Disintegration

Epilogue

ONE MONTH, THREE WEEKS, SIX DAYS AND EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER

Sean walked back toward the hotel, his feet crunching through the late December frost. He felt uneasy. He had that same sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach that he used to get when he went back to work after a holiday. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything like this. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since he’d felt anything.

Why was he here? He kept asking himself the question over and over. It wasn’t because he liked the people he’d left behind. Some of them were decent enough, but most he would never even have given the time of day to had he met them before all of this had happened. So was he doing it out of some misplaced sense of duty? Maybe he was. Truth was he just wanted some company. It had been more than seven weeks since he’d last spoken to anyone else and, much as he tried to deny it, he was lonely. No one should be alone at Christmas, he thought.

The streets were relatively clear now and he was able to move without fear of attack. Being able to risk using a car again had brought him some welcome freedom. The bodies no longer posed a threat now that they had deteriorated to such an extent. Hard to think that the grotesque shadows of people which now littered the ground had ever caused such panic and fear. He looked at them today with pity, but also still with some contempt.

For the most part the dead were unable to move now. Very few could support their own weight and the majority had decayed to such a degree that they could do little more than lie helpless on the ground and watch him, moving only their heads and their dull, clouded eyes. Sean forced himself not to look back at them. Even after all this time it hurt to think that just about everyone he’d ever known and cared about was like this now.

Once on the run Sean had headed for a canal-side apartment belonging to his former boss which overlooked the center of Bromwell. After disposing of his dead ex-employer and her husband, he’d found himself with a relatively safe and secure vantage point eight floors above the devastation; from there he’d sat and watched the dead. In the absence of any other distractions they wearily dragged themselves along the otherwise empty streets, almost as if they’d been looking for help or simply a shelter of some kind. It disturbed him to think that these pitiful, abhorrent creatures might have retained some thought-processing capacity, perhaps even some level of memory or a degree of self-awareness. What if they’d understood what had happened to them? Might they have been lying there in the gutters knowing what they used to be, feeling the constant, gnawing pain of their gradual decay and waiting for the end to finally come?

Sean parked his car a short distance away from the junction that he, Martin, Howard, and Ginnie had blocked with trucks so many weeks ago. The same junction where he’d stood with Webb and practiced killing the dead. The same junction where he’d sat in a truck and waited for hours for Webb on the day he’d left the hotel, struggling with his conscience and his nerves, wondering whether he should go back to the others or take his chances on his own. He’d been so nervous and unsure back then, but his time on his own out in the open had changed him. He was ten times the man he’d been when he’d first arrived here all those months ago on his scooter in the middle of the night like a frightened school kid.

He climbed over the bonnet of the first truck. The vehicles blocking the roads were all still in place, he noticed. That was a good sign. He slid down to the other side, crossed the junction, then forced himself through the narrowest of gaps past the front end of the coach. He began to walk toward the hotel, wondering what kind of reception he’d get when they saw him. Would they be happy to see that he was still alive, or would they turn on him because he’d walked out on them? He hoped they’d understand. He paused for a moment and listened, hoping he’d be able to hear Martin’s music. Nothing. That didn’t mean anything, he decided. After all, there was no need to try and control the dead any longer. They weren’t the problem they used to be.

Sean jogged around the corner and immediately found himself face-to-face with the wreck of the van and, behind it, the bus which lay tipped over on one side like a beached whale. His heart sank. What had happened? Had anyone been hurt? He climbed up the front of the bus and ran along its length. The hotel was visible in the distance, wrapped in a light mist. All around it the ground was covered in a deep, partially frozen, gray slurry—the remains of thousands of cadavers. The foul mire stretched all the way from the building to the road, but that didn’t necessarily mean the people in the hotel hadn’t survived. He wanted to shout out, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even after all this time he didn’t feel comfortable making any noise out in the open like this.

