The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (25 page)

Slap.

Someone had just struck him across his bruised cheekbone.

‘Wake up.’

The voice was like a pair of sharp scissors, cutting through the wool in his head.

‘Roger?’ he asked, disoriented.
Still a dream? No. Yes.

No.

‘Wu?’ he tried.

He was lying on his spine, his arms stretched back behind his head. He stared at his feet far away. His eyes refused to focus, and blurred contours made his legs seem confusing. He tried to sit himself up. He couldn’t. His arms were stuck; he didn’t understand. A hazy figure hovered over him, the rough shape of a man.
Wu?

‘Birth asphyxia,’ Marco mumbled. His lips were numb. The complex syllables were difficult to push across. ‘Hypoxic… ischemic… encephalopathy.’

‘What’d you say?’ The sharp voice again.

Marco continued, concentrating yet woozy. ‘Neonatal condition–newborn babies–born not breathing. No oxygen to the brain. Roger induced hypothermia. Standard treatment, cool her to thirty-three degrees Celsius, three days. But Roger went lower. Risky. The asphyxia was severe. He wanted to save her, no brain damage. But. She died.’

‘Roger who?’ demanded the voice. ‘Roger Ballard?’

Marco wet his lips with his tongue. His head pounded
with pain, but his ears were crackling, clearing. He felt a cool morning breeze freshen his forehead. His words smoothed, flowing easier. ‘Roger wants to keep the brain alive. Without oxygen.’

He stopped and frowned. His eyes had firmed, and at last his surroundings took solid shape. He was laid out amidst a tangle of grey branches and bushes on a rugged embankment of desert earth. The dirt was bone-white, a paler bleach than Arizona. Twenty feet down, the hill bottomed out onto a bleak two-lane highway. Telephone poles spooled off forever to the north and south, and smaller roads broke away from the main highway, skulking towards distant houses and ugly structures that looked like industrial warehouses. He saw rotting bales of hay stacked at intervals across parched fields. He was on the outskirts of some remote California town.

Across the road he saw a dilapidated shingled building, more like an oversized shack, hunkered in a dirt parking lot filled with ghostly sun-whitened cars. Orange cones marked the corners of the lot, and around the perimeter a half-assed fence of nylon rope was strung between rusted metal posts, decorated with small plastic flags of blue and yellow and red. He squinted at the building. Over the entrance, burnt neon tubing looped and twisted to form the word
Bill’s
and a giant mug of foam-headed beer.

A bar.

This was wrong. It took Marco another moment to realise why.

‘Why aren’t we on the train?’ he asked.

The simple question seemed to crash through the last obstructions in his head; suddenly he was sharp and rational, able to remember. ‘
Down!
’ Wu had yelled, and then the explosion through the windshield, the metal canister, the smoke. Someone had gas-bombed the locomotive–knocked Marco halfway into a coma. His mouth was sour
with the after taste of the toxin; he hawked and spat into the dust.

And then he realised why he couldn’t move. His arms were handcuffed. Chained backwards to something above his head. Grunting, he wriggled his body, craned his neck.

He was shackled to the rear tow-bar of a quad. The vehicle was dirt-splattered and coffin-brown, splotched with desert camouflage–the size of a golf cart, but squatter, lower to the earth, with a scooped-out driver’s seat and handlebars to steer. From behind, it looked like a mutated motorcycle with four monster tyres, each treaded deep for off-road traction.

‘Wu!’ he called, alarmed, snapping his head back to where he’d seen the shadowy figure.

‘What the hell—’ he began. Then sucked in a quick breath.

‘You’re not Wu,’ he said.

The man crouching beside him was dark-skinned with a black nest of beard framing two cracked lips and disarrayed yellow teeth. A desert-coloured beret lay flat atop his head; he wore a green camouflaged military jacket and loose cargo pants, neither of which matched.

A soldier… maybe. He was too dishevelled, too haphazardly outfitted. Like some grunt in a guerrilla army, or a mercenary, perhaps. Sure as hell not US Military. On his breast pockets and shoulders, loose threads outlined spots where embroidered patches had been torn off, as though he had no allegiance to any flag, any division, any nation.

‘Wu.’ The man grinned. ‘Who’s that, yer friend?’ His voice was deep. American.

