The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (14 page)

Interesting
, Danielle had commented, sounding unsure what else to say. It wasn’t very exciting, really–just an old metal husk in the desert. They’d driven past the station without stopping, then eaten lunch at a run-down pizza joint a few blocks down the street.

Marco frowned. That pizza place.

He wasn’t far from it now, just another intersection or two. Worth checking out? Finding her there would be a
massive long shot–it was just a place where they’d eaten once, no special significance, and he couldn’t remember a single thing they’d talked about during the meal–but then again, you never knew what might bubble to the surface in a dead brain.

And Christ, he was running out of places to look. He’d even revisited the Gila River Heritage Center a year back. Nothing there except a few dozen Maricopan Indian corpses lurking in damp earthen homes, crawling out to bite at him.

But no Danielle.

He turned left and coasted into the small station parking lot, opposite a dingy auto-parts store and a ramshackle Mexican restaurant called
Papi’s
. The air bogged with a smell like excrement, thick and nauseating. Outside his bug-spattered windshield the grey depot greeted him, looking lonelier than he remembered it, a coach car divorced from its train. He peered farther up the street. Somewhere off in that direction was the pizza place.

In his chest he felt the faint tug that always accompanied these glimpses of possibility–pulling him along, almost impossible to resist. He sighed. If he
didn’t
check this restaurant out, he’d spend the next month convinced she’d been there, sitting forever in one of those cheap red vinyl booths, waiting for a shitty vegetarian pizza that would never arrive from the kitchen.

At the thought, his eyes glossed.

That did it. He had to go look.

He swallowed uncomfortably and swung the Jeep through a clumsy U-turn in the parking lot, the tyres crunching as they stirred the gravel. He’d pop over to the pizza place, get back here before the RRU showed.

Back on Route 347, he drove a block. Darkened storefronts and shopping plazas beckoned from the roadside, their windows bleak with dust: a plumbing supply store, a grocery
market, a laundromat. His eyes darted in and out of each. He felt his mind racing ahead of the Jeep, rehearsing his entrance into the pizza shop.

Footsteps loud in the foyer. The crackle of brittle linoleum under his boots. He steps into the dining area, and there she is. Danielle at a round table. Her face is wrapped in shadow but he knows her immediately. Her hair is still short, still the red-brown of autumn but stiff like straw. He speaks her name softly. She turns to him, a dry rasping in her throat…

A sudden squeal, loud and jarring, made him jump.

His eyes shot to the rear-view mirror in time to see a green truck skid through the intersection behind the Jeep. Towards the station. Fast.

And burning.

Jesus shit Christ!

The truck–a military transport–was on fire. Flames surged across the hood, whipping over the canvas roof like the mane of a demon animal, thunderclouds of black smoke fuming from the cab. The tyres screamed again, and the truck pitched left, bucking the kerb, slamming head-on into an electric transformer box outside the train station. With an obscene screech of metal ripping metal, the truck rocked on two wheels and then rolled entirely onto its back–crushing the roof, showering sparks outward as the steel frame grated the cement.

It flattened a grove of brown prickly bushes and stopped fifty feet from the station, its tyres spinning in the air. The fire poured upwards through the wheel wells, igniting the dry brush into stalks of red and orange, and the tyres began to bubble, and the smoke turned even blacker.

Marco sat dumbfounded, staring into his rear-view mirror. The entire crash had played out with such speed, he hadn’t even turned to look through the back window.

He turned now, his heart galloping. And that’s when he saw the man in the wreckage.

Upside down in the driver’s seat, hands pounding the windshield.

Stuck in a death chamber as the flames raged into the cab.

With utter hopelessness, Marco observed the burning truck, the driver roasting alive. The wreck was an inferno, rescue impossible. And then he blinked twice–
what the hell
, he shrugged,
never know till you try
–and kicked his own ass into action. He slapped the gear in reverse and twisted to see through the back window as he stomped the gas, and with a frantic squeal of rubber the Jeep launched like a backwards torpedo down the street.

For half a second it shot towards the burning truck–then knifed sideways, off course. The metal pole of a streetlamp rushed at him through the rear window, and he jerked the wheel, and the Jeep swerved again, missing the pole and a mailbox before slamming the kerb opposite the station, launching him vertically in his seat; his head cracked against the overhead interior light and his teeth knocked together with an alarming clatter of enamel.

