Ghost Run (19 page)

I put the machine into dormant mode and ran to the metal access door. I cut out the drywall from a section next to the door with my blade and shoved in the explosives I had taken from the stairwell inside.

This was going to be crude.

I stabbed the detonator into the explosives and hunted for extra wire, quickly cutting a section of LAN cable from the wall into different-color lengths. I needed a 9-volt, so I risked standing up to look around.

Yeah, smoke detectors.

I ran around the floor ripping them from ceiling mounts, forcefully disconnecting them from the dead AC power sources. I had three batteries, one of which didn't shock me when I touched it to the tip of my tongue. I picked the strongest charge of those remaining and frantically wired it to the detonator so that it would make a connection when the door opened more than one inch. I pulled the machine gun back, away from the door, and stacked couches and anything else I could find to shield me from the blast.

With the gun repositioned, I put my pack on my back and slung my carbine. I was ready.

Well, that's what I thought, anyway.

Thump.

Thump.

Something was surging against the door. I watched in horror as it momentarily shifted away from the top of the jamb. It was nearly imperceptible the way the light along the seam between the door and the jamb changed, but it moved.

Another burst of gunfire from somewhere else in the building.

Thump
.

The fucking undead were at the doors; there had been enough of them to complete a bridge over the blown-out stairs!

If the creatures tripped the explosives, they'd just blow the door off, allowing the rest to file inside, along with whatever came after.

I couldn't approach the door; it was barricaded and could blow at any moment.

I edged back to the window where the sheets were tied together, forming the opening. I pulled the machine gun back to my position. Through my shitty barricade of sandbags and office furniture, I could see the door wiggle from the pressure exerted on the other side. My pack was cinched tightly to my back, uncomfortably cutting into my shoulders. My carbine was strapped to my pack.

I had no choice.

As I was about to step over the edge and take my chances on the sheet that led only halfway down the building, gunfire opened up from the adjacent building, shattering the glass around me into a million one-carat-diamond-sized pieces. In desperation, I stuffed two spent brass cases into my ears and turned the machine gun counterclockwise, returning fire on the other building. To an onlooker, it would have been reminiscent of two sailing ships firing broadside at one another at a perilously close distance. Half the time I didn't even look where I was shooting, as I knew they had a heavy-bore sniper with them somewhere in the other building.

Glass continued to fly along with the foam ceiling covers. Dark rust water began to flow from a ruptured sprinkler system that somehow still held some pressure after all this time.

My final round was gone. Ammo links, water, foam, and glass were everywhere. My ears rang from the mayhem as I crawled to the window opening, wet and seriously pissed off.

Shaking with fear of the overwhelming height, I edged my legs
out into the chasm, clutching the dangling sheet with both hands. Even though it was soaked with brown-colored water, it was easier to grip than I expected. All the kit I carried made the climb down awkward. The power drill clasped to my rigger's belt banged painfully against my hip bone.

They say never to look down.

The mass below was punctuated only by other buildings and derelict vehicles. Every space in between was filled with the undead tsunami.

I was twenty feet down the sheet rope when the explosion rocked the building. The concussion spit the couch out of the twenty-second-floor window. Surrealistically, it flew twenty feet or so and then whooshed past me on its way down. Still in shock and not fully accepting my current situation, I had to watch. The huge couch flipped end over end until it hit with crushing impact, flattening the corpses underneath.

Forcing myself back to my current predicament, I continued my descent until I was nearly startled off the sheet by half a dozen undead that slammed against the other side of the glass of what I thought might be the eighteenth or seventeenth floor. I was inches from their hunger, feeling the vibration of their impacts against the glass barrier between us.

I kept going down.

Dammit, my arms were getting tired.

A shot rang out, hitting the building somewhere above my head, rattling the glass.

The sixteenth floor was full of undead.

I had maybe twenty more feet before the sheet ran out with a jagged and ripped end.

The fifteenth floor was full of undead.

The fourteenth floor was socked in.

The thirteenth floor had curtains concealing what was inside. I had five feet of sheet remaining.

I went halfway to the twelfth floor before seeing it was filled to the brim with angry corpses.

Painstakingly, I wrapped my legs around the sheet and slowly made my way back up to thirteen.

Wrapping my left arm through the sheet, I pulled my drill like
a six-gun, jammed the carbide bit into the glass in front of me, and depressed the trigger. I punched the drill repeatedly into the glass until it formed a spiderweb. With every last bit of energy, I pressed the bit into the nexus of the window cracks and drove the bit in.

The glass exploded like before into tiny pieces, sprinkling like salt onto the hungry undead below. I tossed the drill through the curtains into the opening I'd created.

I unraveled my leg from the sheet and kicked back on the building as if rappelling.

Time slowed for a moment.

As I traveled forward into the opening feet first, my mind went over the worst-case scenarios. The dark stuff of nightmares concluded what could be behind curtain number one, but I had no real choice.

I flew right into the waiting arms of a large padded leather office chair. It spun around and the momentum tossed me onto a huge wooden desk covered with shit that would never matter again. The curtain flapped in the wind and rounds hit again somewhere above me. The opening where I left the twenty-second floor faced away from the attackers. They might not have noticed I'd escaped.

Kicking myself for not reaching for my carbine sooner, I unsecured it from my pack and raised it up to the ready position. The large corner office was adorned with plaques and pictures of a man standing next to three former presidents. Well, they're
all
former presidents now, aren't they.

The office was clear. I risked a look out the other set of windows to the building from where the shots were coming. Halfway up the building, a fire raged; smoke hugged the sheer glass face before being dissipated by wind turbulence at the top.

I waited for nightfall.

