Disintegration

26

Hollis waited impatiently behind the wheel of the van for the driver of the coach to move out of the way. He watched intently as the long, cumbersome vehicle trundled slowly and very carefully backward, leaving the mouth of a narrow, previously unseen road open. A solitary figure stood a short distance back up the track and waved his arms, beckoning them toward him. He began to jog away, occasionally looking back over his shoulder to make sure they were following. Behind them the driver of the coach parked it back into its original position across the width of the road, then got out and climbed onto a bicycle which had been hurriedly dumped in the tall hedgerow. He pedaled furiously after the bus and the van.

“Where the hell are we going now?” Jas asked, standing at the front of the bus next to Driver’s cab, swaying as they moved along the twisting track. Tall, impenetrable, leafy hedgerows lined either side of the road, preventing them from seeing anything other than what was immediately ahead and behind them.

“The Bromwell Hotel,” Gordon answered, standing at his shoulder, holding onto the handrail as the bus lurched from side to side. “I thought it looked familiar.”

“How do you know that?”

As they reached a fork in the road, Gordon pointed toward a purple sign set into the tall hedge just ahead of them. Ornate white writing proudly proclaimed the name of the hotel they were approaching and an arrow directed them to the right. The person they’d been following had already jogged away in that direction.

“I came here a few Christmases ago for an office party,” Gordon answered, his voice suddenly sounding flat and unenthusiastic as he remembered the occasion. “Bloody terrible night, it was. I didn’t recognize the place today. I mean, I thought we might be close, but not this close…”

“So what’s it like, this hotel?” Jas wondered, glancing back at him. Gordon shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay I suppose. Decent enough place. The facilities were good but the food was vile. It was all that horrible nouvelle cuisine stuff—a little pile of this, a dribble of that … Didn’t fill me up. I had to stop for a kebab on the way home. You want turkey and all the trimmings at Christmas, don’t you, not a few scraps of meat and a bloody vegetable puree.”

“Fuck me,” Harte gasped, ignoring him and pushing past to get a better view. “Look at the state of it. Fucking brilliant!”

The bus, followed closely by the van, slowly drove around the final bend in the road. The hedgerow on their right gradually tapered in height and then disappeared altogether, revealing a large car park and, beyond that, an open expanse of grass. Ahead of them now was the hotel itself. A fairly modern, off-white building, in comparison to the grim concrete surroundings they had left this morning it was an unexpected paradise. There was space to move around outside. The windows all had glass which hadn’t been smashed. The grounds appeared clear of all rubble and dead flesh. This place was an oasis of normality.

“Jesus, this is fantastic,” Gordon said, all memories of his disastrous office party now long forgotten. “How many people do you think are here?”

“Don’t know,” Jas replied, grinning. “Thinking about it though, there must be a fair few of them, at least. There’s plenty of space and the way they’d got the entrance hidden back there was genius. I think we’ve landed on our feet here, lads!”

The lone runner, who had just about managed to keep ahead of the vehicles, finally slowed when he reached the steps at the front of the hotel. He bent over double with his hands on his knees and breathed in deeply, the effort of the sudden sprint obviously taking its toll. He looked up as the bus and van both stopped and quickly emptied. Jas and Harte walked over to him but neither could immediately think of what to say. These people were the first new survivors they’d seen for weeks, months even. Gordon broke the uncomfortable stalemate.

“I’m Gordon,” he announced, moving toward the other man with his hand outstretched. He wiped his hand on his trousers before reciprocating.

“Amir,” he replied quietly, standing up straight and shaking. “Where did you all come from? Was it your helicopter?”

“Helicopter?” Hollis asked, confused. “What helicopter?”

“Christ,” Harte said, “this gets better by the minute.”

“We’ve heard it a few times now,” Amir explained, “a couple of times earlier this week and again this morning. We’ve been trying to attract their attention. I just assumed they’d seen us and you were with them.”

“We don’t know anything about a helicopter,” Jas interrupted. “Christ, we didn’t even know about you until we nearly drove into your truck back there. Bloody hell, that must mean there are even more people left alive.”

“Well, they might not have found you, but we have,” Hollis said. The man riding the bike finally caught up. He jumped off, letting the bike clatter over onto its side, then walked purposefully forward and shook Hollis by the hand.

“I’m Martin Priest,” he said, not letting go of Hollis’s hand, still shaking furiously.

“Greg Hollis.”

“It’s good to meet you Greg. It’s good to meet all of you. It really is so good.” He brushed a wisp of unkempt hair from his narrow, bearded face and then took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sweater. Martin was short, thin, and sweating profusely. His clothing was ragged and dirty with long gray socks pulled up to his knees. Harte smirked at his bizarre dress-sense, then looked down at his own wardrobe: a curious miss-match of bike leathers, skiwear, and other, more typical garments. There seemed to be something about the end of the world, he silently decided, that made everyone dress like complete fucking idiots.

