Disintegration

wearing a pair of fisherman’s waders, safety goggles, and a bright yellow construction worker’s hard hat, but he didn’t care how ridiculous he looked.
    “Ready?” Ginnie shouted from behind the wheel of the coach, fighting to make herself heard over the rattle of the engine and, for once, not worrying about the volume of her voice.
    Driver acknowledged her with a simple thumbs-up and stared straight ahead as the coach began to move to the side. He inched slowly forward before increasing his speed and driving out into the middle of the deserted road junction. He stopped to give Howard a chance to pull himself up into the driver’s seat of the truck which blocked the exit they planned to use. Dog in tow, he settled into the cab and immediately peered down at the mass of bodies on the other side. There were too many to count. Not the biggest crowd he’d ever seen, but too many all the same. His hands suddenly trembling with nerves, he started the engine and waited for Driver to pull the bus closer. The dead began to thump and push against the exposed side of the vehicle. The dog sat in the passenger seat and silently snarled at them, her nostrils full of the smell of rotting flesh.
    The truck that Howard was driving spanned the gap between a six-foot-tall brick wall ahead and another truck just behind. As the bus began to move toward him he slowly reversed.
    “Get as near as you can,” Hollis said to Driver, standing next to him at the front of the bus like a passenger waiting for the next stop. “You want to try and push as many of them back and out of the way as you can, try and stop them getting through.”
    “Thanks, I’d worked that bit out for myself,” Driver grumbled. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and nudged forward as soon as there was room for him to move. Bodies began to pour through the gap, most of them immediately being dragged down beneath the bus or shoved away by the impromptu snowplow they’d bolted to its front weeks earlier. Driver accelerated, slicing through the crowd with ease. Hollis looked over his shoulder along the length of the bus. Through the small rectangular window at the back he watched as Howard immediately shunted the truck forward again, blocking the road and preventing any more cadavers from getting through.
    “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Harte said, relieved, standing just a little way behind Hollis and watching the rotting world rushing by through the windows on either side.
    “Nowhere near as many of them as I thought there would be. Must be Martin’s music,” Hollis admitted. “Give him his due, I thought he was off his head, but maybe not.”
    “Crazy bugger says he’s been playing music to them every day for more than a month,” he laughed. “Damn things are probably sick of it!”
    Hollis nodded and smiled, then turned to look ahead as the first buildings of the town of Bromwell loomed on the dull horizon.
    *   *   *
     
    Incredibly, just three bodies had managed to drag themselves safely through the gap and into the blockaded road junction while the truck had been out of position. All of the others had been swept up and crushed by the bus. Gordon, now feeling far less confident than he had been just a few minutes earlier, stood rooted to the spot, waiting for the first of them to get close enough to attack.
    “You okay, Gordon?” Ginnie shouted from the relative safety of the coach. The bodies were instinctively moving in her direction now, distracted by the noise of the engine and her voice. He wanted to stop them getting any closer. He liked Ginnie. She reminded him of someone he used to work with, and that unexpected familiarity, no matter how tenuous, was welcome. He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. Time to fight.
    Running forward, he swung the ax into the side of the nearest cadaver’s neck, wedging it deep into its putrid flesh, just below its ear. The body, a stocky, awkward creature with only one arm and one eye, was overbalanced by the speed and force of the brutal strike. Gordon dragged it over onto the ground, then plunged the end of the crowbar into its exposed temple. A few seconds of twitching and kicking and it lay still. He yanked out his blood-soaked weapon, suddenly feeling like a gladiator, and turned to look for the next kill.
    The body of a nurse was stumbling precariously close to the side of the coach. Gordon spun it around and, with another savage swing of the ax, ripped through the front of