The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (3 page)

Immediately Marco knew the rope he’d brought wouldn’t do any good. His little cowboy fantasy of lassoing the corpse seemed far-fetched now as he squinted at the diminishing target.

He rubbed his forehead. He supposed there were two options. Swim out there–which meant leaving the guns ashore and stripping down to avoid waterlogged clothes all night, since he couldn’t risk a fire with so many corpses in the area–or just turn around, return to the blind, and chalk this one up to a bad day. Joan Roark would have to take his word, without physical evidence to prove he’d done the job. Unfortunate, but permitted by the contract.

Neither option appealed to him.

He glanced hopefully towards the dock. In the sand next to a piling lay a faded red canoe, belly up. But even from here he could see a hole in the bottom where the wood had simply imploded from winters of neglect. Not seaworthy.

Aware that his indecision was costing him time, he glanced back over his shoulder. The mountain blocked the sky to the east, and he was unable to see how far the vultures had advanced, but the clock in his head told him that he’d better choose fast.

Cursing, he bent and unlaced his boots, kicked them off, then tugged down his pants.

He removed the pants along with his vest and ClimaCool long shirt, but the holster with the Kimber he shortened to a small loop and placed around his neck, unwilling to disarm completely. With some overdue luck, he might be able to wade the whole way out. He placed the Glock atop his folded clothing, then pulled his knife to take along, too.

The water was colder then he expected in September, even for Montana. Clenching his teeth, he splashed deeper as fast as possible, ignoring the shock in his balls as they went under. The lake bottom alternated between rocks and squishy mud. As a kid, he’d hated the sensation of mud squeezing through his toes; he’d been scared of bloodsucking leeches hiding in the ooze. Now he couldn’t resist a smirk. He’d been a timid boy, afraid of everything.

And yet look at me now. If leeches are all that eat me today, I’ll be happy.

Two dozen steps later, the water had climbed to the middle of his chest but then levelled, and he went twice as far without getting any wetter. From down here in the water, it was harder to see the corpse; he wasted some effort moving towards what he soon realised was a floating tree branch before noticing a greasy trail like an oil spill on the water surface.

Discharge from the head wound. Guided by it, Marco spotted Roark moments later, floating just a few yards ahead.

He pushed his way over to the body. Roark’s bare back rose like a hump from the water, the skin purple and white, marbled with countless bruises and lesions–almost beautiful, like the markings on butterfly wings. Marco reached his free hand towards the body, eager to grab hold before it drifted farther, then thought better. With his knife, he jabbed the corpse’s back, springing a fresh rivulet of black fluid that trickled between two emaciated ribs and dripped into the lake. Marco watched.

The corpse didn’t even twitch.

Satisfied, Marco grabbed hold of its shoulders and spun it. Roark’s dead face goggled at the sun, mouth open, two rows of worn brown teeth exposed. God, the thing stank.

Marco studied the pale eyes, the jaw frozen wide. Seeing a kill up close was often an anticlimax. A let-down. He
sometimes wished they’d look peaceful, or relieved, or maybe even grateful. He’d read a story by Poe once–‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’–where an old man had been kept alive unnaturally by hypnosis, only to crumble to dust as the trance broke. Now
that
would be satisfying. A puff of smoke, a hissing noise. A bright flash. Something significant. Instead, this: a poor dead bastard who never knew what hit him.

Normally Marco snapped a picture or two, but he’d left his digital Nikon at base. Joan Roark had emphatically refused photos, which was fine with Marco; the prize souvenir was the ring, anyway. He pulled Roark’s left arm from underwater, the skin tough like rawhide as Marco took a firm hold of the wrist. The ring glittered gold, polished by the lake.

Just then the hair follicles on Marco’s neck shot up straight.

He’d had this feeling before. A subconscious awareness of background noise. Sometimes, joking, he called it his ‘zombie sense’. He wheeled and faced the nearby shore.

And there they were. Twenty corpses, maybe more.

His veins chilled, as if the cold lake pumped through him.

They were a dishevelled group on the sand. Grey-skinned males and females, eyes vacant, decked in tattered, worm-eaten clothes like some grim portrait from the Great Depression. Hair thick and knotted, matted with blood and god knows what else.

