The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (12 page)

Wu’s ears rang. More gunfire, screams, Guerrero wailing the last of his life away as the corpses peeled the meat from his legs, his ribs, his skull.

The dead surged ahead, overwhelming the camp. A withered male corpse with tattooed forearms dropped itself atop Nelson, straddling him, and plunged its hand into the soldier’s gashed neck, all the way to its wrist, tearing the trachea free. Another gurgling scream.

Behind them, the naked corpse dug its teeth again into the back of Guerrero’s scalp.

‘
GET… THE FUCK… OFF!
’ Guerrero shrieked, the words barely intelligible in the awful pitch of his pain. He jammed his Beretta into his mouth and fired. The bullet punched out the back of his head and through the left eye of the feeding corpse, shattering its cranium. Both Guerrero and the corpse flopped face down, motionless, black blood mixing with red.

Two soldiers remained. And nine or ten corpses, by Wu’s quick count.

‘
Pull back! Pull back!
’ bawled one of the soldiers, a white man with a dark stubbly face and bleached yellow crew cut. He’d taken cover behind a boulder along the edge of the
clearing. From there he fired off a burst of errant shots, showering the camp with dust and debris from the rocky slope. ‘Baines! Get down the goddamn trail, re-engage there!’

The second soldier, a black man, giant and muscular, squeezed off three rounds from his handgun–his HK416 was nowhere in sight–at the approaching corpses. He scored just a single headshot before his gun emptied, a metallic
clack.

‘
Roger that!
’ he screamed.

Wu’s eyes widened. He couldn’t allow their retreat. If the soldiers escaped to the trail…

He’d never recover them. The mission would fail.

He felt a pull on his sleeve and turned. A trembling elderly female in a nightgown stained with urine and blood had him by the elbow, steadying itself as it drew towards him. His fist tightened on his knife… but instead he tugged his arm free and pushed, almost gently. The corpse tripped backwards over the plateau edge and plunged to the trail ten metres below.

Wu didn’t linger on the sound of its awful wailing. He had no time. The two soldiers were backing towards him, drawing the mob of corpses. He chose quickly. Springing forward, he launched into a tight cartwheel–whipping himself end over end, both palms planted on the hard soil–and hammered a kick between the shoulders of the bleach-haired soldier.

The man crashed forwards into three dead hikers, their weathered packs still belted to their shoulders, the straps cutting pus-filled trenches in their flesh. Within seconds the corpses had locked arms around the man and pinned him to the earth, their teeth carving and ripping.

‘
Pozzo!
’ shrieked the black soldier. Reflexively he yanked the trigger on his handgun twice before remembering the clip was empty. He stood frozen as more corpses advanced.

On the ground, Pozzo screeched in agony, fought, struggled to his feet–a man with his face shredded beyond recognition, all red and pink pulp, eye sockets pumping blood–before two more corpses joined the feast, dragged him back to the soil.

The last soldier set his eyes on Wu. ‘
Motherfucker!
’ he snarled, then lowered his giant shoulders and charged. Wu squared for the attack, ready to dodge, to strike with the deer-horns, but the soldier was quick and well trained. At the last moment he swerved, deflecting Wu’s swinging fists, then caught Wu off guard with a crushing uppercut. The steel barrel of the Beretta in the man’s hand cracked Wu’s jaw like a punch from a rivet gun. He staggered backwards, dazed, the sky and mountaintops orbiting around him. In a smooth motion the soldier caught him under the elbows and spun him. Strong hands clamped behind Wu’s neck.

Wu struggled, but the chokehold was unbreakable, and he couldn’t bend his arms to slash with the deer-horns. The man outweighed him by a hundred pounds. He shook Wu violently like a toy, wheeled him to face the last corpses–three males, their cracked lips foamy with blood and bile, just a few metres away. Coming nearer.

‘Your turn, chink,’ the soldier growled. ‘Lunch time.’

Hot, mad fear blazed a path through Wu’s suffocated chest. He cooled it rapidly–he had faced death often in his life–but another fire caught instead, burning his throat, his ears.
Shame.
He had failed, beaten by this American. A great opportunity for his homeland… soon to be lost.

He could smell the man’s swamp-like breath, the tang of unwashed skin and sour sweat. The corpses reached for him–so close now he could smell their smoky hides, too. His
eyes shot over their heads. Beyond, he saw the hillside where he’d led the charge down to the camp.

