The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (40 page)

Images flashed across synapses in his panicked head. Himself in his attic in Arizona, the week of the Evacuation. Hiding from Evac Squads that combed his neighbourhood, his ears squished under his palms to repel their urgent pounding on the front door. He’d huddled in the dark, alone, waxed with sweat and dried blood and fear. He would find Danielle, he told himself. He would stay and find her. Somewhere outside on the street, a man screamed, long and excruciating. He pressed his palms harder to his ears until his lobes hurt. Behind his skin he heard his terrified heartbeat, like a separate voice arguing.
But you’re no hero, Henry
…

Shut up
, he’d battled back.
I’ll find her. Shut up!

Now, here in the prison, seconds from his death, he felt his mind drifting, his consciousness detaching from his physical brain and his skull and his bones and his muscle, already departing towards the godless nothing he knew waited for him on the other side of life–abandoning his body so that he wouldn’t be aware of the pain, the teeth in his skin, the sizzle of death-ridden air on his hot organs as the corpses dissected him like a rat…

Or, if he was lucky, Big Skull would shoot him dead first.

Pointless.

The Horseman quad had travelled half the corridor, accelerating. Big Skull had seen the barred door. The commander swore an unrecognisable curse and slammed his fist on the turret siding. Behind him the onslaught of corpses hungered forward and forward…

Next to Marco, Wu squared his feet and extended his knife towards the enemy. His face was grim, his skin clammy. ‘I think,’ he said without emotion, ‘this will end soon.’

Marco flexed his hand on the textured M9 grip. Couldn’t remember how many rounds he had left. Five, six? Didn’t matter. Wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

He shut his eyes and vowed not to open them again. No matter what.

He didn’t need to witness his own disembowelment.

But just then a raucous buzzing startled him, ugly and loud.

ZRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

His eyes snapped open. In the ceiling above, a red domed light had flickered on, and…

It can’t be

… under his spine he felt the door budge an inch.

‘Holy shit…’ he breathed.

‘It’s open,’ Wu confirmed, his face reflecting red from the bulb. Sweat beads glowed on his forehead like dollops of molten lead.

Marco didn’t hesitate, didn’t question, didn’t care. He pounced at the bars and heaved, and with the security buzzer still cawing harshly overhead, a sound more glorious than any church hymn he’d ever heard, the door shuddered open sideways. A two-foot passage to salvation. He chucked himself through, Wu tumbling right behind.

Once through to the other side, Wu snorted a breathless ‘
Shut it!
’ and flung his weight at the door with his good arm. Out in the corridor the Horseman quad had arrived. The vehicle swerved to a rude stop ten feet away as Big Skull bellowed, and he and his driver dismounted, charging furiously on foot, desperate to reach the half-open door…

… as Marco seized the bars in his torn hands, added his muscle to Wu’s, and dragged. With a rusted groan the door herked and jerked on its rollers and then banged back into the iron frame, just as Big Skull grabbed hold with thick hairy fingers…

… and the buzzer silenced, and the red dome cut its light. The door tumblers fell with a decisive
KA-CHUNK,
and the bolts fastened, and the door was sealed again.

Dizzied, huffing, Marco gawked through the bars. Big Skull glared back at him, less than a foot away, yet infinitely separated by this decision of fate–one man condemned, one man reprieved. Up close the commander’s eyes seethed like hot tar, black and scalding; his scabbed lips twisted in a hateful sneer. He was ready for his punishment.

The Horseman driver wasn’t as resolute. He screamed in terror and flailed at the bars, but the door was set solid. He was young, big-eared with soft pimpled cheeks and wispy facial hair, wearing drab olive fatigues that hung too loosely on his slight chest. He was just a teenager, somebody’s kid who would never reach twenty; his eyes whitened with this crazed realisation, and he pulled his handgun, contemplated it for an instant, waffling, wondering how best to use it–shoot the corpses, or Marco, or himself? And then he gasped and whirled and broke back towards the quad, seeking the firepower of the Browning, but too late…

Pointless

… the corpses crashed atop him, tackled him full force against the bars, gnashing and chewing, and he screeched, a hundred decibels of agony spiking Marco’s eardrums like bloody nails, and Marco faltered away, four, five, ten steps in horror as the dead convicts shredded the youth. A wart-faced corpse chomped onto the soldier’s big ear and ripped it free; the ear crunched between the cadaver’s teeth like a gory Dorito, trailing tendrils of cartilage and meat, and the boy gurgled as he vomited yellow-brown bile and blood…

