The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (46 page)

‘Careless,’ he said, inflecting the word with bitter self-judgement.

Tortured cries rocked the hallway outside the lab–very close.

‘Angry hornets,’ Wu observed. His voice shook.

On the monitor the dead had stormed the infirmary, overflowing the video screens, a thousand rotting cannibals mobbing the halls. Fifty feet from the lab, maybe less. Terrified, Marco glanced to the doorway–knowing it would fill in seconds with shambling bodies. Putrid faces, and meat-ripping hands, and merciless, biting jaws.

He took a single step towards Wu, then stopped. Impossible. He’d never get them both out alive.
Wu’s bitten, good as dead
… But maybe the vaccine could help?
Shit!

The corpses were ten feet from the door.

‘Doctor.’ Wu’s voice caught him. Steadied him. Marco turned to the fallen man.

‘It’s time,’ Wu advised, ‘to run like hell.’

The verdict came like a blessing, calm and kind and sure. In an instant all doubt had disappeared; both men understood. Marco nodded, grateful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, and with a grim sense of surrender, he bolted towards the doorway–and just then an urgent thought cried out from what remained of his rational mind, and he switched direction, lunging to his right. He reached below the operating table and snatched out the glass phial.

The vaccine.

C’mon, hurry, asshole.

He stuffed the flask into his side pocket, and then, touching his hand to the floor like a sprinter at the starting line of a race, he scooped up a pea-sized chunk of Roger Ballard’s spongy, blown-out brain. Shoved that, too, into his pocket.

Proof.

Roger didn’t have a wedding ring–
bring back the jewellery, and nobody disputes you did the job
–but bet your ass, Osbourne was getting his goddamn DNA sample.

The dead groans in the hallway reverberated just out of sight. Shadows flickered on the wall. Time was up. The corpses were here.

‘Run,’ Wu urged, sputtering blood.

In obedience Marco broke for the door. A one-eyed convict popped through the frame, snapping and grabbing; Marco slung himself feet-first, sliding under the corpse’s arms. An icy thumb brushed his cheek as he bounced on his ass into the hall.
Shit!
Corpses in jumpsuits jammed the corridor, surrounding him. He skidded to the opposite wall, cradling his head with his arms, deflecting kicks from their bloodstained boots. Against the wall he crumpled and coughed. Bursting into the hall had surprised the dead men–the only reason he wasn’t already dead himself–but the confusion was evaporating fast. In two seconds they’d mob, a flock of freakish orange birds plucking him like a worm from the ground.

He had to move.

With a frantic kick he twisted to his right, away from the maddened corpses stumbling up the hall, and, as he rolled, his eyes darted into the lab for one last topsy-turvy glimpse. Roger’s body lay broken and ugly on the floor, and against the cabinets slumped Wu, dazed and weak,
watching Marco’s clumsy acrobatics with a bemused grin like a child at a circus.

Their eyes met a final time, and Marco pulsed with guilt, and he wished for whatever insane reason that he’d bidden Wu a proper farewell, thanked him, as crazy as that seemed,
thanked
him for the company on this bullshit ride…

… and then he tumbled past the door, and Wu was gone.

Marco struggled to his feet, slipping and sliding, his boots wet with thickening blood; he regained his balance ten feet ahead of the oncoming corpses. The massive riot surged in his direction, goaded by the moving target, fresh meat to chase and consume. But he also noted grimly that the dead mob had split off into the lab as well, a march of empty-eyed corpses jostling through the door, swamping the room where Wu lay fallen.

Good-bye, Wu.

Marco ran, panting, his ribs throbbing, his skin hot with every kind of pain. He stumbled and cracked his shoulder against a dry whiteboard on the wall, smearing lines of black scribbled calculations, and then shoved himself back to the middle of the hall and continued running.

His legs grew heavier with each step. In his head he counted seconds, all sound blotted from his consciousness, like the expectant silence after a grenade pin is pulled.

And then it detonated–a high, hideous scream exploding from the lab, blasting down the hallway after him, a shockwave impossible to outrun.

Goodbye, Wu
, he thought again.

He staggered onwards, exhausted, a thousand corpses close behind.

He had no idea where he was going.

