Ghost Run (5 page)

Visibility remains poor, which is why I'm keeping the Gulf Coast in sight off my left shoulder as
Solitude
presses on at a blazing five knots. Her hull needs a good scraping, but after all the corpses I saw fall into the water, I don't think I'll be putting on the scuba gear anytime soon. Even sitting in the captain's chair back aft, the wind sometimes throws cold salt water my way, drenching my T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. My M4 remains in its scabbard adjacent the helm in the event I encounter something far more wicked than the undead.

Pirates were a thing here now.

It wasn't that far back, maybe two months ago, shortly after my trip to China. I was east of here, off the coast of Panama City. I'd just made it back from the mainland to retrieve all the canned baby formula I could find for Bug. An entire shopping cart full, to be more precise. I was stacking cases into the inflatable raft tied behind my dinghy. As I made my way back to
Solitude
, gunfire erupted from another marina about five hundred meters away. The downside to my subsonic ammo was that it wasn't particularly effective beyond two hundred meters.

That rule I had about running away from anything farther than that didn't apply when the enemy was shooting at you in open water with a thousand-meter weapon.

The rounds hit near, skipping across the water, thudding against
Solitude
's steel hull. With my sailboat between the shooter and me, I jumped from the dinghy onto the aft end, letting my haul drift. I got low to the deck and retrieved the 240 from my cabin, quickly mounting it to the pre-positioned bracket installed near the bow. With sniper rounds hitting my boat, I opened up with the belt-fed machine gun. I could see the sand and rocks explode and the abandoned boats splinter. I hit a propane tank on one of the derelict vessels, blowing out windows and sending a huge fireball into the sky. With no way of knowing where the shooter might be, I blew through an entire ammo can full of linked 7.62 in no time.

With the SAW out of rounds and the barrel smoking from the evaporating grease I keep on the gun to ward off rust, I sat there with my ears ringing in pain. I wondered for a moment what crazy motherfucker would be dumb enough to start a firefight from the shores of Panama City with a million undead on three sides.

The kind with a getaway plan.

A half-million-dollar red speedboat shot out of the marina and began tearing ass in my direction. My ears were wrecked from the 240; I didn't even hear it start its engine. I fumbled for another ammo can and began to load the SAW, burning my forearm on the barrel in the process. Cursing, I racked the machine gun.

The speedboat was nearly on top of me.

I squeezed the trigger, pumping rounds into the shiny chrome engine cowlings and beautiful red paint. Sparks flew and fuel began to spray all over the place, coating the water with the rainbow residue of dead dinosaurs. The boat sputtered, backfired, and caught fire, but the two pirates weren't finished. Dressed in body armor and armed with rifles and spiked baseball bats, one of them lobbed something in my direction that bounced off the hull and into the water.

Grenade.

I had a choice: I could either jump overboard opposite the grenade or keep firing.

I Swiss-cheesed the speedboat drivers, blasting bone, muscle,
Kevlar, and body parts into the gulf. Midway through the burst of gunfire, the grenade went off with a thud, sending an underwhelming amount of water into the air.

I sat there on the bow with the smoking 240, looking out over the water at the carnage. The luxury speedboat was wrecked, riddled with Bonnie-and-Clyde-level bullet holes. The bodies were torn to pieces, faces unrecognizable with most of their heads gone.

The water near the would-be pirates' speedboat was churning with activity. I watched a bull shark partially surface, taking a hunk of red meat down below. After a minute, the boat was fully engulfed in flames. Thankfully the wind took the smell of burning flesh away from
Solitude
.

Over the side, I saw half a dozen fish stunned on the surface. I netted them and put them in the cooler for later, when my appetite would return.

I vowed to never tell Tara about this, about how close I was to never coming back, all for baby formula.

Yes, there are much worse things than the undead.

Day 3

I was at the helm most of the night, fighting swells. At about 0330 this morning, the storm passed, leaving
Solitude
dead in the water. I was too far away from home port to waste diesel, so I doused the sails and activated the radar proximity alarm.
Solitude
began to drift at the whim of the gulf current.

