The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (27 page)

Behind it followed a dozen corpses, with more emerging from the bar even as Marco eyed the door–milky-eyed males in mesh truckers’ caps and cowboy hats and denim jeans dyed with blood and beer, some with necks ripped
wide, others dragging their intestines behind them. Dead men who’d hunkered down for eternity at their favourite watering hole. A female, too, a barmaid in a short skirt, its thighs greased black and wet, a glass mug clutched in its hand. And at the back of the pack, a younger corpse, clearly underage, with scabs of crusted black acne and a knobby Adam’s apple. Marco would have felt sorry for it, if he wasn’t so scared shitless.

‘
Wu!
’ he cried again. ‘
Behind you!
’

But Wu wasn’t listening–couldn’t listen–as the bearded soldier swung again with his blade, cleaved the air just over Wu’s ducking head…

… then lunged forward and drove his elbow into Wu’s brow, just above the eyes; Wu’s neck cracked backwards on his shoulders and he dropped again, sprawling to the ground at the feet of the oncoming corpses. The dead were just five steps away, reaching for the kill—

No!

The realisation that he was about to watch Wu die, so soon after reclaiming him alive, stabbed into Marco like a spur to a slow horse’s ass. Adrenalin danced up his body, superheated and enraging.
Fuck the spectator shit. Do something!

He snatched a fast, hard breath and yanked frantically against the chain holding him to the quad; it snapped taut and his skin bunched against the handcuffs, hot with pain, no fucking way to pull through without pulverising every bone in his hand.
Shit!
He struggled upright, his arms contorted back over his head for a better look…

… just in time to see Wu flip to his feet again, dodging the mulleted corpse that swiped at him. The dead horde mobbed the highway, still more coming, a line stretching from the road to the bar door, and Wu saw them all now, fifty hungry rotting drunks swarming as the enemy soldier rushed him again from the front.

He’s done
, Marco understood suddenly, certainly, horribly. But even as Wu’s eyes widened in surprise, his body was already in motion–a high kick backwards, ramming the bald corpse square in the chest and knocking it to its bony ass, and then, so fast the separate movements blended impossibly into one, Wu lashed out with his opposite foot and booted the charging soldier right under the chin. The man staggered back, emitting a wet gargling noise as he clutched his throat.

Marco almost laughed in relief.
Holy shit, Wu. That kicked ass.

The bearded soldier spat blood and snot onto the highway, then raised his knife into a fighter’s stance, arm halfway extended, blade forward. Corpses had crossed from the parking lot onto the road behind, a double wall of death collapsing on both sides–no way out for the battling men. The soldier licked his lips and grinned; blood squirted from his wounded hand as he teased his fingers, waving an invitation to Wu.

The message was clear.
Let’s finish.

For an uncertain moment, Wu appeared too tired to fight. Drained. His shoulder was an eyesore of black and brown dirty blood; his chest grew and shrank as he gasped for oxygen. He teetered precariously as if his ankles might buckle out from under him. The crescent-shaped knife sagged in his hand, suddenly seeming to weigh more than he could carry.

And then, to Marco’s astonishment, Wu hollered–an ear-splitting warrior’s cry, long and furious, like a flame forging steel–and charged.

What happened next was madness.

Wu and the soldier exploded at each other, colliding as the corpses ran amok on the highway, a chaos of dead bodies and two fighters in the middle.

Marco couldn’t believe what he was seeing, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink,
Christ
…

The bearded man struck like a scorpion, his blade overswinging Wu’s head by inches just as a ponytailed corpse lunged from behind, and the soldier spun in a circle and plunged the knife into the corpse’s earhole, then plucked it free with a queasy sucking sound…

… as Wu dodged low and heel-kicked the leg of a scrawny biker corpse in a bandana and leather-studded vest. The dead kneecap tore loose and plopped to the pavement in a sticky puddle, but even before the corpse hit the ground, Wu was already up, his knife shielding his face as his opponent’s blade glanced off with a high-pitched squeal…

… and then two dead males in baseball caps grabbed the bearded soldier’s arms. The soldier slammed his elbows back like two sledgehammers, demolishing the soft dead nasal bones, leaving deep ditches in the corpses’ faces as he pulled his arms forward again and snagged the tip of his knife into the gunshot wound on Wu’s shoulder.

