to her that the store and her root cellar had been pleasantly free of mice and other rodents the last few weeks. They weren’t broken, so don’t try to fix them.

She did go around the house and open all the windows to air it out. She considered lighting a big citronella candle she spotted in a closet, but the fire risk cautioned against it. She just made some notes – about the dogs rather than the house’s contents – jotted an extra line about bringing food over from the store (she wasn’t going to eat the Alpo and Iams), and left, wiping her shoes on the lawn for a full minute.

Later, once the last house was checked, she might take a day to clean it up a little. But as far as she was concerned, that was the dog pack’s home. She even spray-painted a D for “doggos” on the still-open door instead of her usual X.

With Admiral Drive done, she moved onto Lieutenant Way and did five more houses before it was time to call it quits. Disposal, storage, dinner, bath, then up to the farm’s A/V room with a bag of caramel popcorn, more cat food and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That night, she crawled into bed about as happy as she could hope to be. Tomorrow, she’d …

Her happiness might as well have run into a brick retaining wall. Tomorrow was her day to explore eastern Marin County. She’d covered the Tam Valley area last time, so that meant either going east on 131 to Bel Aire, Belvedere and Tiburon; south on 101 to Marin City and Sausalito; or north on 101 to San Rafael, Greenbrae and Corte Madera. She’d have to take the Shoreline Highway through Tam Valley to get to any of them, since that was the