Desolation Boulevard (30 page)

-

At the car Bonnie and Sally waited
impatiently and watched as Dylan scouted behind the office.

“
What do you think he’s
doing back there?” asked Sally.

“
Who knows? Probably taking
a leak. I wish he’d hurry up, though. I want to get to Gabby, and
this place gives me the creeps.”

Sally felt the same way, and was worried
about Dylan being out of sight and alone for any length of time.
The thought of something bad happening to him was almost too much
to bear. She’d somehow managed to find a man she cared for in this
nightmare world, and she couldn’t imagine losing him now. She was
about to suggest that they go and find him, when she was startled
by a sound behind her. They spun around to find themselves face to
face with a chubby, greasy-haired man pointing a semi-automatic
weapon at them.

“
Hi ladies. I’m Brock. What
can I do you for?”

Chapter 50

When Matt woke up, he realised that Montana
wasn’t beside him in the bed. As the sun began to stream through
his window, he lay on his back and considered what had happened the
night before. After Montana had crawled into bed with him, he
stared at the window for what seemed like hours. Having such a
beautiful girl in bed with him half-naked had him aroused to a high
level, and his desire to make love to her right then was as intense
as a heart attack. On the other hand, if she only wanted
companionship, Matt didn’t want to spoil their relationship by
making a clumsy and unwanted sexual advance. After a while, though,
he finally worked up the courage to turn around and make his move,
but realised that she was sound asleep. Oh well, he thought, it
must have been companionship she had wanted after all, as he rolled
back towards the window and tried to sleep.

The girls were already cleaning up their
breakfast dishes when he got to the kitchen.

“
Good morning,” he said to
them, as he tried to read Montana’s mood.

“
Good afternoon, more like
it,” she laughed good-naturedly. “Gabby and I have been up for
hours, haven’t we?”

“
Yes Matt,” said
Gabby.

“
Well, I had a big day
yesterday. I was really tired.”

“
That’s why Montana said
not to wake you up. She said you’d need your beauty
sleep.”

The girls looked at each other and tried to
suppress their giggles, as Matt attempted to keep a straight
face.

“
Oh, it’s like that is it?”
he asked. “The girls ganging up on the only boy in the
house?”

“
Yes,” said Montana. “We
have you outnumbered so don’t forget it.”

“
Yes,” echoed Gabby.
“Outnumbered.”

”
Oh well then, I guess I’d
better be on my best behaviour. I don’t want to get into
trouble.”

After breakfast Matt went out to complete
the fencing while the girls went to the bookmobile to do some
schoolwork. The arc lights had switched themselves off
automatically when the sun started to rise but Matt knew he would
need to check the fuel levels again before it was dark tonight. If
he got the fencing finished in time he would see if he could rig up
some motion sensors so that the lights would switch on
automatically if triggered. It would save fuel and they wouldn’t
need to put up with the noise of the generators. As he walked the
perimeter of his new fence line, he tested the strength of the
metal posts by grabbing each one in both hands and trying to wiggle
them loose from their concrete pads. They were all rock-solid, and
Matt knew that once the wire was up, the fence would provide them
with a formidable barrier. He got to work unrolling the large
bundles of fencing wire.

A couple of hours later, after he’d attached
almost half of the wire to the posts, Gabby came running to him
with a cool bottle of water and a sandwich. He took them from her
little hands and walked over to the shade of the pepper tree to
eat. Gabby sat down beside him and watched.

“
Would you like to share my
snack?” he asked, as he sat down on the grass.

“
No thanks. Montana gave me
a cookie.”

“
Okay then,” he said, as he
took the sandwich out its plastic wrap and began to eat.

As they sat there together, silent but
happy, Matt realised that, in a strange way, he had a family again.
His initial fear of being responsible for others had given way to
something more positive, more desirable. He actually felt pleased
that he had someone to care for now, and he felt proud that he was
enough of a man to take on the responsibility without resentment or
self-pity. He looked at Gabby, who was making daisy chains from
flowers in the garden, and wondered what her future held. What
would the world be like by the time she became an adult? Would
humans still be living in fear of the feeders, or would the people
who had turned into crazies overnight simply become a bizarre
footnote in the history of humanity? Matt shook his head and
realised that he was wasting valuable time with these thoughts. His
mother used to call it “wool gathering” when she caught him
daydreaming, and ask him what he was thinking about. A lot of the
time, he didn’t even know! That was the past, though, and it was
time to get back to work on the fence. As he stood up he heard the
screen door bang and looked up to see Montana heading down the
front path towards him.

“
How was your
sandwich?”

“
Very good, thank you. I
was getting hungry, actually.”

“
I’m glad you enjoyed it
because that was the last of the bread from the freezer. From now
on, if we want bread, we’re going to have to make it
ourselves.”

“
That shouldn’t be too
hard, but I guess we’ll need to stockpile things like flour and
sugar before the mice and bugs get into everything in town. There’s
so much work to do.”

“
Yes, it would be nice if
we had a little more help around here. We need to be prepared for
anything, don’t we?”

“
Absolutely. One thing I
wasn’t prepared for was your … um, visit last night.”

“
Oh god, Matt, I’m so
sorry. I didn’t want to embarrass you, but I felt so lonely and
scared, and you’re such a nice person. Any other boys I’ve been out
with would have taken advantage of our situation by now, but you
haven’t. Maybe I wanted you to make love to me. I don’t know.
Everything’s so mixed up since the feeders. I honestly don’t know
how I feel about anything anymore. I think something’s wrong with
me.”

Matt looked at her and could see tears
welling up in her eyes. He stepped forward and hugged her.