I went to sleep at about 0430, confident that the Furuno radar would wake me if I drifted too close to anything. I closed my eyes and dozed off, bundled in scratchy wool blankets. Despite the palm tree postcards alluding otherwise, sailboats do get cold at night.

I woke suddenly to the piercing sound of the radar proximity alarm. I splashed my face with water and made way topside, my arm shielding my face from the bright midday sun.

From the deck, I could see the source of the radar alarm.
Solitude
had drifted to within two miles of the mainland. The air remained calm, so I decided to turn off the Furuno and drop anchor for a while. As
Solitude
settled in her anchorage, I realized I hadn't turned on the boat's onboard radio since I'd used it to find the distress signal. I flipped on the DC power to the radio, instantly recognizing the Remote Six frequency on the digital display.

Morse code began erupting from the boat's tinny mono speaker.

Instinctively, I grabbed a nearby roll of paper towels and the Sharpie pen from my chart box. I hadn't copied Morse in more than a year, since back when I found John in San Antonio before the nuke wiped out the city.

The signal was very weak. Listening, I thought to myself,
Why didn't I hear this before today?

The soldier. The one with Checkers.
His beacon must have been putting out enough juice to overpower the Morse code being transmitted over the same frequency. The radio could have been emitting for months and the vantage point of the floating balloon antenna likely canceled out anything on the same frequency. The handheld radio from my pack couldn't receive the faint transmission; only the boat's powerful transceiver and more capable antenna suite was able to pick it out of the RF noise. Judging by the reading and assuming the same effective power as the soldier's radio, the transmission was coming from somewhere far inland . . . but there was no real way to know for certain.

I began to feverishly copy the code, realizing I'd caught the tail end of what hopefully would be a looping and continuous transmission. Most of the broadcast was static.

Between the heavy white noise, I managed to decode words that hit me like a slap to the face.

. . . P H O E N I X . . . C U R E . . . S O U T H . . . A T L A N T A . . .

I lay there on the chart table, trying to listen through the static, unable to make out anything else that made any sense. I was just too far away from the transmission source. I attempted to radio back to the Keys, to let them know what I'd found. Nothing. I was too far north.

My choice was simple: sail a few days south to make the call and potentially lose the signal, or investigate the signal and attempt to make contact. They both had their merits, the former being that I could bring John or Saien. However, that round trip would mean a week of weary sailing down to the Keys and back to where
Solitude
was now. Going to Atlanta seemed out of the question. Maybe I'd just travel inland far enough to find a tall building so that I could get a better copy on the signal.

Just a few miles inland.

Not too far.

Thinking of what to do next, I remembered the machine's gray saddlebag. Still dead in the water while I waited on the wind to return, I dumped the bag, letting its contents thump on the chart table.

I'd nearly forgotten about the tablet. I powered it on, and a splash screen appeared, depicting a four-legged robot just like the
one on my boat dragging a wounded soldier out of harm's way. Below that image was a basic prompt:

Ramirez Login

or

New GARMR Login

I went topside to make sure the machine was still folded up and under the tarp.

I then reluctantly selected:
New Login
.

During the software loading sequence I watched the term
Ground Assault, Reconnaissance, & Mobilization Robot (G.A.R.M.R.)
appear on the screen ahead of the user interface. The prompt asked for my fingerprint and I complied, several times from different angles on the home button as instructed. It then asked for a photo of my face. I half expected the tablet's camera to activate for the photo, but it didn't.

There was a rustling sound from behind me. The tarp was moving. Remembering that the machine was secured to the railing with mooring line, I walked over to it.

Powering up, it stood, shedding the tarp as it began to slowly inch closer to me. Stopping at the end of its rope, it craned its head and stood staring at my face with its creepy rotating sensor. Without warning, it folded back up and sank to the deck of the boat. A high-resolution image of my face appeared on the tablet in my hands with digital measurements between the prominent features of my face. The tablet then asked me to say a series of phrases and every letter of the alphabet in long and short syllables. After this, the tablet requested how I'd like to orally identify the GARMR.

