Free Desolation Boulevard by Mark Gordon

spare
shells, just in case. He was only taking the gun along for
self-defense, though - he had no interest in hunting zombies. All
he wanted to do was to gather information to help him understand
the situation he was in. The last thing he desired was to have to
blast away at one of his friends or relatives with a shotgun.
Observe and get out. That was the plan. He climbed into the ute and
pulled away from the farm.
    As he got closer to town Matt slowed down to
give himself a better chance of spotting anybody who might have
come out of their coma and be wandering around. He also needed to
watch for violent feeders like the ones he saw last night. As he
peered through the windscreen something on the side of the road
caught his eye. On any other day Matt would have been certain that
it was road kill, maybe a roo or a fox. Today, though, he knew
there was another very disturbing likelihood. As he rolled closer
to the reddish lump on the side of the road Matt knew he was
looking at human remains. He stopped the car suddenly, threw open
the door, and vomited the entire contents of his stomach onto the
gravel shoulder. After the events of last night this discovery
shouldn’t have been a complete surprise, but the unglamorous
reality of the vision before him was a severe shock nonetheless.
Once his retching had subsided and he had rinsed his mouth from a
warm bottle of water he found on the floor of the truck, Matt
forced himself to get out and study the corpse, or what was left of
it. He could see that most of the soft tissue had been torn from
the skeleton, the ribs were picked almost clean, and most of the
face had been chewed off. The only remaining flesh was hanging from
the bony frame in stringy flaps or white gristly lumps. Here and
there remnants of the victim’s clothes were scattered around as if
they had been chewed through to get at the flesh. Matt looked
around anxiously, realising that if these creatures were capable of
this kind of savagery towards each other, they would think nothing
of treating him as mid-morning snack. The road, though, was
deserted in all directions. Shaking, pale, and weak in the legs,
Matt climbed into his truck, rolled up the windows and locked the
doors. For the fourth time in three days he headed back into
town.
    Like most teenagers, Matt Winton had seen
his share of gory horror movies, but nothing prepared him for the
raw, brutal realism of the change that had come over his town in
the last forty-eight hours. As he drove through the empty streets
he counted each body he found. He stopped at eighty-three. There
were more, though. He just lost count. Maybe didn’t want to count.
Couldn’t bear to know the true figure. (Later that night, when he
was back at the farm, he would estimate the total number to be
around one hundred and forty). The corpses were in varying stages
of dismemberment. Some, like the first one he found, had been
chewed down to gristle and bone while others had only been
half-eaten. Maybe they were getting full, Matt thought, which made
him shiver, as he watched the crows and flies feasting on the
already decomposing flesh. Within days he knew these scavengers
would play their part in the cycle of life and reduce all of the
corpses to little more than skeletons.
    Of all the bodies Matt saw that day, he only
recognised two. Mr Croft, a retired English teacher from Millfield
High, and Mrs Watson, a nice old lady who had been friends with
Matt’s grandparents before they had passed away. Like a few of the
other bodies, their destruction was less comprehensive, less
ruthless. Their faces were almost untouched by the frenzy of the
feeders, while only the softest parts of their torsos had been
eaten. Humans weren’t the only casualties of the previous night’s
violence, however, and there were also a small number of dogs and
cats that had been too slow to escape a gruesome end. The saddest
part of the whole experience, though, was the skeletons of the
children. Tiny, frail