The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (2 page)

Lake Onahoe was their place. Every July for thirty
summers. ‘He loved it so much,’ Joan had said. ‘Couldn’t wait to get through June, just to get up to the lake again.’

Which was the reason Marco had made the trip to Montana. He’d already wasted three weeks on two failed stakeouts. First Roark’s home town, then his office in Seattle.

But this place seemed like the jackpot.

Roark’s corpse had migrated three hundred miles, just to rot here.

All the dead did it. Picked their own place to haunt. No thought behind the decision; the corpses couldn’t think but were herded instead by an impulse they couldn’t understand. Not that Marco understood, either. But as a neurologist–
ex-neurologist,
he reminded himself,
you’re nothing now
–he could guess. Their brains had gone dark, whittled down to the stems. Functional operations took place in the primitive reptilian complex, ruled by rage, fear, survival, hunger. Yet up in the neural pathways, something else remained, the weakest electricity from the amygdala into the prefrontal cortex. A drip of emotional memory from the higher brain.

He doubted the dead drew comfort from it. They didn’t seem to care. It simply acted like a gravitational pull, drawing their cold bodies to wherever the warmth of their lives still lingered.

For Roark, this lake was where it would end.

Marco swept his Ruger up and down the shore, checking one last time through the scope for signs of trouble before he took the shot. Through the crosshairs the lakefront seemed quiet. Nothing new, nothing he’d missed. No sign of any hiders.

Focus
, he thought. Caution was good–but too much and the corpse might wander back into the trees, and he’d lose the easy shot. And no damn way did Marco want to track the dead man through thick forest and mountainous terrain. Swinging the rifle back, he fitted his outside arm
into the leather sling to stabilise the shot from his seated position.

He fixed his sights. Two hundred yards, into the black hole of the corpse’s shrivelled ear. The walnut stock pressed cold against Marco’s cheek.

He could see the mandibular muscles on the side of Roark’s head flexing, the jaws still working the chewy cartilage of the frog. The corpse gazed across the lake, emotionless.

Marco waited for its head to still.

There.
The crosshairs met in the middle of its ear.

Lingered.

Marco fired.

The crack of the Ruger tore through the trees, the pine needles quaking a million ways around him. He glimpsed a fragment of skull explode from the corpse and spin sideways into the water, like a rock skipping, twice. The echoes of the shot rocketed back towards Marco from the mountains on the other side of the lake, and he watched, his head ringing, as the corpse flopped face-first into the shallow water, staining it with that obscene fluid the things bled–not blood, but black and liquid like diarrhoea. It lay there without a twitch.

Whatever remained of Andrew Roark in that reanimated flesh–gone now.

All parts equally dead.

Marco watched the corpse bob a few feet from shore. The lake and forest sat in utter silence, stunned by the rifle-shot. He imagined the insects, the birds, the animals holding their breath, hearts jackhammering in their chests.

He ejected the spent shell and set the rifle on the platform. Then he closed his eyes and listened, his head tilted back.
He inhaled the scent of pine, let it tingle through his body before breathing out through his mouth. He waited. Minutes passed. The quiet overwhelmed him.

Lately, after the kill, he’d felt this odd emotion–like a sadness that he’d lost someone he knew, someone important to him. It shouldn’t feel personal, Marco knew. And yet it
was
personal. It had to be. For the past two months, Roark had been a companion of sorts, in all Marco’s thoughts and incessant planning. Pathetic, but true. And now it was over.

Roark had been returned.

And so Marco sat, waiting for the sadness, the silence, to lift.

Gradually the hum of wildlife resumed. Squirrels chirped. Chickadees and dark-eyed juncos resettled in their trees and conversed shrilly. Cicadas started again like motors. Marco allowed another ten minutes to pass, just to be careful, sifting through the forest noise–no sound of trouble. He fetched his binoculars again and checked on the corpse.

Roark’s splayed body bobbed a few feet beyond where Marco had dropped it, bumping against rocks in the shallows. The cloudy lake water rippled underneath the corpse, discreet waves caused by winds coming off the mountain and crossing the lake.
Shit
, thought Marco. The body was buoyant, bloated with gas and decay. If the rolling water nudged it from the rocks, just a bit to the right, the carcass could float out to the deep.

