The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (43 page)

An unexpected memory leaped across his thoughts. His first mission so long ago. Tenzin Dawa, the monk who had protested the railway, dying at Wu’s feet. The shaved head, the wizened face, eyelids fluttering as blood cascaded from the wrinkled slit throat. The orange robe dyed a deep bottomless crimson. Wu’s red-stained hands had shaken for hours afterward; he had not wanted to snuff out that life. But China had needed him. The railway had been built.

Now, China needed him again.

Killing Marco
, he thought,
will be like killing for the first
time. Difficult. But I will do it. Like Cat Catching Mice. The cat does not pity its prey.

But first, he needed the vaccine.

‘We’re waiting, Doctor Ballard,’ he said politely and readied his knife.

Ballard frowned; Marco sensed his reluctance. But the truth was, Roger had been waiting years to show off–to
anyone
, even someone he perceived as an army idiot like Wu. On the table the swinging belt strap lost its momentum and went still, and Ballard nodded. Ruled by pride, he turned to the wall-rack and extracted a rubber-corked glass phial from the bottom row.

He raised the container as if prepared to give a toast. Inside, a sludge resembling brown yogurt quivered as he issued it a provocative jiggle.

‘The vaccine,’ he said importantly, hovering just above a whisper.

Wu’s eyes locked on the phial. ‘You’re certain, Doctor? That it works?’

‘Oh, yes, very. I’ve tested it many times, on myself, with no additional increase of the Resurrection prion in my system.’

Marco baulked. ‘On yourself? But–what do you mean, tested? Many times?’

Ballard’s face clouded.

‘You injected yourself with the Resurrection?’ Marco tried.

‘No, Henry.’

Marco persisted. ‘Were you bitten again?’

Ballard said nothing. He turned and slid the phial back into the rack.

‘Tell us, Doctor,’ Wu warned. Marco felt his heartbeat
picking up speed. Somehow he knew–just
knew
–Roger’s answer would disturb him.

‘I consumed infected meat,’ Ballard said. ‘Corpses.’

For several excruciating seconds, no man spoke.

Marco broke first. His lungs expelled a rush of horrified air. ‘Oh,
shit
.’

Wu’s lip curled with obvious disgust. ‘You ate the dead…?’

Ballard glowered. ‘To survive, yes, Sergeant Wu. The prison food locker was stocked for a year. Once it emptied, I required a new supply. Rats were an option, but small, you see–not much sustenance. A single corpse can last weeks.’

Marco shuddered, bile in the bottom of his throat, his head a gallery of yet more unwelcome pictures. Ballard butchering corpses in their cells. Carving the putrid sloppy meat from bones. Gnawing strips of tough grey skin like animal jerky.

‘Roger,’ he sputtered. ‘Those were people…’

Ballard regarded him quizzically. ‘Of course, Henry.’

Same old Roger
, Marco thought. His anger flared again. People had never really been human, not to Roger. More like specimens. And now a daily food source.

You crazy self-centred asshole.

Ballard seemed to read his thoughts. ‘I had no choice, Henry. It made sense. And it provided added confidence of the vaccine’s efficacy. Consuming the prions should have overloaded my system, but there was no negative effect at all.’

‘Did it ever occur to you,’ Marco demanded, ‘to just
leave
?’

Ballard cocked his head, puzzled. ‘Leave?’

‘The prison. Take your fucking vaccine and go. Get out of here.’

The malformed curvature of Ballard’s upper lip tremored,
exaggerating the sneer. He contemplated Marco with disapproval. ‘Of course not,’ he sniped. ‘I can’t just leave my work. I told you I’d made progress, Henry. But the bigger problem remains.’

‘The bigger problem? Don’t tell me you mean a cure.’

Ballard levelled a serious look at Marco. ‘The cure is one challenge, yes. With enough time I’ll isolate a method to reverse the prion transformation. But even so, there is a bigger problem awaiting. I’m surprised you don’t see it, Henry.’

‘Yeah? What is it, the fact that you’re a fucking lunatic—’

Marco’s shoulders leaped in alarm as a crash sounded from the end of the room, a resounding rattle of glass from the medical refrigerator. He spun, the M9 pointed. Something had banged the wide double doors.
From the inside.

The glass was fogged, impossible to see through–but the shape that was pressed against the condensation drove a cold spike down Marco’s spine.

A bare footprint. The outline of a heel, and a pad, and five splayed toes.

‘Roger…’ Marco started, abruptly queasy.

Ballard stopped him. ‘You should understand, Henry. You of all people.’

