Desolation Boulevard

by Mark Gordon

  Chapter 77

  Forging Bonds

  Bonnie tucked her pistol into the waistband at the back of her jeans. “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?" asked Sally. "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. 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. She turned back towards the house. 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 temperament of this mob, and was concerned that if the gun were spotted it might only complicate matters. It was certainly odd how everyone was just standing 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 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 to 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.”

  People in the crowd nodded and smiled 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 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. After the event I managed 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. When we reached Millfield, I felt that I had to stop. 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 - 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 person with these gifts, these powers?”

  Jean gazed earnestly at Bonnie. “We can only hope.”

  -

  Montana lay on the double bed in The Doctor’s apartment and pretended to sleep. Her plan relied on The Doctor either leaving the room, 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. As she lay silently on the bed, however, 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 comatose on the couch, 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 vulnerabl
e, to give her plan the best chance of succeeding. As she stood over him, though, watching his chest rise and fall, the reality of simply plunging the knife through into him was not as straightforward as she had expected. She tried to justify the decision, 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 peered under the closed door to see if the guard was still in his usual position opposite but couldn’t see a pair of feet where they should have been. Where was he? She could see bottoms of the chair's legs, but the guard was not at his post. Montana realised that she’d been granted an amazing piece of luck. Her original plan, 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 encountering a single marauder.

  She 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 it 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. Nobody was in sight and the only sound she could hear was that of The Doctor 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 led to the ground floor.

  Montana knew that marauders were occupying most of the rooms in this building, and even heard snatches of a muffled conversation as she passed by one door, but other than that, she encountered no one.  She moved on, as quickly and quietly as she was able, hoping that 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 went to it and turned the handle. The door was unlocked so she opened it and looked inside. It was empty, as she hoped it would be. She left the door slightly ajar and made her way towards the stairs. The storeroom would be a part of her plans for later.

  Montana was shivering from the cold as she reached the bottom of the stairwell, but she 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, 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. The Doctor and his horde of followers were so caught up in their own sense of superiority; they had become 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.

  She worked her way through each key, 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 suggested 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.

  It stood in the middle of the road, with its nose in the air, and looked around for the source of this fresh blood. Montana figured that The Doctor’s sacrificial entertainment over the past couple of weeks had trained the creatures to keep returning to this place for an easy meal, so she wasn’t totally surprised by the sight of the beast, but it was terrifying nonetheless Once the feeder locked onto her position it would attack and, she would need to flee, but first she needed to unlock the gates. She scrabbled the third last key into her stiff fingers and tried to insert it into the barrel of the padlock. If this one didn’t work, she would be out of time. Almost in tears, Montana forced herself to pause for a moment, then tried the last key. It slid into the barrel and she breathed a frantic sigh of relief and glanced up to check on the feeder. It had moved! It was now racing towards her through the dark, with almost supernatural speed. She was almost out of time! She frantically attempted to turn the key in the lock.