by David Moody
He’d been sitting cross-legged in the dust for almost fifteen minutes when he realized he hadn’t even looked up at the dead today. It said something about both his state of mind and the state of what was left of his world, that a sea of tens of thousands of reanimated cadavers no longer interested him. He picked up a stone and threw it lazily toward the featureless mass of flesh, smirking to himself when it clattered against an old car door and the resulting sound caused a sudden ripple of excitement and animation on the other side of the barrier. He threw another stone, then another, each time taking pleasure in the way he seemed to almost be controlling the corpses and making them dance to his tune. Marginally more interested, he got to his feet and walked closer, pausing to swing at a small rock with his baseball bat, using it like a golf club. The bodies trapped just in front of him were reacting angrily to his presence. They were slamming themselves against the blockade now, shuffling back as best they could, then throwing themselves forward again.
“Look at you,” he announced pointlessly. “You’re all fucking pathetic.”
Now just a couple of meters away, he looked deep into the wall of gnarled, putrefied faces which stared back. He glared at one in particular which reminded him of his older sister. It was wearing the soiled shreds of a revealing pink summer dress and the stupid fucking thing still had a fucking ribbon in its hair! For Christ’s sake, he thought, everything that corpse must have gone through and it’s still managed to keep its fucking hair tied up! That was so like his sister, the silly bitch. She’d been arrested after a fight in a club once when she’d put some poor bastard in hospital. He’d watched the police shove her in the back of their van. Stupid cow, he’d seen her checking her makeup in her reflection in the window as they’d driven her away to the cells.
When Webb thought about his sister, he began to think about everyone else who had been a part of his life before the world had been turned upside down. He swung his baseball bat and thumped it into the side of the nearest car door, the shock wave rippling back through the crowd like a pebble dropped into water. He hit the car door again, now wanting the dead to react. How many of these wretched, dumb, stinking pieces of shit were the same wretched, dumb, stinking pieces of shit that used to give him a hard time and make his life difficult? He hit the door a third time, the metallic clang ricocheting around his empty world. How many of these things gave him grief or caused him pain or—
Webb was suddenly aware of movement to his right. What the fuck?
Bodies.
There were bodies on his side of the blockade. The first one was almost upon him before Webb, stunned momentarily, was able to react. He swung the bat into its groin, sending it flying. Another one lunged. He jabbed the end of the bat into its face, knocking it back into two more. What the hell was going on here? Where were they coming from? Yet another body hurled itself forward, its arms reaching out for him. He grabbed it by the collar and dragged it over onto its back, then stamped on its emaciated face until it was still.
More of them coming. Too many.
Terrified, Webb turned and ran from a crowd of almost twenty cadavers which slowly lumbered after him. Through a momentary gap between their constantly shifting shapes he thought he saw more climbing over the barrier—but that was impossible, wasn’t it? He ran farther up the hill, the slothful dead no match for his speed, then turned back and looked again. His eyes hadn’t deceived him; the bodies were dragging themselves up and over the blockade. Helped up by the countless corpses crushed under their rotting feet over time and by the relentless pressure of others constantly pushing them forward, the damn things were managing to clamber over the cars and rubble and were heading straight for him.
“Help!” he screamed as he scrambled up the hill, not knowing if anyone could hear him. “Get out here, now!”
* * *
Hollis, Harte, Lorna, Jas, and Gordon were already on their way down toward the surging bodies before Webb had even made it back to the flats. They thundered past him, leaving him standing alone at the top of the slope. He stopped to spit and catch his breath before heading back down after them.
“Did you see them?” he started to say to Stokes, who pounded after the others at his usual slow pace.
“We all saw,” he answered quickly. “It’s your fault for winding them up, you fucking jerk!”
“What?” he protested. “I didn’t do anything to…”
His words were wasted; Stokes was already out of earshot. Still panting, Webb ran back down the hill. In the distance he could see that Harte and Lorna had reached the diggers.
