Disintegration

51

Webb was upside down and he could taste blood in his mouth. The light was low and he struggled to make sense of his surroundings. Was it night already? Had he really lay here unconscious for hours, wherever here was? He could hear running water, and he could smell its pungent, stagnant odor too. What the hell had happened? He tried to move but a sudden sharp, jabbing pain in his gut made him stop. With cold, swollen hands he reached out and disentangled himself from his baseball bat. One of the nails was sticking into him. Fortunately several thick layers of clothing had prevented the point from piercing his skin. The pain immediately stopped and he let the bat fall from his hands. It landed with a thump on the upturned roof of the car, right between Amir and himself.

“Amir,” he said, managing to tilt his head slightly so that he could see the other man’s face, “are you okay?”

Amir didn’t respond. Webb looked around again, confused, his eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the gloom. Amir was also upside down, still anchored in his seat by his safety belt. What kind of an idiot wears a safety belt these days? Webb wondered. And why am I lying on my back on the roof? The car, he slowly deduced, his head still cloudy, had turned over in the middle of a stream. He began to remember a few fleeting flashes of how they’d ended up here—plowing into the bodies on the golf course, Amir panicking and steering the wrong way, the sudden stomach-churning drop and the flashing of light over dark again and again as they rolled down the bank—but little else. Still not yet daring to move, he worked his way back through events to try and make more sense of his predicament. He remembered the reason why they’d been away from the hotel. The others would all probably have made it back by now and they’d have given him and Amir up for dead. But wait … maybe it wasn’t as late as he’d first thought. He angled his head around again so that he could look out the window at his side. The glass was almost completely obscured by mud and a corpse which had its legs trapped under the car and was trying unsuccessfully to get away. When the corpse moved its leaden arms he could see definite flashes of daylight.

Got to get out of here.

“Amir,” he said again. He managed to reach across and shake Amir’s shoulder. He felt cold to the touch. Was he dead? He shook him again but still there was no reaction. What did he do now?

Webb slowly moved his legs and found that he was able to work them around the edge of the back of the seat he’d been sitting in when they’d lost control of the car. Now able to move with a little more freedom, he stretched out and shuffled along the roof up toward the engine. The car had come to rest at a slight angle. The front of it was out of the water, propped up on the bank, while the back end was submerged. If he could smash his way through the windscreen, he’d be able to crawl out under the upturned bonnet and get out. What he’d do after that was anyone’s guess. The most prevalent of the snatched memories he had of the moments just before the crash was the incredible size of the crowd they’d managed to drive into. It was fucking huge.

“Amir,” he whispered for a third time, “come on.” When there was still no response he reached out to touch his neck and try to find a pulse. Amir’s skin felt warm but clammy. He noticed that there was a puddle of blood on the roof below his upside-down head and he carefully turned his suspended head to face him. There was a deep gash across Amir’s forehead and, when Webb looked back, a corresponding bloody smudge in the middle of the cracked windscreen. Ironic that Amir was the one who had been strapped in, he thought. Poor bastard.

Webb moved again and his outstretched foot kicked the fuel can which had also dropped onto the roof. Burn the car and distract the corpses, he remembered, that had been the plan. It might still work. He had no idea where he was in relation to the hotel, but anywhere on the golf course would be far enough away from the others not to matter, not that he cared about them and their plans anyway. Never mind getting that helicopter Jas had been constantly banging on about to see them, setting fire to the car would cause enough of a distraction to give him a chance to get away.

“Oi, Amir,” he said, this time a little louder. He shook his shoulder again but still there was no response other than a sudden sickening dribble of blood where before there had been only drips. Time to move. There was nothing he could do for him. Even if he got him out of the car, he was going to have enough trouble getting himself off the golf course.

Struggling in the confined space, Webb spun around on his back through a slow 180 degrees and kicked at the windscreen. A series of three good, strong boots to the already weakened glass was enough to shatter it and kick it through. He turned back around again, grabbing the can of fuel and his baseball bat as he moved, and then crawled out of the car.

The appalling sight which greeted him was almost enough to send him scuttling back under cover but he forced himself to keep going. For as far as he could see ahead the stream was nothing more than a sickening stew of decay, packed solid with incalculable numbers of corpses which had fallen into the mire over time and been unable to get out again. Strangely cushioned and protected in the ditch, however, they continued to move constantly, never stopping but never getting anywhere either. The water he’d heard under the roof of the car was little more than a pathetic trickle. Filled with unidentifiable lumps and chunks and with a disgusting putrid brown- green hue, it reminded him of vomit.

The nearest bodies were trapped, either by each other or by the upturned car, and he found that he was able to move around them with surprising freedom. Working quickly he opened the fuel can and set it down under the bonnet. He tore a strip of rag from the back of a corpse which was stuck facing away from him, soaked it with fuel and jammed it into the mouth of the can. Taking out his lighter from under several layers of clothes, he lit the rag and furiously scrambled away.

“Webb…”

What the fuck was that? He spun around anxiously. It sounded like Amir, but he was dead, wasn’t he? Jesus Christ, what if he was wrong? What if Amir was still alive; if he’d just passed out because of the blood? Webb could see him through the cracked windscreen. He didn’t look like he’d moved. He must have imagined the noise. Amir’s eyes were still closed and the blood was still dripping and … and the rag was still burning. Webb jumped to his feet and hauled himself up the steep bank, grabbing at random corpses and using them as leverage, stamping his feet down onto flesh and bone and whatever else he could get a grip on. He threw himself over the top of the bank, straight into a solid mass of bodies the size of which he couldn’t even begin to appreciate, and then dropped to his knees as the car behind him exploded. Like unprotected trees around a bomb blast, hundreds of cadavers were flattened in a rough circle around the epicenter. Webb found himself buried under a mass of dark figures dripping with decay.

Keep moving.

No time to think. Make the most of the delay before the rest of them start moving toward the blast. As he climbed back to his feet and began to trip through a quagmire of flesh and body parts several inches deep, he glanced back over his shoulder. The car, or parts of it at least, had been blown back out of the ditch. He could see twisted chunks of its blackened frame burning fiercely. If Amir wasn’t dead, he thought, then he is now.

All around Webb, hordes of bodies were turning and advancing toward him. They staggered and stumbled unsteadily through the gruesome slime which coated the once-pristine golf course. Thousands of continually moving feet had churned the remains of countless fallen creatures with the cloying mud to cover everything with a layer of dark, sticky, foul-smelling sludge. Keep moving, he told himself, it’s the fire they’re heading for, not me. As those corpses which had made the most progress lurched nearer he instinctively dropped to his knees and began to crawl through the slurry around and between their emaciated feet, hoping that remaining low would be enough to keep them from reacting to him. Stupid things never look down, he tried to reassure himself. If they looked where they were going, there wouldn’t have been so many of them stuck in the bloody stream. He lowered his head and held onto his baseball bat as he began to move through the sea of spindly, unsteady legs which slipped and slid through the once-human soup all around him.

Which way now?

Time to make another decision. He couldn’t keep crawling like this indefinitely—although he continued to do so as he tried to decide what to do next. Lifting his head momentarily, he glimpsed the trunk of a large, twisted tree up ahead and to his right. He altered his course and moved toward it, intending to use it as cover as the crowd continued to gravitate toward the fire. If he stayed on the blind side of the tree they probably wouldn’t see him. In less than a minute he was there, and he cautiously raised himself up behind it, holding onto its rough bark and pulling himself back up onto his feet with gloved hands. It was surprising how much more he could see and hear now that he was upright. Down at ground level the sheer bulk of the bodies above him had blocked out much of the