The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (42 page)

Wary, Marco relaxed his fingers on the M9 and consulted Wu with an uncertain look. The sergeant’s bloodied knuckles flexed on his knife.

‘That damage is from the corpse bite?’ Wu clarified. His tone was curt.

‘Yes, of course. What else would it be?’

‘The Resurrection is in you now?’

‘Yes,’ Ballard said, sounding peeved. ‘I already said so.’

Marco swallowed. His saliva tasted thick and gritty–too much dirt in his gums from getting his ass beat to the ground for two days straight. He longed for his toothbrush and some baking powder. ‘But Roger,’ he rasped. ‘How did you stop it from killing you? Your email said your blood–the vaccine–wasn’t ready. You said you would die.’

‘Oh, I almost did, yes, almost.’ Ballard shuddered, remembering. ‘Extreme fever, shaking, muscle rigidity. Uncontrollable nausea. I was bedridden for days. My whole
body burned. And, good Lord, how that bite itched, Henry. That was nearly the worst part. The itch.’

‘But…?’

Ballard brightened. ‘But those symptoms passed. As I predicted, the antibodies did not prevent the Resurrection–but surprisingly they did deflect the fatal blow. I’m infected, but I’m not a walking corpse. And, as it turns out, I was correct about the Resurrection.’

Marco studied him, curious. ‘How do you mean?’

‘About its nature. About how to fight it. You see, everyone else has misunderstood. The Resurrection is not a virus.’ Ballard twinkled. ‘Prion, Henry. The Resurrection is a prion.’

Prion?
The word rolled around in Marco’s mind. He frowned.

Prions
…

For a moment he felt himself stepping outside the body of Henry Marco, professional corpse-killer, wretched with blood and sweat and mud-caked clothes; for a moment he was just regular old Henry Marco again, neurologist, contemplating a diagnosis. Testing what fitted, what didn’t. He nodded once, slowly, then again.
Of course
…

‘A TSE,’ he pronounced.

Ballard nodded eagerly in unison. ‘Exactly.’

‘And… protease-resistant?’

‘Yes, unfortunately,’ Ballard admitted, looking somewhat crestfallen. ‘With a remarkably fast incubation period. Astoundingly fast, really, unprecedented. I spent an entire month administering enzymes to break the sample down, but none—’

‘
Doctors.
’ Wu’s steel voice hammered down on both Ballard and Marco together. The sergeant eyed them admonishingly. ‘Please include
me
in the discussion. You said the Resurrection was… a…?’

Ballard darkened–annoyed, Marco knew, by the burden
of elementary explanations. Patient relationships were never Roger’s strong point.

‘Prion,’ Marco offered, not wanting to agitate Roger any further. ‘Short for “proteinaceous infectious particle”. Basically a malformed protein structure, not a virus. Sounds harmless, but if it gets inside you, really bad things happen. See, your brain and your central nervous system have normal proteins called P-R-P. The prion attacks the P-R-P in your body and mutates them–folds the protein in half, kinda like a taco, into the bad prion shape. Then the mutation keeps going, a chain reaction until your whole brain is converted into a big prion mess.’

Wu listened, his jaw set hard. Analysing every word, Marco was sure.

Ballard parted his lips to speak, but Marco cut him off. ‘So the Resurrection is a new kind of TSE–a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.’

‘Which means?’ Wu asked.

‘A brain disease. A nasty one. All the known TSEs are one hundred per cent fatal. Like kuru…’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The disease kuru originated in Papua New Guinea. Some of the native tribes practise ritual cannibalism there.’

Wu raised an eyebrow. ‘In the South Pacific.’

Ballard nodded excitedly, unable to remain silent. ‘The Japanese prisoner, he was the carrier, Henry. I checked them all, but his blood sample had the infected isoform.’

‘Japanese,’ Wu noted. ‘The terrorist organisation Aum Shinrikyo. One of its officers was incarcerated here.’

Marco nodded slowly. South Pacific. It was starting to make sense.

‘So basically,’ he said, ‘A bunch of insane bad guys fucked with the kuru prion, and bioengineered a TSE a thousand times worse. Prions convert the nervous system, then kill the rest and take over. Walking corpses, Christ, they’re just
prions with arms and legs. Requiring fresh protein–as in, raw meat–to repopulate the system.’

