Autumn: Disintegration (30 page)

“You all right?” he asked, looking into Webb’s face, partially illuminated by a sudden glimpse of early moonlight. Webb nodded.

“Fine,” he said, glancing back at the twenty or so corpses which were now smashing themselves relentlessly against the metal gate. He wished they’d stop. The noise was making him nervous. He climbed back on the bike and held on tightly as they powered down to the fork in the road, then sharply turned back on themselves and roared up toward the hotel. The building loomed large up ahead, silhouetted against the darkening sky. Sean could already see movement.

“Shit!” he cursed as the light from the bike illuminated the outline of a crowd of figures moving toward them across the car park. Three—no four—bodies were heading their way. How the hell did they get through? Had they left the gate open earlier? Had they somehow got in through … wait … they were moving too quickly, and their movements were controlled. It was Hollis and the others. He drove up to the front of the building and got off the bike, relieved.

“It’s all right,” he said to Webb, calmer now. “It’s okay. It’s just Jas and—”

Jas silenced him with a savage right hook which sent him spinning around and crashing down. Stunned, he didn’t know where he was or what had happened. Jas then moved toward Webb, who cowered pathetically, covering his face with his hands.

“Don’t hit me,” he pleaded as Jas grabbed his collar and pulled him closer. “Please, I—”

“Leave it,” Hollis warned, forcing himself between the two men. “Not out here.”

“Fuckers took my bike,” Jas seethed.

“Not out here,” Hollis repeated.

“Never mind your damn bike,” Harte said anxiously, “just get them inside before they do any more damage.”

“What you talking about?” Webb stammered, trying to hide the fear in his voice and failing miserably. “We blocked the gate. We didn’t let any of them through.”

“Just shut up and get inside,” Jas hissed, shoving him back toward the hotel.

“But we didn’t—”

“Just get inside,” he shouted, running forward and grabbing Webb again. Face-to-face, Webb found himself looking deep into the other man’s eyes. The anger he’d expected to see wasn’t there, just fear. He wrestled himself away and ran toward the safety of the hotel’s shadows.

45

“I just can’t believe you’d be so damn stupid,” Jas ranted as Sean and Webb were frog-marched into the Steelbrooke Suite. “What the hell did you think you were doing? Are you out of your fucking minds?”

“Fuck you,” Sean mumbled, his jaw still stinging and his head spinning with pain. One of his teeth felt loose and he could taste blood in his mouth. He cowered back as Jas lunged for him again.

“Stop it!” Caron screamed, lowering her voice immediately when she realized how unintentionally loud she’d been. “For Christ’s sake, please stop. We’ve got enough to worry about now without you beating each other senseless.”

“What’s she talking about?” Sean asked, confused. “What’s happened?”

“It’s the bodies,” Gordon said unhelpfully from the table where he sat with Ginnie.

“What about them?”

“Seems they’re smarter than we’ve given them credit for,” Martin began to explain.

“What?” Webb grunted.

“The noise you lot made coming here a couple of days back started it, and when you went out for supplies yesterday it just made matters worse. What you two did today might just have been the straw which broke the camel’s back.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean said. Martin sat down in the nearest chair and held his head in his hands. Howard explained further.

“They’re coming back. There’s a load of them gathered over the road.”

“What about the music?”

“Not working anymore.”

“That’s not exactly true, it is still working,” Hollis corrected him, “but like Martin says, they’re getting wise to it. It fooled them before because they didn’t know anyone was here.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s still drawing them in from miles around. Problem is, when they get close enough and hear us moving about or arguing or driving around on stolen fucking motorbikes, they understandably get more interested in us than anything else. They’re starting to work out that the music is just a decoy and that we’re the ones actually making the noise.”

“Can’t be…” Sean said.

“Can be,” Harte quickly replied. “It’s instinctive. It’s exactly what started happening back at the flats. The more noise we made, the worse they got. A handful of them broke through our defenses, hundreds followed. They
learn
.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Ginnie asked, shuffling a little closer to Gordon. “Is there anything we can do?”

