Tales of the Derry Plague | Book 1 | LAST

by Anselmo, Ray

  She learned a lot that morning, or was reminded of a lot she hadn’t thought through:

  The Pacific was cold – even colder than she remembered! There was no Gulf Stream on this side of the continent, no upwelling of warm tropical water. The main current came straight down from Alaska, and felt like it. She was covered in goosebumps before she got even waist deep.

  Social mores were powerful things. Even though she could be fairly sure no one was around – if there had been, surely they’d have poked their heads up by now – it took an effort of will to take off her clothes outside. And even once she was submerged up to her neck, she found herself glancing around for any Peeping Toms with camera phones. This, she suspected, would be a hard habit to break.

  You had to rinse the sand off your feet once you were finished.

  You didn’t need two towels, because the sun did most of the drying for you – and it felt glorious! You just needed to give your hair a good rub.

  Sitting naked on a rock afterward was a terrific sensation. Kelly looked out at the ocean, over to the beach (the gulls were still avoiding the cremated truck, good) and enjoyed the breezes on her skin and the prickle of the sun’s heat. It was odd, but it felt natural in a way no indoor shower or cotton towel ever could.

  “I almost wish some hot guy could see me here,” she said to herself, then laughed. How had she gone from fear of exposure to actually kind of wanting it in less than an hour? Bizarre! But the last few years she’d been so busy working and keeping herself on an even keel that she largely hadn’t had a libido. Now …

  … yeah, really bizarre. She’d been plunged into a worldwide disaster, left as alone as alone could get, and now she felt sexually attractive? She bet there was no medication available to deal with that kind of thought process.

  She shook her head, chuckling as she got dressed. “You’re weird, Kel.” But maybe it wasn’t so weird – maybe she was finally learning to relax. With over a week of the apocalypse behind her (over two weeks, really, but she slept through most of the first) and no societal pressure (because no society), she wasn’t having to work so hard to fit in. That had always been her #1 stressor. And it had vanished for now, because now she didn’t have to worry about what anyone thought except herself and maybe God.

  She looked up, wondering if God had an issue with public bathing. She couldn’t think of a verse that covered it, except David spying on Bathsheba while she was washing up – and that wasn’t Bathsheba’s fault. King Man-After-God’s-Own-Heart should’ve known better. Well, the Lord could fire a lightning bolt or something as a warning shot to let her now – that was His prerogative. Otherwise she wouldn’t sweat it.

  She dropped the soap and towels home and, seeing as it was a lovely day, decided to walk to the store and see what else could be done. Halfway there she stopped, realizing she’d made an error – if she had to haul anything home (or at least to the Alvarezes’), how would she do it without a car? Then she realized the question itself was erroneous: there were plenty of shopping carts, and since SBN&N had never had a major problem with theft, they’d never gotten the modern kind that locked if you tried to take them past the parking lot.

  She laughed again and continued on, humming Duran Duran’s “Pressure Off.” She felt a little guilty that a side effect of the world’s worst pandemic which had taken all her friends was that her stress levels were dropping through the floor, but emotions were funny things and tended to go wherever they liked. She knew that better than most. Let the helpful ones ride, medicate the unhelpful ones into submission, keep walking – that’s what she’d had to learn over the decades.

  What she had to do at SBN&N was clear – all that cheese. Probably a couple hundred pounds that had been sitting unattended for about two weeks, while she was first ill and later busy with other things. The whole point of cheese was that it was still useful once it spoiled (provided it spoiled in exactly the right way), and it was all hermetically sealed in plastic, but … had it remained edible?

  Darn, she should’ve thought to look that up on the internet while she had access. For that matter, she should’ve used the deli slicer while she had electricity. But should’ve wouldn’t help her now. She looked it over and … it all looked fine, even the bleu cheese and other kinds with iffier appearances. All of it was securely sealed. It had been out of refrigeration for less than a day and a half. And cheese was an item that if it went bad, it was obvious – if not by sight, then (like milk) by smell and taste.

  Well … soonest begun, soonest done. She grabbed a cart, loaded all the cheese into it along with a few boxes of gallon-sized plastic zip-close bags, took it to the back, picked a good sharp knife and got to slicing.

  Not all of it needed to be sliced – some of it already was before being entombed in plastic, others like the Babybels were in smaller portions, and feta and bleu cheeses simply crumbled. Cream cheese, she left in its blocks for the moment. And she had no idea what to do with the ricotta, so she set it aside to toss into the dumpster with all the empty wrappers. The hard cheeses were the real work, but soon she was averaging a minute per block to reduce them to smaller, dryable pieces.

  Only when she was almost finished did she remember that she hadn’t siphoned any more gas to run the dehydrators – and she hadn’t brought her car. Oh, and that soft cheeses would make a mess in the dehydrators if she didn’t do something about it. “And I’d been doing so well,” she whined. After all she’d been through, she’d earned a whine, right?

  But Kelly determined to keep it at one. Too much to do, and who knew how much time? So.

