Ghost Run (20 page)

“You've seen worse, haven't you?” I asked.

Yes,
my subconscious responded.

“Your own catastrophic birth, the death of the dinosaurs.”

It only gets worse, kiddo.

“Not very encouraging, man in the moon. Woo!” I howled.

Yes, now the meds were definitely starting to kick in.

The platform was chilly from the wind coming out of the west. I was on the back side of the building, opposite the action. Looking down with the NOD, I could see only a couple dark spots moving around below.

“Good-bye, Moon,” I said as its face dipped behind a distant building.

See you soon, I hope,
the voice in my head responded.

On my back, looking up to the stars, I could see evidence that the sun was on its way . . . not soon, but not too long from now it would show itself and ruin any chance I had at getting out alive.

Beams of light danced above my line of sight to the stars. I thought that I was hallucinating until shots burst through the window four feet above my head. One of the creatures slammed into the damaged window as rounds were pumped into it. Chunks of glass and corpse showered down onto the metal platform. My heart raced, and adrenaline pumped into my system, temporarily pushing me out of narcotic brain fog.

I adjusted the reticle on my NOD and began to examine the lift control panel. The flashlights waved around above my head and eventually disappeared, leaving me to the howling wind and the inevitable sun. The box had three settings:
Stop
,
Up
, and
Down
. Grabbing on to the rail, I selected the down setting and began to laugh out loud as the machine slowly lowered itself, floor by floor. It must lower hydraulically, I thought, as I doubted the machine
had seen electrons in a long time. I suspected that the Down worked but the Up never would again.

As the floors slowly went by, I saw increasingly gruesome snapshots of death and carnage. The floors that had been cleared by the human raiders were slaughterhouses of dismembered corpses and twitching limbs. The floors that the raiders took a pass on were packed tight with undead. As I passed the seventh floor, I saw that the creatures were crammed so tightly inside that when they saw me, there was no room for them to even beat on the glass.

The window cleaner lift shook for a moment at about the fourth floor before it began to lower one side unevenly.

Ten seconds later, my pack flew off the now vertical lift onto the ground below, and I was hanging off the railing twenty feet off the ground like a trapeze artist. I shook my legs in a desperate attempt to get the cable to pay out more slack, but this only caused excruciating pain to shoot from my injured hands to my entire body. Looking up at the sky, my hands gave way and I fell.

But the pain disappeared as soon as my hands lost their grip. The meds.

I marveled for a moment at weightlessness and at the brief few seconds I felt nothing. And then I hit the ground like a lawn dart. Despite the meds, my ankle hurt like hell, momentarily filling my vision with rhythmic starbursts of pain. I lay on my back, trying not to pass out while simultaneously reaching for my rifle. I crawled over to my pack and used it to wedge myself up into a sitting position. I immediately tightened my bootlaces on my injured foot. My vision started to close in as if I were traveling through a dark tunnel. Every heartbeat expanded the darkness, but the time between beats became darker and darker.

“Checkers, follow, help,” I said into the Simon just before blacking out.

•  •  •

I momentarily returned to consciousness to a dark figure approaching. The sun had not yet come up, so I knew that I hadn't been out very long. With my vision again closing in, I raised the
rifle and shot the dark shape as high up as I could see. Whatever it was, it fell and didn't get back up.

The next sound I remembered was the whirring of the GARMR's motors as it neared. Half conscious, I saw it lowering its body down next to me. I grabbed its titanium frame with my less injured hand (thankfully, I can still shoot and write) and felt the warmth of its nuclear battery on my knuckles as it somehow dragged me and my pack across the grass in a straight line away from the building. It was low to the ground, its legs folded up at the top joint, giving it extra torque while it pulled. Once I felt the security of tall grass, the command was given for the machine to stop.

The rising sun was concealed by the large capitol building, but I could see its rays pass entirely through the building's windows on the second floor. I must have been two hundred meters away from where I'd fallen from the platform. I looked down at my ankle and tried to flex it. It moved but didn't feel so great. I didn't dare loosen my bootlaces or my ankle would expand to the size of a fire hydrant in the span of a few minutes. I looked over at the GARMR and caught myself patting it on the back, treating it as if this man-made beast was somehow alive.