“Just push them back,” Jas shouted. He pointed deep into the growing crowd. “They’re getting through over there. Build the wall up!”
Lorna was the first to get her digger started. She drove it across the uneven ground at full speed, heading straight for the mass of bodies which were still spilling over the top of the barrier. It didn’t look as bad from down here. When they’d first spotted the breach from their high vantage point in the flats there had seemed to be hundreds of spindly figures pouring over. The reality was their numbers were far fewer but that was academic; one corpse on the wrong side of the line was one too many. Scoop down, she thundered into the center of the crowd, forcing many of the advancing grotesques up into the air and back over the blockade. Unsighted, she collided with the very car they were managing to clamber over and the sudden shock jolted her back in her seat.
“Block it up,” Hollis shouted to Harte, gesturing at the point where the dead had managed to get over. It was hard to see clearly through the continual, frantic movement, but they appeared to be getting through by dragging themselves over the low bonnet of a small black, family-sized car. Once he was sure that Harte had heard him he returned his attention to those foul aberrations which had already crossed over, chopping and hacking at them with his machete.
Harte turned the digger around and moved away from the corpses. Behind him Lorna was now driving furiously from side to side, obliterating hordes of defenseless figures with every pass. He drove toward a pile of rubble, collected a huge shovelful, then turned back to face the barrier. It looked like they were beginning to regain control. Lorna had quickly dealt with an unquantifiable number of the dead, leaving Jas, Gordon, Webb, and Stokes to wipe up the few that had managed to get away. Hollis, unusually, was standing a little way back from the center of the chaos, the dismembered remains of a blood-soaked police officer twitching at his booted feet.
A loud warning blast on the horn and Harte powered forward. He stopped just short of the blockade—ploughing down six more cadavers on the way—lifted the digger’s articulated arm and dropped several tons of crumbling masonry onto the front of the black car. When the dust settled it immediately became apparent that he’d hit the spot perfectly. The dead were shut out again. He felt a sense of smug satisfaction when he jumped down from the cab and saw that when he’d dropped the rubble, he’d also managed to crush a handful of bodies as they’d been trying to get across. Arms and legs jutted out from the confusion at awkward angles. The head of a trapped corpse, wedged at the shoulders between the bonnet of the car and a block of concrete, watched him until he ended its unnatural existence with a well-aimed punch to the face.
“Come on, you fuckers!” Webb screamed at the top of his voice, fighting to make himself heard over the noise of Lorna’s digger and the chain saw which Jas was using. Suddenly pumped full of adrenaline again, he braced himself as yet another body hurled itself at him, its decayed face and gnarled lips almost seeming to sneer as it lurched forward. He shoved it back toward Jas, who sliced it in half with a single swipe, the whirring chain-saw blade sliding through its torso. Two more foul, dripping bodies edged toward Jas. He shoved the chain saw into the face of the nearest, angling the whirring blade away from him and down and wincing in disgust as a thick spray of blood, brain and rotten flesh soaked the ground. The other body of the pair seemed to have a little more sense, if that was at all possible. It suddenly veered of
f to the left, evading the next swipe of the chain saw. It turned its head back to watch Jas over its shoulder as it moved awkwardly away, then staggered straight into the path of Lorna in the digger.
“One behind you, Gordon!” Jas yelled.
Gordon spun around and waited nervously for the dishevelled remains of an elderly woman to attack. He gripped his hand ax tightly, wishing he could fight with the confidence and speed of the others. He felt hopelessly inadequate despite the obvious strength advantage he had over this particular corpse, but the monstrous thing was upon him now and he had no alternative but to take action. Go for the head, he silently repeated to himself, remembering what the others had told him. He swung the ax around and smashed it into the side of the corpse’s face, shattering its cheekbone and splitting its ear in half. He wrenched the sunken blade free, then panicked as the creature continued to stagger forward, unperturbed. He swung the ax again, this time wedging it deep into its neck. It took another stumbling step closer, then dropped to the ground in front of him, dark crimson gore slowly dribbling out of its open wounds.
