The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (11 page)

Better, then, to finish what he’d started.

He pulled a canteen from his daypack and swigged the last mouthful of water, then refocused on the trail ahead. He recalled Shenyang, those endless marches without pity. The group leaders barking insults at the stragglers. Wu had learned to keep pace, for fear of shame–or punishment. He could do the same now. ‘
Qian jin
,’ he mumbled, wiping his forehead.

March.

March and suffer. Same orders he’d followed his entire life.

The Arizona sun burned hotter, as if the trail led straight to its core. Wu wet his dehydrated lips with his tongue, tasting salt. His lungs craved more oxygen. With great difficulty he rationed himself on quiet sips of air, no loud panting–sound carried too well along rocky peaks. If the Americans heard his approach up the mountain, the plan would fail.

A minute later, Wu heard the Americans first.

Deep voices, full of curses and laughter, echoed loud and unrestrained between the crags surrounding the unseen enemy camp. Once again, the soldiers had assumed that they were alone in this wilderness, with no need for stealth or caution.

Sensing the advantage, Wu calculated his attack. He knew the trail would wind him around the next ridge, placing him just beneath the American unit. The Americans had pitched their tents on a small plateau, in a crevice ten metres above the path. Staying on the trail, coming from below, was no
good for Wu–certain failure. The enemy would have a superior position, with five guns firing down on him and the corpses as they struggled up to the plateau.

Which left only one option. Attack from
above.

The American camp was close now. Wu could distinguish words from the voices reverberating off the cliff walls.

‘Fuck, Nelson, you fuckin’ cheat, man!’

‘Oh, bullshit I cheat! Just cuz I’m the only one who knows how to play.’

The dead heard the voices, too. The corpse leading the pack–the naked male who had emerged first from the camper–lifted its chin, and Wu watched the bloodshot eyes dart back and forth between the echoes.

A noise like wet bubbling sounded from the corpse’s throat, then sputtered. The others hungered forward; the promise of more meat had sparked them anew. Their faces trembled with something like lust, and a guttural moan emanated from the pack, low but growing louder.

Wu tensed. He hoped the Americans were too distracted to hear.

Back to his plan. There was no time to deliberate–not with sixteen corpses closing on him fast. How to reach the camp? He’d have to bypass the trail, find an alternate route that would take him above the Americans. He envisioned the terrain he’d seen while spying on the Americans, then rapidly mapped a course to his right over a rocky outcrop.
Yes.
On the other side, tall brown crags would funnel him and the corpses downwards onto the plateau.

Steep, but workable. Confident again, he turned and scrambled five metres up the hard-packed side slope. He paused there, perspiring, leaning into the mountain, his heel planted against the root of a scrub bush to prevent himself from sliding down.

‘This way, this way,’ he urged. The dead hikers needed to be redirected from the trail.

Except the corpses didn’t listen.

The naked male staggered past Wu on the trail below, not even turning its head. Three more corpses followed, and Wu realised with dismay–and respect–that the dead were more intelligent, more logical, than he’d presumed. They’d lost interest in him, drawn instead to the louder Americans. With a larger population of prey ahead, Wu was no longer worth the effort.

He scooped a handful of pebbles from the ground and slung a dirty cloud at the passing corpses. One rock glanced off the shoulder of a teenage male in a red baseball jersey. The youth rolled its head briefly on its neck but pressed ahead without changing direction. The corpses marched on. Wu hissed a quiet curse. He was losing them up the trail.

No
, he thought. Arms out for balance, he stutter-stepped back down the slope, spilling onto the trail and almost knocking into one of the dead stragglers. The female in the bikini growled, snatched at him, but Wu ducked and popped up running, keeping to the path’s edge.

In seconds he’d passed half a dozen corpses. The air was humid with their stench, forcing his unsteady abdominal muscles to retch. He spat a mouthful of gummy brown saliva onto the path. A few strides later, he’d overtaken the naked male for the lead–just short of the curve in the trail that would carry them under the Americans.

He swung around in front of the male, an arm’s distance apart. His skin tingled. The thrill, the awe of being
this
close to a living corpse was still new, still amazing to him. The dead man’s red eyeballs ogled him, and he could only guess how he might appear in the corpse’s vision; he had the sensation of being watched from a sacred temple that no man could enter alive.

