Disintegration

24

The van stopped suddenly. Driver, following too close behind, slammed on his brakes to avoid crashing into the back of it.

“What’s the matter?” Caron asked anxiously, getting up from her seat and running the length of the bus to the front where Jas was already standing at the window. They’d been on the move for less than an hour. The road they’d been following had meandered through open countryside for a time, but they’d now reached Cudsford, an unremarkable town nestled between two larger but equally uninteresting towns and the first relatively built-up area they’d come across. On balance they’d decided it was easier and quicker to drive straight through rather than skirt all the way around and add miles to their journey.

“Doesn’t look like anything major,” Jas said, looking down onto the street below. “There’s a van blocking the road, that’s all.”

Harte was already on his way downstairs, hand ax at the ready just in case. Jas followed, pausing only to pick up the chain saw from where he’d dumped it on an empty lower-deck seat. By the time he’d stepped out onto the narrow backstreet, Webb, Hollis and Lorna were already out and surveying the scene. A single corpse staggered from behind the crashed van, tripped in the gutter and fell at Webb’s feet. He nonchalantly smashed its skull with his spiked baseball bat.

“Well?” Harte asked, keeping his voice low. Hollis pointed at the front of the blue liveried van which had thumped into the front of an office block, leaving its rear end jutting out into the road and blocking their way. The dead driver—who was still trying to get out from behind the wheel—slammed its decaying face up against the glass as they moved closer.

“Problem is,” Hollis explained, ignoring the corpse’s frantic movements, “it looks like it’s wedged in.” He leaned over the front of the van and looked up. The impact had brought the low canopy of a porch crashing down onto its roof. There were visible cracks running up the face of the building and the glass in many of the first-floor windows had been smashed. “There’s a chance if we move it that we’ll bring the whole lot down.”

“So?” Webb grunted, returning his attention to the crash.

“So we could end up blocking the road instead of clearing it,” he replied, wishing that he wasn’t stuck out in the middle of nowhere with someone as dense as Webb.

“I think it’ll be all right,” Harte said, carefully stepping under the canopy and looking up to try and assess the damage. “I don’t think there’s any other way of shifting—”

A sudden movement from Lorna distracted him. She rushed across to the other side of the narrow street and grappled with a bloody figure which threw itself at her. She grabbed its scrawny neck, forcing it back against the nearest wall before cracking its skull and beating it repeatedly with the claw hammer she’d been carrying. Sometimes she scared herself with her own brutality. She looked up and saw that the damn thing wasn’t alone.

“Get a move on,” she whispered, looking farther down the street and counting at least seven more bodies heading in their direction. “They’re coming.”

Webb, his appetite for violence clearly undiminished despite the events of the last twenty-four hours, ran forward to head off the approaching dead, swinging the baseball bat wildly through the air. He thumped it into the face of the cadaver nearest to him, catching it perfectly, almost laughing out loud as it tripped blindly back into two more bodies like an uncoordinated drunk, knocking them both over. He ran toward them with predatory speed, determined to finish them all off before they could pick themselves back up.

“So what do we do?” Jas asked hurriedly, seeing that even more bodies were closing in. “Move this thing, or turn around and find another way through?”

“Driver’s never going to get the bus turned around here. He’ll have to back it out…” Hollis’s words trailed away when he heard the bus suddenly begin to move.

Jas started the chain saw and ran back toward the huge vehicle as the farthest advanced figures at the front of an uncomfortably large crowd of corpses began to surge past it, slipping down either side. He held the chain saw at waist height and waded into them, dragging the churning blade from side to side, scything down the creatures as if they were trees being felled. The road beneath his feet, until then relatively clear save for a little rubble and broken glass, was suddenly awash with blood and gore. As he sliced the legs off yet another body that foolishly stumbled toward him, the bus accelerated. Uncharacteristically alert and decisive, Driver shunted it forward and angled it across the street, reversing back to fully block the width of the narrow throughway and prevent any more of the dead from getting closer.

At the back of the top floor of the bus, Caron stood next to Gordon and looked down in disbelief as the entire street behind them quickly became clogged with dead flesh. She hadn’t been this close to them for weeks, probably more than a month, and she was terrified, both of their appearance and their sudden vast numbers. Physically they had deteriorated to an incredible extent and were grotesque—decaying and literally falling apart in front of her. But at the same time, they continued to move with unquestionable intent. When she’d last been this close to them they’d looked relatively untouched by disease. Now their faces were hideously scarred and mutated, barely recognizable as human. Gordon was saying something, rambling incessantly about why he should stay up here with her and how he probably would just get in the way out there, but she wasn’t listening. She hadn’t realized how strong and safe the flats had been. All that’s separating me from them now, she anxiously thought, is this bus.

Out on the street, Harte yanked open the door of the crashed van and grappled with the driver’s corpse trapped inside. It threw its withered arms at him and he battered them away with the ax, unable to get the right angle to use the weapon properly in the confined space. The smell in the van was horrific and he gagged as he struggled to grab the squirming cadaver, undo its safety belt, and drag it out onto the street. He managed to get hold of its arm, his gloved hand easily wrapping right the way around its bony, emaciated wrist, and then yanked it out into the open. Its right foot caught between the gearstick and handbrake. Harte tugged at the struggling creature desperately, pulling with enough force to rip the foot off at the ankle. Finally out, he slammed its face into the pavement, then climbed in and settled himself behind the wheel. The seat was tacky beneath him. Screwing his face up with disgust, he reached down, picked up the dismembered foot from under the pedals, and threw it out of the window.