A corpse with a blood-crusted moustache grabbed Wu’s vest, stretched its jaws wide.

‘Yeah, bitch,’ grunted the huge soldier. He leaned Wu closer to the snapping teeth.

No.
Wu pushed back with his mind, resisting the shame–a useless emotion inhibiting thought.
China is the giant now. Not America.
He strained to remain rational.

America… is… dead.

His eyes widened. The hillside seemed distant, perhaps twenty metres away. Which meant he must be near the ledge, where the old female had fallen over.

Dead hands brushed his hair, his face…

‘
Zhongguo!
’ he screamed, the glorious yell he’d perfected as a young soldier.

China!

Swinging both legs up, he planted his boots on the chest of the corpse before him, then kicked off with every fibre of muscle left in his control. The corpse toppled away, and in reverse Wu and the black man stumbled an off-balance step to the rear, then another step–and then came the sound of scraping dirt and sliding rocks, and gravity shifted, and Wu found himself facing the blue sky. The merciless sun hung over him like a vulture, and there was the sensation of falling, a buoyancy in his gut, and the soldier screamed and the cliff walls rushed past and…

CRACK!

Pain! And the unmistakable snapping sound of bone. Wu’s breath ejected in a single harsh blast; beneath him the soldier cried out. They’d plummeted off the ledge backwards, so that the American slammed first into the stony ground–his body a buffer for Wu, absorbing the worst of the impact. The man’s ribcage had collapsed. His chokehold on Wu went slack.

Wu rolled off, testing himself for damage.

Bruises. Nothing worse.

But the soldier lay gasping in agony, legs spasming, his giant body performing a macabre dance on the ground. Back broken. Blood flecked from his mouth with each difficult breath.

Wu stood and gazed up to the ledge of the plateau. Rotten faces peered over the edge, regarded him sullenly. Then turned away. They had enough fresh meat above.

Wu’s chest swelled. He’d beaten the Americans. His confidence was solid again, his body electric with same thrill he’d felt at eighteen, donning his first crisp uniform in Shenyang; alive with the realisation that he belonged to something big, something important and great.

China would lead the world. And he, Kheng Wu, would make it so.

A dry scraping brought Wu’s attention back to the trail. The elderly female corpse he’d pushed over the edge was now at his feet, dragging itself along the dirt. Both its legs had snapped from the fall; the knees bent at grotesque angles, and sharp bones stabbed through the oozing skin. Wu hopped to the other side of the paralysed soldier and trotted five metres down the trail.

‘No,’ the soldier huffed as the female pulled itself onto his chest.

From this spot on the trail, the view was spectacular. The Americans had chosen their lookout well, situated in a gap on the south side of the Superstitions. Below, the desert rolled out in a flat carpet of orange soil and purple flowers and mute needled cactus, unfurling to the Gold Canyon a few kilometres beyond. Adobe houses dotted the foothills. Wu studied them.

Somewhere in those hills was Henry Marco.

Behind Wu the broken soldier screamed, a shrill sputtering
plea. The elderly corpse had bitten into his face, tearing free a huge flap of bloody skin from his nose to his ear.

The soldier screamed again, unable to move as the corpse plunged its cold fingers deep into his eye and began to gnaw on his exposed cheekbone. A horrible crunching sound.

It would be a long and difficult death for the American.

Wu concentrated, planning his next move.

Now it was Henry Marco’s turn.

Marco first met Danielle nine years ago, in line for the return desk at Tech Town. It was a Saturday in November, a month after his birthday, and he’d finally gotten around to returning the gift his mother had sent–a new cell phone, a sexy silver bar with a touchscreen and bright-lit graphics. He had absolutely no desire to keep it. He was perhaps the last man in California without a cell phone; try as he might, he couldn’t overcome his loathing for the damn things.
The fast food of conversation
, he often groused.
Empty calories, people calling each other with nothing to say, just because they can.
For God’s sake, the last thing he wanted was a bustling social life, never mind a portable one. And so he’d vowed never to own a cell, despite the way people reacted when he didn’t have a number to give them. Gasps, widened eyes. Like he was some kook with long curly fingernails saving his piss in jars.

‘I’m at the hospital sixteen hours a day,’ he informed new acquaintances, secretly enjoying their outrage. ‘You wanna reach me, all you need to do is have an aneurysm.’

Yet this phone, his mother must have believed, was wonderful enough to change his mind. He hadn’t even removed it from the packaging. It came with a note that read,
For my hermit
, with a hand-drawn smiley face and her phone number written below.

