The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (5 page)

An unpleasant grin pulled at his lips.

See, Joan?
he thought.
Everybody’s got their doubts.

Marco shut down the computer and plodded along the hall to the bathroom. His head throbbed, and each lungful of air antagonised the dry passages in his nose. In the cabinet he dug out a bottle of Sudafed gelcaps.
Expires Oct 2016
, the label read. Two years ago.

He swallowed three caps anyway, just in case there was still any life to them. He’d stop by the Walgreens in Apache Junction on his next trip for supplies, but most likely all the
pharmaceuticals there had expired, too. Everything was going bad in the drugstores and the supermarkets, even the dried goods. He was outstaying his welcome.

He felt exhausted, but the idea of returning to bed and sleeping the next twenty-four hours wasn’t smart. He’d come home in half a coma last night and hadn’t checked the property for break-ins. Neglecting it again would be reckless. The barricade he’d erected was nearly corpse-proof, but not a hundred per cent. Plus he had to check the trap.

To his annoyance, his hopes rose, a pathetic optimism that today might be the day. The end of his hunt. Maybe…

Stop it
, he thought crossly and returned to his office.

He’d wait for a lighter sky. Another thirty minutes. He pulled an afghan blanket from the leather couch and slid open the glass door to the balcony. The morning still held the chill of the desert night, sharp on his skin. He clutched the blanket around him and leaned his forearms on the balcony rail, surveying the land. At the base of the eastern sky, a light blue band divided the earth from the deeper universe, while, somewhere below, a dawn of pink and orange waited to emerge. The Superstition Mountains towered on the horizon, gnawing the stars like monolithic black molars in a jawbone of dry earth. Beneath them lay the bajadas, a mile of gentle hills and dried scrub, scattered with saguaro and creosote bush, populated by spiny lizards and owls.

Before the Resurrection, he’d often found peace out here in the evenings, after hard shifts at the hospital. A glass of red wine and Danielle’s hands massaging his neck, the tension leaving him like heat escaping the desert dirt. Everything cooling. Now he could never relax–not with a hundred wild cactuses staring back at him from the bajadas, man-sized silhouettes that could easily mask a corpse advancing towards the property.

Shivering despite the blanket, he thought about Joan Roark. She’d asked a difficult question, and he’d answered. He tried to recall his exact words. He couldn’t remember precisely, but one word had lodged in his mind like a briar.
Soul.

Had he really told her that?
You saved his soul.
His ears warmed with guilt. He felt like some sleazy televangelist, peddling bullshit, whatever it took to make himself rich. But no–that wasn’t fair. He didn’t say it because of the pay cheque. He just wanted her to be okay.

He hadn’t believed in souls since high school, when he was a good Catholic kid. But medical school had erased that notion with a rag of empirical common sense.

‘There’s only one life force,’ he’d remarked once to Danielle, on their way home from a dinner with her California friends in which the talk had centred earnestly on
chakras
and
energy healing
–notions so absurd he might have laughed out loud if it wouldn’t have hurt her feelings. Danielle’s spiritual beliefs were part of her charm, one of many reasons he loved her. And she’d always seemed to find him just as charming–just as out of touch with reality–whenever he articulated his own beliefs. ‘The electrophysiological current of a hundred billion neurons,’ he’d said. ‘
That
’s the voodoo of human life.’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she’d patronised him from the passenger seat, leaning across to tease his ear with her finger. She knew how to both love and annoy him with a single gesture. ‘But that’s your problem, babe. You need to know how everything works. Can’t anything be magic?’

He’d answered her with a sardonic smile. ‘Sorry. All the magic courses at Cornell were full. I had to take pre-med instead.’

‘You’re a jerk,’ she’d laughed, and playfully bitten his hand.

But while Marco didn’t buy into souls, he did believe in
identity.
The sum of individual experience, everything you ever did or thought–memories stored magnetically in brain cells. Identity remained even when life did not, locked away like a closed wing of a library, where the books smelled yellow and musty. Identity was physical, anatomical. Not a spirit.

Andrew Roark had died. And yet he was still Andrew Roark, always would be, until he crumbled to zero on a cellular level. His identity had simply been buried inside his corpse.

