Desolation Boulevard (52 page)

“
It’s a suicide mission,”
he stated, as his eyes filled with tears.

Chapter 77

Bonnie tucked her pistol into the waistband
at the back of her jeans as she spoke to Sally. “Stay by the window
with the shotgun, but don’t come outside if you can help it. I
don’t expect any trouble, but you never know right?”

“
Are you sure this is a
good idea? What if something goes wrong? What will I
do?”

“
I don’t think anything
will go wrong otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this. I need to know
what these people are thinking; what their mood is. Gabby’s
watching “Monsters Inc.” in Matt’s room. She’ll be fine for a
while. I’ll try not to be too long, okay?”

“
Please be
careful.”

“
I always am.”

Sally took up a position in the window as
Bonnie opened the door and stepped out onto the front porch. Within
a few seconds every person in the crowd beyond the fence had their
eyes trained on her as she walked slowly down the path toward them.
Nobody in the gathering spoke, and Sally thought they looked like
Easter Island statues, as they stared, waiting for Bonnie to reach
the gate. It was impossible to judge the mood of the crowd from
Sally’s position inside the house. Would they simply speak to
Bonnie and allow her to come back inside, or would they attempt to
somehow overpower her and storm the farm so they could get to
Gabby?  Sally felt absolutely powerless as Bonnie stopped a
couple of metres from the fence before glancing back up at her.
Sally gave her a little wave through the window .

Bonnie felt the gun pressing into the small
of her back and wondered if arming herself had been a mistake. She
didn’t know anything about the mood of this mob, and was concerned
that the gun might only complicate matters, if it were spotted. It
was certainly a little odd how everyone was just standing there
staring at her, but when Bonnie smiled and offered the gathering a
“hello”, a woman dressed in faded jeans and a pale blue, puffy
parka finally came forward to speak.

“
Hello,” the woman said
gently, as if embarrassed somehow.

“
My name’s
Bonnie.”

“
It’s nice to meet you. I’m
Jean.”

“
Hi Jean,” Bonnie said,
before turning to the rest of the crowd, who had all inched a
little closer. “Hi everyone. I’m Bonnie.”

“
Hi Bonnie,” most of the
crowd responded, somewhat sheepishly, as Bonnie turned her
attention back to the woman in the blue parka.

“
Jean, we need to
talk.”

“
Oh, yes! Of course,” she
answered, smiling at Bonnie eagerly. “You must be wondering why
we’re here.”

“
Um, not really. I’m
guessing you’re all here because of my daughter?”

Jean turned and nodded at the crowd behind
her, before returning her attention to Bonnie.

“
Yes, of course. A mother
would know these things, wouldn’t she? Yes, Bonnie, we have come
because of your daughter. Umm, would you mind telling us her
name?”

“
Sure, I guess so. Her name
is Gabby. Gabrielle really, but we call her Gabby.”

“
Oh, that’s
lovely.”

Bonnie could see people in the crowd nodding
and smiling as word got around that the girl had a name.

“
Jean, listen,” Bonnie
said, eager to move on now that the small talk was over. “May I
ask, what you hope to achieve by being here? What’s the point? No
bullshit please, okay? Just tell me what brought you here, because,
honestly, this is all getting a bit weird.”

“
Oh Bonnie, I’m sorry. This
must be hard for you, but I’ll tell you everything I
can.”

Jean turned to the crowd, “It’s okay
everyone, Bonnie just wants to know why we came. She’s a
friend.”

The crowd looked awfully pleased about this
new information, but inside, Bonnie was fuming. She hadn’t said
anything about being a friend to these people, but she kept her
feelings to herself and waited for Jean’s response.

“
Bonnie, I can’t speak for
all of us exactly, but I think everybody that’s here has had a
similar experience. Like a lot of others, I had an urge to leave
the city. I used to live in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, near the
beach, and I was managing somehow to survive by locking myself in
at night and avoiding marauders during the day, but then I started
having these dreams that were sort of pushing me to head west. I
tried to put it out of my mind, but it got too much. It was as if I
was being tugged by a giant cosmic string.”

