The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (28 page)

Thank me later

… five feet away, the soldier whirled at the oncoming engine roar, his eyes round and white, his beard sopping with gore and chunks of skin…

Fuck you!

With a lung-crushing
whump
, the quad slammed into the bearded man like a four-hundred-pound battering ram, nose-diving forward onto its front wheels–and as Marco catapulted from his seat, his fingertips clinging to the handlebar, he wondered if this was maybe the shittiest idea he’d had in a long fuckin’ time.

The impact launched the soldier airborne; he hovered two feet above the quad for what seemed like minutes, limbs splayed like a freefalling skydiver. And then time and gravity corrected themselves, and the soldier slammed down onto the hood as Marco pitched forward halfway across the handlebar, both men knocked windless, shoulders colliding…

… and for a terrifying moment Marco balanced like this, handcuffed arms pinned under him, stomach on the handlebar–the eerie horse skull on the hood grinning up at him, inches from his face as he rode the quad like a body board–and then the vehicle crashed down, the rear wheels banging to the road; he hooked his ankles underneath the aluminium seat frame and wrangled himself back in the saddle just as the quad swerved out of control. The other man wasn’t as lucky. The bumper sucked his legs under, and he clung to the front hood, his fingers clawing the eyes of the skull, yowling as the vehicle scrubbed him over the asphalt.

In the driver’s seat, Marco heard himself screaming, too. He grabbed the handlebar in a panic, no intent to steer, just a wild prayer to hang on. The quad sailed to the far side of the road, wheels crunching through the brittle weeds as it left the pavement and bounded into the dirt parking lot of Bill’s. The mob of corpses fell behind, ten yards back, twenty…

… the immediate danger subsiding as the quad sped away. The soldier howled and slapped at the hood, the blood from his mangled fingertips smearing red on the metal, and the horse skull snapped apart, tumbled from the quad, smashed to a hundred white shards on the hard earth. Marco met eyes with the man; the soldier’s face was blood-spattered and grotesque, hot with pain–a pain, Marco realised, that he had inflicted on this fellow human being, not a corpse who didn’t care or feel when you broke its leg or chopped off an arm, but a
living, suffering man
. The knowledge sobered him like a bucket of cold water.

His adrenalin rush sputtered, and he snatched his hand from the throttle.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He spoke without thinking, then recognised how ridiculous he’d just sounded.
Sorry I ran you over and tried to kill you.
He choked the brake, and the quad skidded to a stop near a lopsided wooden porch, the entrance to the bar.

The soldier rolled from under the bumper as if he’d been spat out. He tumbled two or three times like a rag doll, then flopped onto his spine and rested there, limp and gasping, folded all wrong; his knees were bent sideways, and a spear-shaped bone stabbed through his left pant leg, just below the thigh. His skin was sticky–blood-wet, coated so thickly with desert dust that he looked like a lump of bread dough rolled in flour.

A hand grabbed Marco by the shoulder, and he spun in a panic.

‘Wu,’ he breathed.

The sergeant collapsed against the quad, his jaw slack with exhaustion. He’d escaped through the hole Marco had punched in the crowd of corpses. His once-noble cheekbones were battered and swollen pink, and his entire face was plastered from forehead to chin with viscous black blood. He looked like a mechanic who’d just gotten his ass kicked during an oil change. His breath came in short grinds that seemed to hurt going in, coming out. And, Christ, he reeked, every inch of him doused in death.

Marco grimaced. Back on the highway, the corpses had turned, heading back this way, into the parking lot. Only a dozen or so–Wu and the soldier had racked up the body count big-time–but these survivors looked hungry as ever, pissed off, growling and frustrated. Wu glanced stiffly over his shoulder.

‘We have to go,’ he huffed.

‘No argument,’ Marco said. He nodded to the groaning bearded soldier. The man had managed to push himself up to hands and knees and was dragging himself towards the bar door, hoping to find cover inside. ‘Let’s collect our new friend.’

Wu narrowed his eyes. Blood clouded the cornea around his left pupil. He glanced once more to the ragged corpses, then separated himself from the quad and half jogged, half limped to the downed soldier. He planted his boot on the square of the man’s neck and drove his heel down hard. With an agonised cry the man collapsed back into the pebbly dirt. Wu bent, and Marco saw him pull something from the soldier’s belt. A moment later Wu had returned to the quad.