‘Roger, what the
fuck
is in the fridge?’

‘You already know.’

‘I don’t,’ Marco insisted. But he was beginning to dread that he did…

Please no. Please tell me it’s not what I think.

Please don’t show me.

But Ballard had already crossed the room, fishing in his pocket. He pulled a key and twisted it into the lock on the glass door. Then he turned to Marco, his face subdued now, a melancholy smile replacing the manic grin of minutes ago.

‘I’m sorry, Henry. I hope you do know how sorry I’ve been.’ He licked his lips like a nervous tic; his eyes swept the floor. ‘For my mistake. With Hannah.’

‘Roger,’ Marco urged. His face burned. ‘Don’t.’

Ballard tapped a round thermometer implanted in the glass. ‘Ten degrees Celsius. Every twelve hours I alternate to twelve degrees, then back down.’

With both hands he yanked open the refrigerator.

‘Hypothermia therapy.’

Hunched on the floor inside was a blue-skinned corpse, a middle-aged male with a veiny nose and eyes fogged white like the glass. Its arms were bound in a straitjacket, knees tucked to its chest. A pale grape-coloured tongue hung frozen from its open mouth, as if they’d caught it licking a popsicle. The corpse groaned and rolled its head with a slow, drowsy motion. The jaw sluggishly closed, opened, closed again. Marco realised it was biting at Ballard, but too drugged by the cold to strike with any amount of speed.

Ballard stepped back and inhaled a deep, dramatic breath, waving his open hand below his nostrils as though shovelling in air. ‘The problem is oxygen, Henry,’ he continued. ‘Even if we could destroy the prions with a cure, how can we expect the brain to recover? After such extended asphyxia? Consider the challenge. Months, years, with no breath, no oxygen. Patients would suffer unthinkable brain damage. Extreme, debilitating cerebral palsy.’

The M9 trembled in Marco’s grip, the only extension of his body able to move. ‘So you’re cooling them,’ he clarified. ‘To limit the damage.’ He spoke without emotion, thankful for the numbness. If he allowed himself to feel anything, it would break him apart, like a machine pushed too hard. Bolts exploding everywhere.

‘Just like you tried with Hannah,’ he added. He glanced
sideways to Wu; even the sergeant seemed uneasy, his blood-streaked brow furrowed at the refrigerated corpse.

Ballard’s unbalanced eyes pleaded with Marco. ‘I can save them, Henry.’

I can save Hannah.
That broken promise, uttered six years in the past–echoing now, clear and sharp, a fresh salty cut of the scalpel. Marco grimaced.

‘No, Roger,’ he said. ‘You can’t. That’s impossible. They’re gone.’

For the span of a second, a panicked expression seized Ballard; his eyes rounded, then just as quickly recovered. He gathered his haggard face into a weak smile.

‘So you see,’ he said with forced cheer, ignoring Marco’s reprimand, ‘I must continue the research. Until a viable treatment is discovered.’ As if for emphasis he swatted the refrigerator doors shut, resealing the corpse into its chilled catacomb. The effort seemed to drain Ballard. He gripped the door handles and pressed his forehead against the glass. His spectacles tapped the frosty surface with a feeble
clink
.

‘The truth is, I think about leaving,’ he admitted, sounding far beyond tired. ‘But I can’t, Henry. You understand. You, of all people. That’s why I’m glad you came. That’s why I wrote to you, to show you how sorry I am. I had to stay here, you see, to atone for Hannah…’

His entire body sagged. ‘You see, Henry? This is
my
prison.’

And then he laughed–a soft wheeze at first, barely audible. Then louder, harder, and his frail shoulders convulsed; he guffawed once and then fell silent, with his head bowed against the refrigerator like a man in prayer.

This is my prison.

Marco’s head swam. The fact was, Roger was right.
I do understand.

A prison. That’s exactly how it felt–a windowless hell, escape-proof, a dungeon door slamming on both him and Danielle the day Hannah died. And on Roger, too–Marco had never recognized it until now, but yes, Roger, too. And none of them had ever found a way out. His chin trembled, and tears clawed at his eyes. Let them. He was tired of resisting.

He cried.

He remembered the days, the weeks, the two years after losing Hannah. Countless dark hours in bed, long after lights out, banging against the bars in his mind. Pleading for mercy–for the midnight reprieve that never came, from a governor who didn’t care. It had been the solitude that hurt most. Danielle a foot away on the uncomfortable mattress, her back to him; and yet he’d always somehow known when her eyes were stuck open, sleepless, memorising the wall. She was the prisoner in the adjacent cell, punished the same but lodged apart–because he never knew what to say, or what to ask, or when to touch her, or when
not
to touch her, because his skin was too cruel a reminder of what they’d already shared and lost.