When Harte next looked up he saw that the number of bodies hauling themselves down the street toward them had increased massively. The bus had blocked the road one way, but the other direction was still clear and a relentless deluge of flesh was now approaching, channeled forward by the tall buildings on either side. Lorna, Webb, and Jas stood and fought, trying desperately to head them off. Jas was a couple of meters ahead of the other two, carving up as many of them as he could reach with the brutally efficient chain saw blade. Lorna and Webb worked behind him, mopping up any of the despicable figures that somehow managed to get past.

“Get it started!” Hollis yelled, hammering on the back of the van.

Harte turned the key in the ignition, willing the engine to fire. It groaned and whined but wouldn’t start.

“Careful, don’t flood it!” Hollis warned.

Harte tried again, turning the key and pumping the pedals with his feet, not knowing if that would help or make the problem worse. The engine almost caught.

“Come on!” he shouted in frustration, slamming his hand against the steering wheel angrily. One more try and the engine suddenly spluttered into life. He accelerated hard to keep it alive, the delivery van’s exhaust belching dirty clouds of fumes into the street, then quickly reversed back. Hollis had said something to him about being careful and driving slowly, but all that was forgotten in the heat of the moment. He careered back, steering hard around to keep the van on the pavement, looking up at the canopy at the front of the damaged building and praying it would hold. It didn’t. The sides of the porch collapsed inward, littering the ground with dust and rubble. The front of the building, thankfully, remained standing. He drove up onto the pavement, leaving the road clear, and parked.

“We need to go,” Hollis said to him as he got back out of the van. “This isn’t good.”

Harte looked up at Lorna, Webb, and Jas, who were just about managing to hold back the tide. They remained in control, but the dead masses still herded toward them and their numbers were increasing. They’d been carving them up for several minutes now and had reduced more than fifty to little more than a bloody pile of unrecognizable body parts. Easily as many again were still stumbling lethargically toward them, and more would undoubtedly follow when the next fifty had been hacked down, then more and more …

Harte ran back to the bus, distracted momentarily by a body which appeared to fall from out of nowhere, dropping facedown onto the street just in front of him and disintegrating on impact like bad fruit. He recoiled in disgust as dark, sticky blood and other foul substances splashed up at him from the splattered remains on the tarmac. He looked up at the office block beside him, bewildered. The sudden, constant noise and movement out in the street had alerted a number of corpses which had been trapped inside the building but which had now found a way out thanks to the damage he’d caused. Drawn out of the shadows by the chaos outside, the stupid creatures were now plummeting out from the first floor like lemmings. Ignorant to the danger and desperate to get closer to the living, the damn things were literally falling out of the sky around him. Another one fell nearby, its head somehow protected from the fall but its body irrevocably damaged. Regardless, it tried to pull itself along the ground toward him with its one remaining good arm.

“We’re going,” he announced to Driver. Not needing any further instruction, Driver straightened the bus again and moved it forward. Stumbling corpses began to slip through on either side, their speed increased by the pressure of others pushing from behind.

A short distance up ahead, Hollis moved their van up to where the others were fighting. Lorna climbed in quickly, shouting across at Webb and Jas for them to follow. Webb heard her and ran back, stopping when he realized that Jas was still out there, isolated from everything else that was happening by the noise of his weapon. He ran forward again and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around and stumbling back as Jas lunged at him, chain-saw blade whirring angrily. At the last possible second he realized it was Webb and yanked the blade back.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he spat furiously as unchallenged corpses began to hurl themselves at him. “I could have killed you!”

Jas immediately shut up when he saw what was happening behind him. Suddenly able to get through again, streams of cadavers were pushing ever closer. Sandwiched between two advancing walls of dead flesh, he followed Webb to the van and dived for cover.

“Get in!” Lorna screamed, her voice so loud that it hurt. Bodies slammed against the van. One of them, half of its face eaten away by rot, glared at her with its one remaining eye and hammered against her window with greasy, leaden fists. She turned away from it in disgust, but all she could see were more equally hideous dead faces staring back through every available square inch of glass. Hollis drove forward, knocking the monsters away and powering through the crowd, thankful that they’d decided to move before the corpses had been able to bunch up tight. The entire street, which had been empty just minutes earlier, was now teeming with death—infested with hundreds of decaying cadavers.

“What the hell just happened?” Jas breathlessly asked from the back. “That was so fast.”

“I guess that’s the reception we’re going to get wherever we go,” Hollis answered, holding the steering wheel tight as they juddered through the seething crowd.

“Five minutes,” Jas said. “We couldn’t have been out there any longer than five minutes.”

“If we’re all that’s left,” Lorna said quietly, “then this will keep happening. Back at the flats we’d got thousands of them gathered in the one place because they knew where we were. Out here they’re running wild.”