Ghost Run

by J. L. Bourne

  I bailed out of the chopper door and picked up the AR-10, peering through the glass. The woman went back to the sniper, but her body language told me the man was already on his way to hell. Defeated, she stood up, covered in blood, and turned to face the undead that continued their assault on the roof. She fought with defiance, slaying them hand to hand with what looked like a lawn mower blade. She fought and fought until she became tired.

  My finger eased onto the trigger of my carbine. My ammo situation was critical; I had to give pause for every subsonic round expended. The woman was just too far away. Even if I managed to aim ten feet high and score a lucky hit, I couldn’t be sure that there would be enough velocity left to penetrate the undead’s skulls.

  I watched the woman during that uncomfortable transition when defiance transforms into fear. With the undead showing no signs of stopping, she ran back to the sniper and picked up his gun. Straining to shoulder the weapon and hold it level, I heard her scream “Fuck!” just before lowering the muzzle to pull back the bolt to load another round. Just as death was upon her, she leveled her gun and pulled the trigger without aiming. The blast from the large-caliber sniper rifle knocked her back five feet, nearly on her ass. The round tore through four corpses, pushing them all back but only taking two out of commission. The round must have severed their spines. The other two flipped over onto their fronts and started to get up.

  The woman charged and kicked the nearest corpse repeatedly until she forced it off the roof, giving it a final blow with a golf swing via the large bolt gun she wielded.

  That was one way to use it.

  The undead on the street far below reminded me of elementary school science class, iron shavings moving along magnetic fields. My machine-gun fire pushed the shavings to the capitol building, where no doubt some of them had entered and were coming up the stairs. Her shots with that shoulder cannon pulled the iron back in her direction and into the bank building. Only, the figures below weren’t harmless elements reacting to magnetic fields. They were a complex biomass engineered to kill, to wipe out intelligent life on Earth.

  I couldn’t help her.

  Besides, she just tried to fucking kill me. They shot first.

  But . . . that’ll never unburn the image of that woman’s last stand. Never.

  She fired the final round out of the bolt gun into the oncoming crowd of monsters, to no effect. They kept coming, pushing her into the corner of the rooftop. Backing to the edge, she began to kick them, but there was nothing anyone could do. The bowels of the building released a hundred undead onto the roof.

  She fell off the building with three sets of jaws clamped to her flesh, plummeting to the concrete. I watched her fall.

  Unburn.

  I listened to her soul-searing scream.

  Unburn.

  I heard the sickening crack of her body on the pavement.

  Unburn.

  I watched the disfigured and broken undead that fell alongside her tear into her flesh as the other lemmings from above dropped, reaching a hundred miles an hour before impacting in a grisly dog pile of bones and rotten meat. The woman was no more, buried without dirt, no ashes to ashes or dust to dust.

  I watched the writhing pile of what used to be human move unnaturally, fighting for warm flesh.

  A final kernel of humanity remaining inside of me began to throb and pull before I lost it over the side of the building, spewing vomit out into the glass, metal, and concrete canyon.

  • • •

  I lay there in the morning sun trying to mentally materialize some brain bleach to somehow unfuck my head, but lost control and went into a deep, trauma-induced sleep. My eyes were open before I woke up; I remember coming back from sleep staring at the sunlight beaming through the bullet holes in the chopper. I stood up and took in my surroundings. The undead completely dominated the streets below.

  When I was twelve years old, my cousin and I went into the woods to hunt squirrels. We stayed out for hours, taking three tree rats with a hundred-year-old bolt-action .22 rifle. We talked about cartoons and video games on the way back home. Reaching the wooden steps, we each looked down at our legs and panicked; we couldn’t even see the blue of our jeans, as our legs were completely infested with seed ticks. My cousin and I doused our legs in gasoline to get them off our skin, repelling the tiny bastards. The current scene reminded me of my childhood in some distant, demented way.

  I stuffed some empty casings in my ears to quell the booming noise of the dead. With some hesitation, I grabbed my pack from the steps and began to set up the radio on the northern side of the building. As I worked, shattering glass punctuated the wails along with wrenching metal.

  I was in a bad situation, standing on the precipice of an undead lava cauldron. Even if I had the inventory of the Remington ammunition factory up there with me, it wouldn’t have been enough to dent the numbers of walking corpses. The wind lifted their stench, dramatically shifting its intensity between the two extremes of being absent and nearly watering my eyes from its pungency. Holding back a fresh wave of nausea, I tossed my antenna over the nearby light pole, missing once.

  Connecting the antenna to my small radio, I heard the sound of gunfire and immediately went flat on the roof. I lay there blowing out a dry spot near my mouth so I could listen without moving.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat.

  Two explosions followed by machine-gun fire. Not terribly close, but somewhere in the city.

  Whoever those people were on the other roof had friends, and those friends had radios. Either they were sharing my view of the streets below and wanted to exfil, or they were coming for me.

  I worked quickly, retuning the radio to intercept the transmission.

  I began to recognize the sloppy Morse and concentrated, copying the signal through the earbud.

  The signal was clear.

  “Tune 8.992 for recording. Atlanta has vaccine. Do not approach CDC. Go south of Atlanta, Wachovia Tower. Need exfil, position under heavy assault. Phoenix sends . . .”

  I quickly tuned the shortwave freq into my radio to hear the recording.

