to shunt it far enough out of the way to leave the gate clear. Even from his position at the back of the queue Jas could see that a huge gathering of bodies had almost immediately amassed on the other side of the gate. They pushed forward angrily, rattling the low metal barrier. Webb sprinted for cover and climbed back into the middle car with Amir as Harte flicked the latch and shoved the gate open, knocking the cadavers at the front of the group backwards. They immediately surged forward again but it didn’t matter. Back behind the wheel of his car, Harte accelerated into the field and sent them flying. Amir and Sean followed, both cars crunching through gravel then pounding over the uneven mud. Jas brought up the rear, glancing back in his mirror momentarily and watching the gate swing shut again. It wasn’t locked, but it would have to do for now. Hopefully the sudden arrival of the four vehicles in the field would be enough to distract the crowds of slothful figures. Judging by the vast numbers of them already stumbling toward him, that certainly seemed to be the case.
As they’d arranged, Harte veered off to the left, plowing into a wave of corpses and driving down the slope of the field toward the very bottom, right-hand corner, diagonally opposite to the gate they’d just entered through. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure that Jas was following. Behind him the van thumped through the sea of lethargic figures, wiping out many of them. There were hundreds of the fucking things here, many more than he’d expected and far more than had been visible from their vantage point back at the hotel. Jas accelerated again, following the curve of the blood-soaked scar Harte had left across the field.
“That’s got to be far enough,” Harte said to himself, anxiously trying to work out where he was. His brief had been to drive as far as he could across the full width and length of the field, but he hadn’t accounted for just how little he’d be able to see from behind the wheel. His driving position was low and all that he could see around him now was a relentless forest of constantly shifting corpses.
He slammed on the brakes, skidding to a juddering halt, the rear end of the car spinning out and smashing into a handful of soggy, rag-doll-like cadavers. Jas pulled up alongside and watched him frantically scramble out of his seat. He leaned over into the back and emptied out half a can of fuel, then looked up to make sure that Jas was ready for him. He tried to shove the door open and almost immediately a mass of emaciated, clawing hands thrust back at him. Jas reversed, then accelerated forward, turning into the car and driving alongside it, scraping a layer of bodies away. In the short-lived moment of space which followed Harte threw himself out into the open, lit a match and dropped it into the back, then ran over to the van. He hauled himself up into the passenger seat just as the inside of the car was filled with a scorching whoosh of billowing flame. Job done.
“Nice one,” Jas said, turning the van away and forcing it in the opposite direction back up the incline, its engine groaning with effort. The bodies around them temporarily reduced in number, the fire in the car proving to be a more interesting distraction. Harte twisted around and hung back over his seat to watch as the ragged gray figures surged toward the light. The boot of the car—packed with several plastic canisters full of fuel—exploded, showering the dead with flames and red-hot shrapnel. The car itself flipped over on its end and landed in the middle of the hordes, crushing untold numbers of them. Despite being steadily consumed by the heat and light, those which were alight but still able to move continued to stagger around until their already weakened muscles had burned away to nothing, setting light to more of the stupid creatures they blindly stumbled into.
“Can you see the others?” Harte asked, panting with a heady mix of nerves, effort, and exhilaration.
“We’ll find them,” Jas replied, sounding less than confident. Not only were they still surrounded by a seemingly unending mass of rancid flesh, but the gradient of the hill was also proving difficult. They were driving up, but they couldn’t yet see what was happening at the top of the climb where the ground leveled out closer to the golf course.
* * *
Less than a hundred meters away but out of sight of the van, Amir and Webb were also struggling. The sheer number of bodies which had surrounded their car had completely disoriented both men. Throngs of disintegrating cadavers filled every available scrap of space, making it difficult to see in any direction and impossible to navigate. Amir kept the car moving forward, but had little idea where he was heading and was certainly not traveling at anywhere near a fast enough speed. His relative inexperience with the dead was painfully apparent. Rather than accelerate into them he frequently swerved or just ground to a halt and tried to nudge them out of the way. Webb was beginning to get desperate.
“Hit the fucking things!” he screamed. “Speed up, for Christ’s sake!”
“But I don’t know where we’re going,” Amir protested, wrenching the steering wheel hard around to the right and turning them in a tight circle, wheels skidding in decay.
“Neither do they.”
“But we might end up in the fence or too close to the gate.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter.” Webb shouted, his voice hoarse with panic and exacerbation. “We’re about to blow the bloody car up!”
“Why don’t you drive, then?” Amir suggested. Webb just glared at him.
“There!” he said suddenly, pointing over to the far left where he’d just spotted the roof of the van whipping past above the heads of the corpses. Amir slowed again, then turned around and accelerated. “Keep moving,” Webb moaned, terrified that they were about to come to a sudden stop, stranded and surrounded. They burst into a muddy track of open, gore-soaked space, a sure sign that the van or one of the other cars had been there just a few seconds earlier. Amir followed the bloody route through the crowd until it disappeared again, swallowed up by another group of lurching figures.
“Where now?”
“Let’s just do it here.”
“But the van’s not here. We can’t do it until the van’s here to pick us up.”
Webb seethed, holding onto the side of his seats as the car bounced over a particularly uneven stretch of ground and clattered into another swell of rotting flesh. “You bloody idiot, it doesn’t matter where the van is. Once we set fire to this thing they’ll see us quickly enough.”
Amir couldn’t think straight. What did he do? Did he keep driving or was Webb right? Should they just stop now? He winced as the front of the car sliced the legs out from under a ragged body, cutting it in two and sending its head and torso spinning into the windscreen directly in front of him, leaving a large crack and a slimy smear of black blood. There were more bodies than ever up ahead of them now, so many that they looked like a solid black mass, no longer recognizable as individual cadavers. Behind the corpses he could see trees rising up on either side. Webb realized what was happening before Amir could react.
“You’re gonna drive us into the fucking fence!” he screamed, covering his head.
Amir finally recognized where he was, but it was too late to do anything about it. He’d been here with Martin and the others way, way back when the nightmare had first begun. He’d spent hours out here as they’d struggled to channel the unresponsive bodies away from the hotel. There was a gap in the trees which marked the position of a break in the fence he and the others had made, and on the other side of the fence was the golf course. It was too late …
He had to make a snap decision. With so many corpses coming toward him he knew he either had to hit them at full speed or stop and turn back again.
“Hold on,” he said pointlessly as he struggled to keep hold of the steering wheel. The car bounced and clattered through the hole that he, Howard and Martin had hacked through the fence weeks earlier. Webb braced himself for the impact he felt sure would come at any second.
The wheels thumped back down onto the hard ground. A sudden swerve to the left, then to the right, and the car burst out of the rough and onto the fairway. Too terrified now to make any rational decisions, Amir simply kept the car moving forward as far as he could, driving head-first into the largest crowd of dead flesh that either of them had ever seen. A relentless storm of decay and dismembered body parts was thrown up into the air as the blood- soaked vehicle blasted into the lifeless masses.
“Where the hell are you going?” Webb yelled, terrified. Amir didn’t answer. He didn’t know. He no longer had any idea what he was doing. The plan that Jas and Harte had come up with was in tatters. Maybe if he could find a way of turning around they could get back.
The car veered off course as it dipped down a sudden steep incline, hidden from view by dense swarms of dead bodies. Amir tried to compensate by steering straight back up into the climb, but the angle was too sharp.
