Disintegration

13

“They’re coming,” said Stokes. “I can hear them.”

“About bloody time,” grumbled Webb. He looked at the house in the near distance and watched it burn, incandescent orange against the dull gray of everything else. “We might as well get started.”

“Give it a few more minutes,” Hollis suggested. “Go in too fast and they’ll forget about the fire and turn back at you.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Webb sneered. “Bring it on. I’ve been looking forward to this.”

Pumped full of adrenaline, Webb marched down the hill, ignoring Hollis’s warning. He glanced back as the motorbike finally returned, watching it sweep around the front of the building behind him. Their distraction seemed to be working. From here, halfway down the slope, he could see that the fire in the distance had spread along to several other nearby houses. As the size of the blaze had increased, so more and more bodies were being drawn to it. Although many thousands remained pressed up against the barrier of cars, rubble, and other obstructions, toward the back of the huge gathering hundreds more had begun to peel away and stumble toward the heat and light.

He stood and watched the dumb crowds below, and waited for the others.

* * *

To her surprise, Lorna found that, for once, Webb was right. The thought of destroying as many of the dead masses as they were able to was strangely appealing. As she walked down toward the foot of the hill with Hollis, Harte and Stokes at her side, all of them dressed in their standard-issue bike leathers, she decided that she too was in need of what Webb called therapy.

“So is there a plan?” Jas asked as he caught up with the others.

“Of sorts,” Hollis replied. Although he’d originally planned to stay indoors and have no part of this massacre, the thought of allowing Webb free rein outside with weapons was enough of a concern to force him outside too.

“And?” he pressed.

“Lorna’s going to use one of the diggers to start shifting part of the barrier back,” he explained.

“And we’re going to get rid of every single one of those fucking things that manages to get through,” Webb added as they finally reached him. They lined up in silence alongside him and squared up to their decaying foes. Most of their usual encounters with the dead happened at speed, with the living doing their upmost to destroy any corpses they came up against in the shortest time possible. Here, however, the rules of engagement were suddenly very different. Here, standing just a short distance away across the no-man’s-land of the barrier, they had an unexpected opportunity to stop and study their horrifically disfigured opponents. The bodies writhed and surged continually, but they weren’t going anywhere. After six weeks their grotesque appearance had become less immediately shocking, but being face-to-face with thousands upon thousands of them like this was a daunting and unnerving prospect for even the most hardened fighter. There were just so bloody many of them. Harte found himself wondering whether he and Jas should have torched several streets full of houses, or even the whole town to distract the apparently endless crowds. Their small fire seemed a painfully insignificant distraction now.

Webb moved slightly farther forward, stopping when he was less than two meters away from the nearest cadaver. He locked onto one particular creature and stared deep into its ravaged face. It was hard to believe that it had once been human. Not a single centimeter of unblemished skin remained. Gross yellow and brown pus-like fluids had seeped and dribbled from every visible orifice. Its ill-fitting skin appeared mummified and hard in some places, unnaturally pliable in others. And the damn thing’s jaw moved continually. Was it getting ready to sink its teeth into him? He wasn’t going to give it a chance. As soon as this one gets through, he decided, I’m going to rip its fucking head off.

“You sure you’re okay with that thing?” Jas shouted to Lorna, who had climbed up into the cab of the larger of two yellow diggers nearby. Truth was, he was nervous and had wanted the seat for himself.

“Been practising,” she answered quickly, annoyed that he’d questioned her ability. For several weeks she’d been messing around with the diggers and with various other pieces of machinery they’d found lying around the ruins of the partially demolished second block of flats. Her interest in the machines had originally been for no other reason than to temporarily alleviate her boredom, but she was glad to have finally found a practical use for her newfound skill.

“Shift this one,” Webb shouted to her, slapping his hand against the wing of a small, two-seater car. “Don’t want to give them too much space to get through, do we?”

“He’s good, isn’t he?” Harte laughed sarcastically. “Got it all planned out in that tiny brain of his, he has!”

“Fuck you,” Webb spat. “Your problem is you’re too—”

No one heard what he said next. His moronic moaning was drowned out as Lorna started the digger’s engine and then by Hollis as he pulled the starter cord on a chain saw. Webb shut up and focused, holding his baseball bat ready in one hand and an ax in the other. The bodies on the other side of the low wall of twisted metal and concrete seethed and surged forward, reacting to the noise. They were beginning to get riled.

Lorna accelerated and shunted the digger forward, lowering its heavy scoop and cringing as the metal scraped along the uneven ground. She raised it slightly and punched it into the door of the blue car, shoving the vehicle back. From her position in the cab it was difficult to see how far the car had moved. Another hard shunt and she’d pushed it too far, leaving a slight gap on either side.