Lorna stood a short distance from the others and looked around, eyes wide with a combination of surprise, tiredness, and relief. The hotel complex looked safe and welcoming, its faux-Mediterranean appearance out of place and yet somehow still reassuring and familiar. The car park was virtually empty with just a handful of vehicles parked here and there. Harte had noticed that too.

“This couldn’t have been the most popular of hotels, judging by how many cars are over there.”

“More than half the rooms were occupied when it happened,” Martin said. “There were more cars than this.”

“So what have you done with them all?”

“We used them to block the roads and entrances. They’ve been useful.”

“How come everything’s so…” she began to ask before losing herself in her question.

“Clear?” suggested Martin.

“Empty?” added Amir.

“Quiet?” said Gordon.

“No, it’s more than that…”

“What have you done with all the fucking bodies?” Webb grunted, successfully putting Lorna’s feelings into words with surprising perception and his trademark lack of tact. “You got rid of them all?”

“Couldn’t do that,” Martin answered. “I don’t know what it’s like where you’ve come from, but there are far too many of them around here for that.”

“So where are they?” Lorna asked.

“The grounds of the hotel are enclosed,” he explained. “We blocked up the entrances like you saw back there, then tricked them into going elsewhere.”

“Martin used to work here,” Amir added.

“Believe me, I know every inch of these grounds. Before all this happened I was chief groundsman and—”

“What do you mean, ‘tricked them’?” Hollis asked, cutting across him.

“Well, they’re not the brightest of sparks, are they? It doesn’t take much to distract them.”

“So what did you do?” he pressed, intrigued.

“Did you see the fork in the road just now? The road runs right the way around the western edge of the grounds,” he explained, gesturing with his arm. “Over there and to the north is a golf course, a full eighteen holes’ worth of empty space. We’ve blocked the other end of the road to stop them getting through and made a few gaps in the fence around the golf course to let them onto the greens.”

“And how’s that helped?” Gordon wondered.

“You know what those golfers are like,” he explained.

“Were like,” Gordon corrected.

“More money than sense, half of them,” he continued. “They built themselves a lovely clubhouse. Beautiful place, it is. Huge. There’s a track leads from the road right around to the kitchens at the back of the building.”

“Get to the fucking point,” Webb grumbled impatiently.

“The point is we can get inside the building and they can’t.”

“Still don’t understand how that makes any difference,” Lorna grumbled, obviously unimpressed.

“It’s simple, really. I play music to them and they think we’re in the clubhouse.”

“You play music?” Gordon said in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t stand there with a guitar serenading them, if that’s what you’re thinking. We set up a couple of portable generators and I leave CDs playing on repeat until the fuel runs out. They think we’re sitting in the clubhouse so they crowd around it and stay away from here. Because there are so many of them and so few ways onto the golf course, once they get through the holes in the fence, it’s almost impossible for them to get back. Might sound a little unusual, but it works.”

“There’s no doubting that,” Jas muttered under his breath.

“I have to go up there two or three times a day to change the music and refill the generators, but—”

“Sorry, but can we get inside?” Caron asked nervously. “I don’t care if there aren’t any of them around, I don’t like standing out here.”

Martin moved first, picking up his bike and leading the way to the front of the hotel complex. He took them inside, up a few low stone steps and through a wide glass door with arched windows on either side into a long, open-plan reception area. Lorna collapsed onto a dusty brown leather sofa and gazed at her surroundings, still unable to take it all in.

“You okay?” Hollis asked, concerned. She looked at him and smiled.

“Just trying to get my head around everything. I never thought we’d find anywhere like this.”

“If you could all just check in at reception,” Martin laughed as he leaned his bike against the side of the ornate wooden desk, “I’ll get your keys and have someone take you up to your rooms!”

Amir shook his head and sighed. “Silly bastard, he’s been waiting to say that to someone since we first got here!”

Harte looked around anxiously. He could hear something. It was a clack-clack-clacking sound coming toward them along a corridor on their right. It didn’t sound human, but it was moving much too quickly to be one of the dead. He instinctively looked around for a weapon, but immediately relaxed when the source of the sound appeared. A scruffy, black and white, medium-sized dog with short, wiry fur and a tatty red collar poked its head through the doorway then walked forward again, its claws rapping against the terra-cotta floor tiles as it moved. It stopped and cocked its head to one side, then glanced back over its shoulder. More footsteps, heavier this time and much slower. A tall and stocky, red-faced man who was hopelessly out of breath entered the room and grabbed hold of the dog’s collar.

“Wow,” he said simply, shaking his head with disbelief when he saw the size of the crowd gathered in reception.

“This is Howard Reece,” Martin said, introducing him. Howard shuffled forward.

“Good to see you all,” he wheezed, relaxing and letting go of the dog again. It walked over to Lorna and began to sniff at her dirty, bloodstained trouser legs and boots. She leaned down and stroked its head.

“Beautiful dog,” she said, ruffling its short fur. “What’s its name?”

“I just call it Dog,” Howard replied.

