Tales of the Derry Plague | Book 1 | LAST

by Anselmo, Ray

  That “if” led her back down the long-term list, to Explore E. Marin (after semi moved – drive there). Well, the semi was moved – there was nothing to stop her except availability of fuel and time. She put Explore E. Marin on the weekly list, then added Siphon min. 5 gal. gas to the daily list. That would fill forty-five minutes to an hour a day and keep her supply up, provided she could find enough jerricans or plastic jugs to put the gas in. She’d have to start searching for those specifically – she’d used almost all the ones in the store …

  Now she needed a list for today, and started it with Look for gasoline containers and Wash the dishes. She took a deep breath and looked at all the papers in front of her – a to-do-list for today, one for every day, one weekly, one long-term … she was about two steps away from pinning them to the wall and stringing yarn between them with pushpins, like a conspiracy theorist trying to figure out who shot JFK. “Yeah, this is chaos. Pick one and get it together.”

  She chose the daily schedule and a new sheet of paper. It didn’t need to be inflexible – she wasn’t bringing stone tablets down from Sinai. But it would be good to have it as a safety net, to fall back on when options threatened to overwhelm her. She could put it up on the otherwise useless refrigerator with a magnet, a guide to sort her days and keep her sanity on track. It took a few attempts before she had something she liked:

  Daily schedule:

  Dress

  Breakfast / journal

  AM – Siphon gas, min. 5 gallons

  AM – Harvest Holy Green (beginning c. 9/15) – 1-2 hours/day

  Lunch

  Aft. – Search min. 2 dwellings, general catalogue of items

  Dinner

  PM – Bathe / other washing

  PM – Lithium

  It wasn’t full, wasn’t comprehensive, and wasn’t law, but it covered enough to serve and not so much that she’d feel pressured. There was plenty of rattle room to put in anything else that might need doing. Just right. She set it aside, looked at the weekly items and started sorting that out:

  Weekly schedule:

  Monday –

  Tuesday – dishwashing (PM)

  Wednesday – laundry (PM)

  Thursday –

  Friday – movie night? (Find equipment, see about power)

  Saturday – explore E. Marin County (all day)

  Sunday – REST DAY, prepare for next week

  Organized but flexible, just what she needed. It felt good to have it on paper in front of her, to look at it and see Things She Could Do and when to do them. To not have to think too hard about it, to free her mind for other work. To take the pressure off. Other people might find it intimidating or restricting, but it suited her.

  And to prepare for it all:

  To do today – day 23:

  Journal (cover day 22)

  Store – water, canned/powdered milk, other?

  AM – Siphon gas, min. 5 gallons

  Find jerricans (check Wally Sandborn’s, fire dept., ranch)

  Find spray paint to mark cars siphoned, houses checked

  Think about rain barrels

  Search houses? (Or start Wed.?)

  Dinner

  PM – Bathe / wash dishes

  PM – Lithium

  Wow, that was kind of a lot. But it was mostly small items – other than house checking and maybe finding gas containers, none were likely to take more than an hour. One just involved thinking. It would let her ease into the proposed daily routine. It would get a lot ready for later in the week or month or next month. And it would keep the dust off her without tiring her out. “I see this as an absolute win,” she quoted and grinned.

  To start it off, she got the journal out of her room, musing as she did about how she hadn’t moved to the master bedroom. But earlier it would have felt creepy, and now she just didn’t see the point – the extra space would be of no use to her. She sat at the dining table and wrote out the Adventure of the Toppling McDonald’s Truck, then added her plans for today because why not?

  She left the book there, but cleaned up the rest of the papers, throwing away the ones she’d recopied or no longer needed and putting the daily, weekly and long-term lists on the fridge.

  Nice. Neat. Next?

  She drove the Ram to the store, loaded it up with gallon bottles of water, a case of condensed milk, her siphoning tools and the store’s last two empty five-gallon jugs, and began decanting internal combustion juice from Rose Li’s minivan. As she did, she thought about moving the gas and siphoning stuff home … no, she didn’t want such flammable items in her home. Honestly, she didn’t want them in the store either, with all those canned and dry foods and other things she’d almost certainly need later. But where else …?

  That was a conundrum, especially since most of the buildings in Sayler Beach were wooden to better blend in with the subtropical rain forest surrounding it. The volunteer fire building looked like it could go up with one dropped cigarette butt. Most of the structures at Holy Green and the horse ranch were wooden too. At least SBN&N was mostly concrete. She’d have to think about that some more, but for now the store was probably the best place for the gas.

  The store had a can of spray paint – gray, half-used – for the few times they’d needed to cover up graffiti. When she finished draining the eight gallons from the minivan, she sprayed a quick X over the gas cap hatch, then did the same for the other cars in the store lot she’d emptied. The gas she’d just glommed went into the Ram’s tank – now about two-thirds full – the re-emptied jugs back into the store, and the spray can into the cup holder in the cab. Four items down now, almost noon, not bad.

