Autumn: Disintegration (15 page)

“What do you mean?” he asked anxiously, fearing that he knew the answer to his question already. “Is she…?”

“Same as Anita,” she answered abruptly. “She said she felt sick last night but I didn’t think much of it. It’s early days, but her symptoms are just the same.”

“This thing’s going to wipe the whole fucking lot of us out,” Stokes said, putting into words what everyone was thinking.

20

Late afternoon. Another wave of bodies had managed to scramble over the barrier. Between them, Harte, Jas, Stokes, and Webb had fought back the ninety or so cadavers which had forced their way over during the fifth breach and had worked quickly to strengthen the blockade at the weak point which had been compromised. Stokes and Webb had been left outside to mop up the last few scrawny figures which had escaped the initial cull and encroached closer toward the survivors’ base.

“Five left, I think,” Stokes wheezed as he moved toward the remaining corpses. Webb shielded his eyes and surveyed the area around them. The sun was setting and was now framed in a narrow strip of clear sky between the horizon and a band of heavy gray cloud just above. The brilliant orange disc drenched the world in light, casting long, eerie shadows across the rubble. He soon saw the bodies that Stokes had spotted—trapped between a skip and a pile of masonry. One of them had fallen and become wedged in the way of the others. He swung his spiked baseball bat up onto his shoulder and headed down after Stokes. Tonight, more than ever, he was in need of therapy.

Stokes was already fighting by the time Webb reached the dead, doing all the damage he could to the trapped corpse with a chisel and a lump hammer. He’d found them in a tool box in the back of a car and was now using them as a makeshift dagger and mace. It was an indication of how the day’s events had altered the individual perspective of each of the survivors that a man as lazy and normally reluctant to fight as Stokes had, through sudden necessity, become remarkably aggressive. He yanked the fallen corpse up onto its feet and dragged it out of the way, immediately allowing the remaining bodies to move again.

“Let’s get this done and get back inside,” he suggested. “I’ve had enough for one day. I need a drink.”

Webb nodded, watching the bodies wearily haul themselves back out into space. Unexpectedly and, he thought, unfairly, they moved toward him
en masse,
leaving Stokes to deal with just the solitary corpse he’d already got hold of. Probably for the best, he decided as he chose which of the pathetic creatures he’d go for first.

Panting with effort, Stokes shoved the lone figure away, then readied himself for its attack. It moved closer, lunging forward angrily with alternate steps, its unsteady movements the result of a broken right tibia which jutted out from an angry wound in its leg. He gripped his weapons tight, expecting it to throw itself at him like so many others had already done today. But instead it held back, rocking clumsily on its feet. It seemed to be sussing out its opposition—if, of course, it was capable of actually seeing anything through those dark, unfocussed eyes. The delay made the already anxious man feel even more uneasy. He decided to take the initiative, thrusting forward and swinging the lump hammer at the foul thing’s head. He caught its chin, wrenching its jaw bone out of its socket and leaving it dangling and deformed. Part of him wished he’d started fighting like this earlier because Webb was definitely right—getting rid of these abominations so aggressively was strangely therapeutic. It made him feel alive. It re-enforced the fact that he was so much better than these useless lumps of decaying gristle and putrid flesh.

“How you doing, Webb?” he yelled as the body fell at his feet. He stamped on its chest, feeling satisfaction as its ribs cracked beneath his boot.

“All right,” Webb replied, continuing to fight a short distance away. He’d already got rid of one body and had incapacitated another. It was on its knees just behind him. He’d broken both of its ankles and smashed its pelvis. Unable to fight back, it desperately tried to reach out for him, clawing wildly at the air. He ignored it, choosing instead to concentrate on another corpse which he’d just shoved facedown in the dirt. He repeatedly slammed the baseball bat down onto its back, ripping its flesh apart and sending a fountain of dark rivulets of blood and slimy scraps churning up into the air. Stokes looked around for his next victim. The fifth body actually seemed to be trying to keep out of sight. It moved behind the large yellow skip. Stokes simply went around the other way, then dragged it back out into the open and threw it to the ground. He dropped down on its exposed rib cage and hammered the chisel through its left eye.

