The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (29 page)

But nothing happened, no crazed attack. Marco killed the engine and scanned the neighbourhood–another sparsely developed ghost town, a bleak boulevard of low-end business establishments crumbling to dust in the desert. A grubby-looking Mexican bar, its brick walls painted a queasy light blue, sulked on the next kerb. Marco eyed it warily. He’d dealt with enough dead drunks for the day. Beyond that stood a shuttered pawn shop and a bail-bond office promising
24/7 Super Service
on a torn banner over its shattered glass door.

Across the road, shielded behind corrugated metal, was a large lot–a scrapyard, stocked with hulking rusted pipes and unrecognisable, multi-jointed farm machinery for which Marco couldn’t imagine a purpose. Telephone poles and stray palm trees led away north. A block farther he spied a car dealership with silent Hondas corralled like steel cattle;
coloured ribbons hung limply from a towering flagpole missing a flag. The ribbons stirred in the breeze. Their motion was the only movement anywhere, as far as he could tell.

‘Fill the tank,’ Wu instructed, sliding off the quad. ‘I’ll look inside.’

‘Inside? What for?’

Wu regarded him disdainfully. ‘I’ve been shot, Doctor. In your medical opinion, should I look for a Band-Aid?’ Without waiting for an answer he limped towards the minimart connected to the gas station. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘My daypack was in the train when the cab exploded. My GPS is gone. I’ll look for a map, too.’

He disappeared into the store, leaving Marco alone outside.

Prick.

Marco had tried pumping gas, but the station had no back-up generator, no way to start the suction in the pipe. Since the Resurrection he’d learned more about the inner mechanisms of a gas pump than any other man alive with a medical degree. But no luck today. The storage tanks were sealed, and even the pipe was dry when he cut the hoses–nothing but a rush of sweet gasoline fumes, lightening his head like a balloon. He tossed the separated gas nozzle to the ground, frustrated, and winced at the clatter of sound.

Jesus, asshole. Don’t ring the dinner bell.

The pump was the old-fashioned kind, with a mechanical display counter that read
$20.96.
He reflected on the numbers, his imagination working. Some panicked man or woman had stood right where he was now, at this pump. When? The last days of the Evacuation? He envisioned them huffing with fear, pumping out the last meagre drops. He wondered how far they’d gotten with their twenty-one dollars’ worth of gas.

Often in the past four years he’d been struck–disheartened, really–by these small leftovers of life, minor evidences
that popped up wherever he travelled. It was like reading the first page of an incomplete novel. Turn the page, nothing but sheets of blank white paper.

Did the hero survive? Or die horribly?

He shivered, unsure whether it was better to know the ending or not.

From inside the minimart he heard Wu fumbling through the aisles, the crunch of broken glass under boots, the remarkably loud crinkle of foil chip bags. A sign in the window advertised $7.59 for a pack of Marlboros. A payphone stood beside the door, its cord ripped loose; the black receiver lay on the concrete kerb below. A ratty clump of hair stuck to the mouthpiece. Probably somebody had used it as a corpse-beater.

He wished Wu would hurry up.

Lying next to the phone was a crushed Styrofoam coffee cup and ten or twelve instant lottery tickets, all weathered and old. And unscratched, Marco noticed. Idly he picked one up.
Desert Dollars
, proclaimed gold type over a cactus shaped like a dollar sign. With his thumbnail he scraped away the silver squares. He’d won $2. He laughed humourlessly and let the ticket slip from his hand. It fluttered back to the kerb.

He squinted into the dark store, feeling his impatience rise.
C’mon, Wu.

The minimart was quiet now.

Suddenly worried, he strained, listening, and heard nothing but the back-and-forth tide of his own breath. Somewhere a few buildings over, a crow cawed.

‘Wu?’ he tried. He spoke in a hush, reluctant to go louder.

He tugged at the netting on the quad and unzipped the bearded soldier’s daypack. Hurriedly he rummaged through the contents. Water bottles, ammo clips, binoculars…

Here we go.
His hand closed on his Glock.

But just then the minimart door swung open, and Wu emerged, carrying a plastic shopping bag. He dumped it on the oil-stained cement at Marco’s feet.

‘Not much left,’ he reported. He bent and dug in the bag. ‘But here. Eat something.’ He produced the antique Snickers bar and handed it over.

