Autumn: Disintegration (5 page)

“We’ll just need to make sure we—” Hollis began to say before the quarter-full fuel tank of the burning car exploded in a swollen, incandescent mushroom of flame, showering the ground with shrapnel. The sudden burst of energy caused huge numbers of diseased creatures to surge toward the epicenter of the blast. “That’s better,” he said to himself, slamming his foot down on the accelerator.

“Here we go, then,” Driver announced to his two passengers in his monotone, emotionless drawl. “Hold tight.” He instinctively checked his mirrors and even indicated before pulling out. Stokes and Webb held onto the handrail inside the bus as if they were rush-hour commuters on their way to work.

Jas paused before following on the bike. The visor on his helmet still raised, he watched the bodies swarming around the fire. Many had been drawn to the flames, some had been crushed in the confusion and others had even found themselves close enough to the heat to be set alight. Others, he noticed, had changed direction. He could see six or seven of them actually trying to move away from the burning wreck. Damn things, it was almost as if they’d realized the fire was nothing more than an unsubtle decoy. Harte tapped his shoulder.

“Come on,” he shouted, his voice muffled by his helmet. Jas flicked his visor down and powered after the bus.

6

“Almost there,” Lorna said, glancing up from the notepad and map she gripped tightly in her hand. The windscreen of the van was covered in an almost opaque film of greasy stains and dripping gore and she couldn’t see much up ahead. Hollis repeatedly tried to use the wipers but all they seemed to do was make the problem worse, smearing the foul muck from side to side in a bloody rainbow arc of insipid yellows, browns, and grays. He frantically used the screen-wash, managing to clear just enough of the glass to be able to see through. “Turn left and we’re on the Kingsway Road.”

Hollis swerved around a tight corner, then put his foot down again as the Kingsway Road stretched out in front of them. Apart from the fact it was crowded with the dead, it didn’t look anything like he remembered.

“What next?”

She looked down at her notes again like the co-pilot in a surreal, obstacle-strewn rally. Her assistance was vital. The almost never-ending waves of bodies made it virtually impossible to navigate by sight alone anymore. They were frequently packed so tightly together that it was hard to see where the road ended and the curb began.

“Keep going for half a mile, go through a set of lights, then Shaylors should be on our right.”

“Should be on our right?”

“
Will
be on our right,” she corrected herself. A sudden thump made her jump and catch her breath as a dismembered arm (it may even have been half a leg) spiralled up from a ruckus in the crowd and thudded against the windscreen, leaving a bloody stain—a sudden splash of crimson red in the midst of the putrid yellow grays.

“Nice,” Hollis mumbled. “They’re virtually falling apart now.”

“Just wish they’d hurry up and get on with it.”

Hollis glanced into his rearview mirror but couldn’t see anything clearly.

“Are they still behind us?”

Lorna turned around in her seat and peered along the length of the empty van to look out through the rear window. She struggled to focus—the ride was increasingly uneven as they powered through and over the dead—before finally seeing the bright lights of Jas’s bike between the crisscrossing corpses. Farther back still, the bus continued to trundle sedately through the carnage. Its size and strength were such that it could move at a more pedestrian pace. It didn’t matter at what speed Driver drove, nothing was going to stop him.

*   *   *

Harte was transfixed by his surroundings. Everything seemed so different from when he was last here: instantly familiar and yet completely different, like looking at the world he remembered through a filter of grime. He held onto the back of the bike as Jas jolted up the curb, mounting the pavement and skillfully weaving through a gap between an overturned hot dog stand and the front of a furniture store, then leaning the bike the other way to avoid the grabbing hands of a corpse. Harte hadn’t seen as many of them this morning as he’d expected—hundreds, not thousands. His theory was that they’d gradually spread out from here like blood on tissue paper. This godforsaken place had always been busy, always heaving with too many people. He’d taught at a school just a few miles away and had always done all he could to avoid coming here. The Kingsway Road ran right through the center of some of the poorest parts of town, and the squalor and ruin here today appeared uncomfortably familiar. He could see some of the pitiful residents of this densely populated hellhole trapped behind the doors and windows of buildings as they passed. Some still moved incessantly as if they might be about to find some miracle escape route which had eluded them for the last couple of months. Others stood slumped against the windows, pointlessly pounding their fists against the dirty glass.

