By the time Jas got out of the truck, the job of destroying the cadavers which had made it through the gap was well in hand. Webb, Lorna and Harte were each standing in different locations, attacking the bodies with whatever weapons they’d managed to lay their hands on. The corpses grouped around each one of them, almost seeming to taunt them by delaying their attacks momentarily. Some stood back and waited. Others, sometimes moving in twos or threes, immediately launched themselves at the nearest survivor. Hollis remained behind the wheel of the van, driving around furiously, doing all he could to wipe out as many of the dead as possible without hitting any of the others. Gordon, who had finally plucked up enough courage to emerge from the bus, quickly realized what Hollis was doing. He offered himself up to a relatively quick-moving, long-dead shell of a man. As the repellent body stumbled toward him he stepped back out of the way and watched with smug satisfaction as the van powered forward, smashing it into oblivion.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Jas yelled to Lorna as he ran toward her. He tripped a corpse, kicking its legs out from under it, then stamped on its face until it stopped moving.
“What do you mean?” Lorna shouted back between gasps and grunts of effort. She shoved the grotesque remains of a schoolteacher back into the path of the van. The button-less, tattered rags of the dead woman’s blouse revealed her exposed torso. Her green-blue skin was severely lacerated and what was left of her intestines hung down like a bizarre adornment to her outfit. The van plowed into her at speed, the force of the impact hurling her high into the air.
“Look around you,” Jas replied, waiting for the van to pass between them and the noise to reduce.
Lorna did as he said. Until now it had been difficult to see anything through the mass of constantly shifting bodies but there were only a handful of them left now, and Hollis was doing his best to chase them down. Ignoring the chaos, for the first time she allowed herself to stop and look around at her surroundings. She was standing next to a set of traffic lights. There were signposts and yellow-hatched markings on the road and … and she realized that this had once been a busy junction. The road they’d been following continued through the junction with turnings to the right and left making a crossroads. But, apart from the corpses they’d just hacked down, the area was completely clear. She couldn’t understand—every other stretch of road she’d seen like this had been almost waist deep in wreckage and bodies. Surely the traffic would have been busy here when everyone had died back in September? The entire junction had been cleared and every available exit sealed off. Who had done this?
Webb swung his baseball bat into the chest of the last corpse standing, sweeping it up and smashing it back against a brick wall. He yanked out his weapon and the body dropped to the ground, a bloody, deflated mass. Driver and Hollis stopped their respective vehicles and suddenly everything was quiet and still. The only noise came from the muffled thumping and banging of countless dead hands hammering against the other side of the truck.
“Which way now, then?” Gordon asked as he carefully wiped blood off his boots on a patch of overgrown grass.
“Don’t know,” Hollis answered, looking around for inspiration. “Whoever did this must be around here somewhere. They wouldn’t have gone to all this effort if they were just going to—”
His words were interrupted by the sudden slam of a door and the rumble of an engine starting. The vehicle up ahead—a long, white and blue coach—was slowly beginning to move out of the way.
Harte grinned. “There’s our answer!”
26
Hollis waited impatiently behind the wheel of the van for the driver of the coach to move out of the way. He watched intently as the long, cumbersome vehicle trundled slowly and very carefully backward, leaving the mouth of a narrow, previously unseen road open. A solitary figure stood a short distance back up the track and waved his arms, beckoning them toward him. He began to jog away, occasionally looking back over his shoulder to make sure they were following. Behind them the driver of the coach parked it back into its original position across the width of the road, then got out and climbed onto a bicycle which had been hurriedly dumped in the tall hedgerow. He pedaled furiously after the bus and the van.
“Where the hell are we going now?” Jas asked, standing at the front of the bus next to Driver’s cab, swaying as they moved along the twisting track. Tall, impenetrable, leafy hedgerows lined either side of the road, preventing them from seeing anything other than what was immediately ahead and behind them.
“The Bromwell Hotel,” Gordon answered, standing at his shoulder, holding onto the handrail as the bus lurched from side to side. “I thought it looked familiar.”
“How do you know that?”
As they reached a fork in the road, Gordon pointed toward a purple sign set into the tall hedge just ahead of them. Ornate white writing proudly proclaimed the name of the hotel they were approaching and an arrow directed them to the right. The person they’d been following had already jogged away in that direction.
“I came here a few Christmases ago for an office party,” Gordon answered, his voice suddenly sounding flat and unenthusiastic as he remembered the occasion. “Bloody terrible night, it was. I didn’t recognize the place today. I mean, I thought we might be close, but not this close…”
“So what’s it like, this hotel?” Jas wondered, glancing back at him. Gordon shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay I suppose. Decent enough place. The facilities were good but the food was vile. It was all that horrible nouvelle cuisine stuff—a little pile of this, a dribble of that … Didn’t fill me up. I had to stop for a kebab on the way home. You want turkey and all the trimmings at Christmas, don’t you, not a few scraps of meat and a bloody vegetable puree.”
“Fuck me,” Harte gasped, ignoring him and pushing past to get a better view. “Look at the state of it. Fucking brilliant!”
The bus, followed closely by the van, slowly drove around the final bend in the road. The hedgerow on their right gradually tapered in height and then disappeared altogether, revealing a large car park and, beyond that, an open expanse of grass. Ahead of them now was the hotel itself. A fairly modern, off-white building, in comparison to the grim concrete surroundings they had left this morning it was an unexpected paradise. There was space to move around outside. The windows all had glass which hadn’t been smashed. The grounds appeared clear of all rubble and dead flesh. This place was an oasis of normality.
“Jesus, this is fantastic,” Gordon said, all memories of his disastrous office party now long forgotten. “How many people do you think are here?”
“Don’t know,” Jas replied, grinning. “Thinking about it though, there must be a fair few of them, at least. There’s plenty of space and the way they’d got the entrance hidden back there was genius. I think we’ve landed on our feet here, lads!”