Disintegration

to their journey.
    “Doesn’t look like anything major,” Jas said, looking down onto the street below. “There’s a van blocking the road, that’s all.”
    Harte was already on his way downstairs, hand ax at the ready just in case. Jas followed, pausing only to pick up the chain saw from where he’d dumped it on an empty lower-deck seat. By the time he’d stepped out onto the narrow backstreet, Webb, Hollis and Lorna were already out and surveying the scene. A single corpse staggered from behind the crashed van, tripped in the gutter and fell at Webb’s feet. He nonchalantly smashed its skull with his spiked baseball bat.
    “Well?” Harte asked, keeping his voice low. Hollis pointed at the front of the blue liveried van which had thumped into the front of an office block, leaving its rear end jutting out into the road and blocking their way. The dead driver—who was still trying to get out from behind the wheel—slammed its decaying face up against the glass as they moved closer.
    “Problem is,” Hollis explained, ignoring the corpse’s frantic movements, “it looks like it’s wedged in.” He leaned over the front of the van and looked up. The impact had brought the low canopy of a porch crashing down onto its roof. There were visible cracks running up the face of the building and the glass in many of the first-floor windows had been smashed. “There’s a chance if we move it that we’ll bring the whole lot down.”
    “So?” Webb grunted, returning his attention to the crash.
    “So we could end up blocking the road instead of clearing it,” he replied, wishing that he wasn’t stuck out in the middle of nowhere with someone as dense as Webb.
    “I think it’ll be all right,” Harte said, carefully stepping under the canopy and looking up to try and assess the damage. “I don’t think there’s any other way of shifting—”
    A sudden movement from Lorna distracted him. She rushed across to the other side of the narrow street and grappled with a bloody figure which threw itself at her. She grabbed its scrawny neck, forcing it back against the nearest wall before cracking its skull and beating it repeatedly with the claw hammer she’d been carrying. Sometimes she scared herself with her own brutality. She looked up and saw that the damn thing wasn’t alone.
    “Get a move on,” she whispered, looking farther down the street and counting at least seven more bodies heading in their direction. “They’re coming.”
    Webb, his appetite for violence clearly undiminished despite the events of the last twenty-four hours, ran forward to head off the approaching dead, swinging the baseball bat wildly through the air. He thumped it into the face of the cadaver nearest to him, catching it perfectly, almost laughing out loud as it tripped blindly back into two more bodies like an uncoordinated drunk, knocking them both over. He ran toward them with predatory speed, determined to finish them all off before they could pick themselves back up.
    “So what do we do?” Jas asked hurriedly, seeing that even more bodies were closing in. “Move this thing, or turn around and find another way through?”
    “Driver’s never going to get the bus turned around here. He’ll have to back it out…” Hollis’s words trailed away when he heard the bus suddenly begin to move.
    Jas started the chain saw and ran back toward the huge vehicle as the farthest advanced figures at the front of an uncomfortably large crowd of corpses began to surge past it, slipping down either side. He held the chain saw at waist height and waded into them, dragging the churning blade from side to side, scything down the creatures as if they were trees being felled. The road beneath his feet, until then relatively clear save for a little rubble and broken glass, was suddenly awash with blood and gore. As he sliced the legs off yet another body that foolishly stumbled toward him, the bus accelerated. Uncharacteristically alert and decisive, Driver shunted it forward and angled it across the street, reversing back to fully block the width of the narrow throughway and prevent any more of the dead from getting closer.
    At the back of the top floor of the bus, Caron stood next to Gordon and looked down in disbelief as the entire street behind them quickly became clogged with dead flesh. She hadn’t been this close to them for weeks, probably more than a month, and she was terrified, both of their appearance and their sudden vast