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

of water from the store and head over to 41 Admiral Drive for some housekeeping and diplomacy.

Over a month of Fridays, she managed to clean up the floors, lay down some newspapers from the store to keep them that way, strip the beds and cover them in newsprint (the bedcovers had to go into the dumpster at the Spinnaker Inn – there was no salvaging them) and brush off the furniture. She found a large roasting pan, poured the kibble into it, and filled a deep baking dish with fresh water. She scrubbed marks off the walls. She left the doors and windows open.

The pack was still wary of her but seemed to appreciate her efforts, and eventually stopped growling at her. The Chihuahua even started greeting her with panting and a wagging tail when she arrived, though if she took a step toward it, it ran for the farthest room. She still counted it as progress.

The one task on the schedule she skipped for a couple of weeks was the Saturday trip to look for other people and check what had happened to the rest of the county. After the North Coast trek had been such a bust, she had trouble facing the prospect of more empty neighborhoods and hopeless searching. The next two Saturdays, she spent house-checking. But then there were no more houses to check – even the horse ranch and the Nature Conservancy had been canvassed and marked off.

The following Saturday, her arms and back needed a rest from picking crops, so she packed up her weapons, binoculars and music and hit the road again, hoping she didn’t regret it. Back to the east county – Bel Aire and Belvedere-Tiburon. If she got done with it quickly and still had emotional reserves left, she’d check out the bay coast toward Sausalito. If she didn’t, she’d go home. At worst, she knew one more place not to bother with. At best …

She tried not to think about best-case scenarios. Why get her hopes up?

That turned out to be the right move once she got to the place. Marin County was just one large peninsula, like San Francisco and San Mateo on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. But unlike its neighbor to the south, it had a lot of little sub-peninsulas – Point Reyes, Point Bonita, Point San Pedro and on and on. Belvedere and Tiburon were twin towns at the end of one of them, with yet another, the prosaically named Peninsula Point, jutting off of that. And southeast of it sat Angel Island, a square mile of state park surrounded by the bay.

She didn’t bother with Angel Island – it was too far to swim given the cold bay water, and she didn’t want to try learning how to drive a boat on short notice. Besides, if someone was going to settle anywhere, it would be more likely in a house on the mainland than in a wilderness on an island.

Not that she found anyone on the mainland either. The places she drove through were as deserted as the Tam Valley had been, and the area around Point Reyes, and Sayler Beach except for her. She did go home early due to emotional exhaustion, saving Sausalito for another time. And she spent most of Sunday moping.

Monday, though, she got back on the horse. She fired up the dehydrators and started processing the vegetables she’d already picked, then went out and harvested more. She might be starved for companionship after all this time, but she’d be darned if she was going to literally starve too. In one house, someone had all four Mad Max movies, and she watched them all, one a day from Monday to Thursday. Those made her feel better, if only from perspective – the apocalypse could be worse.

It wasn’t until Friday, during Dog Day Evening, that she pondered again whether the trips were worth it. They used up much of the day and several gallons of gas, and the only other result seemed to be using up her lamotrigine supply a bit faster to make up for how sad the whole operation made her. Wouldn’t it be a better use of her time to pick and dehydrate more veggies, or better organize the food supply, or find leashes and see if she could persuade the dogs to go into the ocean for a bath and a splash?

And yet … and yet that hope still sang in the distance, that faint one-in-a-very-large-number chance that someone was out there waiting for her to trip over them. The logical but so far unfulfilled scenario that she wasn’t the only one who’d come through the plague and lived to tell the tale. It hadn’t been satisfied, but it Wouldn’t. Leave. Her. Alone.

So she didn’t leave it alone either. Back in the Ram on Saturday morning, wasting gas and time on a roll of the dice, this time to the southern end of the interior coast, Waldo and Marin City and Sausalito. The worst that would happen is that she found nothing and no one, she told herself, but even then she would just be in the same situation. “Nowhere to go but up,” she said aloud, then sang along to Alicia Keys as she headed east on the Shoreline Highway toward southbound 101.

She found no people there either. What she did find was boats. The area was home to a few yacht harbors, and she gave some thought to commandeering a yacht to look farther afield. She only gave it thought, though – she didn’t know how to drive a boat, didn’t know how to fuel one up (or with what – she doubted they’d just take unleaded), and wasn’t sure where she’d go with it that she couldn’t just drive to. If she really wanted to check out the East Bay or South Bay or San Francisco once she finished