Jean shook her head and gave Bonnie an
apologetic look. “I know how stupid that sounds, but that’s how I
felt. Anyway, the string just kept pulling at me, and eventually I
packed a bag and started my journey. After a few days of travelling
I teamed up with a couple of other people in the mountains, and we
just kept moving west together, not really knowing where we’d end
up. My dreams changed too. As I got further from the city, I
started dreaming about a girl. It was Gabrielle, obviously. They
were beautiful dreams, but menacing at the same time. It was as if
I was being promised heaven, but only at a terrible cost. That
doesn’t really make sense does it? But it’s the only way I can
describe it. Then when we reached Millfield, I felt that I had to
stop here. The journey was over for me. My travelling companions
were different, though; they wanted to keep heading west. They
hadn’t been having the dreams about Gabrielle. I think that was the
main reason they didn’t stop here, like I did. Their cosmic string
was pulling them somewhere else.”

Bonnie considered the woman’s story. It
certainly fit with everything else that had happened around Gabby
so far, but she needed to know more. “Tell me Jean, now that you’re
here, how do you feel?”

“
That’s the great part,”
said the woman, smiling beatifically at Bonnie. “I feel so happy to
be near her - near Gabby, I mean. It’s like love, but even stronger
than that.”

She turned and motioned towards the people
behind her. “We’re ready to die if we have to, to protect the
girl.”

“
Protect her from what?”
asked Bonnie. “The feeders?”

“
Perhaps, although the
feeders seem to fear her at the moment. That’s why we’ve been safe
here at night. No, we’re not sure what the threat will be, just
that it will be unexpected, and a great challenge. We believe we’ve
been called here to help protect Gabrielle. We’ve all brought
weapons. If we can keep her alive, we believe she is our hope for
the future.”

“
Can you protect
her?”

“
I don’t know, but if we
can’t, then the world will plunge into dark times - even darker
than it is now. If we can keep the special ones like Gabby alive,
then we might be led out of the wilderness.”

Bonnie was shocked.

“
What do you mean? Special
ones? Do you mean Gabby isn’t the only one with these gifts, these
powers?”

Jean gazed directly into Bonnie’s eyes
earnestly. “We can only hope.”

-

Montana lay on the double bed in The
Doctor’s apartment and pretended to be asleep. Her plan relied on
The Doctor either leaving the room, as he had the previous night,
or falling into a drunken slumber on the couch, but so far neither
of those things had happened, and it was getting later and later.
Montana had calculated that the best time to execute her plan would
be around three in the morning, reasoning that most of the
marauders would be asleep by then, and there would be less chance
of encountering one of them in the hallway. But as she lay silently
on the bed, she was starting to become nervous, because tonight
would be her only opportunity to make this bid for freedom work.
Tomorrow night the boys would face the feeders, and they would be
killed. For the past few hours The Doctor had been pacing around
the apartment doing God knew what, but about ten minutes ago his
footsteps had ceased and there had been silence. She decided to
take a chance, and rolled over, away from the wall, to try to see
what The Doctor was up to. She turned, as if still asleep, and
waited a couple of minutes before she dared to peek through one
slightly opened eye.

To Montana’s relief, The Doctor lay on the
couch, sound asleep, with a half empty tumbler of scotch still
clutched in his right hand.

“
Thank God!” she thought,
as she climbed quietly off the bed.

