Desolation Boulevard (9 page)

As the late afternoon
turned to dusk I took up a vigil on the veranda. I wanted to see
how soon these things appeared after sunset. It didn’t take long.
The sun had disappeared behind the buildings across the street when
the first one showed up. It was a guy, pretty tall and muscly,
wearing business clothes – black trousers, white business shirt,
tie hanging loosely around his neck. I looked at his feet. Sometime
during the night his shoes had gone missing. He didn’t look too
bothered though! I was sitting on the chair that I’d dragged from
inside the room and only my eyes were peeping over the edge of the
balcony. I didn’t want to be noticed, even though I felt I was
pretty safe. I watched it walk out from a florist’s across the
street. It had caked-on blood all over its’ face and his shirt was
black with it. It looked around. No, that’s not right. It studied
the street. I thought it was looking for something and I was right.
After a couple of minutes he spotted a second person come out of a
restaurant a few doors down. Another guy. Looked like a he had
maybe been a chef from his outfit, but it was hard to tell because
of all the blood and dirt on him. They looked at each other like
cowboys in an old western. I think I heard one of them snarl at the
other but I’m not sure. I waited for them to attack each other. It
never happened. What happened was this - a third person appeared on
the street, a middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform. I don’t know
where she came from because I was so intent on watching the other
two. She didn’t have as much blood on her as the men, but I could
see from the dark stain around her mouth that she had her fill last
night too. She surveyed her surroundings (more like a frightened
animal than a person) and then spotted the guys across the street.
She froze as she stared them down. Then suddenly and simultaneously
the two men went into action and sprinted straight for her, making
little grunting sounds each time their feet hit the road. She tried
to turn and run away but only got about five metres before the men
pounced on her and killed her. Then it was feeding time. There was
a lot of blood. Let’s just leave it at that.

Over the next couple of
hours I got a pretty good idea of how these beasts functioned and
it had certainly settled down a bit compared to previous night’s
bedlam. There were fewer of them on the street for one thing (maybe
some only ate every couple of days), and the violence seemed a
little more deliberate (or maybe I was getting jaded). One thing
that was pretty clear, though, was that the strong were dominant,
the younger, quicker ones seemed to skirt around the edges and keep
out of trouble and women who were of child-baring age (let’s say
fifteen to forty?) were left alone to get on with their feeding, in
most cases. In other words, the old, the very young and the weak
became the victims of everybody else (a bit like high school ha
ha). What I had witnessed over those couple of hours I knew would
continue throughout the night. That was enough for me. There was
nothing more to learn.

I closed the balcony
door and went to bed (no minibar tonight).

I love you
mum.”

Chapter
18

Matt stayed in bed for three days. He was
crushed by sadness, and he couldn’t see any point in going on. If
it weren’t for Elvis he might simply have stayed in bed until he
wasted away, but the dog kept him company and probably saved his
life. Matt did not eat for three days, but even in his darkest
hours, he couldn’t allow himself to let the dog suffer. So once a
day he climbed out of bed and poured some dry kibble into the dog’s
bowl, before heading straight back to his personal hell. Elvis
repaid the debt by sleeping in the bed beside the boy and reminding
him that he wasn’t completely alone just yet.

Matt did not give the feeders much thought.
He didn’t care if they took over the world, and he didn’t care if
they found him in the night and savaged him while he slept. His
despair was total and all consuming. He had given up hope of ever
seeing his parents again and that hurt the most. He imagined that
they were dead, because the alternative was too horrific to
contemplate. His parents had loved him and they had always planned
on him taking over the farm at some point, but now he didn’t know.
What was the point of running the farm if there was no one to share
his achievements with? What was the point of being alive in this
hideous new world? What was the point of living without family or
friends? For three days these thoughts weighed him down as if he
was a very sick fish at the bottom of a huge, dark ocean. He wanted
to be dead.

It was the most mundane of things that
brought Matt back from the vice-like grip of his depression. Around
midday of the fourth day something seeped into his consciousness
that triggered a small spark that forced him to sit up bed. It was
the sound of the chickens squawking to be fed. He tried to ignore
them but when he thought of all the care and attention his mother
had given them over the years, he knew that it would not be
possible. Wearily, he pushed the blankets away and climbed out of
bed.

Before he went to the chickens, though, he
needed to use the bathroom. The sight that greeted him in the
mirror was almost as disturbing as some of the sights he had seen
in town. The boy that had woken up on the farm last Saturday
morning was gone. This new person staring back at him was a ghost.
Matt was a reasonably thin boy to begin with, but now he looked
absolutely gaunt. His skin was pale and there were black rings
under his glassy eyes. He looked more closely. Where had he seen
this look before? Then it hit him. He remembered the photos he’d
seen of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Their eyes looked
glassy, blank, and soulless and gave away nothing but an impression
of the horrors they had witnessed. “They’re my eyes now,” he
thought sadly.

By the time he got to the chickens they were
frantic. Their food had probably run out a couple of days ago, but
there was still some water in the drip feeder. He went to the shed
and scooped up a bucket of pellets from the bin before pouring it
on the ground outside their pen. Then he opened the coop and
watched as they charged the food and devoured it enthusiastically.
He left the gate open so that they could forage around the yard for
worms for the rest of the day. When Matt looked up at the sky, he
saw that there was a storm moving in from the southwest. Monumental
thunderheads were climbing high into the sky and soon it would be
raining. He turned around to go back inside, and noticed that Elvis
was standing close by, watching him.

“
It’s okay boy, I’m back,”
he said, as Elvis wagged his tail furiously and jumped up on Matt
to be embraced. For the first time in four days, he
smiled.