  The fire department yielded a few metal jerricans and a big foam extinguisher, which was heavy as lead but could very much come in handy. Wally’s garage/yard yielded two more jerricans and a couple of small one-gallon plastic gas “cans,” the kind you kept in your trunk for when you ran out of fuel on the road. She piled them all into the bed of the truck. The Spinnaker Inn had a couple of jugs like at the store – she took them and made a mental note to give the place an extensive search, because who knew what she’d find?

  At the horse ranch, though, she hit the mother lode. Not only did they have lots of gallon and five-gallon containers for food and water and the like, they had actual rain barrels! Dozens were situated around the houses and stables, probably so they could cut back on their utility bills, and there were other wooden and metal barrels full of feed and tools and … well, it was a load off her mind, that was for sure.

  A couple of the horses were nosing around her, maybe looking for a handout. She found a pallet jack, used it to move a barrel of oats about fifty feet outside the barn it was in, opened the barrel and tipped it over. The animals went to it and she left it there, hoping it wouldn’t make them sick or anything. She really didn’t know much about caring for horses, but she hoped for the best as she filled the rest of the truck bed with empty containers for future gasoline thefts.

  She brought all the empties back to SBN&N and stored them in the back with the full ones, then made lunch out of canned tuna, canned green beans, an energy bar and a bottle of orange juice. She debated whether to spend the afternoon searching houses, then looked at the to-do list and saw she’d already taken care of six of the ten items. Nah, let that one wait for tomorrow – there was time. And given the number of dirty dishes she had at home, maybe she should move that and her bath up to the afternoon …

  The more she thought about it, the better the idea seemed. Once she finished eating, she headed home with her new loot, put it away, then loaded the dishes into bins, the bins into her Hyundai (she didn’t need the truck for this task) and drove the Hyundai to the beach. She stripped down in her car and, naked as a jay, hauled a bin to the war and got to work cleaning them and herself. The big flat rock served as an effective dish drainer with plenty of room for all the pots, pans and particulars.

  It still felt odd – no, forbidden – to be walking around without a stitch on
, but she did her best to set her fears aside. When she did, she found, she could enjoy the taboo-ness of it, the feeling of getting away with something harmlessly naughty. In her new world, where she was by all appearances the only citizen, it was no worse than siphoning gas from another vehicle or taking medications from a Walgreen’s or eating the green beans off the store shelves. Laws about those things were to manage societies – but the only society here was her.

  And within limits, the sun and sea on her skin felt so good!

  Soon enough, though, the dishes were done and Kelly packed them up and went home. Dinner was sausages, noodles with garlic and Parmesan and olive oil, dehydrated broccoli, and chocolate chips for dessert. The sun went down, the noises of the darkness started up, and she took her capsule and bedded down for the night. Another full day, another fine day.

  Next?

  16

  CATS

  Wednesday, day 24, dawned just as Kelly was waking up. Although nothing urgent presented itself aside from a full bladder (easily resolved), she found she was eager to get to her schedule. Days of rest and success, plus already knowing a lot of what she’d be doing, gave her a sense of security in the chaos of an unknown new world. Life might be lonely, but it was still livable.

  She stripped her bed and tossed the linens in a hamper to tote to the ocean later. Breakfast was cereal, canned milk and apple slices while she scribbled in her journal. First stop – in the Hyundai, since she wasn’t figuring on any major hauling today – was the store, where she suctioned six gallons of gas out of Bilbo’s orange Kia Forte, the only car in the lot she hadn’t drained yet. Five gallons got stored away in the back; the rest she dumped into her own tank. She also loaded up the store’s supply of powdered milk. No powdered eggs, though – darn. She missed omelets.

  With plenty of morning to go, she drove over to Holy Green to look at the fields. They were lush with summer growth, but starting to look a little dry, or at least dusty. She knew the farm had an automatic sprinkler system for the crops, but it probably would’ve run dry over a week ago. And the weeds had been left unpulled. Should she …?

  No. She had other things she wanted to do. She wasn’t an expert in farming or even gardening. And it wasn’t that long until she’d be back here for the harvest – mere weeks. She’d let it go until then, harvest what she could, maybe spend the winter studying up on basic agriculture (there must be a few books on it someplace around there) and deal with it in more depth during planting time in the spring.

  If, that is, she was still here and functioning come spring. A lot could happen in the meantime. She wasn’t even a month into this, had little idea of what it would involve in the long-term and didn’t know enough to make good guesses about the rest. “One day at a time” was in many ways as necessary for her to keep in mind as it had ever been for a recovering alcoholic. All the more reason to make any plans loose, and hold them looser still.

  She also went to the dehydrator room and did a little more scrubbing. She’d grabbed another gallon of water from the store before coming, and used part of it to finish cleaning the machines. She put the shelves back in, put their covers on them to keep out dust and inquisitive animals, then headed for the generator, hoping she could make it work for Friday movies.

  It was fine, just needed more gas, and in the storage room next door there were lights and sockets that worked and folding chairs. All she needed was a DVD or Blu-Ray player and a TV. She could haul those up, but …

  More looking around the farm and she hit paydirt – an audiovisual storage room. Inside were, among other gizmos, several DVD/Blu-Ray players and 4K HD Ultra televisions. For all its focus on Zen meditation and organic farming, they sure hadn’t skimped on the electronics. Some big donor must’ve either tossed a lot of money at them or hit a massive close-out sale at Best Buy.

