Disintegration

side, no longer concerned about the noise. The three other cars had stopped again a short distance ahead. Harte was out and was running to the car which Sean and Webb had moved yesterday to get into the field. With Webb’s help he managed to shunt it far enough out of the way to leave the gate clear. Even from his position at the back of the queue Jas could see that a huge gathering of bodies had almost immediately amassed on the other side of the gate. They pushed forward angrily, rattling the low metal barrier. Webb sprinted for cover and climbed back into the middle car with Amir as Harte flicked the latch and shoved the gate open, knocking the cadavers at the front of the group backwards. They immediately surged forward again but it didn’t matter. Back behind the wheel of his car, Harte accelerated into the field and sent them flying. Amir and Sean followed, both cars crunching through gravel then pounding over the uneven mud. Jas brought up the rear, glancing back in his mirror momentarily and watching the gate swing shut again. It wasn’t locked, but it would have to do for now. Hopefully the sudden arrival of the four vehicles in the field would be enough to distract the crowds of slothful figures. Judging by the vast numbers of them already stumbling toward him, that certainly seemed to be the case.
    As they’d arranged, Harte veered off to the left, plowing into a wave of corpses and driving down the slope of the field toward the very bottom, right-hand corner, diagonally opposite to the gate they’d just entered through. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure that Jas was following. Behind him the van thumped through the sea of lethargic figures, wiping out many of them. There were hundreds of the fucking things here, many more than he’d expected and far more than had been visible from their vantage point back at the hotel. Jas accelerated again, following the curve of the blood-soaked scar Harte had left across the field.
    “That’s got to be far enough,” Harte said to himself, anxiously trying to work out where he was. His brief had been to drive as far as he could across the full width and length of the field, but he hadn’t accounted for just how little he’d be able to see from behind the wheel. His driving position was low and all that he could see around him now was a relentless forest of constantly shifting corpses. Better to stop and do it here , he decided, than end up driving into the bloody hedge and killing myself .
    He slammed on the brakes, skidding to a juddering halt, the rear end of the car spinning out and smashing into a handful of soggy, rag-doll-like cadavers. Jas pulled up alongside and watched him frantically scramble out of his seat. He leaned over into the back and emptied out half a can of fuel, then looked up to make sure that Jas was ready for him. He tried to shove the door open and almost immediately a mass of emaciated, clawing hands thrust back at him. Jas reversed, then accelerated forward, turning into the car and driving alongside it, scraping a layer of bodies away. In the short-lived moment of space which followed Harte threw himself out into the open, lit a match and dropped it into the back, then ran over to the van. He hauled himself up into the passenger seat just as the inside of the car was filled with a scorching whoosh of billowing flame. Job done.
    “Nice one,” Jas said, turning the van away and forcing it in the opposite direction back up the incline, its engine groaning with effort. The bodies around them temporarily reduced in number, the fire in the car proving to be a more interesting distraction. Harte twisted around and hung back over his seat to watch as the ragged gray figures surged toward the light. The boot of the car—packed with several plastic canisters full of fuel—exploded, showering the dead with flames and red-hot shrapnel. The car itself flipped over on its end and landed in the middle of the hordes, crushing untold numbers of them. Despite being steadily consumed by the heat and light, those which were alight but still able to move continued to stagger around until their already weakened muscles had burned away to nothing, setting light to more of the stupid creatures they blindly stumbled into.
    “Can you see the others?” Harte asked, panting with a heady mix of nerves, effort, and exhilaration.
    “We’ll find them,” Jas replied, sounding less than confident. Not only were they still surrounded by a