As quickly and as unexpectedly as it had started, the teeming movement around the edge of the barrier wound down to a halt. The diggers and the chain saw were silenced. On the other side of the barrier the bodies continued to surge forward, ripples and aftershocks of movement still running through the huge crowd in response to the sudden carnage and noise. Satisfied that the job was done, the group began to move back toward the flats. Only Hollis remained behind. Lorna walked over to him when she noticed he wasn’t following.
“Problem?” she asked, anxiously surveying the scene, worried that he’d spotted something the rest of them had missed.
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What is it?” she pressed, concerned. Hollis angrily kicked the corpse lying at his feet.
“This thing caught me off-guard,” he reluctantly admitted. “Didn’t know it was there until it got hold of me.”
“So? You sorted it out, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?”
It was obvious there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“I didn’t hear it coming.”
“So what? I’m not surprised. You know, with the diggers and the chain saw and Webb’s mouth it’s no wonder you didn’t…”
He was shaking his head. She stopped talking.
“It’s not that,” he said.
“What, then?”
“Remember when we were out yesterday morning? You let that body out in the pharmacy and it went for me?”
“Yes.”
“I hit my head when I went down.”
“I know. Is that why you’re…?”
“I’ve damaged my ear,” he said, his voice suddenly unusually emotional. “I can’t hear a fucking thing on my left side, and that’s why this fucking thing nearly had me.”
He kicked the corpse at his feet again, sending its bloodied head skidding across the ground like a football, then walked away from her and began to march up the hill.
19
“What are we gonna do?” Harte asked, slumping in a chair and holding his head in his hands. Four hours had passed since the bodies first breached the barrier. They’d broken through three more times since, smaller advances which had been quickly contained. “Those damn things out there are learning! They’re copying each other, for Christ’s sake!”
“The obvious answer is to try and make the barrier stronger,” Hollis replied, “but I don’t think that’s going to help.”
“Of course it’s going to help, you prick. How can it not help?”
“I don’t think we’re looking at the problem the right way.”
“What?” Harte grunted. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.
“Are you talking about the bodies?” Jas wondered.
“Thing is,” he explained, “I don’t think it matters how they got over the barrier or if they’re going to do it again, I think we need to be working out why they’re doing it.”
“That’s bloody obvious,” Lorna interrupted. “It was Webb. We saw you standing out there, throwing stones at them.”
Hollis shook his head dejectedly.
“That’s not it.” He sighed. “Didn’t help, though.”
“What, then?” she snapped.
“I don’t think it’s just because of what you were doing today, Webb. I think they were reacting to what we’ve all been doing down there this week.”
“Still don’t understand,” said Harte.
“For the last two days we’ve been pushing them around and smashing them up and burning a few hundred of them at a time.”
“So?”
“So, they’re running scared. Except they can’t run, because there’s too many of them and they can’t get away. The only option they’ve got left…”
“… is to fight,” Jas said, finishing his sentence for him.
“Exactly. They reacted when you got down there today Webb because they thought you were about to start laying into them again. And they’re climbing over the barrier now because they know that they can. They’ve seen others doing it.”
“No way!” Stokes laughed from the other side of the room. “Is anyone falling for this bullshit? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Think about it,” Hollis continued. “They’re adapting to what’s happening around them. It makes sense.”
“None of this makes sense,” Gordon said.
“So what are we going to do about it?” asked Harte. “I hear what you’re saying, but can’t we just build up the barrier and sit tight?”
“That’s what I think,” Stokes said.
“First off, how? We don’t have enough stuff to build it up with—and anyway, I don’t think we can risk doing it. You saw what effect Webb going down there had on them this morning. If we start throwing our weight around again, even if we’re not directly attacking them, we’re going to push them over the edge and we’ll end up with a full-scale-pitch invasion.”
“So what are our alternatives? Sit here and do nothing?”
