The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (41 page)

He already knew. He understood.

His eyes watered–from the stench, he tried to tell himself.
You’re okay. Keep going.
He passed three more cells. Up ahead the corridor bent left again.

He inhaled a fortifying breath and turned the corner.

More cells, occupying another hundred feet of gloom. Dark sealed doors.

Except the final door, the cell farthest down at the end of the hall. Open. Yellow light flickered from the doorway, dancing on the floor.

Here we go
, Marco thought. His hand throbbed, and he became aware that he was squeezing the M9 so sternly his fingers had cramped. His heart boomed somewhere outside his chest; somehow it had escaped and was now galloping loose in the corridor.

‘Be ready,’ Wu whispered.

‘I’m trying,’ Marco murmured. He edged forward, his boot-steps too loud–but then again, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

With Wu behind him, he plodded down the corridor, solemn and pensive.

Dead man walking.
Isn’t that what the guards said in prison movies, whenever they escorted a man to the execution chamber? Marco almost laughed. Too many dead men walking around here. And wasn’t there always a priest, reading the Bible out loud, so serious?

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death
…

He reached the brink, the open doorway, and took his final breath.

Stepped into the light.

He expected the voice that greeted him.

‘Hello, Henry.’

Marco managed a wan smile.

‘Hello, Roger.’

Roger Ballard. Not dead. Not resurrected.

Roger Ballard–
alive.

He sat propped on the edge of a neatly made prison bed, hands on his knees, looking dapper in a starched white collared shirt and blue tie, no more vexed to encounter Marco here and now, estranged by five years of hell, than if the two men had met yesterday for lunch. His chestnut hair had grown long, combed back as usual but draping to his shoulders. He looked old, far older than his actual forty years. His face was coarse and greatly malnourished; his flesh clung to his skull like shrink-wrap, and he had knobbed cheeks and two grim sinkholes for eyes.

The sight of Roger walloped Marco like a sucker punch; for the second time in two days, he recalled his last morning at Cedars-Sinai before leaving for Arizona with Danielle. On his farewell walk to the parking garage, he’d passed Roger’s office, vowing to avert his eyes… but instead he’d glanced inside, and there had been Roger at his desk, staring at the door as if somehow knowing that Marco would appear at that precise moment.
Goodbye, Henry
, Ballard had offered, and Marco had snubbed him, kept walking–sick to his stomach, wondering if Roger might follow and glad that he didn’t. The image had been lodged in Marco’s brain for half a decade–Roger, forlorn in his glum little
office–and now, in this dumbfounding instant, Roger Ballard, the same man yet unnervingly different, had leaped across time, transported to a glum prison cell instead, gazing expectantly again at Marco in his doorway.

With a twiggy finger he tapped his thin glasses higher onto his nose, then stood.

‘I’m glad you received my email, Henry,’ he said. ‘That was quite some time ago, wasn’t it? I wasn’t certain you’d come.’

The remark caught Marco unprepared–shit, not that he was prepared for
anything
Roger could say–and he gawked, his mouth a stupid circle, grappling for words. His mind spun like a roulette wheel, and he felt himself hanging on the frantic skip and bounce of the imagined silver ball, clueless where it would drop, which slot, which emotion: anger, or relief, or sadness or hatred or maybe even terror.

The wheel slowed. The ball fell.

Landing on bewilderment.

‘Roger,’ he croaked. ‘Roger, everybody thinks you’re
dead
.’

Ballard’s crooked upper lip–the middle groove permanently off-centred like a sneer–twitched. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working. I’ve made great progress, in fact.’

He gestured around himself, vaguely presenting the room. In the corner a steel lab table had been dragged in, a clumsy furnishing in the small cell. Notebooks stacked the surface, the pages thick and warped with moisture. A red candle burned beside them.

‘Roger,’ Marco persisted. ‘Listen to me—’

‘I’ve been working, I said,’ Ballard broke in, annoyed. ‘I’ll show you.’ With an awkward gimp in his stride, he crossed to the table. Marco lowered his gaze and winced. Ballard’s left foot was bent sideways–obscene, his ankle nearly dragging the floor as he walked. The bone had been broken and then healed into a deformity.

From the jump
, Marco knew without asking.
Off the walkway.

‘You’re the army,’ Ballard observed, for the first time acknowledging Wu. The sergeant hovered behind Marco, his eyes darting between the two doctors.