Scalp throbbing, he thrust the Jeep into park and reached for his bag.
Goddamn it.
The gear had dumped all over the passenger-side floor mat, a mess of maps, flashlight batteries, ammo, foil bags of freeze-dried beef, chicken and veggies. And his gun, the Glock, somewhere in the jumble. Furiously he searched the floor, the back seat, the crevice between the side door.

No gun. Couldn’t find the fuckin’ gun.

He heard a wail from the burning wreck of the military truck.

Screw it
, he thought.
No time.

He scrambled from the Jeep and gasped. Even here, twenty
yards from the truck, the heat was fearsome, as if a massive hand had reeled back and slapped him full force the moment he emerged. He slit his eyes to see. A churning cloud of red and black fire raged from the upside-down truck, stealing up the sides, snaking through the exposed underbelly of cylinders and pipes. The air was oily with the funk of burning tyres, and the smoke grated his eyeballs like sandpaper.

He inhaled, but his throat rejected the air, wracking him instead with a fit of foul-tasting coughs.
Christ
. He wrestled his T-shirt from his chest and covered his mouth with the soft cool cotton. Sucking for air, he circled around the truck to the front cab, where he’d seen the man trapped. The windshield was spider-webbed, blackened with soot. Impossible to see inside.

A burst of flames billowed sideways from the wreck, stoked by a passing desert breeze. He crouched and edged closer, risking a view into the driver’s window.

‘
Hey!
’ he shouted.

Through the curtain of smoke, a hand slapped the glass. The palm pressed pink and bloody against the window. Then it pulled away and slapped again.

‘
Hang on!
’ Marco yelled. He bundled his shirt around his fingers and grabbed for the scalding metal door. The handle turned without effort, but the door rattled only an inch in its frame. The crash had buckled the doors, rendering them inoperable. Deep in the smoke on the other side of the window, a red glow began to throb like a heart. The seats had caught fire. The man’s hand clawed the glass with a new, heightened vigour. Through the murk Marco glimpsed a terrified face–a bald black man, thrashing, his mouth prised open in pain.

Marco’s thoughts reeled. If he had the Glock, he could shoot the glass out.

Or a tyre iron. Back somewhere in the Jeep; he’d have to dig for it.

Or use his fists. Or…

Boots.
His heavy-duty, size 12 boots. Serious shit-kickers–he’d stomped enough corpse skulls these last few years to know.

Dropping, he crawled to the front of the truck and rolled to his back, knees squared, taking aim at the already cracked windshield. The upside-down hood loomed above him, crumpled open an inch, hissing angrily–radiator ruptured, steam seething out. The stink of gasoline was everywhere, an invisible timer counting critical seconds.

How long till the tank blows?

Till the whole truck goes up in a fireball? And me with it?

He kicked as hard as he could. Pain laced up his shins and resonated in his knees, but the glass held. He kicked again. The windshield buckled, sagged inward along a dozen fault lines but did not break. Stinging sweat ran into his eyes as he kicked a third time. The glass at last buckled, and his left boot punched a hole straight through into the cab.

He felt the trapped man grabbing at his foot, slipping off.

‘
Hold on!
’ Marco shouted. ‘
Almost done!
’

He pedalled his legs furiously until the hole had widened, a jagged mouth two feet across, vomiting ugly charcoal fumes. The smoke engulfed Marco. He batted it from his face, hacking, lungs revolting. How the hell could the man inside
breathe
…?

Forceful hands clamped down on his ankles. And pulled. Marco slid a foot forward, deeper through the broken windshield.

‘
Hey!
’ he called, surprised.

Hidden in the smoke, panicking, the man hauled again.

‘Wait…’ Marco said as he bounced forward, seeing his body disappear into the hole up to his waist. He felt his canvas pants bunch, flames ripping at his calves…

… cold hands seizing his shins.

At once the frigid, familiar shock of dead skin against his own electrified the nerves in Marco’s legs, surged up his spine, lit him with terror.

‘Oh fuck,’ he sputtered.

Not a man in the truck–a fucking
corpse.

