The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (19 page)

Wu replied with the slightest of nods, and Marco heard a
click.
The antechamber fell dark, barely fed by light from the cracked panelling. In another few moments, Marco’s
eyes had once more adjusted. He squinted into the window to the dining car. Even here, inside the train, the grime and debris on the glass were thick, hard to see past.

He rubbed his elbow on the glass, then cupped his hands around the cleared swathe and peered again. Still no good. Too much shit on the other side, mucking it up. He registered a few dark edges of tables. The rest was pure black.

He raised a fist and rapped three times on the window.

Behind him, Wu spoke up. ‘I thought you said no noise.’

‘If anything’s in there, I’d like to know now.
Before
we open the door.’

They waited. Nothing.

‘All right then,’ Marco said. ‘Pull that bad boy.’

Wu yanked the red lever, and the door shuddered once. ‘Try it.’

Flushed with sweat, Marco wrestled the crowbar into the padded edge of the doorway. Even unlocked, the door was stingy–years of caked filth in the runners had almost cemented it shut, but he threw his shoulder against the bar, and the door popped open, too hard, too loud, dirt grinding in its gears. It rattled halfway, then stopped.

Marco aimed his Glock into the gap. The stock felt slick in his palm.

The darkness seemed alive, grumbling back at him. Buzzing. Sounded like…

Click.
The flashlight leaped on, cutting a beam into the dining car.

Flies. Thousands of flies, exploding in and out of the light, a repulsive black cloud that swirled and bounced, split in pieces, merged again. Marco flinched.
Disgusting.

Wu swung the light lower. To the floor.

Bodies.

The centre aisle was a graveyard–a slaughterhouse killing-floor of torn human limbs and ribcages and mummified heads with screaming mouths captured in final poses of pain and terror. Men, women. Small skeletons, too, chiselled with bite marks. Children. Thirty, forty people caught here in an attack, making a last stand as corpses overtook the train. Bodies piled in the booths, too, gutted while they’d hidden under tables or struggled to break the windows.

‘Welcome to the dining car,’ Wu announced. His voice was unamused.

A sludge of blood and offal carpeted the floor, inches thick. But solid. Hardened with time. The bodies had been dead for years, dried now and colourless. Spines torn apart, brains gnashed. These victims been devoured too quickly, too completely to resurrect.

The stench was old, too–a fusty, stomach-turning gas, molecules of dissolved soft tissue bogging down the air. Marco coughed, hid his nose in the crook of his elbow. The sight sickened him, and at the same time propelled his heart faster.

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘We should go back.’

‘Why? These bodies aren’t moving.’

‘Come on, man,’ Marco urged. ‘What do you think happened here? Food poisoning? The train must’ve had its own mini-outbreak–some passenger with the Resurrection punched everybody else’s ticket, too. The corpses that did this are someplace onboard. Guaranteed.’

‘I understand, Doctor. Thankfully, we only need this one car.’

‘Jesus Christ–how many safety lectures do I have to give you today?’

Wu brushed past, knocking Marco’s shoulder as he stepped through the doorway into the dining car. The
flashlight poked deeper into the darkness, illuminating more ghostly tables cloaked in grey tablecloths and a waiter’s station halfway up the car.

‘
Wu
,’ Marco growled. ‘Get the fuck back. We have to go.’

Wu continued forward, stepping over bones.

Asshole.
Right here was exactly what Marco hated–stupid military bullshit that gets everybody killed. He considered retreating to the Jeep, leaving Wu. Just sit out there and wait for the screaming to start. But then what? Rush back to the rescue? Drive away?

His neck flushed, ashamed.
Don’t be a pussy
, he thought.

He shook his head and sighed.

Whatever. I guess this stupid military bullshit is contagious.

He flexed his fingers on the crowbar and stepped over the gap in the connector, rolling his eyes at a small white sign.

WATCH YOUR STEP

Yeah, tell me about it
, he thought. His boot crunched down on the crust of blood in the entryway, and the smell of death thickened. He followed Wu up the car.

