its misery.
Concentrating on the carcass on the ground but suddenly aware of another figure approaching at speed, Webb turned into the sun and swung his baseball bat around with massive force. Stokes let out a whimper as it hit him square in the chest, the nails piercing through his skin and muscle and puncturing his lungs. He dropped to his knees, clutching his wounds.
“What did you do that for?” he asked, stunned with surprise, only just starting to feel the pain. Webb’s legs turned to jelly as he realized what he’d done.
“Sorry, Stokes…” he stammered pathetically. “I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know it was you … I just…”
“It really hurts,” Stokes groaned, tears of agony running down his face. He looked at his hands and saw that they were soaked with blood. His jacket and shirt were already drenched too. “Go and get the others,” he wheezed. “Get Caron…”
Webb crouched down next to him. What the hell was he going to do? He reached out his hand but stopped before he touched him. Stokes looked at him again, his eyes wide with hurt, then slumped heavily over onto his side. He breathed a few labored, gurgling breaths and then stopped. Everything was silent save for the corpse scrambling around in the dust just out of reach.
“Stokes,” Webb said, getting as close to the other man’s face as he could without touching him. “Stokes, come on! Don’t die…”
He reached out his hand again, this time forcing himself to touch Stokes’s shoulder. He shook it but there was no response. He couldn’t be dead. He just couldn’t be …
The creature behind him managed to drag itself far enough forward to reach his boot with outstretched fingers. Webb turned and grabbed the corpse by the shoulders and threw it several meters away into the dust where it flopped back over onto its chest and began to drag itself toward him again. He didn’t even look at it, concentrating instead on Stokes. He still hadn’t moved.
For a few desperate seconds longer he weighed up his limited options; turn and run or go back and face the others. Much as he wanted to quickly disappear, one look at the thousands of corpses still gathered around the flats and he knew he’d never get away in one piece. If he’d been able to drive then maybe things would have been different, but the fact of the matter was that he couldn’t. He was stuck here.
* * *
“What’s the matter with you?” Hollis asked as Webb burst into the communal flat. Bloody Webb, why did his heart always sink when he saw him?
“They got him,” he gasped.
“What are you talking about? Who got who?”
“Stokes. They got him.”
“Who got him?” he repeated.
“The bodies. He’s dead.”
21
“I’m going,” Harte announced, his face pressed against the window. “They’re coming over the barrier again. Fuck this, I’m going.”
His words were met with silence as the rest of the survivors thought about what they’d heard. Several others had reached the same decision individually, but no one had found the courage to stand up and say as much. Harte hadn’t any courage either; he was entirely motivated by fear.
“Are you sure there’s no other option?” Caron asked. The room was dark. She couldn’t see how anyone else had reacted.
“I’ll listen to anything anyone else has got to say,” Harte replied anxiously, “but I can’t see any other way forward. For Christ’s sake, Anita’s dead upstairs, Stokes is dead down there, Ellie’s dying and the bodies are climbing over the barrier again. You tell me if there’s any better option than getting the hell out of here.”
Silence.
“We could go down there in the morning and clear them out again,” Jas suggested. “I’m not going out there tonight.”
“How many will be down there by then? I’ve seen half a dozen get over in the last couple of minutes. At that rate that’s almost a hundred an hour. There’ll be a thousand of them by the time the sun comes up.”
Hollis got up and walked over to the window where Harte was standing. He was right—in the pale moonlight outside he could see that the corpses had found another weak point in their increasingly ineffective blockade. They were scrambling over the back of another car like cockroaches scuttling across a dirty kitchen floor.
“But is it going to be any different anywhere else?” Gordon asked. He was sitting on the floor in the farthest corner of the room, knees pulled up close to his chest. “It’s not going to be any better, is it?”
“Couldn’t be any worse,” Lorna mumbled.
“Don’t count on it,” Jas said quickly. “We thought we were doing well here.”
“I don’t understand what’s happened,” Caron said. “Why’s it all gone so wrong so quickly?”
“Bad luck,” Hollis answered.
“It’s a bit more than bad luck, you fucking idiot,” Harte said nervously.
“We couldn’t have planned for any of this,” he continued.
“No one could have planned for anything that’s happened since September.”
“I know that, but we thought we’d be able to sit this out here, didn’t we. I thought we’d be okay here until they’d decayed away to nothing. And maybe we still would have been if Anita hadn’t got sick.”
“But why now?” Caron asked. “Why are they climbing over the barrier today?”
“Because they’re scared,” Jas replied. “Because they’ve seen us down there beating the shit out of several hundred of them at a time, and we’ve scared them. They can’t get away because there are so many of them, so they’re fighting back like caged animals. What’s left of their brains is telling them to get us before we get them.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do,” Hollis said quickly. “He’s right. We’ve brought this on ourselves.”
“So is there any point in leaving?”
“Well, yes,” he responded with a blunt and irritating matter-of-factness. “Of course there is. Anita’s dead and Ellie’s dying. If we stay here then there’s a strong chance more of us will go the same way.”
“But like I said,” Gordon whined from the corner, “aren’t we just going to end up in as bad a mess somewhere else? We’ll end up with another bloody huge crowd of them gathered around us.”
“Maybe, but it probably won’t be as big a crowd as we’ve got here. It’s taken more than a month for that many of them to drag themselves over here. It’s going to take time for things to get this bad if we’re starting again from scratch, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“You’ve seen what kind of a state they’re in, haven’t you? So, logically, by the time we get to this stage again with these kind of numbers, the bodies should be pretty much incapable of harming us, no matter how many of them there are.”
“I’m sold,” Lorna said quietly. “Makes sense to me. I’m going.”
“Anyway,” Caron protested, “this is all irrelevant.”
“Is it?” she grumbled. “Why?”
“Because we can’t go anywhere with Ellie the way she is.”
“Yes, we can,” Harte quickly replied.
“We can’t just leave her here…”
“Yes, we can,” he said again. “We can’t take her with us, can we? Kind of defeats the object if we take her and whatever she’s got with us, doesn’t it?”
“But we can’t just leave her.”
