So this afternoon she drank a whole bottle of crème de menthe and then got sick and threw up in the bathroom and then went to bed and lit a cigarette and fell asleep and burned the house down and she didn't have to think about it anymore, ever. The wind had freshened, and she also burned down most of Clewiston. No great loss.
Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and blood loss in the lobby of Toby Harrah's gambling casino, where he had attempted the operation.
In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull.
Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.
In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself to get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, a four-eyes engineering student from the state university. At fifteen she had been flattered just to be asked out by a college man (even if he was only a freshman) and for the life of her she couldn't remember why she had allowed Waldo - Waldo Horton, what a yuck name - to "work his will" on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him? Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to "work their will" on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader. If it hadn't been for yucky old Waldo Horton, she would have made head cheerleader her junior year, easy. And, getting back to the point, either Steve or Mark would have made more acceptable husbands. They both had broad shoulders and Mark had stone bitchin shoulder-length blond hair. But it was Waldo, it could have been no one but Waldo. All she had to do was look in her diary and do the arithmetic. And after the baby came she wouldn't have even had to do that. It looked just like him. Yucky.
So for two long years she had struggled along, through a variety of crummy jobs in fast food restaurants and motels, while Waldo went to school. It got so she hated Waldo's school most of all, even more than the baby and Waldo himself. If he wanted a family so bad, why couldn't he get out and work? She had. But her parents and his wouldn't allow it. Alone, Judy could have sweet-talked him into it (she would have gotten him to promise before she let him touch her in bed), but all four of the in-laws had their noses in things all the time. Oh Judy, things will be so much better when Waldo has a good job. Oh Judy, things would look so much brighter if you'd go to church more often. Oh Judy, eat shit and keep smiling until you get it down. Until you get it all down.
Then the superflu had come along and had solved all her problems. Her parents had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo's parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free. The thought that she herself might die had never crossed her mind, and of course she didn't.
They had been living in a large and rambling apartment house in downtown Milltown. One of the features of the place that sold Waldo on it (Judy, of course, didn't have a say) was a large walk-in meat freezer in the basement. They had taken the apartment in September of 1988, and their apartment was on the third floor, and who always seemed to get stuck taking the roast and the hamburger down to the freezer? Three guesses and the first two don't count. Waldo and Petie had died at home. By that time you couldn't get hospital service unless you were a bigwig and the mortuaries were swamped (creepy old places anyway, Judy wouldn't go near one on a bet), but the power was still on. So she had taken them downstairs and put them in the freezer.
The power had gone off in Milltown three days ago, but it was still fairly cool down there. Judy knew because she went down to look at their dead bodies three or four times a day. She told herself she was just checking. What else could it be? Surely she wasn't gloating?
She went down on the afternoon of July 2 and forgot to put the rubber wedge under the freezer door. The door swung shut behind her and latched. It was then that she noticed, after two years of coming and going down here, that there was no inside knob on the freezer door. By then it was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve. So Judy Horton died in the company of her son and husband after all.
Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up.