Ghost Run (24 page)

I got inside the truck cab and turned the diesel over. Careful not to sink the heavy tractor into the grass, I executed a three-point turn, backing it inside the property in the event I needed to make a quick getaway. With another press of a button, the heavy gates met in the middle, sealing off the property from the monsters outside. Instead of walking down the leaf-strewn path leading back to the house, I took another pass around the gate perimeter. Same as before, same dent in a section of gate caused by a lawn mower, same corpse facedown in a dry creek bed, and the same hot Georgia afternoon.

Checkers faithfully followed, staying ten feet behind me so as to not soak me with RTG battery radiation. Back at the house, I told it to sleep outside the door. It would be easier to recover the GARMR if the house got overrun and I had to exit via the second-
floor window. I cursed under my breath for even having to think that way and went inside to the cool refuge of the home.

That creeping pain started to set in again, making me reach for my cargo pocket to no avail. I'd intentionally left the meds at the end of the driveway. If I braved the heat and limped back to the truck for my fix, I'd know I was still under its spell.

In the medicine cabinet, just inside the great hall, I found some aspirin and took a small handful, washing it down with cold beef stew from the pantry. I stood by the front door, palming the door handle, trying to talk myself into heading back to Goliath for the meds.

You're in pain; you need them.

Only take half a pill, it's not a big deal.

No.

After about thirty minutes, the aspirin and beef stew kicked in, dulling the sharp edges of pain. I fell back from the door to the couch, talking myself down from the prospect of braving the heat for the little pills in the glove box a half mile away. Keeping my mind off the meds, I pulled out the GARMR tablet and began clicking through menus. Finding the one I wanted, I set Checkers' sensors into a sector scan, keeping an eye on the driveway. If it detected movement, it would make the tablet beep and send full-motion video to the screen.

After turning on the GARMR's sentry mode, I took a look out the window at the machine. Its body remained dormant in a rectangular shape, but its sensor turret remained active, sending out LIDAR to its assigned sector, looking for movement to report to the tablet. It was a rather genius design chock-full of military applications. I had never seen one like this before the shit hit the fan . . . the closest to it being the machines made to carry heavy battlefield loads powered by loud gas engines or conventional batteries. With the GARMR on watch, I checked the home a little more thoroughly. Raising the lever on the kitchen sink faucet, I was floored to see water spew from the gooseneck opening. Dirty for the first few seconds, it then cleared up. I put my head under the sink and just stood there. It must be falling down the pipes from the cistern up the hill I'd seen earlier.

I swung the lever over to the side marked
H
and waited. I
heard something sounding like a hot-air balloon coming from another room down the hall, and soon hot water came spilling from the gooseneck faucet onto my damaged hands.

Glorious. My eyes literally began to tear up with joy. If the sink had hot water, then, oh God, so must the shower. I immediately slammed the lever down, cutting off the water flow, not wanting to take any chance of missing out on a hot shower, which was something even rarer than unicorn gills.

Cruising down the hall to the bathroom, I checked the linen closet. Nothing inside but sheets and the home's air circulating unit. Multiple copper pipes snaked out of the slab, entering the circulator. Curious, I pulled the panel and touched my hand to the coils. They were cold.

The shower was a massive walk-in with no door, tiled from wall to wall in fancy marble. I wasted no time in turning on the rain nozzle, letting water flow from the high ceiling into my waiting hands. The water was cold at first, until the on-demand water heater kicked on, releasing water so hot, it was uncomfortable on my injured hands. I dialed it down and stripped off my clothes, not caring at the moment about whatever lurked outside.

I grabbed the shampoo from the shower shelf and began scrubbing. Black dirt and grime circled the drain at my feet. Raising my arms to catch the water, the pungent onion smell almost made me gag. The dirt just kept washing away from my body. I stripped off the bandage on my ankle and the dressing from my hands and tossed them in the corner of the large bathroom.

