Disintegration

16

A frantic, unscheduled stop at a previously forgotten and well-sheltered medical center north of the flats allowed Hollis and Lorna to collect more drugs and pick up several medical journals and reference books. They didn’t know if the information would make any difference, but just having it made them feel marginally better. Caron, who hadn’t had any medical training other than a basic first-aid course at work some twenty years ago, gratefully took everything that was offered to her and shut herself away in the flat next to Anita’s. She found descriptions of numerous conditions and diseases which Anita might have been suffering from, but next to nothing in the way of treatment advice or guidance.

Just after midday Hollis appeared in the doorway of the flat, carrying with him more drugs which he’d found rolling around in the back of the van.

“Any good?” he asked hopefully. Caron put down the text book she’d been reading and rubbed her tired eyes.

“Not really,” she admitted.

“How’s she doing?”

“No better.”

“Is she still being sick? Has she eaten anything?”

She shook her head.

“She’s not doing anything. Her temperature’s sky-high and she’s barely conscious. It’s probably for the best.”

“Have you managed to find anything that might help?”

She looked around the room at the piles of drugs surrounding her.

“I’ve got no idea what I’m looking for,” she answered honestly, “and even if I could find the name of a drug which might help, how am I supposed to know what it looks like? I wouldn’t even know if it was a pill in a packet or a medicine in a bottle. And some of this stuff is out-of-date.”

“Point taken,” Hollis said quietly as he walked across the room and stood at the window. “Do you know what I think?”

“I know what I think,” she interrupted abruptly. “I think I should just force as much of this stuff as I can down the poor cow’s throat and put her out of her bloody misery. Honestly, Greg, is it even worth her getting better?”

Hollis didn’t answer. He was staring out the window, trying to remember the last time anyone had called him by his first name. Natalie used to call him Greg, and his mom and dad, and Mark and all the others he’d lost.

“What the hell is that idiot doing now?” he said suddenly, glad of the distraction.

“Which idiot?” Caron asked, standing up and walking over to him. “There’s more than one around here.”

“Webb. Just look at the silly little bastard!”

Webb was walking precariously along the top of the uneven barrier of cars and rubble which was somehow still succeeding in keeping the dead at bay. As he walked, he emptied the contents of a fuel can over the heads of the repulsive carcasses which grabbed at his feet incessantly.

“He scares me when he starts playing with fire,” Caron admitted, her voice low.

“He scares me whenever I see him.”

As they watched, Gordon passed another can of fuel up to Webb, who immediately began tipping it out over the crowd, drenching some cadavers which had already been soaked once.

“Careful with that stuff,” Hollis muttered under his breath.

“He’ll set fire to himself if he doesn’t watch what he’s doing.”

“I’m not bothered about that, I just don’t want him to use up all our fuel. I’m the sucker who’ll end up out there fetching more.”

They watched as Webb finished emptying the second can, then jumped down to stand with the others a short distance back from the corpses. There was no denying the fact that they had worked hard again this morning—an area of land had already been reclaimed which almost matched the size of the patch they’d taken all day yesterday to recover—but their methods seemed to have become even more haphazard and less effective as time progressed. The diggers, which had previously been used to carefully move one abandoned car or lump of masonry at a time, now sat unused a short distance back. It was clear from Webb’s actions that the people remaining outside now were in the business of finding shortcuts. Safety and planning had been forgotten. It was now all about destroying the maximum number of corpses with minimum amount of effort.

“I can’t watch,” Caron said, half-turning away but then looking back when curiosity got the better of her. Hollis stared intently as Stokes, Jas, Gordon, and Webb scuttled away to a safe distance, leaving Harte on his own trying to light the limp rag-fuse of a petrol bomb with the intermittent flame coming from a frustratingly unreliable cigarette lighter. A sudden flash of orange appeared which made him jump back with surprise. Realizing that the rag was finally lit, he hurled it toward the wall of cars. It ricocheted off the roof of a beaten-up 4 × 4 before exploding into flames. A chain reaction spread instantly across the petrol-soaked crowd, an arc of fire racing to the right and left and back out over the decaying hordes. Harte ran for cover.

“Looks like it worked,” Caron said, relaxing again. The people down below congratulated each other and laughed and pointed as the bodies burned.

“Thank God for that,” Hollis sighed. “They’re lucky it’s not them that’s on fire. If the wind had caught the fumes like last time they would have—”

A sudden explosion tore through the air outside. Fuel had leaked from the damaged petrol tank of a hearse (complete with coffin and body) and the resulting ignition blew it up into the air, flipping the long, box-shaped vehicle up and over. Its charred chassis clattered back down to the ground several meters behind the spot it had originally occupied, crushing scores of unsuspecting corpses.

Outside, the survivors ran for cover.

* * *

“Bloody hell,” grinned Stokes, “that was close. You could have been standing on top of that, Webb.”

“I was standing on top of it a couple of minutes ago,” he replied, subdued. “Good job Harte took his time getting the fuse lit.”

“Piss off,” Harte snapped. “It was your lighter that slowed things down, nothing to do with me.”

“I think we’ve got a problem here,” Jas said ominously, taking a few tentative steps forward and peering through the heavy cloud of dense black smoke which was drifting low across the scene from the burning bodies and the blazing hearse. He shielded his eyes and looked down into the gap in the barrier where the hearse had originally been. The flames there had died down and now he could see movement.

“What is it?” Gordon asked nervously, moving a little nearer but being careful not to get too close. At first Jas didn’t answer, instead pointing at the wide gap which had appeared in their defenses. A mass of furious bodies was beginning to quickly scramble through.

