Disintegration

argument with Hollis; the sooner he got this mess sorted, he decided, the sooner he could empty his bladder. He moved quickly, climbing out of the van and grabbing a crowbar on the way, not wanting to risk the noise from the chain saw again. He slammed the door shut behind him and swung his fist at the nearest body, knocking it into the back of the van, then battered the head of another corpse into a bloody pulp with the crowbar. Many more of the pitiful creatures lurched after him, hauling themselves along on weary feet. He slipped past the bulk of them, confusing them with his speed, and ran toward the cab of the crashed truck, quickly scrambling up onto the bonnet, then climbing higher and standing on the roof.
    “Can you shift it?” Hollis shouted from the van, leaning out of the window and pushing a furious cadaver away with one hand. “Is there any way around?”
    Something wasn’t right. Hordes of wretched bodies clamored around the vehicles, reaching up for Jas incessantly. In no more than a couple of minutes the stretch of road they’d just driven along had become a seething mass of furious, baying corpses and still more were coming. Where were they coming from and how many more were there? More important, how would they get away if he couldn’t get this bloody truck shifted? They’d have to move quick if they wanted to—
    Hang on a second , he thought as realization suddenly dawned. The ground on the other side of the truck he was standing on was clear. Absolutely empty. There wasn’t a single damn corpse anywhere to be seen. The truck had stopped in such a position that it had blocked the entire width of the carriageway, left almost perfectly at right angles to the direction of the road. Its front was pushed up close to a brick wall and its back end overlapped with the side of another similar-sized vehicle, making it impossible for anything to get past. He dropped to his knees and pressed his face against the rain-streaked windscreen. There was no body in the cab. No driver. This truck hadn’t crashed here, he realized, the bloody thing had been parked!
    Suddenly revitalized with energy, he jumped down onto the clear side and pulled himself up into the cab. Christ, whoever had done this had even left the keys in the ignition! He’d never driven anything of this size before but he had to act fast and do what he could. He started it up, cringing inwardly as the machine shuddered into life and the throaty roar of its powerful engine drowned out every other sound he could hear. More through luck than judgment he managed to select a reverse gear and sent the truck juddering and kangaroo-jumping back, steering hard to swerve its tail around the other vehicle which had been abandoned directly behind. Up ahead Hollis drove the van through the gap as soon as he was able. The bus also squeezed through, as did somewhere in the region of thirty scrambling bodies. Jas searched anxiously for a forward gear now, aware that every second he wasted allowed more and more of the dead to flood through after the survivors. With relief he did it, sending the truck lurching forward again, stopping just inches short of the wall and blocking up the gap, crushing another handful of spindly figures which had managed to get halfway through. He stopped the engine and sat there with his head in his hands, panting with exhaustion as if he’d just run a marathon.
    By the time Jas got out of the truck, the job of destroying the cadavers which had made it through the gap was well in hand. Webb, Lorna and Harte were each standing in different locations, attacking the bodies with whatever weapons they’d managed to lay their hands on. The corpses grouped around each one of them, almost seeming to taunt them by delaying their attacks momentarily. Some stood back and waited. Others, sometimes moving in twos or threes, immediately launched themselves at the nearest survivor. Hollis remained behind the wheel of the van, driving around furiously, doing all he could to wipe out as many of the dead as possible without hitting any of the others. Gordon, who had finally plucked up enough courage to emerge from the bus, quickly realized what Hollis was doing. He offered himself up to a relatively quick-moving, long-dead shell of a man. As the repellent body stumbled toward him he stepped back out of the way and watched with smug satisfaction as the van powered forward, smashing it into oblivion.
    “What the hell’s going on here?” Jas