Twisting on his chain, Marco scanned both left and right, his forehead steamy with a fresh sweat. No sign of Wu. He turned back to the soldier. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

The grin vanished from the soldier’s ugly mouth. He slouched forward and boxed Marco’s left ear with a heavy
backhand. All around him the desert flashed white; Marco scrunched his eyes, felt a tear dribble onto his lashes. The pain was familiar. He waited for it to subside, then reopened his eyes. He remembered the half-dreams he’d had while knocked unconscious by the gas, the sensation of being slapped.
Wake up.

This jackass had been hitting him.

Now the man was scratching his knuckles on his beard, grinning again. His pale blue eyes shone with malice. ‘None a’ yer business,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, that’s who.’

‘Nice to meet you, too,’ Marco muttered, his earlobe throbbing. Despite his tough talk, he was afraid–stricken with the sensation of being crushed, as if the four-hundred-pound quad had rolled over onto his chest. He swallowed dryly.

Oh god. I’m in deep shit here.

Over the horizon the sun had grown larger, coaxing more colour from the land. Yellow desert sunflowers winked cheerily from a patch near Marco’s feet. He saw his Glock on the ground, and the AK-47, laid out beside a dusty brown daypack. Next to them was a gun that looked like a grenade launcher–probably used to fire the gas canister into the train. The soldier picked up the AK and carried it to the quad. On the side of the vehicle was a makeshift gun rack–a network of frayed bungee cords holding a shotgun, an axe and some sort of squat-barrelled machine gun. He added the AK to the collection, then returned and knelt beside his pack.

Marco hesitated… then dared to ask. ‘Where’s Wu?’

He braced, awaiting another punch for an answer.

The man ignored him. Instead he pulled a brick-sized walkie-talkie from a side pocket of his daypack and flicked it on. ‘Conquest Three,’ he barked.

A coarse voice crackled from the speaker. ‘Conquest Three, what d’ya got?’

The soldier paced away, and Marco lost the conversation. A minute later the soldier returned, nodding. ‘Hell yeah,’ he finished. ‘See ya soon.’ He clicked the handset off.

Marco tried again. ‘Where’s Wu?’

The soldier held up his hand as if to say,
Be patient.
He returned the radio to his pack, then stood and grabbed Marco by the ankles. Before Marco had a chance to kick away, the soldier dragged him in a half-circle, orienting him feet-first up the embankment. Blood rushed to Marco’s head, pushed against his eyeballs. Under his spine the ground was hard and stony; the chain on his hands jangled as he swivelled.

The soldier dropped him to the dirt with a solid thud.

‘Your bud on the train?’ the man asked, gesturing west past Marco’s feet.

Marco looked. From his new position he could see up the hill, past the prickly scrub. There was the Sunset Limited. Motionless, dead on the tracks. The alerter had shut down the driverless locomotive. Orange smoke wheezed from a hole in the windshield.

‘Wu, right?’ the soldier said, smirking; the name seemed to bring him amusement. ‘Yeah, found him taking a nap up there. The gas got him sleepy.’ He made a gun shape with his thumb and index finger, then aimed the imaginary weapon at his temple and fired. ‘Pow,’ he said, and splayed his fingers wide to mimic splatter from his skull. ‘Bad news. I shot Wu.’

Marco grimaced, felt his stomach contract.
Wu’s dead
. The thought clamped onto him like another shackle, steel and inescapable, as certain as the chains on his trembling wrists. He was alone now. No way out.
Wu’s dead and I’m fucked.

A dull, sad weight hung from his heart; however ambivalent he’d been about Wu, he was tired, too fucking tired, of people around him dying.

Still smiling, the bearded soldier reached to his belt. From his hip he unclipped a keychain and dangled it theatrically, inches from Marco’s face. A small black box danced at the tip of Marco’s nose. It was a wireless control of some kind, with a round red button in the middle. Satisfied that Marco had seen, the soldier snatched the device away and planted his thumb on the button. Dried brown blood caked in the creases of his knuckles.

‘Buh-bye, Wu,’ the man said. Then squeezed the button.

A red bulb blinked three times on the box.

For a full second the desert seemed to hold its breath–silent, expectant–and then it exploded. From everywhere at once a massive hammer plummeted down on Marco’s skull, pounded a deafening spike through his ears, and he cried out in pain as the locomotive erupted in a volcano-blast of flame–a tremendous ball of fire that grew and grew, giant and terrible, as if the sun had finally descended to swallow the desert. The locomotive rocked on the rails, and shockwaves tore down the hill to suck the air from Marco’s lungs as a huge chunk of fire snapped off into the sky. Glass rained over the tracks. And then it was quiet again. The blackened shell of the locomotive settled into the earth, its sides bent outward, black fumes spewing from gashes in the steel. Small flames crackled between the wood rail ties.

