careful and driving slowly, but all that was forgotten in the heat of the moment. He careered back, steering hard around to keep the van on the pavement, looking up at the canopy at the front of the damaged building and praying it would hold. It didn’t. The sides of the porch collapsed inward, littering the ground with dust and rubble. The front of the building, thankfully, remained standing. He drove up onto the pavement, leaving the road clear, and parked.
“We need to go,” Hollis said to him as he got back out of the van. “This isn’t good.”
Harte looked up at Lorna, Webb, and Jas, who were just about managing to hold back the tide. They remained in control, but the dead masses still herded toward them and their numbers were increasing. They’d been carving them up for several minutes now and had reduced more than fifty to little more than a bloody pile of unrecognizable body parts. Easily as many again were still stumbling lethargically toward them, and more would undoubtedly follow when the next fifty had been hacked down, then more and more …
Harte ran back to the bus, distracted momentarily by a body which appeared to fall from out of nowhere, dropping facedown onto the street just in front of him and disintegrating on impact like bad fruit. He recoiled in disgust as dark, sticky blood and other foul substances splashed up at him from the splattered remains on the tarmac. He looked up at the office block beside him, bewildered. The sudden, constant noise and movement out in the street had alerted a number of corpses which had been trapped inside the building but which had now found a way out thanks to the damage he’d caused. Drawn out of the shadows by the chaos outside, the stupid creatures were now plummeting out from the first floor like lemmings. Ignorant to the danger and desperate to get closer to the living, the damn things were literally falling out of the sky around him. Another one fell nearby, its head somehow protected from the fall but its body irrevocably damaged. Regardless, it tried to pull itself along the ground toward him with its one remaining good arm.
“We’re going,” he announced to Driver. Not needing any further instruction, Driver straightened the bus again and moved it forward. Stumbling corpses began to slip through on either side, their speed increased by the pressure of others pushing from behind.
A short distance up ahead, Hollis moved their van up to where the others were fighting. Lorna climbed in quickly, shouting across at Webb and Jas for them to follow. Webb heard her and ran back, stopping when he realized that Jas was still out there, isolated from everything else that was happening by the noise of his weapon. He ran forward again and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around and stumbling back as Jas lunged at him, chain-saw blade whirring angrily. At the last possible second he realized it was Webb and yanked the blade back.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he spat furiously as unchallenged corpses began to hurl themselves at him. “I could have killed you!”
Jas immediately shut up when he saw what was happening behind him. Suddenly able to get through again, streams of cadavers were pushing ever closer. Sandwiched between two advancing walls of dead flesh, he followed Webb to the van and dived for cover.
“Get in!” Lorna screamed, her voice so loud that it hurt. Bodies slammed against the van. One of them, half of its face eaten away by rot, glared at her with its one remaining eye and hammered against her window with greasy, leaden fists. She turned away from it in disgust, but all she could see were more equally hideous dead faces staring back through every available square inch of glass. Hollis drove forward, knocking the monsters away and powering through the crowd, thankful that they’d decided to move before the corpses had been able to bunch up tight. The entire street, which had been empty just minutes earlier, was now teeming with death—infested with hundreds of decaying cadavers.
“What the hell just happened?” Jas breathlessly asked from the back. “That was so fast.”
“I guess that’s the reception we’re going to get wherever we go,” Hollis answered, holding the steering wheel tight as they juddered through the seething crowd.
“Five minutes,” Jas said. “We couldn’t have been out there any longer than five minutes.”
“If we’re all that’s left,” Lorna said quietly, “then this will keep happening. Back at the flats we’d got thousands of them gathered in the one place because they knew where we were. Out here they’re running wild.”
25
The van powered along quiet and relatively clear rural roads having easily outrun the last of the rotting population of Cudsford. The difference here on the other side of the town was stark; there were hardly any bodies and considerably fewer wrecks and ruins than they’d seen in a long time. Hollis noticed that there were still plenty of the telltale signs of the devastation which had blighted the country, he just had to look a little harder to see them. Moss and weeds were slowly taking over here and there, encroaching on everything with greens and browns. Buildings, abandoned vehicles, and dead bodies alike would eventually be completely swallowed up and absorbed back into the landscape.
“Where’s the bus?” Jas asked, anxiously looking over his shoulder. Hollis glanced into his mirror. The road behind them was empty. He slowed down—not daring to stop, despite the relative lack of bodies around them—and waited. After a few seconds the lumbering, blood-splattered bus came back into view. The sudden freedom of the open road had caught Hollis off-guard and he’d simply driven too fast.
“Here they are,” he announced, accelerating again.
The wide, tree-lined road curved to the left around the foot of a large hill. Several hundred meters ahead was a traffic island, sign-posted with names which didn’t mean anything to Hollis, who searched for something familiar. He thought he could remember the route to the exhibition center Driver had talked about, but like everyone else his nerves were shattered and he needed reassurance.
“Any ideas?” he asked hopefully.
“Second exit,” Lorna replied, her voice sounding nervous and unsure. Hollis steered the van around the roundabout, flinching slightly as he plowed into a lone body which had foolishly tripped into his path.
“I need a piss,” Jas said, banging on the side of the van.
“What do you want me to do about it?” Hollis snapped.
“Well, you could stop the van and let me out,” he answered, annoyed. “I’m not going to do it in here.”
“And I’m not going to stop.”
“Don’t be stupid, Hollis, I’m bloody desperate.”
“You’ve got to stop,” Webb chipped in. “Come on, I need to go too.”
“Just piss in a bottle or something and throw it out of the window. I’m not stopping. Look what happened back there.”
“That was different and you know it.” Jas sighed. “That was the middle of a town, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing around here.”
“You reckon? Look over there.”
He pointed to an area of land over to the right of another roundabout. A number of corpses were gathered outside a dilapidated petrol station and service area, milling around between the pumps and outbuildings. When they heard the noise of the engines they immediately began to herd toward the road in a ragtag group.
“So what?” Webb protested. “There’s fifteen of them, twenty at most. Bloody hell, Hollis, any one of us could sort that number out on our own back at the flats.”
“Yes, but we’re not at the flats now, are we?”
“A corpse is a corpse. Doesn’t matter where it is.”
“I know that, but we don’t know the area.”
“It’s all fields, for fuck’s sake. There’s nothing to know.”
“Things are different when we don’t know the area. Look what happened earlier. You don’t want to be caught out by a hundred of them when you’re stood there with your dick in your hands.”
“Come on, Hollis, stop making excuses. Just stop the van for a minute so we can have a piss.”
“No.”
Hollis put his foot down and increased his speed, making a point and powering toward the first of the group of cadavers which had staggered out into the road. He swerved around them and accelerated again, racing ahead down a long straight, leaving the bus trundling after them, struggling to catch up.
