Disintegration

He grabbed it by the collar and dragged it over onto its back, then stamped on its emaciated face until it was still.
    More of them coming. Too many.
    Terrified, Webb turned and ran from a crowd of almost twenty cadavers which slowly lumbered after him. Through a momentary gap between their constantly shifting shapes he thought he saw more climbing over the barrier—but that was impossible, wasn’t it? He ran farther up the hill, the slothful dead no match for his speed, then turned back and looked again. His eyes hadn’t deceived him; the bodies were dragging themselves up and over the blockade. Helped up by the countless corpses crushed under their rotting feet over time and by the relentless pressure of others constantly pushing them forward, the damn things were managing to clamber over the cars and rubble and were heading straight for him.
    “Help!” he screamed as he scrambled up the hill, not knowing if anyone could hear him. “Get out here, now!”
    *   *   *
     
    Hollis, Harte, Lorna, Jas, and Gordon were already on their way down toward the surging bodies before Webb had even made it back to the flats. They thundered past him, leaving him standing alone at the top of the slope. He stopped to spit and catch his breath before heading back down after them.
    “Did you see them?” he started to say to Stokes, who pounded after the others at his usual slow pace.
    “We all saw,” he answered quickly. “It’s your fault for winding them up, you fucking jerk!”
    “What?” he protested. “I didn’t do anything to…”
    His words were wasted; Stokes was already out of earshot. Still panting, Webb ran back down the hill. In the distance he could see that Harte and Lorna had reached the diggers.
    “Just push them back,” Jas shouted. He pointed deep into the growing crowd. “They’re getting through over there. Build the wall up!”
    Lorna was the first to get her digger started. She drove it across the uneven ground at full speed, heading straight for the mass of bodies which were still spilling over the top of the barrier. It didn’t look as bad from down here. When they’d first spotted the breach from their high vantage point in the flats there had seemed to be hundreds of spindly figures pouring over. The reality was their numbers were far fewer but that was academic; one corpse on the wrong side of the line was one too many. Scoop down, she thundered into the center of the crowd, forcing many of the advancing grotesques up into the air and back over the blockade. Unsighted, she collided with the very car they were managing to clamber over and the sudden shock jolted her back in her seat.
    “Block it up,” Hollis shouted to Harte, gesturing at the point where the dead had managed to get over. It was hard to see clearly through the continual, frantic movement, but they appeared to be getting through by dragging themselves over the low bonnet of a small black, family-sized car. Once he was sure that Harte had heard him he returned his attention to those foul aberrations which had already crossed over, chopping and hacking at them with his machete.
    Harte turned the digger around and moved away from the corpses. Behind him Lorna was now driving furiously from side to side, obliterating hordes of defenseless figures with every pass. He drove toward a pile of rubble, collected a huge shovelful, then turned back to face the barrier. It looked like they were beginning to regain control. Lorna had quickly dealt with an unquantifiable number of the dead, leaving Jas, Gordon, Webb, and Stokes to wipe up the few that had managed to get away. Hollis, unusually, was standing a little way back from the center of the chaos, the dismembered remains of a blood-soaked police officer twitching at his booted feet.
    A loud warning blast on the horn and Harte powered forward. He stopped just short of the blockade—ploughing down six more cadavers on the way—lifted the digger’s articulated arm and dropped several tons of crumbling masonry onto the front of the black car. When the dust settled it immediately became apparent that he’d hit the spot perfectly. The dead were shut out again. He felt a sense of smug satisfaction when he jumped down from the cab and saw that when he’d dropped the rubble, he’d also managed to crush a handful of bodies as they’d been trying to get across. Arms and legs jutted out from the confusion at awkward angles. The head of a trapped corpse, wedged at the shoulders