Disintegration

21

“I’m going,” Harte announced, his face pressed against the window. “They’re coming over the barrier again. Fuck this, I’m going.”

His words were met with silence as the rest of the survivors thought about what they’d heard. Several others had reached the same decision individually, but no one had found the courage to stand up and say as much. Harte hadn’t any courage either; he was entirely motivated by fear.

“Are you sure there’s no other option?” Caron asked. The room was dark. She couldn’t see how anyone else had reacted.

“I’ll listen to anything anyone else has got to say,” Harte replied anxiously, “but I can’t see any other way forward. For Christ’s sake, Anita’s dead upstairs, Stokes is dead down there, Ellie’s dying and the bodies are climbing over the barrier again. You tell me if there’s any better option than getting the hell out of here.”

Silence.

“We could go down there in the morning and clear them out again,” Jas suggested. “I’m not going out there tonight.”

“How many will be down there by then? I’ve seen half a dozen get over in the last couple of minutes. At that rate that’s almost a hundred an hour. There’ll be a thousand of them by the time the sun comes up.”

Hollis got up and walked over to the window where Harte was standing. He was right—in the pale moonlight outside he could see that the corpses had found another weak point in their increasingly ineffective blockade. They were scrambling over the back of another car like cockroaches scuttling across a dirty kitchen floor.

“But is it going to be any different anywhere else?” Gordon asked. He was sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the room, knees pulled up close to his chest. “It’s not going to be any better, is it?”

“Couldn’t be any worse,” Lorna mumbled.

“Don’t count on it,” Jas said quickly. “We thought we were doing well here.”

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” Caron said. “Why’s it all gone so wrong so quickly?”

“Bad luck,” Hollis answered.

“It’s a bit more than bad luck, you fucking idiot,” Harte said nervously.

“We couldn’t have planned for any of this,” he continued.

“No one could have planned for anything that’s happened since September.”

“I know that, but we thought we’d be able to sit this out here, didn’t we. I thought we’d be okay here until they’d decayed away to nothing. And maybe we still would have been if Anita hadn’t got sick.”

“But why now?” Caron asked. “Why are they climbing over the barrier today?”

“Because they’re scared,” Jas replied. “Because they’ve seen us down there beating the shit out of several hundred of them at a time, and we’ve scared them. They can’t get away because there are so many of them, so they’re fighting back like caged animals. What’s left of their brains is telling them to get us before we get them.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I do,” Hollis said quickly. “He’s right. We’ve brought this on ourselves.”

“So is there any point in leaving?”

“Well, yes,” he responded with a blunt and irritating matter-of-factness. “Of course there is. Anita’s dead and Ellie’s dying. If we stay here then there’s a strong chance more of us will go the same way.”

“But like I said,” Gordon whined from the corner, “aren’t we just going to end up in as bad a mess somewhere else? We’ll end up with another bloody huge crowd of them gathered around us.”

“Maybe, but it probably won’t be as big a crowd as we’ve got here. It’s taken more than a month for that many of them to drag themselves over here. It’s going to take time for things to get this bad if we’re starting again from scratch, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ve seen what kind of a state they’re in, haven’t you? So, logically, by the time we get to this stage again with these kind of numbers, the bodies should be pretty much incapable of harming us, no matter how many of them there are.”

“I’m sold,” Lorna said quietly. “Makes sense to me. I’m going.”

“Anyway,” Caron protested, “this is all irrelevant.”

“Is it?” she grumbled. “Why?”

“Because we can’t go anywhere with Ellie the way she is.”

“Yes, we can,” Harte quickly replied.

“We can’t just leave her here…”

“Yes, we can,” he said again. “We can’t take her with us, can we? Kind of defeats the object if we take her and whatever she’s got with us, doesn’t it?”

“But we can’t just leave her.”

“Are you sure she’s got the same thing that killed Anita?” Jas asked.

“Well, her symptoms are the same and she’s been getting worse as quickly as Anita did.”

