Disintegration

Stokes shouted.
    “Watch this,” Webb yelled back. He ran toward the last corpse, swinging the baseball bat again and timing his strike to the head perfectly. Weak flesh tore and withered sinews snapped. Partially decapitated, the diseased creature staggered back, then collapsed on the ground, flat on its stomach but with its head still looking up.
    “Nice one,” Stokes said, throwing away his empty beer can and giving Webb a slow handclap. “Here you go, get this down you.” He threw a can over to him, then opened another for himself. Webb drank thirstily.
    “Going to do a few more,” he said between gulps.
    “Might as well,” Stokes agreed. “Nothing else to do.”
    With adrenaline from the satisfying but one-sided fight still coursing through his veins, Webb finished his can, then scrambled back out through the wire mesh. Moving with more speed and confidence now, he jumped back onto the wreck of the taxi again and unceremoniously snatched four more corpses from the edge of the heaving crowd. He rammed them back through the hole in the fence.
    “Take your time,” Stokes suggested, standing on the pile of rubble now so that he could get a better view. “Fifty points for a kill, double if you do it with one hit.”
    Webb glanced over at him and grinned as he picked up his weapon again.
    “Easy. Watch this.”
    His next victim was hunched forward like an old crone. Its physical deterioration was such that it was impossible to be sure what age it had been when it had died. Six or sixty, it didn’t matter; it only had seconds left now. Using the cadaver’s top-heavy gait to his advantage, Webb lifted the baseball bat high and brought it down hard on the back of its skull as if he was trying to hammer it into the ground. Facedown in the dust, the corpse twitched for an instant then lay still.
    “One hundred points!” Stokes announced. “Good lad!”
    Webb turned and moved toward the next shuffler, ready to repeat the maneuver and double his score. Maybe he’d knock this one’s head clean off its shoulders, he thought. A sudden flurry of movement from another body on his right caught him off guard. He spun around to defend himself but was too late and he lost his balance, tripping over a pile of broken bricks as the corpse of a boiler-suited garbage collector grabbed hold of him. Stunned by the sudden, unexpected attack he struggled to shake the creature off. He lifted his arm to push it away and watched in disbelief as the horrifically decayed monstrosity sank its few remaining yellow teeth into the leather sleeve of his jacket.
    “Jesus Christ!” Stokes shouted, jumping down from the pile of rubble and knocking his beer over. Although he usually did all that he could to avoid physical contact with the dead, he immediately grabbed the corpse and yanked it back, throwing it to the ground. Webb turned and unleashed a furious attack on the body, kicking its face repeatedly with his steel-toed boots.
    “Damn fucking thing,” he seethed. “You stupid fucking thing!”
    The bloody body on the ground stopped moving almost instantly. Webb immediately turned and dealt with the remaining two corpses which, bizarrely, actually seemed now to be trying to move away from him. He ran at the first and grabbed a handful of greasy, wiry hair. In the same movement he continued forward, slamming its face down hard into a mound of broken concrete and twisted metal. He felt none of the usual satisfaction, just fear.
    A short distance away, Stokes was gingerly pushing the last body away, trying to summon up the courage to attack. Full of words but usually very little action, he couldn’t begin to match Webb’s ferocity. Webb grabbed a length of narrow gauge metal pipe which was sticking out of the rubble at his feet.
    “Get out of the way!” he screamed at Stokes as he ran toward him. Stokes obediently did as he was told, leaving the last corpse standing alone, swaying unsteadily. Webb speared it with his lance, sinking the pipe so deep into its chest cavity that it burst out through the other side, its decayed innards slopping down in a puddle on the ground behind it. Unbalanced, its legs gave way. Webb made certain of the kill with a single stomp of his boot to its vacant, emotionless face.
    “Did that thing bite you?” Stokes asked, standing over the bulk of the fallen garbage collector.
    Webb answered only with a nervous nod of the head before running back up the hill toward the flats. Stokes followed