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the doors of the bus opening on the other side of the car park distracted Hollis. He watched as Driver let Stokes and Webb on board. Before disappearing inside, Webb glanced along the length of the bizarre-looking vehicle. Once just like any other double-decker bus, over the weeks the group had cannibalized and fortified it to the best of their limited abilities. Barbwire had been spooled along both sides in an attempt to make it as difficult as possible for the dead to reach the survivors inside. Sheet metal had been bolted to its otherwise flat front to form a rudimentary pointed plow, perfect for cutting through the incessant crowds which gathered around them whenever they left the relative safety and calm of the flats.
    The air, so eerily quiet and still most of the time now, was suddenly filled with noise as, one by one, the engines were started. Lorna shuffled forward in her seat and peered through binoculars down into the gray sea of cadavers. Even from this distance she could see that they were already beginning to react to the rumble of the machines.
    The geography of the area around the block of flats had made the ugly concrete building a surprisingly effective base. Its location, perched three-quarters of the way up a steep hill, made it difficult for the bodies to get close easily. Some of them, those less damaged or decayed than the rest, were occasionally able to drag themselves through the desolation and get closer to the survivors, but were easy pickings. Webb in particular seemed to take great pleasure in destroying them, although Jas, Harte, and Hollis were always ready to take their turn. Behind their building, a myriad of tracks and roads led through an empty, mazelike housing estate which had also been scheduled for demolition before everything had ended. Many houses were boarded up, and the group had created makeshift road blocks and barriers, leaving only the most inaccessible roads clear and making it all but impossible for even the most determined of corpses to reach them.
    No one was sure how much of a difference it made anymore, but it had become standard practice to create a distraction whenever anyone left the flats. Regardless of how much control the bodies had begun to exhibit, they could still be fooled. Fire was usually the best diversion. A little heat, light and noise were usually enough to take some of the pressure off whoever it was heading out into the open.
    “Ready?” Ellie yelled from Hollis’s right. He gave her a leather-gloved thumbs-up. On his signal she ran over to where Caron and Gordon were standing and started working. Hollis wiped sweat from his brow. Christ, he was hot. One of the worst things about going outside—apart from the unwanted attention of the remains of the local population—was the regulation uniform they had each decided to adopt. Bike leathers, wet suits, over-trousers—anything that might protect them from the layer of germs, slime and decay which was gradually coating every square inch of the world outside.
    Ellie lit a petrol-soaked rag and tossed it through the open window of a small, box-shaped silver car. A puddle of fuel on the driver’s seat and in the foot-well immediately burst into flame. Moving with sudden purpose and speed, she ran around to the back of the car and, with the other two, began to push it away from the flats. They could hear the crackle and pop of the fire taking hold inside; dirty black smoke was already beginning to belch out through the window.
    “Come on,” Gordon grunted, his face flushed red with effort and his dodgy hip feeling like it was about to pop out of his pelvis. Ellie took a step back then ran and launched herself at the car, finally feeling its wheels beginning to turn and pick up some speed. Its interior now completely ablaze, it rolled down the hill with increasing velocity, running away from the three people pushing it. Breathless, she stood with her hands on her hips and watched as it raced down the slope,