“There’s no way I’m just gonna sit in here, waiting for them to give up and keel over,” Webb protested. “No way am I going to spend all my time shut in this fucking building, waiting. There’s a fucking corpse in here too, don’t forget.”
“No one’s forgotten, Webb,” Hollis sighed. “I know it’s not ideal, but what’s the alternative? It’s either that or leave. We pack up and get out of here.”
Webb turned and looked out the window, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. He didn’t know which was worse—the idea of staying put, or the prospect of heading out for good. The flats might have been cold, uncomfortable, and right on the edge of the biggest cess-pit of rotting human remains imaginable, but they’d been relatively safe here until now. None of them had any idea what they’d find elsewhere.
“There’s something else you need to know,” Caron said, standing in the doorway. Everyone looked around. No one knew how long she’d been there.
“What’s that?” Hollis asked, immediately concerned.
“It’s Ellie. She’s sick.”
“What do you mean?” he asked anxiously, fearing that he knew the answer to his question already. “Is she…?”
“Same as Anita,” she answered abruptly. “She said she felt sick last night but I didn’t think much of it. It’s early days, but her symptoms are just the same.”
“This thing’s going to wipe the whole fucking lot of us out,” Stokes said, putting into words what everyone was thinking.
20
Late afternoon. Another wave of bodies had managed to scramble over the barrier. Between them, Harte, Jas, Stokes, and Webb had fought back the ninety or so cadavers which had forced their way over during the fifth breach and had worked quickly to strengthen the blockade at the weak point which had been compromised. Stokes and Webb had been left outside to mop up the last few scrawny
figures which had escaped the initial cull and encroached closer toward the survivors’ base.
“Five left, I think,” Stokes wheezed as he moved toward the remaining corpses. Webb shielded his eyes and surveyed the area around them. The sun was setting and was now framed in a narrow strip of clear sky between the horizon and a band of heavy gray cloud just above. The brilliant orange disc drenched the world in light, casting long, eerie shadows across the rubble. He soon saw the bodies that Stokes had spotted—trapped between a skip and a pile of masonry. One of them had fallen and become wedged in the way of the others. He swung his spiked baseball bat up onto his shoulder and headed down after Stokes. Tonight, more than ever, he was in need of therapy.
Stokes was already fighting by the time Webb reached the dead, doing all the damage he could to the trapped corpse with a chisel and a lump hammer. He’d found them in a tool box in the back of a car and was now using them as a makeshift dagger and mace. It was an indication of how the day’s events had altered the individual perspective of each of the survivors that a man as lazy and normally reluctant to fight as Stokes had, through sudden necessity, become remarkably aggressive. He yanked the fallen corpse up onto its feet and dragged it out of the way, immediately allowing the remaining bodies to move again.
“Let’s get this done and get back inside,” he suggested. “I’ve had enough for one day. I need a drink.”
Webb nodded, watching the bodies wearily haul themselves back out into space. Unexpectedly and, he thought, unfairly, they moved toward him en masse, leaving Stokes to deal with just the solitary corpse he’d already got hold of. Probably for the best, he decided as he chose which of the pathetic creatures he’d go for first.
Panting with effort, Stokes shoved the lone figure away, then readied himself for its attack. It moved closer, lunging forward angrily with alternate steps, its unsteady movements the result of a broken right tibia which jutted out from an angry wound in its leg. He gripped his weapons tight, expecting it to throw itself at him like so many others had already done today. But instead it held back, rocking clumsily on its feet. It seemed to be sussing out its opposition—if, of course, it was capable of actually seeing anything through those dark, unfocussed eyes. The delay made the already anxious man feel even more uneasy. He decided to take the initiative, thrusting forward and swinging the lump hammer at the foul thing’s head. He caught its chin, wrenching its jaw bone out of its socket and leaving it dangling and deformed. Part of him wished he’d started fighting like this earlier because Webb was definitely right—getting rid of these abominations so aggressively was strangely therapeutic. It made him feel alive. It re-enforced the fact that he was so much better than these useless lumps of decaying gristle and putrid flesh.