“
Hey. It’s okay. There’s
absolutely nothing wrong with you. Everybody in the world that
survived this nightmare is going through the same thing. We’re the
lucky ones. We found somebody. Imagine the people that are out
there on their own, or the ones who found the wrong people. We’re
going to be okay. We have each other and we have some skills and
resources to help us survive. God only knows what it must have been
like for people in the cities.”

He held her by the shoulders at arm’s length
and looked into her sad, blue eyes. “We’re okay. And by the way, I
loved having you with me last night. It felt wonderful having you
beside me, and I was kind of disappointed when you fell
asleep.”

She looked at him and he could see a slight
smile breaking through on her tear-stained face.

“
Really?”

“
Yes, really.”

Montana hugged him and buried her soft face
into his grimy neck as Gabby ran up and threw her arms around their
waists, “Group hug! Group hug!”

For the briefest of moments they were
genuinely happy.

-

It was late in the day when Matt finished
his fencing project. The construction of a functional gate, which
could be locked, took up most of the afternoon, but when he closed
it and he had secured the padlock and chain he felt a great sense
of satisfaction. He had worked solidly for two days and he could
feel the effects of the exertion crying out in every single muscle
of his body. Usually on a job like this he would have worked
closely with his father, and it would almost have been fun. This
job, however, was pure drudgery, borne out of necessity and extreme
circumstances. Montana had helped occasionally, when two pairs of
hands were required, but it had mostly been a solo effort. He stood
and looked at the foreboding metal construction that now circled
the house. His mother would have loathed it, and it made Matt feel
as though he was a prisoner, but he knew that they would all feel
more secure now, especially at night when the feeders were awake.
As he walked up onto the veranda, the girls came out to view the
fruits of his labour. Montana put her arm around Matt’s waist.

“
Nice job, sir. You must be
exhausted.”

“
Exhausted, but satisfied.
And starving. What’s for dinner?”

Montana gave him a surprised expression, “I
don’t know. What are you cooking?”

“
Ha-ha. I can cook you
know, but I think I smell something delicious coming from the
kitchen. Gabby must have cooked it while you weren’t
looking!”

“
No Matt!” yelled Gabby.
“We both did! It’s chicken. I helped peel the potatoes.”

“
You can cook tomorrow
night,” said Montana playfully, as she steered him into the house.
“But first you need a bath. You smell really, really
bad!”

-

Two hundred metres from the house, hidden
amongst a dense patch of foliage near the road, a lone figure had
been watching through binoculars as Matt put the finishing touches
on his fence. When he joined the girls on the porch the figure felt
a pang of strong emotion course through his body. He found their
happiness abhorrent. Since the event, there had been no joy for
him, had there? He was living like an animal; hiding at night,
scared out of his wits by the crazies, foraging for food wherever
he could find it, talking to himself like a mad man, and constantly
wondering whether life was even worth clinging to. And, to rub salt
into his wounds, he had discovered that there were people in the
world like that boy on the veranda who was receiving the affection
and companionship of not one, but two people. The planet had become
a stinking cesspit of violence and chaos, but this farm boy had
created something good for himself, and then, out of pure greed and
selfishness, had built a fence around it, so nobody else could
share. It just wasn’t fair! If it weren’t for the girl, he knew he
wouldn’t be this patient. They wanted her, and he would take her to
them! He looked across at the sun, as it began to set behind the
trees. Soon they would be out to feed. It was time to leave. He
slunk away in the shadows to the spot where his bicycle waited. He
climbed on and began pedalling back into town.

Chapter 51

His mind still was reeling from finding the
caged zombies, as Dylan tripped over the wire fence hurrying back
to the car yard where Bonnie and Sally would be waiting for him. He
picked himself up from the weeds and ran, but when he reached the
front of the office, they were nowhere to be seen. He looked right
and left frantically, hoping that they had just moved to a shadier
spot, but they had vanished. When he hurried over to the car and
saw their weapons resting on the hood, he knew immediately that
they had met with trouble - they wouldn’t both wander off leaving
their guns behind. Dylan had only been at the cage for a couple of
minutes, so he knew they couldn’t have gone far. He ran out into
the street and looked one way, and then the other, hoping to see
something that would give him a clue where to start his search, but
nothing moved. As he stood in the deserted street, under the warm
afternoon sun, he felt useless and lost. He wondered whether he
should call out for them, but he immediately ruled that idea out.
If marauders had kidnapped them, then he would lose the only
advantage he had – that of surprise. He began walking quickly up
the street, away from the car towards the centre of the town, when
a flash of movement in the distance, reflected in a shop window,
caught his eye.

-

Brock was pushing the girls along the street
with the barrel of his shotgun as fast as his fat legs would
allow.

“
Hurry up!” he
barked.  “I’d hate to have to put a hole in you
bitches.”

The women marched along in front of him,
scared for their lives, but also frustrated that they’d allowed
themselves to be captured by this creep, especially when they’d
survived so many other dangerous situations. Halfway down the
street Brock suddenly ordered them to stop, and herded them through
big double doors into an old brick building. When they were inside
he forced them to sit on the floor, while he closed the doors by
kicking them shut, then locked them without taking his eye off the
women.

“
Now, sit down and don’t
say a fucking thing until I tell you. Understand?”

Sally and Bonnie nodded, as they looked at
each other for reassurance. Sally was terrified and wished Dylan
was with them, but as she looked at Bonnie she could see that the
older woman was more composed, despite their predicament. Sally
looked around the room and realised that it must have been a bank
at one time. A large open vault loomed ominously at the back of the
room, and their kidnapper gestured at it with his gun as he
threatened them, “Behave yourselves, and I might not have to put
you in there.  Now tell me; what the fuck do you think you’re
doing in my town?”