Walking out of the shower, I stood in front of the fogged mirror and noticed that a heart had been written there from untold showers ago . . . left there for me to find, far from home, far from Tara and the baby. The way it was shaped reminded me of Tara, how she makes her hearts when she writes little notes to me. She puts little skinny hearts as dots on her
i
's. Not quite Tara's hearts here, but the mirror still reminded me of her. I stared until the fog faded, revealing the face of a person I barely recognized.

Who was this beat-up old man with a beard standing naked in front of me, scarred from shrapnel, gunshots, and burns?

I ran my hand over my jawline, noticing a few gray hairs hidden in my beard. I looked feral, like some wild mountain man.
There was a double-edged safety razor, shaving brush, and soap, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Shaving flipped a switch in my head. A clean face was for when I was home, not here in the undead badlands. Out here, I was this man, not that one. Out here, I ate with my fingers from tin cans and shot dead things in the head as if they were paper targets at a shooting range in bygone days.

I felt a lot better, though. The soap and warm water, although painful at first, were a godsend for my wounds and bruises. I didn't bother wrapping a towel around my waist, but I did sling my gun across my chest. I nonchalantly headed for the utility room, opened the washing machine, and tossed in all my dirty clothes, even the skivvies from my pack I'd been holding on to. I set a quick cycle and hit
Start
, and the damn machine worked.

I watched the cistern water fill the machine through the glass on top and the motor began to agitate the clothes, fed by the electricity generated by the turbine and whatever else this house had going for it. Upon closer inspection of the circulator in the linen closet, I found a sticker affixed to the side.

HALE GEOTHERMAL

Mark on map

Figures. I find a geothermal climate-controlled home with plenty of water, surrounded by a tall iron fence, off the beaten path and I couldn't use it. I made a note to myself to mark this place on my map.

The sun was starting to dip below the trees and my pain pushed beyond the aspirin into the realm of madness. I put on the last clean pair of skivvies from my pack and slid on my boots, not bothering to lace them up. I opened the door and was blasted by the summer heat as I limped to Goliath for the meds to help me hang on. The carbine's charging handle dug into my skin as I walked, reminding me that I was mostly naked with a black rifle machine gun slung across my chest. I'd have looked like a lunatic two years ago.

Goliath's hood was still warm and its frame still popped as the rig cooled down. I climbed up into the cab and grabbed the bag of
meds, disappointed in my inability to resist. If I'm being honest with myself, these half doses were making me very uncomfortable.

•  •  •

After the codeine kicked in, I went around the house at sunset unplugging nonessential items that were ghost draining the local microgrid. The house was heated and cooled by geothermal, but the electricity was supplied by three wind turbines as well as an array of solar shingles situated on the southern slope of the large stronghold's roof. The generated energy supplied a battery bank situated in a small shed that was attached to the northern side of the house, away from direct sunlight. Upon inspection of the batteries via flashlight, I could see that about twenty percent of them were dead, their fluid seeping from the top of the battery and down onto the floor, corroding the bolts that held the battery rack together. I couldn't say for sure, but the battery banks probably had a year, maybe two, before they'd need replacements. De-stressing the microgrid like I did would help, but wouldn't stop the eventual full degeneration of the banks.

I checked the washer and noticed that my clothes were done, so I strung them out to dry on the line in the backyard; I could have used the dryer, but I wasn't sure how much strain the home's grid could handle. Back inside the house, I flipped on the lights and went to the master bedroom on the ground level and set up temporary shop. Again I laid my pack out on the large floor and dumped it for reorganization and sorting. I recompressed my sleeping bag and put it on the bottom. My spare skivvies and socks would go next whenever they were dry, and my cooking supplies and first aid would go at the top of the bag along with a magazine that held seven rounds of subsonic ammunition. The last full mag of subs was in my carbine. I had thirty-five total rounds of subsonic remaining. Knowing how I shoot, any OPFOR of undead over thirty strong and I'd be full-time bayonet, straight-up World War I trench warfare.

At least my pack was a lot lighter than when I started this journey eighteen days ago.

