Free Desolation Boulevard by Mark Gordon Page B

after I locked myself in the bathroom last night I think I
might have passed out for a while. By the time I recovered, the
person who tried to attack me (the second one, from Room 13) had
stopped banging on my door. I felt awful. My head was pounding and
I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t. I lay there without moving for
about ten minutes, and listened carefully before I dared to leave
the bathroom. There were no sounds from inside my hotel room, but I
could hear some pretty scary stuff going on in the street –
occasional muffled screams and less often the sound of breaking
glass.
    After a while I got
brave enough to leave the bathroom and that’s when I realised my
front door had not been broken in. This place turned out to be a
good choice! I went out to the balcony to survey the street and
what was below me was like some crazy scene by that Bosch guy who
did those paintings of Hell. People were chasing each other and
when a faster or stronger one caught a weak one, they would rip out
their throat with their teeth then a whole gang of other ones would
join in until the victim was just a pile of bones and gore. (FYI, I
just read that back and it sounds like I was sitting out on that
balcony watching a movie, scarfing down popcorn and having a great
old time, but actually I was alternating between crying, covering
my eyes and pissing my pants). Once I got the gist of what was
going on down there, I didn’t need to see any more. I came back
inside, lit a candle and tried to think. And this is what I thought
– “You need a drink”! So (like a chip off the old block, hey mum?)
I raided the minibar, drank everything I could find and passed out
(again).
    When I woke up the sun
was streaming in through the balcony doors and everything was
quiet. And guess what? I had a hangover. A Coke from the evil
minibar seemed to help and I shuffled out to the balcony to see
what I could see. First thing I noticed was that there were no
savages roaming the streets like last night. The second thing was
the bodies. If there was a bomb invented which would only blow up
people and not buildings, this is what it would do. One floor below
me on the street were scores of people that looked as if they’d
been eaten by werewolves. Some were just skeletons. Some people
were just bits of people. Crows were picking at fleshy scraps and a
stray dog had his whole head inside someone’s torso and I could
hear the wet slurping sounds it made as it gorged on the corpse. I
ran to the bathroom and puked my guts up. Bloody
hangover!
    I didn’t know what to
do next. I paced that little hotel room for a couple of hours and
went out to the balcony occasionally to see if there were any
“werewolves” about. There weren’t. Then I slept. Then I paced for
another hour! I heard and saw nothing from outside. I wondered what
had happened to the freak from Room 13. I was so absorbed with the
mayhem last night I totally forgot that it was probably inside my
building the whole time! Maybe he or she (it?) sat outside my door
all night like a cat waiting for a mouse. I’m so glad I didn’t
think of that last night, by the way.
    By about one o’clock in
the afternoon (I think! I had no way of telling the time – my phone
was dead and only old people wore watches, right?) I had decided
that the sickness that had put almost everyone to sleep, and then
woken them up as crazed killers, had also made them nocturnal -
like vampires. And that is why they weren’t on the street today. I
felt that I could probably leave the hotel and try to find help if
I wanted to. My analytical self knew that I wouldn’t encounter any
of the creatures during the daylight, but my emotional self
wouldn’t let me leave that room. So I stayed. I laid on the double
bed and tried to concentrate on the “Old Man and the Sea”. I racked
up eighty bucks on my bill (which I won’t be paying by the way, the
service here is terrible) by eating all the snacks from the
minibar. And I cried (a