The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (33 page)

Tipped over beside it was an aluminium walker.

The corpse’s filmy eyes were fixed on the cross behind the altar. Its parched lips smacked together, and the head bobbed once more. It didn’t turn, even when Wu spoke.

‘What is it doing?’ he asked.

Marco felt a shudder twist up his spine. ‘I… I think it might be praying.’

Wu studied Marco briefly. ‘You’re serious.’

‘Well, I mean, not really praying–but stuck in the motion of it. He must’ve been the religious type. Church was real important to him. Emotional geography.’

Wu stared. ‘Emotional geography?’

Marco shook him off. ‘Never mind, long story. The short version is that for the same reason Roger Ballard is wherever he is, this particular corpse is here.’

Wu watched the transfixed corpse. ‘Doesn’t it wish to eat us?’

‘I don’t know. I’d assume so. But… maybe this is more important to it.’

Jesus Christ, listen to me
, Marco thought.
What am I saying?

This corpse found a higher calling?

‘Anyway,’ he said, feeling the urge to back-pedal. ‘Let’s not stick our hands in its mouth. I suggest we retreat a few rows, and observe from there.’

Wu nodded. ‘Yes.’

They slipped back down the aisle and shuffled into the last pew. Outside, the dogs were stubborn; the world reverberated with a constant high whine and the occasional squall of animals fighting. Every few seconds intruded a scratching at the oak.

‘Might as well get comfortable,’ Wu said. ‘We could be here a while.’

‘Not too long, I hope. We’re in trouble if the rest of the parish shows up.’

Six rows ahead in the darkness the old corpse quivered in pantomime worship, and Marco wondered… If God actually
did
exist, what the fuck was He thinking?

‘It’s a mean joke,’ Marco observed. He sat alongside Wu in the musty wooden pew, hands folded in his laps, legs crossed at the ankles. The coloured light from the windows had intensified a few brighter notches up the spectrum; the sun outside had prevailed over the clouds. Marco
guessed the time was around noon. His stomach had begun to gurgle again, an embarrassing loud complaint in the quiet chapel.

He pressed a hand to his gut and continued. ‘A dead chunk of meat praying to a giant plaster replica of Jesus. Totally oblivious to the fact that
this
is its afterlife, and its God is fake.’

Wu stirred. ‘From your tone, I assume that’s your assessment of all religion.’

Marco laughed mirthlessly. ‘Ha. Yeah.’

‘You don’t believe in God.’

‘Not really.’

‘I thought you bring peace to tortured souls. Isn’t that your business?’

Marco flashed a bitter smile. ‘That’s marketing, my friend. Words chosen to sell a service. I doubt the corpses actually give a shit.’ He hated himself the moment he said it. An immediate image of Danielle appeared to him–emaciated, mould-faced, suffering who-the-fuck-knows-where, with her guts torn out and the agonising need to eat raw skin…

He squeezed his eyes shut, erased the image. Blobs of light swirled in his retinas. Somewhere within the formless shapes he heard the Horseman soldier still screaming.

Had Danielle ever peeled a man apart like that?

Horrified, he recoiled, blinked his senses back to the chapel. The morning had beaten him down, he realised, given him a severe spiritual ass-kicking. His chest ached something fierce, as if Hannah’s tombstone had toppled onto him, crushed his heart flat.

He became aware of Wu observing him curiously.

‘Sorry,’ Marco said. ‘I’m kinda having a bad day.’

The men waited, serenaded by the baying of dogs beyond the stained glass. Five minutes passed, then ten. Wu’s breath
cycled slow and even, and Marco thought he might have drifted off to sleep; as far as he knew, the sergeant hadn’t rested in two days.

Then Wu spoke.

‘I come from a Chinese family,’ he began haltingly, guardedly, as if some unspoken thought were hiding between the words. ‘Very traditional. I was not given a name the day I was born. My uncle Bao Zhi had instructed my brothers and sisters to refer to me only as an “animal”. Not because he was cruel–he loved me very much–it was simply his trick to fool evil spirits that were believed to kidnap human newborns. When I was several weeks old, he honoured me with my father’s name, Kheng Wu, who had died before my birth. As a child, I was told that my achievements in this life would bring happiness to my father’s spirit.’

The sergeant raised his chin, his eyes absorbing the stained-glass depictions of saints and holy miracles immortalised in the chapel windows. Marco waited, not sure what Wu was trying to tell him. Wu seemed to detect his uncertainty.