And then they came.

Driven forward by their unnatural anger and by the weight of many thousands more bodies pressing behind them, the corpses at the front of the crowd began to slip around both ends of the small blue car which had helped keep them at bay for so long. Like a sticky, oily sludge they spilled forward. Hollis was the first to react. As Lorna reversed the digger and readied herself to try and block the slender gaps she’d left and shove the next section of the barrier back, he covered his face with a protective plastic visor, then raised his weapon and marched toward the advancing dead. The first of them walked face-first straight into the chain saw’s powerful churning teeth, disintegrating most of its head on impact. Hollis continued to push the blade forward, dealing the exact same fate to a second body lurching too close behind. Webb stood back and watched, transfixed by the waterfall of crimson-brown gore which was soaking the ground like red rain around Hollis and the pile of body parts mounting at the other man’s feet. One of the cadavers lunged to the side and slipped past him, moving toward Webb and forcing him into action. He dispatched it with a single ax blow to the forehead, the blade leaving a deep, dark groove between its eyes. The satisfying crack and splinter of the creature’s skull was reassuring.

Lorna pushed the next car back as she had the first, taking care this time to make sure she plugged any gaps. There were still corpses pushing their way through the opening on the other side of the first car. She decided she’d deal with that problem next. Stokes, meanwhile, had found himself uncomfortably close to the fighting for once and had scuttled back out of the way, heading for the other, much smaller digger. He started the engine and slowly drove it back toward the front line, making a slight detour to crush a single spidery corpse which had managed to sneak past the others. Although he was now protected, from his elevated position in the cab the size of the job which lay ahead of them seemed even more daunting. Judging from the number of dead heads he quickly counted—some lying on their own in the mud like footballs, others still attached to bodies—he estimated that in the few minutes since the barrier had been breached, the survivors had destroyed somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen corpses. It was difficult to estimate with any degree of accuracy because of the continual frenzied movement all around him and also the fact that much of the mottled dead flesh had been butchered and sliced into a single detail-free layer. However many of them they’d managed to get rid of, there were many, many thousands more lining up to take their place and it was going to take hours to make any kind of impression on them. Not for the first time he found himself silently questioning what they were doing. Was this as bloody stupid an idea as it suddenly seemed?

“Pile ’em up over there,” Hollis yelled in a pause between kills, struggling to make himself heard over the combined noise of the fighting, the two digger engines, and his chain saw. He gestured wildly toward an area of land close to the fenced enclosed where Webb had been bitten yesterday. Stokes moved toward the mass of fallen bodies, trying to familiarize himself with the controls of the digger. Satisfied that he’d worked out how to move the shovel down, forward, and then back up again, he clumsily scooped a bucketful of flesh—some inert, some still twitching—then turned around and drove it over toward the area Hollis had pointed to. He tipped the shovel out, emptying its contents onto the rough ground with a reassuring slop and splatter. Even now as the last dregs dripped down, some of the dismembered creatures he’d scooped up continued to move. His stomach churned as he watched the half-torso of a cadaver, which had been hacked in two by the chain saw just below its nipple line, reach out with its one good arm and try desperately to drag itself away.

Lorna moved another car, closing one gap but inadvertently opening another. The digger’s shovel had become entangled with the door of the car and she struggled to knock it free. She concentrated on the mechanical claw, trying to ignore the wave of corpses which now surrounded her, all of them pointlessly fighting to get even closer. A sudden flash of light overhead distracted her momentarily. She looked up and watched as Harte hurled petrol bombs into the front of the crowd, hoping to dissipate their numbers and make it easier for her to shunt the barrier back. The bombs flew through the gray sky above them in beautiful arcs of spiraling flame before smashing down into the bodies and exploding.

Hollis noticed the crowd growing around the digger and marched toward it. They were preoccupied with the machine and disposing of them was a simple matter. He simply held up the chain saw and walked into them, carving them up before they’d even realized he was there, the noise from the digger drowning out the powerful grind of his weapon. Lorna looked down and acknowledged him, then pointed behind, desperate to get his attention. He spun around to see a group of three corpses moving toward him. They attacked at the same time, surging at him with spindly limbs flailing. He lashed out with the chain saw and succeeded in cutting down the nearest two. He then ran toward the third—which, incredibly, now seemed to be retreating—and, with a flick of his wrist, sliced a jagged diagonal cut across its bony chest. The body fell to the ground, legs going one way, head and shoulders the other.

Just inches away from Hollis, Webb smashed his ax into the ravaged face of a body which reminded him of a social worker who had once been assigned to him. Concentrating on the satisfying splinter and crack of the creature’s skull, he was unaware that the digger being driven by Stokes was close behind until Hollis grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him out of the way. Webb turned to attack but then lowered his weapons when he saw that there was no danger. They stepped back to allow Stokes to collect another scoop full of bloodstained remains.