So what
was
the right thing to do? Marco remembered a woman in Florida, years before the Resurrection–a car-crash victim, comatose for years in her hospital bed, and yet her eyes were open and she sometimes moved. The courts had exploded into an uproar over living wills; loud debates raged about whether her damaged brain was still aware or wasn’t. In the end her life support had been discontinued. Watching CNN that morning, Marco had sipped his coffee, feeling only relief that the mess hadn’t happened at Cedars-Sinai. Danielle sat across the breakfast table, carving out a melon slice, watching an interview with the woman’s distraught husband.

‘I hope that’s never you,’ Danielle had said, her eyes glistening. For a moment he’d wondered who she meant–the husband or the wife. But Danielle had finished her melon and left for an audition, and he’d never asked.

At least he knew now which tragic figure he’d turned out to be. And only now that it was
his
decision–pull the plug, or no?–did he realise what he really believed.

Sometimes euthanasia was the correct choice.

Joan Roark came to mind again. Her face, chalky without make-up, skin flaking at the top of her nose between her eyebrows. He hoped she’d be all right. He hoped she had enough money to set herself up properly; too many people’s
finances were held hostage out West, stagnating in dark local banks and credit unions. Proxy banks had been created in the Safe States to transfer funds, but the process was slow and rife with bureaucracy. Hopefully Joan had gotten hers.

Goddamn it. Why was he
still
thinking about Joan Roark? Usually when he powered down the computer, after the job was done and closed, the client’s life disappeared from his with the same abruptness as the screen image. Case closed, and he could think only of the next contract, the next life he would share. The next corpse to return.

Perhaps his problem now was that the next scheduled job was an entire three months away. Before setting out to Montana, he’d told Benjamin that he’d needed a good long break. Benjamin was his business partner in the Safe States, and his former brother-in-law.

No more for a while
, Marco had said.
I’m worn out, Ben.

Although Benjamin had grumbled at first–Marco never pried, but he did wonder occasionally what financial obligations Ben had in the Safe States–in the end he’d agreed. No new contracts. Shop closed, October, November, December, open again for business in January. Ben had booked the next contract for a corpse named Thomas Flynn, a twenty-six-year-old logger last seen somewhere in a million muddy square miles of Oregon forest.

Fun
, Marco had said to Ben.
Should be eight feet of snow by then. Are you punishing me?

You know it
, Ben answered.
Besides, you’ll be nice and rested after your vacation.

The truth was, Ben could gripe all he wanted about the loss of business, but really, what choice did he have? Marco was the whole operation–the one out here risking his ass in a corpse wasteland. If he wanted a break, goddamn it, then he was getting one.

The talent.
That’s what Danielle would have called him.
Keep the talent happy.

He winced. Sometimes he caught himself writing lines for her like a playwright, and then her voice was really there, performing in his head. Sly, sensual alto, and with it the suggestion of her mouth, that funny half-smile she sported when she teased, and her breath on his cheek, and that hurt him, too, the invocation of her physical presence.

He’d been remembering her too much lately. He did better when she remained an abstraction, a formless fog with a name.

He coughed, and she was gone again. From the roof, a brown bat zigzagged low over the balcony, scooping up a final bug on its way home to roost in the mountains. Dawn had arrived without fanfare, not the candy colours he’d hoped for, instead a gradual lifting of the light to reveal a cloudless sky to the east. The details of his balcony sharpened, and he saw the leftovers of his last dinner here, the night before he’d ventured to Montana to find Roark.

He’d been in a grim mood that night, like a soldier shipping out the next day. A wine bottle lay tossed in the ashes of the adobe fire pit; on the bench was his wine glass, tipped over in a dried stain of red. He’d left it full. Some squirrel must have helped itself to a good buzz.

The congestion in his ears made clicking sounds as he stretched his jaw. He leaned out over the balcony rail. With one finger he pressed against his nose and blew a missile of snot to the patio below, then repeated with the other nostril, a habit he’d developed while trail-running the Arizona mountains. Uncouth, but nowadays he had only himself to offend.

Jesus, he hadn’t even showered in weeks. How long before he stopped wiping his ass?

