Autumn 6 - Autumn Disintegration

by David Moody

  “What’s she talking about?” Sean asked, confused. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s the bodies,” Gordon said unhelpfully from the table where he sat with Ginnie.

  “What about them?”

  “Seems they’re smarter than we’ve given them credit for,” Martin began to explain.

  “What?” Webb grunted.

  “The noise you lot made coming here a couple of days back started it, and when you went out for supplies yesterday it just made matters worse. What you two did today might just have been the straw which broke the camel’s back.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sean said. Martin sat down in the nearest chair and held his head in his hands. Howard explained further.

  “They’re coming back. There’s a load of them gathered over the road.”

  “What about the music?”

  “Not working anymore.”

  “That’s not exactly true, it is still working,” Hollis corrected him, “but like Martin says, they’re getting wise to it. It fooled them before because they didn’t know anyone was here.”

  “And now?”

  “And now it’s still drawing them in from miles around. Problem is, when they get close enough and hear us moving about or arguing or driving around on stolen fucking motorbikes, they understandably get more interested in us than anything else. They’re starting to work out that the music is just a decoy and that we’re the ones actually making the noise.”

  “Can’t be…” Sean said.

  “Can be,” Harte quickly replied. “It’s instinctive. It’s exactly what started happening back at the flats. The more noise we made, the worse they got. A handful of them broke through our defenses, hundreds followed. They learn.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Ginnie asked, shuffling a little closer to Gordon. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “What we should do now,” Martin announced, unsuccessfully attempting to exert some authority, “is exactly what we were doing in the first place before you clowns arrived. We keep our heads down, stay absolutely silent, and wait for those creatures out there to disintegrate down to nothing. If we run out of food then we go hungry. If we start to—”

  “No way!” Sean yelled, his voice furious, the fuzziness in his head clearing and being replaced with anger. “No fucking way. If you think I’m sitting here in fucking silence with you lot just waiting for the bodies to rot, then you can think again. You can stick your fucking—”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Jas said, moving toward him again. Sean recoiled. “Because if you don’t I’ll break your fucking neck.”

  “Is that right?” Webb goaded.

  “Don’t you start. I’ll kill you now if you want me to, you little piece of shit.”

  “Come on, then!” he yelled, jumping to his feet and squaring up against Jas. The others cringed, willing them both to shut up as the volume of their pointless argument continued to increase.

  “Leave it, Jas,” Harte said. “He’s not worth it.”

  Webb stood his ground as Jas moved forward again. Their faces almost touching, he whispered loud enough for Webb alone to hear.

  “Want me to tell them about Stokes?”

  Webb pushed him away and slunk back into the shadows.

  “Let’s just keep things in perspective,” Lorna said. She’d been watching the discussion deteriorate with disappointment. “There’s no need to panic. They still can’t get to us. Every access point is blocked. Like Hollis says, we just need them to forget we’re over here.”

  “But what about the helicopter?” Caron wondered. “And the plane? How are we supposed to attract their attention if we’re keeping our heads down? We don’t know how many more times they’re going to fly over.”

  “Have they been here again?” Sean wondered.

  “Twice more,” Gordon replied.

  “Twice?”

  “Flew over late afternoon,” he explained, “then again just about an hour later.”

  “They’re clearing out, aren’t they? It’s like you said this morning, Jas, they’re evacuating.”

  “I think he’s right,” Gordon said.

  “Then that’s all the more reason for us not to lock ourselves down, isn’t it?” Sean nervously continued. “If we don’t let them know we’re here now then they’ll never find us. And I’m not just talking about writing love letters on the grass with bedsheets or playing music, we have to do something big that they’re going to see and we have to do it now!”

  “Sean…” Martin warned. His voice was getting louder again.

  “Oh, just shut up, Martin. Will you get off my case? You haven’t even—”

  “Just calm down and be quiet.”

