The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (13 page)

She raised her chin, and, as the hat tilted, he realised that she was watching him.

She was remarkably attractive. Her eyes seemed to display an intelligent curiosity in him, as if he’d just said something fascinating and philosophical; her eyelids were tinted lightly with eyeshadow, a faint lilac luster, almost but not quite a glitter. She had a model’s face, perfect for an artist’s sketchbook: a sleek nose and cheekbones captured with confident strokes, and short auburn hair tucked back behind her ears. Three small jade earrings dotted each lobe.

‘Hi,’ she said, startling him. He blinked two or three times
reflexively, as though she’d swung a flashlight on him, before he was able to answer.

‘Hi,’ he said. So much for fascinating and philosophical. He debated which would make him feel more idiotic now–turning back to the desk to wait awkwardly, or chit-chatting with this woman who’d just caught him ogling. He wished Mr Lang would hurry his ass down.

‘I heard what you were saying,’ the woman said. ‘About your phone.’ Her head ducked into her shoulders, and she smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry, I eavesdrop everywhere I go.’

‘Oh,’ he said. He glanced backwards. The kid was typing on his keypad, not paying attention. Feeling bolder, sensing he’d gained a sympathiser, Marco faced the woman again. Yes, she truly was attractive. Her face had a pixie-ish quality, with strawberry cheeks and a nose angled up at the tip; she was in her thirties, yet she emitted the airy glow of a teenage girl. And yes, her eyeshadow
did
glitter, a delicate twinkle that would have annoyed him on anybody else–but on her it charmed him somehow. As if he’d received a sprinkling of her pixie magic.

‘They won’t let you return it,’ she said, as though to clarify the situation.

‘No, apparently not,’ he confirmed. ‘Not without a receipt. It was a gift.’

‘It’s a nice gift,’ she said, and he felt a momentary betrayal, as if she were trying to convince him to keep the phone. Perhaps she noticed his mouth twitch, because she immediately added, ‘You shouldn’t need a receipt. Hardly anybody makes you have them any more.’

‘I’m making that same argument,’ he said, pacified. ‘I may call on you as a witness.’

She encouraged him with a smile. ‘Actually, that’s what I wanted to tell you. I was standing here in line, listening, and
I couldn’t believe it. I just bought that
same
phone here. The exact same one, last week. Look.’ She reached into her purse and pulled out a duplicate model.

‘Really,’ he said, not quite seeing her point. ‘You’re returning it?’

‘Oh, I like mine,’ she replied. ‘I’m here for something else, a CD. But what I mean about the phone is that I have the
receipt
for it, right here, still in my purse.’

A moment passed, during which he heard the unspoken suggestion. She grinned, biting her bottom lip in a way he’d later come to recognise as a harbinger of her mischief. Again he sensed an aura of girlishness, the teen tiptoeing out the back door after her parents fell asleep.

‘Wow,’ he said at last. ‘There’s a clever thought. Actually–you know, it would actually work, I think. It might be wrong, but it would work.’

Her mouth rounded, and she pretended to appear insulted. ‘It’s not wrong,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t really steal that phone, did you?’

‘No.’

‘Exactly. So it’s not wrong. If anything, it’s righting a wrong done to you.’

He glanced back at the kid. Still not paying attention. ‘Should we be whispering?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t care,’ she said, flicking her hand at the counter. A smoky crystal sat in a copper ring on her pinkie. The other fingers were bare.

‘All right,’ Marco agreed. ‘I’d really appreciate it, if you really don’t mind.’

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I was going to throw it out, but it had some other things on it, so I figured I better keep it a little longer. Now I’m glad I did.’

‘Me, too.’ He let that statement hang a second longer than
necessary, then held out his hand low. ‘Quick. He’ll be here any second.’

She laughed and handed him a small white slip of paper from her purse. ‘You have a knack for drama,’ she mused. ‘Don’t tell me you’re an actor.’

‘God, no,’ he said too strongly. Her eyebrows lifted, and he sensed he’d made a gaffe. ‘What I mean,’ he began, but before he could soften his stance, a voice spoke up behind him.

‘Sir, you had the phone?’ A middle-aged man with a moustache now stood at the counter.

‘Yes, that’s me,’ Marco said. He held up the receipt–the ‘Receipt of Destiny’, Danielle later referred to it–and rattled it in the air. ‘You won’t believe what I just found.’