Disturbed by his own joke, he went back inside, intent on completing the security check on the grounds. He closed
the balcony door and had nearly crossed the room when he remembered the wedding ring in his pocket. He fished it out and returned to his desk. From the side drawer he pulled out a manila folder labelled ‘ROARK’–thick with contents wrapped in a red rubber band, everything from scans of photos and bank receipts to transcripts of his interviews with Joan–and a box of Ziploc sandwich bags. He placed Roark’s ring in a bag and tucked it into the folder, then returned the folder to the desk and closed the drawer. Someday he’d bring it back to Joan. Someday he’d bring back all the other rings he kept stored in there, too, trinkets from past jobs. Bring them back to the mourning families of the dead.

If the Quarantine ever lifted, and if he was ever allowed back in the Safe States.

If the living could forgive him.

On his way downstairs, Marco stopped by the gun room, formerly a large linen closet off the master bedroom, and equipped himself with the fully loaded Glock.

The wistful idea of rejoining the Safe States still played in his mind.
Fat chance
, he thought, sobering. Not with Hoff in the White House, not with the New Republicans keeping everything in lockdown, guarded against the slightest sign of trouble.

New Republicans. Power-hungry bastards, a bunch of zealots morphed from the old right wing. After the Resurrection, their ideals had spread like a fresh infection, exploiting the weak tissues of wounded America. The Safe States were afraid, everyone’s breath held waiting for another outbreak, wondering when the Resurrection would come back to finish them off. Hospitals remained on alert; posters on trains advised
What to Look For,
with colourful illustrations
of alpha-stage Resurrection patients–sallow white cheeks, parched lips, pink weepy eyes–peering constantly over the shoulders of nervous morning commuters.

The New Republicans had promised to cure the fear, but at the same time they strived to preserve it. Hoff’s campaign in 2016 emphasised the danger still lurking: President Garrett had been neglectful and weak, Hoff criticised; not proactive enough to stop a virus–a terrorist attack, perhaps?–from annihilating the West.
The next time Garrett fails, we’ll all be dead
, warned the ads on television, on billboards, on radios. Hoff won in a landslide.

Marco had observed from his laptop in Arizona, disappointed, an expatriate without a vote.
Crap
, he’d thought.
These guys know the formula for power.
Stoke the fear, encourage alarm. Frightened citizens were willing to trade freedom for safety.

And sure enough, stricter laws passed; the Patriot Act sharpened its teeth, bit down harder on private life. Mandatory blood tests. Court-ordered hospital visits. Gasoline rations, based on mileage applications approved by the Resource Office. Army trucks patrolled low-income neighbourhoods. The controversial Survivor Tax–
forced charity
, critics cried–squeezed money from every man and woman to fund the ongoing recovery.

The laws kept coming. Capitol Hill was a mess; votes from the ‘Ghost Congress’–senators and representatives from the now-empty states–were ruled unconstitutional and then voided. Within a year President Hoff had more power over twenty-eight Safe States than he
ever
would have held over all fifty. The New Republicans controlled the floor.

The Quarantine wasn’t going to be lifted, not anytime soon.

The Quarantine kept people afraid.

Standing in his hallway, Marco shook his head.
You think
they’d let you back?
he asked himself.
Sure, just walk up to the border, wave your arms and say, ‘Hey guys! I’ve been out here four years with the corpses! But I promise I don’t have the Resurrection cooties on me!’

Yeah, right. You’d be shot dead before you opened your stupid mouth.

He shrugged. Screw it. No use worrying about that right now.

Right now he had to check the trap.

From the back of the closet, he grabbed an aluminium softball bat with duct tape wound in strips around the handle. Bringing the bat always made him feel silly, but there was no sense in wasting bullets when a good Willie Mays swing could bring down a single corpse.

He descended the back staircase into the kitchen. The room had once been bright and airy, with its breakfast nook built especially for a stunning view of the Superstitions, but since then he’d drilled thick sheets of pool siding across all the ground-floor windows. Now the only light was a rectangular shaft beaming through a skylight on the angled ceiling, spotlighting an island countertop of red and orange-brown mosaic tile. The kitchen was the only room in the house where Danielle had insisted on a desert decor. Ironic, considering she didn’t like southwestern cuisine. But coloured kitchen tiles? She’d loved those like candy.