‘Yes.’ Wu glanced warningly at Marco. His forearm muscle tensed, and the knife in his hand stirred as if he were expecting trouble. ‘Sergeant Ken Wu.’

‘You brought the army, Henry?’

‘He tagged along.’

‘Does Osbourne know?’

Marco hesitated, registering the sudden apprehension on Ballard’s face. ‘Yes…’ he allowed cautiously. Despite himself, he felt oddly afraid to upset Roger.

But Ballard simply pinched his lips tight for a moment, and then sighed. ‘Well. Perhaps I was foolish to hope otherwise. I’m still glad you came, Henry. If you’re here, everything will be quite fine. However, those other men at the checkpoint–they were not with you?’

‘No.’

Ballard nodded, satisfied. He huffed the candle flame dead, then plucked the top notebook from the water-damaged pile and, hobbling, brushed between Marco and Wu into the corridor. He carried with him a whiff of surgical soap, pleasant and jasmine-scented, as he passed. And then it was gone, and the air blackened again.

Ballard spoke. ‘I really have made progress, Henry, you’ll see. I’ll show you…’

Trailing off, he navigated left, vanishing around the next bend in the hallway. Marco blinked twice, three times. His head fizzed with a sort of drunken, unsteady vertigo, and irrationally he wondered if he’d hallucinated the entire meeting with Ballard.

One look at Wu’s cold green eyes sobered him.

‘What do we do now?’ Marco asked.

‘We follow him,’ Wu declared. ‘But carefully.’

Around the corner Ballard was still bobbing ahead on his bum foot. Quickly the men caught up, and Marco had to stifle an urge to grab Roger by his bony little shoulder–spin him and ask just what the
fuck
was going on. Instead he fell in step behind his former associate, already dreading wherever this bizarre hike was leading.

Typical Roger
, he groused.
Too deep in his own head to realise we think he’s fucking nuts. And I had years to get used to this bullshit. God knows what Wu is thinking right now.

Probably thinks I’m crazy, too.

Halfway along the corridor Ballard spoke, a subdued, almost confidential hush. ‘I’ve thought a great deal about you, Henry. About what happened.’ He fell quiet for three or four strides. And then he asked, ‘How is Danielle?’

Marco stiffened. Said nothing.
Goddamn it, Roger.

Ballard’s head tilted, and he seemed to hear the unspoken answer. ‘Oh,’ he said, a single sad note, and pushed his glasses higher again on his nose. A darkness seemed to descend over him, the shadows in the prison corridor fusing with his skin.

‘No offence, Roger, but let’s change the subject. Why are you still
here
?’

‘Here? Well. Because I had to finish.’

As Marco waited for Roger to elaborate, Wu paced himself a step closer behind the two doctors. ‘Finish?’ he pressed. ‘Do you mean the vaccine?’

Ballard shook his head, clicked his tongue. ‘You see, Henry? That’s the military. Impatient, always pushing. Complaining. “Go faster,” Osbourne would say, all the blasted time. That man, he had his own agenda, very much so. Not to be trusted. It’s politics to him, not science. You do realise, Sergeant Wu, that it took four hundred years to solve smallpox?’

Wu and Marco exchanged questioning looks. Marco spoke first, drawing Ballard’s searing expression away from poor Wu. ‘Roger, in your email you said—’

‘Quiet now, Henry,’ Ballard hushed. ‘Too much talking in the halls disturbs the patients. It’s better to let them rest.’

‘Roger—’

‘Henry,
please.
In the lab.’

The corridor crossed another hundred feet of cells, then met another hallway and continued through; at the intersection, Marco was surprised to see the same brown-stained gurney they’d passed on their way into the infirmary, and the same reception area far off to the right. He’d been distracted by the rat, hadn’t noticed these secondary corridors branching off. The infirmary was a goddamn maze, he observed now–a good place to get lost.

Past the intersection were open examination rooms. Marco took quick stock as he passed, braced for more bloody horrors like the corpse in the medical cell. But the rooms here were clean, strikingly so; the counters gleamed dust-free, and the floors had all been recently mopped. However trashed the infirmary had been during the outbreak, Roger had done a tidy job rebuilding here. Ballard proceeded past each room without comment. A hundred feet ahead, Marco saw another intersection waiting, but the men had travelled only three-quarters of the distance down the hall when Ballard ducked through a wide-arched doorway to his right.