He’d got used to dressing like a human being again. Sean lazed away his long, lonely days in the apartment wearing clothes he’d taken from the shops in Bromwell. When something got dirty, he threw it away. When he planned to spend any length of time out in the open, however, he reverted to the strong boots and over-trousers preferred by Webb, Hollis, and the others. He was thankful for the protection now as he jumped down onto the road and stepped into the partially frozen, once-human sludge. A paper mask over his mouth and nose did little to diffuse the horrendous smell, and his uncertainty increased as his feet sank into almost eighteen inches of liquid decay. He hated walking through this stuff. It was stupid, he knew, but he couldn’t help thinking there might be something lurking deep under the surface which might somehow have survived and which might be about to grab him and drag him down. A hand attached to a perfectly preserved cadaver, perhaps, buried by chance deep under the fetid remains of hundreds more. There was a thin layer of ice on the surface of the slush where it had almost completely liquefied and dirty water had puddled. Apart from the crunch of the ice and the slip, suck and slide of his boots in the mire, the rest of the world was unnaturally silent and still. He focused on getting to the building up ahead.

“Anyone here?”

Sean’s voice echoed uncomfortably loudly around the interior of the hotel. He’d reached the main entrance and had managed to force his way in past the desk, sofa, and other items of furniture which had been piled up against the door. His already low expectations sank further still when he walked through the silent building. The sludge in here was shallower than outside, but no less difficult to navigate and it was immediately clear that the corpses had had the run of the hotel. But had the others managed to get away before their shelter had been compromised?

The staircase at the reception end of the west wing was impassable and had clearly been blocked from above. With suddenly renewed optimism he ran the length of the corridor and found that the staircase at the far end of the wing had also been blocked in a similar way. Could someone still be upstairs? Sean continued through the hotel, working his way through the narrow, slime-filled corridor which led to the swimming pool. The glass doors and some of the windows surrounding the pool had been smashed, no doubt by the pressure of the immense invading army of corpses which had obviously run riot here. The pool itself formed a bizarre and grotesque centerpiece, piled high with bodies which had stumbled into the noxious water and been unable to get back out.

Sean worked his way around the side of the building, looking up at the many bedroom windows.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Hello! Is anyone there?”

One first-floor window, he noticed, was open. He moved toward it as quickly as he could, wanting to run but not daring to speed up and risk losing his footing and falling into the germ-ridden tide of liquefied flesh around him. When he was almost directly underneath the window he risked shouting again.

“Can you hear me? Is anyone there?”

There was no response. He was about to continue farther around when he noticed a pile of semi-submerged mattresses on the ground. Whoever had survived the taking of the hotel by the dead, he decided, had managed to get away. He stared up at the window again and wondered who’d been trapped up there. Was it Webb, Gordon, Caron, or Martin Priest? Howard or Hollis? Lorna? Jas? Didn’t matter now. They were probably long gone. He headed back inside.

On the way around to search through the kitchens and restaurants, Sean discovered that unlike the west, the east staircases were relatively clear; still soaked with the putrefied remains of hundreds of bodies, but passable. The entire east wing was ghostly silent save for the steady dripping of decayed flesh as it trickled down the interior of the building. He climbed up to the top floor, not expecting to find anything, but keen to check all the same. If anyone had been trapped up here, his logic told him, then surely they’d have tried barricading the access points too? He opened a couple of doors but the rooms were empty, and then stopped when he remembered that Driver and his germs had been quarantined up here. He tripped lethargically back down the stairs to the floor below and shouted out again, listening to the way his voice echoed eerily across the empty first floor landing, wishing that someone would answer back.

Christ, he suddenly felt desperately lonely and low. He’d expected to find the others here, and the fact that they’d gone hit him hard. If he’d stayed he could have gone with them. He hadn’t realized how much he’d craved company until it was clear that he was still on his own and it was going to stay that way. He continued back down to the ground floor.

Sean readied himself to leave. He called out a few more times, but he knew it was pointless. There was nothing to stay here for.

* * *

Room 24 East.

Emaciated, dehydrated, and sitting half-dressed, surrounded by his own waste, Webb leaned back against the wall under the window and covered his head with his hands. He wanted the voice outside to go away. Only silence was safe.

“Stop!” he screamed to himself, too afraid to say the words out loud. “Please stop! You’ll bring the bodies back again…”

He curled himself into a ball and lay sobbing on the soiled carpet, waiting for the noise outside to disappear, terrified that the banging on the door was about to start again.