The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (37 page)

Before it enters us, air is only air
, Danielle once told him, teaching him yoga on a Sunday morning in LA, their mats stretched out on the sunny floor.
But we change it to breath. Breath is life. It’s you. Breathe out, and the universe absorbs you.

I don’t want to be absorbed
, he’d protested.

She’d laughed, lovingly.
Too late, Henry. The universe has already claimed you.

And now he was here, in this frozen dark corner of the universe, missing her like mad. He watched as his lungs emptied him across the prison grounds.

Breath is life, yeah? Well, I’m still alive.

For now.

His eyelids eased shut. Below him the floor seemed to soften, as if the wood were rotting under his weight, allowing him to sink into the planks.

Quietly, eerily, an image floated up from his subconscious.

The dead toddler in the car seat. It hovered in the black void, its throat savaged open, its windpipe flopped to its bloody chest like a detached hose. It reached its arms for him, same as it had on the highway when he’d driven past.

Just a little boy. A kid who didn’t know enough to unstrap his seat belt, never mind comprehend the enormity of his death.

I should have returned you
, Marco thought.
I’m sorry.

The boy’s face shifted. Morphed. A girl now.

And Marco’s heart sparked and scorched like a burnt fuse, because somehow he knew that this girl was
Hannah–
Hannah, if she’d lived a few years more. A beautiful little girl with auburn hair and pixie magic in her eyes, just like Danielle.

Would it have been you?
he asked.
You in that car?

Hannah’s corpse stared, her eyes like congealed milk. He saw that she was tucked into a cooling blanket, hooked to the Blanketrol machine they’d used at Cedars-Sinai. An endotracheal thermometer was lodged in her throat, and IV lines ran from her thin arms. On her ankle a blinking red light counted the oxygen concentration in her blood.

He almost cried out in horror, overwhelmed by the sight of her like this, again. His baby, struggling for life, stuck with tubes and cuffs and wires. He wanted to hold her, comfort her, promise her there was a reason for this miserable horrible world of shit…

He blinked.
I’m glad
, he said.
I’m glad you aren’t here today.

He stopped, shocked at his words. Then continued, tentatively.

I’m glad you were spared. Because this… this is worse than being dead.

And then his face crumpled, and he was awash in tears.

I love you…

The car seat floated closer, and Hannah reached her hand to him, and he took it. Her fingers were stiff and icy. She turned, and he understood. He was being escorted. Together they descended, down into a deep sleep, and she deposited him there…

And, exhausted, he slept, perhaps for the last time in his life–sequestered from the night chill and the cruel wood floor and the groans of the condemned, and thank god he didn’t dream, and thank god he didn’t have nightmares.

He slept.

The night passed.

At dawn he rocketed awake, thunderbolts in his blood—

Crack Crack Crack!

Beside him Wu was up, already scrambling. He kicked Marco hard.

‘
Horsemen!
’ Wu hollered, his voice a faint siren, nearly lost under deafening gunfire and the roar of oncoming quads, and vanished down the ladder.

The prison grounds were a mad circus–a thousand dead convicts in orange jumpsuits, red lips snarling, cheeks white and waxen like nightmarish clowns stumbling across the barren field. The air quaked, and three smoke-belching Horsemen quads screamed through the crowd, zigzagging, firing handguns as they veered–a death-defying act, part daredevil, part sharpshooter, dropping corpses to the left,
right and ahead. A convict with a long wiry ponytail flipped like an acrobat as a bullet popped its rotten brain.

So
, Wu thought, not surprised,
the Horsemen survived.

Or some had, at least. Two standard Boar quads, and the double-manned quad with the gun turret. The giant commander Big Skull was alive–his body a brute muscle behind the Browning, his face a sneer as he rattled maniacal bursts of ammo into the field. Blood geysered from dead foreheads, bodies toppled. In the dirt the quads sawed brown circles as the wheels skidded, spun, reversed. Corpses surged from the cell blocks to replace the fallen–staggered through the torn fence, overwhelming the yard, the earthen battleground, the road between the buildings. More corpses than Wu had ever seen at once.

His fingertip touched the MTVR’s starter switch.

And waited.

In his lifetime he had often stared across a battlefield, outnumbered. Never once had he hesitated to charge. Never had he doubted that he would win.

