The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (35 page)

Didn’t want that shit getting in his mouth.

From somewhere far away, popping noises accompanied
the roar of the quad, bouncing back and forth against the cliff walls, and it wasn’t until the rear-view mirror on a grey sedan right beside him exploded into shards that Marco understood the Horsemen were shooting. ‘
Fuck!
’ he screamed and hunkered lower in his seat. ‘They’re shooting at us!’

‘They’re shooting at
me
,’ Wu carped back, annoyed. ‘They want
you
alive.’

‘Hey, don’t blame me—shit!’ Fixing his eyes ahead, Marco slammed the brakes.

Wu banged against his back, cursing. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Dead end,’ Marco said.

Ten feet before them, crashed sideways into the barrier, was a prehistoric-looking Cadillac–fins crumpled, pinned there by a black Lexus, and beyond that, a mash-up of more tangled fenders, five or six cars deep. A chain reaction of rear-end collisions as corpses had mobbed the highway and drivers panicked, floored the gas, and died even faster.

And now the mangled wrecks entirely cut off the lane.

Frantic, Marco wheeled in his seat, seeking another route. But the entire highway denied him, cars bumper to bumper, too tight for the quad to squeeze to the next lane.

The only direction to go… was back.

Fuck that.

Two hundred yards to the rear, the Horsemen had entered the breakdown lane, flying single-file up the sideline of the ghost jam. In their green helmets and goggles, they were like freakish insects, cold-blooded, a killer swarm. They zipped past corpses raging in the next lane; the dead were blocked by the wall of endless cars but fighting out, crawling under tyres, climbing hoods. More corpses than Marco had even imagined.

Christ
, he’d driven right past them–stirred them all up.

‘We can’t fight so many,’ he conceded, his voice glum.

The weight of an AK pressed into his chest–Wu was
shoving the last weapon from the gun rack into his arms. The sergeant stood next to the quad, knives swinging on his belt, the Horseman’s daypack slung over his good shoulder.

‘We’re not going to,’ Wu said, his eyes sharp and urgent. ‘Run.’

And then Wu bolted, sliding over the hood of the sideways Cadillac, ditching the quad behind. Marco watched him go, stunned momentarily.

A grunt made him turn. The fat trucker corpse hobbled towards him. The stump of its missing foot dragged the road, etching a line of oily blood.

Marco hopped over the Cadillac and ran.

Gunfire exploded, and bullets jack-hammered the highway barrier to his right, spitting up concrete chunks. Wu dived for cover, scrambling to his left, between bumpers, into the middle lane as Marco bounded behind.
Jesus, Wu! You sure they aren’t shootin’ at me?!?

He hastily measured the barrier, but right away saw that hopping it to scramble up the mountainside wasn’t an option. Out there in the open, he’d be the easiest target on the shooting range. The Horsemen fired again, and bullet marks singed the asphalt a step away.

Then he understood.
My legs… they’re takin’ me down alive
…

Highstepping, he dashed up the middle lane, feeling like a bull herded into a corral with walls made of empty cars. He vaulted over a dead teenager as it wriggled out from under an old Camaro, barking, grabbing at his ankles; its black lip was pierced with a tarnished silver loop.

Ahead Wu cut left again as a mob of corpses charged down the lane. Marco ducked behind a lopsided white RV as the corpses ran past; he crept to the opposite side and emerged disoriented, almost forgetting whether he wanted to go left or right.

Right.

He ran, fixing on Wu ahead, determined to keep pace.

By now, he guessed, the Horsemen must have reached the Cadillac dead-end. Good guess–he heard a sudden shout, echoing unintelligibly off the rock walls. He imagined Big Skull, that massive domed head thrown back in a roar of anger, the taut skin sunburned a poisonous red. More shouts now, answering from across the lanes–
Five, take middle! Six, check left! Hump it!–
as the Horsemen, too, dumped their quads and spread out on foot.

As if to prove his theory, a bullet sizzled low past Marco, plunked the hubcap of a rusted Volkswagen. He whirled. There, a hundred yards behind him, crouched the Horseman in the pilot’s jumpsuit; the soldier aimed a sleek rifle, its nozzle propped on a toppled motorcycle…

Shit!

… but before the gunman could fire again, a rotten biker corpse sprang from behind a car, sacking the Horseman as the rifle screamed skyward. More corpses piled on.

