Disintegration

morning.”
    “Nosy bastard,” Webb grumbled. Jas was still shouting after them, but they both ignored him and carried on walking down the hill.
    “Ah, don’t worry about him,” Stoke said. “He’s just trying to let us know he’s in charge. Him and Hollis are like a pair of bloody mother hens. They nag me more than my old missus ever did!”
    Webb smirked as he swung his baseball bat around, loosening his shoulders in preparation for the fight. Stokes glanced back over his shoulder. Jas had disappeared. Probably gone back inside to moan to the others about them, he thought.
    The sweeping hill in front of them resembled a series of interconnected bomb sites. Hardly anything remained of the lowest block of flats and over time the bodies had managed to encroach on most of the uneven land where the building had originally stood. The sudden apocalypse had abruptly halted work on the second building midway through its demolition. One wing had already been completely leveled, the other reduced to a windowless, skeletal frame. The rubbish-strewn area had been enclosed by a wire-mesh fence, originally erected to keep vandals and other timewasters at bay. Two large diggers had been abandoned nearby and, once the group had worked out how to drive them, the powerful machines had proved useful in shifting tons of debris, beaten-up cars, and other wreckage to construct the ugly but effective barricade between the ruins of the first two buildings. Uneven and improvised it might have been, but it had successfully kept the ever-growing mass of corpses at bay for weeks now.
    Webb and Stokes reached the wire-mesh enclosure. Stokes lifted a loose section of fence and Webb ducked down and went through like a fighter entering the ring through the ropes. Together they walked out into the center of the large patch of waste-ground, dotted with piles of masonry and the occasional sprouting of weeds. They used this area as a training ground of sorts, a place where Webb could flex his muscles and the older man could flex his vocal cords. Webb fancied himself as a welterweight champion. Stokes fancied himself as his coach.
    “How many you going for today?” he asked. Webb stared back through the wire mesh at the hordes of bodies a short distance away.
    “I’ll start with five. Way I feel, though, I could get rid of the whole fucking lot of them.”
    “Just see how you get on,” Stokes suggested, perching himself on a seat of crumbling brickwork and opening his first can of beer of the day. “Take your time. There’s no rush.”
    Webb continued to look deep into the endless mass of loathsome figures, eyeing up potential opponents for the one-sided sparring session he was planning. He knew it didn’t matter which monstrosity he plucked from the crowd—one worthless, maggot-ridden, decaying piece of shit was the same as the next. Running forward, he peeled a previously prepared section of the wire fence back in on itself, scrambled through the hole he’d made, and then jogged out toward the corpses. He climbed up onto the crumpled bonnet of an old black taxi, then reached down and grabbed the shoulders of the nearest body. He lifted its light, withered frame and, in a single movement, threw it over the taxi and back toward the hole in the fence through which he’d just emerged. It landed in an undignified heap in the dust, arms and legs everywhere, then immediately dragged itself up and began to stagger back in his direction. He paid it little attention, concentrating instead on plucking more writhing creatures from the crowd. Many vicious, thrashing hands reached up into the air as if volunteering for slaughter. He ignored them as he quickly hauled another four diseased figures over onto the other side of the blockade. He herded them back toward his arena. For the most part they conveniently followed him and he shoved each of them down through the gap when they were close enough. If they tried to retaliate or resist he simply threw them to the ground, then kicked and punched them through to the other side of the fence.
    “Fuck me, look at that one!” Stokes laughed as Webb forced the last cadaver through the hole in the mesh. “No arms!” Howling with laughter he pointed at the naked remains of a middle-aged woman which stumbled back toward Webb as he closed and secured the fence. The pitiful carcass had somehow managed to lose both arms, one at the shoulder and the other just below the elbow. The longer of its two stumps