Desolation Boulevard

by Mark Gordon

  Chapter 25

  Extract From Sally’s Journal:

  “It’s late and almost everyone’s asleep now. I’m so lucky I found Dylan so that he could bring me here. Everybody’s been really nice to me. When I walked through the front gates a woman called Jo came over and gave me a big hug. It felt so good. She’s kind of in charge along with a man called Mr Ash. He makes everyone call him Mr Ash too! He used to be a high school teacher, but he seems nice anyway (ha ha). She introduced me to a few other people my own age and took me to one end of the church, where there were beds set up for the girls - the boys and men have to sleep at the other end. There are no couples here (yet). Everybody has lost their entire families. It’s such a sad, quiet place, but Jo and Mr Ash are trying to keep everyone’s spirits up as much as they can.

  The church is bigger than it looks from the outside. There’s a room where Jo has set up a little play area with books and toys for the younger kids. There’s also a big kitchen at the back where they’ve collected loads of canned food and other things we need like clothes and medical stuff. I can see why they chose this building to “hole up” in. It’s got a really tall metal fence around it that has spikes at the top. A plaque in the church says it was built in 1870 and its walls are blocks of really thick sandstone. A couple of the men have rigged up electricity from a generator so that we can have lights at night. They also have these huge portable lights with their own generators that shine onto the church fence at night. That seems to be keeping the creatures away (at the moment anyway).

  After Jo showed me around she gave me some clean clothes to wear and I went to the bathroom and made myself a bit more presentable. Then she took me to the kitchen and made me some lunch while we talked. She used to be a lawyer before the event and was really rich and into the whole power-dressing, ladder-climbing thing. I can see how she would be good at that; she’s a really tough, intelligent woman. Earlier when I came out of the bathroom I saw her on the other side of the church arguing with this other woman who was crying and really upset. By the time they finished, though, the woman gave Jo a hug and went off to her bed where she collapsed and continued to cry by herself. I might talk to her tomorrow. Maybe she needs a friend.

  As soon as Dylan introduced me to Jo he left the church and went straight back out to hunt “zombies” as he calls them. I wouldn’t say that he enjoys it but he certainly seems to be driven to wipe them out (even though we all know that it’s an impossible task). He said that I could go with him tomorrow if I wanted to. I think I will. Confession time. There is something about him that I find really intriguing. He’s very good looking (and he knows it) but it’s not the only thing that he’s about. I think there’s a secret there that he won’t share with anyone. Secret or not, I wouldn’t be upset if something happened between us. So I guess I’ll go zombie hunting with him tomorrow.

  The rest of the afternoon I just wandered around meeting people and helping to get dinner ready. They’re all scared like me and don’t know what to do next. Most want to stay in the city. A group has actually been going out during the day with a truck and a backo? (whatever that is), cleaning up the corpses in the streets around the church. It’s to stop disease and hopefully keep the rats away. They say that if we’re going to be here for a while then we may as well start making the local area as liveable as possible. They’re burying the dead in a big hole at the bottom of a building site somewhere. There are also teams of people who go out looking for supplies, survivors and other suitable places for people to live. Before dark everybody who’d been out came back to the church and gathered around a big long table for dinner (they took out the first five rows of pews). It was nice to have a proper meal again for a change and despite the nightmare we are living in, I felt like I had a family for just a little while. When Dylan sat next to me Jo looked over and winked. Is it that obvious? I thought I was playing it cool! Dylan, of course, was oblivious. He was too busy telling everyone about the “zombies”. He said that he had a little problem with one of them today. He was in a supermarket freezer “cleaning up a nest” (as he calls it) when one of them attacked him. He said there were three of them, and after he shot the second one the last one woke up and snarled at him. He said the creature never really got near him but we don’t know if he was just playing it down a bit so we wouldn’t worry. He touched me on the leg and said we’d have to be careful tomorrow.

  Well it’s late, the big lights are on outside and there are people watching the fence, so it’s time for me to go to sleep. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

  Oh, I almost forgot. A really sad thing happened this afternoon. At around three in the afternoon Mr Ash turned off “The Wiggles” music. I knew immediately what that meant. Everybody stopped what they were doing and listened, even the little kids. When the music didn’t start again some of the woman started crying. I guess they were the ones who had children of their own until a few days ago.

  I hate this world.