Up until a month ago, he’d never even seen a corpse first-hand. During the outbreak, he’d been stationed in
Beijing; his initial encounters with the dead had occurred in dark briefing rooms, analysing unsteady news video or satellite photos of mobbed, death-ridden cities. The Resurrection had brought America its comeuppance, and the rest of the world watched. Later, stationed in Boston, he’d kept his television fixed on Fox News, where the dead were nonstop political fodder; the same iconic footage played again and again, rolling on screen as New Republican pundits ranted about the need for vigilance. The videos immortalised episodes from the outbreak–tagged with sensational names like California Z-Day, the Denver Death March, the San Antonio Massacre. ‘Mother Reaper’ was the most indecent–a shock media favourite, typical American garbage. In it, a dazed young mother stumbles past the news camera, carrying the decapitated body of a five-year-old boy. Ominous groans rumble in the background.
They pulled his head
, the woman says without emotion, and the camera goes black.

Wu had watched it all, mesmerised. Unafraid.

He wasn’t afraid now, either.

Without hesitation he hopped forward and slapped the corpse hard on its shoulder, a satisfying smack that left a white handprint on the violet, festering skin. The male huffed in surprise; its lips tightened to a snarl. Wu pulled away and cut back to the edge of the trail.

He paused there, hoping. Slowly, to his relief, the male pivoted and staggered in his direction. The corpses behind it followed, steering the pack around towards Wu.

He had them again.

Just to be certain, he let the first few corpses creep near–too near, arriving in a mass of outstretched arms and gnashing teeth, frustrated, hungry for him…

Close enough. Wu stepped away and skirted the path, using the higher slope as safe ground, just beyond the reach
of the crowd. On the uneven surface, his ankle buckled, nearly twisting him fatally downwards–
Idiot!
he scolded himself–but he stabilised and moments later had retraced the trail to his chosen attack point. He charged again up the slope.

This time the dead followed, bent at the waist, clambering over the bottommost rocks on all fours, as if they couldn’t decide whether to be human or animal. Wu met eyes with a Native American corpse, the roots of its rotten upper teeth exposed where the top lip had been torn away. It slinked towards him, its fingers dragging over the red boulders, leaving black, bloody skid-marks.

Wu wheeled and pumped his legs uphill. His quad muscles screamed like overheated pistons, moments from locking up. He stifled the need to cry out; instead he clenched his teeth and his fists and fought the pain, until at last there was only sky above him, no more burning canyons, no more cliffs. A surge of pride carried him the final ten strides to the peak.

He’d beaten the mountain.
Now the next fight.
He staggered over the summit and braked a few steps down the other side, careful not to kick pebbles that might skip down the slope and give him away. The Americans were about fifty metres below, a direct descent from Wu’s perch.

He’d calculated perfectly.

He appraised the camp. He’d tracked the Americans for days but had never ventured so close. Two small tents huddled against the western rock wall, next to four sandy backpacks. The soldiers formed a rough circle in the centre of the plateau, squatting on rocks they’d rolled in from the edges. In their tan shirts and desert-brown camouflage pants, the men almost looked like rocks themselves–dirty, solid, earthen. They hunched over a backpack positioned on the ground between them, a makeshift table. Playing cards were spread out on the surface.

The Americans’ guns lay on the rocks at their feet. They’d be able to arm quickly, but the slight delay was all Wu would need. He couldn’t help but smile. All the advantages seemed his. Even his earlier adversary, the sun, had now switched its allegiance–casting his shadow backwards up the slope, away from the camp, to prevent any possible last-second detection.

One of the white soldiers flipped over his cards. ‘Read ’em and weep, bitches.’

‘Un-fuckin-believable. Now I
know
you cheat.’

The white man–the one called Nelson, Wu remembered–pointed a finger. ‘Guerrero, man, I’m seriously gonna beat your ass if you don’t quit with that shit.’

Guerrero brushed Nelson’s hand away, and the soldiers hollered with laughter.

Wu heard the crunch of dry dirt behind him. Corpses, reaching the top of the Flatiron peak, spilling over, hurdling down towards his back.

His hands swept his belt, then flew up into a fighter’s stance. The crescent blades of his deer-horn knives glinted in the sun. Like predators, licking their lips for blood.

Wu inhaled once, then launched himself down the slope, towards the Americans.

