The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (4 page)

So far, so good.

Sweating, he jammed his knife into the wooden hull, inches from his face, all the way to the hilt so it wouldn’t fall out. Now both hands were free.
Hurry
, he thought; if the corpses outside piled their weight onto the boat, he was lunchmeat. He contorted himself into a crouch and shoved his shoulders up into the hull, ready to lift the canoe onto his back…

… except the goddamn boat didn’t budge.

Bitch!
The canoe was heavier than he’d guessed. It sat atop him, immovable as he strained, and the blood in his head felt primed to squirt from his eyes. But although Marco was thin, what he did have was muscle–a body whittled to its core by endless angry workouts in his basement gym, two or three hours on days he really hated the world. Now, enraged, he screamed… and felt the canoe shift. It lifted off the ground, dripping sand, the yoke digging at his neck.

And away we go!

He stumbled to his feet, half bent, the upside-down canoe
cupped over his spine like the shell of some ridiculous turtle. The bow pointed straight and long ahead of him, ready to launch, but he hadn’t yet taken a step before a loud boom sounded on the exterior, next to his ear; the entire boat quaked, and aftershocks rumbled down into his vertebrae.

The canoe’s weight shifted sharply as the first corpses dove against it, and he fought to keep it balanced overhead. The physics were simple:
If it tips, I’m dead.

The pounding on the boat doubled, merged with the pounding pulse in his ears. His legs shook, and then more corpses arrived from the left, counterbalancing the attack from the right, so that he had an easier time keeping himself upright. He couldn’t see in any direction but down to his bare white toes, and a bit to the left and right. Outside the canoe, a hundred corpses crowded the rims from both sides; he saw only their crooked legs and rotten feet.

Seconds later the corpses mobbed the hull, an all-out attack.

Blows rained onto the canoe, the crack of the wood terrifyingly loud, and he prayed the boat wouldn’t simply fall apart around him. Angry cries joined the violence; the corpses were confused by his improvised defence, but the confusion wouldn’t last.

Sure enough, the canoe began to pull upwards as they tried to tear it off him. Alarmed, he held it down with all his strength.
Time to go.
He drove hard with his legs, relieved as the boat slipped easily through their grasp–he heard them scrabbling for grip, but the wood was worn smooth–and stumbled forwards along the sand, wearing his canoe armour.

The point of the bow parted the crowd, dealing hard punches to those in its path. He gained momentum, whooping aloud as if each hollow clunk, each speared skull
off the metal bow-ball, were another block of coal thrown into his internal boiler.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

He surged ahead like a locomotive knocking cows from the rails, barely checked by the impacts. A white-eyed male corpse fell, rolled under the canoe. It hissed and grabbed at his ankles, but he high-stepped over it, resisting the urge to kick its forehead.

If only he’d had his boots on.

The canoe grew heavier by the moment, but Marco’s legs kept churning despite the pain. He had no idea where he was going. Looking down, he followed the foamy dark sand along the shore, concentrating on the wet impressions of his feet, confident he was at least headed back to his starting point, where Roark’s body had first hit the water.

As he cleared the initial mob, a jolt from the side nearly sent him sprawling. He recovered in time to see a pair of obese legs, enormous and pickled and veiny, below the left rim of the canoe. A fat corpse had broadsided him and now hung on, pressing against the boat with all its weight, driving Marco sideways a step into the lake, then two steps, three. The water rose to his shins.

Any deeper and he was fucked.

Desperate, he threw his shoulders up into the boat, freeing one hand to grab the knife still embedded in the hull; he retrieved it with a furious yank and in the same motion drove the blade into the bulbous rotted belly outside the canoe. He jerked hard…

… disembowelling the dead man; the knife cut up into the ribcage and popped from Marco’s grip, gone. The corpse bellowed as its guts cascaded onto the shore. Surprised, it released the boat and flopped forward, chasing its own entrails. Marco splashed back to the sand.

The sounds of awful wailing fell farther behind as he
maintained a quick-footed trot, grimacing but afraid to slow down. A hundred yards later he was rewarded for his work. His folded stack of clothing and the Glock appeared at his feet.

