Free the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller

exchange rate table, as if it made any difference.  She had her carry-on suitcase unzipped on top of the bed, and the cat had gotten itself inside, like it always did.  She set down the lists and picked over the fabric of her dinner dress with a lint roller, and when she finished she peeled away the used tape and then packed the lint roller, which was a normal thing for her to take along. 
    She put the medications in last.  He saw her drop the brown zippered pouch into a sleeve made of elastic webbing stitched against the inner wall of the carry-on.  And according to her, the pouch is still inside the suitcase, and the suitcase is still inside their suite at the resort, in the Makoa building, resting on the fold-out stand next to the bedside. 
     
     
    After leaving the culvert, Park returns to the beachfront.  From where he stands at the treeline, he can see the body of the felled man near where the surf leaves off.  Pale skin against pale sand and the red liquid coronating the broken skull.  A swarm of blowflies and sand gnats lift into the air and circle madly before settling again on the back of the still body. 
    Park scans the shore in both directions, and there is no movement other than the incoming wavefronts and the cormorants and petrels, airborne on the currents of the tradewinds, idling above.  Gulls on the ground jockeying over a beach position.  He reaches into the satchel and pulls out the sheathed knife, just to hold it.
    Carefully, he lowers himself onto the outer berm and pauses, watching—scanning the treeline on both sides.  For a while he just holds still and listens, but there’s no audible sound other than the advent of breakers onshore and the wisping of liana palm fronds, sinuous.  The beachfront is abandoned.  He starts walking toward the water, into the open, still scanning around him. 
    Park stops at the collection of mounted watercraft on the long rack.  He works the knife in between his belt and waistband, and then he reaches up and hauls down one of the kayaks, a sea-tourer around ten feet long, meant for one person.  Blue green, yellow detailing.  He lets it fall onto the sand.  He tries out a few double-blade paddles, hefting them, getting a feel, and after he ’s chosen one, he leashes it to the kayak coaming with a five-foot nylon tether. 
    He tosses a blue lifejacket into the open cockpit.  He takes hold of the bungee deck-rigging and starts dragging the kayak down the beachface.  As he approaches the water, he is watching for the body he pulled out of the surf yesterday morning.  The rescued remains.  He doesn ’t see them where he thought they would be.
     
     
    There ’s no easy way to get back to Resort Lavelha from here.  It’s a spectrum, really, but every choice on the spectrum is pretty near the difficult end.  The problem isn’t distance.  The resort complex itself isn’t very far as the crow flies—this beach practically adjoins it, separated from the main resort beach by nothing but a rugged stone outcropping.  The problem is access.  The routes across are impassable ever since the Collapse. 
    There used to be a paved footpath that ran between this beach and that beach but it ’s been barricaded, choked off at one of the narrow bottlenecks.  It was a handful of survivors—all of them dead and gone now—who constructed the barricade out of a mound of beach chairs and drink tables and fallen trees hauled out from the nearby groundcover, everything piled together and woven through with a decarya plant’s thorny brambles.  A few boulders at the base to serve as an undergird.  Makeshift, but strong enough.  The survivors were hoping to secure this position at some point during the first weeks, not sure of the reason exactly.  The barrier doesn’t do much besides make it more difficult to gather resources from the hotel proper, now that the outlying buildings have been picked clean.  The only thing the builders really accomplished was to