Autumn: Disintegration (35 page)

“Come on,” he said, jumping out onto the road. He rubbed his aching neck and turned back to look for Harte, who was struggling to get out, unable to open his badly buckled door. “This way,” he shouted.

Disoriented by the jolting shock and speed of the crash, Harte continued to try and get the passenger door to open for a second longer, unable to understand why he couldn’t do it. Distracted, he looked up when he saw more movement out of the corner of his eye. The front of the bus was just a couple of meters away from where he sat, forced up at an unnatural sloping angle, and someone was trying to escape from inside. It was Martin. What the hell was he doing driving the bus? And what had he done? Blood was pouring down his face and he was banging on the glass.

“Come on,” Jas yelled again, reaching back into the van and dragging Harte out onto the road. His head clearing, he picked himself up and ran around to the front of the bus. Martin was hammering frantically on the windscreen now, desperately trying to free himself.

“Keep still,” Harte shouted. “Shut up and keep still!”

Martin was panicking. He was kicking and screaming and trying to get himself out of the driver’s seat with no appreciation of how precariously balanced the bus was. Harte could see that all of the wheels on one side had been forced up the bank. Again he tried to stop Martin moving, but his words had no effect. The wiry little man finally freed himself from the seat and stood up to get out, scrambling up the steeply inclined floor. His desperate, clumsy movements were enough to upset the delicate balance of the bus and force it completely over onto its side. Jas yanked Harte back out of the way as the huge vehicle crashed down into the road. Martin was thrown across the cab, thumping his head again as he went down. This time he didn’t get up.

“Do you think he’s…” Harte began to ask.

“Probably,” Jas said, his voice cold and devoid of emotion. “Stupid bastard. What the hell was he doing?”

Harte hauled himself up the front of the box-shaped vehicle and stood on its uppermost side, the top edge of the folding door at his feet. He dropped to his knees and pushed against it, managing to force it half-open.

“Martin!” he shouted. “Martin…”

Six feet below them, Martin began to groan.

“We’ll come back for him,” Jas said as he pulled himself up. “Stupid, bloody fool.” He glanced down again at Martin’s slowly stirring body, then turned and ran along the side of the bus.

“Looks like he was trying to clear the road,” Harte said, stopping when he reached the back end of the vehicle and looking down at the track, completely awash with blood and unrecognizable heaps of fetid remains.

“Fucking idiot. All he’s done is block it.”

“Come on, he didn’t know we were coming around the corner, did he?”

“I don’t care. Fact is he’s blocked our way out. How are we supposed to shift this thing now?”

“No idea. Come on, we’ll sort it out later. We should get back to the others.”

He was about to move when he heard the distant whine of another engine. He remained where he was, completely motionless. Where was it? Who was it? It had to be Webb and Amir. Where the hell had they been?

“Helicopter,” Jas said, immediately recognizing the noise and pointing up at the aircraft he’d just spotted. His heart began to thump in his chest and his legs felt heavy with nerves.
Come on
, he thought,
this is it.

He glanced over to his left. Two huge black columns of smoke were still rising high into the sky—surely they had to see them. Surely they’d fly over here to investigate … There was hardly any wind and the smoke was rising straight up like hundred-story-tall arrows pointing down at the hotel. He willed the helicopter to change course and fly closer.

“They’ll see it,” Harte said under his breath. “They have to…”

Jas stared unblinking at the single speck of black crawling across the white clouds. He watched it until it disappeared, praying it would bank around and come back.

Minutes passed before he stopped looking.

“That’s it, then,” he said dejectedly, his voice weak with emotion. “I don’t think they’ll be back again. We’re completely fucked now.”

51

Webb was upside down and he could taste blood in his mouth. The light was low and he struggled to make sense of his surroundings. Was it night already? Had he really lay here unconscious for hours, wherever here was? He could hear running water, and he could smell its pungent, stagnant odor too. What the hell had happened? He tried to move but a sudden sharp, jabbing pain in his gut made him stop. With cold, swollen hands he reached out and disentangled himself from his baseball bat. One of the nails was sticking into him. Fortunately several thick layers of clothing had prevented the point from piercing his skin. The pain immediately stopped and he let the bat fall from his hands. It landed with a thump on the upturned roof of the car, right between Amir and himself.

