“What’s the matter?” he asked, glancing anxiously around. There were more bodies here, and he was already aware of several creeping, twisted figures which were emerging from the shadows on either side of the road.
“Need to work out how we’re going to get out of here,” Jas replied, his voice muffled and quiet.
“Don’t you think we should have thought about that before we came out?”
Harte stared at a grotesque creature which limped closer to them. A huge chunk of flesh was missing from the right of its torso, as if something had taken a bite out of its side. It wore a pair of soiled pajama bottoms and slippers, and its awkward, lethargic movement caused more of its putrefied guts to spill out of the hole in its chest.
“Are you listening to me?” Jas said angrily. Harte shook his head, cursing himself for being so distracted by the monstrosity he’d been watching and the trail of guts it had left on the road.
“What?” he mumbled.
“We’ll go around the back,” Jas yelled, driving a little farther forward, then stopping midway down what had once been an ordinary suburban street lined on either side with unremarkable, semidetached houses. He looked up to make sure he could still see the flats—no point creating a distraction that can’t be seen from up there, he thought—then gestured toward the nearest house. More bodies were hauling themselves toward them now. A group of three seemed to be moving together. “Open that gate!” he ordered, pointing to the narrow passageway which ran down the side of the house.
Harte immediately jumped off the bike and ran down the driveway, pausing only to barge a lanky and particularly unsteady body out of the way, sending it tripping over onto the tarmac. He tried to force the wooden gate open but it wouldn’t move.
“It’s locked,” he shouted to Jas, who had driven down the drive after him.
“Of course it’s locked, you idiot!” he shouted back. “Just climb over and get the bloody thing open!”
Inquisitive bodies were beginning to swarm down the driveway now, almost completely blocking the way out. Still holding on to the fuel can, Harte hauled himself up over the top of the tall gate and crashed down into the passageway on the other side, immediately picking himself up, turning around and sliding the bolt. As soon as the gate was open Jas drove toward him, barely giving him chance to get out of the way. Once he was through, Harte ran back and pushed the gate shut again, slamming it in the rotting face of a once-pregnant cadaver. The creature’s distended belly—still filled with the partially-developed remains of its dead child—slapped against the wood like meat on a butcher’s slab.
“Now what?” Harte asked, returning to Jas, who’d parked his bike on a patio. Weeds sprouted between the slabs they stood on.
“On foot,” he said. “We’ll cut through a few more gardens, then do it. It should disorient them. Once we start the fire they’ll lose track of where we are. It’ll give us a better chance of getting back out.”
Harte didn’t argue. He followed Jas deeper into the long garden, moving away from the back of the house and looking for a way through to next-door. Jas found a broken fence panel two-thirds of the way down the narrow lawn. He pushed it over and clambered through to the other side. Harte stayed close, running across the second garden and checking back over his shoulder to make sure he’d remember where they’d started out from.
“Bloody hell,” Jas cursed as he crawled through a gap in a laurel hedge into the third garden, then stood up and walked straight into the dead arms of something which, from the look of its blood and paint-stained overalls, might have been a builder or decorator when it had been alive. It had been on the right side of the garden at exactly the wrong time for Jas and had managed to grab hold of him with its clumsy, outstretched arms. He pushed the corpse away. It stumbled back, then pivoted around on heavy, uncoordinated legs and lurched toward him again.
“I’ve got it,” Harte said. Jas stepped out of the way as Harte plunged a garden fork up into the creature’s face, one prong drilling through the side of its cheek and into the roof of its mouth, another gouging an eye, then sinking deep into what was left of its brain.
“Cheers,” Jas grunted, stepping over the body and continuing through into garden number four. In no time he’d managed to get through gardens five, six, and seven. Still struggling to get across garden six, Harte, who was nowhere near as fit and was lagging behind, yelled for him to stop.
“Come on,” he wheezed as he clambered over the final low fence. “Surely this’ll do.”
Jas stopped and rested with his hands on his hips. He cleared his throat and spat a lump of phlegm into a stagnant fish pond just ahead of him. His spit settled on the surface, barely even causing a ripple in the murky water, which was dark green, almost solid with algae and silt. He could just make out a few shards and slivers of orange and white among the sludge—all that remained of someone’s pet goldfish.
Harte was already walking toward the house, moving around the edge of a large, circular children’s trampoline. The center of the trampoline sagged heavily. A puddle of rainwater had gathered over weeks, steadily distorting the once taut elastic sheeting. He climbed four low steps up to another weed-infested patio, then paused at the back door before entering the building. Jas peered in through the cobweb-covered kitchen window.
“Can’t see anything in there,” he said, unaware that he had suddenly started to whisper. Harte tried the door, which was stiff and hard to open. A shove with his shoulder and it moved. He pushed it fully open and stepped into the house. The building was filled with the suffocating and disturbingly familiar stench of death. His concern was not how many bodies he’d find inside, however, just how many were moving.
Speed was vital. Not needing to discuss the routine, the two men immediately began moving at pace. Jas checked downstairs while Harte worked through upstairs, briefly looking into every room, ready to react if anything moved, grabbing anything he thought might be of use later. Apart from two motionless, skeletal bodies curled up in bed together, the building was clear.
“All clear,” he shouted as he ran back down the stairs. “Couple of stiffs up there, that’s all. Nothing moving.” He paused for a moment to look out a small window just to the right of the front door. There was an uncomfortably large number of bodies milling about in the road outside, most of them gravitating around the house the men had originally entered. Their numbers were nothing they couldn’t handle, but something they could still do without. He found Jas in the dining room, piling furniture up against one wall. He had pushed a long, rectangular table over onto its side and was stacking chairs up against it. As Harte watched he pulled down the curtains and began to stuff them into the gaps between upturned wooden chair legs.
“Where’s the fuel, Harte?” he asked as he worked. Harte disappeared again, leaving him alone. Jas ran around to the other side of the upturned table to look for more to burn. He stopped immediately when he saw the body. How he hadn’t noticed it before, he didn’t know. Slumped in the corner of the room under the bay window was the curled up body of a child. Two years old when it had died, three at the most. For a moment the small, defenseless, withered husk was all that he could see and think about. It had died lying on its back, its tiny hand held across its face as if it had been trying to hide from whatever it was that was killing it.