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

pass. Or just one lonely person who’d gone around putting up signs to try and find anyone still living.

She didn’t know. She’d have to go find out. She was terrified of finding out. So much had gone wrong that one more disaster might break her. But … she hadn’t broken yet. It felt like she’d come close a few times, but she hadn’t.

And look at what hadn’t broken her. Hundreds of corpses in the streets and in their homes. The loss of electricity and running water, without which the old world could barely function. Dog attacks. A cat attack. Finding town after town empty of human life. Not to mention her own neurochemical imbalances, which had given her life a high degree of difficulty from day one. She’d survived them all. She’d even thrived in spots. She was still here, still fighting, still discovering solutions to problems.

“I guess I’m tougher than I thought,” she mused. Honestly, she was tougher than just about anyone would’ve thought. Certainly Mom. She had no idea if Mom had gotten through this, but she had. Take that.

Kelly watched the waves splash on the beach, ate and drank and felt her fragile confidence rise. Whatever she found down the road was what she’d find. Whatever she had to deal with, she’d deal with. If she died, well, that meant she was done and God could judge her as He pleased. If she lived, she’d keep on living. Simple as that.

24

FEAR

But as simple as that was, she was tired from the day’s travel and stress, and felt as unready to tackle the mystery of Santa Cruz as she could possibly be. She was positively dragging as she returned to her truck. If there were people down the road, she didn’t get the sense that she was ready to deal with them. She wanted to be at her best, or close enough as she could manage.

A couple of miles down the road, she pulled up by the entrance to a small farm or something. A dairy farm? It kind of smelled like dairy farms she’d gone by in the past, but she didn’t hear any mooing or snorting. Would the cattle survive if no one had let them out? She didn’t want to think about that. She wanted to think about what she would do when she got to Santa Cruz.

She quickly concluded she had no idea, for the simple but obvious reason that she had no idea what was happening there. She couldn’t be sure there were even people alive there – they could be dead now, or could’ve moved on to another place. She hadn’t seen any as she approached. Plus if there were people there, would they want her there with all her problems? How were they organized? Who was in charge? What would be expected of her? What should she expect of them?

The only evidence she had were those signs. There had been people there who left in early September and visited at least a few spots around San Francisco Bay. They apparently wanted whoever saw their handiwork to come. That was literally all she knew or could comfortably assume. Anything else was conjecture, if not guesswork or wishful thinking. She didn’t, and couldn’t, know until she arrived, saw them (if there were them to see) and say, “Heigh-ho, greetings from Sayler Beach!”

(Followed by telling them where Sayler Beach was. She always had to do that. It was a small town on the underpopulated side of a small county, in the shadow of the nearby big cities. The only people who knew of it where those who’d been through it – and not all of those.)

Never mind that, though. She’d decided, even before really asking herself the question, that she wasn’t going there tonight. She’d rest, here or somewhere nearby, get some sleep, take time to develop scenarios, hit the morning daisy-fresh and what would be would be. She opened the day’s food bag and her journal and recounted the events of day 69 (tee-hee) for posterity while she ate. The bottle of Mug Root Beer was an adequate dessert.

She filled up the gas tank, emptying one jerrican and most of another. She checked the Ram over carefully for any damage she’d missed and found none. The sun went down, and she locked the car doors and eased the driver’s seat back so she could recline. She stared up at the roof of the cab. She looked out the windows at the road and the stars and the dairy farm or whatever it had been. She closed her eyes. She opened her eyes. She closed them again.

She wasn’t finding sleep an easy thing. Too tense. Too many thoughts in her head. Too aware of being one broken window away from getting grabbed by something or someone. After two months alone in Sayler Beach, she knew nothing was coming for her unless she was out in the open. No people around meant no robbers, no rapists, no motorcycle gangs. She’d only seen the mountain lion once, and after two tries she’d frightened the local canines into submission. The whole town was a safe zone for her.

Here, she was not only alone, but out of her element. She had no familiar surroundings to reassure her. She didn’t know the roads except from a map, didn’t know the places to hide or find food or borrow some tool or book or piece of clothing – not that she’d borrowed a lot of stuff, but if she’d needed to she knew where to look. If she ran out of or broke anything here, and the theoretically friendly theoretical citizens of Santa Cruz couldn’t replace it, she was back to square one.

She recalled she hadn’t taken her lithium yet and did, along with an olanzapine to hopefully curb her anxiety. It didn’t seem to help much.

She’d been unsure or confused so many