They stood facing him, arms limp, bodies swaying in place–that eerie slow dance they did at times while waiting for another instinct to kick in. He stood frozen himself, afraid to trigger the attack, but he knew it was inevitable. They were hungry. Their dead eyes locked on him with emotionless interest, their necks craned forward. Evenly he drew the Kimber.

Nice and slow
, he thought.
And then the fun begins.

This couldn’t be the pack he’d heard earlier, the one from the east–no way could they be so fast. His forehead burned, angry at himself; he’d been so damn obsessed with one threat, he’d ignored a dozen other dangers. Probably these things had been waiting nearby, dormant in the woods behind the cabins, emerging as soon as they’d heard him splash into the lake.

Any second now, they’d charge. He ignored the voice in his head whispering,
You’re fucked.
Roark’s body bumped against his hip. He steadied himself and raised the Kimber towards a corpse at the water line, a narrow-bodied male with no shirt, only a bolero tie circling its torn-out neck. Marco aimed carefully. This shot was the only one he wouldn’t need to rush.

So make it count.

The scene in front of him was silent; he heard a horsefly buzz past his ear.

The gun exploded.

And all hell broke loose.

The thin corpse’s cranium slammed backwards as the bullet hammered it, dumping wet white brains down its spine; the dead man’s eyes crossed and it sat down hard on its ass before toppling over. The other corpses roared–a furious, unified sound, like a cry to battle, and Marco’s heart shrank as the dead pack charged, crashing and swarming into the lake.

Go.
He took fast aim and fired off three more shots in a five-second blur, sweeping bullets from left to right across the front line of attackers.
You. You. And you.

He scored just a single headshot, dropping a blubbery-breasted male corpse with a long wet beard, and saw one
of his other shots blast through the bony shoulder of a wild-eyed old female with no ears. His shot at a teenage girl in a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt disappeared into nowhere. Incensed, wailing, the things continued to splash in from shore, lurching towards him.

They weren’t fast–the footing underwater was even more treacherous for them than it had been for Marco–but they were spread dangerously, so that he couldn’t direct his gunshots in any single direction. Then again, he’d never intended to keep shooting. Knocking a few corpses out from a pack was smart, to thin their numbers and improve your odds of escape. But a full-out killing spree? That was just stupid asshole bravado. He’d seen too many soldiers go down, guns blazing during the Evacuation, realising too late that the enemy had advanced from unworkable angles. Men and their useless weapons swallowed beneath a ravenous mass of corpses.

Retreat.
Always the best option.
Remember–you can’t kill ’em all.

The corpses crashed closer, arms wild and flailing.

Too many to dash between, especially in water. He’d be grabbed, tackled, torn apart.

Thinking furiously, he calculated his best route. Deeper into the lake? The dead couldn’t swim… but they didn’t need to breathe, either. They’d pick their way along the bottom, out of sight, reach up, pull him under by the ankles. Shit, there could be corpses down there already, sloshing towards him; he’d seen men pulled from rowboats, ambushed by underwater attacks…

Something else. They’d closed to within twenty feet.

He had to choose.
Now.

The shore by the cabins–fifty yards to his left, away from the onrush. Perfect. He’d race there, slip between the houses, lose them in the confusion. He blasted another round
at the nearest corpse, a young male in army fatigues; the bullet punched through the soldier’s drippy right eye. Satisfied, Marco splashed a full two steps towards the cabins before he remembered.

Roark. The ring.

Shit.
He spun and splashed in reverse, back to the floating body, seconds ahead of the attack. Already he knew this was a mistake, turning around, but now the stubborn son-of-a-bitch in him had to see it through. His head buzzed, eyes pinned to the horde almost on him as he grabbed for Roark’s hand, felt their fingers entwine.
Find it, fucking find it.

There. Cold hard metal. He yanked in a panic, and with a pop and a squish the ring slid off, pulling Roark’s ripe flesh with it, like meat from a greasy turkey bone. Marco jammed the ring onto his thumb–even dead, Roark had beefier fingers than his own–then stumbled backwards to avoid a pasty-white black male lunging at him from across Roark’s body. Three more corpses charged from the left, snarling. Time was up.