Now Marco forced the last bite down his throat; the urge to vomit hit him hard, but he endured five or ten seconds, and it passed. Wu had returned to the plastic bag, and, as Marco watched sullenly, he pulled out a gauze square and a roll of bandage.

‘No alcohol,’ Wu commented, almost to himself. ‘I’ll disinfect with gasoline.’

Marco shook his head, and for the first time Wu noticed the severed gas nozzle lying where Marco had cast it. ‘No gas?’ he asked. His concern was audible.

‘Not a drop,’ Marco said. ‘Not that we can get to, at least. Unless you happen to have a tanker’s wrench-key to open the iron ground caps.’

Wu scowled. ‘The quad’s half full. That won’t get us far.’

‘True, but how far do we need? Any idea where we are now?’

‘Salton, California. According to a business licence behind the counter.’

With paper towels Wu wiped the blood from his face and arms until he was as clean as possible without water to help, then plastered the gauze to the oozing groove on his shoulder. He hissed as he pressed it flat. A red circle bloomed within the white square. Next he unfurled the bandage and began wrapping it around his bicep, under his armpit, securing the gauze in place.

‘I found the road maps to get us to Sarsgard,’ he continued as he worked. ‘Back roads only–the next hundred miles will be hot with Horsemen.’ He noted Marco’s puzzled frown.
‘Horsemen, like our friend back there. A Californian militia, anarchists, linked to terrorists in Iran and Kazakhstan. You’ve never run into them out here?’

‘No, I can definitely say I haven’t. I haven’t been to California in a while.’

‘Consider yourself lucky. Horsemen are dangerous.’

‘What’s with the name? And the skull on the quad?’

Wu shrugged. ‘A biblical reference. As in the Four—’

‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ Marco finished. ‘I get it. Conquest, War, Famine and Death. Very cute. So what are these guys–religious whack-jobs?’

Wu regarded him soberly. ‘Don’t let the name fool you, Doctor. It’s self-aggrandising, meant to intimidate. The Horsemen don’t care about God. They’re thieves and looters. They want money and power, and they’re exploiting the Resurrection for both.’

‘Conquest,’ Marco remembered. ‘That’s how the guy with the beard referred to himself on the walkie-talkie. ‘Conquest Three.’ I overheard him talking.’

‘Yes,’ Wu said. Consternation had crept into his voice. ‘They want Ballard, too–they just don’t know where he is. They need you to guide them.’

‘Gee, I wish I was this popular in high school.’

Wu ignored the joke. ‘That Horseman radioed in our location, so we’d better move. No doubt the others are headed this way. We bought ourselves only a little time by killing the scout.’

The reminder of the bearded soldier’s execution stung Marco anew. To Wu, the man’s murder meant nothing–just a bit of strategy designed to provide an advantage. It was logical, yes, it made sense… and yet it chilled the blood in all four chambers of Marco’s heart.

Wu gave his bandage a final tightening tug, then clamped on the metal clips. Marco watched, not bothering to help.
Probably he should feel grateful; Wu had taken a bullet to rescue him from the enemy soldier–the Horseman. And yet, Marco knew instinctively, there was no altruism in Wu. He’d saved Marco for his own selfish reasons.

And what exactly
were
those reasons?

Marco remembered his question on the train, right before the gas grenade.

‘So you never answered me,’ he said now. ‘Who are you, for real?’

Marco observed as Wu tensed, and the sergeant’s eyes avoided his.

‘And what do you mean by that, Doctor?’ Wu asked, checking his bandage.

‘You’re not some regular Joe Shmoe sergeant. All that shit you fed me, “we’re just the bullets, not the gun” crap. Seems like you know a hell of a lot more than you let on. Sorry if I sound naive, but everything on the train sounded pretty damn top secret. Not the kind of information the Army hands out to grunts.’

Wu patted the bandage and gingerly lifted his arm, testing its mobility. He winced. ‘Relax, Doctor,’ he said. ‘The truth isn’t as sinister as you make it sound.’

‘So what is it?’

‘I’m MI–Military Intelligence.’ Wu looked him in the eye. ‘Planted with the RRU team sent to meet you. Osbourne wanted critical insight to inform all military decisions. That’s my role. It doesn’t affect your role, or our relationship. In fact, it’s so unimportant that it’s not worth the effort to hide it from you, since you guessed. Does that satisfy you?’

Marco watched him warily. Bit by bit, he was forming a complete picture of this man, Ken Wu. He couldn’t decide
whether he liked it. The feeling that something wasn’t right had been dogging Marco since yesterday, a constant irritation like a small jagged rock in his boot. But now, at least, Wu’s confession helped explain matters.