Wu bucked with pain…

… and more corpses surged from the left and right, tightening the circle, a three-way war between Wu and the soldier and a snarling mass of the dead.

All with the same mindless hunger. The same need to kill.

Marco’s head dizzied; he hadn’t taken a breath since the melee began, awestruck by the velocity of the action, the skill of the fighters. It was like watching a movie played somehow at two speeds simultaneously–the dead lumbering and heavy, the soldier and Wu quantum-quick, moving faster than light, slowing down time around them as they fired impossible punches at the corpses and each other. The stakes were all or nothing, and a single mistake, the smallest miscalculation of tempo or distance, meant death to the loser.

The thought overwhelmed Marco, and he gasped, air bounding from his lungs.

His mind cleared…

Oh shit.

Six or seven corpses had crossed the road and were climbing the embankment.

Towards him.

A nice easy meal chained to the quad.

The sight of the climbing corpses jolted Marco like a cattle prod. Frantic, he threw his weight against the chains; they jangled tauntingly and held strong to the quad bumper. He pulled anyway. Needles shot into his shoulders, and he dropped the chains.
Nope.
He scrambled awkwardly to his feet instead, contorting to keep his elbow from dislocating.

‘
Wu!
’ he yelled and immediately felt like an idiot.

Yeah, right.

No chance for Wu to bail him out this time–Wu had his own shitload of trouble down on the road. The sergeant was busy punching a skeletal black male to the asphalt, as beside him the enemy soldier grappled with a fat old corpse in a worm-eaten Dodgers jersey. In a burst of motion the dead barmaid joined the fight, slung its wiry arm around Wu’s neck from behind. Wu’s reaction was instant; he grabbed the beer mug from the female’s hand and smashed the glass against its black teeth. Its gums caved in, it swallowed its teeth…

… as the bearded soldier carved a rancid blubbery strip from the fat corpse’s belly, then turned and lunged, his knife a slick red point aimed at Wu’s heart…

… but Wu twisted, lightning-fast, the female still draped on his back, and the soldier’s blade sank into the corpse’s brain stem instead.

Dammit.
Marco needed another solution, fast. His eyes darted down the embankment, measuring seconds until the corpses reached him–
fifteen? twenty?
–then reeled back to his wrists, the unbreakable chain, the bumper, the quad…

Son of a bitch.

The answer was so goddamn obvious he cursed himself for taking this long to see.

The soldier’s guns. Strapped to the ATV, not five feet from his hands.

The chain was plenty long enough to reach; he snatched up the machine gun, but the weapon was too bulky, too awkward to hold with his hands bound together. He’d never manage.
Shit.
Fine, the shotgun would have to do. Two shots.

Better than nothing.

If it was even loaded.

Grunting with effort, he wedged the stock against his shoulder and swung to aim down the embankment. The corpses were a tight group, just steps away, led by a loose-skinned male with a braided beard. Broken ribs like thorns pierced the skin beneath its right pectoral. Marco planted the shotgun sight on its forehead and fired; the kickback nearly knocked Marco on his ass, slamming him to the quad, but the shot was a bull’s-eye. The male’s head vaporised into a cloud of black mist; its body fell, muddying the dirt as its brain plopped out like pudding.

Marco didn’t pause to congratulate himself. The shotgun erupted again, spraying buckshot wide, drilling holes into the underage corpse he’d seen earlier–
Did your parents know you were a drinker?
Marco wondered fleetingly–as well as the mulleted corpse next to it. Both crashed over backwards and tumbled downhill.

Two with one shot. Bonus points.
Nice.

But the shotgun was spent, and four corpses remained–three males and a topless female with pierced tits that
sagged to the belt of its jeans. The smell of burnt gunpowder tingled heatedly in Marco’s nose, and his thumbs throbbed from the kickback.
Quit yer bitchin’
, he thought. The female attacked, and he swung the shotgun like a baseball bat. But the swing was weak, a lame-ass embarrassing little wave.
Fuckin’ handcuffs.
The corpse grabbed the barrel of the gun and twisted it out of his hands.

Great.
Time for Plan B.

