His words were wasted; Stokes was already out of earshot. Still panting, Webb ran back down the hill. In the distance he could see that Harte and Lorna had reached the diggers.
“Just push them back,” Jas shouted. He pointed deep into the growing crowd. “They’re getting through over there. Build the wall up!”
Lorna was the first to get her digger started. She drove it across the uneven ground at full speed, heading straight for the mass of bodies which were still spilling over the top of the barrier. It didn’t look as bad from down here. When they’d first spotted the breach from their high vantage point in the flats there had seemed to be hundreds of spindly figures pouring over. The reality was their numbers were far fewer but that was academic; one corpse on the wrong side of the line was one too many. Scoop down, she thundered into the center of the crowd, forcing many of the advancing grotesques up into the air and back over the blockade. Unsighted, she collided with the very car they were managing to clamber over and the sudden shock jolted her back in her seat.
“Block it up,” Hollis shouted to Harte, gesturing at the point where the dead had managed to get over. It was hard to see clearly through the continual, frantic movement, but they appeared to be getting through by dragging themselves over the low bonnet of a small black, family-sized car. Once he was sure that Harte had heard him he returned his attention to those foul aberrations which had already crossed over, chopping and hacking at them with his machete.
Harte turned the digger around and moved away from the corpses. Behind him Lorna was now driving furiously from side to side, obliterating hordes of defenseless figures with every pass. He drove toward a pile of rubble, collected a huge shovelful, then turned back to face the barrier. It looked like they were beginning to regain control. Lorna had quickly dealt with an unquantifiable number of the dead, leaving Jas, Gordon, Webb, and Stokes to wipe up the few that had managed to get away. Hollis, unusually, was standing a little way back from the center of the chaos, the dismembered remains of a blood-soaked police officer twitching at his booted feet.
A loud warning blast on the horn and Harte powered forward. He stopped just short of the blockade— ploughing down six more cadavers on the way—lifted the digger’s articulated arm and dropped several tons of crumbling masonry onto the front of the black car. When the dust settled it immediately became apparent that he’d hit the spot perfectly. The dead were shut out again. He felt a sense of smug satisfaction when he jumped down from the cab and saw that when he’d dropped the rubble, he’d also managed to crush a handful of bodies as they’d been trying to get across. Arms and legs jutted out from the confusion at awkward angles. The head of a trapped corpse, wedged at the shoulders between the bonnet of the car and a block of concrete, watched him until he ended its unnatural existence with a well-aimed punch to the face.
“Come on, you fuckers!” Webb screamed at the top of his voice, fighting to make himself heard over the noise of Lorna’s digger and the chain saw which Jas was using. Suddenly pumped full of adrenaline again, he braced himself as yet another body hurled itself at him, its decayed face and gnarled lips almost seeming to sneer as it lurched forward. He shoved it back toward Jas, who sliced it in half with a single swipe, the whirring chain-saw blade sliding through its torso. Two more foul, dripping bodies edged toward Jas. He shoved the chain saw into the face of the nearest, angling the whirring blade away from him and down and wincing in disgust as a thick spray of blood, brain and rotten flesh soaked the ground. The other body of the pair seemed to have a little more sense, if that was at all possible. It suddenly veered off to the left, evading the next swipe of the chain saw. It turned its head back to watch Jas over its shoulder as it moved awkwardly away, then staggered straight into the path of Lorna in the digger.
“One behind you, Gordon!” Jas yelled.
Gordon spun around and waited nervously for the dishevelled remains of an elderly woman to attack. He gripped his hand ax tightly, wishing he could fight with the confidence and speed of the others. He felt hopelessly inadequate despite the obvious strength advantage he had over this particular corpse, but the monstrous thing was upon him now and he had no alternative but to take action. Go for the head, he silently repeated to himself, remembering what the others had told him. He swung the ax around and smashed it into the side of the corpse’s face, shattering its cheekbone and splitting its ear in half. He wrenched the sunken blade free, then panicked as the creature continued to stagger forward, unperturbed. He swung the ax again, this time wedging it deep into its neck. It took another stumbling step closer, then dropped to the ground in front of him, dark crimson gore slowly dribbling out of its open wounds.
As quickly and as unexpectedly as it had started, the teeming movement around the edge of the barrier wound down to a halt. The diggers and the chain saw were silenced. On the other side of the barrier the bodies continued to surge forward, ripples and aftershocks of movement still running through the huge crowd in response to the sudden carnage and noise. Satisfied that the job was done, the group began to move back toward the flats. Only Hollis remained behind. Lorna walked over to him when she noticed he wasn’t following.
“Problem?” she asked, anxiously surveying the scene, worried that he’d spotted something the rest of them had missed.
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What is it?” she pressed, concerned. Hollis angrily kicked the corpse lying at his feet.
“This thing caught me off-guard,” he reluctantly admitted. “Didn’t know it was there until it got hold of me.”
“So? You sorted it out, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?”
It was obvious there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“I didn’t hear it coming.”
“So what? I’m not surprised. You know, with the diggers and the chain saw and Webb’s mouth it’s no wonder you didn’t…”
He was shaking his head. She stopped talking.
“It’s not that,” he said.
“What, then?”
“Remember when we were out yesterday morning? You let that body out in the pharmacy and it went for me?”
“Yes.”
“I hit my head when I went down.”
“I know. Is that why you’re…?”
“I’ve damaged my ear,” he said, his voice suddenly unusually emotional. “I can’t hear a fucking thing on my left side, and that’s why this fucking thing nearly had me.”
He kicked the corpse at his feet again, sending its bloodied head skidding across the ground like a football, then walked away from her and began to march up the hill.
19
“What are we gonna do?” Harte asked, slumping in a chair and holding his head in his hands. Four hours had passed since the bodies first breached the barrier. They’d broken through three more times since, smaller advances which had been quickly contained. “Those damn things out there are learning! They’re copying each other, for Christ’s sake!”
“The obvious answer is to try and make the barrier stronger,” Hollis replied, “but I don’t think that’s going to help.”
“Of course it’s going to help, you prick. How can it not help?”
“I don’t think we’re looking at the problem the right way.”
“What?” Harte grunted. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.
“Are you talking about the bodies?” Jas wondered.
“Thing is,” he explained, “I don’t think it matters how they got over the barrier or if they’re going to do it again, I think we need to be working out
“That’s bloody obvious,” Lorna interrupted. “It was Webb. We saw you standing out there, throwing stones at them.”