I took the time to break down my gun and wipe the extreme carbon buildup off the bolt carrier assembly and bolt with paper towels and an old toothbrush I found in one of the master bath vanities. I always keep a bore snake in my kit, as they're light and have multiple uses. I ran the snake through the barrel a few times, knocking out as much carbon as I could without a full-on cleaning. A suppressor throws a lot of shit back into the receiver, filling it with gunk pretty fast. Surprised I hadn't had a malfunction yet, I reattached the upper to the lower and headed to the garage with my NOD on my head. Finding some two-cycle oil, I dabbed some into the holes on the bolt carrier, letting it seep down to the bolt, and then racked the action a few times before replacing the magazine and chambering a round.

At seven pounds, my carbine could kill twenty-eight undead at or inside a hundred meters. Thirty-five if I could get to my last magazine. Even with few rounds remaining, it was deadlier than a Spartan blade or a quiver full of bolts. Back inside, I walked every room, checking every lock on every window and door. With my rifle next to me and my boots on the floor, I climbed into the bed and grabbed the GARMR tablet I had plugged into the home's grid. I stood Checkers up and steered it around the property, looking for anything out of place. I clicked the audio on and listened to the machine walk down the path to Goliath.

After checking that the gate was secure, I turned it left to walk down the perimeter. Same corpse facedown in the dry creek, same dent on the iron fence from a lawn mower. Slewing the GARMR's sensor over to look at the house, I saw my own bedroom window glowing brightly in the machine's night vision–capable sensor array. The moonlight reflected off the low-profile solar panels, causing the machine to auto-gate its night vision and compensate for the lumen fluctuations. Satisfied the area was clear, I activated the machine's sentry mode and placed the tablet on top of my pack while it charged.

Feeling tinges of pain returning, I forced my mind to shut down before I yearned for another dose of drugs to see me through the night.

0600

Bump in the Night

At first, I wasn't certain whether it was the drugs or for real. I kept hearing a thumping sound coming from somewhere in the house. I didn't really know how long it had been going on, hidden by ambient noise. The air circulator had automatically shut off, blanketing the entire home in silence. There was no pattern to the sound; its low, methodical beat penetrated whatever barrier it passed through. I first noticed it at about midnight and immediately jumped out of my rack and began clearing rooms in my underwear with my carbine and NOD. The noise couldn't be heard in any room but the master. I flipped on the LED overhead lighting and began putting my ear to the walls to try to triangulate the source. When I was about to take my knife to the drywall, I noticed that the carpet under the corners of the bed was disturbed, as if someone had rolled the bed on caster wheels.

Reluctantly, I put my hip into the bedpost and gave it a nudge. It rolled nearly effortlessly, almost hitting the dresser. Concealed underneath the bed was a stainless steel hatch with the largest Torx hole I'd ever seen in the center of it. Must have been a T500, if they even made those before. I pushed the bed aside into the wall and pressed my ear to the cold stainless hatch. It was definitely louder. Running my fingers over the edges and contours of the large hatch, I knew it must have literally weighed a ton. Large, vault-like hinges were recessed into the two-inch-thick steel jamb, rendering the door almost impossible to attack with an angle grinder.

I sat there on top of the hatch, formulating what must be inside. The conclusion wasn't hard to come to. The house had been unlocked when I found it and music was playing. The home's local grid and water supply cistern told me that whoever owned the place had a lot of money and that they were hard-core preppers. The rhythmic pounding on the hatch door only slightly changed cadences, just enough to let me know that it was one of those things down there. If a living human was trapped inside and knew someone was above, they'd either make absolutely zero noise or
they'd be pounding and screaming like crazy. The second round of long-interval thumps coming from inside was the undead.

I'd never know for certain unless I somehow found a plasma torch and another power source, but it really wasn't my place to know. Hell, any guess was as good as mine. Maybe that decomposing bag of bones I keep seeing on patrol outside, the one facedown in the riverbed, bit the owners. Maybe they didn't know what the bite would do yet. Maybe a lot of them showed up at the gate, scaring them underground with an injured kid who was already infected thanks to taunting one of the creatures through the fence. Whatever it was, they went underground; one of them turned and took out the rest of them. I imagined some vast steel cavern loaded to the ceiling with ammunition and food.