Out on the street, Harte yanked open the door of the crashed van and grappled with the driver’s corpse trapped inside. It threw its withered arms at him and he battered them away with the ax, unable to get the right angle to use the weapon properly in the confined space. The smell in the van was horrific and he gagged as he struggled to grab the squirming cadaver, undo its safety belt, and drag it out onto the street. He managed to get hold of its arm, his gloved hand easily wrapping right the way around its bony, emaciated wrist, and then yanked it out into the open. Its right foot caught between the gearstick and handbrake. Harte tugged at the struggling creature desperately, pulling with enough force to rip the foot off at the ankle. Finally out, he slammed its face into the pavement, then climbed in and settled himself behind the wheel. The seat was tacky beneath him. Screwing his face up with disgust, he reached down, picked up the dismembered foot from under the pedals, and threw it out of the window.
When Harte next looked up he saw that the number of bodies hauling themselves down the street toward them had increased massively. The bus had blocked the road one way, but the other direction was still clear and a relentless deluge of flesh was now approaching, channeled forward by the tall buildings on either side. Lorna, Webb, and Jas stood and fought, trying desperately to head them off. Jas was a couple of meters ahead of the other two, carving up as many of them as he could reach with the brutally efficient chain saw blade. Lorna and Webb worked behind him, mopping up any of the despicable figures that somehow managed to get past.
“Get it started!” Hollis yelled, hammering on the back of the van.
Harte turned the key in the ignition, willing the engine to fire. It groaned and whined but wouldn’t start.
“Careful, don’t flood it!” Hollis warned.
Harte tried again, turning the key and pumping the pedals with his feet, not knowing if that would help or make the problem worse. The engine almost caught.
“Come on!” he shouted in frustration, slamming his hand against the steering wheel angrily. One more try and the engine suddenly spluttered into life. He accelerated hard to keep it alive, the delivery van’s exhaust belching dirty clouds of fumes into the street, then quickly reversed back. Hollis had said something to him about being 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.