Disintegration

he’d found. Was this the wrong room? Should he have looked in room 25? There was a piece of paper stuck to the front of the top box. He picked it up and carried it over to the window, struggling to make it out in the early evening gloom. A simple message was written in Jas’s scrawled handwriting:
     
Webb, the stuff in the boxes is your share. I put the rest somewhere else.
    He sank to the floor under the window and covered his head with his hands. The damn banging outside was getting louder …
    *   *   *
     
    “Can’t get anything else down there,” Gordon announced breathlessly. Jas peered down the stairwell, which had been almost completely filled with furniture.
    “Good,” he said, satisfied that they were about as safe as they were going to be for now. “We’ll keep checking, just to be sure they can’t get through.”
    “Nothing’s going to get through that lot,” Lorna added. “It’s the same at the other end. Don’t know how we’re ever going to get down.”
    “We’ll worry about that later,” Gordon replied. “I’m in no hurry to leave.”
    Jas turned around and walked back down the corridor. Harte and Hollis were coming the other way. They met in the middle and disappeared into the same room. Inside, Ginnie and Caron were busy shifting boxes of supplies, trying to work out exactly what they had and where they were going to put it all. Harte tugged Jas’s sleeve and pulled him back.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” Harte answered quickly, his voice quiet. “Good idea, you clever bastard.”
    Jas shrugged. “No problem. I could see this coming, that was why I wanted to get away. Did it for myself, really.”
    Harte looked at him, unsure if he was telling the truth.
    “Thanks, anyway,” he mumbled.
    Jas nodded and walked farther into the room, edging around the bed and stepping over boxes and bags of food and other supplies. He stood at the window and surveyed the devastation. He’d never seen so many bodies packed so tightly into a single space. Maybe the helicopter will come back tomorrow , he thought. Maybe I’ll try and find a way to get up onto the roof so they can see me. Then again, maybe I just won’t bother … the harder I try, the more chance there is that everything will get screwed up again.
    He turned back around and looked at the other people he now found himself trapped with: Harte, Hollis, Lorna, Caron, Gordon, Ginnie, Howard, and his dog.
    I can’t afford to let anyone make any more mistakes. We’ve got nowhere left to run now.

 
     
    Epilogue
     
    ONE MONTH, THREE WEEKS, SIX DAYS AND EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER
     
    Sean walked back toward the hotel, his feet crunching through the late December frost. He felt uneasy. He had that same sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach that he used to get when he went back to work after a holiday. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything like this. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since he’d felt anything.
    Why was he here? He kept asking himself the question over and over. It wasn’t because he liked the people he’d left behind. Some of them were decent enough, but most he would never even have given the time of day to had he met them before all of this had happened. So was he doing it out of some misplaced sense of duty? Maybe he was. Truth was he just wanted some company. It had been more than seven weeks since he’d last spoken to anyone else and, much as he tried to deny it, he was lonely. No one should be alone at Christmas, he thought.
    The streets were relatively clear now and he was able to move without fear of attack. Being able to risk using a car again had brought him some welcome freedom. The bodies no longer posed a threat now that they had deteriorated to such an extent. Hard to think that the grotesque shadows of people which now littered the ground had ever caused such panic and fear. He looked at them today with pity, but also still with some contempt.
    For the most part the dead were unable to move now. Very few could support their own weight and the majority had decayed to such a degree that they could do little more than lie helpless on the ground and watch him, moving only their heads and their dull, clouded eyes. Sean forced himself not to look back at them. Even after all this time it hurt to think that just about everyone he’d ever known and cared about was like this now.
    Once on the run Sean had headed for a canal-side apartment