“You having fun?” Hollis yelled over the noise. Webb grinned. As perverse as it seemed, Hollis was enjoying himself too.

“You?” Webb asked back as he shook a lump of flesh off the end of his baseball bat and readied himself for his next victim.

“Wonderful,” the other man grunted.

“They’re fucking stupid,” he laughed as he swung the bat at the head of another corpse, sending it flying into the side of Lorna’s digger. “Look at them! They’re just lining up to be wiped out!”

“Is that what you think?” Hollis said, shaking his head.

“’Course it is,” he answered.

“You’re really dumb at times, Webb,” he said as he lifted his chain saw and readied himself to move forward again. “It might look that way, but just watch them. More to the point, watch yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because if you look closely,” he continued, pausing to cut another body in two from its groin up to its neck, “you’ll see that some of them are actually trying to coordinate themselves and attack.”

Webb laughed out loud at Hollis’s comment, but he found himself watching the next cadaver more closely. It was slow and weak but Christ, he was right, it was moving with a very real purpose and intent. He expected it to leap straight at him aggressively, but it didn’t. Instead it watched him with dull, unblinking eyes and chose its moment, suddenly lifting its spindly arms and increasing its speed and force. Whether it had been a considered attack or not, Webb destroyed it with a dismissive thump from the baseball bat to the side of its head.

* * *

After hours of virtually constant fighting, it was time to stop. Lorna dropped a car diagonally across the bonnet of another she’d moved previously, plugging the last remaining gap and stemming the flow of bodies toward the survivors. Exhausted and soaked with a layer of mud, blood, and gore, Webb, Hollis and Harte quickly disposed of the last few loose cadavers before dropping their weapons. Jas cleared the area with the smaller digger, dropping larger body parts onto a smoldering pyre, then scraping the metal shovel along the ground and dumping a scoop full of once-human slurry over the other side of the wall of cars and rubble, onto the heads of the unsuspecting crowd. Job done, he switched off the engine and climbed out of the cab. Without the constant mechanical drone of the two machines the world was suddenly eerily silent, so quiet that the loudest sound remaining was the trickle of liquefied flesh dripping from the metal scoop behind him into a muddy puddle.

Webb was the first to speak. Still buzzing with excitement from the kill, he babbled breathlessly as they began to walk back up the hill.

“How many do you reckon, then?” he asked.

“What?” Hollis asked.

“How many did we get rid of? Couple of hundred?”

“Something like that,” Harte replied quietly, shaking something unpleasant from his right glove.

“Christ, I’m tired.” Jas sighed wearily.

“I could do more,” Webb continued.

“Be my guest,” Hollis said. “You carry on.”

“I could spend all day getting rid of those bloody things. There’s nothing better than wiping out a load of them when you’re pissed off and wound up.”

“Most of us seem to be pissed off and wound up all the time,” Harte said. “I’ve been like that since this all started.”

“Well, at least we’re doing something positive now. Taking a stand. Letting them know who’s in charge…”

Webb shut up when he realized that Hollis had stopped walking. He turned around to look back at him.

“Problem?” Harte asked, concerned. Hollis was gazing back down the hill toward the crowd. Thick smoke was rising from the smoldering heap of charred flesh by the diggers and drifting out over the heads of the dead.

“Look what we did today,” Webb said excitedly. “Look how many of them we got rid of.”

“That’s exactly what I was looking at,” Hollis said.

“And?” Webb pushed, sensing that the other man still had more to say.

Hollis pointed back toward the area where they’d worked. “That,” he said, “took six of us a few hours to clear.”

“So what’s your point?”

“It took us the best part of a day and a shitload of fuel and effort just to take out a hundred or so bodies. Bloody hell, there are hundreds of thousands of them down there—how long’s that going to take? We haven’t cleared one percent yet. We haven’t even scratched the surface.”

“You’re a miserable fucker,” Webb snarled, annoyed. “Tell me it doesn’t make you feel good when you stand down there and rip those fucking things apart.”

“I’m not denying that.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“There’s too many of them, that’s all. You’re never going to get rid of all of them, are you?”

“No one said we were trying to do that,” Harte said.

“Wiping the floor with a few dozen stiffs might make you feel like you’ve done something worthwhile,” Hollis continued, “but do me a favor and let’s not pretend it’s going to change the world. I don’t want to spend all day, every day, down there fighting. There’s got to be more to life than that.”

“Has there? Seems to me this is just about all we’ve got left.”

Hollis shook his head and carried on up the hill, leaving the others standing in silence. They stared down through the smoke at the insignificant gray scar they’d left on the landscape below.