Tales of the Derry Plague | Book 1 | LAST

on the dashboard, the other at his side as if he’d been about to reach out and close the passenger-side door but hadn’t made it in time. And the smell was the smell of someone who’d been dead for a few days – he didn’t look like he was rotting, but the stench was unmistakable.

For once, she was glad she had a very strong gag reflex. As a child when she swallowed something she shouldn’t have, Mom would have to give her syrup of ipecac to make her throw up. It was the only thing that worked – even the finger-down-the-throat trick didn’t help. It had always been an inconvenience before. Now, though, it was keeping her breakfast in its proper place as she slowly backed away from the Volvo …

… into the Mercedes C230 Kompressor next door. Startled when she bumped into it, she turned around – and screamed.

Once she managed to silence herself, an eternity of maybe fifteen seconds later, she sat on the grass of the nearest front lawn, stuck her head between her knees and did her best to breathe normally again before glancing up at the Kompressor again. No, her eyes hadn’t deceived her; yes, that was a woman and her daughter in the front seat; yes, Mommy should’ve put her in back in a DOT-approved booster; no, that didn’t matter anymore because they were both dead …

More breathing practice was needed once her brain processed more information: yes, that was Wendy Harring, a regular customer at SBN&N whose hubby was a derivatives trader at one of the big San Francisco investment firms. And their seven-year-old daughter Taylor, always cute and bubbly when she came in the store and had a hankering for spearmint chewing gum. The Harrings were residents of Sayler Beach, not just vacationers, so she’d see them a couple of times a week.

And they were dead. Gone. Wendy would never share her discovery of a new salad recipe again. Taylor would no longer say “thank you” for a package of Wrigley’s, or skip down the aisles singing the Sid the Science Kid theme.

“Oh, God, what’s happening?” Kelly moaned.

She needed to take more time to think this through, to get her wheels back under her. She pulled out her phone and tried calling numbers again, but gave up after the third one – there was still nobody answering, not even 911. 911 never shut down – the whole point of 911 was that there was always someone there in an emergency! If no one was picking up the phones there (and it appeared no one was, there wasn’t even a busy signal, just endless ringing), then … then this was even worse than it looked. Which didn’t seem possible, but …

“Don’t. Panic,” she ordered herself. The last thing she needed was to freak out, especially since her meds were back at the Matchicks’ house. Losing her cool wouldn’t help anyone right now – not her, not anyone else.

Since her phone was still in her hand, she started checking news websites again. Nothing had changed on the AP site, so she tried Reuters, CNN, RawStory, NBC, Buzzfeed, Yahoo News. Not one of them had a post later than Thursday, and they all pretty much said the same thing – millions known dead, billions unknown, world in chaos, symptoms like flu, then tiredness and brain death. Fox News was even less useful – their last post was Wednesday, and blamed the outbreak on the current administration because reasons.

Would the international news be any better, she wondered. She racked her brain for names of organizations. Al-Jazeera … no help. Agence France-Presse, ditto. Xinhua, same. Crud, she used to know more of them, back in college, but when was the last time she had to worry about getting urgent updates from Japan or Italy? Oh, CBC … no, nothing more there either. The BBC had a post from Friday, but it only said they were currently too shorthanded to operate and were shutting down until the pandemic passed.

Kelly looked around her. Until it passed … but what if it had only passed because almost no one was left to get sick?

That was when she realized how quiet it was. She could hear birds, mostly seagulls looking for rubbish to nosh on or strafing the crustaceans down on the beach a few blocks away. She could pick out the distant chuff of the waves coming in off the Pacific. Somewhere, a dog barked hoarsely. But no sounds of people – no joggers stamping by, no parents calling their children, no children playing games, no headache-inducing thud of teenagers with subwoofers bigger than their heads and the latest Migos mixtape driving down the road …

Come to think, no one had come down the road for the last … how long had she been sitting there? She checked her phone – a half-hour at least. And not one car had rolled by, not one bike, not one pedestrian, not one senior citizen in a mobility cart. Sayler Beach had over three hundred people, not counting vacationers, in less than a square mile of space. She hadn’t seen or heard even one since she left the house – not a live one, anyway.

Could she be … nah, that only happened in the movies. It would make no sense. Except … “Well, Kel, do you have a better explanation?” she muttered.

Item one: lots of news about a dread disease wiping out who knew how many millions, and none of it more recent than three days ago; since then, silence on all websites. Item two: the Harrings and the other guy, who she didn’t know, dead in their cars. Item three: nobody picking up the phone, anywhere. Item four: no one moving around or making any noise.

Hypothesis: was she the only person left alive in the entire town?

Extension of hypothesis: was she the only person left