“What’s the matter?” Harte asked, returning to the room and finding him standing over the corpse on the carpet. He threw down a pile of coats he’d grabbed from the hallway and started to pack them around the table and chairs. Jas continued to stare at the child. The small boy looked about the same age as his little girl Annia had been when she’d …
Don’t do this, he thought. Please don’t do this. He could feel the pain of the family he’d lost welling up inside him. Most of the time he managed to keep this suppressed, but like everyone else there were moments when he was caught off-guard. He couldn’t allow himself to break down. Not here, not now. He had to forget about everything he’d lost and—
“Jas!” Harte snapped. “Now’s not the time. Come on, mate, get a fucking move on!”
Still nothing.
The last time he’d seen his children alive they’d been at home in their house, which was similar in design to the one they stood in now. He hadn’t been back there since he’d lost them. Were they still there, lying motionless like this poor little creature, or were they moving? Was Annia up on her feet, staggering around hopelessly, aimlessly and tirelessly? Were the kids alone or had—
A corpse slammed against the window directly in front of him, distracting him and bringing a sudden, thankful release from his increasingly dark thoughts. He turned around and acknowledged Harte.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, “I just…”
“Doesn’t matter,” Harte said quickly, doing all he could to avoid getting involved in another awkward conversation. He opened the fuel can and began to empty its contents over the pile of furniture. Jas pushed past him as the acrid smell of petrol filled the air and ran back to the kitchen. Harte followed, slowly shuffling out backward, carefully spilling a trail of petrol through the house behind him. Once the can was empty he kicked it across the kitchen floor; it clattered noisily on the hard tiles.
“Keep still,” Jas mumbled as he ferreted around in the rucksack on Harte’s back for a box of matches. As soon as he had them they both barged out through the back door, Harte not stopping until he was on the far side of the trampoline again. He shielded his eyes from the light drizzle and watched as Jas crouched in the doorway.
Jas almost allowed himself to think about the body of the child again before he struck the match; almost, but not quite. Just at the last second he managed to distract himself and, before his mind could wander again, he lit the flame. The vapor in the air caught light immediately. He turned and ran.
By the time the two men had worked their way back through seven gardens and were ready to get on the bike, the house down the road was well ablaze. The crackling, spitting flames, the noise, the belching black smoke and the dancing orange, red, and yellow light were enough to distract virtually all of the bodies out in the street. Jas and Harte were away before the dead had even realized they were there.
13
“They’re coming,” said Stokes. “I can hear them.”
“About bloody time,” grumbled Webb. He looked at the house in the near distance and watched it burn, incandescent orange against the dull gray of everything else. “We might as well get started.”
“Give it a few more minutes,” Hollis suggested. “Go in too fast and they’ll forget about the fire and turn back at you.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” Webb sneered. “Bring it on. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
Pumped full of adrenaline, Webb marched down the hill, ignoring Hollis’s warning. He glanced back as the motorbike finally returned, watching it sweep around the front of the building behind him. Their distraction seemed to be working. From here, halfway down the slope, he could see that the fire in the distance had spread along to several other nearby houses. As the size of the blaze had increased, so more and more bodies were being drawn to it. Although many thousands remained pressed up against the barrier of cars, rubble, and other obstructions, toward the back of the huge gathering hundreds more had begun to peel away and stumble toward the heat and light.
He stood and watched the dumb crowds below, and waited for the others.
* * *
To her surprise, Lorna found that, for once, Webb was right. The thought of destroying as many of the dead masses as they were able to was strangely appealing. As she walked down toward the foot of the hill with Hollis, Harte and Stokes at her side, all of them dressed in their standard-issue bike leathers, she decided that she too was in need of what Webb called therapy.
“So is there a plan?” Jas asked as he caught up with the others.
“Of sorts,” Hollis replied. Although he’d originally planned to stay indoors and have no part of this massacre, the thought of allowing Webb free rein outside with weapons was enough of a concern to force him outside too.
“And?” he pressed.
“Lorna’s going to use one of the diggers to start shifting part of the barrier back,” he explained.
“And we’re going to get rid of every single one of those fucking things that manages to get through,” Webb added as they finally reached him. They lined up in silence alongside him and squared up to their decaying foes. Most of their usual encounters with the dead happened at speed, with the living doing their upmost to destroy any corpses they came up against in the shortest time possible. Here, however, the rules of engagement were suddenly very different. Here, standing just a short distance away across the no-man’s-land of the barrier, they had an unexpected opportunity to stop and study their horrifically disfigured opponents. The bodies writhed and surged continually, but they weren’t going anywhere. After six weeks their grotesque appearance had become less immediately shocking, but being face-to-face with thousands upon thousands of them like this was a daunting and unnerving prospect for even the most hardened fighter. There were just so bloody many of them. Harte found himself wondering whether he and Jas should have torched several streets full of houses, or even the whole town to distract the apparently endless crowds. Their small fire seemed a painfully insignificant distraction now.
Webb moved slightly farther forward, stopping when he was less than two meters away from the nearest cadaver. He locked onto one particular creature and stared deep into its ravaged face. It was hard to believe that it had once been human. Not a single centimeter of unblemished skin remained. Gross yellow and brown pus-like fluids had seeped and dribbled from every visible orifice. Its ill-fitting skin appeared mummified and hard in some places, unnaturally pliable in others. And the damn thing’s jaw moved continually. Was it getting ready to sink its teeth into him? He wasn’t going to give it a chance. As soon as this one gets through, he decided, I’m going to rip its fucking head off.
“You sure you’re okay with that thing?” Jas shouted to Lorna, who had climbed up into the cab of the larger of two yellow diggers nearby. Truth was, he was nervous and had wanted the seat for himself.
“Been practising,” she answered quickly, annoyed that he’d questioned her ability. For several weeks she’d been messing around with the diggers and with various other pieces of machinery they’d found lying around the ruins of the partially demolished second block of flats. Her interest in the machines had originally been for no other reason than to temporarily alleviate her boredom, but she was glad to have finally found a practical use for her newfound skill.
“Shift this one,” Webb shouted to her, slapping his hand against the wing of a small, two-seater car. “Don’t want to give them too much space to get through, do we?”
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Harte laughed sarcastically. “Got it all planned out in that tiny brain of his, he has!”