Wu studied the dead complexion of Ballard’s arm, as if searching for a message scrawled in the black veins. ‘Is there a cure?’

Ballard bristled and rolled his sleeve back over his forearm. ‘There is no cure,’ he said, sounding defensive. ‘Not yet.’ He sniffed moodily and buttoned his cuff.

‘So, what then?’ Marco asked. He, too, had grown impatient. ‘What about the antibodies, the DNA vaccination? You said there’s a current formula that works. That anybody exposed to the Resurrection wouldn’t be infected at all. None of…
that.
’ He gestured to Ballard’s arm.

Ballard adjusted his glasses. ‘Correct,’ he answered. He addressed his reply to Marco, noticeably snubbing Wu. ‘A true vaccine. It was difficult, Henry. I travelled many wrong paths, trying to bond the prion with another immunogen. Months developing modified protease—’

‘Enzymes that break down proteins,’ Marco translated to Wu.

Ballard ignored the interruption, speaking over him. ‘—but that proved fruitless. Then I looked at the P-R-P itself, and that’s where I began to visualise the answer…
chemical chaperones.
You see? The right antibody produced by the DNA could stabilise the microscopic pockets in P-R-P. Much like caulk filling cracks in cement, to make them stronger…’

Jesus Christ
, Marco thought. He felt suddenly woozy. He pinched his eyes shut with his chilled fingertips; the pressure was momentarily soothing, a dazzle of light on his retinas.

Is this for real?

Yes
, he answered.
Yes, it is. Roger is really here. Really alive.

Explaining to me how he’s gonna save the world.

When he couldn’t even save Hannah.

The thought incensed him, a fiery blast of anger up through his oesophagus, and the floor seemed to tilt underfoot. Ballard’s voice enveloped him like a fume, swirling, intoxicating. He knew he should sober up and pay attention, listen devoutly as Roger orated like some mystic medicine man around the tribal fire–
oh, Great Spirit of the Resurrection, reveal to us the secrets of your all-powerful vaccine—

And then his head shifted, and he stopped, startled by a thought so unexpected it seemed to originate outside himself.
The science doesn’t matter.
Let Ballard drone on. Let him pin the Resurrection down and cut it open, define its parts, watch the cogs grind under a microscope to determine how it functioned. The truth was, you could dig and dig–ask
how this
, and
how that
, and
how how how
–but you’d never hit bottom. Science only took you so far. After that, there was always a gap you couldn’t cross; the last answer was always out of reach.

‘
That’s your problem, babe
,’ Danielle had accused him. ‘
You need to know how everything works. Can’t anything be magic?
’

Yes
, he agreed at last. Magic. It was
all
magic–mind-boggling, impossible.
A dead man resurrects. A newborn baby takes its first breath. They’re the same. Life flowing from some hidden source. A fountain switched on by a godlike hand. We call it biology, but it’s a miracle… and we only pretend to explain.

He swallowed uncomfortably.
Or can Roger explain miracles, too?

The last thought unnerved him, and he trembled, teetering at the brink of some horrible chasm. He was abruptly certain that to know whatever Roger knew would destroy him–hurtle him into the same abyss his old friend had already fallen.

‘… stop them from folding when the prion attacks,’ Ballard’s voice drifted on. ‘And I created it, Henry, gave birth to it from my own blood. I worked non-stop the year after the military left. Ninety-three injection cycles, millions upon millions of cell divisions, and then it existed. A nucleotide capable of the required immunoresponse…’

As Marco half-listened, images popped into his head; somewhere deep in his brain a slide projector had whirred to life, and his mind clicked from one disturbing snapshot to another, showing him a story he hated to watch, yet couldn’t shut off.
Click.
Roger at the guard’s desk, his hair pasted with blood and sweat, sealing himself into the infirmary as corpses overran Sarsgard.
Click.
Roger experimenting on the infected prisoners here in the hospital ward–drilling holes into poor bastards handcuffed to gurneys, scooping out meaty brain samples, running IV drips of god-knows-what into their stalled veins.

Ballard’s voice drifted to him. ‘… which confirmed that the vaccine worked in rats. I was fortunate in that regard, having an infestation of rats to use for trials. But did you know, Henry, that the Resurrection only kills rodents, that it doesn’t bring them back? And so the question remained whether the formula would perform as effectively on humans…’

Click.
A corpse mauling Roger’s arm during the escape attempt.

