The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (36 page)

‘We won’t have time to walk the whole exterior. Not before dark.’

‘Not much choice. C’mon.’

They hugged the wall, avoiding the sightline of the guard tower. Even chimps could pull a trigger, Marco mused, and maybe the dead guard had enough leftover muscle memory to warrant taking a shot. As they passed below the tower, a dull
whump
sounded from the ground on the opposite side of the wall. Marco backed a step and craned his neck up. The tower was empty. ‘I think the guard fell out,’ he said.

‘No fear of heights,’ Wu noted. ‘He leaned too far.’

Cautiously, the men hiked west along the barrier. Wu had been right about the unmanageable distance. Circling the entire compound would take hours.

But to Marco’s relief, ten minutes were all they needed. Not far around the first corner, they hit the jackpot–a row of drab-green military trucks. Four 7-Ton models, armoured and solid, with six-wheeled drive for transporting troops and weapons cross-desert. All abandoned.

‘MTVR’s,’ Wu noted. ‘Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacements.’

‘Cool,’ Marco said.

Beyond the trucks was a large collapse in the wall, ten feet wide. Rubble littered the ground in melon-sized chunks, and bars of reinforced steel protruded from the blasted-apart cement like bent spider legs. The work of dynamite, Marco guessed.

‘The first RRU squad blew this up, trying to get Roger,’
he said. ‘That didn’t go so well. But at least they made a nice new door.’

He readied the automatic in his hand and stepped cautiously to the breach.

Then poked his head through… half expecting dead hands to lash out and seize him, impale his face on the exposed steel rods.

But the complex inside was silent. Nothing moved. He swivelled his neck, checking the wall for hiders, then quickly assessed the layout of the enormous prison grounds. As much as he could see, anyway. Guard towers dotted the wall every few hundred feet; in the distance to his right he saw the fallen dead guard staggering towards him, its pace slow and excruciating, dragging its hand along the wall for support. Its rifle was gone.

Straight ahead, a broad no-man’s land of dirt separated him from the first set of prison buildings–three grim structures a hundred yards away. They looked more like old factories than prison housing; the windows were grimy and broken, and conical brick chimneys stretched their long necks high. A narrow service road led from the factories to a small gas station and a water tower that looked cracked and empty. Beyond the last building was a softball field, the infield potted with rocks and sparse, anguished-looking grass.

And beyond that was the main compound–a modest outpost of what looked like administration offices, and the prison itself.

The cell blocks. The formidable red buildings he’d viewed from the main road. Three long buildings, each four storeys high, the windows bracketed with black steel bars. They were arranged in a horseshoe shape around a weed-choked courtyard, a maze of chain-link fencing that reminded Marco of a dog kennel. And behind that fence…

Corpses. Like caged animals. Dark figures shuffled behind
the chain link, jostling each other, skirmishing, barking. Marco chewed his lip.

Are you someplace in there, Roger?

Nervous, he studied the fence. At one end it hung open, a tear in the chain link. The corpses didn’t seem to notice, milling back and forth without climbing through. No reason for them to leave the prison yard, he guessed. They were accustomed to it.
Lifers.

Behind him he heard an engine cough. He turned.

Wu had assumed the driver’s seat of the nearest MTVR. The sergeant frowned as the ignition sputtered, the gas old and oxidated. He tried again, and a third time. On the fourth attempt, the motor kicked to life. He leaned out the window. ‘Get in,’ he said.

‘You sure you know how to drive that? You crashed the last one.’

Wu showed no smile. ‘It’s getting dark, Doctor.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Marco climbed into the passenger seat. ‘Good idea. I’d much rather see the sights from a moving vehicle. The walking tour looks risky.’

Wu edged the truck through the gap, bumping over the rubble, and turned left to follow the interior wall. The sun had surrendered, and the prison grounds were dissolving into grey fuzz; a pale shard of moon was already present in the eastern sky. Even the vultures had left, gone to nest for the night. ‘We’re too late to go exploring the cell blocks,’ Wu said. ‘Not tonight–no light in there. It would be suicide.’

‘You mean it’s not already?’

Wu ignored him. ‘You’ll be happy, Doctor. There’s an entire rack of guns in the cargo bed. Food supplies, too. I imagine you’re as hungry as I am.’

‘You’re not planning a camp-out, I hope. In this truck?’

‘No. Up
there.
’ Wu braked the truck. They’d reached the
base of another guard tower. Unmanned. ‘We’ll be safe at night.’