But this
…

His heart panged with a sudden longing for his uncle Bao Zhi–an emotion he hadn’t felt in many years, joined immediately by a memory of himself as an eight-year-old boy. Cross-legged on the floor in Qinghai, admiring the shoes Bao Zhi had cobbled for him. On each small shoe, a tiger had been stitched in orange thread to ward away evil spirits.

Bao Zhi had known how to outsmart the dead.

Bao Zhi’s hand would not be trembling now…

Crack!
A gunshot ripped Wu back to the present.

‘
Hurry
,’ he snarled up the tower ladder. What was
taking
the American?

The Horsemen zipped past the truck; they hadn’t seen Wu in the driver’s seat, but that would soon change.
He watched them go with a grim respect. These militiamen were resilient, and he… he had been far too optimistic. The highway corpse attack had only slowed the enemy down. They’d likely backtracked, sought out a longer route around the mountains. Yes, he’d suspected they would return–but the ambush now was unexpected, an aggressive strategy in the half-light before dawn. He imagined them walking their quads up the road last night, silent and careful, and camping outside the prison wall. Huddled in the cold, patient like rocks, counting the minutes until daybreak. Then they’d pounced.
Cat Catching Mice.

With a scowl Wu mashed the starter switch. The truck cranked, a loud, obnoxious wheeze heard by a hundred corpses. The crowd broke, and a mammoth horde turned and teetered his way. He could feel their cold eyes brushing him; his skin prickled.

Fifty metres away on the nearest quad, the Horseman’s helmeted head whipped towards the rumbling truck. Like a reflex, barely aiming, the driver flailed his arm backward and fired two bang-bang shots, wild and off-target. Beside the truck, a rung on the ladder sparked white with a metallic
ping
, and Wu heard the second bullet clang high off the tower siren.

A millisecond later, Marco’s voice ricocheted down. ‘
Shit!
’

Wu popped the truck in gear just as the American came plummeting down the ladder, his toes stubbing the rungs, his gun holster looped on his elbow.

The single quad had pulled away from the other two. Dust mushroomed from its tyres as it chucked through a violent 180-degree turn.

Back towards Wu and Marco.

‘Get in,’ Wu snapped. He seized the steering wheel…

pain!

… and released it with a shameful cry. His wounded shoulder had crusted over during the night, the skin red and infected around the crater of the wound, and now the pain was too livid to lift his arm. He grimaced and slid across the seat. As Marco flung open the passenger door, Wu caught the handle and yanked it shut.

‘You drive,’ he ordered through gritted teeth.

Marco sprinted to the driver’s side. ‘Thanks, Dad. Promise I’ll be careful—’

A bullet whistled through the windshield, popped the seat between them.

‘Oh shit,’ Marco breathed. ‘They’re still just aiming at you, right?’

‘Drive.’

The Horseman quad fired towards them like a missile, twenty metres away, ten, the driver’s pistol held out like a lance, pointed at Wu’s forehead…

‘
Drive!
’ Wu bellowed.

Marco gunned the gas, and with a vicious chawing of rubber on hard-packed earth the MTVR bounded ahead, bull-charging the quad. Wu threw his legs straight, braced for impact–but the driver spun left, avoiding collision by the length of an arm. The quad disappeared, reappeared immediately in the side-view mirror, chopping up dirt as the Horseman fought the steering for control. In seconds he’d recircled, now behind the truck.

‘So much for tiptoeing inside,’ Marco said, knuckles white on the wheel.

‘What took you so long?’ Wu demanded. ‘In the tower?’

The American seemed embarrassed. ‘Finding a gun.’

‘
Look out!
’ Wu cried.

They’d met head-on the first onslaught of corpses, the outer lip of a massive army. Stiff faces leered at Wu through the punctured windshield as Marco wrenched the wheel; the
truck fishtailed, tilted on two left wheels, and as it tottered for a mortifying heartbeat, debating whether to tip or right itself, Wu glimpsed individuals in the crowd.

A sad-looking male with bent spectacles but empty purple eye sockets…

A skeletal black corpse with dreadlocks, its bony wrists handcuffed together…

A pockmarked face with a swastika tattooed on its shaved scalp…

… and then the truck slammed on all four tyres to the earth, and Marco cried out a curse, breaking Wu’s focus.