… and beside the dying teen was Big Skull, pinned to the bars by the horde, his arms spread wide to his left and right as if he were being crucified. The dead mouths cut into his shoulders, his biceps, his forearms, his fingers, and
still his eyes drilled into Marco, defiant, refusing to cry out; the man’s entire body spasmed as though an electric current ran through him, and on his bare temples veins raged like crooked lightning bolts, and his teeth bit hard on his lip, spurting blood, severing the bottom lip clean off. He spit it through the bars at Marco.

And then the dead finished him.

Shrivelled hands dug into the bony ridges on the commander’s head–above his ears, under his brow, gouging his orbital sockets–and with a slow, awful, moist, sucking
craa-aaa-ck
, the big skull broke apart. The corpses dismantled the bone, peeling fragments loose like shelling a hard-boiled egg, and the brain opened, and Marco gagged as the man’s face turned inside out–a red wet blob with impossibly round white eyeballs.

For a final second, the eyeballs still watched him, hated him. And then the two globes rolled back in the bloody slop that had been the man’s face, and the electricity in the dancing limbs shut down. Big Skull went still. His blood puddled on the floor and seeped under the door, slinking towards Marco and Wu as the corpses devoured their kill.

Countless other dead felons battered the door, their discoloured arms reaching through the bars, swiping at the air. Begging for meat.

Marco jumped when Wu nudged his elbow.

‘We’d better move,’ Wu said. ‘In case that door buzzes open again.’

‘But… how?’

‘I don’t know, Doctor. Let’s go.’

‘This side has power.’ Marco frowned, remembering what he’d observed the night before, gazing across the prison grounds. ‘Last night. I saw it glowing.’

He turned to find Wu already hustling down the corridor. He followed gladly, eager to escape the nauseating stew of
sound here at the barred door–the slurping mouths, the squishing flesh. Crisp snaps like tart juicy apples. High-pitched cries as corpses fought over gruesome handfuls. And worst of all, a deep contented murmur–
mmmph, mmmph
–the sound of diners enjoying their food. Delicious, wonderful food.

That’s all we are to them
, Marco thought.
Food. Not human.

Overcome with horror, he fled.

Fifty feet he ran, to where the hall opened into a small antechamber–what looked like a reception area of sorts. The interior was brighter here; the breakfast-hour sun had climbed above a skylight in the vaulted ceiling and sliced open a white rectangle on the otherwise dark floor. A chest-high counter extended to Marco’s right, breaking the room in two; the surface was bare but splotched with crimson handprints.

Wu leaned over the counter and tensed. Then relaxed.

On the floor, the headless carcass of a guard sprawled next to a toppled swivel chair. Spent shotgun shells dotted the tiles. No sign of the shotgun.

‘Well, we know
he
didn’t buzz us in,’ Marco said.

A low hum called his attention to a shelf behind the counter. Poking his head over, he saw a bank of security monitors, streaming multiple videos like a miniature film festival. Black and white and fuzzy, eight of them. He recognised the yard from two angles–the abandoned military truck butting the brick wall on one screen, and corpses meandering through the torn fence on the second. Next to that was the ground floor of Cell Block B, now empty and eerie, and the upper balcony strewn with corpses Marco had dropped with the M9; and there was the obese corpse, still helpless on its back, its short fat limbs paddling the air.

On the nearest monitor he saw the locked security checkpoint. The corpses hadn’t subsided. They continued their assault on the door with malevolent gusto; dead faces leered through the bars, their rag-tag bodies packed so tight that they seemed more like a solid mass than individuals. One demon-beast with a thousand heads.

Marco turned to Wu. ‘We put on a good show for the camera. Action-packed.’

‘One’s missing.’

‘What?’

‘A monitor,’ Wu noted. ‘Look.’

He was right. The bottom row of monitors included an empty slot and a hole in the countertop where wire had once been fed.

‘Interesting,’ Marco agreed. ‘Somebody borrowed it.’

