Ghost Run

by J. L. Bourne

  I recovered the Ruger pistol from its green plastic container under the bed. I pulled the action a few times, the slide painfully pinching my thumb and index finger. I could smell a thin coat of minty lubrication on the gun. The barrel wasn’t threaded, but it really didn’t matter. I only had a 7.62 can that wouldn’t fit the threads even if the pistol barrel was silencer ready. I loaded the ten-round magazines and inserted one into the gun before racking the slide and engaging the safety.

  The front seat was peppered with empty water bottles, giving me an idea. I took the magazines from the back and began to tear out pages, stuffing small shreds into one of the empty bottles. Once it was full, I poured some water inside and split the mouth of the bottle. Taking a zip tie from my pack, I carefully secured the bottle over the pistol barrel.

  The door opened with a creak as I hopped down the steps onto the weathered concrete unloading area. Before I forgot, I positioned the solar panels southeast to maximize power to the battery. At the fence, I could see the damage done by the passing horde. Three stuck corpses leaned their heads in my direction and began to gurgle noisily through their shredded windpipes. I hopped the fence and approached one of the flailing sacks of rotting meat. I placed the water bottle on its head and selected Fire on the Ruger.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Pop.

  It was loud, but not as much as my suppressed carbine. I repeated the process, eliminating the immobilized undead until my magazine ran dry. The shots got progressively louder as I blew out the guts of my makeshift silencer with each round I sent into the skulls of the creatures. I yanked the bottle off the end of the gun and tossed it into the mud, disgusted. A bulky silencer effective for only five or ten rounds wouldn’t do me any favors. I stuffed the warm pistol under my belt and splashed through the dark mud back to the semi.

  I had lunch on the roof of the trailer, glassing the area all around me with my binos, seeing nothing but the occasional corpse stumbling through the fields in the distance. Once back in the truck, I placed the brick of .22 ammo and the Ruger pistol in the GARMR’s saddlebags and again adjusted the panels into the rising Florida sun. As I crouched below the trailer, I could hear a faint thumping on the aluminum walls.

  One of them might be inside, or it could just be from the creatures in the store.

  Feeling like a million dollars for a multimeter would be a fair trade, I ignored the noises and focused on organizing the cab of the truck as well as my gear. I hadn’t scavenged the nearby truck with the flat tire, so I methodically worked that from the back to the front, taking tools, ropes, and everything else that might come in handy from its exterior. The cab was locked, but there didn’t seem to be anything useful inside, and this one didn’t have a sleeper compartment. Breaking the window wasn’t worth the trouble or the noise.

  Thump, thump, thump came the sound from the other trailer.

  I hoped it would go away. I looked up at the bright sun that beamed down onto the copper-tinted solar panels.

  “Shine, you bastard,” I said aloud, willing the photons onto the panels and the electrons into the precious battery.

  At about ten thirty, I decided to give it a shot. I disconnected the battery and lumbered up onto the engine compartment. I replaced the leads and nearly fell from the truck as loud static began blasting from the speakers inside the cab. I jumped off the engine and raced up into the cab, shutting off the source of the dinner bell static. The key wasn’t even in the ignition. The trucker had his CB wired to work without the key.

  Thump, thump—the sound from the trailer continued.

  I worked quickly, preparing for a mob of undead to round any corner without notice.

  As I worked, a question formed in my mind: How am I going to get the GARMR in the cab?

  Pushing the problem out of my head for the moment, I plugged the panels back into the GARMR’s lithium polymer battery frame, tucking the cords out of its way.

  “Checkers, follow.”

  The machine walked gracefully over to me in the shaded grass. I told it to stay and ran back over to the truck. Up in the cab with the door open, I went through the steps I remembered. The machine started on the second attempt, blowing dark smoke from its stack and over my hood. I let the long-dormant engine spin and lubricate for a minute before putting it into gear and edging forward.

  Something fell behind the truck. Looking back into my rearview mirror, the creature began to get back on its feet. I gave the truck some gas and parked near the GARMR, leaving it running. I jumped down off the truck and nearly twisted my ankle, sending off an unwanted shot into the brick facade of the store. As the round zinged off the wall, I put another one into the corpse’s face, disconnecting enough nerves to put it down, but not enough to stop it from moving. The thing jerked and twisted uncontrollably as I focused on the open loading bay doors and into the deep black.

  Nothing came for me.

  The truck was still running when an idea hit me. I ran to the back of the trailer, hoping to see pallets of ammunition and dry food but instead found rotted lettuce. I pulled one of the aluminum-undermounted ramps down from the back of the truck and pressed the follow button on the beacon watch. As I came up the ramp, I heard the sounds of several creatures rounding the outside corner of the store. The other truck was between the advancing creatures and me. They didn’t notice me yet. The GARMR clicked and clacked up the ramp into the trailer; I told it to stay and stowed the ramp before getting back into the cab.

