The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (26 page)

Still, the terrorist intelligence was spotty, he reasoned, clearly lacking critical details such as Ballard’s location at Sarsgard. The Horsemen were relying on Marco to lead them. They were like hyenas circling a lion’s kill, hoping to steal a meal; the superpowers may have found the vaccine, but it was the Horsemen who planned to snatch it away at the last moment for a sale to terrorist allies. Horsemen were mercenaries–but they were fierce and good at their jobs.

Defeating this enemy would be hard. Very hard.

Which meant Wu could afford no more errors like the one he’d already made, back on the Sunset Limited. True, he’d known the train was being stalked, but carelessly he had assumed a single operative working alone.
Fool!
When Wu had accelerated the train to outrun the first Horseman quad, the driver had simply radioed ahead, thirty miles north.
The second Horseman had been ready with the gas launcher as Wu had driven into the trap.

And how many others were out there now? Patrolling up and down California? Converging across the desert to collect Henry Marco, even as Wu wasted time here wondering? One Horseman was bad enough.
Strike now, before more arrive.

Half an hour ago the gas grenade had torn into the locomotive, and Wu had become briefly the hunted, not the hunter–scrambling for self-preservation, furious that the food chain had shifted against him. He dropped to the floor and stole a single deep breath, and seconds later orange smoke filled the cab. One lungful of clean oxygen–it was all he had been allotted, and all he would need. He scrabbled up the corridor on hands and knees, the smoke chasing him. He floundered over the mummified engineer corpses as somewhere back in the fog he heard Marco choke and crash against the console.

Nothing Wu could do about that now. His lungs bulged, his eyes burned. He reached the door to the next coach, slapped the button, and collapsed through the door as it opened. Tendrils of smoke reached after him, but the door closed, slicing them off.

Gasping, he rolled to his back. Tears beaded on his lashes, poison flushing from his eyes. From the train’s undercarriage he heard the air brakes hiss, felt a check in momentum. The train was slowing. With nobody at the controls, the alerter had cut the engine and engaged the brakes.

He coughed up a bitter-tasting phlegm and, as his head cleared, so did his thoughts.

Marco.

The American was alive, without doubt. The gas wouldn’t be lethal; Wu knew the stink of Kolokol-1, an old Soviet incapacitator still manufactured in black markets.

Knockout gas, of course. Deadly force would be illogical;
the enemy wanted Marco alive to lead them to Roger Ballard.

Wu stiffened and sat bolt upright.

The enemy needed only Marco. Orders would certainly call for Wu’s immediate execution. He could flee and save himself… but if he were discovered missing on the train, an alarm would be sounded, the area scoured until he was found and terminated.

How, then, to prevent this? His mind whirled, grabbing at ideas, and in moments he’d cobbled together a plan–a risk, but a plan. But time was short. He had to act.

Bracing himself, he stood and elbowed the button on the door. As it groaned open, he inhaled, stockpiling his lungs again.

Then hurtled back into the smoke-filled locomotive.

The fumes grabbed him instantly, absorbed him into a ghostly orange gloom. He couldn’t see beyond his outstretched arms, but he knew where to go, where to stop. The dead engineers appeared at his feet. Without pause he grabbed the top carcass by its shoulders and wrenched; it broke apart from the second body with a rude crack.

Good so far. Already Wu detected an ominous urgency between his ribs–his body begging him to breathe.
Hurry.

Straining, he dragged the body to the front of the cab. Marco lay in a crumpled heap, unmoving, but Wu had no time to check for a pulse; he dumped the dead body next to Marco and rolled it on its stomach, face down on the floor.

His army gear jacket hung over the stool at the controls; he snatched it and, hastening, wrestled it onto the engineer. A decoy–believable enough in the murky room, provided it wasn’t examined closely. Wu could only hope it wouldn’t be.

The side door of the locomotive rattled in its frame, making him jump.

They were here. Entering the cab.

His lungs convulsed.
Go!
No time to seek his daypack in the mist. Desperately he clamped a hand to his throat, crushing his trachea shut–a single breath would render him unconscious, deliver him to execution–and dashed down the hall, knives bouncing on his belt. Just as the side door screeched open on rusted gears, Wu burst out the back exit, spilling into the connector between cars and ducking as the door shut behind him.

