The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (49 page)

Even his curses sounded flat, like airless tyres.

He had nothing left.

Osbourne served him a look of bemusement, perhaps even approval. The skin around his eyes flexed. ‘Of course I knew, Doctor Marco. Knowing is my job. I could tell you the shoe size of every terrorist in the Middle East, if you asked. Locating your missing wife took me less than a morning. I didn’t even miss lunch.’

Fuck you
, Marco thought, but it didn’t really matter what Osbourne knew, either now or then, and Marco’s mind was already floating back towards Danielle, to the fresh memory of her on the sofa, flowers in the giant vase, green trees in the window. Full of life.
I’m alive here
, she’d said. Danielle was not dead. But his marriage…

His marriage had been dead a long, long time.

Crumbled, decayed, wriggling with worms.

And at last he understood–understood that these past four years had been a goddamn trick he’d played on himself. A ploy to keep his marriage alive, breathing artificially, jump-starting the heart because it couldn’t beat
on its own. The constant search, returning and returning to the same damn places–the obsessive reliving of each happy memory he could recover from those hundred billion brain cells in his head…

Tech Town…

Nights in LA…

Lake Hemet
…

And a thousand others, all dead, dead, dead, sealed off forever into the past.

And
he’d
been the force reanimating Danielle, again and again and again. Because he couldn’t accept that her love had run out. That it was done.

You’re avoiding, Henry. You’re always avoiding.

He’d pulled it from the grave, over and over. His own personal Resurrection.

‘Doctor Marco.’ Osbourne flagged him back to the present.

Marco stared wearily at the director. So what now? In Osbourne’s famished expression he saw the Safe States waiting for him, eager to swallow him back into organised society–gnash him between the teeth of the New Republican government and all the rules and politics and relationships with people and stupid television shows and even the simplest of mundane things like trips to Shop Rite to buy milk–a society that would digest him, break him into smaller and smaller bits until he was nothing. Alive, but nothing.

At least the corpses here killed you first.

He shuddered.

He wasn’t ready. Not for that.

Before Danielle, he’d always been alone, adrift. No friends, no socialising, not even a goddamn cell phone. And then he’d met her. Danielle. His link to life.

But now…

He surprised himself with a chuckle.

‘Hang on,’ he told Osbourne. He held up one finger. ‘Gimme a second.’

Bending, he tugged open the bottommost drawer on his desk and thumbed past the hanging files stuffed with rubber-banded manila folders. From the back he dug out a fresh folder and a clean Ziploc sandwich bag. Just as he was about to kick the drawer shut with his boot, his eye snagged on the first folder in the stack.

Flynn, Thomas.

His next job–the missing logger, the contract Ben had booked for January.

Ruminating, he left the drawer open and turned back to his desk. He sensed Osbourne watching him with impatience, a smouldering in the man’s coal-black pupils, but Marco didn’t care; he moved methodically, at his own pace. From his pocket he scooped the spongy blob of Roger’s brain and shovelled it into the Ziploc.

‘Is that—’ Osbourne began.

‘Not yet,’ Marco said. He shuffled the phial containing the vaccine into the plastic bag, a tight fit but good enough. With three loops of a red oversized rubber band, he wrapped the Ziploc into the folder and then, opening the top desk drawer, found a black Sharpie marker and labelled the folder
Ballard, Roger.

He lifted the folder up for Osbourne to see.

‘Everything you need,’ he explained. ‘The vaccine. And for extra credit on my report card, a genuine authentic Roger Ballard tissue sample. I’m leaving these right here in a folder on my desk. Tell your pick-up boys they can’t miss it. Also, they can help themselves to anything they find in the kitchen. Won’t be much, though.’

Osbourne pressed both hands flat on the desk, furious. Marco imagined a sound effect of splintering wood. Gratified,
he smiled to himself.
Here we go. Now he’s pissed.

‘Doctor,’ Osbourne growled. ‘You’ve tested me enough. Consider this your final warning. Cooperate–
immediately
–or the offer for Safe State amnesty and all accompanying privileges is rescinded. Permanently, I assure you.’

Marco pushed back his chair and rose. ‘I’ll lock the front door–don’t want corpses getting inside, wrecking up the place. Feel free to shoot the lock.’

