The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (10 page)

Today, older, thirty-eight, he gritted his teeth and ordered himself up the trail.

Twenty metres to his rear, a small cluster of corpses staggered in pursuit. Sixteen dead men and women; he counted repeatedly, afraid to lose track of a single one, their faces parched almost black like charred bodies from a fire
scene. They’d been following him the past twenty minutes, ever since the old campsite on the north side of the Superstitions.

He’d been picking through the smashed canvas tents half buried in the red dirt. Across the parking lot sat the United States military truck–the truck he’d been tracking for days. The Chinese Ministry of State Security had included GPS coordinates in the intelligence dossier, but the given location had been miles away; pinpointing the American RRU team had been more difficult than anticipated. And yet, after all the effort, here was their truck, an old 7-Ton model parked carelessly in the open. Perhaps the Americans had assumed–
typical arrogance
, Wu noted–that nobody was alive on this side of the continent to make stealth necessary.

He’d marked the site as a waypoint on his Droid GPS, then replaced the unit in his daypack. In the far corner of the lot leaned a filthy camper, its front end dug into the ground where a car had unhitched and driven off without it. From inside Wu heard hollow pounding. Someone had trapped the dead within; the door was padlocked, the windows too small to crawl through. The corpses had withstood years inside, rotting. Withering in a makeshift prison, the stifling heat, no food or water.
Remarkable.
Wu often marvelled at the dead’s ability to survive.

If ‘survive’ was the proper word.

As usual, he couldn’t help but pity them. He fetched a large rock from a nearby fire pit and hammered at the lock. Fingernails scrabbled at the other side of the door.

When the lock broke apart, Wu retreated a few metres and waited. The door batted open, and almost at once the air surrounding the trailer soured. His nostrils stung. He hoped for the hundredth time that the briefing he’d been given last month by MSS was correct–an assurance that
the infection was not airborne. But perhaps… at this close distance…?

Before he could second-guess himself, a corpse lurched from the dark interior, teetering onto the top step. It was male, naked and grotesque; the head of its penis had pooled with rotten blood and bulged between the thighs like a horrible purple gourd. Its stomach was a shiny hard balloon, full of gas, distended to the point of almost bursting.

Wu ran his fingertips along the rounded handles of the two deer-horn knives on his belt, ready to draw if necessary. The deer-horns–
lujiaodao
, in his language–were still his most trusted weapons. He’d mastered them in Beijing; his first year in MSS had included an intense study of the Baguazhang martial arts. The double blades curved around his fists like two razor-sharp crescent moons–perfect for combat at close quarters, especially if surrounded, enabling him to swing in graceful circles and slice apart the necks of multiple attackers at once.

He’d been warned against using traditional weaponry for this mission. Flesh damage did nothing to stop the resurrected dead; by now everyone knew that the brain itself must be decommissioned. A bullet to the head. On Wu’s back was a Chinese AK rifle, supplied by MSS, which he had no intention of using. The cold feel of the knife handles was enough to put him at ease; the blades could disable a corpse without causing it more harm than required.

The naked male corpse locked eyes on him.

The corpse snorted once, a wet sound like dislodged phlegm, followed by a burp of black goo onto its chin. Slowly it descended the steps towards Wu. Its stiff, uncooperative legs tilted it off balance, nearly pitching it onto its face. Before it reached bottom, another brittle figure emerged from the doorway–a female corpse in a muddy bikini top and tattered
shorts. Its scalp dangled in meaty strips from the exposed skull, and remnants of red braided hair, thick like filthy ropes, swung side to side as it, too, hobbled down the steps.

Wu stepped back again, ready to turn and leave, hike back to his own sparse camp in the mountains. The shambling corpses were no real danger. At a brisk pace he could lose them in minutes. But another motion from the trailer stopped him. A third corpse–another male, and then behind it a fourth and a fifth filed out. The trailer had been packed full, and Wu experienced a sharp flashing vision of his own living quarters as a boy. His four brothers and two sisters, asleep with tangled limbs on the rough wooden floor of his uncle Bao Zhi’s shack. The rain at night tittering on the red and white metal roof above–a sheet of uncut aluminium, imprinted with Coca-Cola logos, stolen from a shipment to the bottling plant in Sichuan.

Again Wu felt a twinge of sympathy for the dead campers.

