Disintegration

building up ahead.
    “Anyone here?”
    Sean’s voice echoed uncomfortably loudly around the interior of the hotel. He’d reached the main entrance and had managed to force his way in past the desk, sofa, and other items of furniture which had been piled up against the door. His already low expectations sank further still when he walked through the silent building. The sludge in here was shallower than outside, but no less difficult to navigate and it was immediately clear that the corpses had had the run of the hotel. But had the others managed to get away before their shelter had been compromised?
    The staircase at the reception end of the west wing was impassable and had clearly been blocked from above. With suddenly renewed optimism he ran the length of the corridor and found that the staircase at the far end of the wing had also been blocked in a similar way. Could someone still be upstairs? Sean continued through the hotel, working his way through the narrow, slime-filled corridor which led to the swimming pool. The glass doors and some of the windows surrounding the pool had been smashed, no doubt by the pressure of the immense invading army of corpses which had obviously run riot here. The pool itself formed a bizarre and grotesque centerpiece, piled high with bodies which had stumbled into the noxious water and been unable to get back out.
    Sean worked his way around the side of the building, looking up at the many bedroom windows.
    “Hello!” he shouted. “Hello! Is anyone there?”
    One first-floor window, he noticed, was open. He moved toward it as quickly as he could, wanting to run but not daring to speed up and risk losing his footing and falling into the germ-ridden tide of liquefied flesh around him. When he was almost directly underneath the window he risked shouting again.
    “Can you hear me? Is anyone there?”
    There was no response. He was about to continue farther around when he noticed a pile of semi-submerged mattresses on the ground. Whoever had survived the taking of the hotel by the dead, he decided, had managed to get away. He stared up at the window again and wondered who’d been trapped up there. Was it Webb, Gordon, Caron, or Martin Priest? Howard or Hollis? Lorna? Jas? Didn’t matter now. They were probably long gone. He headed back inside.
    On the way around to search through the kitchens and restaurants, Sean discovered that unlike the west, the east staircases were relatively clear; still soaked with the putrefied remains of hundreds of bodies, but passable. The entire east wing was ghostly silent save for the steady dripping of decayed flesh as it trickled down the interior of the building. He climbed up to the top floor, not expecting to find anything, but keen to check all the same. If anyone had been trapped up here, his logic told him, then surely they’d have tried barricading the access points too? He opened a couple of doors but the rooms were empty, and then stopped when he remembered that Driver and his germs had been quarantined up here. He tripped lethargically back down the stairs to the floor below and shouted out again, listening to the way his voice echoed eerily across the empty first floor landing, wishing that someone would answer back.
    Christ, he suddenly felt desperately lonely and low. He’d expected to find the others here, and the fact that they’d gone hit him hard. If he’d stayed he could have gone with them. He hadn’t realized how much he’d craved company until it was clear that he was still on his own and it was going to stay that way. He continued back down to the ground floor.
    Sean readied himself to leave. He called out a few more times, but he knew it was pointless. There was nothing to stay here for.
    *   *   *
     
    Room 24 East.
    Emaciated, dehydrated, and sitting half-dressed, surrounded by his own waste, Webb leaned back against the wall under the window and covered his head with his hands. He wanted the voice outside to go away. Only silence was safe.
    “Stop!” he screamed to himself, too afraid to say the words out loud. “Please stop! You’ll bring the bodies back again…”
    He curled himself into a ball and lay sobbing on the soiled carpet, waiting for the noise outside to disappear, terrified that the banging on the door was about to start again.

Also by David Moody
    Hater
    Dog Blood
    Them or Us
    Autumn
    Autumn: The City
    Autumn: Purification

About the Author
     

     
    David Moody was born in 1970 and grew