Disintegration

Too many of them.”
    “Where is Amir?”
    He shook his head, and a brief moment of silence followed.
    “How come you were gone for so long?” Jas asked.
    “Car got stuck in a ditch,” he mumbled. “Couldn’t get Amir out. Think the crash killed him anyway. I did what you asked me to, though.”
    “You blew up the car?”
    He nodded.
    “Where?”
    “On the golf course.”
    “With Amir in it?”
    “He was already dead.”
    “And you made sure of that,” Jas muttered under his breath. Hollis glared at him.
    “Give him a break,” he said angrily. “You’re not helping.”
    “Webb,” Howard asked, getting a little closer now that his dog had calmed down, “how exactly did you get back?”
    Webb swigged more water and dropped the empty bottle on the floor.
    “Ran,” he answered, still struggling to think straight.
    “We know that,” Howard continued, his stomach suddenly twisting with nerves, “but which way did you run? Did you come back through the field and over the gate, or did you find another way through?”
    Webb was shaking his head.
    “No,” he replied, “came back across the golf course.”
    “And how exactly did you get off the golf course and back into the grounds of the hotel?”
    “Followed the music.”
    “So you managed to reach the clubhouse?”
    “Came through it. Broke in and got out the back way.”
    Howard looked around. Had no one else realized what Webb was saying?
    “What’s wrong, Howard?” Hollis asked. Howard simply shook his head, unable to answer for a second or two.
    “If he came through the clubhouse…” he began to say.
    The penny dropped.
    “Shit,” Hollis said. He turned and ran out of the room and back through the kitchens. Lorna and Harte, who both now realized what was happening, followed close behind. Hollis was first to reach the back door. He flung it open and ran out onto the lawns behind the hotel complex.
    Bodies. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of bodies were up ahead, steadily advancing through the gap in the fence that Martin had showed him days earlier. A huge, unstoppable wave of cold, dead flesh was now rolling relentlessly forward in their direction—enough decay to surround and swallow the entire hotel and everything in it and it was too late to stop it. There was no way they could hold back a crowd the size of which he’d seen out on the golf course yesterday morning.
    “Oh, God,” Lorna said with her hand over her mouth. “What the hell are we going to do?”
    Hollis looked at her but couldn’t answer. He couldn’t think straight. It was impossible for any of them to appreciate the scale of what was suddenly unfolding around them.
    “Fuck,” Jas cursed as he rushed out into the open and pushed past the others. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
    “Where you going to go?” Hollis asked, still staring unblinking at the advancing dead.
    “Anywhere,” he answered, already sprinting back indoors.
    “No point running,” he shouted after him. “There’s no way out.”
    “But we’ve got to do something,” Lorna pleaded, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him back inside. “Come on!”
    Hollis pulled himself free and ran a short distance farther away from the building, trying to gauge the true size of the crowd which was surging closer by the second. He was distracted by a sudden engine roar and flash of light as Jas came powering around the side of the building on his motorbike, desperately looking for an escape route. Their options were terrifyingly limited. Bodies still tripped and stumbled through the gap in the hedge, making it impossible to even consider trying to get out that way, and the crash wreckage at the front of the building had rendered the road away from the hotel useless too. He accelerated forward, driving in a wide arc as close as he dared get to the farthest advanced cadavers. They seemed to increase their speed as he approached, moving toward him to try and cut him off. These bodies showed none of the reluctance and caution that some corpses had exhibited before now. Did they now understand the huge advantage they had over the living? he wondered. They were marching forward like an unstoppable invading army. For a second he rode parallel with them as they stormed relentlessly ahead. They were hugely outnumbered—thousands of corpses for every single survivor. Jas turned and rode back toward the hotel, his muddy wheels leaving a dirty brown mark across the letter P from Hollis and Martin’s