Get it off!
Every tendon in his legs went wild at once, and he kicked madly, desperately, blindly. His lower body was lost in the black smoke-storm beyond the windshield; he couldn’t see his own feet, had no idea how near his flesh came to the dead man’s teeth. He felt his shin crack against hard bone, the corpse’s jaw or forehead perhaps, and he cried out in horror, certain for a millisecond he’d been bitten. And then a muscular arm coiled around his knee, and the corpse dragged him another half-foot into the smoke.

The heat was livid, agonising. Fire seethed along the green surface of the hood, two feet from his face, a terrible whistle in his ears. In seconds he’d either burn to death or be eaten alive.

Determined, he slammed his hands to the windshield, locking his elbows to keep from being pulled through. The glass itself had become another monster, superheated. Red blisters bubbled across his palms and broke instantly, leaving raw rosy puddles, and he screamed. But he had no choice. He strained against the windshield, arching his back, fighting the rotten weight attached to his legs. His arms shook. He gained an inch back in his favour, then six inches.

But then an ashen hand struck from the smoke, seizing him just above his knee as a beastly growl cut through the fumes; a moment later the corpse’s head broke into the clean air. The skull was burnt hairless, the brown skin melted away in white gummy patches. One eye socket was empty, hollowed out, wafting smoke.

Gasping, Marco snatched his hands from the hot windshield and planted them on the pavement, crying out again as tiny
squares of broken safety glass ate into his torn skin. From the wreck a hurricane of fire swallowed the corpse’s face. The flames shot over Marco’s bare chest. He bucked with a rush of adrenalin, fuelled by the pain, and wrestled another few feet back onto the pavement. His boots cleared the windshield, the soles spewing greasy noxious smoke.

The corpse hung on, stubborn. Its head thrashed from side to side like a panicked animal’s, its lips pulled and snarling. Its other arm sprang from the wreck, grabbed at the glass, hoisted itself forward until finally the dead man’s huge body crashed atop Marco’s shins, pinning him.

The corpse was on fire, flames consuming its back. Blackened tatters of a military uniform clung to its charbroiled muscles–a soldier. Its single eye fixed on Marco, and he felt its fingers dig tighter, the pressure mounting until he swore his kneecaps would pop apart.

Strong fucker.

Marco strained, fighting panic himself. No good. The corpse had too much weight on him now. The soldier was at least two fifty, a real badass of sinew and strength. It had clawed farther up Marco’s body, mouth stretched wide, snapping down…

… but with his quickest reflex, Marco lunged just ahead of the bite and jammed his thumb squarely into the corpse’s empty eye socket, hooking the orbital bone. The corpse’s head jolted to a stop. It chopped at the air, fighting, unable to connect with the meat on Marco’s legs.

Marco drove his thumb deeper, felt it sink into an awful squishiness inside the skull. Black juice splashed from the hole. Marco cringed; he knew from experience that the cuts on his hands weren’t big enough to suck the Resurrection into his veins–he’d stopped worrying about nicks and scrapes years ago–but Jesus, he still hated corpse blood anywhere on him.

C’mon, quit bein’ a baby, and focus
, he thought.
Now what?

A mangled cry from up the street answered him.

He twisted his head, following the sound.

Four more corpses had emerged from the auto-parts store on the corner, shuffling towards him, wet hungry noises gargling in their throats.

The burning corpse crushed Marco with its full weight. With a quick strike it seized his free arm and slammed his wrist to the pavement.

Marco cried out. Couldn’t move. As if his entire body had been nailed to the ground.

The corpses closed in for the kill.

Marco wrestled furiously for his life. He buried his thumb farther into the dead soldier’s orbital socket, desperate to pry the corpse away, but it had him pinned solid–teeth snapping at his neck, inches from his pounding jugular vein. Fire rollicked on the corpse’s back. A stink blew from its lips–not breath, but shit-smelling gas forced from the lungs as it slammed Marco against the pavement. Marco gagged, turned his eyes again to the side street.

The four other corpses were almost on him. Thirty feet away. Three males in torn mechanics’ coveralls, and a female–
no
, the corpse with long black hair was male, too, a naked Maricopan with skin like grey leather and purple gashes on its stomach. It snarled at Marco.