  “What if I don’t want to? I know exactly what we have to do to get that helicopter or the plane to see us, and I’ll do it if none of you have got the nerve to.”

  At the side of the room, unnoticed by anyone but Ginnie, Gordon stood up and cleared his throat. With great hesitancy but a definite need to act, he slowly walked forward into the middle of the argument, placing himself directly between Hollis, Martin, and Jas on one side, and Sean and Webb on the other. He looked Sean straight in the eye.

  “Listen,” he began, captivating the others with his unexpected and uncharacteristically positive involvement, “you have to listen. I know you’re angry and you’re probably just as scared as I am right now, but you’ve got to listen. Please don’t do anything stupid. We’ve sat in here today and we’ve watched those things work out where we are. It’s only a fraction of them at the moment, but if the rest of them catch on and end up down here we’re going to have a real problem on our hands. I know you don’t want to stay here, but I really don’t think you’ve got any choice. None of us have.”

  Sean stared deep into Gordon’s face and carefully considered his words. He knew he wasn’t overstating the threat from outside, but were they really only limited to one option? He didn’t think so. Being outside today had been such an unexpectedly uplifting experience. Could he turn his back on that freedom and everything he’d seen now? He couldn’t stand the thought of being shut away in this hellhole with these people any longer.

  The silence in the room was deafening.

  “Don’t know,” he said eventually. “I don’t know if I can—”

  “You have to,” Caron said from the shadows to his left. Christ, he reminded her of her son at times. He was just like Matthew—so volatile and opinionated, yet vulnerable too.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” he answered, glaring at her. “None of us do. You can all stay here if you want to but I think I’ll take my chances out there.”

  “Just give it some time,” she pleaded.

  “I’d give anything for another day like today,” he said, his voice suddenly wavering with emotion. “Do you know what I did today?” he asked, looking around at the few faces he could see. When no one answered he continued. “I lived,” he explained, tears welling up in his eyes. “For the first time in weeks I actually felt like I was alive and it didn’t matter what I did. And I come back here and everything feels wrong again, and it’s not because of the bodies out there, it’s you lot.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gordon asked.

  “From where I’m standing there’s no difference between the bodies on one side of the fence and the other. There’s no difference between any of you and those things out there. You’re all dead. You’re all just sitting here rotting, waiting for the end to come. I don’t really care if I’ve got one day left or fifty years. I don’t care if I don’t get through tomorrow. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my time trapped in here with us all watching each other decay.”

  46

  “How many?”

  Startled, Martin spun around and saw Harte standing in the doorway of his second-floor bedroom. Hollis, who was standing next to him, hadn’t heard a thing. He turned around when he saw that Martin had been distracted, then turned back to f
ace the window.

  “Maybe as many as five hundred or so,” Martin replied. “Difficult to tell.”

  “Are more still coming?”

  It was difficult to make out much detail in the late-evening gloom, but there still seemed to be plenty of movement in the field across the road. The dark mass of inquisitive corpses had grown steadily through the course of the day just gone and their numbers showed no signs of slowing.

  “Plenty more,” Martin answered, his voice tired and low.

  “So what do we do now?” Harte asked, joining the other two at the window.

  “Depends,” Hollis grunted. He could hear him now that he’d moved closer.

  “On what?”

  “On them, mainly,” he replied, nodding in the direction of the throng of constantly shifting figures. “It depends how responsive they are. If all they’re going to do is just stand on the other side of the fence, then there’s not much of a problem. If they decide they want to attack us then—”

  “They won’t,” Martin immediately interrupted. “Why would they?”

  “If they’re threatened they will,” Harte said quietly. “We’ve seen it happen loads of times.”

  “But who’s going to threaten them?”

  “What you see as a threat and what they do are very different things,” Hollis explained. “Take those fucking jokers out on the bike, for example. We just see a couple of idiots escaping for a while. The dead react like animals would. They see the speed and hear the noise and sense the danger.”

  “Then try and attack before whatever it is can get them,” Harte continued.