  She finished the slicing and sorted all the cheese into the gallon bags, took the wrappers and the ricotta to the Bog of Eternal Stench, and walked home to get her car, trying to think of what to put on the dehydrator shelves to keep melting cheese from dripping everywhere. Plastic wrap would melt too. So would the wax on wax paper. Aluminum foil? Wait – parchment paper, that should do it! And she knew there were several rolls at the store.

  One problem resolved, she reached her car, where she thankfully still had her siphon tubes and a couple of five-gallon jugs in the trunk. She made a mental note to put those somewhere else – she’d heard of gasoline spontaneously combusting just by getting warm, and didn’t want that to happen inside her vehicle – drove back to the store and spent the next couple of hours swiping the contents of a Lincoln Navigator’s tank. She filled both jugs, leaving plenty in the SUV, but deciding to drain the rest once the dehydrators were running again.

  Back to the farm. Fill up the generator. Lay parchment paper in the dehydrators. Unwrap and lay the cheese on the parchment paper – plenty of room for the lot with one shelf left over. Crank ‘em all up. Time: 2:31 p.m. Long sigh of relief. Return to the store to check the inventory. Nothing left that needed freezing, refrigeration or immediate preservation, though the potatoes had to be dealt with. Another sigh of relief plus a smile. She’d check on the dehydrators before she went to bed at night, refilling the generator’s gas tank as needed.

  As planned, she finished decanting the Navigator, filling one more five-gallon jug and most of another. She left the jugs in the back of the store – better they cause trouble there than at home. Then she went to attack the other major project of the day, cleaning up Keith Alvarez’s woodworking room to use as the new root cellar.

  She soon realized she should’ve probably done that first and dealt with the cheese later. With all the running around and the cutting, she was just too tired to be shoving heavy wood-shaping equipment around. She dragged a couple of them into corners, shook her head and concluded that the rest would have to wait until she got her strength back. She had enough energy to sweep the floor, though, and collected half a kitchen garbage bag’s worth of chips and shavings for later fire-starting.

  Dinner was a dessicated hamburger patty, two dessicated slices of toast and two comparatively juicy carrots, plus a bottle of room-temperature Sprite. Not gourmet by a long shot, but suitable fuel for the furn
ace. She chose to relax for the rest of the evening, since the only thing she needed to do before sleeping was to check the dehydrators and refill the generator (where she’d left a full jug of fuel earlier).

  It was a beautiful evening, not too warm or cold with a breeze coming off the ocean, so once again she decided to walk, this time to the farm. By the time she left home it was night, but without electricity to block them, the moon and stars gave her sufficient light to see by. She found herself grinning at the beauty of nature, the lights above and the smells and sounds around. Disaster or no disaster, they fed her soul, or at least that was how it felt.

  The cheese was nowhere near done, but she expected that. She turned off the generator, refilled its reservoir and started it up again, knowing it had more than enough gas to run well into the morning. She left again, wondering if she should dry the potatoes too, or would they keep well enough without it. Potatoes were supposed to be good for that, but some in the store were starting to sprout, and she wasn’t sure …

  She heard a noise behind her, a mumble or something. She looked, saw nothing, kept on walking home.

  Another sound – a growl.

  She turned and squinted into the dark. Eyes – two pairs, three. What … were coyotes or wolves coming into town? Was there a difference between coyotes and wolves, or were they just different names for the same animal, like cougars and pumas? And more importantly, could she escape either one?

  The eyes approached, and she almost laughed. Five pet dogs – a cocker, a golden Lab, a Chihuahua, a corgi or Pomeranian or other fluffy breed, and a mutt of some nature. None of them too big or scary – she’d probably set them all free during the Great Corpse Scavenger Hunt of the previous week. “Oh, who’s good bois?” she cooed at them. “Who’s a handsome pack of doggos?”

  The cocker spaniel snarled at her. Then so did a sixth dog, a German Shepherd that came out of the night behind the others. That’s when she noticed that none of them looked friendly, not even the fluffy boi. These were pets, she remembered – pets whose owners had died about two weeks ago and saw no one else alive until she came along, tossed them out of their homes – and didn’t do anything else, like feed them. Had any of them eaten recently?

  She began walking backwards toward home, scanning her surroundings for a stick, a pole, anything that could be a weapon in a pinch. The dogs followed her, stalked her. “Oh, dear,” she muttered, and heard the quake in her voice. She had nothing on her but the clothes she wore, not even a flashlight. And while she could probably outrun Fluffy and the Chihuahua, she didn’t like her odds against the rest of the mixed-breed gang. She didn’t want to hurt them, but if one of them charged …

  None of them did. She kept backing up, and they trailed her, growling all the while, keeping a safe distance but making it clear that they didn’t consider her a dominant predator so much as large prey. The dance continued until she saw she was at her front walk. She retreated slowly to her door, opened it, ducked inside …

  … fell back against the door and began crying hysterically. The barking and howling that began outside did her nerves no favors. If one of them, especially the Shepherd or the Lab, had gone for her, her chances would’ve been zero. The last person on Earth(?), killed and eaten by puppers turned feral. That morning, she’d thought she hadn’t needed to defend herself from anything. That showed what she knew. Nature wasn’t just warn sunshine and starlight. It was red in tooth and claw, and baying on her doorstep.