Time to show his hand.

Read ’em and weep, bitches.

The first moments were chaos–exactly as Wu had hoped. Ten feet above the camp, running madly, almost in freefall, he kicked off from the steep mountainside–each frame of action distinct in his mind, seeing himself pinned airborne over the Americans, their round Western eyes startled white by this creature attacking from the sky, its talons curved and
shining–and then he crashed across the hard earth, somersaulting once into the circle of soldiers. Cries of ‘
Fuck!
’ and ‘
Shit!
’ exploded around him, ricocheting off the rock walls. He lashed out with his left leg to kick at a black HK416 assault rifle lying unattended on the ground and, as the weapon clattered away, Wu vaulted to his feet and split the soldier Nelson’s neck with his deer-horn knife, lengthwise along the base of the jaw.

The backsplash of blood against Wu’s face was sweet-smelling and cool–a strange refreshment in the desert heat. Nelson grabbed his spouting throat and crashed onto his back, legs thrashing.

‘
Fuck you!
’ someone screamed.

The canyon roared, and a bullet cracked the rock behind Wu. Dropping flat, he grabbed the backpack–the soldiers’ makeshift card table–then spun up on one knee and thrust the backpack out before his body, just as another bullet tore into the pack with an audible
WHUMP.
Playing cards and tufts of green fabric twirled in the air. Ahead of Wu, the soldier called Guerrero steadied a Beretta M9 in his hand, his face livid and red, measuring another shot as the other men scuttled for their guns.

Glancing up the slope, Wu dumped the pack and his deer-horns, then grabbed for the AK on his back. But the long climb had weakened him, and the Americans were fresher, faster. The barrels of HK416s sprang like black vipers from the rocks, coiled and quick in the soldiers’ hands. All eyes on Wu. He braced for a torrent of bullets…

… but just then the corpses swarmed the camp.

Guerrero took the first hit. He stood with his back to the mountainside, squinting across his gun at Wu, so that when the naked male corpse dropped onto him from behind, Guerrero was completely unprepared for the attack. Off balance, he buckled forward.

‘Fuck…’ he coughed.

Five metres away, the grey-scruffed commander was the first to react. ‘
ZOMS!
’ he bellowed and fired a thunderous barrage up the mountain, ripping dirt and stones from the hillside. The teenage corpse in the baseball jersey blasted backwards off its feet, brains erupting from its skull. In camp, the other soldiers forgot Wu, spun their guns to the new attack.

The corpse crunched down on the back of Guerrero’s head.

‘
Fuck!
’ Guerrero roared. Two more corpses piled onto his legs, tackling him to the ground. Behind him the dead continued to stumble down the slope, tripping, falling, popping up again. With a vicious jerk the male corpse ripped away a strip of Guerrero’s scalp. The meat hung like a hairy rectangle of bacon from its jaws, dripping blood.

Guerrero began to scream. And didn’t stop.

Past him, the dead poured into camp. The soldiers pedalled backwards, their weapons bouncing from target to target, choosing carefully.

‘
Cut ’em up!
’ shouted Grey Beard.

Now
, Wu thought, snatching up his deer-horns, and sprinted at the older man. He’d rushed half the distance when the soldiers fired their guns in unison, and the tremendous hammer-blow of sound almost knocked Wu to his knees. Above him, under him, the red mountain thundered like a volcano, crossfires of echo that made his organs tremble, his eyes water.

On the hillside, a row of corpses–the bikini woman, the Native American–thrashed and fell, spilling a slop of meaty chunks and blood like black oil. Wu staggered, the stink of gunpowder in his head, remembering again his boyhood in China and his uncle Bao Zhi, the fireworks they’d set off in a barrel behind the shack each year to scare evil spirits
away. He almost laughed now at the memory as he rushed towards the pack of advancing corpses.
The dead cannot be frightened. Only men.

The gunfire lulled, and Grey Beard yelled, ‘
Again!
’ and Wu made one decisive stride forward and plunged his knives with all his strength into both sides of the old soldier’s neck. The man barely had time to react. One final order–‘
Cut ’em up
’–wheezed across his lips, and then the deer-horn blades snapped together, severing his windpipe, nearly decapitating him. His head flopped to his chest, held to his shoulders only by spaghetti-like strands of spinal cord. The body crashed to the dirt.