Webb was still attacking the same corpse. He’d long since incapacitated it, but the urge to continue to violently disembowel the creature was strong. Battering it into oblivion and splattering its guts over the dust and rubble was helping him deal with the fear he’d felt since hearing that Anita had died and Ellie was ill. Stokes noticed the incapacitated cadaver behind Webb was still moving and he strode toward it purposefully, ready to put it out of its misery.

Concentrating on the carcass on the ground but suddenly aware of another figure approaching at speed, Webb turned into the sun and swung his baseball bat around with massive force. Stokes let out a whimper as it hit him square in the chest, the nails piercing through his skin and muscle and puncturing his lungs. He dropped to his knees, clutching his wounds.

“What did you do that for?” he asked, stunned with surprise, only just starting to feel the pain. Webb’s legs turned to jelly as he realized what he’d done.

“Sorry, Stokes…” he stammered pathetically. “I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know it was you … I just…”

“It really hurts,” Stokes groaned, tears of agony running down his face. He looked at his hands and saw that they were soaked with blood. His jacket and shirt were already drenched too. “Go and get the others,” he wheezed. “Get Caron…”

Webb crouched down next to him. What the hell was he going to do? He reached out his hand but stopped before he touched him. Stokes looked at him again, his eyes wide with hurt, then slumped heavily over onto his side. He breathed a few labored, gurgling breaths and then stopped. Everything was silent save for the corpse scrambling around in the dust just out of reach.

“Stokes,” Webb said, getting as close to the other man’s face as he could without touching him. “Stokes, come on! Don’t die…”

He reached out his hand again, this time forcing himself to touch Stokes’s shoulder. He shook it but there was no response. He couldn’t be dead. He just couldn’t be …

The creature behind him managed to drag itself far enough forward to reach his boot with outstretched fingers. Webb turned and grabbed the corpse by the shoulders and threw it several meters away into the dust where it flopped back over onto its chest and began to drag itself toward him again. He didn’t even look at it, concentrating instead on Stokes. He still hadn’t moved.

Jesus Christ
, Webb thought, his panic mounting,
what have I done? It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault. If the stupid idiot hadn’t crept up on me like that it never would have happened. The rest of them will understand, won’t they? They’ll know I didn’t do it on purpose …

For a few desperate seconds longer he weighed up his limited options; turn and run or go back and face the others. Much as he wanted to quickly disappear, one look at the thousands of corpses still gathered around the flats and he knew he’d never get away in one piece. If he’d been able to drive then maybe things would have been different, but the fact of the matter was that he couldn’t. He was stuck here.

*   *   *

“What’s the matter with you?” Hollis asked as Webb burst into the communal flat. Bloody Webb, why did his heart always sink when he saw him?

“They got him,” he gasped.

“What are you talking about? Who got who?”

“Stokes. They got him.”

“Who got him?” he repeated.

“The bodies. He’s dead.”

21

“I’m going,” Harte announced, his face pressed against the window. “They’re coming over the barrier again. Fuck this, I’m going.”

His words were met with silence as the rest of the survivors thought about what they’d heard. Several others had reached the same decision individually, but no one had found the courage to stand up and say as much. Harte hadn’t any courage either; he was entirely motivated by fear.

“Are you sure there’s no other option?” Caron asked. The room was dark. She couldn’t see how anyone else had reacted.

“I’ll listen to anything anyone else has got to say,” Harte replied anxiously, “but I can’t see any other way forward. For Christ’s sake, Anita’s dead upstairs, Stokes is dead down there, Ellie’s dying and the bodies are climbing over the barrier again. You tell me if there’s any better option than getting the hell out of here.”

Silence.

“We could go down there in the morning and clear them out again,” Jas suggested. “I’m not going out there tonight.”

“How many will be down there by then? I’ve seen half a dozen get over in the last couple of minutes. At that rate that’s almost a hundred an hour. There’ll be a thousand of them by the time the sun comes up.”

Hollis got up and walked over to the window where Harte was standing. He was right—in the pale moonlight outside he could see that the corpses had found another weak point in their increasingly ineffective blockade. They were scrambling over the back of another car like cockroaches scuttling across a dirty kitchen floor.

