Autumn: Disintegration (12 page)

A body lunged out from the shadows into the light, missing Lorna and throwing itself at Hollis, who stood in front of it, completely unprepared. Wearing the once-white coat of a pharmacist, now yellowed and soiled by seepage, the dishevelled corpse hurtled toward him with unexpected force and venom. Trapped behind the door for more than fifty days, its sudden release seemed somehow to energize and invigorate it. Its weight was insignificant, but its speed and velocity were enough to knock Hollis over. He tripped and fell back, smashing the side of his head against the back of the wooden counter. The pain was excruciating.

Lorna grabbed a fire extinguisher from a bracket on the wall and brought the base of it crashing down on the back of the cadaver’s skull with a sickening crunch. It collapsed on top of Hollis, black clots of blood and other foul-smelling gunk dribbling out of its mouth and nose. Hollis kicked and scrambled underneath it desperately, more aware than ever of the germs and disease which might be thriving in the stodgy liquids dripping over him. Finally free, he dragged himself back up onto his feet, gagging in disgust as the remains of the pharmacist slid onto the floor. He angrily put his boot through its face.

“Fucking thing,” he cursed, gingerly touching his left ear. When he drew back his fingers he saw blood.

“Let’s go,” Lorna said, carrying another basket and moving toward the door. She stopped when she saw that almost the entire width of the glass frontage of the pharmacy was now a solid mass of dead flesh which reacted violently as she approached. Parts of the crowd appeared to try and recoil from her; others pushed harder against the dirt and cobweb-covered windows.

“Bloody hell,” Hollis moaned under his breath. “How the hell are we going to do this?” They were used to being hounded by huge crowds of corpses wherever they went, but this felt different. Had they just managed to spook themselves by talking about the bodies getting smarter, or were some of the creatures on the other side of the glass really demonstrating behaviors which appeared conscious and controlled? It felt like they were waiting for the two of them to come out into the open, almost as if they knew they’d have to leave sooner or later.

“Are we going to stand here waiting for Christmas, or are we going home?” Lorna asked, trying to hide her mounting unease.

“No such thing as Christmas anymore,” he replied. “Ready?”

“Think so,” she mumbled, sounding far from sure.

“Get closer to the door.”

Without questioning him she moved forward. The bodies were just inches away now, separated from her by a single sheet of glass. One of them seemed to be pushing at the door. Fortunately it was pushing the hinged side and it was never going to open, but its intent was clear.

Hollis disappeared back into the shop and picked up the bloodied fire extinguisher Lorna had used moments earlier. Still wincing with the pain behind his ear, he lifted the red metal canister above his head and threw it at the section of window farthest from the door. It thumped against the toughened glass, cracking it but not breaking through, then dropped to the ground with a sonorous thump and rolled into a display rack. Many of the bodies immediately began to shuffle nearer to the noise. Hollis picked up the extinguisher again and this time slammed it into the glass like a battering ram, doing enough damage to shatter it and causing huge, jagged shards to fall out of the metal frame. The dead immediately began to force their way inside, ignorant to the daggers of broken glass which sliced their feet.

Without stopping to look back Hollis ran over to Lorna, pulled the door open and pushed her through. She dropped the basket of medicine she’d been holding, sending packets and bottles flying. With the bulk of the crowd distracted, pouring through the broken window, they barged their way through the rest of the bodies. Hollis dropped his shoulder and waded into them as Lorna crouched down and wormed her way through, managing to scramble back into the van first.

Hollis was surprised by the dead’s dogged resistance. Most of the dumb creatures had fallen for his ploy and were still pushing and jostling to get into the shop through the smashed window. Others were standing firm—still weak, still clumsy and still uncoordinated, but undeniably more determined than they ever had been before. He struggled with a particularly aggressive cadaver with a huge black hole in its face where its right eye should have been, until Lorna grabbed hold of his collar and yanked him back into the van. Many more bodies were shuffling toward them again. They needed to go.

“What the hell are you doing?” he jabbered nervously with surprise as he fell back into his seat. He knocked another rancid figure back onto the street and slammed the door shut. It was dark inside the van. Emotionless faces were pressed up against every window.

“We need to go,” she replied, watching through a gap in the bodies as the pharmacy quickly filled with dead flesh. “We need to get out of here.”

He started the engine—the noise immediately causing the still-growing crowd to become even more animated—and drove forward, dragging several of the rotting shells beneath the wheels of the van and churning them into the ground. Lorna turned around in her seat and watched as a smaller section of the crowd marched after them lethargically.

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.