‘Your handcuffs,’ he said, and held out a stubby silver key.

Marco exhaled, relieved. ‘Good thinking. These kinda cramp my style.’

He winced as Wu grabbed the handcuffs rudely. The key clicked in the chamber, and the cuffs swung loose into Wu’s hands. The chain slithered free, jangling happily. Marco exhaled. Shit, that hurt. He blew a cooling breath across the ugly scarlet gashes that the bracelets had sawed into his skin.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get the hell out—’

He didn’t finish. Wu had turned back to the injured soldier, kneeling beside the man.

‘What are you doing?’ Marco asked suspiciously. Halfway across the lot, the corpses were advancing. Getting too damn close.

Without answering, Wu grabbed hold of the man’s arm and began to drag him. The soldier screamed as his exposed broken femur scraped the ground. Wu dropped him five feet nearer to the building. There in the dirt was a square grate, a rusted sewer hole.

The handcuffs flashed in Wu’s grip.

‘Wait—’ Marco protested, suddenly understanding.

But too late. Wu had snapped one cuff on the man’s wrist.

The other cuff clamped around the iron grate.

‘
No!
’ the soldier cried through gritted teeth.

Wu bent and spoke into the man’s ear, quietly, beyond Marco’s hearing. Marco paled; his pores flushed a new sweat onto his skin, freezing him, soaking him in horror. ‘
Wu!
’ he blustered. ‘We’re not doing this!’

With a defiant glare, Wu hurled the key across the lot. It disappeared in the scrub beyond a stack of faded orange parking cones. Marco’s stomach sickened.

Yes, apparently, they
were
doing this.

Wu hiked himself up onto the quad, sitting backwards in a small hollow behind the seat that was meant for supplies and gear. His legs dangled over the rear wheel well. Fearlessly he faced the corpses shambling towards him, ten feet away.

‘Go,’ he said, the command curt, without emotion.

No
, Marco thought. His right hand twitched on the throttle, his mind reeling. The groaning of the corpses wafted to his ears, close, very close…

In moments he’d feel dead, sticklike fingers seizing handfuls of his hair, yanking him kicking and screaming from the quad…

I can’t leave. I can’t—

‘Go!’ Wu roared as a rotted beefy bartender in a vomit-brown apron threw itself at him, and that did it, like a whip cracking Marco’s back–no time left to argue, no time for rescues, no time to do anything but accept the bearded soldier’s fate; and with a frustrated cry of ‘
Fuck!
’, Marco gunned the throttle and the engine screamed in terror.

The quad fired forward past the doomed man.

For an instant Marco remembered himself pinned under the truck in Maricopa yesterday, those bitter moments he’d believed to be his last. And then he felt his consciousness shift, suddenly able to see through the enemy soldier’s eyes–these dwindling seconds of the man’s life, the quad abandoning him, his hands chained to a makeshift feeding trough for a slavering pack of cannibals. No escape possible, and nothing but agony ahead–and then, just as abruptly, Marco recoiled from these thoughts, overwhelmed…

Thankful it wasn’t him. Not this time.

‘
Please!
’ From far behind the soldier begged, his voice fading with distance.

And then the dead were on him and, for half a second, there was silence.

A horrible, stomach-turning silence.

And then the morning erupted with a noise that men
weren’t meant to make. It was a high-octave screeching, damned and hideous, violating Marco not just through his ears but somehow through his skin. A nauseating scream that went on and on…

Keep going. Don’t look.

… and on and on…

Don’t look.

… as if it would last for ever.

Shit.
Marco braked and turned in his seat. The corpses were peeling the man open, breaking him, cracking him like a lobster to suck out the juices–grey fingers plunged into his eye sockets, his nostrils, his howling mouth, prying the cheeks while others attacked his arms, his legs… tearing away pieces of rubbery muscle and entrails like pink stretchy gum, and Marco glimpsed the dead bartender gnawing the exposed broken bone as the soldier writhed and bucked, the last ticks of his existence devoted solely to pain.

And then, with a hellish
crack
, the man broke apart, showering the dirt with bone and brains and sloppy organs, and the corpses grabbed up their prizes like demon children playing piñata. His head detached and blood jetted from the neck, carrying with it a final wet shriek…

And then at last the man fell eternally, mercifully quiet.