Around him, a thousand flies rose and dived, bouncing off his face as he tried to swat them. He clamped his mouth tight to keep them out. He couldn’t help but marvel at how long they must have existed here, chewing nests into carcasses. Generations of flies. Each surviving days at a time, doing its part, picking the dead clean. Laying eggs. Dying so the next can be born, repeating over and over, four years here in this same train, shut off from the world outside. The first generation had seen the carnage, had feasted on fresh blood and moist, shivering organs. But these flies knew none of that.

This is all normal to them
, Marco thought.
The only life they’ve known.

Hatched into a land of silent bones.

How long
, he wondered,
until it’s like that for us? A generation? Nobody’ll even remember this planet before the Resurrection.

Disheartened, he moved carefully, but stumbled once, stepping hard on a brittle femur bone that broke underfoot with a grisly
crack.
He grabbed hold of a table edge to steady himself, and the stiff fabric of the tablecloth bunched in his fingers. In the dim light he saw a dark blotch on the cloth. An old bloody handprint, small and female. He fixed his balance and kept moving.

Halfway through the car, he caught up to Wu at the counter of the small waiter’s station. Wu stood examining a square hole in the wall, about a foot and a half wide. He shone the flashlight in. A narrow shaft dropped straight down.

‘Dumbwaiter,’ Wu said. ‘For sending up food. The kitchen’s below us.’

‘Don’t tell me. We’re going to slide down it.’

Wu shot him a quizzical look. ‘If you’d like, Doctor. I’ll use the staircase there.’ He gestured with the flashlight to a small flight of steps beyond the counter.

‘Wise ass. Well, I’m glad you have at least
some
common sens—’

He stopped, snapped his head to the left. Squinted towards the far end of the car.

‘What?’ Wu asked.

‘Shh.’ Marco frowned and pointed up the aisle. ‘Shine the light.’

Wu turned the beam. The door at the other end was open. A petrified mess of human forms lay sprawled in the doorway, preventing it from sliding shut.

Marco’s gut went cold.

‘Would’ve been easier to come in that way,’ Wu observed.

‘Hold the light there,’ Marco told him, extending his arm
with the Glock out in front. He ventured another few feet, eyes fixed on the open door, his head bent.

The buzzing of flies engulfed his ears. He batted them away.

There was something else. Something he needed to hear.

A few feet further, past the stairs, he heard it again. A heavy thump.

Then a whispery sliding. Then a thump again.

Footsteps.

His pulse pounding, he focused on the rectangular doorway. Felt himself jump when a pale hand reached from the shadows and grabbed the frame.

A slender feminine hand.

His mind leaped.
Danielle…

No
, he scolded himself.
Not Danielle, dumbass.

An older female corpse slithered through the door. A black dress hung in tatters from its bony body, exposing shrivelled tits. It goggled at Marco, ice-white eyes sunk deep in its skull. Strands of brittle silver hair dangled in its face.

And it wasn’t alone.

Two, three… four corpses creeping in, and more behind them; pasty figures swaying in the dark of the adjoining car. Shambling into the diner.

‘I
knew
it,’ Marco muttered. ‘Fucking
knew
it…’

Without pause he aimed his Glock straight into the middle of the female’s forehead, tightened his finger on the trigger…

Behind him the flashlight clattered to the floor.

Blackness overtook him as if he’d been thrown into a sack, and he lost his mark on the corpse. ‘Christ!’ he shouted, more pissed than frightened, and spun around.

He couldn’t see shit. ‘Wu!’

On the floor, the flashlight rolled in a lazy semi-circle, sending light into the wall… then rolled back to face the waiter’s station.

Wu—

Suddenly Marco wasn’t pissed at all. Suddenly he was pretty fucking alarmed.

Wu was there, slammed against the counter, thrashing, wrestling with a heavyset corpse–a fat monster in a soiled conductor’s shirt, ticket punch bouncing from its belt, its face a vicious white snarl. It slung its bulbous arms around Wu’s neck, squeezing him towards its teeth.

The tables
, Marco realised stupidly, his thoughts spinning like tyres in mud, trying to grab hold. Hadn’t checked beneath. The corpse must’ve crawled out.
Jesus Christ.

‘Doct—’ Wu began, but his hands slipped from the counter. He crashed to the floor, kicking up bones, and the dead conductor pounced on top of him.

Marco choked the crowbar, bit his lip.
Here we go. Head-bangin’ time.