‘
Doctor Marco.
’

‘Marco,’ Ben said, off camera, then edging just into frame behind Osbourne. ‘C’mon, man, don’t be stubborn. This is your chance.’

‘Exactly,’ Marco said. ‘My chance.’

With a giddy thrill he watched Osbourne seethe. A plump vein zigzagged on the man’s cosmetically tightened forehead, and thin tendons bulged along his neck, stiff and rigid like bamboo stalks rising from the white-collared shirt. Marco laid the folder on the desk and angled the camera to centre the rubber-banded bundle in the frame.

For your viewing pleasure, asshole.

‘I’ll leave this on while I take care of some things,’ he said. ‘Enjoy.’

He’d crossed the room halfway when Osbourne called him one last time.

‘Doctor.’ Casual–as if in the span of five footsteps all had been forgiven.

Marco hesitated, turned. ‘Yes?’

‘I will respect your decision,’ Osbourne declared, then lowered his chin. ‘Due to the fact that we may require more from one another in the future. As you can imagine, there is still much work to be done in securing a new and safer America. Perhaps more contracts–“returns” to be made, as you say, in the interests of national security. However…’ and here his tone darkened again,
instantly ominous, ‘your refusal to accommodate me has been noted.’

The implied threat lingered in the stale air for several seconds.

‘Fuck you,’ Marco said. ‘I don’t want your jobs.’

He strode from the room. Osbourne’s cruel laugh clawed at his back.

‘
You will, Doctor
,’ Osbourne called. ‘
You will
.’

Three hours later the truck was packed with clothes, firearms, camping gear, suitcases, maps, MREs, all the Tang and canned goods from the pantry–enough for a week’s drive, he estimated, and then he’d need to scrounge for more–plus books, his favourite pillow from the bed upstairs, and the computer. He’d unplugged Osbourne in mid-sentence.
Be rational, Doctor, and consider
, Osbourne had urged, and then
click
, that was all, and as the hard drive powered down, a white pixel of light blazed once in the blackness and then disappeared like the final star extinguishing at time’s end.

In a cardboard box on the truck’s passenger seat floor were all the folders from past jobs, all the rings and necklaces and bracelets and wristwatches he’d collected over the years. He would return them someday, but not soon. On top sat the folder for Thomas Flynn, stuffed with dog-eared sheets of notes, photos, transcripts of his interviews two months ago with Gary Flynn–Tom’s grief-stricken father. Nice guy.

Returning Flynn will be good
, Marco reasoned.
Keep me busy.

Back on the desk in his office lay Roger’s file, exactly where he’d left it, waiting for pick-up. Without doubt
Osbourne would dispatch another goon squad to come collect the prize–probably the orders had already been given, the team scrambling.

Maybe I’m paranoid
, Marco thought.
Maybe they’re nice, and I could just hand over the vaccine, and we’d all have a beer and laugh and tell jokes about Uncle Owen.

Right. Or maybe they’ll just blast a bullet in my head.

Hell no, he wasn’t taking that chance. No need to stay in the Gold Canyon, not any more. Danielle wasn’t coming back. She’d moved on.

His eyes misted.
My turn now.

One good thing about the Evacuated States–there were plenty of places to conceal yourself. Houses, office buildings, hotels, shopping malls, even a cave someplace in the goddamn mountains. Osbourne could send a hundred search teams and never find him.

And the Horsemen–what about them? Was there still an army lurking out West, eager to hunt him down, extract revenge for what he’d done to Big Skull and the others?

Marco sighed.
Yes, Henry
, he thought.
Better lay low for a while.

But just remember. The trouble with hiding spots.

You think you’re safe… until you’re not.

He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. His left ring finger looked bizarre–the golden tan broken in half by a white stripe of skin, wrinkled and pathetic.

Back in the office, a second folder lay on the desk beside Roger’s. A fresh new file.
Marco, Henry
scrawled on the tab, and inside, in a Ziploc, his wedding ring.

He wasn’t sure why he’d done that, but somehow it made him feel better. It felt… more official, he supposed. Done and over with.

He wondered if the goon squad would take his ring back to Osbourne.

