Autumn Disintegration Read online

  “Come on!” he shouted in frustration, slamming his hand against the steering wheel angrily. One more try and the engine suddenly spluttered into life. He accelerated hard to keep it alive, the delivery van’s exhaust belching dirty clouds of fumes into the street, then quickly reversed back. Hollis had said something to him about being careful and driving slowly, but all that was forgotten in the heat of the moment. He careered back, steering hard around to keep the van on the pavement, looking up at the canopy at the front of the damaged building and praying it would hold. It didn’t. The sides of the porch collapsed inward, littering the ground with dust and rubble. The front of the building, thankfully, remained standing. He drove up onto the pavement, leaving the road clear, and parked.

  “We need to go,” Hollis said to him as he got back out of the van. “This isn’t good.”

  Harte looked up at Lorna, Webb, and Jas, who were just about managing to hold back the tide. They remained in control, but the dead masses still herded toward them and their numbers were increasing. They’d been carving them up for several minutes now and had reduced more than fifty to little more than a bloody pile of unrecognizable body parts. Easily as many again were still stumbling lethargically toward them, and more would undoubtedly follow when the next fifty had been hacked down, then more and more …

  Harte ran back to the bus, distracted momentarily by a body which appeared to fall from out of nowhere, dropping facedown onto the street just in front of him and disintegrating on impact like bad fruit. He recoiled in disgust as dark, sticky blood and other foul substances splashed up at him from the splattered remains on the tarmac. He looked up at the office block beside him, bewildered. The sudden, constant noise and movement out in the street had alerted a number of corpses which had been trapped inside the building but which had now found a way out thanks to the damage he’d caused. Drawn out of the shadows by the chaos outside, the stupid creatures were now plummeting out from the first floor like lemmings. Ignorant to the danger and desperate to get closer to the living, the damn things were literally falling out of the sky around him. Another one fell nearby, its head somehow protected from the fall but its body irrevocably damaged. Regardless, it tried to pull itself along the ground toward him with its one remaining good arm.

  “We’re going,” he announced to Driver. Not needing any further instruction, Driver straightened the bus again and moved it forward. Stumbling corpses began to slip through on either side, their speed increased by the pressure of others pushing from behind.

  A short distance up ahead, Hollis moved their van up to where the others were fighting. Lorna climbed in quickly, shouting across at Webb and Jas for them to follow. Webb heard her and ran back, stopping when he realized that Jas was still out there, isolated from everything else that was happening by the noise of his weapon. He ran forward again and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around and stumbling back as Jas lunged at him, chain-saw blade whirring angrily. At the last possible second he realized it was Webb and yanked the blade back.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he spat furiously as unchallenged corpses began to hurl themselves at him. “I could have killed you!”

  Jas immediately shut up when he saw what was happening behind him. Suddenly able to get through again, streams of cadavers were pushing ever closer. Sandwiched between two advancing walls of dead flesh, he followed Webb to the van and dived for cover.

  “Get in!” Lorna screamed, her voice so loud that it hurt. Bodies slammed against the van. One of them, half of its face eaten away by rot, glared at her with its one remaining eye and hammered against her window with greasy, leaden fists. She turned away from it in disgust, but all she could see were more equally hideous dead faces staring back through every available square inch of glass. Hollis drove forward, knocking the monsters away and powering through the crowd, thankful that they’d decided to move before the corpses had been able to bunch up tight. The entire street, which had been empty just minutes earlier, was now teeming with death—infested with hundreds of decaying cadavers.

  “What the hell just happened?” Jas breathlessly asked from the back. “That was so fast.”

  “I guess that’s the reception we’re going to get wherever we go,” Hollis answered, holding the steering wheel tight as they juddered through the seething crowd.

  “Five minutes,” Jas said. “We couldn’t have been out there any longer than five minutes.”

  “If we’re all that’s left,” Lorna said quietly, “then this will keep happening. Back at the flats we’d got thousands of them gathered in the one place because they knew where we were. Out here they’re running wild.”

  25

  The van powered along quiet and relatively clear rural roads having easily outrun the last of the rotting population of Cudsford. The difference here on the other side of the town was stark; there were hardly any bodies and considerably fewer wrecks and ruins than they’d seen in a long time. Hollis noticed that there were still plenty of the telltale signs of the devastation which had blighted the country, he just had to look a little harder to see them. Moss and weeds were slowly taking over here and there, encroaching on everything with greens and browns. Buildings, abandoned vehicles, and dead bodies alike would eventually be completely swallowed up and absorbed back into the landscape.

  “Where’s the bus?” Jas asked, anxiously looking over his shoulder. Hollis glanced into his mirror. The road behind them was empty. He slowed down—not daring to stop, despite the relative lack of bodies around them—and waited. After a few seconds the lumbering, blood-splattered bus came back into view. The sudden freedom of the open road had caught Hollis off-guard and he’d simply driven too fast.

  “Here they are,” he announced, accelerating again.

  The wide, tree-lined road curved to the left around the foot of a large hill. Several hundred meters ahead was a traffic island, sign-posted with names which didn’t mean anything to Hollis, who searched for something familiar. He thought he could remember the route to the exhibition center Driver had talked about, but like everyone else his nerves were shattered and he needed reassurance.

