Autumn Disintegration Page 12

  “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 l
uck, 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.”

  “No one’s trying to force you to do anything, Caron,” Jas said, his voice a little calmer, quieter and less emotional than the others. “All we’re saying is that we can’t afford to take Ellie with us. If you want to stay here and nurse her then that’s up to you.”

  Caron didn’t answer at first. She stared angrily into the darkness, her mind filled with so many painful thoughts and impossible decisions that she couldn’t make sense of any of it.

  “When did you last check on her?” Lorna asked. Again, Caron didn’t answer. She tried asking another question. “Have you seen her this evening? Did you go up there after the bodies first got through this morning?”

  “I haven’t seen her for hours,” Caron eventually replied, having to force herself to spit the words out. “I haven’t seen her since early this morning.”

  “Why not? I thought you’d—”

  “I’m too scared,” she admitted. “I don’t want to go in there anymore after what happened to Anita, all right? I don’t want to catch what she’s got.”

  “Then there’s your answer,” Harte said under his breath as Caron’s sobbing filled the room.

  “The longer we leave this, the worse it’s going to get,” Jas said. “If the germs don’t get us then those bastards outside will. Look what they did to Stokes.”

  “Poor bastard didn’t know they were there until they’d got him,” Webb said from where he’d been sitting on the floor next to the arm of the sofa. He swallowed hard and hoped that the others were sufficiently wrapped up with their own problems not to notice his sudden nervousness.

  “You’re right,” Hollis agreed. “We’ve all seen it. Their behavior is changing. They’re more aggressive, and they’re working together.”

  “So where would we go?” Gordon asked, begrudgingly beginning to accept that leaving now looked like their only option. Silence.

  “In the summer,” Driver suddenly announced, “I used to drive the two-twenty-two out of Catsgrove.”

  “Fuck me, Driver,” Harte gasped. “I didn’t even know you were in here!”

  “He’s always in here,” Lorna muttered angrily. “Lazy bastard never goes anywhere else.”

  “What were you saying?” Hollis asked, trying to pick out Driver in the darkness.

  “I used to drive the two-twenty-two,” he repeated. “Day trips to the coast.”

  “What? You want to go to the seaside? You’re a fucking idiot,” Webb cursed.

  “On the A197 out of town,” he continued, unfazed, “you pass this bloody huge exhibition center. Make a good place to go, that would. Out in the country. Loads of space. Nothing else for miles.”

  The room was suddenly, completely silent. Even Caron had stopped crying to listen to Driver and think about his suggestion. Hollis wondered why he’d waited until now to speak up. Whatever the reason, he was glad that Driver finally had.

  22

  After a sleepless night and an hour spent collecting her belongings from her flat, Caron climbed the stairs to the room where Ellie laid. Her nervousness increased with each step she took. She couldn’t believe she’d allowed herself to be coerced into doing this. She clutched a polyethylene bag full of drugs in her hand but didn’t know whether she’d be able to use them. She didn’t even know if she’d be able to go into Ellie’s room this morning. The stench had been appalling when she’d last checked on her. She’d made a halfhearted attempt to clean her up but the mess had been too severe. Ellie’s bedding was heavily soiled but, as Hollis had pointed out, the poor girl was bound to be
long past the point of caring now. It would have caused her more distress to get her up and clean her than to leave her lying in her own shit.

  The cold wind blew through an empty window frame, gusting into Caron’s face like a slap across the cheek. She walked down the final long, dark corridor and reached the door to Ellie’s flat. She was too scared to go in, too scared to stand outside and too scared to go back downstairs without having seen her. She could hear the others out in the car park, loading their supplies into the bus and one of the vans. She didn’t want to leave, but she definitely didn’t want to stay either. When she’d looked out the window first thing this morning the barrier at the foot of the hill had all but disappeared, obscured from view by hundreds of bodies which had managed to drag themselves across during the long hours of the night just ended. Only the steep slope had so far prevented them from getting any farther.

  Closing her eyes and struggling to hold her nerve, Caron cautiously pushed the door open and looked inside. No movement. No sound. She tiptoed into the flat and peered through the bedroom door. Still no movement. Christ, the smell was worse than she remembered: the stagnant stench of sweat, vomit, and excretion mixing with the ever-present wafts of death and decay drifting in from outside. Was Ellie dead? She wasn’t moving. Maybe it would be better for all concerned if she’d gone in her sleep. Caron took a few steps farther into the bedroom, the drugs gripped tightly in one hand, a handkerchief held over her mouth and nose with the other.

  “Ellie,” she whispered lightly. “Ellie, honey, are you awake?”

  Ellie still wasn’t moving. Caron crept a little closer, not wanting to get too near. Her foot kicked Ellie’s doll, sending it spinning across the floor. She cringed at the noise and squinted into the darkness. Ellie was on her side with her back to her and her torso uncovered. She still couldn’t see any movement. Was she breathing? Maybe she should try and touch her and check for a pulse or—