His mouth exploded open, fresh oxygen nourishing his body.

Gulping hungrily, he waited… thirty seconds passed… his deer-horns drawn, ready to strike if the door opened… if anyone pursued him.

Nothing.

Tentatively he stood and peered through the glass porthole.

The gas inside had thinned just enough to see down the corridor, all the way to the cab. He sighted a barrel-chested soldier–
just one
, Wu thought, feeling his hopes lift–outfitted in an olive-green uniform and a beret, muddling past the control stand. The man looked more like a monster, his face deformed by a black gas mask as he swept a flashlight through the cab. The flashlight beam stopped on Marco’s unconscious face…

… hovered there as if considering…

Then continued a metre farther until the beam lit upon the dead engineer, face down and disguised in the American army jacket.

Wu tensed. Silently he cast his thoughts at the man.

Go ahead. Believe what you see. Be a fool.

The soldier bent and clipped a set of handcuffs on Marco’s limp arms. Then he stood again and pulled a pistol from his belt; he aimed straight down and fired two shots into the back of the dead engineer’s skull.

The blasts were like bursts of laughter in Wu’s head. He smiled coldly, pleased with himself, as the soldier holstered his firearm and grabbed Marco by the ankles, dragged him to the open door, and lowered him outside.

Relieved, Wu turned and slumped against the wall. The stink of the gas had soaked into his shirt. He crinkled his nose and wiped his agitated eyes with his arm.

Ten minutes later, long enough to ensure that the soldier had abandoned the train, Wu had crept outside and found his perch on the embankment as the morning sun broke over the hills. The heat cracked him across the shoulders like the first lash of a whip.

He watched as farther down the hillside the bearded Horseman struck Marco with a violent backhand. Wu twitched. His veins swelled with a rush of liquid anger, and he frowned, curious at his reaction. Whether the American suffered meant nothing to him–or shouldn’t, at least–yet somehow, Wu sensed, this was a violation.
An insult
. Yes, that was the explanation.

Henry Marco belonged to Wu, and Wu alone would decide the punishment.

He cut the thought short. At the moment it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting the American back alive before more militiamen arrived—

His eyes shot wide.

The Horseman had a detonator in his hand.

At once Wu recognised the logic he himself would have applied if he were the enemy. The locomotive had been wired to explode–
plastique
, he guessed fleetingly,
C4 or Russian PVV
, although it made no difference now–to render it useless to hostile operatives who might follow. The train sat ten metres up the hill, so close he could still smell the lingering acrid tang of the gas. His mind lit up with a single word, bright and brief like lightning–
move
–and then switched to
wordless instinct; he flipped from the ridge, away from the tracks as the explosion tore open the morning and fire swarmed over the terrain he’d only moments before escaped.

For an instant the flash was blinding, and he threw himself down the embankment, betting that the Horseman would miss the sudden move–counting on the man’s eyes to be covered from the blast. In mid-roll he regained his feet and sprinted to the grove of low-lying bushes near where Marco lay captured. He threw himself at their roots, merging with the shadows as metal hail from the exploded train clanged to the tracks.

He held there, panting, tense. But he’d gambled correctly; his leap to safety had gone unnoticed, and the Horseman did not attack.

Within moments the desert was calm again.

But not Wu. Inwardly he raged, cursing the Horseman. Cursing
himself.
His daypack had been in the locomotive, and his Droid. Destroyed now. He pinched his eyes closed and exhaled.

Focus
, he counselled himself, listening to his breath.
Calm your thoughts. Focus ahead.

He quieted his lungs and, like a sleek, soundless cat, circled the brush.

This, finally, felt right–being the hunter once more, ears buzzing, muscles eager, his nostrils wide and hungering for the sweet smell of the kill. He reached the edge of the brush and peered through the gnarled sticks. The mercenary soldier was three metres below on the hillside, crouched over Marco, a gun shoved between the American’s bleeding lips.

‘Or pow,’ the soldier said. ‘Like Wu.’

The Horseman laughed.

Smouldering, further insulted by the invocation of his name, Wu coiled the power in his legs. His body ached like a compressed spring, begging for release.
Not yet.

He dug his fingernails into the rough earth and anchored himself there with the pain. Sweat prickled on his skin, evaporating away into the early desert heat.

