Disintegration

focused, holding his baseball bat ready in one hand and an ax in the other. The bodies on the other side of the low wall of twisted metal and concrete seethed and surged forward, reacting to the noise. They were beginning to get riled.
    Lorna accelerated and shunted the digger forward, lowering its heavy scoop and cringing as the metal scraped along the uneven ground. She raised it slightly and punched it into the door of the blue car, shoving the vehicle back. From her position in the cab it was difficult to see how far the car had moved. Another hard shunt and she’d pushed it too far, leaving a slight gap on either side.
    And then they came.
    Driven forward by their unnatural anger and by the weight of many thousands more bodies pressing behind them, the corpses at the front of the crowd began to slip around both ends of the small blue car which had helped keep them at bay for so long. Like a sticky, oily sludge they spilled forward. Hollis was the first to react. As Lorna reversed the digger and readied herself to try and block the slender gaps she’d left and shove the next section of the barrier back, he covered his face with a protective plastic visor, then raised his weapon and marched toward the advancing dead. The first of them walked face-first straight into the chain saw’s powerful churning teeth, disintegrating most of its head on impact. Hollis continued to push the blade forward, dealing the exact same fate to a second body lurching too close behind. Webb stood back and watched, transfixed by the waterfall of crimson-brown gore which was soaking the ground like red rain around Hollis and the pile of body parts mounting at the other man’s feet. One of the cadavers lunged to the side and slipped past him, moving toward Webb and forcing him into action. He dispatched it with a single ax blow to the forehead, the blade leaving a deep, dark groove between its eyes. The satisfying crack and splinter of the creature’s skull was reassuring.
    Lorna pushed the next car back as she had the first, taking care this time to make sure she plugged any gaps. There were still corpses pushing their way through the opening on the other side of the first car. She decided she’d deal with that problem next. Stokes, meanwhile, had found himself uncomfortably close to the fighting for once and had scuttled back out of the way, heading for the other, much smaller digger. He started the engine and slowly drove it back toward the front line, making a slight detour to crush a single spidery corpse which had managed to sneak past the others. Although he was now protected, from his elevated position in the cab the size of the job which lay ahead of them seemed even more daunting. Judging from the number of dead heads he quickly counted—some lying on their own in the mud like footballs, others still attached to bodies—he estimated that in the few minutes since the barrier had been breached, the survivors had destroyed somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen corpses. It was difficult to estimate with any degree of accuracy because of the continual frenzied movement all around him and also the fact that much of the mottled dead flesh had been butchered and sliced into a single detail-free layer. However many of them they’d managed to get rid of, there were many, many thousands more lining up to take their place and it was going to take hours to make any kind of impression on them. Not for the first time he found himself silently questioning what they were doing. Was this as bloody stupid an idea as it suddenly seemed?
    “Pile ’em up over there,” Hollis yelled in a pause between kills, struggling to make himself heard over the combined noise of the fighting, the two digger engines, and his chain saw. He gestured wildly toward an area of land close to the fenced enclosed where Webb had been bitten yesterday. Stokes moved toward the mass of fallen bodies, trying to familiarize himself with the controls of the digger. Satisfied that he’d worked out how to move the shovel down, forward, and then back up again, he clumsily scooped a bucketful of flesh—some inert, some still twitching—then turned around and drove it over toward the area Hollis had pointed to. He tipped the shovel out, emptying its contents onto the rough ground with a reassuring slop and splatter. Even now as the last dregs dripped down, some of the dismembered creatures he’d scooped up continued to move. His stomach churned as he watched the