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

Still, she was about to get off 580 and go look – someone might’ve perceived the penitentiary as a good fortress to hole up in – when something caught her eye. “Wha …?” She stopped at the top of the offramp and got out with the binoculars to get a better look.

Up ahead on the highway, there was a big piece of plywood painted white … no, three big pieces of plywood, attached to each other and deployed vertically. There was writing on it – spray paint, to be more precise – and she could just make out what it said …

She hopped back into the Ram, reversed off the offramp and drove down the highway to the sign. “It probably went up during the plague, and it’s too late now,” she cautioned herself. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t get your hopes up …”

But when she got there, she found that whoever had put it up must have been anticipating her doubts. There was a date painted at the bottom right corner – Sept 24. This was put up recently, less than two weeks ago?! That meant that if that date hadn’t been someone’s idea of a cruel trick, somebody else was still around, or had been less than a week ago!

She walked over, reached up and touched the paint. It was dry, but that only meant it had been done more than a day before. Spray paint, she knew from experience, dried fairly quickly.

She thought back to a few weeks ago, coming home from that depressing trip up the coast and praying to God for a sign. “Well, I didn’t mean a literal one, but I’m not complaining. Please, though, God, let it be true. Let it be true …”

Kelly began tearing up as she leaned against the fender of the Dodge and looked up at the sign, thinking that maybe, just maybe, there was hope. Over and over she read the words sprayed onto the wood in overlapping Day-Glo green and orange:

COME TO

SANTA

CRUZ

21

PLAN

Two months of being tossed, turned and tumble-dried by reality (really, thirty-three years of it, but the last two months were the most severe) had taught Kelly to be wary of blindly embracing good fortune. If there was someone alive down in Santa Cruz, someone with the resources to be putting big signs up about a hundred miles north in San Quentin, that was the best possible fortune indeed. Which only made her more cautious – big hopes could lead to big disappointments.

But despite her concern, she headed home that Saturday with an irrepressible song in her heart. The one-in-a-million chance’s odds had just been reduced to … four-to-one? Three-to-one? Not quite a lead-pipe cinch, but something reasonable. Something she needed to drive down and check out at the very least, right? Right.

And the possibility of it going sideways, of finding no one there or finding someone there who’d lured her into a trap for some reason scared her senseless. Also right. Once again, it was the not knowing that was the real trouble. And there was no way of knowing without going down to Santa Cruz and finding out. At the end of that limb was an answer – but she didn’t know if it would hold her weight.

So she stalled. Sunday, she rested except for a couple of dehydrator runs – she didn’t want all those recently harvested vegetables going bad or being found by animals. Monday was back to her regular schedule – breakfast, journal, empty dehydrators, harvest, lunch and movie, harvest more, dinner, bath, set up and turn on dehydrators, lithium, bed. Tuesday, the same plus washing dishes. She made sure she ate right, got enough rest, wore sunscreen and bug-b-gone, took good care of herself.

But the thought of Santa Cruz never stopped pinging around her brain for more than a few minutes. Not even when she was asleep – she had dreams of being chased by zombies down the boardwalk, of getting trapped on the Ferris wheel (which she knew had been torn down years ago, but dream logic) by men with automatic weapons, of finding herself stuck on the beach between roaring sea lions and roaring humans seeking to rape or kill her, of finding the sand unpopulated only to have it open up and swallow her …

Wednesday morning, she woke up out of one of those just as the sky was starting to lighten. “Ughhhh … subconscious, you need to chill out,” she groaned. But it had her too wired to go back to sleep, so she gave up after a few minutes of trying. It was days like this she wished she could be a “coffee achiever,” but caffeine tended to mess with her meds. She settled for downing a bottle of 7-Up with breakfast and hoping the sugar would get her through.

It did, but another issue presented itself – there wasn’t much left to harvest. She’d finish it the next day, barring her dislocating something or getting eaten by wolves. Which meant she couldn’t put off the question with work. The houses had all been checked, the dogs were settled, and she’d hit everything else on her long-term list except learning to ride a horse and building an outhouse in her backyard. She was prepared for the winter, and having found the farm’s (and some other people’s) store of seeds, she was ready for the spring as well.

She could put it off. But at this point it would be more difficult and take more planning than just doing it. She needed to go to Santa Cruz and see for herself. There was no other solution. She’d go. She’d go. She’d go.

On Saturday she’d go. Take some time to plot it out first. Finish the harvest and the drying and a few other things. Lock up well behind her. And go. One way or another,