A forty-foot piece of shrapnel.

And a coffin for Wu.

Marco clenched his eyes shut, his jaw hanging, his eardrums beating with horror.

Suddenly something hard clacked against his front teeth. Metal. The soldier had jammed the barrel of the Glock into Marco’s mouth. It tasted foul and oily.

‘Now,’ the soldier said. ‘You’re gonna take me to Roger Ballard, right?’

His blue irises burned hot like gaslight. He twisted the gun painfully against Marco’s tongue and wiggled his trigger finger.

‘Or pow. Like Wu.’

The soldier laughed.

Wu pressed his body flat atop the stony ridge, hiding, blending; his warm skin harmonised with the clay, and the muscles in his biceps were edged like rock. He was a predator on the hunt, poised and watchful before the attack. He’d always been good at this, even as a boy–running down his brothers in games of Cat Catching Mice, played in the unpaved alleys of his boyhood village in Qinghai. He still knew the chant sung by the children:

What time is it?

Just struck nine.

Is the cat at home?

About to dine.

Kheng Wu had warrior’s eyes, the townspeople had said. Green, the colour of legend. It was the hereditary mark of Crassus’s lost Roman legion, soldiers who’d disappeared in Gansu two thousand years ago; they were rumoured to have wandered China as mercenaries, fathering exotic new bloodlines as they went. Surely young Wu had soldier-blood in his heart, pounding like cannon-fire, his rare green eyes sparking as he chased and dragged his quarry to the dirt. He was a born killer. Strong, ruthless–not cruel, but the games always awakened some part of him otherwise hidden. Once triggered, he was unstoppable, targeting his brothers
with a fury that left them bleeding and breathless. Often he’d pinned Jiang–poor Jiang, the slowest, the easiest to outmanoeuvre and out-think–and pretended to devour him while the other boys cheered for the winning Cat. And then, sated, Wu had helped him up, and together they’d visited the water pump to wash the grit from Jiang’s skinned elbows before returning to Bao Zhi’s for dinner.

Now, all these years later, Wu was playing a deadlier game.

Thirty metres across the embankment he saw Marco, captive, handcuffed to an all-terrain quad. An unkempt bearded man in mismatched fatigues crouched next to the American.

Who was this enemy? For starters, he was no real soldier, not of any national force, Wu was certain. Everything about the man suggested he was renegade.
Militia?

Yes. An extremist in a private army, Wu guessed; even before the Resurrection, America had been riddled with such nonsense, fools in love with their guns.

But this man had targeted Marco specifically–abducted him. And Wu had heard the soldier speak Roger Ballard’s name just moments before.

What militia would possess such knowledge, so high-level?

Suddenly Wu knew. He squinted and studied the quad. It was a Boar model, wide-bodied, specially outfitted for military excursion. And there, tied to the front rack as he’d suspected…

… was a horse’s skull, bleached stark-white and missing its lower jaw.

Horseman
, Wu confirmed. His jaw muscles flexed. MSS had profiled Horsemen in his briefing–extreme survivalists, anarchists, a post-apocalyptic army holed up somewhere in the forests of California. Ex-military, most of them, highly trained and lethal; many were dropouts with criminal records,
glad to see America fall. They’d ignored the Evacuation and now lived off the land–hunting, gathering–while ransacking civilisation’s leftovers, stockpiling cash and jewellery and guns and drugs and whatever else they could scavenge from dark houses and dry skeletons. Mexico had a thriving black market for such ill-gotten goods; most of the desolate southern borders were easy to cross–huge unpatrolled gaps, no different from the days before the Resurrection–and the Horsemen reaped profits by transporting loot into Central and South America, the lower latitudes where the Resurrection had not yet travelled.

Wu frowned. Horsemen were dangerous. Worse, they had ties overseas; MSS had linked them with terror organisations in Kazakhstan and Iran. And now they, too, were seeking the Ballard DNA. Wu imagined faceless terrorists, watchful in the shadows, deciphering encrypted radio frequencies from the US, or worse, as MSS agents had relayed information to Beijing–knowledge discovered during China’s hacks into the American mainframes.