‘Show’s over, Doctor.’ Wu’s voice.

Marco turned. Dazed.

Wu was speaking to him. ‘Now drive, please. Or we’ll be the encore.’

With a mechanical motion, struggling to think, Marco hit the gas. The quad swung through the parking lot entrance, out again to the highway. The morning sun was in full force now, the asphalt alive and undulating with heat. Leading away.

A thought materialised from the fog in Marco’s mind.

I just helped kill a man.

And then a question.

So where do we go from here?

‘Christ, that’s awful.’ Marco spat out a mouthful of the stale Snickers bar that Wu had rummaged from the minimart; the chocolate crumbled like powder, and the chewy centre tasted like caramelised piss. ‘There was nothing else? Twizzlers?’

‘The store’s cleaned out, Doctor.’

Marco scowled. The hunger in his gut jabbed at him for the third time in a minute. He could practically hear his stomach begging.
Shut up and eat.

He smacked his lips and bit off another chunk. Nasty.

He was leaning on the quad, parked under the overhang of a Mobil gas pump about twenty miles from the massacre at Bill’s Bar. Escaping the last surviving corpses hadn’t been much of a challenge. With Wu on the back of the quad, Marco had buzzed north along the dusty road, skimming the fringe of the paltry California town. Dead citizens shambled up the side streets, emerging from ramshackle homes, early risers in sweatsuits and raggedy robes–but the quad was just too damn fast, and the roaring motor caught their attention only long enough for them to see their breakfast escaping at fifty miles an hour.
You snooze, you lose.

And anyway, Marco realised, the dead weren’t the real danger. Not any more.

Crazy-ass soldiers and foreign governments had just jumped to the top of the list.

For fifteen minutes neither he nor Wu had spoken as the quad barrelled northwards, the sun ascending to the east. A white road sign offered minimal guidance.
CA 111N.
Marco registered it only dimly; his mind was stuck in a tar pit of remorse, scalding him alive as it sucked him to the bottom. The bearded soldier’s hideous death-squeal nagged his eardrums, refusing to go silent. He’d heard that sound before, witnessed men die in equally horrible fashion–but this death was different in one monumental way.

I did it. I left him there. I fed him to the fucking zombies.

And Wu. The sergeant had clapped on the handcuffs without a moment’s hesitation. Without mercy. Marco shuddered.
What the hell kind of man does that?

Behind him on the quad, Wu had been just as silent, perhaps gathering his thoughts or diagnosing his wounds. Sure as hell not mourning his fallen enemy, Marco was certain.

But even if Wu’s conscience was unharmed, the rest of him looked like hell. His face and arms were pasted with dark, sticky blood, and scraps of dead flesh clung to his stubbled chin like blobs of mincemeat. His eyes had swollen noticeably, and he seemed to flinch whenever he blinked. Across his shoulder, a short trench opened where the soldier’s bullet had grazed him; the skin was red and black at the torn edges, burnt and bleeding at the same time.
Better clean that up
, Marco thought. With so much corpse juice spilled over Wu’s face and arms, there was a real danger of infection through the carved-out gun wound.

He deserves it
, Marco thought, then reddened.

Nobody deserved that.

The men drove on, wordlessly motoring up Route 111 on a course towards hazy, distant mountains. When Wu finally called out, shouting over the engine, Marco had jumped in his seat.

‘
Pull in!
’ He pounded Marco on the back and pointed to a haunted-looking gas station a hundred yards ahead, coming up on the right. The windows were dark, and tall grass spiked through cracks in the asphalt between the pumps. Beside the road a red sign with missing letters and numbers teased a few ancient gas prices.

U
NLE DED
3 9,
D SEL
2.8.

Meaningless now, in every sense.

Marco was in no mood for a stop, but Wu was right. They needed to regroup, figure out what the hell to do next. He swerved more rudely than necessary, a petulant answer to Wu’s habit of ordering him around, and the quad coasted into the station.

He brought it to a rest between a quartet of beaten old pumps, two to the left, two to the right. His fingers tensed on the throttle, ready to peel out if some dead freak came charging around the corner in bloody gas station coveralls.