  All at once, the things poured into the loading area from both corners of the store, no doubt attracted by the CB static and engine noise. They began to quickly fill the area. Not wanting to damage my ride, I kept it in first and rolled slowly through the growing crowd, crunching some under the massive weight of the truck and knocking others to the side. After passing the majority of them, I upshifted, eventually getting to twenty miles per hour as I rounded the corner past the automotive bays and into the front parking lot. Coming out of the turn, my tire took out a concrete guard with a loud clang, sending it flying under the semi.

  • • •

  I departed the store lot and turned out onto the road, towing a trailer full of rotten lettuce. As I straightened the rig out on the overgrown road, I checked my mirrors and saw a hundred creatures marching out behind me. I gave it some gas, banking around abandoned cars and road debris. My companions in the passenger seat were the two empty fuel jugs and a length of hose sitting near my carbine. As I stayed slow and attentive to the hazards of the road, I tuned through CB channels, hoping to miraculously land on some intel. I found nothing but silence and static as I tuned the dial back and forth along every citizens band frequency.

  I was having luck navigating around the deep potholes and wrecked cars until I came to a roadblock up ahead consisting of a giant red conex box. I stopped the truck, grabbed my rifle and binos, and headed for the roof. I lay prone on the top, glassing the roadblock. The heat coming off the blacktop caused mirage distortion. I saw movement, figures walking back and forth in front of the red box. I got back into the cab and idled ahead for a closer look. When I got to within two hundred meters, the situation became apparent.

  The roadblock was abandoned.

  There were half a dozen animated corpses chained by their necks to the base of the conex. As I crept to within a hundred meters, I could make out the faded black spray-painted letters on the front of the metal box:

  YOU’RE DEAD!

  I rolled up to the roadblock slowly with my carbine sitting across my lap. Scanning left and right, I saw no indicators of ambush or other shenanigans, so I stopped the truck in front of the conex, just out of reach of the incarcerated creatures. I listened to their chains drag and scrape against the ground; the sounds sent me back to a memory of the undead chain gang I was once forced to deal with. My handwritten record of that encounter was lost in some Hourglass lab somewhere too secret for my pay grade.

  The creatures here, though, converged on the truck, the slack in their cha
ins pulled taut just out of reach. With duct tape from the truck’s toolbox, I attached my five-inch tantō switchblade to the tire thumper. The corpses were dispatched quickly and quietly without incident. There was a guard shack (if you could even call it that) sitting out of direct view behind a van. It consisted of a tarp for a roof over a few rusted folding chairs and one of those plastic folding craft tables. Using one of the chairs, I climbed up onto the red conex box and looked over to the other side.

  What I saw caused me to drop to the roof, melting into it in order to get as flat as possible. The other side of the roadblock was crawling with the undead. I slunk slowly off the box and went for the yellow tow strap I’d used to fasten rope down into the store. I didn’t waste any time attaching one of the undead’s chain collars to the front bumper of the semi, not even bothering to free the cadaver. I jumped up into the cab and put it in reverse. Backing slowly, the heavy-duty yellow strap took the slack from the chain, raising the body off the ground in a grotesque pose. The truck stopped moving, so I gave it more gas, causing the large metal box to screech across the surface of the road in my direction.

  The adrenaline flowed, brought on by the corpses coming at me from both sides of the box. I gave the truck more gas, yanking the box from its long-held spot on the road, revealing a rectangular outline of rust where it sat before. I barely got the truck parked before jumping out and retrieving the tow strap. I took a parting shot at one of them just before it grabbed me by the shoulder.

  It got that close.

  I was up in the cab just before the mass of creatures surrounded the truck. I couldn’t close the door now; there were too many trying to climb up into the cab. I edged the truck forward, kicking wildly outside, tempted to empty a precious mag into the ones that blocked the door. Rolling past the roadblock, I saw two of the undead wearing severed ears as necklaces. They had guns slung tightly across their chests, FN FALs. Might as well be on a different planet; there was no salvaging them from the sea of undead that surrounded the rig. These guys were probably bad news when they were alive. I kept rolling on, away from the creatures, rounding two more bends before losing them.

  An hour after the roadblock, I came to a long straight stretch in the road with nothing for miles in both directions but a few abandoned cars. One of them had an open side window with a small oak tree growing through it and out the shattered front glass. In fifty years, that car would be high off the ground and someone like me would wonder how the fuck that could have happened.

  Perspective.

  I took this time to shut down the rig and regroup. I was fairly sure the alternator would have charged the battery over the past few hours of hauling ass at a brisk twenty-mile-per-hour average. I checked the atlas I’d found wedged between the seats; I was on Highway 319 heading north to Tallahassee. Using the scale on the map, I estimated that I was more than two hundred miles away from Atlanta. Part of me wanted to turn back right now and head for the gulf, for Solitude. The other wanted my wife and child to live in a world where they would never have to worry about a corpse climbing into their window at night. I knew Tara would be concerned and pissed; I missed both her and Bug more than anything in the world.

  But my idea? I just had to try.

  Everything that gave me happiness in the world was at the mercy of the undead.