“Original,” Jas said.

“She doesn’t care. I never wanted her. Bloody thing just attached herself to me when all this started,” he explained, “and now I can’t get rid of her.”

“She’s good to have around,” Martin continued. “She’s got a good nose on her. She sniffs out the dead for us.”

“What?”

“They freak her out, send her wild.”

“They freak us all out,” Harte mumbled.

“But she catches their scent earlier than we do. She lets us know when they’re close.”

“But what about her barking? Isn’t it a risk having her around?”

“She’s not stupid,” Howard said as the dog padded back over to him and sat down at his feet. “She had a couple of close calls early on when they first started to react to us. She knows not to make any noise but she lets you know when they’re near. You can see it in her face and the way she moves.”

“Bullshit,” Webb said. The dog just looked at him.

“So where’s everyone else?” Jas asked, keen to get back to more important issues.

“In the restaurant,” Amir answered. “Follow me.”

He led the group across the reception area and into a corridor directly opposite the one from which Howard and his dog had just appeared. In silence they walked along a wall full of windows which looked out onto an enclosed courtyard—half-paved, half-lawn. Hollis noticed a sign on the wall at the foot of a glass-fronted staircase which pointed to WEST WING - ROOMS 1–42. He assumed that the similar-looking part of the complex on the directly opposite side of the courtyard—an identical staircase at either end, three floors, many equally-spaced windows—was the east wing, and that it almost certainly had a comparable number of rooms to the west. He looked up at the mass of rectangular windows he could see from ground level.

Christ, he thought, more than eighty rooms. If just a quarter of them are occupied then we’ve more than doubled our number. He remembered the disorientation, desperation, and cold fear he’d felt on the day everyone had died, and how much easier everything had felt when he’d finally found other survivors. The more people I’m with, he’d long since decided, the easier the ride should be. The potential of using the hotel as a long-term base was immediately apparent, as it surely had been for everyone else who had ended up here. It was strong, safe, secure, and a damn sight more comfortable than the flats where he’d spent almost all of his time since the infection had first struck. Proper beds, space to move around freely, kitchens, and no bodies …

“Swimming pool,” Jas said, grinning as they passed another sign on the wall.

“Out of action,” Martin immediately told him. “I’ll show you around properly later.”

“All this space,” Caron mused, looking across the courtyard at the three-story block of bedrooms, trying to decide where she wanted her room to be. Now this was more like it. She’d become used to living her life surrounded by waste and rubbish. The interior of the hotel, however, appeared relatively well-kept. Sure it was dusty and everything smelled stale, and it might have only been a two-star hotel when she was used to three at least, preferably four, but the floors were clean and the rooms she’d so far seen were tidy and, if she really was condemned to spend the rest of her days suffering and scavenging with these people, at least it looked like she’d now be able to separate herself from them from time to time. Imagine that—the luxury of being able to close and lock the door behind her and shut everyone else out. She was sick of trying (and failing) to look after people and clean up for them and sort out their pointless, petty squabbles. Maybe now she could just stop and spend her time looking after herself.

At the end of the corridor a sudden sharp-right turn led the group along the farthest and shortest edge of the rectangular courtyard, parallel with the reception area they’d originally entered. They passed an empty meeting room and a bar. The rows of half-full optics behind the wooden counter caught the attention of several of the new arrivals. Webb attempted to make a quick detour but was jostled back on course by Harte. They followed Amir through a set of swinging double doors into a restaurant. Two people—a middle-aged woman and a tall, thin, and much younger man—immediately got up from where they’d been sitting slouched around a table playing cards and walked toward them.

“Ginnie and Sean,” Amir announced. Harte acknowledged them with a nod and looked hopefully around the large, empty room.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“There are no others,” Martin replied. “Just the five of us.”

“And a dog,” Webb added unhelpfully.

“That’s all?” Jas said, surprised. “Just five?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I was working here when it happened and Howard found me a couple of days later. We found Ginnie and Amir when we were out looking for supplies, and Sean found us when he heard us driving around.”

“So that’s it?”

Martin appeared perplexed. “You sound disappointed.”

“I am,” he admitted. “This place is great. I thought there’d be loads of people here.”

“Well, we haven’t exactly been broadcasting the fact that we are here very loudly. We don’t want those things out there to start dragging themselves back over to us.”

“But what about when you go out? Have you not looked for anyone else?”

“We don’t go out,” he answered abruptly. “It’s too dangerous. We’ll go back out there when the time’s right.”

“You need food, though.”

“We’ve got enough.”

“But how do you get—”

“We manage. We don’t need to go outside or make any noise or do anything that might risk what we’ve got here,” Martin said, sounding both aggressive and defensive at the same time.

“We do have one other resident,” Howard said cryptically. “I think we should tell them about her, Martin. We don’t want them stumbling into her in the dark, do we?”

Hollis felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Come this way,” Martin said, his voice a little calmer. “I’ll introduce you to the Swimmer.”