It wouldn’t sink–but Marco was in no mood for a swim to retrieve it.

Enough meditation. Move your ass.

In confident motions he removed two handguns–a police-issue Glock .40 and a Kimber he’d found in an abandoned Phoenix SWAT truck–from the side compartment of his backpack and holstered them to his chest. From another bag he pulled his hunting knife and slung the sheath from his
belt, then slipped another three ammo clips into his vest. He grabbed a coil of nylon rope in case he had to lasso the corpse back to land, and then, moving to the rear of the blind, he turned himself around and stepped onto the first spike down…

… when he heard it.

That noise that always made his eyes water, his spine contract.

The cry. Strangled, wet, gurgling… not a low moan, but a high, sickening squall that seemed to churn unnaturally in the throat, choked off for ever from dark dead lungs.

Somewhere to the east. Still distant, thank Jesus, a long wail rising from the trees, and Marco saw nothing but forest. He swung back atop the platform, his breath quick. Moments later a second cry echoed the first. More than one corpse. Then a third cry, then a fourth. And then too many to count.

Marco shuddered. God, he hated that sound.

He hated it, because
this
was when they seemed their most human. The miserable noise was the touch-point between his existence and theirs, the awful joke played on them all. They suffered. He suffered. Listening to them now, he heard the pain. The frustration, the dread that beat in his own chest every night as he tried to sleep, suffocating in his room at base, wanting to scream but afraid to make a sound. Too careful to release his anguish out loud.

In that small way he envied them.

He scanned the eastern horizon. A small cluster of black specks bustled above the treeline, about two miles away, swooping in and out of each other. Turkey vultures. The birds were a great early warning system, Marco had discovered, like canaries in a mine. The stench of death attracted them, and once they’d locked onto a corpse, they might follow for days, launching attacks on the walking carrion, swinging down to tear at a leg or a neck. Two or three birds
could devour a corpse alive. It was justice of sorts, if justice still existed.

With larger crowds of the dead, the birds tended to keep high in the sky, on the lookout for stragglers. Their presence had tipped Marco off in the past, saved his ass more than once, and he’d come to think of them as allies.
Says a lot
, he thought sourly sometimes.
My only friends are vultures.
Back at base in the mornings, he had a habit of peering out through his bedroom window the moment he awoke, scanning the sky for vultures like people used to check for rain.

Seeing what kind of day it would be. A lot of vultures meant a bad day.

Now the ghastly wailing continued, louder. Marco judged it would take the horde–from the chorus he guessed there might be as many as fifty–maybe half an hour to cover the ground, figuring the terrain was uneven and choked with roots and rocks. And, besides, they might not even be heading in his direction. With luck, they’d wander away.

He frowned. There was no real reason for the shiver in his stomach. He himself had a short walk to the lake, a quick errand: check the body, get the ring, return to the blind. Fifteen minutes, tops. Up here with the canvas drawn tight, he’d never be detected. Not the perfect situation, but workable. Better than letting the corpse float to the middle of the lake.

Deliberating, he absently pinched his left earlobe between his thumb and index finger–a habit of his while thinking, ever since childhood. His knuckle pressed into a small triangular notch in his lobe, a missing piece of cartilage the size of a tooth. Dog bite when he was seven. The injury had occurred on a summer morning, thirty-five years ago, as Marco crawled between the hedges in his yard to dislodge a rubber ball. Without warning, Frankie, the yellow-eyed mongrel next door, had crashed through the branches, teeth snapping. The utter terror of that one single moment
remained vivid to Marco even now. The roar of animal anger, the black head exploding from the leaves, the hot, reeking weight of fur crushing him into the garden mulch.

I’m getting eaten
, he’d thought, dazed, as claws tore his shirt, raked his back.

His first lesson that monsters weren’t pretend. Things could get you in real life.

To this day, dogs scared the shit out of him.

‘Oh hell,’ he decided. ‘Let’s go already.’

