Disintegration

seemingly unending mass of rancid flesh, but the gradient of the hill was also proving difficult. They were driving up, but they couldn’t yet see what was happening at the top of the climb where the ground leveled out closer to the golf course.
    *   *   *
     
    Less than a hundred meters away but out of sight of the van, Amir and Webb were also struggling. The sheer number of bodies which had surrounded their car had completely disoriented both men. Throngs of disintegrating cadavers filled every available scrap of space, making it difficult to see in any direction and impossible to navigate. Amir kept the car moving forward, but had little idea where he was heading and was certainly not traveling at anywhere near a fast enough speed. His relative inexperience with the dead was painfully apparent. Rather than accelerate into them he frequently swerved or just ground to a halt and tried to nudge them out of the way. Webb was beginning to get desperate.
    “Hit the fucking things!” he screamed. “Speed up, for Christ’s sake!”
    “But I don’t know where we’re going,” Amir protested, wrenching the steering wheel hard around to the right and turning them in a tight circle, wheels skidding in decay.
    “Neither do they.”
    “But we might end up in the fence or too close to the gate.”
    “It doesn’t fucking matter.” Webb shouted, his voice hoarse with panic and exacerbation. “We’re about to blow the bloody car up!”
    “Why don’t you drive, then?” Amir suggested. Webb just glared at him.
    “There!” he said suddenly, pointing over to the far left where he’d just spotted the roof of the van whipping past above the heads of the corpses. Amir slowed again, then turned around and accelerated. “Keep moving,” Webb moaned, terrified that they were about to come to a sudden stop, stranded and surrounded. They burst into a muddy track of open, gore-soaked space, a sure sign that the van or one of the other cars had been there just a few seconds earlier. Amir followed the bloody route through the crowd until it disappeared again, swallowed up by another group of lurching figures.
    “Where now?”
    “Let’s just do it here.”
    “But the van’s not here. We can’t do it until the van’s here to pick us up.”
    Webb seethed, holding onto the side of his seats as the car bounced over a particularly uneven stretch of ground and clattered into another swell of rotting flesh. “You bloody idiot, it doesn’t matter where the van is. Once we set fire to this thing they’ll see us quickly enough.”
    Amir couldn’t think straight. What did he do? Did he keep driving or was Webb right? Should they just stop now? He winced as the front of the car sliced the legs out from under a ragged body, cutting it in two and sending its head and torso spinning into the windscreen directly in front of him, leaving a large crack and a slimy smear of black blood. There were more bodies than ever up ahead of them now, so many that they looked like a solid black mass, no longer recognizable as individual cadavers. Behind the corpses he could see trees rising up on either side. Webb realized what was happening before Amir could react.
    “You’re gonna drive us into the fucking fence!” he screamed, covering his head.
    Amir finally recognized where he was, but it was too late to do anything about it. He’d been here with Martin and the others way, way back when the nightmare had first begun. He’d spent hours out here as they’d struggled to channel the unresponsive bodies away from the hotel. There was a gap in the trees which marked the position of a break in the fence he and the others had made, and on the other side of the fence was the golf course. It was too late …
    He had to make a snap decision. With so many corpses coming toward him he knew he either had to hit them at full speed or stop and turn back again. Too close to the fence now, he thought as the trees loomed up above them, only one option left . He jammed his foot down on the accelerator pedal.
    “Hold on,” he said pointlessly as he struggled to keep hold of the steering wheel. The car bounced and clattered through the hole that he, Howard and Martin had hacked through the fence weeks earlier. Webb braced himself for the impact he felt sure would come at any second.
    The wheels thumped back down onto the hard ground. A sudden swerve to the left, then to the right, and the car burst out of the rough and onto the fairway. Too