Marco didn’t linger. He spun again and quick-stepped along the narrow corridor between cars, cracking his hip on side-view mirrors as he went.

Behind him he heard hideous screams and gibbering, and panicked gunfire rattled fast and faster yet. The tunnel of corpses was collapsing, he realised, crushing the Horsemen within. He’d inadvertently lured them into a death trap.
Like Moses and the Egyptians
, he thought giddily,
the Red Sea crashing down on Pharaoh’s army. All I need’s a white beard.

Meanwhile, Wu was nowhere to be seen.

‘
Wu!
’ Marco shouted, anxious.

‘
This way!’
Wu’s voice boomed from the next lane, over to the right.

Another pile-up of cars heaped in front of Marco, and a filthy windowless van had wedged itself sideways, blocking
the path. The back door of the van banged open, and seven or eight dark-haired corpses poured out, rushing Marco.
Crap.
He scrambled under the colossal trailer of an eighteen-wheel truck; the corpses snatched at his legs, but he kicked and kicked and rolled out the other side, and there was Wu, waving him on.

‘
This way!
’ Wu yelled again and pointed ahead.

The end point of the ghost jam. A hundred yards to go. The cars began to spread out, separated by larger gaps; the mountains ceased, and the road returned to the flat brown earth, a glum landscape rubbed raw of vegetation. Marco bounced on the balls of his feet and took off running. His lungs heaved, begging him to stop, but the screams of Horsemen being eaten alive cheered him on, bolstered him. He was winning the race.

He broke past the end, a state police sedan overturned on its roof, flipped probably during a hopeless effort to restore order during the Evacuation; instead, all the officer had accomplished was to stop traffic for miles. A skeleton hand hung limply from the driver’s side window, a macabre welcome to the uncluttered highway beyond.

Back in the ghost jam, bullets chattered in rapid succession like a string of firecrackers. A collective agonising shriek, multiple men dying at once, echoed from the wrecks, penetrating to the core of Marco’s brain before it cut off in a wet gurgle.

Another sound effect for his nightmares.

He kept running, a length behind Wu–promising his burning legs just five strides more, then five strides more, then five strides more…

The last of the gunfire stopped, swallowed up by the dead.

And then the desert was quiet again.

Wu stutter-stepped to a walk. ‘Far enough,’ he said, panting. ‘Rest.’

Marco turned, surprised to see how far he’d run; fear and adrenalin had confused his internal odometer. The overturned police car was a speck, a mile off in the sun-glazed distance, the rusted traffic just another coarse texture blending with the dirt.

From here it all looked calm; no hint of the feeding frenzy going on inside.

The two men lingered. Watching.

Still calm.

‘The Horsemen?’ Marco asked.

Wu shrugged and resumed walking. ‘We’re safe for now.’

‘Death by ghost jam,’ Marco mused.

‘Let’s hope,’ Wu said, although he didn’t sound hopeful. ‘Our concern now is reaching Sarsgard on foot. From our current location in the middle of nowhere.’

The barren earth scrolled east and west from the interstate, nothing but scrub and knobs of brittlebush drawing long shadows from the late afternoon sun.

‘I’ve got the map.’ Marco patted his back pocket. ‘But I don’t know if we need it–we’re probably pretty close.’

He pointed up the road to a solitary white road sign, the lone manmade structure in the barren panorama. Black letters pronounced a stern warning:

CORRECTIONAL FACILITY AREA
DO NOT PICK UP
HITCHHIKERS

Wu straightened the daypack on his shoulder. ‘Encouraging.’

‘Yeah. I’d call that some good advice.’ Marco glanced one final time back to the mountains. Nobody coming. But the sun was dropping steadily. He wiped sweat from his slick forehead and eyebrows. ‘We’d better hurry.’

They quickened their steps, pushing north, Wu in the
lead. The muscles in his shoulder blades rose and fell as he walked, like those of a prowling animal. Flies buzzed around his soiled bandage. He brushed them away every dozen steps.

‘Too bad about the no-hitchhiking rule,’ Marco said dryly. ‘We’re gonna need a ride home after this. Arizona’s a long walk.’

‘First things first, Doctor,’ Wu said without turning. ‘We might not live long enough for that to be a problem.’