Feeling the press of time, he lowered himself again onto the top spike, then dipped his right foot until he felt the spike below. In swift increments he descended the tree, keeping close to the trunk, listening to his holster knock a hurried rhythm against the evergreen wood.

At the bottom, he surveyed the immediate area. The tall ferns carpeting the forest floor were green, bright with life. Globules of dew glistened in spider webs between the fronds, and sunlight pierced the treetops like white javelins. The only sign of disturbance was a corridor of partly crushed stalks heading south–a trail he’d made himself yesterday on his hike to the lake. He drew the Glock, just to be prudent, and started off down the path.

Stretching his legs felt good, to uncramp and get moving again.

The air grew noticeably warmer a hundred feet lower and, when he looked back, he saw a light mist above him. He’d been sitting in a mountain cloud without realising it. The mist obscured the bent vegetation.
Could be an advantage
, he thought.

Or not. He doubted the corpses were smart enough to track him. Instead he realised he’d better pay attention to his surroundings, take note of landmarks. Like a giant grey flat-sided boulder, and a half-toppled tree growing sideways from a mound of intricate roots. Marco added them to his mental
map. He couldn’t afford to get lost on the way back to the blind.

Especially if monsters were after him.

Closer to the lake, as the trees thinned and the air began to smell like a damp basement, he came across a mash-up of footprints–some barefoot, others not–in the soft earth.

The area had recently been hot.

He wasn’t too concerned. He’d seen these tracks already, inspected them a few days ago on his first morning at the lake. He’d ventured down to the cabins to check if he was alone out here. The row of eight identical houses had greeted him–impressive structures chiselled from ruddy brown logs, two storeys high, flanked by stone chimneys, windows ominously dark.

The doors were all locked, which he found reassuring. The former residents had likely left on their own, still alive and ahead of the violence, probably back when the evacuation orders first came down from the state. He doubted he’d find any squatters, but of course he had to check. In each front door he shattered the glass pane, using his bedroll to muffle the sound, then crept through the shadowy hallways with his gun pointed ahead of him. His heart knocked heavily, his pulse flared every time a squirrel ran along the roof outside.

Empty, all of them. Safe. Cleaned out, too, the pantries and closets bare. On the dinner table in Cabin Seven–next door to the Roarks’–he’d found a handwritten note:

Jay, hope you didn’t come here, but if you did, we had to go to Kim and Robert’s in Connecticut. Please call. Sorry. We didn’t know where you were, and the army won’t let us stay longer. We’re okay and went with the escort. Hope you are, too. Dad said to leave you the Remington in case you came. It’s in the hall closet.

Marco had checked the closet. Nothing but a few wire coat hangers and sawdust on a plywood shelf. He’d slipped the note into his vest. A phone number was scribbled there, too, and he thought maybe he’d try ringing Connecticut when he returned to base. See if Jay had ever shown.

At any rate, these footprints were fainter now, the mud resculpted by the morning drizzle. Except in one spot–a fresh, sharp set of prints, pressed into the rust-coloured pine needles.

His hand tightened on the Glock. He eyed the new prints, following them with a studied gaze in both directions. To the north they moved out of sight, away from his own path, back into the woods; southward they angled through the last remaining trees and down into the sandy pit of the shoreline. Exactly where Marco himself was heading.

Roark
, he thought, relaxing. This was where Marco had first spotted the corpse, shambling out of the treeline towards the water.

Bolstered, Marco hiked along the tracks the last fifty yards to the beach. Emerging from the forest, the prints disappeared where the sand loosened. No problem. He cut straight to the water, then followed the lake shore towards the dock and cabins at the far end of the beach. Half a minute later he recognised the rocks, slimy with algae, where he’d dropped the corpse.

‘Shit,’ he declared.

The body wasn’t there.

‘Shit,’ Marco said again, angrier this time.

He scanned the lake surface, out towards the deeper water. Floating there was the corpse, just as he’d worried, thirty feet into the lake–the sopping dark green of Roark’s pants,
limbs splayed, the blasted-out side of its head turned up, carrying water like a cup. Streamers of brain and broken skull trailed alongside the body as it drifted farther away by the second.