“Thanks,” I told it aloud.

The GARMR didn't respond but simply locked onto my face with its spinning sensors, not willing to miss any gesture commands it might be given. Unyielding obedience, but not unconditional love—this was the way of machines, of tools, but not of living companions.

Smoke climbed up over the buildings and I hobbled my way back to the country club, using the GARMR to support the weight my injured leg couldn't handle. The warmth of the GARMR was unsettling, but I had no choice. I could injure myself beyond the point of mobility if I got too careless.

With the majority of the undead concentrated between the two buildings in the distance behind me, I was able to get to the golf course while shooting only twice, bringing my magazine down to five rounds remaining. I stopped near a water hazard and watched as two oblivious turtles jumped into the drink and swam off. Wincing from the pain, I reluctantly reached into my pack and popped
my last two painkillers. I didn't bring more because I knew myself (from past experience) and knew that addiction was more of a vicious monster (master?) than those things walking around. I couldn't really decide which was worse, my torn-up hands or my ankle. The pain from both was hard to compartmentalize, even with the strong meds that coursed through my body. I'd lost a lot of water fighting to high ground in order to intercept the Phoenix transmission, and looked thirstily at the pond after downing my last half bottle of water.

I fought off the urge to dunk my head in and drink; getting diarrhea or some other god-awful disease while being injured would definitely seal my fate. I wasn't far from Goliath, so I changed magazines and pressed on.

0800

Gunfire erupted from the direction of the capitol building, along with an explosion that shook the trees within visible distance. I watched the capitol building shed clouds of dust and glass as if about to collapse in on itself. Those dark visions of 9/11 flashed back to my mind for a brief second, but the capitol didn't give in on itself; the building lurched over like a refrigerator on an appliance dolly. Great steel beams snapped and more dust shot out of its broken windows as the building slowly toppled over instead. It fell at a tragically slow speed before shaking the earth, coming to rest at a forty-five-degree angle on top of the shorter building nearby. The shorter building was barely visible over the tops of the trees surrounding the country club golf course, but the state capitol resembled a crashed monolithic spaceship. Dust hovered all around, and sunlight glimmered off the shards of glass that somehow remained attached to it.

Pulling my binos, I watched masses of confused undead shuffle out of windows and fall away into the dust clouds below. Tracer fire beamed like a laser from somewhere on the ground up into the building, wreaking havoc on what was left of its internal symmetric lines. I watched in awe as enough firepower to sustain our stronghold in the Florida Keys for years was wasted in the span of a few short minutes. These idiots were likely trying to kill me.
There was no other fathomable reason to go scorched earth like that.

I turned away from the train wreck that was downtown and slipped away into the field that led to the area where Goliath was hopefully still parked. I knew I was on the right track, as I'd already seen a chemlight I'd dropped on my way to the interior of the city. The GARMR's heat was now freaking me out, so I found a walking stick along my path in the form of a small tree poking up out of some old mulch like a weed. I took out my blade and chopped the green wood at the base and cut the branches off, forming the crude implement.

With one hand on my gun and the other on the oak stick, I hobbled ahead to the building, careful to not attract too much attention. As I approached, the hellish faces of undead stared back at me through the glass of the office building. They opened and closed their mouths and beat on the glass in protest. Beat all to hell and high on meds, I didn't give a fuck.

The warm leather seats of Goliath were almost as nice as the sound the electronic locks made when I engaged them. I was here: not my home but a home insofar as this world would allow. I had a working diesel engine under my feet, fuel, power, water, ammo riding shotgun in the passenger seat, and a robot dog on the fifth-wheel steps.

1600

Sometime before noon, I downed another bottle of water and started up the rig, turning the air conditioner on full blast. Finding my gear, Goliath jerked forward into the grass. I flipped it around back onto the road out of Tallahassee. I slalomed between abandoned vehicles, watching the broken capitol building burn through my side mirrors. I almost looked away when I noticed the flash of something move behind me in the road. Easing off the gas, I concentrated on the mirror.