Minutes later he had his refund, sixty-five dollars. On the receipt the kid scribbled out the cell phone in red pen before passing it back to Marco. Marco rejoined the woman in line.

‘Thank you again,’ he told her. ‘I owe you. Here you go.’ He offered her the receipt, but she pushed it back into his hand, shaking her head.

‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘Oh god, this is the embarrassing part.’

She crossed her eyes and put a hand to her forehead, laughing. ‘Okay, I’ll just say it. You didn’t notice, but I wrote my number on the back. Before I even spoke to you, when I was waiting in line. It was all part of an intricate plot.’

Marco blushed. The receipt quivered in his hand, like a magic-trick prop that might burst into flames. He resisted an urge to turn it over, check to see if she was telling the truth.

‘Oh,’ he said. His heart quickened a few beats. ‘Thank you.’ The stupidity of his words appalled him, yet she seemed pleased. She smiled beautifully, as though she’d
been saving her prettiest face for the right moment, and held out her hand.

‘You’re welcome,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Danielle.’

He crammed the receipt into his pocket, then reached back to her. Her hand felt like a soft leaf in his. ‘Henry,’ he said.

And that was how he’d met Danielle. A great ‘meeting story’, she liked to call it. Every marriage has its mythology, and Danielle delighted in telling theirs. She was an actress, he learned, with credits in movies he vaguely recalled–
Photo Album
and
Pearls
and
Next to Nothing
–although he’d never been much of a moviegoer. Her Hollywood friends were a mystic bunch, always marvelling at the machinery of the universe. At dinner parties, whenever conversations turned to the topic of fate, Danielle offered her meeting with Marco as proof, while he played the straight man–interjecting to argue it was only a coincidence, at which point he’d be drowned out by boos, and somebody usually hit him with a sofa cushion.

And that was the irony: rejecting the cell phone had brought him Danielle, his living, breathing, beautiful lifeline to the world. Before Danielle, he’d had nobody.
A hermit
, his mother had called him, and her assessment wasn’t far from the truth. But with Danielle came friends, parties, plans for a family… Except now Danielle was gone again.

And without her, life was hell on earth.

The silver dome of the Maricopa train station harnessed the morning sun, shooting off a white flare that Marco could see from two blocks away in his Jeep. Ahead of him Route 347 wavered with a hazy heat. The morning was already hot. Twenty-four hours had passed since his negotiations with
Osbourne; afterwards he’d shut down the computer and made a beeline for bed, plummeting to the mattress like a defeated boxer to the mat. He slept a feverish sleep that sucked him deeper the more he tried to rise out of it, as if he were struggling in a vat of warm mud. Somewhere in another reality, distant, not his own, he heard gunshots, explosions. He slept through the afternoon, the evening, the night again; when he’d finally opened his eyes this morning, he felt healthier. The soreness in his throat had relented, his sinuses were clear, his airways alive once more with fresh flowing oxygen. He relaxed, suddenly aware that he’d been concerned; but there was definitely no Resurrection in his body.
No raw meat for me.

And so he’d gotten up. He boiled water in the fireplace for a quick wash, then dressed and packed his gear and firearms. Out the door just after seven. He’d finally succumbed to Osbourne’s plan–reluctantly, but at the same time perhaps grateful for the extra manpower–to meet the Resurrection Resistance Unit in the town of Maricopa, an hour south.

Roger Ballard
, he thought now for the hundredth time as he drove. He frowned, still rattled by last night. The dredging up of that name. What the hell was Osbourne plotting? Why the need to return Roger? ‘
National security’
was all that Osbourne had offered.

Something’s not right
, Marco fretted.
I should’ve said no.

But then again, he didn’t really have a choice. Osbourne was a true bastard. The threats had been bad enough, Marco thought, but using Danielle like that to manipulate him… Christ, he’d practically been on his knees, begging for the job. He scowled now, remembering the questions Osbourne had put to him. The same cruel questions that loomed over him every day out here in this wasteland, beating down on him like the sun.

Why haven’t you found her? Why is this taking so goddamn long?

Christ, he’d tried, staked out a hundred spots she
should
have been. The wedding chapel in Hollywood. The resort in Carefree. Their first apartment in LA, and the coffee shop they’d gone to for a first date. And the Arizona house, of course, four years there, waiting for her to show. He’d looked everywhere, every place that meant something–that
should’ve
meant something to her. Unless he was wrong…

His chest ached. He didn’t want to doubt her.