“What we should do now,” Martin announced, unsuccessfully attempting to exert some authority, “is exactly what we were doing in the first place before you clowns arrived. We keep our heads down, stay absolutely silent, and wait for those creatures out there to disintegrate down to nothing. If we run out of food then we go hungry. If we start to—”

“No way!” Sean yelled, his voice furious, the fuzziness in his head clearing and being replaced with anger. “No fucking way. If you think I’m sitting here in fucking silence with you lot just waiting for the bodies to rot, then you can think again. You can stick your fucking—”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Jas said, moving toward him again. Sean recoiled. “Because if you don’t I’ll break your fucking neck.”

“Is that right?” Webb goaded.

“Don’t you start. I’ll kill you now if you want me to, you little piece of shit.”

“Come on, then!” he yelled, jumping to his feet and squaring up against Jas. The others cringed, willing them both to shut up as the volume of their pointless argument continued to increase.

“Leave it, Jas,” Harte said. “He’s not worth it.”

Webb stood his ground as Jas moved forward again. Their faces almost touching, he whispered loud enough for Webb alone to hear.

“Want me to tell them about Stokes?”

Webb pushed him away and slunk back into the shadows.

“Let’s just keep things in perspective,” Lorna said. She’d been watching the discussion deteriorate with disappointment. “There’s no need to panic. They still can’t get to us. Every access point is blocked. Like Hollis says, we just need them to forget we’re over here.”

“But what about the helicopter?” Caron wondered. “And the plane? How are we supposed to attract their attention if we’re keeping our heads down? We don’t know how many more times they’re going to fly over.”

“Have they been here again?” Sean wondered.

“Twice more,” Gordon replied.

“Twice?”

“Flew over late afternoon,” he explained, “then again just about an hour later.”

“They’re clearing out, aren’t they? It’s like you said this morning, Jas, they’re evacuating.”

“I think he’s right,” Gordon said.

“Then that’s all the more reason for us not to lock ourselves down, isn’t it?” Sean nervously continued. “If we don’t let them know we’re here now then they’ll never find us. And I’m not just talking about writing love letters on the grass with bedsheets or playing music, we have to do something big that they’re going to see and we have to do it now!”

“Sean…” Martin warned. His voice was getting louder again.

“Oh, just shut up, Martin. Will you get off my case? You haven’t even—”

“Just calm down and be quiet.”

“What if I don’t want to? I know exactly what we have to do to get that helicopter or the plane to see us, and I’ll do it if none of you have got the nerve to.”

At the side of the room, unnoticed by anyone but Ginnie, Gordon stood up and cleared his throat. With great hesitancy but a definite need to act, he slowly walked forward into the middle of the argument, placing himself directly between Hollis, Martin, and Jas on one side, and Sean and Webb on the other. He looked Sean straight in the eye.

“Listen,” he began, captivating the others with his unexpected and uncharacteristically positive involvement, “you have to listen. I know you’re angry and you’re probably just as scared as I am right now, but you’ve got to listen. Please don’t do anything stupid. We’ve sat in here today and we’ve watched those things work out where we are. It’s only a fraction of them at the moment, but if the rest of them catch on and end up down here we’re going to have a real problem on our hands. I know you don’t want to stay here, but I really don’t think you’ve got any choice. None of us have.”

Sean stared deep into Gordon’s face and carefully considered his words. He knew he wasn’t overstating the threat from outside, but were they really only limited to one option? He didn’t think so. Being outside today had been such an unexpectedly uplifting experience. Could he turn his back on that freedom and everything he’d seen now? He couldn’t stand the thought of being shut away in this hellhole with these people any longer.

The silence in the room was deafening.

“Don’t know,” he said eventually. “I don’t know if I can—”

“You have to,” Caron said from the shadows to his left. Christ, he reminded her of her son at times. He was just like Matthew—so volatile and opinionated, yet vulnerable too.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he answered, glaring at her. “None of us do. You can all stay here if you want to but I think I’ll take my chances out there.”

“Just give it some time,” she pleaded.

