Disintegration

half-torso of a cadaver, which had been hacked in two by the chain saw just below its nipple line, reach out with its one good arm and try desperately to drag itself away.
    Lorna moved another car, closing one gap but inadvertently opening another. The digger’s shovel had become entangled with the door of the car and she struggled to knock it free. She concentrated on the mechanical claw, trying to ignore the wave of corpses which now surrounded her, all of them pointlessly fighting to get even closer. A sudden flash of light overhead distracted her momentarily. She looked up and watched as Harte hurled petrol bombs into the front of the crowd, hoping to dissipate their numbers and make it easier for her to shunt the barrier back. The bombs flew through the gray sky above them in beautiful arcs of spiraling flame before smashing down into the bodies and exploding.
    Hollis noticed the crowd growing around the digger and marched toward it. They were preoccupied with the machine and disposing of them was a simple matter. He simply held up the chain saw and walked into them, carving them up before they’d even realized he was there, the noise from the digger drowning out the powerful grind of his weapon. Lorna looked down and acknowledged him, then pointed behind, desperate to get his attention. He spun around to see a group of three corpses moving toward him. They attacked at the same time, surging at him with spindly limbs flailing. He lashed out with the chain saw and succeeded in cutting down the nearest two. He then ran toward the third—which, incredibly, now seemed to be retreating—and, with a flick of his wrist, sliced a jagged diagonal cut across its bony chest. The body fell to the ground, legs going one way, head and shoulders the other.
    Just inches away from Hollis, Webb smashed his ax into the ravaged face of a body which reminded him of a social worker who had once been assigned to him. Concentrating on the satisfying splinter and crack of the creature’s skull, he was unaware that the digger being driven by Stokes was close behind until Hollis grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him out of the way. Webb turned to attack but then lowered his weapons when he saw that there was no danger. They stepped back to allow Stokes to collect another scoop full of bloodstained remains.
    “You having fun?” Hollis yelled over the noise. Webb grinned. As perverse as it seemed, Hollis was enjoying himself too.
    “You?” Webb asked back as he shook a lump of flesh off the end of his baseball bat and readied himself for his next victim.
    “Wonderful,” the other man grunted.
    “They’re fucking stupid,” he laughed as he swung the bat at the head of another corpse, sending it flying into the side of Lorna’s digger. “Look at them! They’re just lining up to be wiped out!”
    “Is that what you think?” Hollis said, shaking his head.
    “’Course it is,” he answered.
    “You’re really dumb at times, Webb,” he said as he lifted his chain saw and readied himself to move forward again. “It might look that way, but just watch them. More to the point, watch yourself.”
    “Why?”
    “Because if you look closely,” he continued, pausing to cut another body in two from its groin up to its neck, “you’ll see that some of them are actually trying to coordinate themselves and attack.”
    Webb laughed out loud at Hollis’s comment, but he found himself watching the next cadaver more closely. It was slow and weak but Christ, he was right, it was moving with a very real purpose and intent. He expected it to leap straight at him aggressively, but it didn’t. Instead it watched him with dull, unblinking eyes and chose its moment, suddenly lifting its spindly arms and increasing its speed and force. Whether it had been a considered attack or not, Webb destroyed it with a dismissive thump from the baseball bat to the side of its head.
    *   *   *
     
    After hours of virtually constant fighting, it was time to stop. Lorna dropped a car diagonally across the bonnet of another she’d moved previously, plugging the last remaining gap and stemming the flow of bodies toward the survivors. Exhausted and soaked with a layer of mud, blood, and gore, Webb, Hollis and Harte quickly disposed of the last few loose cadavers before dropping their weapons. Jas cleared the area with the smaller digger, dropping larger body parts onto a smoldering pyre, then scraping the metal shovel along the ground and