  “Any ideas?” he asked hopefully.

  “Second exit,” Lorna replied, her voice sounding nervous and unsure. Hollis steered the van around the roundabout, flinching slightly as he plowed into a lone body which had foolishly tripped into his path.

  “I need a piss,” Jas said, banging on the side of the van.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Hollis snapped.

  “Well, you could stop the van and let me out,” he answered, annoyed. “I’m not going to do it in here.”

  “And I’m not going to stop.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Hollis, I’m bloody desperate.”

  “You’ve got to stop,” Webb chipped in. “Come on, I need to go too.”

  “Just piss in a bottle or something and throw it out of the window. I’m not stopping. Look what happened back there.”

  “That was different and you know it.” Jas sighed. “That was the middle of a town, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing around here.”

  “You reckon? Look over there.”

  He pointed to an area of land over to the right of another roundabout. A number of corpses were gathered outside a dilapidated petrol station and service area, milling around between the pumps and outbuildings. When they heard the noise of the engines they immediately began to herd toward the road in a ragtag group.

  “So what?” Webb protested. “There’s fifteen of them, twenty at most. Bloody hell, Hollis, any one of us could sort that number out on our own back at the flats.”

  “Yes, but we’re not at the flats now, are we?”

  “A corpse is a corpse. Doesn’t matter where it is.”

  “I know that, but we don’t know the area.”

  “It’s all fields, for fuck’s sake. There’s nothing to know.”

  “Things are different when we don’t know the area. Look what happened earl
ier. You don’t want to be caught out by a hundred of them when you’re stood there with your dick in your hands.”

  “Come on, Hollis, stop making excuses. Just stop the van for a minute so we can have a piss.”

  “No.”

  Hollis put his foot down and increased his speed, making a point and powering toward the first of the group of cadavers which had staggered out into the road. He swerved around them and accelerated again, racing ahead down a long straight, leaving the bus trundling after them, struggling to catch up.

  “You fucking jerk,” Webb hissed. “Just because you’re scared you’re going to make the rest of us suffer. You know what I hate most about you?”

  “I don’t give a shit Webb. Just shut up!” Hollis ordered, silencing the whining little idiot in the back as he swung the van around a sharp right-hand turn. His speed was such that two of the wheels temporarily left the ground, then crashed heavily back down. “Jesus Christ,” he cursed, slamming on the brakes, bringing the speeding vehicle to a sudden, lurching halt just inches away from the side of an abandoned truck which blocked the full width of the road.

  Behind him Driver had accelerated to catch up and now struggled to stop the bus in time. Jas turned around and braced himself for impact. The distance was deceptive but there was no collision, just a bloody thump when a lone corpse stumbled out in front of the still-moving bus and was hit and thrown against the back of the van. He watched as it slid slowly down the glass. By the time it had dropped to the ground the vehicle behind was still. He could see the relief on Driver’s normally expressionless face.

  “Oh that’s just bloody perfect,” Lorna moaned, looking at the obstruction in front of them. “What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

  Decayed figures immediately began to converge on the two vehicles, flinging themselves forward and hammering on their metal sides.

  “Now do you believe me?” Hollis shouted, turning around to face Webb and Jas in the back. “You see, according to your logic there shouldn’t be any bodies around here but look, there are loads of the damn things. Do either of you want to go for your piss now?”

  He was right. Inexplicably the dead were again swarming all around them. Jas didn’t want to look for explanations or prolong his argument with Hollis; the sooner he got this mess sorted, he decided, the sooner he could empty his bladder. He moved quickly, climbing out of the van and grabbing a crowbar on the way, not wanting to risk the noise from the chain saw again. He slammed the door shut behind him and swung his fist at the nearest body, knocking it into the back of the van, then battered the head of another corpse into a bloody pulp with the crowbar. Many more of the pitiful creatures lurched after him, hauling themselves along on weary feet. He slipped past the bulk of them, confusing them with his speed, and ran toward the cab of the crashed truck, quickly scrambling up onto the bonnet, then climbing higher and standing on the roof.

  “Can you shift it?” Hollis shouted from the van, leaning out of the window and pushing a furious cadaver away with one hand. “Is there any way around?”

  Something wasn’t right. Hordes of wretched bodies clamored around the vehicles, reaching up for Jas incessantly. In no more than a couple of minutes the stretch of road they’d just driven along had become a seething mass of furious, baying corpses and still more were coming. Where were they coming from and how many more were there? More important, how would they get away if he couldn’t get this bloody truck shifted? They’d have to move quick if they wanted to—

  Hang on a second, he thought as realization suddenly dawned. The ground on the other side of the truck he was standing on was clear. Absolutely empty. There wasn’t a single damn corpse anywhere to be seen. The truck had stopped in such a position that it had blocked the entire width of the carriageway, left almost perfectly at right angles to the direction of the road. Its front was pushed up close to a brick wall and its back end overlapped with the side of another similar-sized vehicle, making it impossible for anything to get past. He dropped to his knees and pressed his face against the rain-streaked windscreen. There was no body in the cab. No driver. This truck hadn’t crashed here, he realized, the bloody thing had been parked!