“Amir,” he said, managing to tilt his head slightly so that he could see the other man’s face, “are you okay?”

Amir didn’t respond. Webb looked around again, confused, his eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the gloom. Amir was also upside down, still anchored in his seat by his safety belt. What kind of an idiot wears a safety belt these days? Webb wondered. And why am I lying on my back on the roof? The car, he slowly deduced, his head still cloudy, had turned over in the middle of a stream. He began to remember a few fleeting flashes of how they’d ended up here—plowing into the bodies on the golf course, Amir panicking and steering the wrong way, the sudden stomach-churning drop and the flashing of light over dark again and again as they rolled down the bank—but little else. Still not yet daring to move, he worked his way back through events to try and make more sense of his predicament. He remembered the reason why they’d been away from the hotel. The others would all probably have made it back by now and they’d have given him and Amir up for dead. But wait … maybe it wasn’t as late as he’d first thought. He angled his head around again so that he could look out the window at his side. The glass was almost completely obscured by mud and a corpse which had its legs trapped under the car and was trying unsuccessfully to get away. When the corpse moved its leaden arms he could see definite flashes of daylight.

Got to get out of here.

“Amir,” he said again. He managed to reach across and shake Amir’s shoulder. He felt cold to the touch. Was he dead? He shook him again but still there was no reaction. What did he do now?

Webb slowly moved his legs and found that he was able to work them around the edge of the back of the seat he’d been sitting in when they’d lost control of the car. Now able to move with a little more freedom, he stretched out and shuffled along the roof up toward the engine. The car had come to rest at a slight angle. The front of it was out of the water, propped up on the bank, while the back end was submerged. If he could smash his way through the windscreen, he’d be able to crawl out under the upturned bonnet and get out. What he’d do after that was anyone’s guess. The most prevalent of the snatched memories he had of the moments just before the crash was the incredible size of the crowd they’d managed to drive into. It was fucking huge.

“Amir,” he whispered for a third time, “come on.” When there was still no response he reached out to touch his neck and try to find a pulse. Amir’s skin felt warm but clammy. He noticed that there was a puddle of blood on the roof below his upside-down head and he carefully turned his suspended head to face him. There was a deep gash across Amir’s forehead and, when Webb looked back, a corresponding bloody smudge in the middle of the cracked windscreen. Ironic that Amir was the one who had been strapped in, he thought. Poor bastard.

Webb moved again and his outstretched foot kicked the fuel can which had also dropped onto the roof. Burn the car and distract the corpses, he remembered, that had been the plan. It might still work. He had no idea where he was in relation to the hotel, but anywhere on the golf course would be far enough away from the others not to matter, not that he cared about them and their plans anyway. Never mind getting that helicopter Jas had been constantly banging on about to see them, setting fire to the car would cause enough of a distraction to give
him
a chance to get away.

“Oi, Amir,” he said, this time a little louder. He shook his shoulder again but still there was no response other than a sudden sickening dribble of blood where before there had been only drips. Time to move. There was nothing he could do for him. Even if he got him out of the car, he was going to have enough trouble getting himself off the golf course.

Struggling in the confined space, Webb spun around on his back through a slow 180 degrees and kicked at the windscreen. A series of three good, strong boots to the already weakened glass was enough to shatter it and kick it through. He turned back around again, grabbing the can of fuel and his baseball bat as he moved, and then crawled out of the car.

The appalling sight which greeted him was almost enough to send him scuttling back under cover but he forced himself to keep going. For as far as he could see ahead the stream was nothing more than a sickening stew of decay, packed solid with incalculable numbers of corpses which had fallen into the mire over time and been unable to get out again. Strangely cushioned and protected in the ditch, however, they continued to move constantly, never stopping but never getting anywhere either. The water he’d heard under the roof of the car was little more than a pathetic trickle. Filled with unidentifiable lumps and chunks and with a disgusting putrid brown-green hue, it reminded him of vomit.

