Disintegration a-5 Read online

  Disintegration

  ( Autumn - 5 )

  David Moody

  "As Moody’s Autumn series continues, it’s been about a month and a half since a virus wiped out most of humanity and turned the dead into zombies—although the author doesn’t use either the word zombie or most of the familiar tropes. A small group of men and women are holed up in a block of flats, barricaded against the lumbering dead. But their uneasy safety doesn’t last, and eventually they’re forced out into the open, where, rather coincidentally, they meet up with another band of survivors who seem to have made themselves a much more secure stronghold, until clashing personalities inside the compound threaten to put them all at risk. This is a crisply written novel (although it’s not as visceral as Moody’s Hater series, which tackles the zombie theme from a more violent angle) with well-defined characters and a palpable sense of creeping terror: these undead might be sluggish and easy to kill, but they also seem to be a lot smarter than anyone realizes. The novel ends on a terrifying, tragic note, promising a suitably horrific finale for the series."—David Pitt, Booklist

  Acknowledgments

  This book was originally announced back in 2006, and written shortly thereafter. At the time, the previously released Autumn books—some published independently, others given away for free—were doing well, a low-budget film adaptation of the first novel had been announced, and everything was moving along nicely. Then things went a little crazy … My novel Hater was released, Guillermo del Toro became attached to a movie version, and the Autumn and Hater books were subsequently acquired by Thomas Dunne Books in the United States and Gollancz in the UK.

  Sounds like a dream come true, doesn’t it? It was. It still is.

  The only downside was that there were a lot of people waiting expectantly to read this book five years ago, only to have it snatched from them before they’d even seen the cover. So I’d like to publicly apologize and thank them all for waiting. Sorry for the unintentional but unavoidable delay. I hope you (finally) enjoy Disintegration.

  I also want to thank my family and friends for their continued love and support. Thanks also to Brendan Deneen and all at Thomas Dunne Books, Jo Fletcher and all at Gollancz, John Schoenfelder, and Scott Miller.

  Finally, thanks to the close-knit community of zombie authors of which I’m proud to be a part, particularly Wayne Simmons and Iain McKinnon, and also to Richard Grundy, Craig Paton, Antony White, Michael Dick, Jack O’Hare, David Naughton-Shires, David Joseph, Daniel Boucher, and all the other artists and designers who’ve contributed to the ongoing www.lastoftheliving.net project.

  Prologue

  THE SWIMMER

  They said I should have burned her with the rest of them. When everyone died I cleared this place out room by room, not stopping till I’d got rid of every last one of them. I worked for hours until every trace of dead flesh had been removed from the building. Except for her. Except for the Swimmer.

  I found her a couple of days later when she’d just started to move. Don’t know how I missed her before, lying there dressed in her bathing costume. Poor bitch had been about to take a dip in the pool when it caught her. The doors had swung shut, trapping her inside. When I first found her she was shuffling about in the shadows like those on the other side of the boundary fence, constantly dragging herself from one end of the room to the other, backward and forward, walking into walls and lockers, tripping over upturned benches and other obstructions. She looked pretty comical crashing around, stupid almost, but I wasn’t laughing. I was too scared. I still am.

  When the others got here we talked for hours about getting rid of her. Ginnie and Sean were dead set against the idea of keeping her inside the building with us, even though there was no way she could get out into any other part of the hotel. Howard and Amir came around to my way of thinking pretty quickly. It made sense to keep hold of her and watch her. Christ, those bloody bodies dragged themselves up onto their feet after they’d been lying dead for days and none of us knew what they might do next. I knew that the Swimmer would show us. In a perverse way she’s helped us to stay alive. Shut away in the changing room, she’s sheltered from the rest of the dead world outside, and over the weeks we’ve watched her change. We’ve watched her decay. She’s shown us how the dead have evolved. She’s shown us what they’ve become.

  The changes have been gradual. Sometimes nothing seems to happen for days, but then she’ll react differently to one of us and we’ll know that the hundreds of thousands of bodies on the other side of the fence will soon be doing the same. None of what’s happened to the world makes any sense, but what’s happening to them makes the least sense of all: as they continue to rot, their control and coordination has somehow returned. It’s like they’re starting to think again and make decisions. Sometime soon, I’m sure, they’ll reach the point where they’ve decayed to such an extent they can no longer keep moving—but when will that be? And what will they be capable of by then?

  It was less than a week after the day the world died when I first realized she was watching me. A week of dumb, uncoordinated, and random movements, and then suddenly she could see and hear again. Her dark eyes stared back at me whenever I approached. And when Howard’s dog barked she reacted too. She lurched toward the window and hammered her hands against the glass as if she was trying to escape. As the days passed her reactions slowed down, became more deliberate and less instinctive. I realized she was regaining control.