‘I’m back,’ he announced, his voice raw.

Panting, he tilted his body and managed to dump the canoe without collapsing. The boat crashed into the shallows, startling the same minnows he’d watched Roark hunt an hour before.

He glanced around in haste. As he’d guessed, the corpses were a good distance back, still labouring towards him, but their slow, singular advance wasn’t half the threat of being surrounded. He’d survived. He would continue to survive. Trembling, he grabbed his Glock and clothes, jammed his sore feet into his boots, then turned and bolted north to the trees.

He found his earlier path without trouble. At the edge of the forest he paused and turned.

The beach crawled with dead men and women, arms and legs jerking like ugly puppet limbs as they staggered up the shore.
Men and women
, Marco repeated to himself. Easy to forget sometimes. He wondered how many had wives, kids, lovers in the Safe States, mourning for them, sick with grief and wondering where they were now.

Christ, how fucked up the world had turned. How it made the dead so alive and the living feel so dead. He doubted there was any fixing it, any way to turn it back.

But, shit, he could at least help make things better.

Grim-faced, he jogged up the mountain, past the tree that grew crooked and the flat-sided boulder, into the mist and the walkway of broken fern. Up in the blind, he shut the canvas curtain and sat undetected, unafraid, listening to the groans of the dead pass through the forest and fade as the mob lost his trail. And as he waited for them to
leave, to wander off to wherever their tortured minds beckoned them, he held Roark’s ring–yes, he was certain now, he
had
found Roark–and read again the words etched inside the band.

Together we make a circle, one life without end. Always, Joan.

‘One more thing,’ Joan Roark said. Her grainy image transmitted from the Safe States, materialising on the computer screen atop Marco’s desk. He sat in his study, in the dark, an hour before dawn. At midnight he’d arrived back at base–the house he’d owned with Danielle for a year before the Resurrection–his legs and arms heavy with a fever he’d picked up on the trip. Months of undereating and poor sleep had left his immune system for shit.

The flu, that’s all.
He didn’t dare wonder if the Resurrection had gotten to him somehow.

He’d unchained the iron gate and rolled the Jeep up his long cobblestone driveway, while in the hills the keening of coyotes welcomed him back to Arizona; inside he’d squirmed in bed for a few hours with stomach cramps and a sore throat before getting up to contact Joan. He’d left the lights off in the study. But on Joan’s end of the transmission, the room was bright; the sun was up in Baltimore. The Safe States were all east of the Mississippi River–a natural, easily defended border behind which America still functioned. The government had pulled back as the Resurrection spawned and spiralled out of control in the West. Now the Safe States were in lockdown–nobody in, nobody out. The Evacuated States had been surrendered to the dead.

Here in Marco’s study, the image of Joan’s face was a
luminous window in the darkness, seeming supernatural. He’d been about to power the computer down. Instead he nodded at her on the screen. It was his sly way of avoiding eye contact; the webcam mounted on his desk captured him in partial profile, denying her an easy read of his face, his thoughts. He was glad he never had to debrief in person. God, how he’d hated those awkward moments during his residency at Cedars-Sinai–explaining EEG results to the patients and distraught families. Often he’d catch himself tapping the page erratically with his pen, as if he had a neurological problem of his own.

He watched Joan shift in her seat. Her gaze sank low. Perhaps she sensed her husband’s wedding ring sitting on his desk. Marco pocketed it discreetly. No need to show her again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I don’t mean to be… it’s just… it’s just that I want to ask you. I mean, you’ve done so many of these. You must know.’

She looked awful. He hadn’t seen her in weeks, and the difference in her appearance alarmed him. She wasn’t wearing make-up as she always had before, and he felt a sting of guilt for even noticing this. Her eyes were veined red, the lower lids grey and puffy. A meniscus of clear snot bulged from her right nostril; she sniffled it up, but it re-emerged at once. Her shoulders slumped forward, arms straight down, her hands pinned between her knees. She was dressed in a dull green sweatshirt with an obvious bleach spot on the shoulder–the first time he’d seen her in anything but ritzy designer labels–and he had a hunch she’d slept in it. The sweatshirt was snug around her breasts, the nice figure she still had in her fifties, but her face looked older than that, coarse, as if widowhood had dragged her through a few phantom years.

