Disintegration Read Free Page A

gorged themselves on a seemingly never-ending supply of decaying flesh. His labored breathing and the sound of his squelching footsteps were as loud as anything.
    But wait—what was that? Just for a moment he was sure he could hear something else. He swung the bat into the chest of a peculiarly lopsided corpse, then stopped for a fraction of a second when he heard the sound in the distance again. It was an engine. Thank God, the others had realized they’d left him behind and come back for him. With renewed energy he threw himself forward yet again, knocking a half dozen scrambling bodies down like skittles.
    The noise was definitely getting closer. Two engines this time—the bike and just one of the vans perhaps—and they were fast approaching. He sensed a change in the behavior and direction of the fetid crowd around him. Suddenly he was no longer the sole focus of attention. Easily as many bodies turned and staggered away from him now as continued to move toward him. Desperate to let the others know exactly where he was—if he didn’t there was a good chance they’d drive straight into the middle of the crowd looking for him—he stopped using the baseball bat as a weapon and instead shoved it into the air above his head as a marker.
    “Over here!” he screamed at the top of his voice as he anxiously barged through the dead, fighting past them as if he was the sole passenger trying to get off a train that everyone else wanted to get on to. He heard the van and bike stop.
    “We can see you,” Hollis’s distinctive voice yelled back. “Now get your fucking head down and get over here!”
    Webb knew what was coming next. They’d had to do this kind of thing numerous times before. He dropped to the ground and started crawling furiously away on his hands and knees, weaving around countless lumbering pairs of rotting feet. Speed was suddenly more important than ever. He had to get as close as he could to the others before—
    A sudden searing blast of light and heat tore through the crowd just a few meters behind him. He allowed himself the briefest of glances back but kept moving forward, ignoring the pain in his knees and wrists. All around him the bodies began to converge on the area into which Hollis had just hurled a crude, but very effective, petrol bomb. They were attracted to the sudden burst of light and heat. Stupid things walked closer to the epicenter of the blast, many of them oblivious to the fact that they themselves were also now beginning to burn.
    The crowd finally thinned sufficiently for Webb to risk getting up and running again. He could see the van and the bike waiting behind the gutted remains of a burned-out coach, parked at such an angle that the dead were prevented from getting too close. He pushed through the final few awkward figures, then slipped between the side of the coach and the front of the van. Hollis lobbed another two bombs directly over his head and watched them detonate deep in the heart of the maggot-ridden mob.
    “Let’s get out of here.” Jas, on the bike, sighed wearily as he climbed back onto the saddle of his machine. Webb moved toward him. “Piss off,” he spat. “You’re not getting on here like that. Look at the state of you. You’re covered in all kinds of shit.”
    Webb looked down at his blood- and pus-soaked leathers. Gore dripped onto the ground around him. With his face screwed up in a grimace he bent down and picked a piece of scalp—complete with a clump of lank brown hair—out of a crease in his trousers at the top of his boot. He tossed it away in disgust.
    “You’re not coming in here either,” Hollis snapped, looking him up and down. “Hold onto the back of the van.”
    Too tired to argue, Webb picked up his trusty baseball bat from where he’d dropped it at the roadside, then climbed wearily up onto the footplate at the back of the van. Jas pulled up alongside him and shouted over the roar of the bike.
    “And when we get back you make sure