The truck swerved east, skirting the dead, but the mob was shifting fast, spreading outward and outward in a widening circle. Behind Marco, the Horseman quad had gained ground, just metres back–and worse, up ahead, the other two quads had joined the assault; they’d skidded and turned, and were now hurtling across the field on a sharp diagonal to intercept the truck, Big Skull hungering forward in his gun turret, hellbent…

The wheel jerked in Marco’s hands and the truck veered left, mowing a path through dead men; the side mirror brained nine or ten heads in a rapid burst.

Pa-tunk-tunk-tunk-tunk-tunk-tunk.

‘Where are you going?’ Wu demanded.

Marco answered with a harder punch of gas, and the engine’s roar amplified.

Whump.
The sound of a bullet punching the back of the truck. Wu scoured the side-view mirror. The Horseman was right there. ‘Coming up the side!’

Wu faced forward again–and sucked in his breath. The two other quads sliced across the truck’s path directly ahead; Big Skull howled as the Browning sparked in his grip, and a barrage of bullets puckered the hood, then bounced high and obliterated the windshield. Marco and Wu ducked. Glass
rained like sharp confetti across their necks, the blasts rocking their eardrums.

‘
Fuck!
’ Marco cried and dragged the steering wheel, and the MTVR pitched hard right, whipping Wu sideways in his seat…

… and he heard a hollow metallic crunch, mashed with the needling scream of an engine rotor under his window…

… and he saw the third quad, caught under the truck, its front corner wedged behind the wheel well, the rubber tyres churning and smoking, black fumes pumping through the orbital sockets of the horse’s skull strapped to the hood; the truck had sideswiped the Horseman, and Wu saw surprised eyes behind the driver’s goggles as Marco stomped the brake. Beneath a shower of dirt, the conjoined vehicles pirouetted like dance partners; the truck spun halfway round, facing backwards now, and slammed sideways–the side dragging the quad–into the horde of rioting corpses. The man screamed, the dead swarmed.

Fifty clawlike hands clamped on the Horseman, wrestled him kicking from his seat. In the mirror Wu saw a hairy plump corpse bite down on the soldier’s cheek, and then the man was gone, buried under a chaos of flailing bodies and greedy grunts.

Marco and Wu goggled at one another, momentarily stunned.

Wu spoke first. ‘Smart manoeuvre, Doctor.’

‘Thanks,’ Marco gasped. ‘It was kind of an accident.’

And then more corpses began to scale the quad, hoisting themselves up. A bloody hand slapped Wu’s window, deposited a palm-print with no thumb.

‘Better go,’ Wu urged.

‘Going!’ Marco floored the gas, and the truck lumbered a slow ten metres, burdened by the bodies pressed against
it and the quad mashed underneath; and then suddenly the scraping wheel well went silent, and the truck skipped ahead, lighter.

Wu turned. The corpses had wrung the quad free from the truck. They’d flipped it and were biting ridiculously at the smoking tyres, the scalding belly. Indifferent to the skin that peeled from their hungry mouths and stuck to the hot metal.

‘What a pit crew,’ said Marco as the truck sped off.

‘Where are the others? The quads and Big Skull?’

Marco squinted into his mirror. ‘Hmm. Don’t see’em.’

‘They must have gone that way, around the buildings. To the cell blocks.’

‘Guess they don’t have your satellite photo–that’s the long way.’ He swept his eyes ahead, found what he wanted. ‘
There.
The service road.’

The truck squeezed a tight turn and bounced onto the single-lane asphalt. Corpses swamped the path; Marco banged ahead–
ka-thump, ka-thump
–racking up hits, spattering the hood with black blood. A dead male in a shirt and tie, probably a prison administrator, bounced hard off the metal bull bar on the front grille. Yellow-gold sparks showered upwards like popcorn popping, coupled with the sound of scraping metal.

‘Bumper’s loose,’ Wu warned. ‘You don’t have to hit every corpse, Doctor. We need the truck to last until we get there.’

‘Right. If you see a road
without
a thousand dead speed bumps, let me know.’

Ka-thump!

The truck raced between the two nearest buildings, monstrous brick blocks with the sullen mood of abandoned factories.
Vocational Industries
, a white sign flashed. In the wide alley lay an overturned dumpster and something that looked like a ribcage attached to a spine.

Marco didn’t slow, swerving instead around the dumpster, and seconds later the service road broke again into the open.