The first corpse had drawn too close now, near enough so that Wu could hear its teeth clicking. The body’s navel protruded obscenely, popped outward by the pressure of gases swelling within the gut. Unrattled, Wu jogged ten steps in reverse, his eyes still on the trailer. Even more corpses than before. Sixteen total.

Still he felt unthreatened, confident in his ability to evade as long as the dead remained in a group. Wu wasn’t like the American soldiers he’d been assigned to track; they were fools, too quick with their rifles, popping off with enthusiasm at every corpse they encountered. A day earlier he’d observed them in their truck, whooping and hollering as they’d shot corpses for sport, like some hideous safari. The sight had disgusted him. A dishonour to the dead.

And a waste of bullets.
But that is the American way
, Wu had thought harshly.

Squander what you have, until everything is gone.

He’d be glad to return home to China after the mission. Since last summer he’d been embedded in the Safe States–a sleeper agent on the East Coast, awaiting unspecified orders from Beijing. He knew never to press for details. America was in disarray, and a political firefight was mounting; he’d assumed MSS wanted him near the chaos, his skills available if some unforeseen need arose. For restless months he’d lingered, wondering how he might be deployed–surveillance? assassination?–but Beijing had remained frustratingly silent.

And so he’d endured. He’d taken up residence in the former garment district of Boston’s Chinatown, renting a one-room apartment in a converted hosiery factory. He knew no one, lived quietly. In the mornings he trained alone at the Boston Sports Club; in the afternoons he enjoyed meditations in the bamboo and rock gardens at the Chinatown Gate, or strolled through bustling markets, or browsed quaint, tea-scented shops. The proprietors intrigued him–descendants of poor Chinese sojourners, he imagined, crossing the oceans a hundred years ago. America had been their dream. Now the dream was shattered, and Wu wondered how many Chinese Americans longed secretly for a return to the now-thriving homeland.

The thought saddened him.

His own immigration to America had been faked with surprising ease. For all the New Republican tough talk, the Safe States’ international borders were soft and weak. The watchdogs were distracted. Too many eyes on the Mississippi strongwall, hypervigilant against the dead menace staring back across the Mississippi River. One set of falsified documents and a bribed INS official, and Kenny Wu joined the payroll of Green Solar, a Boston manufacturer of solar energy modules. Green Solar had partnered with China before the Resurrection to build a photovoltaic plant in Mongolia; now
MSS had the executive board under its control, and a dummy position had been effortlessly arranged for Wu in the New England office.

He never once visited Green Solar in Boston; no questions were asked. He followed the business through press releases, watching as the States scrambled for new energy options; the oil trade here was hugely compromised, with Texas under the Quarantine and the Middle East finally shaking off its American oppressor. Wu relished the American downfall–the anguish, the confusion, the desperation sweetening as the Chinese economy vaulted to the top of the world. He’d savoured the anxious looks on white faces in the cobbled Boston streets.
How could this happen to us?
they seemed to ask.
To other people, yes. To other countries. But not to us.

You had your time
, he wanted to tell them.
Now it’s our turn.

Finally, last month, Beijing had transmitted its orders. The mission was far more glorious than Wu could have expected; his heart bounded as he’d decoded the brief from his Droid. Two days later he’d entered Canada through New York. Even here, at the top of the Safe States, the borders were closed indefinitely to Americans; all roads north had been sealed off using massive cargo containers from the shipping yards, each the size of a truck trailer, loaded with cement and stacked two high. But another well-placed bribe had afforded Wu a ride on a police boat across the tip of silent Lake Erie, late past midnight, with the fearsome Niagara Falls a whisper in the distance. From there he’d trekked west, then south into the Evacuated States; the mountainous forest below Calgary had pressed his survival skills to the limit, across a vast obstacle course of sheer cliffs and unending trees that the Canadians saw no need to guard. At last, over the border again, he’d hot-wired a Pontiac and motored the remaining miles to Arizona. When the Superstition Mountains grew
large on the horizon, he’d ditched the car; the loud engine threatened to forewarn the enemy as he travelled the lone highway towards the GPS location.