He waited. ‘Know?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She looked at him, determined. ‘Did I do the right thing?’

He sucked in his breath.

She continued, stumbling again. ‘Please, I just want the truth–honestly, Mr Marco, like you would tell a friend. You can tell me now. I’ve already paid, and you’ve made the sale, either way. So, please.’ Her bottom lip quavered. She bent towards the camera, her face expanding on his screen.

‘Did I?’ she asked.

He deliberated for a moment, which surprised him–not that she asked, but that he actually gave thought to his answer. He’d heard the question before. Sometimes before the job, sometimes after. His clients were like children, inexperienced and uncertain; the whole world had started over on them, trashing what they knew, handing out new rules to learn.

Horrible new rules.

Nobody knew what to do, how to feel, how to adapt to life after the Resurrection. The Evacuated States were a silent wasteland; the Safe States, meanwhile, raged and roiled–overcrowded by fifty million refugees from the West, the economy shot to shit, not enough jobs or food to go around. The loss of contaminated farmland across the Midwest and California had been devastating. Half the populace was on welfare, either Food Relief or Property Reimbursement or Survival Assistance; in the months after the border shut, the Garrett administration had authorised multi-billion-dollar relief packages. But Garrett was ousted now; the New Republicans had been voted into power, and relief programmes were being scaled back.

It was overwhelming… and belittling. And often Marco’s clients looked to him for advice, as if he must have some secret insight into the Resurrection–why it had done this, what it wanted from them–just because he was the guy
out here, out where it first began, face to face with it on his own. And, at the end of the miserable day, he was supposed to tuck these poor people into bed, kiss them on the head and tell them that everything would be all right.

Me, a father figure. Now there’s a big fuck-you from the universe.

‘Did I do the right thing?’ Joan Roark had asked.

He sighed and then almost told her the truth–that he wasn’t sure whether any of it really mattered or did a damn bit of good. But he liked Joan. So he settled instead on what she needed to hear, and then he nodded slowly. Slow meant serious. Like he would never lie.

‘I believe you did,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

At that she began to cry again, covering her mouth with one hand, cheeks puffing. A carat of diamond glittered from her ring finger.

‘You didn’t do the easy thing,’ he admitted. ‘But you gave your husband peace. If it were me–I mean, if I were the one out
there
–I would’ve wanted you to do the same.’

She shook her head. He wasn’t sure whether she disagreed with what he’d just said, or perhaps was just horrified at how easily she accepted it.

‘Joan,’ he said in a softer voice. ‘Listen to me.’

She stopped and regarded him, and he wondered what he looked like on her screen in the Safe States–if he were anything more than a shadow projected from his dark office. Could she see the fever on his face, the lumps of cold sweat? ‘You saved his soul,’ he said. ‘He’s returned now, wherever we’re
supposed
to go in the end. When it was done, he looked… peaceful.’

Maybe she believed him. Maybe it didn’t matter if she did, just that she heard somebody say those words. She laughed, and the snot from her nose dripped down to her lip.

‘Okay,’ she said, nodding back at him.

‘I mean it.’ His tongue stuck to his teeth as he spoke.
I did mean some of it.

‘Okay,’ she said again. ‘Thank you.’ She pulled a tissue from off screen and dried her nose. ‘I’m sorry. I cry at every movie, too, even bad ones. Even comedies. It used to drive Andy crazy.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway. What’s done is done.’

He swallowed, the spit like acid in his sore throat. The few seconds of silence seemed to satisfy them both as a goodbye. ‘Good luck,’ was all he added.

She managed a weak smile. ‘Good luck to you, Mr Marco.’

He waited another moment. His instincts told him it was important for Joan Roark to take the final action, that she should reach across and shut off her computer, then stand up from her chair in Baltimore and start over. A second later the screen went black. For Joan, life could now begin again in the Safe States. For her, this was done. She’d said it herself.

What’s done is done.

‘Not for me,’ he commented, his eyes adjusting to the pure darkness. Silently he added,
Is it wrong that I’m jealous?