Marco said nothing. The soles of his feet hurt; he felt a damp, cranky blister on his big toe, rasping against the boot as he trudged. On the eastern horizon he saw buildings and a tall sign for a Circle K gas station, but the road curled west towards the sunset. A cinnamon-coloured hawk glided overhead, on the hunt for jackrabbits and ground squirrels.
At least the rabbits are smart enough to hide
, Marco thought.
Not like us idiots, strolling out in the open through the middle of Corpseland, USA. We’re easy pickin’s.
Anxious, he focused on his blistered toe.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
At least this pain was tiny. Kept his mind off bigger troubles.

Twenty minutes passed, and then thirty. Neither man spoke. There was nothing to say. They were exhausted and hurting. They huffed as they went.

At last Wu broke the silence.

‘There it is,’ he said solemnly. ‘Sarsgard.’

Standing at the intersection of two desert roads, gazing upon the vast structure of Sarsgard Medical Prison, Marco recalled the first time he’d seen the Grand Canyon. It had been a day’s drive to the South Rim, the summer he and Danielle moved to Arizona. Nothing had prepared him for that first encounter–not photos in books, not television shows, not
the abstract sketches of his own imagination. There he’d stood at the rail of a breathtaking chasm, as if five hours in the car had somehow transported him to an alien planet, sculpted in strata of dizzying red and gold and green rock. He’d never felt so dwarfed by nature, so powerless to change the earth in his lifetime.
Six million years
, he’d thought.
That’s what it takes.
Danielle had leaned on his arm, and they’d wordlessly shared a strawberry ice-cream cone, absorbing the sight. And it had occurred to him that, in geological time, his own existence on Earth would be as fleeting as Hannah’s–over so soon as to almost warrant never being born at all. He’d reddened, squelching tears, and kept the thought to himself. Danielle would’ve hated him.

Now, here, that same overwhelming feeling returned. The prison was a colossus, and he was an insignificant mite. So small and weak. Staring into another abyss.

‘It’s too big,’ he told Wu. ‘How the hell are we gonna find Roger in there?’

The prison complex dominated six hundred acres of desert, a solemn metropolis of red, block-shaped buildings surrounded by a towering concrete wall. It loomed on the northern horizon like a great ruin uncovered from an archaeological dig–bleak and menacing, reborn from the ground but unmistakably dead, dead, dead. Vultures blackened the sky above the slate roofs. Marco’s innards chilled.

God knew what was waiting behind that wall.

Wu swigged the last gulp from his water bottle and squinted at Marco. They’d slowed half a mile from the main prison gate; Marco noted the hesitation in their steps, like boxers plodding out for the final round, resigned to a decisive beating. The sun scraped the mountains to the west, and the sky had darkened like a bruise, as if it, too, had been through an ass-kicking. Sunset was an hour away, at most.
Ahead, the long driveway stretched towards the prison, culminating in a massive, iron-latticed gate.

Even from afar, Marco could see the gate was shut tight.

‘Let’s not linger,’ Wu said. ‘We still need to locate a way in.’

‘Osbourne said the prison was a breach,’ Marco remembered. ‘So there must be a hole, someplace we can’t see. Maybe around back.’

Hiking towards the main gate, Marco grew reflective; he imagined how newly arriving convicts must have felt being transported up this very road into Sarsgard. They must have wondered: would this be their last look at the world outside? The road led in; it didn’t always lead out.
I’m going to die here
, he predicted, then recoiled at the thought.

Fuck no. You’re going to find Roger and return him. Let Wu collect his blood sample. Then you’re walking outta here, a free man.

He blanched, remembering Osbourne’s video. Thousands of rioting corpses.

Sure, no problem at all.

As expected, the main gate was impenetrable, the iron bars thick and tumoured with orange rust. And the wall, Christ, the wall put Marco’s barricade back home to shame–sixteen feet high, topped with curls of angry razor wire. Impossible to scale, even if Wu’s shoulder worked and Marco’s hands weren’t chewed with burn wounds.

The wall ran five hundred yards towards the sinking sun, then wrapped right, boxing in the prison grounds. Rising from the other side was a forbidding guard tower, a square-walled platform on iron stilts. A white siren roosted on the roof like a fat seagull.

As Marco watched, a corpse popped up on the platform–a dead guard, its blue uniform tattered, emotionless eyes deep in its sockets. It surveyed them with a slack
expression. Cradled in its arms, upside down and awkward, was a rifle.

‘Hopefully it doesn’t know how to use that thing,’ Marco said. ‘Let’s go that way. Around the perimeter.’ He pointed to where the wall turned the corner.