  Deciding to strike while the irony was hot, she whipped back to the store for gas and a DVD from the discount rack, brought them back, filled the generator, cranked it up and hooked up some of the multimedia monstrosities. Five minutes later, she was working a remote for the first time in weeks, running the machines through their paces. It turned out that What Men Want (or the first fifteen minutes of it, anyway) was just as mediocre as she’d heard, but she’d find something better for Friday – if not in the Matchicks’ collection, in someone else’s.

  She shut down the media center, turned off the generator and was heading back to her car when she heard a noise she didn’t recognize for a moment. A high squeak, or a whine, or …

  She turned around and spotted movement beneath the little gazebo or whatever they called it that they used for outdoor meditation. Just a flicker, something ducking out of sight under the platform. She walked closer, slowly, not wanting to frighten or get attacked by whatever it was. When she got there she crouched and squinted into the shade.

  “Mowp?”

  “Awwwww …” A black-and-gray kitten was looking out at her from the shadows. She held still and a minute later, a second one snuck out behind the first, then another. They were so cute and fluffy and she had to resist the urge to try to reach one and cuddle it. Not that she’d be able to – they were clearly wary, and she was a good twelve feet away. They’d scamper off before she got close.

  But unlike with the deer, you didn’t have to keep silent around a cat. “You guys have enough to eat out here?” She recalled the farm tended to attract stray cats – or to be more precise, the farm attracted birds and mice, which attracted the strays. Even with humans gone, they should have enough prey to keep them fat and sassy, provided Mom or Dad Cat was also around. But you never knew.

  “Myert,” the second one replied. The third was busy trying to swat the first one’s tail.

  “Well, maybe I’ll bring something by for you later.” A dried hamburger or a bag of jerky might do them good. Maybe mix up some powdered milk – that would be a treat for the little ones. Adult cats didn’t go for milk, but kittens did.

  A fourth pair of eyes peeked out at her – ah, Mom Cat had arrived. She began nosing one of the kittens back into the dark, and the others followed. “Bye,” Kelly said, glad to know they were being taken care of. She hadn’t seen any of the dog pack around for a few days, and hoped they didn’t come up here to harass their traditional enemies. She didn’t like the odds of Mom and her triplets (or more) against the canines, especially not the big ones.

  It was about noon, so she returned to the store for lunch. What to have today? Looking through the canned meat section, she felt a little frustrated. A lot of it wasn’t exactly ready-to-eat – canned hams and corned beef hash really needed preparation. She settled on turkey jerky, canned corn and another Sprite, wolfed it down, then moved a flat of Spam and another of canned cat food to the back seat of her car. Come Friday night, she’d take the cat food with her to the farm – unless she went there earlier.

  Back home, she moved the food into the kitchen, then pondered the next item: searching houses. She had her homemade map and notepad and spray paint, and two vehicles to haul home anything she found and just had to keep close at hand. But, she realized, she hadn’t thought about her route. Where would she start the search? Where would she end it? Should she go in any particular order, or pick at random and fill in the rest later. Min. 2 dwellings, great – but which two?

  Well, since she was just starting, why not the two on either side of her, the Alvarezes’ and the Wilkinses’? She’d already been inside each one multiple times in the last few weeks – they would be the most familiar. And she wouldn’t even need to use any gas. If she wanted to bring something home, she could just carry it, or get the shopping cart still sitting by the front door. Simple.

  She had to steel herself before going back in the Alvarezes’. She hadn’t been in there since she stored all the food in Keith’s old wood shop. Being prepared to document and possibly take stuff had a different vibe than putting stuff away, especially without the desperation she’d felt those first several days when she’d been
moving bodies and stockpiling necessities. This was more like getting a sneak peek at a colossal estate sale. Or maybe she was just more conscious of it now.

  “Suck it up, buttercup,” she told herself. She took the map, spray paint, a pen and an empty accounting journal she spotted on the office shelves, and walked next door.

  She set her stuff on the living room table and looked around. How to do this? “Well, just write something and change it later if you don’t like it. It’s not like your supervisor will care.” God was her only boss, and the Bible was largely absent of inventory policies. She marked a 1 on the square on the map that corresponded to the Alvarez house, opened the ledger to the first page and started walking around and jotting down:

  1

  36 Commodore Avenue

  Keith and Rita Alvarez, Ernes

  2 stories + basement (current use – root cellar)

  1st floor – liv room w/fireplace, kitchen, dining, office, craft room, guest room w/bath

  2nd floor – 4 bedrooms, 1 w/bath, other bath in hall

  Men’s clothes – L-XL, women’s clothes – 12-16, children’s clothes – ages 12m, 9m, 5f

  Backyard – medium, 5 trees (0 fruit)

  Books – est. 600, ½ children’s

  DVD/Blu-Rays – est. 100, mostly children’s