For the rest of the afternoon Matt worked,
simply because that’s what he had been brought up to do. He got the
all-terrain bike out of the shed and went out to check on the
cattle. It hadn’t rained for a month, and the paddock was light on
feed, so he dragged a couple of hay bales out of the nearby shed
and threw them into the paddock. When that was done he checked the
sky again and guessed that it would be raining hard before dark.
The farm could use a drenching, so a storm would be welcome. As he
rode the perimeter of the paddocks, checking fences and looking for
maintenance tasks to be done, his mind kept going back to the
events that had unfolded in Millfield. The last few days in bed had
allowed some ideas to ferment in his mind, and as he rode the
quad-bike he had time to consider things in a more rational manner
and he tried to rationalise how so many people could simply go into
a state of hibernation simultaneously. Initially he had thought
that maybe it was some kind of virus, but he had never heard of
viruses that effected entire populations so quickly. He briefly
considered some kind of mass hypnosis or mind control, but how
would that be delivered? He ruled out electronic communications and
the water supply because surely that would not have had such an
effective coverage and apart from himself, the “virus” had hit one
hundred per cent of the town. His final hypotheses were pretty
crazy, but he had to explain this somehow or he didn’t think he
would be able to move forward. His next theory was the zaniest.
What if the entire earth had been blanketed by some kind of cosmic
fallout that caused this zombie-like state in the population? It
would certainly explain how everyone was affected simultaneously,
but why would it only affect humans? Maybe it was only targeted at
humans, by super-intelligent extra-terrestrial beings that needed
Earth as a new home? Matt ruled that out as being too ludicrous. If
you were an alien species with that kind of power, it would be
easier just to kill everyone, surely?

His final theory was the one he decided to
go with, simply because it seemed a little more scientific than the
others, and he couldn’t think of anything else. Could it be that
humans had reached plague proportions and the planet needed to cull
them for life to survive on earth? Superficially, that seemed
almost as outlandish as Matt’s other theories, but he knew there
were some scientific beliefs out there that made this concept
usable enough for him. The earth’s population had risen
exponentially over the last few hundred years, and the human
population was currently somewhere around twenty billion. It was up
from only one billion not so long ago (a few hundred years, he
guessed). On top of that, thousands of animal species were being
wiped out every year. Another very recent phenomenon he knew of was
the ease with which people, and animal species, were being moved
around the globe. He had seen a show on The Discovery Channel that
showed how whole ecosystems were being wiped out when fish, who
were picked up in sea water as ballast in empty ocean going liners,
were then deposited into a different system on the other side of
the world, where they didn’t belong, took up residence then wiped
out the fish population of the local area. Also if you considered
how humans were moving viruses and diseases around via air travel,
and live animal exports, it was easy to see how the world could
become a huge cross-contaminated Petrie dish of disease and
sickness. Maybe Mother Nature finally decided that we were just too
much trouble. Matt didn’t know if that was possible, but as a boy
who lived on the land he knew that animal species didn’t behave as
individuals, they behaved as a group. He thought of how whales
beached themselves in large numbers and how flocks of birds
sometimes attacked people for no reason. Matt was locking these
thoughts away when the first raindrops started to fall. He rode
back down the hill, put the chickens in their coop, filled up the
generator, and then went inside to the empty house.

Chapter 19

The morning after Sally had observed the
nighttime feeding frenzy, she had no option but to leave her room
and venture outdoors. She had run out of snacks from the minibar,
the water supply had shut down and she wanted to stock up on
medical supplies. Despite feeling confident that the creatures (as
she now thought of them) wouldn’t come out in daylight, she knew
that she needed to take every precaution to stay safe. She wasn’t
going to leave her building until the sun had been up for at least
two hours, and she was going to make sure that she was safely home
well before dark. She briefly considered changing her location to
another building, but she couldn’t really see any advantage and,
besides, this place had served her well over the last couple of
days. Even the creature that had tried to break in couldn’t do so.
So when she felt that there was enough daylight outside, she
strapped on her backpack and cautiously opened the door to the
hallway. It was deserted. She paused and considered whether she
needed some kind of weapon like a knife, but decided that her best
chance of survival was to flee danger rather than face it, unless
of course she could get her hands on a real weapon like a gun at
some point in the future, even though she would have no idea how to
use it. She could worry about that later. She closed the door
behind her and stepped into the carpeted corridor.

As Sally passed Room 13 she noticed that the
door was open. She wondered about her attacker from the first
night. If it could open the door to get out of its’ room, then it
could also have opened the lobby door to let itself out of the
hotel to join the others in their night of violence. Her stomach
was clenched in knots of anxiety, but as she passed the darkened
doorway nothing moved, and so she continued quickly and quietly
down to the lobby. Her suspicion was confirmed; the front door had
been opened after she had made sure it was locked the night before.
That meant that the “once-humans” still had enough memory of their
previous lives to perform simple tasks! They couldn’t speak, and
they were more like animals than people, but they had retained
vestiges of skills that would help them survive in an urban
environment. Sally knew she would need to check all of the rooms in
her hotel as soon as she felt confident enough. She certainly
didn’t want to be sharing her new home with those vicious
freaks.

As she stepped out onto the street she
surveyed the desolation around her. Bloody corpses dotted the
streets, like some extravagant Hollywood movie set, where the
soundtrack was the incessant buzz of flies. Sally didn’t see any
dogs, but she knew she would need to be careful because it wouldn’t
take them long to revert to a feral and potentially lethal state.
She was also alert for other survivors as she remembered the
encounter with the troubled man from her first day. She hoped,
though, that not all survivors would be crazy, and she prayed that
she would meet somebody who would be able to help. But for now she
was alone.