  “So we stay here and wait for them to rot.” Martin sighed. “Just like we were doing before you lot turned up here and screwed everything up.”

  “We haven’t screwed everything up,” Hollis corrected him. “Be honest, Martin, you were starving and you wouldn’t have lasted much longer. Sean would have cracked eventually and you’d have ended up in this exact same mess. It’s not completely our fault.”

  “We’ve just fucked things up a little quicker than you would have on your own,” Harte said, his attempt at humor falling flat.

  “But we’ve got supplies now, and Sean’s had his moment. We can let him and Webb leave if they really want to.”

  “They won’t go,” Hollis said. “They haven’t got the balls to do it. If they had they wouldn’t have come running back tonight.”

  “Then we’ve got to keep them under control, Greg,” Martin added. “Stop them getting so wound up. Find a way to get them to let off steam.”

  “That might be difficult,” Harte announced ominously. “We have another problem.”

  “What?”

  “It’s why I came looking for you two.”

  “What?” Hollis demanded impatiently.

  “Driver’s sick.”

  “Sick? What, like—”

  “Yes, sick like Anita and Ellie,” Harte said quickly, anticipating his question.

  “The girls that died?” Martin asked anxiously.

  “Yep,” he answered. “So I for one don’t actually fancy sitting in here for another couple of months anymore.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Packed him off to bed with his paper and enough food and drink to keep him happy for a couple of days. Told him we’d keep checking on him.”

  “And will you?”

  “No fucking way. I might go back up there in a few days and see how he’s doing. If he’s still alive then he hasn’t got what Ellie and Anita had and we’re safe.”

  “Where’s his room?”

  “Luckily he’s always been an antisocial bastard. He’s up on his own on the top floor of the east wing.”

  “Good,” Martin muttered.

  “We’ve also got the plane and helicopter to think about,” Harte continued, subdued. “I think Jas is right, and if they are evacuating from somewhere like he says, then they’ll probably be done soon. The fact they flew over so many times today makes me think they must be close to being done now. We need to get them to see us.”

  “But we can’t risk giving away our location.” Martin sighed. “We’ve already been through this. That might be all it takes to tip the bodies over the edge.”

  “Well, we might just have to take that risk,” Hollis said.

  “We can’t.”

  “We might have to.”

  “But—”

  “He’s right,” Harte said. “We could torch this whole fucking place if we had to. Imagine that … there’s the distraction you need. Every single one of those fucking things outside would drag their sorry backsides straight over here. We could just walk away.”

  “No, that’d be suicidal. No way.”

  “I’m not suggesting we do it, but it’s an option.”

  “It’s a stupid option,” Martin protested, his voice getting louder.

  “Let’s wait until morning,” said Hollis. “We can’t make any decisions tonight. I think we should try and work out how the bodies are likely to react, then work out how to attract the attention of the plane, if it comes back.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?”

  “Isn’t this is exactly the kind of reason you’ve kept the body by the swimming pool?”

  “Suppose,” Martin said, sounding more subdued.

  “Well, we need to see how your corpse reacts when we get up close.”

  47

  The morning came too soon. Hollis’s stomach grumbled with pangs of hunger but he was too nervous to even think about eating. He waited for Martin at the end of the corridor which led to the swimming pool. Lorna, Harte, Howard, and Gordon waited with him.

  “You okay?” Lorna asked, picking up on his obvious unease. He nodded but didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk. Others didn’t seem to want to shut up.

  “Remind me what we’re supposed to be doing again,” Gordon mumbled nervously.

  “Stop being such a fucking drip,” Harte said. “You know exactly what we’re doing.”

  He was right, Gordon understood completely, but like the rest of them he didn’t relish the prospect of being face-to-face with one of the dead, even if they did outnumber it six (and a dog) to one. He wished there was an alternative, but none of them had managed to come up with a safer way of being able to properly gauge the strength of the creature’s reactions. It had seemed like a sensible idea when they’d talked about it late last night. Now they were actually here, however, they were all having serious doubts.