Now, poised here at the base of the Superstitions, these thoughts about the Americans had given Wu his idea. The enemy’s camp was located high in the mountains as well, a mile beyond his own. He’d studied them at sunrise that morning from a hidden point along the ridgeline. Five soldiers. Two dark-skinned men, three whites, among them a muscular man with silver-stubbled cheeks.
Grey Beard
, Wu had dubbed him, and he appeared to be in command. Wu didn’t know their actual names. The names did not matter. Now that he’d at last located the American team after weeks of hard tracking–during which he’d half starved for lack of proper supplies, burrowing and sleeping in holes under boulders like a mangy desert fox–Wu was more than ready to complete this first stage of the mission.

Exterminate the Americans. Then move on to his next target.

Doctor Henry Marco.

‘Hey,’ Wu said to the nearest corpse. ‘
Gen wo zou
.’

Come with me.

The dead male’s eyes widened, pink and veiny. From twenty paces away it staggered towards Wu, one skeletal hand outstretched–or not quite a hand. A thumb and four mangled nubs where the fingers had been bitten off. Wu turned, satisfied the corpse would follow, and jogged ten steps towards the entrance of the mountain trail. He paused at the trailhead, beside a brown wooden sign etched with faded yellow letters:

LOST DUTCHMAN STATE PARK
TRAIL 53, SIPHON DRAW 1.6 MILE
FLATIRON 2.4 MILE
STAY ON TRAIL, STAY SAFE

Wise advice
, Wu thought.

He waved encouragingly to the pack of corpses creeping up behind him.

‘
Guhn whu zoe
. Follow me!’

And they did, farther and farther up the trail. All he had to do was keep a safe distance, stop every dozen metres to let them
almost
catch up, keep them interested. Each time he allowed them close enough so that he could see their shrivelled faces hungering for him–black tongues hanging from black mouths like dogs–and then he sped up again, trotting out of reach as behind him the corpses barked grunts of frustration. He’d led them almost two miles now. Once again he found himself admiring the dead. They were persistent. Refusing to accept defeat.

The trail wove upward around a series of switchbacks, cutting between yellow carpets of desert marigolds and the rough ashen stubble of unflowered brittlebrush. A spiny-feathered bird, a roadrunner, dashed across the path into the scrub to the west. Gradually the crags in the surrounding cliff seemed to separate, and a massive peak angled into view, still far above.

‘Flatiron’, the peak was called, where the Americans had established their lookout onto the valley. Down where Wu stood, the trail dipped into a smooth rock basin, worn by the elements; on the opposite side, the rock sloped upwards again, leading to the base of a long natural staircase–steep, staggered plateaus of stone ascending another few thousand feet to the summit.

Long way to go. Longer than he’d remembered. He drew
a sustained breath and cursed. No lonely workout on the StairMaster in Boston could have prepared him for this.

He heard a pebble kick past his feet and realised he’d lost focus while bemoaning the climb ahead. The corpses had gained ground. With a scowl he resumed his climb, jogging forwards just as the slavering pack staggered into the basin behind him.

Anxious for the first time, he hurried to the start of the Flatiron staircase and skipped up the bottom step. For a hundred metres, all seemed well. The corpses were easy to outpace on the uneven stones, tripping over loose rubble and roots. The naked male flailed its arms and sprawled flat across the path, face first and hard; with an audible pop, its bloated stomach burst against the jutting rock, spraying a gassy jet of blood and slime onto the dirt. But the corpse rose quickly, teeth gnashing, stubborn and starving, its abdomen gaping open like a window into its gut. The other corpses, too–stumbling, rising, rejoining the chase without pause.

Midway up the steps, Wu began to worry. The dead hikers were tireless, moving as well now as they had half an hour ago. Perhaps they were even faster, as if spurred by frustration. He didn’t know whether they experienced pain–whether the dead’s physiology subjected them to the same fire of lactic acid that consumed living athletes–but, if so, they ignored it.

His own legs, however, burned like torches. He was aware of moving slower, no longer outrunning the corpses. They trailed closer now, overtaking him metre by worrisome metre.

He pressed a hand to his rib and upped his effort. He considered ditching the corpses–abandoning the plan by leaving the trail and cutting across the mountain, where the terrain would be too severe for them to follow. But then he spotted the small white mark on the red cliff wall. It was
the scratch he’d made that morning to identify the turnoff point to his camp, about two hundred metres into the cliffs above. He knew the Americans weren’t much farther ahead.