passageway on the other side, immediately picking himself up, turning around and sliding the bolt. As soon as the gate was open Jas drove toward him, barely giving him chance to get out of the way. Once he was through, Harte ran back and pushed the gate shut again, slamming it in the rotting face of a once-pregnant cadaver. The creature’s distended belly—still filled with the partially-developed remains of its dead child—slapped against the wood like meat on a butcher’s slab.
“Now what?” Harte asked, returning to Jas, who’d parked his bike on a patio. Weeds sprouted between the slabs they stood on.
“On foot,” he said. “We’ll cut through a few more gardens, then do it. It should disorient them. Once we start the fire they’ll lose track of where we are. It’ll give us a better chance of getting back out.”
Harte didn’t argue. He followed Jas deeper into the long garden, moving away from the back of the house and looking for a way through to next-door. Jas found a broken fence panel two-thirds of the way down the narrow lawn. He pushed it over and clambered through to the other side. Harte stayed close, running across the second garden and checking back over his shoulder to make sure he’d remember where they’d started out from.
“Bloody hell,” Jas cursed as he crawled through a gap in a laurel hedge into the third garden, then stood up and walked straight into the dead arms of something which, from the look of its blood and paint-stained overalls, might have been a builder or decorator when it had been alive. It had been on the right side of the garden at exactly the wrong time for Jas and had managed to grab hold of him with its clumsy, outstretched arms. He pushed the corpse away. It stumbled back, then pivoted around on heavy, uncoordinated legs and lurched toward him again.
“I’ve got it,” Harte said. Jas stepped out of the way as Harte plunged a garden fork up into the creature’s face, one prong drilling through the side of its cheek and into the roof of its mouth, another gouging an eye, then sinking deep into what was left of its brain.
“Cheers,” Jas grunted, stepping over the body and continuing through into garden number four. In no time he’d managed to get through gardens five, six, and seven. Still struggling to get across garden six, Harte, who was nowhere near as fit and was lagging behind, yelled for him to stop.
“Come on,” he wheezed as he clambered over the final low fence. “Surely this’ll do.”
Jas stopped and rested with his hands on his hips. He cleared his throat and spat a lump of phlegm into a stagnant fish pond just ahead of him. His spit settled on the surface, barely even causing a ripple in the murky water, which was dark green, almost solid with algae and silt. He could just make out a few shards and slivers of orange and white among the sludge—all that remained of someone’s pet goldfish.
Harte was already walking toward the house, moving around the edge of a large, circular children’s trampoline. The center of the trampoline sagged heavily. A puddle of rainwater had gathered over weeks, steadily distorting the once taut elastic sheeting. He climbed four low steps up to another weed-infested patio, then paused at the back door before entering the building. Jas peered in through the cobweb-covered kitchen window.
“Can’t see anything in there,” he said, unaware that he had suddenly started to whisper. Harte tried the door, which was stiff and hard to open. A shove with his shoulder and it moved. He pushed it fully open and stepped into the house. The building was filled with the suffocating and disturbingly familiar stench of death. His concern was not how many bodies he’d find inside, however, just how many were moving.
Speed was vital. Not needing to discuss the routine, the two men immediately began moving at pace. Jas checked downstairs while Harte worked through upstairs, briefly looking into every room, ready to react if anything moved, grabbing anything he thought might be of use later. Apart from two motionless, skeletal bodies curled up in bed together, the building was clear.
“All clear,” he shouted as he ran back down the stairs. “Couple of stiffs up there, that’s all. Nothing moving.” He paused for a moment to look out a small window just to the right of the front door. There was an uncomfortably large number of bodies milling about in the road outside, most of them gravitating around the house the men had originally entered. Their numbers were nothing they couldn’t handle, but something they could still do without. He found Jas in the dining room, piling furniture up against one wall. He had pushed a long, rectangular table over onto its side and was stacking chairs up against it. As Harte watched he pulled down the curtains and began to stuff them into the gaps between upturned wooden chair legs.
“Where’s the fuel, Harte?” he asked as he worked. Harte disappeared again, leaving him alone. Jas ran around to the other side of the upturned table to look for more to burn. He stopped immediately when he saw the body. How he hadn’t noticed it before, he didn’t know. Slumped in the corner of the room under the bay window was the curled up body of a child. Two years old when it had died, three at the most. For a moment the small, defenseless, withered husk was all that he could see and think about. It had died lying on its back, its tiny hand held across its face as if it had been trying to hide from whatever it was that was killing it.
“What’s the matter?” Harte asked, returning to the room and finding him standing over the corpse on the carpet. He threw down a pile of coats he’d grabbed from the hallway and started to pack them around the table and chairs. Jas continued to stare at the child. The small boy looked about the same age as his little girl Annia had been when she’d …
“Jas!” Harte snapped. “Now’s not the time. Come on, mate, get a fucking move on!”
Still nothing.
The last time he’d seen his children alive they’d been at home in their house, which was similar in design to the one they stood in now. He hadn’t been back there since he’d lost them. Were they still there, lying motionless like this poor little creature, or were they moving? Was Annia up on her feet, staggering around hopelessly, aimlessly and tirelessly? Were the kids alone or had—
A corpse slammed against the window directly in front of him, distracting him and bringing a sudden, thankful release from his increasingly dark thoughts. He turned around and acknowledged Harte.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, “I just…”
“Doesn’t matter,” Harte said quickly, doing all he could to avoid getting involved in another awkward conversation. He opened the fuel can and began to empty its contents over the pile of furniture. Jas pushed past him as the acrid smell of petrol filled the air and ran back to the kitchen. Harte followed, slowly shuffling out backward, carefully spilling a trail of petrol through the house behind him. Once the can was empty he kicked it across the kitchen floor; it clattered noisily on the hard tiles.
“Keep still,” Jas mumbled as he ferreted around in the rucksack on Harte’s back for a box of matches. As soon as he had them they both barged out through the back door, Harte not stopping until he was on the far side of the trampoline again. He shielded his eyes from the light drizzle and watched as Jas crouched in the doorway.
Jas almost allowed himself to think about the body of the child again before he struck the match; almost, but not quite. Just at the last second he managed to distract himself and, before his mind could wander again, he lit the flame. The vapor in the air caught light immediately. He turned and ran.
By the time the two men had worked their way back through seven gardens and were ready to get on the bike, the house down the road was well ablaze. The crackling, spitting flames, the noise, the belching black smoke and the dancing orange, red, and yellow light were enough to distract virtually all of the bodies out in the street. Jas and Harte were away before the dead had even realized they were there.
13
“They’re coming,” said Stokes. “I can hear them.”
“About bloody time,” grumbled Webb. He looked at the house in the near distance and watched it burn, incandescent orange against the dull gray of everything else. “We might as well get started.”
“Give it a few more minutes,” Hollis suggested. “Go in too fast and they’ll forget about the fire and turn back at you.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Webb sneered. “Bring it on. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
Pumped full of adrenaline, Webb marched down the hill, ignoring Hollis’s warning. He glanced back as the motorbike finally returned, watching it sweep around the front of the building behind him. Their distraction seemed