The nearest bodies were trapped, either by each other or by the upturned car, and he found that he was able to move around them with surprising freedom. Working quickly he opened the fuel can and set it down under the bonnet. He tore a strip of rag from the back of a corpse which was stuck facing away from him, soaked it with fuel and jammed it into the mouth of the can. Taking out his lighter from under several layers of clothes, he lit the rag and furiously scrambled away.

“Webb…”

What the fuck was that? He spun around anxiously. It sounded like Amir, but he was dead, wasn’t he? Jesus Christ, what if he was wrong? What if Amir was still alive; if he’d just passed out because of the blood? Webb could see him through the cracked windscreen. He didn’t look like he’d moved. He must have imagined the noise. Amir’s eyes were still closed and the blood was still dripping and … and the rag was still burning. Webb jumped to his feet and hauled himself up the steep bank, grabbing at random corpses and using them as leverage, stamping his feet down onto flesh and bone and whatever else he could get a grip on. He threw himself over the top of the bank, straight into a solid mass of bodies the size of which he couldn’t even begin to appreciate, and then dropped to his knees as the car behind him exploded. Like unprotected trees around a bomb blast, hundreds of cadavers were flattened in a rough circle around the epicenter. Webb found himself buried under a mass of dark figures dripping with decay.

Keep moving.

No time to think. Make the most of the delay before the rest of them start moving toward the blast. As he climbed back to his feet and began to trip through a quagmire of flesh and body parts several inches deep, he glanced back over his shoulder. The car, or parts of it at least, had been blown back out of the ditch. He could see twisted chunks of its blackened frame burning fiercely. If Amir wasn’t dead, he thought, then he is now.

All around Webb, hordes of bodies were turning and advancing toward him. They staggered and stumbled unsteadily through the gruesome slime which coated the once-pristine golf course. Thousands of continually moving feet had churned the remains of countless fallen creatures with the cloying mud to cover everything with a layer of dark, sticky, foul-smelling sludge.
Keep moving
, he told himself,
it’s the fire they’re heading for, not me.
As those corpses which had made the most progress lurched nearer he instinctively dropped to his knees and began to crawl through the slurry around and between their emaciated feet, hoping that remaining low would be enough to keep them from reacting to him. Stupid things never look down, he tried to reassure himself. If they looked where they were going, there wouldn’t have been so many of them stuck in the bloody stream. He lowered his head and held onto his baseball bat as he began to move through the sea of spindly, unsteady legs which slipped and slid through the once-human soup all around him.

Which way now?

Time to make another decision. He couldn’t keep crawling like this indefinitely—although he continued to do so as he tried to decide what to do next. Lifting his head momentarily, he glimpsed the trunk of a large, twisted tree up ahead and to his right. He altered his course and moved toward it, intending to use it as cover as the crowd continued to gravitate toward the fire. If he stayed on the blind side of the tree they probably wouldn’t see him. In less than a minute he was there, and he cautiously raised himself up behind it, holding onto its rough bark and pulling himself back up onto his feet with gloved hands. It was surprising how much more he could see and hear now that he was upright. Down at ground level the sheer bulk of the bodies above him had blocked out much of the natural light, and they were so tightly packed that they’d acted like a canopy, muffling the rest of the world. Now that he was finally up straight again he could see over the heads of the dead. Almost all of them stooped, walking with their heads bowed as if the weight of their skulls were too much for their weakened bodies to support. He hadn’t appreciated that before, but he hadn’t been this deep in corpses and dared to stand still before now either.

Music.

He had to be imagining it. Could he really hear Martin’s music? He was sure he’d imagined hearing Amir’s voice just a few minutes earlier—was this just another cruel trick of his tired and increasingly confused mind? No, he could definitely hear it. His ears suddenly seemed to lock onto the frequency of the tune playing in the distance and it gradually became clear. A god-awful, screeching country and western tune was echoing around the golf course. Thank God for Martin Priest, he thought. He cautiously allowed himself to peer out around the side of the tree, quickly pulling his head back in again when a particularly grotesque figure raised its emaciated arms and lunged toward him. Christ, for a second in the confusion it looked like Stokes, but he knew that was impossible. It was just the low light and his nerves playing games with him. He looked again … slowly … carefully … forcing himself to concentrate … and then he saw it. The clubhouse. A couple of hundred meters away. Reachable.