Disintegration

their increasingly ineffective blockade. They were scrambling over the back of another car like cockroaches scuttling across a dirty kitchen floor.
    “But is it going to be any different anywhere else?” Gordon asked. He was sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the room, knees pulled up close to his chest. “It’s not going to be any better, is it?”
    “Couldn’t be any worse,” Lorna mumbled.
    “Don’t count on it,” Jas said quickly. “We thought we were doing well here.”
    “I don’t understand what’s happened,” Caron said. “Why’s it all gone so wrong so quickly?”
    “Bad luck,” Hollis answered.
    “It’s a bit more than bad luck, you fucking idiot,” Harte said nervously.
    “We couldn’t have planned for any of this,” he continued.
    “No one could have planned for anything that’s happened since September.”
    “I know that, but we thought we’d be able to sit this out here, didn’t we. I thought we’d be okay here until they’d decayed away to nothing. And maybe we still would have been if Anita hadn’t got sick.”
    “But why now?” Caron asked. “Why are they climbing over the barrier today?”
    “Because they’re scared,” Jas replied. “Because they’ve seen us down there beating the shit out of several hundred of them at a time, and we’ve scared them. They can’t get away because there are so many of them, so they’re fighting back like caged animals. What’s left of their brains is telling them to get us before we get them.”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “I do,” Hollis said quickly. “He’s right. We’ve brought this on ourselves.”
    “So is there any point in leaving?”
    “Well, yes,” he responded with a blunt and irritating matter-of-factness. “Of course there is. Anita’s dead and Ellie’s dying. If we stay here then there’s a strong chance more of us will go the same way.”
    “But like I said,” Gordon whined from the corner, “aren’t we just going to end up in as bad a mess somewhere else? We’ll end up with another bloody huge crowd of them gathered around us.”
    “Maybe, but it probably won’t be as big a crowd as we’ve got here. It’s taken more than a month for that many of them to drag themselves over here. It’s going to take time for things to get this bad if we’re starting again from scratch, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “You’ve seen what kind of a state they’re in, haven’t you? So, logically, by the time we get to this stage again with these kind of numbers, the bodies should be pretty much incapable of harming us, no matter how many of them there are.”
    “I’m sold,” Lorna said quietly. “Makes sense to me. I’m going.”
    “Anyway,” Caron protested, “this is all irrelevant.”
    “Is it?” she grumbled. “Why?”
    “Because we can’t go anywhere with Ellie the way she is.”
    “Yes, we can,” Harte quickly replied.
    “We can’t just leave her here…”
    “Yes, we can,” he said again. “We can’t take her with us, can we? Kind of defeats the object if we take her and whatever she’s got with us, doesn’t it?”
    “But we can’t just leave her.”
    “Are you sure she’s got the same thing that killed Anita?” Jas asked.
    “Well, her symptoms are the same and she’s been getting worse as quickly as Anita did.”
    “So she’s probably going to die, isn’t she?”
    Although she knew the answer, Caron didn’t want to say it.
    “She … she might not,” she stammered awkwardly. “Anita might have had some other medical problem that we didn’t know about. She might have—”
    “I think she’s going to die,” Hollis said, “and a few more of us probably will too if we don’t leave here.”
    “But you can’t just abandon her!”
    “Does she say anything when you walk into her flat?” Jas asked.
    “No, but—”
    “Does she sit up in bed? Does she look at you and talk to you? Does she even know you’re in there with her?”
    “Sometimes. Most of the time she’s asleep or—”
    “By the time we’re ready to leave here that poor cow won’t have a clue what’s going on. She won’t know if she’s on her own or if we’re all in the room with her. More to the point, she won’t give a shit.”
    “We can’t just leave her here to die. It’s inhuman!”
    “Then maybe we should put her out of her misery?” Hollis suggested. “If what’s going to happen to her really is inevitable, speeding it up is only going to