“I’d give anything for another day like today,” he said, his voice suddenly wavering with emotion. “Do you know what I did today?” he asked, looking around at the few faces he could see. When no one answered he continued. “I lived,” he explained, tears welling up in his eyes. “For the first time in weeks I actually felt like I was alive and it didn’t matter what I did. And I come back here and everything feels wrong again, and it’s not because of the bodies out there, it’s you lot.”

“What are you talking about?” Gordon asked.

“From where I’m standing there’s no difference between the bodies on one side of the fence and the other. There’s no difference between any of you and those things out there. You’re all dead. You’re all just sitting here rotting, waiting for the end to come. I don’t really care if I’ve got one day left or fifty years. I don’t care if I don’t get through tomorrow. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my time trapped in here with us all watching each other decay.”

46

“How many?”

Startled, Martin spun around and saw Harte standing in the doorway of his second-floor bedroom. Hollis, who was standing next to him, hadn’t heard a thing. He turned around when he saw that Martin had been distracted, then turned back to face the window.

“Maybe as many as five hundred or so,” Martin replied. “Difficult to tell.”

“Are more still coming?”

It was difficult to make out much detail in the late-evening gloom, but there still seemed to be plenty of movement in the field across the road. The dark mass of inquisitive corpses had grown steadily through the course of the day just gone and their numbers showed no signs of slowing.

“Plenty more,” Martin answered, his voice tired and low.

“So what do we do now?” Harte asked, joining the other two at the window.

“Depends,” Hollis grunted. He could hear him now that he’d moved closer.

“On what?”

“On them, mainly,” he replied, nodding in the direction of the throng of constantly shifting figures. “It depends how responsive they are. If all they’re going to do is just stand on the other side of the fence, then there’s not much of a problem. If they decide they want to attack us then—”

“They won’t,” Martin immediately interrupted. “Why would they?”

“If they’re threatened they will,” Harte said quietly. “We’ve seen it happen loads of times.”

“But who’s going to threaten them?”

“What you see as a threat and what they do are very different things,” Hollis explained. “Take those fucking jokers out on the bike, for example. We just see a couple of idiots escaping for a while. The dead react like animals would. They see the speed and hear the noise and sense the danger.”

“Then try and attack before whatever it is can get them,” Harte continued.

“So we stay here and wait for them to rot.” Martin sighed. “Just like we were doing before you lot turned up here and screwed everything up.”

“We haven’t screwed everything up,” Hollis corrected him. “Be honest, Martin, you were starving and you wouldn’t have lasted much longer. Sean would have cracked eventually and you’d have ended up in this exact same mess. It’s not completely our fault.”

“We’ve just fucked things up a little quicker than you would have on your own,” Harte said, his attempt at humor falling flat.

“But we’ve got supplies now, and Sean’s had his moment. We can let him and Webb leave if they really want to.”

“They won’t go,” Hollis said. “They haven’t got the balls to do it. If they had they wouldn’t have come running back tonight.”

“Then we’ve got to keep them under control, Greg,” Martin added. “Stop them getting so wound up. Find a way to get them to let off steam.”

“That might be difficult,” Harte announced ominously. “We have another problem.”

“What?”

“It’s why I came looking for you two.”

“What?” Hollis demanded impatiently.

“Driver’s sick.”

“Sick? What, like—”

“Yes, sick like Anita and Ellie,” Harte said quickly, anticipating his question.

“The girls that died?” Martin asked anxiously.

“Yep,” he answered. “So I for one don’t actually fancy sitting in here for another couple of months anymore.”

“Where is he now?”

“Packed him off to bed with his paper and enough food and drink to keep him happy for a couple of days. Told him we’d keep checking on him.”

“And will you?”

“No fucking way. I might go back up there in a few days and see how he’s doing. If he’s still alive then he hasn’t got what Ellie and Anita had and we’re safe.”

“Where’s his room?”

“Luckily he’s always been an antisocial bastard. He’s up on his own on the top floor of the east wing.”

“Good,” Martin muttered.