And then always came the dull horror of waking–the morning roll call, answering to a reality that never changed, never would. Another day served.

Yes. A fucking prison, exactly right. A miserable cage.

No sunlight. No Hannah.

I have to get out.
Those had been Danielle’s words, written in thin purple ink from a ballpoint pen. On a square of dainty flowered stationery.

The vision sickened him instantly; his stomach dropped from a great height, and he gasped, pressed his hand to his ribs as if he could push back the nausea.

You let him do it, Henry.
Her voice now, loud in his ears.
You let him!

He had to, Delle. Her asphyxia was severe–she never would have
…

Goddamn it, Henry! You’re avoiding. You’re always avoiding.

I’m not, I’m not, I swear I’m not
…

His mouth opened, a gag reflex. He realised it was time. Time to prove, once and for all, to her, to himself, that he wasn’t avoiding. Time to remember.

To confront the past. The highs, the lows.

The roller coaster
, he thought, and closed his eyes in terror, and with a wet, pathetic whimper he vomited, hot and brown, onto the cold tile floor.

I have to get out.

The light blurred, distorted by tears as Marco retched and choked for air; it was a disorienting underwater sensation, like drowning. Around him the room pirouetted, his mind caught in a whirlpool, and time, too, was a liquid, flowing backward…

… And Marco was in his Audi, squealing through a red light in downtown Phoenix four summers in the past, his eyes wild, each heartbeat a dynamite blast of terror. In the rear-view mirror the street was jammed with–
dead, how can they be dead? shit shit shit
–the monsters, a massive relentless tsunami of teeth and blood, smashing store windows, turning cars, burying the city. He’d been at the hospital since dawn. The day had begun with all the pacings of a normal day, but by eleven o’clock had convened into an emergency conference with the entire neurology staff as the ER swelled with new arrivals, more and more, pasty men and women and kids, oozing a sweat that stank like sour milk, and their worried families, cramming the waiting room, the halls, every last corner. No place to put them all.
Redirect to Good Samaritan. Maryvale. Kindred.
But
all
the hospitals were overwhelmed. Across the city, the state. Reports from California, too. Nobody understood how fucked they were–not yet–but the fear was there, that sense of a tremendous crack zigzagging up the dam, irreversible, portending doom.

And then it had burst.

On the main stretch of Central Avenue, Marco gunned the gas, keeping up with the panicked traffic–cars and trucks speeding block to block, desperate to gain ground on the dead menace behind them. A man in a business jacket dashed from an alley, running blindly into the street, and Marco cried out as, ahead, a silver car blasted through the man, chucking him airborne; his flailing body, a pin-striped blur, sailed free over Marco’s Audi and smashed broken onto the street behind. A swerving brown UPS truck crushed the body flat as Marco passed the alley where the businessman had emerged. More of the monsters spilled out, swarming the stalled UPS truck. The dead piled through the truck’s open door, engulfing the screaming driver.

Marco forced his eyes ahead.
Don’t crash. Do… not… crash.

A police car blasted past him, going in the opposite direction, its siren shrieking. With grim certainty Marco knew the officer wouldn’t survive the day.

Guns don’t work.

The Audi was sickly sweet with the scent of blood, Marco’s shirt soaked red.
Tommy.
The hospital security guard, back at Cedars-Sinai. A dead nurse had bitten deep into Tommy’s throat as he’d fired into her ribs–emptied the clip, and
still
she wouldn’t die. Marco had coiled a phone cord around her neck and dragged her off, then helped Tommy to the parking garage. He’d leaned Tommy against
the Audi as he dug for his keys; at the end of the row, the garage entrance had darkened with shadows, and the concrete walls echoed with ghostly cries as the dead charged in from the street, and when Marco looked again, Tommy was a corpse, too…

The art museum zipped past on the left, eviscerated bodies face down on the marble steps.
Oh god oh god dammit
, he thought, cranking the wheel; the Audi skidded onto the entrance ramp for I-10, and seconds later he was barrelling east on the interstate towards the Gold Canyon. The highway traffic was light; he guessed he was riding the edge of a deadly shockwave rolling outward from downtown. The surrounding suburbs hadn’t been hit. Yet.
Stay fast, stay ahead
, he thought. Ahead, just long enough to get home to Danielle.