  Martin appeared from the direction of the Steelbrooke Suite. He tried to hold back, but the others made it abundantly clear that he should go first.

  “She’s your baby,” Howard whispered.

  The group walked down the curved corridor, stopping just before the window into the office. Martin peered in but it was difficult to see anything through the layer of grease and rotten flesh which had been smeared across the glass. After having spent so much time hiding in the shadows, the increased amount of staining on the window indicated that the behavior of the corpse had indeed changed. Had it been looking for them? Howard’s dog stood beneath the window looking up, her sharp white teeth bared in a silent, sneering growl.

  “So how are we going to do this?” Howard asked. He jumped back as the corpse’s rot-eaten face appeared at the window. Its dulled eyes looked around at the six people who stared back at it. Perhaps sensing it was outnumbered, it took a few awkward, uncoordinated steps back into the darkness.

  “There’s not enough room here,” Martin answered. “We should get her out onto the side of the pool.”

  After a few seconds of nervous inactivity, Lorna pushed past the others and followed the corridor around to the entrance to the pool. She shoved the heavy door open, wincing with disgust when the smell of the stagnant water hit her. The air was icy cold and a sudden smacking, clattering noise made her catch her breath. A door on the other side of the pool was blowing open in the strong wind, then slowly closing again when the breeze died down. She had
n’t actually been in here before, she’d just glanced in from outside. It would have been lovely, she thought sadly to herself, just the kind of place she could have imagined spending her pre-Armageddon time if she’d ever been able to afford to stay in a place like this. On one side of the pool were the various items of gym equipment which she’d heard Jas and Harte talking about previously, and over in the far corner a scattering of wooden deck chairs and sun-loungers, all draped with a shroud-like layer of dust and cobwebs. The large, open windows and the glass ceiling, had they not all been covered with dust and dark, moss-green stains, would normally have allowed the whole area to flood with sunlight. Her daydreams were interrupted by the noise of Hollis yanking open the changing room door. He disappeared into the darkness momentarily to prop open the door to the office, giving the corpse a clear passage out to the pool.

  “Come on,” he yelled. “You’ve been in there too long, sweetheart. It’s time you came out to see us…”

  The rest of the group stood a safe distance back and waited. For a moment nothing happened but then, very suddenly and very definitely, low sounds of shuffling movement came from inside the office. A loud clatter and bang sent Hollis scampering back to the others.

  “Can you see her?” Lorna asked quietly. Howard’s dog took a couple of padded steps forward and then stopped and bared her teeth again. Normally completely silent, she emitted the faintest low growl as more noises came from the darkness.

  “Nothing yet,” Hollis replied, shuffling tentatively forward again. “Hold on, here she comes…”

  The corpse dragged itself out into the light, and it was an abhorrent sight. Despite the filth, the sloping glass roof above them meant that the light levels in the swimming pool were better than in much of the rest of the hotel complex, certainly better than the office in which the loathsome carcase had been held captive for almost two months. This, Martin realized, was the first time he’d seen her in her full glory, and her dishevelled appearance fascinated him. He felt an instant revulsion but also genuine pity as she lumbered clumsily forward. A guest at the hotel on the day that she and almost everyone else had died, he remembered again having seen her just before the infection had struck. Transfixed, he walked over to where Hollis was standing, finding it hard to believe that the grotesque creature he was looking at now was the same woman he’d seen previously. Her figure—and she’d had a great figure, he remembered that clearly—was all gone. Where her body had been pert and tight before, it now sagged and drooped. Gravity had steadily drained the contents of her bowels down. Her feet were swollen and blue, her belly and buttocks distended and her heavily stained and discolored swimming costume had been stretched completely out of shape. The straps of the one-piece outfit had cut into the skin on top of her shoulders, wearing little grooves where they’d continually rubbed against her deteriorating flesh.