“So she’s probably going to die, isn’t she?”

Although she knew the answer, Caron didn’t want to say it.

“She … she might not,” she stammered awkwardly. “Anita might have had some other medical problem that we didn’t know about. She might have—”

“I think she’s going to die,” Hollis said, “and a few more of us probably will too if we don’t leave here.”

“But you can’t just abandon her!”

“Does she say anything when you walk into her flat?” Jas asked.

“No, but—”

“Does she sit up in bed? Does she look at you and talk to you? Does she even know you’re in there with her?”

“Sometimes. Most of the time she’s asleep or—”

“By the time we’re ready to leave here that poor cow won’t have a clue what’s going on. She won’t know if she’s on her own or if we’re all in the room with her. More to the point, she won’t give a shit.”

“We can’t just leave her here to die. It’s inhuman!”

“Then maybe we should put her out of her misery?” Hollis suggested. “If what’s going to happen to her really is inevitable, speeding it up is only going to help.”

“Christ, she’s not a dog!” Caron screamed, crying now. “You can’t just put her down!”

“I’ll do it,” Harte said, surprising the others. “Give her some dignity…”

“Dignity?” she yelled in disbelief. “Where’s the dignity in being murdered?”

“There’s more dignity in dying quickly and quietly at the hands of one of us than there is lying in a dirty flat, surrounded by thousands of dead bodies and in so much pain that you lose your mind.”

“No one’s trying to force you to do anything, Caron,” Jas said, his voice a little calmer, quieter and less emotional than the others. “All we’re saying is that we can’t afford to take Ellie with us. If you want to stay here and nurse her then that’s up to you.”

Caron didn’t answer at first. She stared angrily into the darkness, her mind filled with so many painful thoughts and impossible decisions that she couldn’t make sense of any of it.

“When did you last check on her?” Lorna asked. Again, Caron didn’t answer. She tried asking another question. “Have you seen her this evening? Did you go up there after the bodies first got through this morning?”

“I haven’t seen her for hours,” Caron eventually replied, having to force herself to spit the words out. “I haven’t seen her since early this morning.”

“Why not? I thought you’d—”

“I’m too scared,” she admitted. “I don’t want to go in there anymore after what happened to Anita, all right? I don’t want to catch what she’s got.”

“Then there’s your answer,” Harte said under his breath as Caron’s sobbing filled the room.

“The longer we leave this, the worse it’s going to get,” Jas said. “If the germs don’t get us then those bastards outside will. Look what they did to Stokes.”

“Poor bastard didn’t know they were there until they’d got him,” Webb said from where he’d been sitting on the floor next to the arm of the sofa. He swallowed hard and hoped that the others were sufficiently wrapped up with their own problems not to notice his sudden nervousness.

“You’re right,” Hollis agreed. “We’ve all seen it. Their behavior is changing. They’re more aggressive, and they’re working together.”

“So where would we go?” Gordon asked, begrudgingly beginning to accept that leaving now looked like their only option. Silence.

“In the summer,” Driver suddenly announced, “I used to drive the two-twenty-two out of Catsgrove.”

“Fuck me, Driver,” Harte gasped. “I didn’t even know you were in here!”

“He’s always in here,” Lorna muttered angrily. “Lazy bastard never goes anywhere else.”

“What were you saying?” Hollis asked, trying to pick out Driver in the darkness.

“I used to drive the two-twenty-two,” he repeated. “Day trips to the coast.”

“What? You want to go to the seaside? You’re a fucking idiot,” Webb cursed.

“On the A197 out of town,” he continued, unfazed, “you pass this bloody huge exhibition center. Make a good place to go, that would. Out in the country. Loads of space. Nothing else for miles.”

The room was suddenly, completely silent. Even Caron had stopped crying to listen to Driver and think about his suggestion. Hollis wondered why he’d waited until now to speak up. Whatever the reason, he was glad that Driver finally had.