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

times over the last two-plus months, over the last three-plus decades. But except for the dealings with angry animals, and a car accident she was a passenger in about ten years ago, there had not been any moments that she would truly consider life or death. She had, in all honesty, lived a somewhat sheltered life. Death had touched her – heck, for much of a week in August, death had occupied every waking hour – but it had rarely threatened her.

Five miles down Highway 1, though, whatever was there was guaranteed to change her life, if not end it. Things would never be the same no matter what she found. She knew that. It might kill her. It might hurt her. It might exalt her. It might dishearten her. But one way or another, part of her world would be forever affected by going around that bend in the coast, from the Pacific Ocean to Monterey Bay. That die had been cast the second she saw that white sign with the spray paint near San Quentin on 580.

She shivered, and not from the cold of the deepening night. Though she’d noticed the evenings were getting brisk – it was well into autumn now, the days now shorter than the nights. Hadn’t she walked through the first puddles of fall that very morning? But she had food and fuel to last her through it easily, and plenty of warm clothes to choose from, and she could gather wood for fireplaces if it got too cold.

All of it about a hundred miles up the coast. All she had here was six days of food, a few changes of clothes, tampons for one period and a few other items. If things went badly, there was a good chance she wouldn’t be able to get out of it.

Kelly rested her hands on the steering wheel and her forehead on her knuckles. “God, I am so scared, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything I can do about it. I don’t know what will happen when I get there, and I’m afraid of what might happen, and I’m afraid nothing will happen because there won’t be anyone there, and I’m afraid it’ll be great but I’ll screw it up by being a spaz because You know I can be a spaz, and there’s no one to guard all the stuff I left up north, and what am I supposed to do?!”

The peace that passeth all understanding pointedly failed to show up. She had nothing more to say, and no answer came from Heaven. “Just me and my nerves,” she concluded. They’d have to get through the night together. She double-checked the door locks, laid back, closed her eyes again and waited.

And waited.

It was like she could hear every boar and bird and basilisk within a mile, and they all sounded like they’d consider a nice plate of Kelly sushi an ideal snack. Every hiss through the grass by the roadside was some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards her truck. Every creak was a tree branch ready to fall on her, even though the nearest tree was fifty feet away. Every breeze shifting the Ram was a clawed paw rocking the frame.

She opened her eyes. Her imagination was doing her no favors. Her anxiety was going omnidirectional. “No weapon formed against me shall prosper,” she recited, recalling proof-verses and one-liners from church youth group. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God … He has put a hedge around me … He is my sword and shield?” Darn, if only she’d thought to bring a Bible. Not that the attempt at “sword drills” was doing a lot of good. She closed her eyes again, hard.

What seemed like hours later, she drifted off, and it got worse. She dreamed of the fires from San Francisco following her down the highway, which woke her up. She went back to sleep and this time it was a pack of mountain lions. Wake up again, fall asleep again, a freak storm hurling a flood across Highway 1, tossing her and the truck into the ocean. Wake up again.

She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Was there a way to tire herself out enough that her subconscious would take a hike? She decided to try, took the flashlight from the bag, got out and locked the Dodge. Perhaps a nice walk in nature would shift things around.

There wasn’t much nature to see, though – the road and the grassy hills beside it, the dairy or whatever farm. She strolled along the asphalt the way she’d come for a few minutes, shaking her arms and rotating her neck, trying to loosen up.

A howl in the distance. Without thinking, she sprinted back to the truck, took three attempts to unlock it, piled in and locked it again. “Nope, nope, nope, nope,” she repeated until she clapped her hand over her mouth to stop herself. No more of that. She turned off the flashlight, put it away, lay down, squeezed her eyes shut and stayed that way. Nightmares were bad. Nightmares were no fun at all. But you woke up from them. Their teeth didn’t draw blood and their claws didn’t rip flesh. She’d risk them until morning.

Her R.E.M. cycle seemed to take that as a challenge. Wolves worked their way into her dreams, and vigilantes and gangs. George Willard was there with the AK-47, asking what she was doing with his pistol – “think ya can rob me, little girl?” – and Mrs. Cavendish calling her a dirty Mick. She found herself cornered and retreated to the truck, but she was on the passenger side and couldn’t open the door.

She heard someone behind her and saw a masked man with a chainsaw. She ran around the front of the truck, got in on the driver’s side and closed the door just ahead