Disintegration

out but he knew that he couldn’t. Any second now, he thought, and she’ll come thundering back, her toy clamped tight between her teeth. Maybe she hadn’t found it. Perhaps it had become stuck in a tree or in the hedge? Still no sign. Hollis jumped down from the bench and began to jog across the grass. Howard was close behind.
    “Be careful,” Caron urged, her stomach suddenly knotted with nerves.
    Hollis ran up over a slight rise and then stopped. He could see the dog. She was standing perfectly still, ears pricked up.
    “What’s the matter with her?” he asked.
    “That’s not good,” Howard replied ominously. “See how she’s standing? That’s what she does when they’re near.”
    The two men continued cautiously toward the hedge. The dog hardly moved. Her ears twitched and she sniffed and turned her head momentarily as they approached, but otherwise she remained completely still. Hollis noticed that her teeth were bared. She was snarling but not making a sound.
    “Must be on the other side of the road,” he whispered. “I take it from this reaction that they don’t usually come down this far?”
    “Not seen them here for a long time,” Howard replied.
    Hollis edged closer to the boundary. Iron railings ran around the perimeter of the hotel which, over the years, had been swallowed up by thick laurel hedging. Beyond that was the road and, on the other side, the golf course, itself enclosed by another hedgerow. Despite the distance he could see flashes of movement through the mass of gnarled and twisted branches. He could see three or four bodies, maybe more. Their awkward, stumbling gait gave them away.
    “What’s brought them back?”
    Howard looked at him incredulously. Didn’t he understand? Christ, from what he’d seen Hollis was supposed to be one of the more intelligent of the new arrivals. Did he have to spell it out to him?
    “You noisy bastards,” he answered angrily, keeping the level of his voice low. “Them being here is the result of the noise you lot made when you got here yesterday and your friends playing football earlier. Now just imagine how much damage you’ll probably do when you go out again tomorrow.”
    Hollis began to walk back toward the hotel. “Two hedges, metal railings and a road,” he said. “They won’t get through. I don’t care how many of them there are, they’ll disappear again in time.”
    “You reckon?”
    He kept walking. Howard crouched down next to his dog, held her head in his hands and blew gently into her face, distracting her.
    “Come on, girl,” he said quietly, grabbing her collar and leading her away. “It’s all right.”

 
     
    36
     
    A long evening doing nothing, a relatively good night’s sleep, the most substantial breakfast they could muster from their dwindling reserves, and they were finally ready to move. Eight o’clock in the morning and Hollis, Harte, Jas, Webb, Lorna, Amir, and Sean prepared themselves to head into town. They climbed onto the battered bus as Driver started the engine. Jas watched him intently. What was the unkempt and increasingly insular man thinking? Did he feel as nervous as he himself did? Could he taste bile in his mouth and were his guts churning with nerves too? As he slumped into the nearest seat he couldn’t help wondering why he felt so damn uneasy this morning. As the doors closed and the bus began to move he put it down to the fact that the hotel had, unexpectedly, provided them with the most isolation they’d yet had from the nightmare world outside. And here they were, already on their way back out into the chaos and uncertainty again.
    Driver edged his clumsy vehicle slowly along the track, past the fork in the road and back down to the junction. Howard, Gordon, and Ginnie were already waiting there. Somebody had to move the vehicles to let them through and, as that job seemed considerably safer than venturing into Bromwell, Howard and Ginnie had reluctantly volunteered. Gordon, as probably the most experienced fighter remaining at the hotel, was there to mop up those few (he hoped) random corpses which managed to slip through as the bus drove out. He stood on one side of the junction, nervously swinging an ax in one hand and a crowbar in the other. He was dressed in as much protective clothing as he’d been able to find, enough to keep him safe from the germs and any slimy slugs of decaying flesh that an encounter with the dead might throw up into the air. He stood there