‘My point, Doctor,’ Wu continued, ‘is that the dead do “give a shit”, as you said. My uncle’s culture perceives death differently than Americans. The traditional Chinese believe that the dead and the living exist together–side-by-side in the same plane, not infinitely separated dimensions like your Heaven and Hell. Our dead are not gone. They are here with us, literally, and even though they are spirits, they have physical needs.’

‘Needs?’

Wu nodded. ‘As children we prepared them food and water, left them toothbrushes and combs, burned “spirit money” into the air for them to collect and buy goods. If my uncle Bao Zhi were alive today to explain–he himself passed away years ago–he would perhaps tell us that, in the Evacuated
States, the spirits have assumed a physical form as well. Dead bodies that eat and walk. Frightening, but still we must honour them. Because the dead connect us to God.’

Marco pinched his dog-bitten ear, reflecting.

Spirits in physical form
…

‘So you’re saying what?’ he frowned. ‘The Resurrection is some sort of Chinese afterlife? We should honour the dead by feeding ourselves to them?’

Wu shook his head disapprovingly. ‘You misinterpret, Doctor. I don’t pretend to understand the Resurrection. I’m only assuring you that there
are
spirits here on earth, real spirits. Some remain invisible, the way it has always been, and some now travel in rotting bodies–for whatever purpose the universe has deemed necessary.’

‘And so,’ he added, flexing his neck left and then right, ‘I accept my duty to respect the dead. To hold them sacred the way my uncle taught me, the same way you respect life. This morning, for example. You were repulsed by me because I killed the Horseman soldier. You would have spared him, even though he posed great danger to us both.’

Marco flushed. He hadn’t known Wu had read him so clearly.

‘So now let me ask you, Henry Marco, corpse-killer-for-hire,’ Wu said. ‘Would it surprise you that I’ve never killed a corpse?’

Marco raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean? Never?’

‘Never.’

‘Not once, since the Resurrection?’

‘No.’

‘Jesus,’ Marco admitted. ‘That’s hard to imagine.’

‘Not from my perspective.’

Marco frowned. ‘Maricopa,’ he said. ‘You pulled the burning corpse off me, and I wondered why you didn’t use your gun.’

‘Yes. For the purpose of my own survival, I will confront a corpse, disable it if necessary–but to kill it would dishonour my father.’ He shrugged, then scowled and put a hand to his shoulder, cradling the bullet wound as if to calm the pain. ‘Men, however. In my life, I have learned to kill the men who oppose me, never to hesitate…’

He trailed off, woozy with fatigue and discomfort, his swollen lip curled in distaste. His eyes rolled back, the lids half closed in a trance. Perhaps the conversation continued on in his head; Marco didn’t know, but the silence was immediately odd, awkward, like a lull in an argument. Sadly, Marco faced front again.

In the first row the elderly corpse bobbed its head–how many times more before the skull simply snapped from the spine and thumped to the altar?–and a pained, wheezing sound creaked from its putrid mouth.

Marco felt his gun holster rubbing under his arm.

He thought about the Glock, the single bullet it held.

He could just walk up there, end the corpse’s misery. Put the muzzle right square against that brown patch of skull, and pull the trigger.

Would that really be dishonour? A violation? Was Wu right?

No. Marco couldn’t accept that.

I’m helping them
, he thought.
Returning them.

But returning them where?
countered some other voice in his mind, traitorous, subversive.
What if
here
is where they’re supposed to be?

No.
He shuddered the doubt off him like a spider he’d found crawling on his skin.

Danielle needs me. My help.

When I find her, I’ll return her. That’s honour. That’s love.

He sniffled up the loose snot in his nose as the pew creaked under him.

Then he cocked his head, realising why the silence had struck him as so odd.

‘The dogs are quiet,’ he announced.

It was true. The howls, the growls, the yelps… gone.

At the sound of Marco’s voice, Wu was instantly alert. He bucked up straight in his seat and grabbed at his knives, his breath quick as if he were being chased. Marco wondered what things Wu saw in his nightmares.

‘The dogs,’ Marco said again, reassuringly. ‘I think they left.’ He slipped from the pew and crept to the vestibule, afraid to make noise that might summon the animals back. He put his ear to the oak door and listened. Nothing.

