Disintegration

partially-developed remains of its dead child—slapped against the wood like meat on a butcher’s slab.
    “Now what?” Harte asked, returning to Jas, who’d parked his bike on a patio. Weeds sprouted between the slabs they stood on.
    “On foot,” he said. “We’ll cut through a few more gardens, then do it. It should disorient them. Once we start the fire they’ll lose track of where we are. It’ll give us a better chance of getting back out.”
    Harte didn’t argue. He followed Jas deeper into the long garden, moving away from the back of the house and looking for a way through to next-door. Jas found a broken fence panel two-thirds of the way down the narrow lawn. He pushed it over and clambered through to the other side. Harte stayed close, running across the second garden and checking back over his shoulder to make sure he’d remember where they’d started out from.
    “Bloody hell,” Jas cursed as he crawled through a gap in a laurel hedge into the third garden, then stood up and walked straight into the dead arms of something which, from the look of its blood and paint-stained overalls, might have been a builder or decorator when it had been alive. It had been on the right side of the garden at exactly the wrong time for Jas and had managed to grab hold of him with its clumsy, outstretched arms. He pushed the corpse away. It stumbled back, then pivoted around on heavy, uncoordinated legs and lurched toward him again.
    “I’ve got it,” Harte said. Jas stepped out of the way as Harte plunged a garden fork up into the creature’s face, one prong drilling through the side of its cheek and into the roof of its mouth, another gouging an eye, then sinking deep into what was left of its brain.
    “Cheers,” Jas grunted, stepping over the body and continuing through into garden number four. In no time he’d managed to get through gardens five, six, and seven. Still struggling to get across garden six, Harte, who was nowhere near as fit and was lagging behind, yelled for him to stop.
    “Come on,” he wheezed as he clambered over the final low fence. “Surely this’ll do.”
    Jas stopped and rested with his hands on his hips. He cleared his throat and spat a lump of phlegm into a stagnant fish pond just ahead of him. His spit settled on the surface, barely even causing a ripple in the murky water, which was dark green, almost solid with algae and silt. He could just make out a few shards and slivers of orange and white among the sludge—all that remained of someone’s pet goldfish.
    Harte was already walking toward the house, moving around the edge of a large, circular children’s trampoline. The center of the trampoline sagged heavily. A puddle of rainwater had gathered over weeks, steadily distorting the once taut elastic sheeting. He climbed four low steps up to another weed-infested patio, then paused at the back door before entering the building. Jas peered in through the cobweb-covered kitchen window.
    “Can’t see anything in there,” he said, unaware that he had suddenly started to whisper. Harte tried the door, which was stiff and hard to open. A shove with his shoulder and it moved. He pushed it fully open and stepped into the house. The building was filled with the suffocating and disturbingly familiar stench of death. His concern was not how many bodies he’d find inside, however, just how many were moving.
    Speed was vital. Not needing to discuss the routine, the two men immediately began moving at pace. Jas checked downstairs while Harte worked through upstairs, briefly looking into every room, ready to react if anything moved, grabbing anything he thought might be of use later. Apart from two motionless, skeletal bodies curled up in bed together, the building was clear.
    “All clear,” he shouted as he ran back down the stairs. “Couple of stiffs up there, that’s all. Nothing moving.” He paused for a moment to look out a small window just to the right of the front door. There was an uncomfortably large number of bodies milling about in the road outside, most of them gravitating around the house the men had originally entered. Their numbers were nothing they couldn’t handle, but something they could still do without. He found Jas in the dining room, piling furniture up against one wall. He had pushed a long, rectangular table over onto its side and was stacking chairs up against it. As Harte watched he pulled down the curtains and began to stuff them into the gaps