Disintegration

and kicked at the windscreen. A series of three good, strong boots to the already weakened glass was enough to shatter it and kick it through. He turned back around again, grabbing the can of fuel and his baseball bat as he moved, and then crawled out of the car.
    The appalling sight which greeted him was almost enough to send him scuttling back under cover but he forced himself to keep going. For as far as he could see ahead the stream was nothing more than a sickening stew of decay, packed solid with incalculable numbers of corpses which had fallen into the mire over time and been unable to get out again. Strangely cushioned and protected in the ditch, however, they continued to move constantly, never stopping but never getting anywhere either. The water he’d heard under the roof of the car was little more than a pathetic trickle. Filled with unidentifiable lumps and chunks and with a disgusting putrid brown-green hue, it reminded him of vomit.
    The nearest bodies were trapped, either by each other or by the upturned car, and he found that he was able to move around them with surprising freedom. Working quickly he opened the fuel can and set it down under the bonnet. He tore a strip of rag from the back of a corpse which was stuck facing away from him, soaked it with fuel and jammed it into the mouth of the can. Taking out his lighter from under several layers of clothes, he lit the rag and furiously scrambled away.
    “Webb…”
    What the fuck was that? He spun around anxiously. It sounded like Amir, but he was dead, wasn’t he? Jesus Christ, what if he was wrong? What if Amir was still alive; if he’d just passed out because of the blood? Webb could see him through the cracked windscreen. He didn’t look like he’d moved. He must have imagined the noise. Amir’s eyes were still closed and the blood was still dripping and … and the rag was still burning. Webb jumped to his feet and hauled himself up the steep bank, grabbing at random corpses and using them as leverage, stamping his feet down onto flesh and bone and whatever else he could get a grip on. He threw himself over the top of the bank, straight into a solid mass of bodies the size of which he couldn’t even begin to appreciate, and then dropped to his knees as the car behind him exploded. Like unprotected trees around a bomb blast, hundreds of cadavers were flattened in a rough circle around the epicenter. Webb found himself buried under a mass of dark figures dripping with decay.
    Keep moving.
    No time to think. Make the most of the delay before the rest of them start moving toward the blast. As he climbed back to his feet and began to trip through a quagmire of flesh and body parts several inches deep, he glanced back over his shoulder. The car, or parts of it at least, had been blown back out of the ditch. He could see twisted chunks of its blackened frame burning fiercely. If Amir wasn’t dead, he thought, then he is now.
    All around Webb, hordes of bodies were turning and advancing toward him. They staggered and stumbled unsteadily through the gruesome slime which coated the once-pristine golf course. Thousands of continually moving feet had churned the remains of countless fallen creatures with the cloying mud to cover everything with a layer of dark, sticky, foul-smelling sludge. Keep moving , he told himself, it’s the fire they’re heading for, not me. As those corpses which had made the most progress lurched nearer he instinctively dropped to his knees and began to crawl through the slurry around and between their emaciated feet, hoping that remaining low would be enough to keep them from reacting to him. Stupid things never look down, he tried to reassure himself. If they looked where they were going, there wouldn’t have been so many of them stuck in the bloody stream. He lowered his head and held onto his baseball bat as he began to move through the sea of spindly, unsteady legs which slipped and slid through the once-human soup all around him.
    Which way now?
    Time to make another decision. He couldn’t keep crawling like this indefinitely—although he continued to do so as he tried to decide what to do next. Lifting his head momentarily, he glimpsed the trunk of a large, twisted tree up ahead and to his right. He altered his course and moved toward it, intending to use it as cover as the crowd continued to gravitate toward the fire. If he stayed on the blind side of the tree they probably wouldn’t see him. In less than a