He charged a single step…

… and faltered as the older female clenched its hands on his shoulders from behind. Before he could whirl, the corpse pitched itself against him, and he stumbled to the left, surprised–surprised again when his ankle buckled under him, and the floor opened like a pit, and all at once his vision spun topsy-turvy.

With the female corpse pinned to his back, he toppled down the unlit stairwell.

Down to whatever waited in the shadows below.

White fireworks ruptured the blackness, pain lighting the nerves in Marco’s visual cortex as he crashed sideways down the stairs. He hit the last four steps on his chest and slid as if being scrubbed on a washboard, his teeth clacking, the female corpse screeching in his ear. Halfway down, the
stairwell turned; Marco and the corpse met the wall with a terrible
snap
–brittle bones splintering into toothpicks under the female’s skin–and they flipped, a tangle of hot and cold limbs, their foreheads knocking. For an instant the corpse’s mangled lips were so close to his own that he could have kissed it. Horrified, he planted his foot and shoved off.

He felt himself airborne again, this time falling backwards, somersaulting down the second short flight of steps. He landed with a thud on his ass. The floor was wet, soaking through his pants in moments. His boots slipped as he scrambled to his feet.

Christ, the air reeked here, fierce like ammonia. His eyes flashed left, right, straining into the dark. Waist-high countertops. Cupboards, shelves, the deep basin of a sink.

He’d found the kitchen.

Feeble light trickled into the room from a single glass pane–a muck-covered window on the opposite wall, facing west out of the train. He hadn’t detected it earlier from outside; the Jeep had driven along the unending chain of cars on the east, where the diner’s bottom level had appeared windowless.
Nice going, genius
, he grumbled.
Woulda been a lot fuckin’ easier to break in here, through a window. Next time, check the
other
side of the train.

Frustrated, he gave himself a rapid check-up, bent and unbent his arms, flexed his knees. Sore but nothing broken; probably just a few more bumps and bruises for his collection. And, thank Christ, he’d held onto the Glock and the crowbar, two reassuring weights in his hands.

The female corpse hadn’t forgotten him. It faltered down the last step, grunting, arms outstretched. A marble-sized diamond crowned its ring finger. Fleetingly, Marco pondered the fate of its husband. One of the mummified bodies upstairs, or another walking corpse on board?

Or had the husband escaped?

Fuck it
, Marco decided.
Nobody escapes.

Incensed by his own nihilism, he lashed forward and rammed the point of the crowbar up through the female’s nose–the easiest path to the brain, he’d discovered years ago–until he felt the tip punch past the nasal cavity and lodge in the prefrontal cortex. In a single motion he wrenched the bar, ripping the brain in half, and twisted the female’s head around on its shoulder until he heard the vertebrae in the wrinkled neck groan and shatter.

The corpse flopped to the floor.

Shadows lurched on the staircase. More corpses coming.

‘
Wu!
’ Marco screamed up the steps.

No answer. Then a crash.

Marco backed away. A cluster of corpses rounded the corner, descending into the gloom.

Enough dark
, he thought.
Let’s turn the lights on.

He wheeled, the Glock ready in his right hand, and fired one bullet into the filthy pane on the western wall. The gunshot thundered in the small kitchen, the reverberations so intense he heard knives and ladles on wall hooks chattering against themselves.

The glass exploded. Sunlight flooded the kitchen.

Much better.

He blinked, ears ringing, and shaded his eyes with the gun. Suddenly he understood the putrid smell he’d noticed in the darkness.

The floor was a stew of liquefied rat bedding, turds and piss; he’d stumbled into a nest. So that’s how this post-apocalyptic world worked–flies ruled the top level, rats below in a subkingdom of spoiled vegetables and cupboard perishables. Along the counters, brown hairy bodies scurried for safe crevices, terrified by the light and noise.

Not a bad idea
, he reckoned.
I could use a crevice myself.

A dead couple emerged from the stairwell, a male and
female decked in red sweatshirts emblazoned with University of Arizona decals, followed by another male, and another. Daunted, Marco retreated around a stainless steel island occupying the centre of the kitchen. He passed three shelf fixtures stocked with canned soups, fruits, pasta–
Wu’s gonna have a feast, if he’s not already dead
–and stopped at the broken window. Shattered glass crackled underfoot.