  As I penciled my route north onto the road atlas, I imagined what these parts might be like thirty years from now. Anyone handy with a gun and a few rounds could make it out here if they were smart and not too brave. Guns got you food and water and everything else left abandoned to the undead. If you had guns, you could waste enough of them to loot an entire warehouse full of food and water. What would happen when the guns wore out and all the bullets resided in the skulls of a hundred million corpses turning to dust out here? Then that will be the age of the mountain man, the true survivor forced to learn to make it out here without endless ammunition and food that hasn’t expired. Right now, we’re making it off the back of fading technology and production capacity that died along with most of the population. With no refineries, we’re all pretty much on foot within a few years. Ammo will probably become currency. I’ve scavenged spare sails from other derelict boats in my travels, putting them in a safe place along with riggings and extra parts. I’ve thought this through as much as any man could. We’re beyond peak oil now. Beyond peak everything.

  • • •

  I hadn’t made much progress since the roadblock. Even this back-road highway was in pretty sad shape. I’ve had to stop and pull three cars out of the way, some of them filled with hungry corpses. I heard them but couldn’t really see them inside their vehicles; the glass was translucent, too glazed over with whatever slime sunbaked corpses secreted. As I slowly edged north, I came to a large lake just off the highway to the east. Rolling forward, I nearly turned the rig around from what I saw. There were dozens of corpses on the banks of the lake walking into the water, trying to get at something. The noise from my engine peeled a few off from the mass at the shore. They lumbered in the direction of my rig with their arms reaching out, as if they had no depth perception that I was over a hundred meters away.

  As I watched the advancing creatures, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. The water flashed white near the beach and a dozen corpses were knocked over like bowling pins in a strike roll. A few of them turned over onto their backs and stood back up. They again advanced into the water nearly up to their knees. The other stricken corpses were flailing miserably on the beach, covered with mud.

  Something had broken their legs. Through my binoculars, I could see white bones from compound fractures poking through the gray and rotting skin of their thighs and knees.

  The creatures that ventured out into the water were agitated by something.

  I watched one as it was taken under in a violent blast of white and black water. Then it happened again. I kept watching the battle between the creatures and the lake, still unsure of what I was seeing. I hadn’t been this entertained and mystified in a damn long time.

  I rolled the truck farther down the road. Fixated on the water, I nearly ran the truck off the road. I slammed the brakes, throwing me forward into the steering wheel as a massive fourteen-foot something partially beached itself and grabbed one of the undead in its powerful jaws, pulling it back into the black, death-rolling the creature into pieces.

  My mouth hung open at the fearlessness of the alligator.

  It wasn’t working alone.

  Two other alligators showed themselves just in front of the group of corpses that were dumb enough to wade into knee-deep water with thousand-pound reptiles. The beasts tore into them, ripping their decomposing bodies to pieces by sheer jaw pressure and lacerating death rolls. The large alligator came back for more after its smaller companions took their enemies under the water. Unafraid, the alpha reptile charged the beach. It was completely out of the water, swinging its large tail at lighting speed into a fresh group of advancing creatures. The undead didn’t stand a chance. The alligator’s tail impacted with a sickening thwack, tossing broken bodies like rag dolls into the water near the muddy shoreline. Similar to the wild boars I’d encountered, these half-ton reptiles were well fed and not afraid to use the weapons that millions of years of evolution provided them.

  My concentration on the spectacle was broken by a thumping on the driver’s-side door. Four corpses stared at me from the ground below, unsuccessfully attempting to climb the steps to the door. I reluctantly put the rig into gear and rolled forward slowly, past the scene of reptilian carnage I’d never forget. Just like the birds, alligators were suited to survival against the dead. The birds could fly over unthinkable hordes; the alligators could simply swim away or feast on rotten flesh from the safety of the murky waters they dominated.

  “Eat every last one of the fuckers!” I screamed out the window as I drove past.

  1700

  I’d only made about twenty miles of progress since leaving Alligator Lake. Fuel
state looked good, but I’d be looking out for somewhere to siphon some diesel tomorrow if possible. I found a mansion off the road with a wide turnaround driveway to park for the night. At probably five thousand square feet, I didn’t have the inclination or energy to clear the place. This fact was hammered home by the corpse I saw inside looking out at me and clawing at the window on the second floor. There was no telling what horrors awaited me inside.

  I climbed up into the trailer to check on the GARMR. It had slid a couple feet from where I’d put it on standby. I began to toss out pallets of rotted lettuce and was assaulted by flies and mosquitoes for my effort. I kept clearing the trailer. The pile of lettuce boxes outside grew larger as I moved closer to the front. As I got rid of the rest of the rotten food, I felt the cool air from the trailer’s refrigeration unit blowing against my face. I figured out how to disable it, hoping to save a few precious drops of diesel.

  I slid the aluminum ramp down and hit the follow button on the GARMR. As it exited the trailer, I pulled out the tablet and began to direct the machine through the tall, unkempt grass leading behind the mansion. Like the spiral staircase house I’d used for shelter, this one had a large screened-in back area with a pool. I watched the high-definition feed streaming onto the tablet as I sat in relative safety inside the cab. The GARMR feed showed five or six corpses standing in the field behind the house. There was also a detached three-car garage in the back near the pool.