Less than fifty meters in front of the bike and bus, the van had slowed down. Lorna wound down her window, stuck her hand out, and pointed over to the right. Knowing that was his cue to take the lead, Jas accelerated, roaring past the van toward Shaylors. The group of survivors, although frequently argumentative, unhelpful, and volatile, were occasionally surprisingly organized. They had developed a well-rehearsed routine for times such as this. The van dropped back, leaving Jas and Harte to get closer and suss out the surrounds of the building they were planning to loot.

After dodging a small group of cadavers which had lurched perilously close, Jas drove across the wide car park at the front of the building at speed. Harte spotted a signpost marked
DELIVERIES
. Perfect. He pointed toward it and Jas accelerated again. A straight length of road, no more than one hundred meters long, stretched all the way along the side of the building down to a fenced-off loading bay. Jas drove into the bay, turned a tight circle, then drove back the way he’d just come and gestured for the others to follow. Another tight full turn and he disappeared again. Hollis put his foot down, then braked hard and skidded around the corner after him. A short distance behind, Webb and Stokes held on for dear life as they approached the turning in the bus. The swarming bodies suddenly seemed the least of their worries. How the hell was Driver going to get the bus around the corner and along the gap between the side of the building and the fence?

“Bloody hell, are you going to get this thing down there?” Webb asked. Driver nodded confidently, checked his mirrors, and gently swung the bus around to the right to follow the others down the track.

“We’ll be fine. They used to get trucks down here, didn’t they?”

Driver carefully shunted the massive vehicle a few feet farther forward, then hard-locked the steering wheel. He took his time. A man who’d spent his life driving according to timetables and working regulations, he wasn’t about to start hurrying for anyone or anything. With a total lack of urgency or any visible emotion he continued to inch forward, craning his neck and lifting himself up on his seat to be sure the farthest forward corner of the bus didn’t clip the fence. He seemed oblivious to all other distractions—to Stokes and Webb, who cursed and mumbled incessantly behind him, to the endless stream of cadavers which had caught up with the bus and began hammering against the back of it, and to the rattle and whip of the coils of barbwire which were scraped off the sides of the vehicle by the tall fence on one side and the brick wall on the other. Many of the bodies immediately became entangled in the spools of vicious wire. Their flesh, already ravaged by decay, was lacerated, virtually stripped from their bones by countless, pin-sharp metal spikes.

Hollis had turned the van full-circle as soon as he’d reached the loading area. Face-to-face with the oncoming bus now, he waited for it to complete its short journey, ready for the crowd of corpses which would no doubt be close behind.

“You get out,” he told Lorna. “I’ll plug the gap.”

Having driven with before him on numerous occasions, Lorna knew exactly what he was planning. She grabbed her weapon—a claw hammer—then jumped out of the van and ran across the tarmac toward Harte and Jas. Hollis gripped the steering wheel tightly as the bus thundered past him. The moment his view of the track was clear he powered forward again, hurtling back down the narrow alleyway and annihilating the few pathetic carcasses which had somehow managed to avoid the barbwire and stagger closer. He slammed on the brakes when he had almost reached the front of the building, and the wet remains of several bodies slid to the ground with the sudden stop. The track was a foot wider than the van on either side, maybe a little more. Hollis steered to the right and edged forward, wedging the vehicle across the full width of the road and preventing any more of the dead from getting through to disrupt their precious looting time.

Hollis scrambled over the back of his seat, then climbed out of the van and sprinted down the track.

“Watch yourself,” he heard Harte shout as a solitary body slipped out from behind an overflowing, rat-infested Dumpster in the farthest corner of the enclosed area. He watched it as it moved toward them with inexplicable intent. Just two months ago it had been a night worker here at the warehouse, a happily married father of four. Now it was a pitiful, bedraggled, bloodstained shell of a human being. A fall on the first day after reanimation had shattered the bones in its right arm, leaving the useless limb hanging heavily at its side, swinging like a pendulum with every uncoordinated trip and stumble.