Marco tilted his head to peer at the ladder. The hatch was open, inviting him up. ‘Works for me,’ he agreed. ‘But
that
guy’s not allowed.’

He pointed to the side-view mirror. The dead guard from the first tower was still staggering in their direction, one tortured footstep at a time.

‘He’ll draw a crowd under us,’ Marco warned. ‘There’s a hole in the prison yard fence. If we attract attention, those dead cons will make a jailbreak.’

Wu pressed his lips together. After a moment’s deliberation, he knocked the MTVR into reverse, and they rattled backwards over the rocky soil.

Ka-thunk.

Wu shifted the truck forward again. Marco glanced into the mirror. The guard was down, its legs cracked at the knees by the rear bumper. It slapped the hard earth with a mould-coloured hand, like a wrestler begging out of a fight.

‘It’ll stay there,’ Wu said. He parked under the tower and killed the engine. ‘Collect what you need, and let’s go.’

The cargo bed was an arsenal wonderland–M16 rifles, M4 carbines, HK416s, pistols, sleek carbon-fibre models Marco had never seen before, all lined up ready for action. A stout shotgun caught his eye. He had no idea what it was, but damn, it looked like an ass-kicker, so he grabbed it, then tucked a smaller pistol into his belt. He could feel Wu’s disapproval as he stocked up, but he didn’t give a damn. Fuck Wu. Firepower was good. And food. Under his elbow he clamped as many MREs as he could.

Hands full, he clumsily ascended the ladder. At the top he looked back at the dead guard lying crumpled in the dirt. Its face was puckered, haggard; its knees bent at wrong angles, oozing black puddles like some awful melting candy.

I know how you feel, buddy
, Marco thought. His muscles groaned as he climbed, pain spiking from every raw wound on his body.
I feel it, too.

Like I’ve been hit by a truck.

Marco stirred in the dark, his head propped uncomfortably on a wadded wool blanket he’d found on a second supply run to the truck. Overhead the moon was a great round searchlight, affixed over the guard tower where he slept. Tried to sleep, more like it. He felt like a death-row prisoner, the night before execution; his mind throbbed, refusing to rest. The wooden platform grated against his vertebrae, and his ass was freezing, even with the blanket. The night air was sharp; the wool under his cheek was damp and cold with condensation from his breath. Unseen insects congregated in the roof beams, chirruping a creepy little tune, and once he felt a spider scuttle over his arm, sending him into momentary terror. Now he itched like mad, too.

Across the platform Wu was a silent dark mass. Maybe dozing, maybe not.

Up here in the tower, his legs cramped and restless, Marco remembered the tree blind twelve hundred miles away in Montana–the Roark contract, Andrew and Joan. How long ago had that been? A week? He shook his head. Impossible. He thought again.
Yes. A week.

Holy shit.

Felt like a year. He wondered about Joan Roark, how she was doing. And what had
her
week been like? Had she told her friends that Andrew was dead–
really
dead? Or maybe she’d been too guilt-ridden, too ashamed to tell anyone she’d hired Marco.

He hoped she wasn’t ashamed. He hoped she was doing okay.

In the distance a dead wailing sounded from the prison blocks, long and mournful like a lone wolf’s howl. Marco shivered, buried his ear in the blanket to muffle the sound. He didn’t want nightmares. Not tonight.

From Joan Roark his thoughts gravitated to Benjamin. How was Ben handling himself, stuck at his home in Pittsburgh with Owen Osbourne breathing down his neck? And the goons from Homeland Security? Poor Ben. Trapped with those assholes bullying him around his own house. Osbourne eating his food, shitting in his toilet.

Marco winced. Osbourne had threatened to kill Benjamin.

Please
, he thought.
Let Ben be okay, too.

The cry from the prison fell silent as the corpse lapsed back into whatever emptiness the night held for it.
Do the dead dream?
Marco wondered. Was that possible? Was a resurrected corpse like a sleep-walker, dazed, enacting some scene from its churning subconscious? A never-ending nightmare of carnage…

Squashed beneath his rib, Marco’s left arm had begun to tingle; he tossed to his other side and felt his blood readjust. Damn hard wood. He’d be lucky to walk tomorrow.

More groans from the prison, louder this time, the pack joining in.

Those horrible, tormented voices…

Did one of them belong to Roger?

Sighing, Marco closed his eyes. He imagined an aerial view of the prison, the way vultures saw it. So that’s what he’d finally become–a vulture, here to prey on the dead.
Find Roger, swoop down, put a bullet in his rotten brain.