Off balance, still back-pedalling, Marco raised his gun.

And tripped.

His foot caught on something hidden, a chunk of rock or wood buried in the silt, and he yelled out as the lake closed over his head. Darkness cut him off. The silence underwater was terrifying. He kicked, trying to right himself, felt his leg make contact with another leg–
they’re on top of me
, his mind screamed, expecting to feel cold hands clamp down all over his body–and then he pushed away and broke surface a few feet from where he’d gone down, desperate for air to breathe and light to see.

The dead were everywhere now, the lake slick with black feculent blood lapping at his bare chest. The Resurrection couldn’t be absorbed through the skin, thank god; he’d been doused in enough corpse slime over the years to be sure of that. Brazenly he broke towards the cabins, slipping between
two corpses in quilted hunting vests, and as he ran he wiped a stinging gob of mud from his eye. It was then he realised with shock that his right hand was—
empty.

The Kimber was gone.

Stupid fucking asshole.
He’d dropped it underwater. Gone for good.

‘Fuck!’ he screamed, and it actually felt good to be as loud as he wanted for once. Discretion didn’t matter now.

He tightened his grip on his knife and pressed on towards the cabins. Picking up speed as the lake grew shallow and his knees cleared the water, he reached the shore with a good lead on the corpses still struggling in the deep. They’d been baited away from the beach, and now all he had to do was circle back to retrieve his clothes, the Glock and…

… and there came the fuckers from the east.

Pouring out of the woods all along the lake, from the cabins to his escape route through the trees. More than the fifty he’d predicted. A hundred, maybe more. Maybe
way
the fuck more.

Suddenly the attack had opened from another side, and as he stumbled to a stop, the army of corpses sensed him–swivelled to face him all at once, so perfectly synchronised that he wondered if the fucking things were able to communicate in a way he’d never detected.

We have you surrounded.

There was no way to reach the forest.

Give yourself up.

As a boy, he’d always been the kid who panicked during games of tag, who froze in the middle of pursuit and let himself be grabbed, simply because the resolution of being caught felt better than the terror of the chase. That same sensation returned to him now. His legs buckled, and for a moment he actually considered sitting down in the wet sand. Sitting there cross-legged like some kind of Buddhist monk,
blissful and transcendent, merging his mind with the serene blue sky, the cool water and happy green trees on the opposite shore; taking one last look, closing his eyes and waiting, and the end wouldn’t even hurt.

Except that he knew it would hurt.

Bad.

So instead he forced his legs straight, opened his eyes wider, looked for options.
Options, goddamn it
, he repeated, like an affirmation of life. To his left, the cabins had been sealed off behind a wall of corpses, collapsing on him fast; to the far right sat the old dock. Lopsided, falling apart, it led back out into the lake, a pointless dead end. But the beaten canoe next to it…

For the second time that day he seized on the thought of the canoe.

And this time he had an idea.

Gasping, he dashed back across the beach, racing along the precarious seam between the two packs of undead, those staggering from the woods and those pursuing him from the water.

The opportunity would be gone in seconds–the corpses were converging fast. He focused on the canoe ahead, but in his peripheral vision the dead faces were impossible to ignore. Dark and savage, teeth snapping at the air as he ran past.

He covered the final yards to the dock in a sprint, awestruck by the gamble he was taking.

His mind reeled.

Am I crazy? Will this work?

The canoe had long ago been flipped and laid lengthwise on the shore beside the dock, like a long wooden bowl turned upside down. It leaned slightly in the sand, inviting
Marco beneath; at full speed, he launched himself towards it and belly-flopped hard to the shore. The impact knocked him airless; with a grunt he wriggled below the overturned boat, as if he were entering a tight and narrow cave, his elbows scraped raw by pebbles and his navel full of wet grit.

Here in this dusky, hollow shelter, the air was rank with mildew and an oily smell of fish, and invisible cobwebs stuck to his face and arms. Sunlight punched through the gaping hole in the canoe hull overhead. He felt like a small animal cowering in its den. He lowered his cheek to the sand and peered back out at the beach through the crevice he’d entered. Dozens of grotesque feet, naked and swollen purple, shuffled towards the canoe.