He waited.
Patience.

The soldier removed the gun barrel from Marco’s mouth and stood.

Kill!

Unleashing his anger, Wu sprang–pouncing airborne as his eyes measured his prey below, marking the nape of the neck, the soft spot where the knives would plunge and rip…

… but the Horseman’s senses were honed, too, reflexes quicker than Wu had bargained for and, at the sound of skittering pebbles, the soldier’s head jerked, and the man spun…

… and as the gun exploded and the bullet bit his arm, Wu realised that he’d miscalculated, that this vulgar soldier was
not
prey but a perfect killer like himself, and with a thud of bone against bone, the two blood-soaked predators crashed down the hillside to determine whose throat would be torn, and who would live to hunt again.

Marco watched. Watching was all he could do–sprawled on the dirt, handcuffed to the quad–as the bearded soldier whirled with his gun upraised, and a fast-moving shadow struck from overhead, and the gun blasted, and Marco twisted away, confused, certain that the next bullet would come streaking right into his gut.

Instead the soldier hit the ground, tackled by…
a corpse
, Marco thought, his heart misfiring.

But no, thank god… it was
Wu.

Wu! Alive, bleeding.
Shot.
The bullet had grazed him,
clipped off a chunk of his arm as it passed. The wound spat red droplets like a demonic sprinkler as Wu and the soldier tumbled down the embankment, caterwauling like animals as they went.

The two fighters somersaulted onto the desert highway and somehow landed upright, bouncing to their feet like an acrobat act gone wrong, each man streaked with blood but determined to perform. The soldier struck first–a powerhouse punch straight to the gory bull’s-eye on Wu’s left shoulder, the gunshot wound. Wu barked in pain and staggered backwards, and the soldier struck again, this time with the gun in his hand, hammering Wu across the jaw–a sickening
crack
that echoed in Marco’s stomach–and Wu’s legs seemed to go slack, and he toppled to his back. Without hesitation the bearded man raised the gun, aimed into Wu’s chest—

‘HEY!’
Marco screamed.

The soldier flinched–barely, barely–his head cocking to the side for just the smallest fraction of time, but it was enough.

On the ground, Wu seemed to burst into fire.

A white-hot flash of light consumed him whole, stretched across the desert and then just as instantly retracted, and Marco saw Wu on his feet, the steel rounded knife blade in his hand, catching the sun. With a snap of his wrist, Wu sent the knife spinning like a lethal discus at the distracted soldier. The blade gyrated twice and clipped the soldier’s gun hand.

The man yipped as his firearm clattered to the road and his fingertips tumbled and scattered, sliced off, his fingers spraying blood like hose nozzles. His thumb flopped and bounced at his wrist, held only by a disgusting meaty hinge.

In a burst Wu was up again, darting, sliding feet-first at his opponent. With a single fluid motion Wu kicked the
gun where it lay, sending it into the brush off the highway, and followed with a chop to the man’s ankles, toppling him to the pavement…

An ugly racket, a sound like splintering, distracted Marco.

The bar across the road. Bill’s. The door had broken open.

Out into the daylight staggered a putrid-skinned corpse in a red plaid sleeveless vest, the crown of its head bald and peeling, long ratty hair clinging to the sides around its ears. Its mouth hung freakishly open, the bottom jaw broken and resting on its chest, exposing its entire bottom row of shit-coloured rotten molars and a tongue torn in two, each half wriggling obscenely independent of the other. It stumbled a few steps into the dirt lot, looking like a drunk venturing out to his car after a hard night’s drinking.

A
very
hard night for this poor bastard.

‘Aw, shit,’ Marco groaned.

The corpse had drinking buddies.

The bar was emptying, a mob of the dead crowding out through the door, wakened by the explosion and the highway fistfight. Crossing the lot towards Wu and the soldier.

‘
Wu!
’ Marco shouted.

On the road the soldier had regained his feet. His gun hand was useless, spouting blood that hit the pavement in thick drops and congealed immediately in the dirt. But in his left hand he’d drawn a knife of his own, a hunting knife, thick and serrated, and he slashed at Wu like a madman. Wu dodged, shielded himself with his remaining knife, and the metallic
clang
of blade striking blade reverberated up the hill as the first corpse reached the highway.