But what if he couldn’t find him? What if Ballard wasn’t even in this hellhole, after all the bullshit getting here? Marco fidgeted, flustered by the thought.
Where would we go next? Christ, I don’t know. Cedars-Sinai?

He strained, groping back through time for any
recollection of Roger’s personal world, no matter how slight. Where would the compass in Roger’s dead brain navigate him? Some secluded coffee shop, a quiet bookstore, maybe. Had Roger ever mentioned places like that?

Nope. Cedars-Sinai. That’s all I got. Three years working side by side, and I barely knew the guy, like he didn’t even exist outside work. Wow, Henry. Some great friend you are.

He sighed.
Then again, does it matter? If Roger’s not here, we’re pretty much fucked anyway. Wu and I are half dead. We don’t have the strength to keep looking. I doubt we’d even make it to Los Angeles.

Good thing I didn’t offer Osbourne a money-back guarantee.

An hour ago Marco and Wu had hunkered down on the tower platform for a dinner of cold jerky. They ate in silence, too exhausted to do anything except shovel food into their destitute stomachs. Wu chewed deliberately, his eyes unfocused, lost on some faraway sight. Finally he shoved the last of the jerky into his mouth and opened a zippered pocket on his pant leg.

He pulled out a photograph, tossed it like a Frisbee to Marco’s feet.

‘What’s this?’ Marco asked.

‘Sarsgard.’

Marco wiped his fingers on his bloodied shirt and picked it up. It was a grainy black-and-white view of the prison complex–the rectangular cell blocks arranged in a horseshoe around the courtyard. The picture had been taken from high above.

‘Satellite photo?’

Wu nodded.

Marco squinted in the fading light, held the photo close to his eyes. The land between the buildings teemed with black dots. Corpses.

‘How did you get this?’ he asked.

‘My briefing.’

‘So which, if any, of these dots is Roger?’

Wu raised an eyebrow. ‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to tell me?’

‘Okay, relax. Where’s the hospital in this place?’

‘Attached to the cell blocks. Bottom of the picture.’

Marco touched his finger to the photograph. A separate square building was joined to the cell blocks by a long connecting tunnel. The hospital. It sat on the opposite side of the horseshoe arrangement, away from the prison yard; he hadn’t been able to see it earlier from his vantage point at the prison wall. He tapped it twice.

‘I assume that’s where Roger was conducting his work?’

Wu nodded again.

‘Then if he’s anywhere in this godforsaken place, he’ll be right there,’ Marco declared. ‘You didn’t need me to tell you that.’

Wu shrugged. ‘I wanted to be sure we agree. The infirmary.’

‘Roger worked around the clock when he was alive. That’s where he would be now. And knowing Roger, we’ll find his corpse organising the scalpels from small to large.’

‘Getting to him will be difficult,’ Wu warned. ‘The only path to the infirmary is through the main block out front.’

‘Through a thousand corpses, in other words.’ Marco tossed his unfinished beef jerky over the edge of the platform. No more appetite.

He studied the photo. ‘The exercise yard connects to the main block. We could take the truck and punch into the yard, then get our asses inside quick.’ He sighed. ‘Too bad Roger didn’t like basketball. Would’ve been a lot easier if he were shooting hoops outside.’

His joke was lost on Wu. The sergeant eyed him blankly. ‘Let’s rest,’ Wu said. ‘We’ll go at first light. Perhaps we can get past the crowd before they’re fully alert.’

‘Yeah, the best laid plans and all that. I wouldn’t count on it.’

Now, lying on the floor, Marco’s arm had lost sensation again. He wrapped the blanket more tightly around his shoulder and, settling back onto his crude pillow, stared out over the platform edge. Seen sideways, the world made even less sense. Across the prison grounds the cell blocks were black cut-outs in the night sky. All dark like pitch, except for the softest glow somewhere beyond the main building, a weak halo like a second moon hiding just out of sight–was dawn coming so soon? Christ, he hadn’t slept.

His breath puffed cold and white, swirling like a dreamy fog before his eyes and then dissipating. And then again. He watched it come and go, a hypnotic cycle. As a kid he’d been fascinated by his breath on frigid days in Philly–not so much the wintry splendour of it, but the revelation that
this was happening all the time
, whether he could see it or not. Air that had been
inside his body–
touching his lungs!
–
was pouring out each time he flexed his diaphragm, and the low temperature was like a special lens, allowing him to view the invisible. Sometimes on a warm summer afternoon, he’d focus his eyes to the end of his nose and imagine the whorling blobs he knew were right there, his breath firing unseen into the world.