The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. by V. M. Zito Page B

They’d lost interest in him, drawn instead to the louder Americans. With a larger population of prey ahead, Wu was no longer worth the effort.
    He scooped a handful of pebbles from the ground and slung a dirty cloud at the passing corpses. One rock glanced off the shoulder of a teenage male in a red baseball jersey. The youth rolled its head briefly on its neck but pressed ahead without changing direction. The corpses marched on. Wu hissed a quiet curse. He was losing them up the trail.
    No
, he thought. Arms out for balance, he stutter-stepped back down the slope, spilling onto the trail and almost knocking into one of the dead stragglers. The female in the bikini growled, snatched at him, but Wu ducked and popped up running, keeping to the path’s edge.
    In seconds he’d passed half a dozen corpses. The air was humid with their stench, forcing his unsteady abdominal muscles to retch. He spat a mouthful of gummy brown saliva onto the path. A few strides later, he’d overtaken the naked male for the lead–just short of the curve in the trail that would carry them under the Americans.
    He swung around in front of the male, an arm’s distance apart. His skin tingled. The thrill, the awe of being
this
close to a living corpse was still new, still amazing to him. The dead man’s red eyeballs ogled him, and he could only guess how he might appear in the corpse’s vision; he had the sensation of being watched from a sacred temple that no man could enter alive.
    Up until a month ago, he’d never even seen a corpse first-hand. During the outbreak, he’d been stationed inBeijing; his initial encounters with the dead had occurred in dark briefing rooms, analysing unsteady news video or satellite photos of mobbed, death-ridden cities. The Resurrection had brought America its comeuppance, and the rest of the world watched. Later, stationed in Boston, he’d kept his television fixed on Fox News, where the dead were nonstop political fodder; the same iconic footage played again and again, rolling on screen as New Republican pundits ranted about the need for vigilance. The videos immortalised episodes from the outbreak–tagged with sensational names like California Z-Day, the Denver Death March, the San Antonio Massacre. ‘Mother Reaper’ was the most indecent–a shock media favourite, typical American garbage. In it, a dazed young mother stumbles past the news camera, carrying the decapitated body of a five-year-old boy. Ominous groans rumble in the background.
They pulled his head
, the woman says without emotion, and the camera goes black.
    Wu had watched it all, mesmerised. Unafraid.
    He wasn’t afraid now, either.
    Without hesitation he hopped forward and slapped the corpse hard on its shoulder, a satisfying smack that left a white handprint on the violet, festering skin. The male huffed in surprise; its lips tightened to a snarl. Wu pulled away and cut back to the edge of the trail.
    He paused there, hoping. Slowly, to his relief, the male pivoted and staggered in his direction. The corpses behind it followed, steering the pack around towards Wu.
    He had them again.
    Just to be certain, he let the first few corpses creep near–too near, arriving in a mass of outstretched arms and gnashing teeth, frustrated, hungry for him…
    Close enough. Wu stepped away and skirted the path, using the higher slope as safe ground, just beyond the reachof the crowd. On the uneven surface, his ankle buckled, nearly twisting him fatally downwards–
Idiot!
he scolded himself–but he stabilised and moments later had retraced the trail to his chosen attack point. He charged again up the slope.
    This time the dead followed, bent at the waist, clambering over the bottommost rocks on all fours, as if they couldn’t decide whether to be human or animal. Wu met eyes with a Native American corpse, the roots of its rotten upper teeth exposed where the top lip had been torn away. It slinked towards him, its fingers dragging over the red