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

… and found that she’d spoken too soon. She actually got the binocs back out to confirm what she was seeing. Yes, that should be Interstate 80 up ahead – and it looked like part of it had collapsed. Maybe she had missed an earthquake. Even if she hadn’t, her current trajectory wasn’t taking her where she needed to go. She three-point turned and went back up 6th to Market, turned left and sighed. This was becoming more frustrating than she’d dreamed – and she’d had some lousy dreams.

Market took her under Van Ness, but three consecutive right turns put her back on it and heading south again. And after less than a mile and a couple of wrong turns, she was on highway again, cruising east and south and swerving around stalled and crashed cars on her way to 280 and hopefully smoother sailing. She kept to her comfy save twenty-five as she passed San Francisco General Hospital, and winced as she spotted a Jack-in-the-Box sign. Boy, she’d love an Ultimate Cheeseburger right about now.

She had more problems than cheeseburger availability, though, as she approached the interchange. It was an impassable tangle of roasting and roasted vehicles, like someone had put a hedge maze to the torch. Not too far ahead, a gasoline tanker had jackknifed, spilling its load before setting it on fire, leaving a mass of tar and ashes and singed metal across all lanes. Even in her behemoth, there was no getting around or through that.

She never had learned how to swear properly. Pity, because now would’ve been the perfect time. Instead, she turned around and headed back to the previous onramp, at Cesar Chavez, to think things over. This day had already been gut-wrenching between all the accidents on the bridge and what she’d found in the City. Even with the A/C cranked it was getting hot inside the Ram, and there was so much junk in the air outside that she didn’t want to leave the truck even with a mask over her nose and mouth. She just needed a way through the city and …

A dark thought occurred to her: what if the South Bay was in just as bad shape? And the South Bay wasn’t a city – it was twenty cities, melting into a megalopolis. San Jose by itself was bigger than San Francisco, and that wasn’t taking into account Santa Clara and Cupertino and Saratoga and Sunnyvale and Campbell and Mountain View and … well, you got the idea. Yet her planned route would lead her inevitably through the middle of that. If S.F. looked like this, what would it be like there?

Part of Kelly’s mind was telling her “don’t worry about that, just deal with what’s in front of you and handle the rest when you get to it.” But another part was pointing out all the obstacles she’d faced already today and how it was barely past noon, and she should probably think about this and everything else before she charged into something she couldn’t back out of.

Mercifully, a third part came up with a compromise: relax and have lunch. That sounded best of all, so she parked and did that.

It proved to be the wisest move. Calming down and not trying to do anything but fortify herself put her in a much better frame of mind, especially when she realized that in her hurry to get going she’d forgotten to eat breakfast. More directly, it gave her a chance to look over the state map and see something she might otherwise have missed. She’d planned her journey as if she had been going down to Santa Cruz before the pandemic, before everything fell to bits, and naturally had followed the smoothest, most trafficked route for normal circumstances.

But these weren’t normal circumstances. And there was another way, an obvious one she’d looked right past.

She followed the thought process with amusement. What road did she usually take to get out of Sayler Beach, or to the far ends of it? State Route 1, called the Shoreline Highway in her part of the world. What was the name for Highway 1 in other parts? The Pacific Coast Highway. So where does it run, based on that information? Along the Pacific coast – duh. How far does it run? From somewhere up in Mendocino County, way north of Marin, all the way south to Orange County, past Los Angeles.

Which means Highway 1 runs right through …? San Francisco. And …? Santa Cruz.

She’d been so fixated on the bright yellow interstate highway lines going through the eastern half of the City that she’d gazed right past a narrower yellow line that ran through the western half: good old State Route 1, her old buddy. And she recalled that more of the fires were in the older, more built-up, eastern side of town than in the west. There was another, safer way to travel – one that avoided the big, blocked highway interchanges, and one that led even more directly to her destination.

And really, you only needed to use the big interstates before the apocalypse if you wanted to go faster. She was keeping herself to residential-street speeds for safety’s sake. As long as 1 wasn’t badly obstructed, it was a better way to go! “So how do I get there?” she mused, looking at the insert on the map and giving serious thought to finding a service station that wasn’t on fire and snapping up a map of the City.

But the insert was enough for now – Cesar Chavez was a major enough street to show up on it. If she followed Cesar Chavez to its end, then kept working west, she’d reach Market Street about where it turned into Portola Drive. Take Portola west, and it would become Sloat Boulevard – at Highway 1, 19th Avenue. Further, Sloat itself turned into State Highway 35, which looped