She tiptoed over to the kitchen alcove and
picked up the chef’s knife she had seen earlier, and then padded
back and stood beside The Doctor. She knew that she should kill him
now, while he was vulnerable, to give her plan the best chance of
succeeding. But as she stood over him, watching him doze, the
reality of simply plunging the knife through his chest, was not as
straightforward as she had expected. She tried to justify the
decision in her mind, by thinking about the lives that might be
saved if this psychopath was eliminated right now, but she just
couldn’t bring herself to commit the final, ruthless act - it was
just too clinical. And besides, if her plan worked, The Doctor
would be dead by the morning anyway. Instead, she went to the door
that led to the corridor and knelt down on all fours. She needed to
peer under the closed door to make sure that the guard was still in
his usual position opposite before she put her plan into action,
but when she put her cheek down against the carpet and peeked
through the gap she couldn’t see a pair of feet where they should
have been. Where was the guard? She could see bottoms of the chair
legs, but the guard was not at his post. All of a sudden, Montana
realised that she’d been granted an amazing piece of luck. Her
original plan, to try to sweet-talk the guard into letting her go
to the toilet alone (which she always considered a long shot) was
unnecessary. If she acted quickly, she might just get to her
destination without even encountering a single marauder.

She quickly put her shoes on and went to the
table where The Doctor kept his personal junk. She grabbed the
large ring of keys and stuffed them into her pocket, before sliding
the knife into her belt. She walked back to the door, and crouched
down once more to make sure that the guard had not returned. He
hadn’t. Montana didn’t know if he had left for the night or was
simply on a toilet break, but she knew that it was time to move.
She turned the handle of the door, and peeked up and down the
corridor. There was nobody in sight and the only sound she could
hear was that of The Doctor, now snoring noisily behind her. She
pulled the door almost closed, hoping that a returning guard
wouldn’t notice anything unusual, and then headed towards the dark
stairs that would lead her to the ground floor.

Montana knew that marauders were occupying
most of the rooms in this building, and she even heard snatches of
a muffled conversation as she passed by one door, but other than
that, she encountered no one on the first floor.  She moved
on, as quickly and quietly as she was able, because she knew that
if somebody decided to leave their room at this moment, she would
have no chance of escape - but if she was lucky, the late hour and
cold conditions might keep everyone inside. She recognised one of
the doors she passed as the storeroom she had been incarcerated in
earlier, and she went to it and turned the handle. The door was
unlocked and she was able to open it and peer inside. It was empty,
as she hoped it would be, so she left the door slightly ajar and
made her way towards the stairs. The storeroom would be a part of
her plans for later.

She was shivering from the cold as she
reached the bottom of the stairwell, but Montana knew that this
would be the least of her problems as she crept to the big double
glass doors that led outside. She peered through them. It was
ridiculously dark out there! The moon was nothing more than a thin
crescent, low in the sky, and there was only the palest overspill
of light from a few occupied windows above her. She couldn’t see
any guards outside, but then realised that they would already have
seen her silhouette in the dimly lit doorway anyway, if they were
watching. She unlocked the door and stepped into the night.

The cold air was like a slap across the
face, but Montana was relieved to see that nobody else was around.
It seemed as if The Doctor and his horde of followers were so
caught up in their own sense of superiority, that they had become
somewhat complacent about their power and had never seriously
contemplated their own downfall. She fished the bunch of keys from
her pocket, and headed to the large double metal gates, that had
been the setting for last night’s bloodbath. Yet again, Montana was
aware that the plan could end right here if none of these keys
belonged to the padlock that secured the chain around the gates,
but she had ridden her luck so far, so she said a little prayer and
began trying the keys in the lock one by one.

As she worked her way through each key, she
kept glancing anxiously out into the gloom, worried that feeders
would emerge from the darkness and attack her before she had a
chance to unlock the chain, but so far there was no sign. Montana’s
knowledge of the feeders’ habits told her that they would
eventually latch onto her scent, and appear out of the darkness,
but she hoped to have the gate opened before then. She had tried
around a dozen keys in the padlock, and so far none had worked, but
now, as her fingers got colder, it was becoming difficult for her
to even get the key into the lock. She continued to work her way
through them, systematically, trying not to hurry herself, but with
each key that didn’t fit she became more and more despondent and
frantic. After around ten minutes of trying keys, she was down to
the fourth last, the gates were still locked and her whole body was
shaking from the cold. Then, silently, at the end of the street,
barely visible in the pale moonlight, the first feeder appeared as
if from nowhere.