He jostled the table aside and then, hesitating, held his breath and clicked down on the brass handle. The door cracked an inch. He propped his shoulder against the wood, ready to slam it shut if drooling jaws came snapping through the gap.

Again, nothing. He peered outside.

The dogs weren’t there. Tufts of torn fur rolled like tumbleweeds in a breeze over the walk, and dark fresh dirt lay in piles where they’d dug at the walls. Brown paw-prints crossed the road, disappearing into the brush. He scanned the shadows.

‘All clear,’ he determined. ‘We should go now.’

‘Doctor.’

The solemn note in Wu’s voice made him turn. The sergeant was standing at the carpet edge, just inside the vestibule.

‘What I explained about my father, and the dead,’ Wu began, then stopped, then began again. ‘I meant it to bring you comfort.’

The remark caught Marco off guard. He blinked, not understanding.

‘I meant,’ Wu said, ‘that your daughter is not gone. She, too, is on this journey–travelling with you, watching over
you. Petitioning the universe on your behalf, even when you say you don’t believe. She is the reason you’ve survived this far.’

Marco paled. A chemical heat passed through his body, leaked into his eyes.

He remembered Danielle, that day at the grave.

We can’t, Henry. We can’t leave her here. Alone.

Delle. Baby, we have to go… I promise she’s not alone.

‘I’d like to think that,’ he finally allowed. It came out strained and hoarse.

Wu’s bruised face regarded him in the soft light, unsmiling but, for the first time Marco could recall, not unkind. The sergeant nodded, then straightened the knives on his belt with a solid tug, signalling an end to the talk. He brushed past Marco to the door.

‘We’d better hurry,’ he said. ‘The dogs might circle back.’

‘Yeah.’ Marco rubbed his neck and turned for a final look at the pews. The pious corpse hadn’t moved. It would remain here for eternity, prayers unanswered.

Briefly he wished he knew the corpse’s name.

Maybe someday he’d come back this way on a job.

Peace be with you.
What he used to say as a kid before leaving church with his dad.
Peace be with you. And also with you.

Outside, the sun was bright now, the clouds evaporated. The men jogged down the looping road, their senses tuned for any indication of stray dogs or corpses. Once, wistfully, Marco glanced back up the hill towards Hannah’s grave, tantalised by a fleeting hunch that he’d missed Danielle by minutes.
What if she showed just after I left?
he wondered but just as soon banished the thought, knowing it would only drive him mad.

Rounding the bend, he saw the quad a hundred yards ahead, undisturbed, exactly as they’d left it. The road ran
straight through a suffocating tunnel of low-hanging pine branches and grass on either side. He faltered half a step, thinking he might be entering a perfect trap, baited with the quad… but what the hell could he do? He bolted the last hundred yards like a sprinter to the finish line, certain the dogs would come pouring through the trees and tackle him off the track. He reached the quad untouched.

‘We should be clear,’ Wu said, arriving behind him. ‘I heard barking and what sounded like a corpse screech, back in the opposite direction. The dogs found lunch.’

‘Poor dead guy. Even I feel sorry for it.’

‘Check the map,’ Wu said, stone-faced. ‘We need to get back on course.’

Whatever glow had softened Wu back at the chapel was gone now, Marco noted. The sergeant was all business again.

‘Gotcha,’ Marco said. He, too, felt restored from the gloom of the church interior, reinvigorated by the fresh, grass-smelling air and the promising sun. He fished the Rand McNally map from his back pocket and spread it over the seat of the quad.

‘How far until Sarsgard?’ Wu asked.

‘Hmmm… hundred miles, maybe.’

‘Good. Get us there before dark.’ Wu took up his position on the rear rack.

Marco refolded the map, settled into the driver’s seat. It struck him that he was growing acclimated to Wu’s curt orders, no longer as compelled to push back. Wu knew what he was doing, Marco figured. No point arguing.

But still…

‘Y’know, there’s a word we still use in civilian life. It’s called “please”,’ he quipped. He didn’t bother turning to see how Wu received the remark. ‘Anyway, we’ll hit the first gas station out of town. After that, it’s a straight shot, no stops.’

He started the quad and swung a U-turn, heading back.
Sweat had plastered his shirt to his skin; he was eager to ride again and let the wind cool him down. Obliging, the quad picked up speed and skimmed along the cracked cemetery road. Seconds later they zipped through the main gate, back to the world of sidewalks and pavement and brick buildings. The shift was disconcerting; the city seemed more lifeless than the graveyard.