For three weeks he’d debated keeping it, opening the
account just to make her happy, even if he never intended to make a call. But he was stubborn and, on top of that, he found himself lying awake one night, stressed by the idea of another phone number to memorise, as if seven more digits would burst his brain. And so he’d finally decided to just return the goddamn thing. Take the money and order his mother a nice vase of Christmas poinsettias instead.

He had no idea where she’d purchased the phone, but Tech Town seemed as good a bet as any, and he knew there were locations near her condo in Philly. The store nearest Marco was in Glendale, and so on that Saturday he’d blasted through a workout on the rower at the gym, and then, feeling hurried, shortened his usual shower to an unsatisfying three minutes. Back in the car, smelling of inadequately rinsed peppermint shampoo, he turned west out of the garage, chagrined at the loss of an hour from his only free morning that week.

At Tech Town, the parking lot was a claustrophobic environment of slow-moving cars and SUVs circling like sharks in an aquarium. He hadn’t anticipated the early holiday rush. Now doubly annoyed, he darted his Audi to the first parking spot he saw.

Inside, the clerk at the return counter was a beefy kid, early twenties with messy blond hair and a poorly knotted tie. He watched Marco approach.

‘Hi,’ Marco said. He laid the cell phone in its plastic package on the counter.

‘Hello, sir.’ The kid’s soft cheeks were cloudy pink and razor-burned. He wore a name tag with no name on it pinned to his blue vest.
Hello I’m
, it teased. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I received that as a gift,’ Marco said. He smelled peppermint and realised with embarrassment that it was wafting from his scalp. He took a small step backwards. ‘I’d like to return it, please.’

‘All right, no problem,’ the kid said. ‘Do you have your receipt?’

Marco hesitated. ‘Well, no. It was a gift.’

‘Oh,’ the kid said, sounding crestfallen. ‘You need a receipt.’

Shit
, Marco thought. ‘Even for gifts?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry.’ The kid pointed somewhere behind him, presumably to a sign posted someplace Marco couldn’t see. ‘Returns have to have a receipt.’

‘Even for gifts?’ Marco repeated, thinking perhaps the kid hadn’t absorbed the logic. ‘That can’t be. People return gifts all the time.’

‘Well…’ the kid said, and the razor marks on his cheeks flushed a deeper pink. ‘See, that’s just the policy for phones. It’s because we don’t know if it really came from here.’

‘But you sell them, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then does it really matter?’

The kid absently slid the phone along the countertop. ‘Well, I know you’re not like this,’ he said confidentially, and Marco realised the kid was trying to be cool with him, ‘but lots of times, people just pick stuff off the shelf and, like, try to walk over here and return it.’

Marco took a deep breath. The peppermint cooled his sinuses. ‘So what about after Christmas?’ he asked, switching arguments. ‘People can’t return presents they don’t want?’

The kid paused. ‘Well… I never worked here for Christmas.’

‘Right,’ Marco said.
Figures.
‘Is there a manager here, then, that can help me?’

The kid raised his hand halfway. ‘I’m assistant manager.’

‘Right,’ Marco said again. ‘So is the manager here?’ The question presented itself more rudely than he’d intended, and he saw the kid stiffen.
Oh well. Friendship’s over.
Unsmiling now, the kid–the assistant manager without a name–reached for a phone mounted behind the counter. He punched a few buttons and listened into the receiver. Marco waited, feeling stupid. In the next department he could hear a wall of televisions all tuned to
SportsCenter
.

‘Hey,’ the kid said into the phone. ‘Is Mr Lang there? I need him for a return.’

‘Thank you,’ Marco said as the kid hung up the receiver. His head buzzed with a vague sense of wrongdoing. What if his mother didn’t even get the damn thing at Tech Town? He turned from the counter, avoiding the kid as he silently rehearsed his argument for Mr Lang.

At least a minute passed before Marco noticed a woman ten feet away, waiting next in line for the return desk. What struck him first was the oddness of her hat–a straw sun hat with an enormous brim and outlandish pink flower, bigger than his fist, sewn to the side. The hat’s weaving had come undone in spots, with haphazard stalks poking out here and there, and he couldn’t decide if she looked more like a crazy gardener or Huckleberry Finn. The brim hid her upper face, revealing only two glossy lips and a slender chin. She wore a white skirt with a ruffled yellow blouse; her breasts were demure shapes, small and tantalising.