They’d entered a blood lab. A white laminate counter ran the entire perimeter, and all along it were microscopes hunkered like little black vultures over meals of Petri dishes. Mounted to the near wall was a rack of phials darkened with some nauseating, mustard-coloured fluid. The room smelled like Clorox, sterile and sharp. On the counter nearest Marco rested a bulky box–a centrifuge for spinning blood–where a haematology analyser had been activated, gibbering small
green numbers as it diced plasma and counted reticulocytes. A stainless-steel medical refrigerator hummed against the back wall. The fridge’s glass doors were clouded with frost.

And in the middle of the lab–an unsettling centrepiece–was a full-sized operating table, spotless and polished and thankfully unoccupied. The bed had been modified, fitted with restraints; ominous buckled straps dangled from the side.

From the corner of the room, a flickering motion caught Marco’s eye. There on the far end was the ninth video monitor–the unit that had been missing from the guard’s desk. It sat squarely on the counter where Ballard had rigged it, looking like a chaotic octopus of black and yellow cords and an electrical box with a white toggle switch in the metal-plated centre. The screen split into nine tiny frames; all the scenes from the main console played at once.

‘I like to watch while I work,’ Ballard explained simply.

All right, enough of this shit
, Marco decided. He was done playing polite.

‘Roger.
Listen
to me, for Christ’s sake. It’s been four goddamn years since anybody heard from you–do you get that? You were
bit.
Your message said you were dying. We came to… to see if you’d survived,’ he said, lying. He slipped Wu a self-conscious glance.

Ballard nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said distractedly and scanned the digits on the haematology analyser, his lips pursed. ‘Communications have been down for quite a while now. The facility went offline soon after I emailed you, Henry, and I wasn’t able to write again or call out. Those soldiers left without me. But I made the best of it, Henry. I had everything I needed.’

‘Yes, but…’ Marco faltered. ‘But how did you even
survive
? I saw a video of you that day, Roger. You
were
bitten, weren’t you?’

Ballard raised a wiry eyebrow. ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ Behind
his bookish glasses, his eyes glinted. Amused. Deep in the room, the refrigerator clicked and murmured.

Marco cleared his throat, uncomfortable. ‘So… your blood, everything you said about your DNA, the new antibodies… it actually worked? It destroyed the infection?’

‘No, Henry,’ Ballard said. ‘Not exactly.’ His voice climbed, and Marco heard the restrained excitement he remembered from early morning conversations at Cedars-Sinai–Marco arriving with a bagel in his mouth and a Styrofoam coffee cup in his grasp, barely able to remove his coat before Ballard pounced on him to discuss some new strand of research.

‘But that’s what I wanted to show you,’ Ballard continued. ‘The progress.’

He extended his left arm and awkwardly unbuttoned the sleeve with his free hand. Then folded back the cuff, and rolled the sleeve up…

… all the way to his elbow…

… and rotated his arm in the light.

Marco heard himself gasp.

Ballard’s entire forearm was rotted purple and thick, warted with grey-green splotches of gangrenous tissue; engorged veins slithered like black snakes just below the skin’s surface. Midway up, a half-circle of scar tissue glistened wetly, like a shocking red crescent moon.

The arm reeked, a disgusting chemical smell like formaldehyde.

‘You see?’ Ballard said, and now the excitement in his voice was obvious–an insane child showing off a favourite toy. ‘I
am
infected. I’m carrying the Resurrection.’

Marco stared, both repulsed and fascinated at once. And then a buried thought exploded like a landmine in his head,
an abrupt panic that he’d been tricked–
oh god, Roger
is
a corpse, a talking goddamn corpse
–and now Ballard would lunge, rip a chunk from his throat…

But instead Ballard extended his infected arm, beaming. ‘You see, Henry? I contained the impact. Necrotic tissue, yes, but a limited radius, extending up the arm and partially across my torso. And this was just the Beta compound of the antibodies–my leukocytes had not fully adapted, remember. The current formula would have prevented this completely.’

Marco goggled, catching his breath. The M9 in his hand was a comforting weight, ready if necessary to take Roger down with a bullet through the bridge of those wire-frame eyeglasses. Except Roger seemed harmless; he gazed back at Marco benignly, expectantly, like a dog anticipating praise for a trick well done–oblivious to the fact that it just shit the rug.