At the bottom of the driveway he nosed the truck through the gate and peered one last time into the rear-view mirror. He’d never return to this house again. He silently wished it goodbye and thanked it for the years. Seeing it there, dark and sealed and vacant, he felt a door inside himself seal and lock as well. In the sky, black specks of vultures had begun to gather like an oncoming storm–somewhere nearby, he guessed, corpses were on the move–and so he cleared his throat and turned left out of the driveway.

North
, he thought.
North might be nice.

Hell, he even knew a great vacation cabin on a lake in Montana.

Ten or eleven corpses greeted him outside on the street–he glimpsed a ponytailed male in a Starbucks apron, and an older female burnt black and crisp, and a white-eyed postal carrier with blue uniformed shorts and what looked like a crowbar lodged in its ribcage–throwing their rotten arms wide, cheering awful noises through torn-out throats, like a going-away party organised in his honour. In the sturdy truck, he wasn’t afraid. He bumped through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and desperate
clunk-cla-clunk
of hands slapping the doors. The truck jostled as it turned, catching the kerb, and then straightened, and he goosed the gas and left them.

The truth was, he’d grown accustomed to this. The corpses, the suffering. This existence he’d claimed for himself, here in the shade between living and dying. Just Henry Marco and the corpses and all the useless memories rattling around in all their confused heads. His, too.

Along Route 60 he rolled his window down and watched the crusted landscape chug past–the scrub, the ocotillo, the crumbling planks of old wood fences, and now and then a corroded dirt-caked radio tower. Yes, the Arizona desert was
an endless brown. And yet, everywhere, the brown was tinged with green–vegetation adapting to the environment.

Out here, brown was alive. Prospering.

He thought of a guided nature hike he’d taken five years ago, he and Danielle, through a preserve near Tucson the summer they’d moved. Trudging along a dirt trail between thirsty cactus and arid rocks, the biologist had stopped the group and knelt beside a dead brown clump of vegetation–what looked like a shrivelled-up fern the size of a baseball.
Rose of Jericho
, the biologist said.
Also called the Resurrection Plant.

‘Resurrection Plant,’ Marco half laughed now. ‘Hilarious.’

It’s not dead
, the biologist had explained.
It can’t store water, so it turns brown in a drought and withers up to conserve moisture. Then it goes dormant, no metabolic function until the next rainfall. Could be years like this. You’d swear it’s dead
–he’d poked the stiff tangle to prove his point–
but it’s doing fine. A little rain and it turns green again. Opens up nice, and keeps growing until the next dry spell, then repeats the cycle.

Like me
, Marco realised as the truck rumbled north. He wasn’t a zombie–not yet, anyway–but he wasn’t quite alive, either.
Dormant.

Brown and green. Yin and yang. Two halves of the whole.

And who knew? Perhaps Wu had been right. Danielle, too. Perhaps Hannah
was
here alongside him–a beautiful amazing spirit, escorting him, nudging the wheel in his hands towards the correct road. And perhaps, if he tried, if he kept straddling this murky line between death and life, and if he believed at last what he’d never believed before, then he’d be granted what he so desperately wanted. The power to perceive her. Hear her. See her again.

He inhaled a long hopeful breath, alert for any sign of her presence.

Nothing. Only the musty scent of the truck’s vinyl seats, the mildewed canvas.

A thin smile hardened his lips.

He just needed a little more time.

‘
Your man failed
.’

The words crackled rudely from the speaker phone, a small black box of insult on Director Zhang Hao’s desk. The head of MSS scowled. He scooped a wrinkled walnut from a bowl on his side table and squeezed. The shell resisted.

‘You disrespect us. And you displease me,’ he admonished the speaker phone. His English was ragged at times, a source of some embarrassment for him in these international matters, but effective nonetheless. ‘Kheng Wu was our most elite operative. He died honourably to serve his homeland. Our objective, and yours, would not have been possible without his excellent actions. China is
proud
.’

‘His “honourable death” was a great inconvenience to me,’ the American voice grumbled. ‘If he’d lived to deliver his payload, you’d have the vaccine in your hands as we speak. Instead I put myself at greater risk. And I’ve risked quite enough already.’

Zhang bristled but ignored the complaint. ‘Where is the vaccine now?’