But he hoped–prayed–this hall wasn’t another dead end.

His life spilling from him, Wu watched Henry Marco go. The American dived recklessly into the dead mob, barely avoiding the onslaught, and then vanished down the hall to either live or die elsewhere in the prison.
He’ll live
, Wu decided.
He is strong.

Strong survival instincts. The brief had been right.

As the lab entrance darkened with corpses, like an execution squad coming to collect him, Wu laughed aloud. The sudden warm impulse surprised him–he hadn’t laughed in months, perhaps years–and he marvelled, wondering what this meant now, this unlikely good humour conquering his fear. And then he understood.

Bao Zhi…

His
uncle.

Bao Zhi, who had always made Wu roll with laughter as a boy. Bao Zhi, the master of silly jokes and cherished bedtime stories told by firelight, was
here–
here but invisible, a spirit holding Wu’s hand to comfort him.

Yes. Bao Zhi
. Wu felt the iron muscles in his arms relax. His vision blurred; a chill swept his skin as blood fled his wounded neck like heat from a chimney. His body was descending, dropping, cooling to room temperature.

Dead convicts shuffled through the door, two and three at a time, shoulders bumping. A Hispanic male led the mob, its face half skinned, its mouth broken open. A single gold tooth gleamed in a pit of black gums and brown stumps.

Pain boiled from every pore in Wu’s skin, and he forced himself to embrace it–to make it part of himself, because the pain was all he had now, and if he owned it, he would not fear it. Pain. He was going to die. He bit his lip to steel himself, and that hurt, too.

‘
Sh
shu
,’ he groaned.

Uncle.

‘
Q
ng liú zài w
sh
nbi
n
.’

Please stay with me.

He looked up. Above was a sky of grotesque faces, blood-starved corpses bending over him. His head swam. The view of his impending death dizzied him. Like gazing up at skyscrapers on a city street.
Like Beijing
, he thought, remembering the first time he’d ever visited as a nineteen-year-old soldier. It had been the summer after the Yangtze floods, to accept his new position with the MSS; he’d lived his boyhood two thousand kilometres west, cavorting amidst green forests and glistening bamboo and awe-inspiring mountains, and yet until that first day in Beijing he’d had no idea how
beautiful
his country could be. Cement and glass and steel arranged masterfully by human hand, stacked a hundred metres high–a promise of the greatness and growth and prosperity awaiting all China. The future would be proud for his brothers and sisters, a salvation from hard labour and filth-riddled villages. And
he
, young Kheng Wu, would help build the noble new China, add himself like a brick to the foundation, obey his orders…

Here in the lab, a dozen corpses had crowded around him like guests at a dinner table. Dry fingertips brushed his face, dabbed his tears. The touch was light, a brief misleading caress–and then the ripping began. He gasped once as jagged fingernails carved ditches into his flesh, spiked into his ears, his nostrils, his eye sockets, crammed his mouth and split his cheeks. The universe exploded, a bright, excruciating, bloody orange, forcing his eyes deep into his skull. Blinded, he bucked, overloaded, lost in the pain. He felt mouths on his skin…

Shūshu!

… and teeth, teeth everywhere, opening him to the world; he convulsed as a frigid blast rocked his gut, cold air, a
savage tug that ended with a snap. He felt momentarily buoyant, his weight escaping him in wet sloppy bursts; he had the sensation of being unravelled like a spool of meaty rope. And then a new weight fell atop him, a fresh shuddering agony as a hundred hands crushed him down; his tongue splashed with something sweet, and blood flooded his throat.

He heard his body scream–loud, long, an awful earthly sound.

But he was done with the earth.

Done with Beijing.

Done being the killer.

He squeezed his right hand into a fist, tighter, tighter, until at last he felt Bao Zhi gripping back. And then it was time. Time to leave this place, peacefully and humbly and with respect. Time to join his uncle. Return to his village in Qinghai. Take his place in the realm of the dead… walk alongside the living, alongside his beloved sisters and brothers.

He missed them. He would be happy there, serving and protecting. Guarding over them, the way ancestral spirits do.

A smile spread across the wet mangled pulp of his face.

This was not failure.

China needs me
, he thought.
My family needs me.