“But is it going to be any different anywhere else?” Gordon asked. He was sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the room, knees pulled up close to his chest. “It’s not going to be any better, is it?”

“Couldn’t be any worse,” Lorna mumbled.

“Don’t count on it,” Jas said quickly. “We thought we were doing well here.”

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” Caron said. “Why’s it all gone so wrong so quickly?”

“Bad luck,” Hollis answered.

“It’s a bit more than bad luck, you fucking idiot,” Harte said nervously.

“We couldn’t have planned for any of this,” he continued.

“No one could have planned for anything that’s happened since September.”

“I know that, but we thought we’d be able to sit this out here, didn’t we. I thought we’d be okay here until they’d decayed away to nothing. And maybe we still would have been if Anita hadn’t got sick.”

“But why now?” Caron asked. “Why are they climbing over the barrier today?”

“Because they’re scared,” Jas replied. “Because they’ve seen us down there beating the shit out of several hundred of them at a time, and we’ve scared them. They can’t get away because there are so many of them, so they’re fighting back like caged animals. What’s left of their brains is telling them to get us before we get them.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I do,” Hollis said quickly. “He’s right. We’ve brought this on ourselves.”

“So is there any point in leaving?”

“Well, yes,” he responded with a blunt and irritating matter-of-factness. “Of course there is. Anita’s dead and Ellie’s dying. If we stay here then there’s a strong chance more of us will go the same way.”

“But like I said,” Gordon whined from the corner, “aren’t we just going to end up in as bad a mess somewhere else? We’ll end up with another bloody huge crowd of them gathered around us.”

“Maybe, but it probably won’t be as big a crowd as we’ve got here. It’s taken more than a month for that many of them to drag themselves over here. It’s going to take time for things to get this bad if we’re starting again from scratch, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ve seen what kind of a state they’re in, haven’t you? So, logically, by the time we get to this stage again with these kind of numbers, the bodies should be pretty much incapable of harming us, no matter how many of them there are.”

“I’m sold,” Lorna said quietly. “Makes sense to me. I’m going.”

“Anyway,” Caron protested, “this is all irrelevant.”

“Is it?” she grumbled. “Why?”

“Because we can’t go anywhere with Ellie the way she is.”

“Yes, we can,” Harte quickly replied.

“We can’t just leave her here…”

“Yes, we can,” he said again. “We can’t take her with us, can we? Kind of defeats the object if we take her and whatever she’s got with us, doesn’t it?”

“But we can’t just leave her.”

“Are you sure she’s got the same thing that killed Anita?” Jas asked.

“Well, her symptoms are the same and she’s been getting worse as quickly as Anita did.”

“So she’s probably going to die, isn’t she?”

Although she knew the answer, Caron didn’t want to say it.

“She … she might not,” she stammered awkwardly. “Anita might have had some other medical problem that we didn’t know about. She might have—”

“I think she’s going to die,” Hollis said, “and a few more of us probably will too if we don’t leave here.”

“But you can’t just abandon her!”

“Does she say anything when you walk into her flat?” Jas asked.

“No, but—”

“Does she sit up in bed? Does she look at you and talk to you? Does she even know you’re in there with her?”

“Sometimes. Most of the time she’s asleep or—”

“By the time we’re ready to leave here that poor cow won’t have a clue what’s going on. She won’t know if she’s on her own or if we’re all in the room with her. More to the point, she won’t give a shit.”

“We can’t just leave her here to die. It’s inhuman!”

“Then maybe we should put her out of her misery?” Hollis suggested. “If what’s going to happen to her really is inevitable, speeding it up is only going to help.”

“Christ, she’s not a dog!” Caron screamed, crying now. “You can’t just put her down!”

“I’ll do it,” Harte said, surprising the others. “Give her some dignity…”

“
Dignity
?” she yelled in disbelief. “Where’s the dignity in being murdered?”

“There’s more dignity in dying quickly and quietly at the hands of one of us than there is lying in a dirty flat, surrounded by thousands of dead bodies and in so much pain that you lose your mind.”