‘Do I still call you “Sergeant?” ’ he asked.

Wu shrugged. ‘If you’d like. It was my rank, prior to MI.’ He bent and returned the medical supplies into the plastic bag, organising the contents.

Marco chewed his lip. He wasn’t quite ready to forgive and forget. Still reverberating in another corner of his mind was the bearded soldier’s death scream.

‘What did you say to him?’ he asked Wu.

Wu looked up, puzzled. ‘To whom?’

‘The Horseman. Before you left him there, you said something in his ear.’

The temperature of Wu’s skin seemed to drop, and he gazed at Marco with frosted displeasure. Again Marco sensed calculations clicking and whirring behind the man’s green irises, as if circuit boards existed where his brain should be.

‘I told him,’ Wu said flatly, ‘that it was my duty to destroy him.’

‘Wow.’ Marco made a sour face. ‘Very patriotic of you.’

‘I sense you disapprove, Doctor.’

‘Of leaving him to die? Fuck yes, I disapprove of that.’

‘Our lives meant nothing to him. He received no worse than he would have handed us.’

‘So you killed him, just like that.’

‘Yes. I’ve killed many men like him. Enough to know when it’s required.’ Wu’s eyes flared a warning, as if expecting a challenge.

But Marco already sensed himself backing away.
I can’t do this
, he thought.
I’m in over my head. So goddamn deep you’d need a submarine to find me.
He regarded Wu through what felt like a hot mist and swallowed miserably.

‘I never killed anyone,’ he said. ‘Until today.’

The admission seemed to catch Wu off guard. The soldier frowned.

‘Not anybody living,’ Marco continued. ‘Only corpses. What I mean is, I never took anybody alive and made them dead. I only do “dead to deader”, and that’s tough enough. Like Cassandra Pearson–she was a dead fourth grader. That was the hardest. She was… sitting on the roller coaster at Knotts Berry Farm, not moving, just sitting in the station, waiting…’

The corners of his mouth tugged tight.
Why am I telling him this?

Because
, he realised,
it feels good to confess.

‘Anyway,’ he said, cutting the memory short, regrouping, ‘today tops that. I mean, I know he was a bad guy, or whatever. But… he was alive, still a normal man, and I…’

He sighed dismally and gave up. ‘Oh well. Shit happens, right?’

Wu’s face clouded. He bent back to the bag, fished out a handful of road maps and carried the bag to the quad, stashing it in the side net. When he turned to Marco again, his countenance had shifted. The bent shape of his lips almost suggested empathy–but too guarded and too austere to be kind. He handed Marco the maps.

‘Find Sarsgard,’ he instructed, then studied the highway in the direction they’d come. ‘We’ve been stationary too long already.’

Marco thumbed through the maps, distracted. A Rand McNally road atlas of California and a few smaller folded maps. Palm Springs… Victorville & Barstow…

He froze on the third map in the pile.

Hemet & Perris.

His heart quickened. Hemet, California.

Jesus, how close was he to Hemet? The other maps slipped
from his hand as he knelt and spread the crinkling paper on the cement.
Hemet.
Right there. He tapped a tiny black dot with his fingertip and felt himself flush with the discovery. Next he scanned the alphabetical index of city names. Salton… Salton…

There.

He eyeballed the distance to Hemet. Ninety miles, maybe.

Should he try?

Of course he should try. How could he not? Excitement mixed with a sick, reluctant weight in his stomach.

But you don’t really want to go there, do you?

He ignored this and focused back to the map. Sarsgard Medical Prison was much farther north; Salton to Hemet would be a huge detour, steering them south on a lonely sojourn through desert mountains before carrying them north again.

Could add half a damn day to the trip.

Then again, Wu
did
say back roads.

He became suddenly conscious of Wu watching him. He cleared his throat and gathered up the map, tucking it under his elbow. ‘We’ll stay on this road here, Route 111. Not much choice right now, but we can ditch it a few miles up, then go hide ourselves on some quieter roads off the beaten path. I’d say two hundred miles to Sarsgard.’

Oh, and we’ll just happen to be passing through a town called Hemet. I forgot to mention that. I’ll let you know when we get there.

Hemet. Danielle’s hometown, where she’d been born, where she’d grown. Where both her parents were buried. The cemetery where—