  Kelly didn’t stop crying or shaking until she was almost asleep an hour later. And that night, she woke at every howl and yip.

  9

  BLOOD

  The morning did not improve things. Kelly got up, bleary-eyed and aching, tired from dreams full of wagging tails and gnashing teeth. Then she looked down to see a red spot the size of a salad plate on the bedsheet.

  Great. Exhausted muscles, feral dogs, and now “the manner of women” (as her mom used to quote from Genesis) was upon her.

  For the first time in years, it had taken her by surprise. It wasn’t so much that her periods were “regular” as that she usually had advance warning courtesy of a day’s worth of PMS. That feeling of being one huge exposed nerve always let her know the flow was coming, so she could grit her teeth and get ready for it. And so that others could get ready for it – if she found herself getting snappish, she could just say “sorry, PMS day” and everyone at SBN&N knew she wasn’t actually angry at them.

  This time, no alert. She’d probably been so busy/suppressing her emotions/in shock that the PMS couldn’t break through. Or something. She wasn’t sure of anything other than she needed to get herself and the bed cleaned up before anything else. And that would now be much more difficult because this time, no running water – not in the house, at least.

  A bottle of Aquafina, a washcloth and a tampon took care of the most immediate need. Mom had been dead set against tampons in a manner she usually reserved for Satan and rap music, insisting that her daughter should never put anything inside her until she had a husband. Her freshman year at college, someone introduced her to Tampax and it was like discovering the eighth wonder of the world. Mom, being Mom, had started all kinds of drama when she came home the following summer, but she’d never looked back.

  Her clothes and bedding required another swim in the ocean. She didn’t take a full bath this time, but did shampoo and condition her hair in addition to scrubbing her linens and sleepwear. She hoped she wasn’t poisoning fish with all the surfactants she was using, but didn’t see any dead ones washing up. And the blood in the water didn’t attract any sharks.

  Back home, she broke out some twine, rigged up a couple of clotheslines in the backyard, then went searching for clothespins and couldn’t spot any. Oh. The sheets, she could just throw half over the line and they’d stay put, but her PJs and underwear … hmmm. She checked Saul’s office and, sure enough, entire boxes of binder clips in various sizes. She pinned up the rest, glad she hadn’t been forced to use the potato chip bag clips.

  With that behind her, she thought about breakfast, decided she didn’t want any – cramps and big meals never mixed for her – then remembered the dehydrators and sprinted for her car. Crud, she hoped the generator hadn’t run dry …

  It hadn’t, but it was a near-run thing. She switched it off and went to check the cheese, which was an interesting experience. It certainly looked nothing like the freeze-dried cheese balls she’d tried a couple of times. She found a couple of lint-free towels and wiped the grease off the slices, chunks and disks as she bagged them up. “Disks” were the Babybels, and the blocks of cream cheese which had melted into plate-size rounds that she had to break apart. But the parchment paper had reduced the mess. She looked at yesterday’s list and made an addition:

  Today’s work:

  Bathe

  Breakfast

  Check store – what else to do?

  Find good flashlight/batteries

  Prep Alvarez basement for root cellar

  Move food into root cellar

  Siphon more gas?

  Read LaSheba’s journal?

  Scrub down dehydrators

  Then she thought about last night and added one more:

  Find SOMETHING for personal defense - ?

  She still didn’t think a gun would be a good idea, but faced with aggressive predators, she might not have a better one. Needs must.

  The store was the next stop. She loaded the potatoes, carrots and cabbage into the Hyundai with the dried cheese, then searched for a flashlight. But all they sold were cheaper plastic ones. What she really wanted was one of those big heavy ones police used, heavy enough to double as a truncheon with a light that could bleach your skin. For now she settled for two of the larger ones on the shelf and every pack of batteries in the place.

  As she got ready to go home again, she wondered if she should move the rest of the store’s usable inventory as well. It would be more convenient to have it at home or next door, but it would b
e a lot of work and she might not have room … no, room was no issue. She had the whole town for storage. But it might be better to keep things in multiple spots in case of a roof leak or wildfire or unexpected disaster …

  She decided to table that idea and deal with what was in front of her. Get the Alvarez hobby room fixed up, move most of the dried food there and find a weapon. If she still had time today once those were taken care of, she’d come back to that and other possibilities.

  A night’s rest, however fitful, a morning of low-stress work and a snack of cheese and toast set her up with enough energy to complete the “renovation” of the woodworking room. With all the equipment shoved against one wall, that left over half the room clear, not counting shelf space and the flat surfaces of the work tables, cabinets and table saw. Cleaning off the shelves and emptying the larger cabinets, stuffing the contents in between the larger items, gave her more room still.

  She swept the floor again, getting what she missed previously, then went to her place and stopped. How much of the food should she move over? Once again, she had to weigh the factors of space, convenience and work required. She mentally kicked herself for not working that out earlier, but she had been busy. If anything, now that she’d done all the urgent labor regarding body disposal and food stockpiling, she should either start scheduling rest days or limiting how much she did each day …