“I’ll do it,” Lorna volunteered, striding toward the body with confidence. She took a step back with surprise as it lurched angrily toward her, arm flapping, then moved forward again and caved in its head with her hammer. The corpse dropped motionless at her feet, the contents of its shattered skull slowly leaking out over the ground, glistening in the sunlight. She nonchalantly shook the hammer clean and returned to the others.

“We ready then, ladies?” Jas asked as Stokes and Webb finally emerged from the bus. Driver remained in his cab, door closed, reading his newspaper.

Everyone carried their weapon of choice. Hollis unsheathed a machete he’d brought with him from the van. Jas also had a machete, Webb his trusty spiked baseball bat, Harte a hand ax and Stokes, bizarrely, a garden spade.

“Just do it,” Stokes said. “I need a drink.”

Jas pushed the door open and waited for a second before entering the dark building. He held his breath and listened. Nothing at first … then the sound of something moving close by … sliding, shuffling footsteps. He took another step forward and heard a clatter and crash just ahead. Several bodies at least. Impossible to tell how many.

“Anything?” Harte yelled from outside.

“There’s something in here,” Jas replied, inching forward slowly. “Can’t see very much…”

“Be careful, mate.”

Sensing movement in the darkness to his right, Jas glanced up and, with a single well-aimed flash of his blade, sliced through the neck of a cadaver which had been about to attack. It fell at his feet and he stepped over it to reach a second door. He could definitely hear movement on the other side. He banged his fist against the wood and, almost immediately, felt something thump back against it in angry response. Taking another deep breath he pushed it open and shoved a body back as it immediately launched itself at him from the gloom. Ignoring the unwanted attentions of the corpse he propped the second door open with a fire extinguisher and began making as much noise as he could.

“Come and get us,” he shouted, his voice echoing through the vast, mausoleum-like building. There was an almost instant reaction to his words. From the shadows all around cadavers began to appear, all gravitating toward him. He quickly backed out through the open door.

“Any idea how many?” Lorna asked.

“Nah,” he replied, “couldn’t see much.” He cleared his throat and shouted again, “Come on, you fuckers! Get a move on! Get yourselves out here!”

The first two bodies appeared quickly, almost fighting with each other to get through the door. A dead security guard tried to push past the awkward bulk of a badly decayed but still grossly overweight female shopper. The shopper’s slobbering mass prevailed and it heaved itself forward, sending the smaller corpse crashing to the ground then trampling over it as it moved toward the survivors.

“Fuck me,” said Stokes, “look at the size of that thing!”

The group stood together in silence and watched the body as it waddled toward them. Its massively distended, discolored belly hung heavy over the top of a pair of brown-stained leggings, little shock waves running up through its saggy, curiously lumpy flesh with every ungainly step it took. Huge, pendulous breasts swung down like bags of grain, almost reaching its waist, a tear in its shapeless T-shirt revealing dark-veined skin like blue cheese. For a moment no one moved, everyone waiting for someone else to take the lead and dispatch the enormous cadaver. The appearance of another six bodies from the building in quick succession forced them all into action.

“Watch yourselves,” Hollis warned as his colleagues lifted their weapons and began to attack.

Harte was first to strike, grunting with satisfaction as he sunk the blade of his ax into the neck of the body of a teenage girl, the force of the strike knocking it to the ground. It reached up for him and he hauled it back to its feet, then yanked the ax free and swung it down again at its now lopsided head, this time managing to hit the back of its neck and almost completely cut through its spinal cord. Suddenly limp, the body slumped against him and he tossed it away as if he was throwing out a bag of rubbish. He stepped back, almost falling over the legs of the huge corpse which Stokes was now doing his best to destroy. The other man was ramming his shovel repeatedly into the creature’s grotesquely swollen stomach, slicing through its flesh and splattering its rancid guts everywhere. The damn thing continued to fight, its arms and legs thrashing.