Perhaps you’ve begun to wonder
, Osbourne had commented.

Yeah. Perhaps.

The image of her empty Honda flickered at the back of his eyes, ghostly and half formed. It appeared to him often in moments like these, particularly when he was tired and depressed. And always more images followed, and once they began they were hard to stop–
himself in his Audi on the first day of the Resurrection, speeding madly across town to rescue Danielle from the unfathomable chaos of screaming people and broken glass and ambulance sirens and dead monsters chasing him, and suddenly he slammed his brakes and there was her Honda, crumpled around a splintered telephone pole, her silly licence plate
YIN
•
YANG
mocking him as he sprinted across the street, dodging corpses–No no no, he thought–bloody brown handprints on the open doors, the engine still hissing and steaming–No no no fuck fuck fuck–the driver’s seat soaked with guts, loops of intestine, half a bitten liver, the floor mats submerged in blood–her red footprints exiting the car, disappearing into the desert, and he’d never seen her again…

‘Stop!’ he said, and slammed his fist on the car horn. The brazen honk broke the daydream apart, sent the unwelcome thoughts scattering. ‘No more,’ he ordered.

Immediately he regretted the reckless horn blow.
Don’t announce yourself, asshole
, he thought, forcing his
concentration back to the road, watchful for what he called ‘early risers’. Corpses never slept–but after a nightlong chill in the dark, sunlight seemed to trigger a higher state of activity in some. Probably another echo of their lives, distinct to personality and habit. Just after dawn you were likely to find white-haired corpses staggering along sidewalks, the elderly out for a sunrise stroll. Dead kids, too, acting on impulse to catch a school bus, maybe, or deliver papers. He’d once had to bolt from a corpse in jogging shorts; the calf muscles on its right leg were chewed off completely, just a grey stick of bone crammed into a crusted Nike sneaker.

Early risers were no real danger, not while driving. There were never many of them. But smacking a corpse in the road could damage the Jeep, maybe knock a part loose under the hood. And the last thing Marco needed was engine trouble.

His plan was to drive to Maricopa and join with the railroad tracks past the train station; steer the Jeep up the gravel embankment and drop right onto the tracks. Then follow the rails all the way to Los Angeles with the RRU tailing behind in their truck.

Bumpy, yes, but the surest way to cover long distances.

He’d thought up the trick two years ago. On highways in the Evacuated States, you were almost certain to run into a ‘ghost jam’ somewhere along the drive–thousands of empty cars and trucks clogging the road at unpredictable points, abandoned during the Evacuation. Terrified drivers caught in standstill traffic, forced to get out and run when mobs of the dead came swarming up the ramps, choking off any escape. Entire families became easy meals.

Now half the roads in America were just miles of rusting metal and sun-baked bones, impossible to pass. Crawling with hungry dead, too. He’d tried once to hike through on
foot. Big mistake. He’d been lucky to reach an overpass, jumped into a river to escape a hundred corpses.

So–railroad tracks were the answer. No traffic, no getting lost. Just straight shots from Point A to Point B, over all kinds of terrain. Big cities, thick forests, grand mountains, you name it. Marco had plotted today’s course on the map before leaving the house. Pick up the rail at Maricopa, then 400 miles west, exiting Arizona, up towards Los Angeles. He’d ditch the tracks far enough outside the city, before the area turned too population-heavy and dangerous.

The Maricopa train station glinted in the sun again, closer now. The station was a tourist attraction of sorts–an actual dome railroad car from the classic California Zephyr line, unhitched and deposited alongside the eastbound tracks, converted into a steel depot. He’d visited it once before the Resurrection–not as a passenger, but on a self-guided sightseeing tour he and Danielle had taken five years ago. Back when they’d first moved to Arizona.

Those first few weekends they’d bought travel books, explored the scenic driving routes, introduced themselves to the highlights of their new state. On that morning they’d toured the Gila River Heritage Center, absorbing Native American folklore and mysticism; Danielle loved it, while in Marco’s opinion it was a large overdose of feathers and turquoise beads. Afterwards they’d followed the itinerary west to Maricopa, to the famous Silver Horizon train station.