0315

The steel beams from the building across the street were straining under the extreme heat and weight of the floors above them. I could smell roasting flesh in the air, even from my holdout here
halfway up the capitol building. Flaming corpses walked around on the street below, unaware they were on fire. I caught a glimpse of a flashlight beaming around below the fire-stricken floors. Whoever it was, they were looking for something or someone.

In my building, I heard intermittent gunshots; they seemed to come from above. It was dark so I dug my NOD out of the top of my pack and flipped it on. Quietly, I moved the heavy chair away from the double doors that led into the office. I heard nothing, so I proceeded into the foyer, careful to turn the handle mechanism slowly, disengaging the lock and moving the heavy door inward. I could see a corpse standing next to an empty water cooler with its back to me, swaying, hibernating almost imperceptibly against the grainy and green honeycomb backdrop of intensifier illumination. I snuck up on the corpse and rammed the blade of my switchblade into the base of its neck.

I was startled when the corpse didn't crumple to the ground but swung in a wide arc. I hadn't noticed that the body was attached by its neck to a length of dark wire suspending it a few inches off the floor. Its mouth still opened and closed; I must have missed the brain, so I pulled my carbon steel fixed blade and came down hard on the top of its skull with a crack.

Lights out.

I froze for a moment, listening.

Footsteps.

Ducking low into a reception area, I heard something approach. I low crawled away from the noise into a cubicle farm that smelled like mildew. With the sound in the foyer area getting louder, I went deeper into the maze of office desks and dividers, a potpourri of lives that once were, small picture frames holding photos of strangers alongside toddlers' works of art penned in crayon. I saw a grenade sitting on a nearby desk and eagerly reached for it as if it were a lightsaber. I swiped it from the desk along with its attached plaque, which stated:
Complaint Department: Take a number
.

Fuck.

For no logical reason, I tossed it in the top of my pack and continued into the labyrinth of the early-twenty-first-century office. The moon was in full view through the windows up ahead, its disk nearly bisected by some sort of wire that hung down over
the outside of the building. The moonlight shone in, outlining the silhouette of a corpse that stood sentry over the windows.

I checked my carbine and took aim as I closed in on the creature. This one wasn't suspended by a wire necktie but, like billions of others, by some dark force that kept the terrifying things moving. The creature paid no attention to me. I pulled the drill from my belt and moved in closer, wondering why I hadn't used it earlier. I rammed it into the creature's face, simultaneously squeezing the black plastic trigger. The bit rapidly bored into the creature's head, scrambling its brain and the chemical switches that let it walk and seek out what it thought was food. Anticipating, I switched directions on the drill and reversed the bit just before the corpse fell to the carpet floor with a thud.

The sound of the electrical motor on the drill turned out to be a very bad idea.

The cubicles stirred with movement and the bright moonlight at my back shone on a dozen creatures jolted from dormancy by the interesting mechanical noise I'd just offered them. Their simultaneous moans were calls to action for all nearby undead that were listening.

The call to feed.

The moonlight was at my back. They didn't see me yet but were going off sound, like bats. Gray cubicle dividers shook and office chairs tipped to the floor as the creatures began to scramble and search. I backed away from the mob, which now numbered well over twenty. More of them stood, their heads peeking over the dividers, looking for a way out. As I edged backward, my elbow hit the cool window glass, signifying that I could retreat no farther.

The moon's light brightened the faces of the undead. More began to come into the office area from the hallway beyond, stimulated by the activity inside. I looked over my shoulder again, noticing the cable running outside the building from higher above. Taking another glance, I saw a second cable and followed it down to a platform glowing in the setting moonlight. Looking back, I was forced to take a shot at one of the creatures that came within arm's length.

All hell broke lose.

The undead triangulated the shot and began to converge. I
went full auto on the glass behind me and kicked. My leg launched through the glass and I almost fell through it before grabbing the thin frame of metal that separated the panes. I took more shots as the mob doubled down on my position. I slung my carbine and squeezed through the hole in the window, clutching the jagged, skinny metal wire. I began to descend much faster than expected because of the extra weight of the heavy pack on my back and the thinness of the wire.

The skin on my hands was torn away in places before I impacted the aluminum platform rail, tumbling hard onto the window cleaning platform. I saw stars, and it took everything for me not to scream out in agony at the pain throbbing through my hands. I looked down at them through the NOD and saw too much blood.

The first creature made it out of the opening above and hit the platform before spinning out of control, away into the void.

Another corpse hit with a loud clang but remained bent over the platform at its waist. It looked up at me and grinned, or it looked that way to me. I gave it a front kick to the chin, helping it off the platform and down to the ground. It must have been a three-second fall before the audible thud. Another fell and missed the platform altogether, but I didn't see it; the flapping of clothing fabric and whoosh of air were what gave away its passing in the night.

I could hear the crunching of glass above, but nothing else fell.

I dropped my pack and opened it with bloody hands. I pulled out my med kit and tore into the silver-laced clotting agent, spreading the powder onto my hands. The sting was nearly unbearable as I stood there on the suspended platform, holding my hands like claws to keep anything from touching the wounds. Small strips of skin hung from my palms, revealing dark tissue underneath. Eventually I drummed up enough courage to shove my hand back into the pack to get a bandage. I sloppily wrapped my left hand with my right and pressed the button on my Microtech knife for a one-handed opening. The
tantō
spike shot out, reflecting the last remnants of moonlight off the bloodstained razor-sharp blade. I sliced the bandage and repeated the process on my right hand. I reluctantly took my emergency oxycodone with a half bottle of
water. Those motherfuckers are addictive; I only carried two in my kit for a reason. If it were not for Jan, I'd have been addicted to them a few months ago after a scavenging trip that went south on me.

I lay back on the far end of the scaffolding and turned off my NOD. The meds hadn't kicked in yet, but the water and the gift of temporary asylum from the undead had. I looked over at my only companion, the man in the moon, and began to speak.