  I’ve spent hours watching her since then. Sometimes I can’t take my eyes off her, even though she disgusts me. I’m sure I saw her here before she died. I remember her once-pretty round face, heart-shaped lips, slightly upturned nose and short, dark brown hair, flecked with highlights. Her subsequent deterioration has been remarkable. Even in here, where she’s isolated and protected from the weather and the worst of the insects, she has been reduced to little more than a grotesque shadow of the person she once was. The color of her flesh has changed from the white-pink of life to a cold blue-gray. Her skin has shrivelled in places and slipped in others. There are bags under her bulging eyes where her mottled flesh has sagged. Her body seems almost to be turning itself inside out. Gravity has dragged her rotting guts down and now they’re dripping out between her unsteady legs. Even from the other side of the door I can smell the stench of her decay.

  It’s almost two months since this nightmare began. Recently the Swimmer’s behavior has changed again. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but she seems more aware than ever now—more aware of me and the others, and more self-aware too. I don’t know if she has any memory of who she used to be or if she understands what she has become. Whatever she does or doesn’t know, a couple of days ago I swear I caught her trying to open the door. I found her leaning up against it, banging her right hand down on the handle repeatedly. She eventually noticed me standing at the window and stopped. She looked at me for a few seconds, then stumbled back into the shadows. If she’d run at the glass I’d have been less concerned, but she didn’t. She actually moved away. She saw that I was watching her and tried to hide.

  Yesterday afternoon, for a short time, she seemed to forget herself. She stood in the middle of the room looking directly at me through the window. I couldn’t take my eyes off her grotesque face and I found myself wondering again who she might have been before she died. Does she see me and remember what she once was, or does she see me as a threat? Am I her enemy?

  I hate her. She’s one corpse alone in a world filled with millions but, because she’s in here with us, I’ve begun to aim all my pain and frustration directly at her. Sometimes I feel like she’s taunting me and it’s all I can do not to destroy her. Yesterday, when she was watching me, I stood on the other side of the door with an ax in my hands
for what felt like forever. I wanted so badly to cut her down to nothing and batter her into memory.

  I know I can’t harm her. We still need her.

  1

  Webb kicked his way through the litter behind the counter of the petrol station kiosk. They’d been here several times before and had cleared the place out, but maybe today he’d find one last packet of cigarettes that he’d missed last time, or a previously overlooked bottle of drink. It was always worth a look. Christ, what he’d give for a can of lager right now.

  Wait … he could hear an engine. More than that, he could hear three engines—the bike and both the vans. Bloody hell, they were going without him! The fucking idiots were leaving him behind! No time to think. He scrambled back over the counter, stepped through the mess of twisted metal and broken glass where the entrance door used to be, then ran out into the middle of the forecourt.

  “Wait!” he screamed, his voice quickly deteriorating from a strong yell to a strained smoker’s rasp. Bent over double coughing, he glanced up and caught a glimpse of the roof of one of the vans as it raced back toward the flats. It was just a momentary flash of sunlight on metal, gone in a second but visible long enough to leave him in no doubt that he was now completely alone. Alone, that was, apart from a fractious mob of more than two hundred dead bodies closing in on him. The whine of the engines faded away into echoes. Still coughing, Webb covered his mouth, desperate to stifle the noise but knowing it was already too late.

  What are my options? Can’t go back into the store, the back door’s blocked. They’ll follow me in and I’ll be trapped.

  He glanced across the forecourt at the green and yellow liveried tanker they’d been siphoning fuel from. Could he climb on top of it and sit and wait until something else distracted them? It might well have worked, but it would have taken time. Although clear and blue immediately above him, the skies all around had been filling with threatening gray rain clouds all afternoon. It would be dark soon. He didn’t relish the prospect of being stranded on top of the tanker all night, soaked through and surrounded by rotting flesh.

  Only one option left. Run.

  Webb surveyed the opposition and gripped his weapon tight. A baseball bat with four six-inch nails hammered through its end, it was a rudimentary but undeniably effective, modern-day variation on the medieval mace. Basic or not, over the weeks he’d used it to get rid of literally hundreds of these vile, germ-infested bastards and he was thankful for it.

  With vast swathes of disintegrating corpses advancing from all sides it didn’t seem to matter which direction he chose. Hoping to buy himself a few precious seconds’ breathing space he yanked the loose helmet off the withered head of a dead motorcyclist which lay at his feet. Like an Olympic hammer thrower he spun around through almost a full circle before letting go of the helmet. It flew toward the store, smashing through what was left of an already broken window and filling the air with ugly noise. The nearest of the shambling cadavers began to shuffle toward the building, their movements in turn causing more and more of the dumb fuckers to follow like sheep. Webb held his position as the crowd surged predictably, then ran the other way.

  He could still just about hear the bike in the distance. Its powerful engine was louder than the two vans combined and he knew he’d probably be able to hear it until it reached the flats. It was only just over a mile. If the streets were clear he’d probably be able to run there in around ten minutes. Problem was, the streets were never clear anymore. Between here and home were thousands upon thousands of corpses, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, and one of the nearest had just lifted its bony arms and begun lurching forward in his direction. With a grunt of effort Webb lifted the baseball bat and swung it in a loose arc above his head. He thumped it down into the side of the creature’s chest, sweeping it off its already unsteady feet. Another swing, this time in the opposite direction, and two more swaying corpses were hacked down. Three gone, he thought to himself as he started running again, just a few thousand more to go.