The axe.

He snatched the weapon from the quad and was already in mid-swing back at the female when his eye caught a glint of metal from within the vehicle, a familiar shape and, as the axe completed its arc and chopped sideways into the female’s ear, lodging firmly in the skull with a crisp clean
thwack
, Marco realised what he’d just seen.

Are you kidding me?

He whirled back to the quad even before the female hit the ground, spasming.

The key. The key was in the goddamn ignition.

With the male corpses ten feet away, Marco mounted the quad, dragging the chain over the handlebar. For the first time, he noticed the bulk of an animal skull–a burro? a horse?–tied with twine to the front of the quad like a demented hood ornament.
What the fuck…?

Screw it, no time for that shit.
He refocused on the quad’s ignition. He’d driven a quad once before–an adventure tour in the dunes near Sedona, the year before the Resurrection. He and Benjamin. It had been a ‘guys day out’ while the wives, Danielle and her sister Trish, spent the afternoon at some silly thing called an
energy vortex
at a New Age centre in town.

Hey
, Ben had asked him tentatively, buckling his helmet before the ride.
Are things okay?

What do you mean?

Y’know, man. Things with Danielle.

Everything’s fine.

Cause Trish said—

It’s fine, Ben. Goddamn it.
And with that Marco had started the engine, just like the instructor had demonstrated, and the deafening roar ended the conversation.

Now, dripping sweat, Marco re-enacted that first step. He wrenched the ignition switch to the ‘on’ position, then blinked, frozen, desperate to recall that afternoon’s lesson from all the years of shit and misery since. His hands fumbled on the key. His mind was blank. The first corpse shambled up, and he kicked sideways, vaguely aware that he’d just snapped the dead man’s knee. The corpse crumpled beside the quad.

Brake lever!
There it was, on his left; he yanked the small red handle, and thank god it was like a release on his brain, and the rest came easy–check the fuel cock, push the starter button, feel the engine roar like a buzz-saw as his teeth chattered together. With the handcuffs on, he couldn’t grip both handlebars, so he grabbed the right-side throttle between his palms and gunned the quad as the last two corpses attacked, and with a spitting of soil and pebbles, the wheels swerved left then right and then shot forward, through the grasp of the corpses, bucking like a wild bronco down the embankment as though the horse skull on the hood had come to life.

He almost fell, which would have killed him for sure, but with his ass half on the seat, half off, and his organs jouncing in his chest, he kept his balance and somehow steered. For a pants-shitting second he sailed airborne over a flat rock that angled like a ramp from the earth, then crashed down again with a crunch of metal and plastic and the chain whipping against the handlebar. Brisk air whistled in his earlobes.

Shit!

The highway sped towards him, the war zone, the battlefield below where the corpses and the soldier and Wu were taking each other apart, bit by fleshy bit.

His fingers eased on the throttle, slowing…

Ah, fuck it.

Wu needs help.

He crushed the throttle with both hands, and the quad rocketed ahead.

His senses seemed to speed up, as if powered by the engine; he heard and saw everything–the tortured wails, the knives carving skin, the black asphalt doused with fallen corpses and chopped-off arms and glistening blood-slicks, like a horrible traffic accident minus the cars, and other corpses still on the attack, Wu and the soldier fending them off in between punches and kicks to each other,
thwack thwack thwack
; more dismantled corpses–and then the quad shot to the highway, clipping slack-jawed corpses, sending them spinning with broken legs and backs.

The quad was like a knife itself, slicing the crowd, and Marco didn’t swerve,
refused
to swerve, instead battling the handlebars to keep the wheel straight, every stubborn drop of adrenalin combusting in his head as he hurtled towards his target, locked in…

Hey Wu, buddy ol’ pal

… twenty feet before impact, he glimpsed Wu drenched in blood, bedraggled, his eyeballs paled to a cool green mint, his arms locked with the bearded soldier’s in a deadly stalemate. Each man’s knife strained towards the other’s throat…

My turn to bail your ass out

… the quad barrelled another ten feet, and something in Wu seemed to break at last, too much life pouring from his gunshot wound as the soldier’s razor-sharp
dagger pressed a red dimple into the lump of Wu’s jugular vein…