In the corner ceiling, a mounted security camera studied his reaction with a silent black eye. A tiny red light blinked on the side. Behind that lens were tentacles of wire, Marco imagined, spooling away through the mouldering walls, deeper and deeper into the infirmary–a mechanical gatekeeper presenting two new arrivals to the secret host.

Suddenly self-conscious, Marco slit his eyes tighter, as if with proper focus he could see backwards through the lens. His pulse bobbed in time to the blinking red bulb.

‘We’re here,’ he muttered. ‘We’re coming up.’

At the end of the reception area another barred door stood open, beckoning them into a smooth and featureless hallway with jarring acoustics; Marco cleared his throat, and the hall thundered. The air was rank. Jutted against the right wall was an empty hospital gurney, the padding soiled with a disturbing stain that could have been blood or bacteria-coloured shit. As the men neared, a rat burst from under the gurney wheels, squealing, and scampered a zigzag course to the far end of the hall. It disappeared around the corner
with a flick of the tail like a raised middle finger, as if the rat were telling them,
Fuck you.

The men followed. The hall concluded at an intersection forking left and right. Marco swept both directions with the M9. Quiet, not even the rat. Only rows of…
cells
, he realised, but different from those in the blocks. These cells weren’t like cages–these had metal doors, with small portholes at eye level for observing imprisoned patients.

The doors were all shut and, Marco sincerely hoped, locked.

‘Which way?’ Wu wondered.

Marco shrugged. ‘The rat went left. Mean anything?’

Wu shot him a look. ‘My uncle would have said that rats are good luck.’

‘Gamble our lives on Chinese superstition? Hell, why not. Left it is.’

They steered into the musty corridor. The space was silent, the overhead lights off.
Conserving juice
, Marco guessed. A bad intuition had begun coagulating in his gut; he felt it pressing against his lungs as he breathed. Cautiously he peered into the observation hole on the first door. Dark, but his eyes sorted through the shadows. Empty. No prisoner. Just a rumpled, half-reclined hospital bed and a forlorn IV stand positioned in the corner like a coat rack. On the floor an upturned metal food tray. He tried the door.

Locked.

The next two cells were likewise uninhabited but, as Marco crossed the third, the atmosphere corrupted, now pure evil and black; he recognised the mind-bending stench of gangrene, a god-awful horror he would never forget from his tenure at Cedars-Sinai. Like having hot egg-beaters shoved up your nose, scrambling your fucking brain.
Christ
, he thought, sputtering. The air clung to his skin. He cupped a hand over his nose.

On the door, the square window was crawling with flies, and from within the cell he heard something stir… a slithery, jangling sound, like pennies clinking into a coin jar.

He glanced at Wu. The sergeant’s lips were pinched tight; muscles flexed at the base of his jaw, as if he were fighting back vomit.

Carefully Marco brushed the flies from the hatch and lowered his eyes to the unlit opening. The stench intensified, and he had to turn his head to suck a quick breath.

‘Oh shit…’

A corpse reclined on the hospital bed in the cell, naked, its skin cracked like bark. It was male, no doubt, but where its genitals had hung was a hollowed-out cave. Its atrophied arms and legs were handcuffed to the bed rails, too tight; the hands and feet had ballooned to enormous proportions, like shiny black pumpkins, pooled with blood. Flies buzzed its lips, and it lapped at them with a waterless tongue, catching none. It grunted, and the handcuffs chimed on its limbs–the metallic noise Marco had detected earlier.

An IV pole stood over the bed like an attending nurse. On the hook dangled a polyvinyl bag, fat with greasy brown liquid; a tube extended from the bottom and disappeared beneath a bloodstained bandage on the corpse’s bald head.

‘What is it?’ Wu asked, concerned.

‘See for yourself.’ Marco stepped aside, and Wu took his place.

A cursory inspection was all Wu needed. ‘A patient?’ he wondered, stepping away. ‘Put in restraints, then forgotten when the prison was overrun.’

Marco shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen a patient with an IV to their head. Not like that.’

‘So what then?’

Swallowing hard, Marco ignored the question and
ventured further up the hall. Inside him the coagulated anxiety continued to expand, spilling between organs, occupying every crevice it could find. The hideous stink in the hallway thickened; he had the image of himself tunnelling through it, an invisible mud of bacteria and pus and spoiled, maggoty meat. He heard movement–
jangle jangle
–in more cells, but he didn’t look inside. No need for that.