“Block it up!” Jas screamed, his voice suddenly hoarse with panic. “Block the fucking hole up!”

Webb and Stokes peered into the haze, still not sure what was happening. Harte immediately realized the danger and sprang into action, sprinting over to the nearest of the two diggers and hauling himself up into the cab. He started the heavy machine and rumbled toward the lumbering bodies, trying to work out how best to stop, or at least stem, the flow of dead flesh pouring through the ruptured barricade. Suddenly forced into action, Webb swung his nail-skewered baseball bat around with scant regard for his own, or anyone else’s, safety. Even Gordon was forced to fight. He battered a single crippled creature to the ground with a bloodied fence post, standing over it and repeatedly slamming the wooden post into its face, continuing even when the decaying monster had stopped moving. Stokes scampered out of the way and climbed into the other digger, hand on the ignition, ready to get involved only if he had absolutely no alternative.

Harte blasted the digger’s horn. Still fighting, Jas looked up and stepped back out of the way as the vehicle moved toward him, rolling relentlessly over the dead and squashing them into the mud. On the other side of the breached barrier, a short distance into the advancing crowd, he could see the roof of the wreck of another car which he could use to block the hole left by the still-burning hearse. He accelerated again, carving another deep and bloody furrow through the sea of cadavers, then shunted his way out through the gap and into the crowd. He concentrated on the car just ahead, doing his best to block out the fact that now, for the first time, he was completely surrounded by corpses on every side. Shutting out the noise of their, tireless hammering on the sides of the digger, he stretched out the vehicle’s scoop, then smashed it down and punched a hole through the roof of the car. He slammed the digger into reverse and powered back, slipping out through the gap again, then veering over to the right and wedging the wreck across the breach.

* * *

All around the digger the chaos continued. The smoke and constant movement made it almost impossible to see what was happening clearly. Looking down from the flats, Hollis estimated that more than fifty corpses had managed to push their way through the barricade before Harte had blocked the gap. Around half that number had already been destroyed, most of them obliterated by the digger.

“I should go down there.”

“They can take care of themselves,” Caron said. “They made the mess, let them clear it up. Idiots, if they’d just slow down and think before they…”

Her voice trailed away to nothing as she watched the fighting continue. Several cadavers had surrounded Gordon. It might have been bad luck or inexperience on his part, but he’d somehow allowed himself to be cornered. His back was pressed up against a section of wire-mesh fence and he cowered as the dead approached.

* * *

“Get out of the way!” Jas shouted, noticing the other man was trapped. “Move!”

Terrified, Gordon looked for a way out. He was about to drop to his knees and try crawling away through the mud when the bodies attacked. Their movements were sudden, surprisingly controlled and inexplicably coordinated. It was almost as if they were working together.

“Get down!” Jas screamed again. Running forward, he unsheathed the machete he’d been carrying on his belt and began to lash out at the twisted creatures. He sank the blade into the small of the back of the first of them, cutting deep into its already partially exposed spinal cord. He then yanked it free and immediately struck out at the next nearest corpse. It was much smaller than the first, disarmingly childlike. He looked away as he slammed the blade down onto the top of its head, center-parting what remained of its lank, greasy hair and splitting its skull.

Now that he found himself facing only one opponent again, Gordon managed to force himself back into action. He fumbled around for the fence post he’d been using as a bludgeon, then picked it up and swung it into the side of the third corpse’s body, smashing its pelvis and giving it a far more serious hip problem than the one he himself suffered with. It collapsed into a puddle of bloody rainwater.

“You okay, Gord?” Jas asked, wiping his blade clean on the back of a slumped body lying next to him. Gordon was standing over the corpse he’d just crippled, pounding its face with the fence post.

“Fine,” he said between angry grunts of effort. “Nothing to worry about.”

Stokes watched from the safety of the stationary digger. Webb continued to hack down those cadavers unfortunate enough to find themselves within striking range of his baseball bat. Jas too had returned to the fray and was chopping at the remaining figures which lumbered toward him. Harte continued to operate the other digger, stretching the articulated arm out over pockets of attacking corpses, then dropping the heavy metal scoop on their unsuspecting heads, crushing them instantly. Stokes might have found their slapstick demise funny if he hadn’t been so bloody terrified.

* * *

Hollis and Caron looked on from the safety of the flats.

“Looks like they’ve got everything under control now,” Caron said optimistically.

“I know, but I really don’t like this.”

“What’s the problem?” she asked. From where she was standing the survivors on the ground seemed to be doing well. The sudden surge of dead flesh through the barrier had been stopped and those which had made it through were being destroyed quickly and with very little effort.

“Watch him,” Hollis answered, pointing at Gordon again. “He’s not used to this. He’s not as quick as the others.”

He was right. Rather than move toward the corpses and attack, Gordon instead held back and waited for them to come to him, perhaps hoping that someone else would take action before he had to. Four decayed figures closed in on him now.

“Look!”

With remarkable coordination the four bodies suddenly increased their pace and launched themselves at Gordon. At the last possible moment he lifted his fence post and skewered the creature immediately in front of him through the abdomen. In a desperately defensive action he swung the post—with the limp body still impaled on it—from side to side, knocking two more of the foul figures clean off their clumsy feet. To Caron’s relief, Jas returned to his side to help him finish off his rotting assailants.

“Did you see them?” Hollis asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Did you see the bodies?” he asked again. “Did you see what they were doing? The fucking things were moving together like pack animals.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I tell you, they’re working together!” he insisted. “It’s like they’re starting to realize they’re no match for us on their own. Damn things are fighting in packs!”