Click.
Roger in freefall from the balcony.

Click.
Roger hobbling to his lab, ankle shattered, skin festering. Hiding here, pecking out one final email to Marco as he waited for death.

Click.
Roger–alone in this hellhole, working, eating, shitting, slicing corpses, cackling to himself at night in his godforsaken cell. Four years.
Click, click, click.

‘… success. A fully working vaccine,’ Ballard concluded and wiped his forehead. In Marco’s mind, the slideshow ended, and he resumed his grip on the lab. Roger was here, breathing hard–cheeks red, his brow greased with exertion. He glowed with some sort of sick energy, a glee that crossed beyond sanity and delved into the perverse, as if he had absorbed the prison’s madness and his skin now radiated the aura of rapists and murderers.

He’s crazy
, Marco concluded. The verdict saddened him.
Batshit fucking crazy.

‘Roger,’ he asked uncertainly, ‘Does Osbourne know any of this?’

Ballard sniffed. ‘None of it. I warned you about that man, Henry. His only concern was himself, not helping others.’ He glared defiantly toward the hallway as though Osbourne might momentarily walk through the door. ‘And so I kept my research hidden. I had to be careful until I knew. Osbourne demanded reports, but I scrubbed those clean, took out the useful bits, just to be safe. But then the rescue team left without me. Without my research.’

‘They thought you were dead.’

‘Yes,’ Ballard conceded. ‘Understandable. So I carried on without them.’

In the middle of the room, Wu stood scrutinising the operating table. Marco wondered if he, too, were imagining the atrocities Roger must have performed here. The sergeant tugged firmly on one of the restraint straps and let it drop. The buckle swung like a pendulum, clocking seconds as Wu turned and looked squarely at Ballard.

‘Show me the vaccine,’ Wu said. His green eyes were hard like jewels.

The buckle swung forward, then back.

Counting down to zero.

Breathing coolly through his nostrils, Wu awaited an answer from this mad American doctor, the once-great Roger Ballard. With his stare he marked the precise spot on Ballard’s neck–a centimetre from the larynx, under which the jugular hid–where he would plunge his
lujiaodao
knife if Ballard refused to present the vaccine.

The plan had not changed, despite the remarkable discovery that Ballard was alive; Wu had come for the man’s blood, and he intended to collect it. Briefly he’d considered abducting the doctor, presenting him to Beijing for interrogation, perhaps even forced servitude in an MSS research lab. But Ballard was obviously a radical–unhinged, subversive to authority. Surely he would refuse to aid China, even if his crumbling mind had anything left to offer. And, Wu realised, the two-hundred-mile trek to the Mexican border would be far too perilous with a hostage in tow, especially without his Droid. Alerting MSS for pick-up was still a dilemma.

I’d be lucky to survive,
he judged,
against corpses
and
a crazy man the entire way.

The truth was, he did not need Roger Ballard. What he had here was
better.
Not just the DNA, but the vaccine
itself
. The answer to the Resurrection, a formula for Chinese chemists to study and reproduce. And so he would execute the doctor, then escape with DNA samples and the vaccine like treasures from a buried temple. Beijing would laud him as a hero.

Except… what if the doctor didn’t show him? Wu surveyed the small glass phials on the wall rack, filled with chunky slops in various shades of brown and yellow. Four rows, six containers each. Did one contain the vaccine?

Killing Ballard without the answer would be inconvenient.

‘Can you show us, Roger?’ Marco’s voice broke into Wu’s thoughts.

Wu twitched. He’d almost forgotten the other task remaining.

Kill Henry Marco.

The realisation caused him a sudden, surprising anxiety. He flashed Marco a quick sideways appraisal. His fellow survivor. His unwitting partner. Marco had saved his life, not just once, but several times. In Salton, in the prison yard, on the cell-block walkway. Would Wu have succeeded this far without Marco, even as haphazard and untrained as the man’s methods were?

Of course
, Wu asserted, offended at the thought.
I would not have failed
.

But within him a humble whisper disagreed.

No. You needed him.

His mind drifting, he remembered Marco at the cemetery the previous morning. The two men had sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the chapel, sharing respects for the dead; the grief in the American’s heart had briefly touched his own. Wu had tried to ease the man’s suffering.

But I will kill him now
, Wu reaffirmed.
I will take the vaccine and kill him.