Disintegration

everyone had died. The place had been full of noise, light, and people back then. Hard to believe that everyone he’d been there with was now dead … Get a grip, he ordered himself, feeling uncomfortable, long-supressed emotions beginning to rise.
    “Looks like the place was empty,” Webb shouted to him from the other side of the bowling lanes. “Can only find this one.”
    Sean moved forward to get a better view. Webb was dragging the body of a female cleaner behind him by its hair. Poor cow didn’t look like she’d been any older than twenty when she’d died. The corpse’s light blue pinafore, gray T-shirt, and jeans were stained with dribbles of blood, pus, and Christ alone knew what else. Its arms and legs thrashed about furiously as Webb bumped it down three low steps toward him. A clump of scalp came away from its skull, leaving him holding just a handful of greasy hair and skin. The body tried to get up but he was having none of it.
    “Sorry, darling,” Webb said as he put his arms around its emaciated waist, “your cleaning days are over.” With that he swung the corpse around, clouting its head hard against a concrete pillar, shattering its skull and showering the ground with what was left of its brain. Disinterested, he dropped it like it was an empty beer can and walked away, looking for food and other distractions.
    For a moment Sean stood and stared into the dead girl’s face which, at this angle and in this light, appeared surprisingly untroubled by all that had happened to her. Poor bitch, he thought to himself sadly. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t deserve that. He glanced back over his shoulder at the carcass which had attacked him just minutes earlier, then looked down at the girl at his feet again. He nudged her chin with his boot, hard enough to make her head roll and reveal the other side of her face, a bloody mass of fetid, blistered skin and dribbles of decay. Get a grip , he said to himself again, angry that he’d allowed himself to feel something for the grotesque corpse. Can’t afford to think like that anymore. Doesn’t matter who or what any of these things used to be, they’re not human now.
    *   *   *
     
    The hours which followed were unexpectedly surreal. Sean continued to feel a bizarre mix of emotions—nervous, desperate, and scared one minute, elated and free the next. After collecting food and drink by smashing open vending machines—and disturbing a nest of squealing, fat, overfed rats in the process—Webb had suggested they try bowling. It didn’t last long. The electronic scoreboards remained black and unlit and when the pins and the balls disappeared over the precipice at the end of the lanes, they never returned. But, for just a few snatched moments at a time, Sean was able to close his eyes and recall how everything used to feel and sound: the reassuringly familiar rumble of the heavy balls rolling down the alley filling the vast room, followed by the clatter and bang of the pins being knocked down.
    They gave up on bowling when all the balls had disappeared, neither man relishing the prospect of disappearing down into the labyrinthine bowels of the alley to retrieve them. Instead they cleared a space in the carpeted area where rows of blank-faced arcade machines stood and then, between the two of them, dragged a pool table nearer to the tall windows at the front of the building. As the sun began to sink toward the horizon, and under the vacant but watchful gaze of several hundred dead faces pressed hard against the glass, they played for as long as they were able, finally accepting that it was time to return to the hotel when the light had all but completely gone.
    “We could stay here, you know,” Sean had suggested as they prepared to leave. “We don’t have to go back.”
    “Nah,” Webb had quickly replied. “I want my bed and my beer. We can come back tomorrow.”
    “We can go anywhere we bloody well want to tomorrow,” Sean said as he climbed onto the motorbike, already planning his next escape. He wasn’t looking forward to facing the bunch of miserable fuckers who would be waiting for them at the hotel. In many ways they worried him more than the crowds of grotesque cadavers swarming across the countryside. It didn’t matter, he decided. If they gave him any trouble he’d just turn around and leave.
    What was left of the world was his for the taking.

 
     
    44
     
    Sean drove back across the field, the bike’s headlamp