Because I was not paying attention to the road, I smashed into the fender of a compact car, sending it hard into the guardrail of the small bridge I was crossing. Looking back again, I saw them. A pair of motorcycles shadowing me, maybe three hundred meters
back. I kept cruising for fifteen minutes, watching them and trying not to hit another car on the road while I careened between obstacles. My pain meds wore thin and my ankle and hands were becoming a problem. Even my hair follicles somehow hurt. I needed more oxy in a bad way; my right hand shook when transiting between the wheel and the gearshift. I looked back and could still see the flash of motorcycles swerving, one red, one white.

I slowed to a stop and waited. The hum of the bike engines soon overtook the rumble of the diesel as the bikers approached. Kitted up in full motocross gear, I saw one of them reach for a long gun from a scabbard mounted to the handlebars. I found reverse and hit the gas, throwing me forward into the steering wheel as the huge rig rolled backward. The biker got off a shot, sending a round through the chrome exhaust pipe at about my eye level. I nearly redlined the engine and swerved to line my rear axle up with the red motorcycle.

I looked away just before hearing the crunch of the bike, but it could have just as easily been bones and tendons. As the rig slowed again to a stop, I put it in first and hit the gas, spinning the tires and throwing motorcycle parts out behind me. The other biker stayed behind the cover of an abandoned car. I couldn't tell what he was doing and didn't much care. I was getting the fuck out. I glanced over at my mirror again and saw the white motorcycle resume pursuit.

Behind him, a large crane rounded the corner and barreled through a group of vehicles, tossing them aside like empty cardboard boxes. The biker gestured to the crane to follow, as if the driver didn't notice me in the rig up ahead. Upshifting, I scanned ahead on the highway and began to change lanes, smashing through a small group of undead that were chasing a buzzard around the highway as the large bird attempted to feed on them. I barely missed a propane vehicle as I sped past, changing lanes again to dodge an overturned log truck. I saw stacks of logs spilled out into the median and forest, probably thrown by the trailer when it overturned.

Why weren't they shooting at me?

Up ahead, a long-abandoned police checkpoint came into view. An MRAP sat across the road, surrounded by sandbag pillboxes
and tattered tents. I noticed the strips in the road just before it was too late.

Spikes.

I spun the wheel and hit the brakes, skidding sideways into the grass on the right side of the highway. My rig stopped next to the checkpoint as the white motorcycle hit the rusty road spikes. Its tires shredded and its front wheel locked up, sending its rider face-first into the MRAP at sixty miles an hour. Like a bug to a windshield, the heavy MRAP didn't even shake from the impact of the human projectile.

Getting my bearings, I realized that I had spun around, facing the approaching crane vehicle. Putting the rig into first did nothing but throw mud behind me. I rocked it back and forth between reverse and first until I could find traction, getting it around to the other side of the roadblock. I could hear the large tires on the crane explode on the spikes, and I edged the rig forward down the road until I was sure I was out of range of any rifleman on board the crane. I was damn lucky to notice those spikes; thank you, 20/15 vision.

At a safe distance from the checkpoint, I idled the rig and stepped out onto the side for a better look. I could hear cries for help from the other side of the checkpoint. Someone was screaming into a radio. At first I thought the crane driver had found his motorcycle buddy spread out all over the side of the MRAP and was freaking out, but the booming moans of the approaching undead were all I needed to convince me otherwise.

I heard some clinking and finally saw a man climb into the crane control seat just before a second motor started up. The tattered FEMA tents and bullet-ridden sandbags obscured a lot of what I saw, but when the crane woke up, extending its metal neck, and the ball dropped, I realized what the man was doing. The ball on the end of the crane was full of spikes. I had to stop watching to kill three creatures that rounded the front of my rig, so I missed the first impact, but the second was spectacular. The crane operator swung the spiked steel ball with impunity, catapulting corpses over the tops of trees and sending them smashing into the sides of cars, nearly folding the doors in half.