  Suddenly revitalized with energy, he jumped down onto the clear side and pulled himself up into the cab. Christ, whoever had done this had even left the keys in the ignition! He’d never driven anything of this size before but he had to act fast and do what he could. He started it up, cringing inwardly as the machine shuddered into life and the throaty roar of its powerful engine drowned out every other sound he could hear. More through luck than judgment he managed to select a reverse gear and sent the truck juddering and kangaroo-jumping back, steering hard to swerve its tail around the other vehicle which had been abandoned directly behind. Up ahead Hollis drove the van through the gap as soon as he was able. The bus also squeezed through, as did somewhere in the region of thirty scrambling bodies. Jas searched anxiously for a forward gear now, aware that every second he wasted allowed more and more of the dead to flood through after the survivors. With relief he did it, sending the truck lurching forward again, stopping just inches short of the wall and blocking up the gap, crushing another handful of spindly figures which had managed to get halfway through. He stopped the engine and sat there with his head in his hands, panting with exhaustion as if he’d just run a marathon.

  By the time Jas got out of the truck, the job of destroying the cadavers which had made it through the gap was well in hand. Webb, Lorna and Harte were each standing in different locations, attacking the bodies with whatever weapons they’d managed to lay their hands on. The corpses grouped around each one of them, almost seeming to taunt them by delaying their attacks momentarily. Some stood back and waited. Others, sometimes moving in twos or threes, immediately launched themselves at the nearest survivor. Hollis remained behind the wheel of the van, driving around furiously, doing all he could to wipe out as many of the dead as possible without hitting any of the others. Gordon, who had finally plucked up enough courage to emerge from the bus, quickly realized what Hollis was doing. He offered himself up to a relatively quick-moving, long-dead shell of a man. As the repellent body stumbled toward him he stepped back out of the way and watched with smug satisfaction as the van powered forward, smashing it into oblivion.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Jas yelled to Lorna as he ran toward her. He tripped a corpse, kicking its legs out from under it, then stamped on its face until it stopped moving.

  “What do you mean?” Lorna shouted back between gasps and grunts of effort. She shoved the grotesque remains of a schoolteacher back into the path of the van. The button-less, tattered rags of the dead woman’s blouse revealed her exposed torso. Her green-blue skin was severely lacerated and what was left of her intestines hung down like a bizarre adornment to her outfit. The van plowed into her at speed, the force of the impact hurling her high into the air.

  “Look around you,” Jas replied, waiting for the van to pass between them and the noise to reduce.

  Lorna did as he said. Until now it had been difficult to see anything through the mass of constantly shifting bodies but there were only a handful of them left now, and Hollis was doing his best to chase them down. Ignoring the chaos, for the first time she allowed herself to stop and look around at her surroundings. She was standing next to a set of traffic lights. There were signposts and yellow-hatched markings on the road and … and she realized that this had once been a busy junction. The road they’d been following continued through the junction with turnings to the right and left making a crossroads. But, apart from the corpses they’d just hacked down, the area was completely clear. She couldn’t understand—every other stretch of road she’d seen like this had been almost waist deep in wreckage and bodies. Surely the traffic would have been busy here when everyone had died back in September? The entire junction had been cleared and every available exit sealed off. Who had done this?

  Webb swung his baseball bat into the chest of the l
ast corpse standing, sweeping it up and smashing it back against a brick wall. He yanked out his weapon and the body dropped to the ground, a bloody, deflated mass. Driver and Hollis stopped their respective vehicles and suddenly everything was quiet and still. The only noise came from the muffled thumping and banging of countless dead hands hammering against the other side of the truck.

  “Which way now, then?” Gordon asked as he carefully wiped blood off his boots on a patch of overgrown grass.

  “Don’t know,” Hollis answered, looking around for inspiration. “Whoever did this must be around here somewhere. They wouldn’t have gone to all this effort if they were just going to—”

  His words were interrupted by the sudden slam of a door and the rumble of an engine starting. The vehicle up ahead—a long, white and blue coach—was slowly beginning to move out of the way.

  Harte grinned. “There’s our answer!”

  26

  Hollis waited impatiently behind the wheel of the van for the driver of the coach to move out of the way. He watched intently as the long, cumbersome vehicle trundled slowly and very carefully backward, leaving the mouth of a narrow, previously unseen road open. A solitary figure stood a short distance back up the track and waved his arms, beckoning them toward him. He began to jog away, occasionally looking back over his shoulder to make sure they were following. Behind them the driver of the coach parked it back into its original position across the width of the road, then got out and climbed onto a bicycle which had been hurriedly dumped in the tall hedgerow. He pedaled furiously after the bus and the van.

  “Where the hell are we going now?” Jas asked, standing at the front of the bus next to Driver’s cab, swaying as they moved along the twisting track. Tall, impenetrable, leafy hedgerows lined either side of the road, preventing them from seeing anything other than what was immediately ahead and behind them.