“Checkers,” I responded.

A green check mark on the new log-in progress bar indicated I'd completed the process. A tutorial video began to play on the tablet, showing the GARMR negotiating complex obstacles while being loaded down with cargo. The GARMR appeared to easily climb hills that I'd have trouble with. In the video, it was sent across a frozen parking lot while being kicked and shot at with beanbag guns. It absorbed every hit, counterbalanced, and kept moving.

The next part of the intro was a GARMR construction overview.
People in lab coats held gray bars of what looked like titanium as the screen cut to a carbon fiber molding bay.

Then things got a little more interesting.

The presentation faded to CGI of a probe flying through deep space at unimaginable speeds. The graphic zoomed in on a part of the spacecraft called an RTG, IDed as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Then animation moved the RTG from the probe into an overlay of a moving GARMR, indicating its location mounted underneath the body of the robotic unit.

This sucker was nuclear.

The video went on to state that the GARMR utilized a highly advanced RTG for its primary power supply, but supplemented it via efficient solar panels, which I had currently laid out on my chart table. The screen then indicated the electrical signal flow from the RTG and solar panels into a series of capacitors for energy storage. When depleted, it took the GARMR unit two hours to recharge the capacitors via RTG. The unit had a range of twenty miles per day, fully loaded. When depleted, it would simply go dormant, allowing its nuclear battery to charge its conventional battery banks. Finally, a series of short segments outlining self-healing joints, tackling maneuvers, night vision capability, and common oral commands ended the GARMR introduction.

After watching the entire presentation, I was taken to a new tutorial on setting up the Simon watch worn by the dead soldier. All four color-coded buttons were programmable. There was an embedded microphone in the center of the watch for voice commands out of the GARMR's organic hearing range. All I had to do was drag-and-drop the command I wanted onto the graphical representation of the Simon, hit
Save
, and the watch was programmed via the data link between the tablet, watch, and GARMR.

I didn't change the original Simon button functions but did add yellow-button functionality as
Scout
.

Hitting the yellow button would now send the GARMR a quarter mile in the compass direction of my choosing, giving me the ability to slew its camera via the tablet. Direction could be relayed via voice, tablet, or by simply pointing where I wanted the GARMR to go. Upon reaching the end of its scouting algorithm, it would return to me unless otherwise instructed via tablet or Simon.

The GARMR could even be told to go anywhere on the map of the United States I chose, but a caveat came with that option:

Dispatching GARMR on long-range reconnaissance missions may result in loss or damage of the asset. GARMR functions most efficiently as a battlefield human assistant.

GARMR's RTG power source concerned me, especially considering the warning I now read telling the user not to remain within one meter of GARMR for extended periods of time and the mention of an RTG self-destruct protocol. That could make things very interesting.

I waved the Geiger over the machine and heard the faint clicking, indicating low-level radioactivity. Far from lethal and not even comparable to the rubber boots I tossed in the water after leaving the docks. Even so, I'd be keeping my distance—that is, if I didn't decide to simply dump the seventy-kilogram GARMR overboard and let the salt water take care of it.

It goes without saying that Tara would literally shit a brick if she knew what I was thinking right now.

Day 4

The wind finally returned this morning.

I awoke to
Solitude
shifting at anchorage. After boiling water for coffee and having some canned beans and fruit for breakfast, I pulled anchor and set sail for the nearby island. It was hard to even call it that, as I could see the entire length of it from the helm. At maybe a mile long, it was void of trees, but had some grass and high dunes that could conceal trouble.

I was able to drop anchor a hundred yards out. My depth finder indicated that the bottom was twenty feet, a safe clearance for the keel. Running hard aground out here would mean certain death; the only place to go would be the mainland. Using
Solitude
's boom, I was able to rig a block and tackle to get the dormant GARMR on board my dinghy. It was ugly, but it worked.