  Christ, he hated the smell of these bloody things. It was always there, hanging in the air like an ever-present fug, but it was a thousand times worse at close quarters. With his shoulder dropped he charged into the middle of the crowd straight ahead. Most of the bodies were too slow to react and they toppled like dominos, each one causing more of them to fall. Webb kept moving, leaping over their slow, grabbing hands and holding his weapon out in front of him like a battering ram, using its rounded end to smash them out of the way. A sudden unexpected gap in the crowd opened up, allowing him to slow momentarily and get his bearings. He was running away from the petrol station, but he was heading back toward the center of town. He needed to be moving in the opposite direction. Forced to make an instant decision, he changed direction and headed back toward the main road, the way the others would have gone.

  The repulsive remains of a forty-eight-day dead traffic warden angrily threw itself at him. Still dressed in the ragged scraps of its black uniform it moved with a sudden burst of unexpected speed and ferocity. Webb had seen more and more of them attacking like this recently and he didn’t like it. The faster ones scared the hell out of him, although he’d never admit it to any of the other survivors. He couldn’t understand how something which had been dead for weeks could be getting stronger. For a split second he looked up into what was left of the traffic warden’s hideously decomposed face before swinging the baseball bat around again and burying the points of two six-inch nails deep in the side of its skull.

  Stuck.

  Shit. He’d hit the body with such force that he couldn’t get his weapon out. The sharp metal spikes were wedged tight into bone. He yanked hard, but only succeeded in pulling the thrashing body over onto the ground. It lay squirming at his feet as more and more of them closed in on him. He could feel their fingers on his back now, clawing and scratching as he tried to free the nails from the skull. Still stuck. Stay calm, he thought to himself, struggling to keep himself from panicking. They’re dead. I’m alive. I can do this …

  Webb stamped his boot down across the throat of the writhing corpse. The dead traffic warden, now flat on its back with its arms and legs flailing wildly, glared up at him with a single dark eye, the other having been gouged out of its socket by the force of the baseball bat impact. Webb began to twist the handle of his bat in his hands, still keeping the pressure on the corpse under his foot. Moving with frantic, frightened speed as the other corpses pressed against him, Webb twisted the bat backward and forward, from side to side and around and around in a desperate attempt to sever the head. Long-dead flesh, muscle and cartilage began to tear and brittle bone snapped. The body finally lay still and he stomped angrily on its neck until the final few troublesome connecting sinews gave way. Relieved, he took a deep breath of dirty, germ-filled air, then lifted the bat (with dead head still intact) and swung it out in front of him as he ran on.

  Pushing his way through an impenetrable forest of cadavers, Webb forced himself to keep moving. He’d overheard a conversation between Hollis and Lorna on their way out to the petrol station less than an hour earlier. Much as Hollis annoyed him, he knew he’d been right and the other man’s words now rattled around his head. “If you’re surrounded,” he’d said, “do anything but stop. Stand still and you’ll have a hundred of them onto you in seconds. Keep moving and they can’t get you. You’ve got speed, strength and control on your side; you can be gone before they’ve even realized you’re there.” Panicking again, Webb tried to work out how he was supposed to keep moving when suddenly all he could see in front of him was a brick wall. He changed direction and dived to his left, circling around the back of the petrol station now. Just keep moving, he told himself again, willing his already tired legs to continue working. Another swipe of the baseball bat (and impaled head) knocked a trio of bodies off their feet and down onto the concrete. Those immediately behind fell over the fallen corpses in their hopelessly uncoordinated attempt to get to Webb. Stupid fuckers, he thought a
s he pushed another two of them away with a determined hand-off before dropping his shoulder, increasing his speed and scrambling up a slippery grass bank toward the road. He cursed as he pulled himself upright and started to sprint again, muscles burning with effort. The wide carriageway ahead was packed solid with corpses. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks, he tried to assure himself as he barged into the nearest few. The dead had such a lack of color about them that it was sometimes difficult to make out any detail. Weeks of decomposition had eliminated almost all their distinguishing features. Different skin tones and colorings had been bleached away by decay so that the endless crowds now seemed to have mutated into a single dead race. Their ragged clothing was stained with so much dirt, dust, mold and seepage that they all now appeared to be wearing a kind of gray-green uniform. The upshot of all this, Webb decided as he threw a pretty decent punch at another one which had shown a little control and lashed out at him with gnarled, twisted hands, was that he couldn’t tell whether there were a hundred of them up ahead or a thousand.

  Just keep moving.

  Webb found himself in a narrow sliver of space, just room enough to be able to swing the baseball bat around again. He struck out in an aimless arc, not knowing what, if anything, he’d hit. He made contact with the neck and left shoulder of an awkwardly advancing dead pensioner, hitting it with sufficient force to throw its skeletal frame up into the air like a rag doll. The traffic warden’s head, still impaled, was loosened by the impact. Webb’s second swing, even lazier in aim but stronger than the first, was enough to dislodge the decapitated head completely. He looked up and watched in amazement as he scored a bizarre home run, the head spinning up through the gray sky high above the massive crowd. Distracted, he followed its flight until it crashed back down to earth. A sudden surge of bodies forced him into action again.