  “Atlanta, CDC site B. We have a cure. Repeat, we have a cure. We can stop . . . deactivate them. If anyone is out there, get to Atlanta, to the Wachovia Tower, and draw them out. We’ve got no fucking choice: We’ve got to make it out with what we’ve got. The building is completely surrounded and we’re running out of resources. If you’re hearing this, we are either all dead or need immediate extract from a hot LZ, and I do mean hot. This is Sean Casey, United States Navy, Task Force Phoenix. Out.”

  Another fucking building. I was trapped above Tallahassee with a million screaming freaks on the streets below. If I made it out alive, my next stop was another building . . . just outside Atlanta proper. I was watching the other rooftop, when the person who’d shot at me before began to move. Through the AR-10 glass, I could see the legs twitch before the new corpse opened its eyes and lifted its head. Its head moved from left to right, as if scanning its environment before it sat up and got to its feet. I waved my arms, catching its attention. It somehow knew I wasn’t dead. Somewhere firing in its still-warm brain was a primordial, possibly reptilian instinct to feed. It’d been a while since I’d seen one this fresh, which unsettled me. Upon recognition, its lips drew back and its legs took the body forward, right over the edge of the building. The creature fell, eventually knocking over half a dozen more of its kind, as it most likely broke every bone in its miserable body on impact.

  More gunfire.

  Closer.

  An explosion.

  A concussion broke windows in the distance. I could hear panes of glass hit the ground from buildings somewhere east of me. I headed back downstairs in case one of those thugs was gunning for me, which was almost a foregone conclusion at this point.

  I had to find a way out, a way back to Goliath, my virtual lifeboat with ten wheels of freedom. Disregarding for now the noise of approaching com
bat, I headed back down to the observation floor below. The wind was gusting, causing the red tablecloths to flap on the tables near the broken glass that led straight down to the ground. The sheet hung there just as it had before, just as it had for over a year.

  I went back to the stair access door and put my ear to it, listening for any signs that the enemy was on the other side. Nothing yet.

  After laboriously removing the sandbags, I swung the door open. The distant shuffling of feet caused my heart rate to increase. I sat at the top of the stairs, briefly listening with my eyes closed to somehow get a better idea of what I was up against.

  The GARMR’s tablet glowed brightly in the dim stairwell. I navigated to the manual operation screen and turned on the machine’s LiDAR turret, panning it around. The view was half obstructed by a cardboard box I’d used to conceal the machine, but it fell out of the way, revealing a stairwell full of undead, all heading upstairs to my position. The blown-out stairs halfway down would slow them.

  I activated the GARMR’s motor function and listened to the audio as its camouflage fell away to the ground, causing some of the creatures to crane their heads in curiosity. Moaning, they went for the GARMR, likely attracted by the heat radiating from its nuclear battery. Upon closer inspection of the machine (like, face-to-the-camera close), they lost interest and kept moving.

  The creatures must have snapped the zip tie on the revolving door at the front of the building. I needed a door wedge.

  I moved the GARMR slowly. All I needed was snow and it would look as if I was piloting it at the speed of an Imperial AT-AT.

  After making it through the door, I pushed the machine forward via touch screen, toward the front of the building. With its sensors blinded by walking corpses in all directions, the GARMR navigated ahead, occasionally being nudged or grabbed by a curious corpse.

  After the machine cleared the densest group of creatures, I could see the revolving door spinning via the machine’s crackling video. I increased my pace, garnering the attention of more creatures that immediately rushed the machine, attracted by heat and movement, only to realize it wasn’t edible. A steady stream of them were entering the building. Too many more, and the whole place would fill to the brim, forcing me higher and higher until I met the same fate as that woman on the other rooftop.

  The revolving door kept turning and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I panned the machine’s LIDAR sensor around the room. The only thing I could control in this environment was the GARMR. Without thinking, I pressed forward on the virtual control stick of the touch screen and charged the machine into the spinning revolving door until the door slammed into the GARMR, causing a burst of on-screen static. The sounds of straining metal told me that either the door was getting over-torqued or the GARMR’s hardened titanium frame was getting beat to shit. I spun the camera 180 degrees, looked down the GARMR’s back, and saw that the door stopped spinning, temporarily stemming the flow of undead into the building. I put the machine into dormant mode.

  The GARMR was now my shield.

  I picked up the heavy machine gun, wrench, ammo, and new barrel and rushed back into the observation room. Tossing the heavy gun onto the nearby couch, I closed the door and began stacking the sandbags and furniture, fortifying the only way inside.

  The undead were coming.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat . . .

  Another burst of machine-gun fire made me jump. It was much closer.

  I set the heavy gun up facing the door and dropped the new barrel into place. I loaded the gun and racked a round into the chamber. I had about five hundred rounds remaining—not much, considering there were probably at least a thousand inside the building before I plugged the leak with the GARMR.

  Checking the screen, the door was still stuck. I panned the machine’s optic around to the undead trapped in the door, seeing a dozen gnashing faces pressed angrily against the heavy glass, trying to push through. Wrenching metal and great bellowing moans erupted from the tablet’s small speakers.

  I turned the GARMR audio off.

  I rounded up my kit and placed it nearby. Crawling to the window in the prone position, I saw the first group of human OPFOR; a convoy of armored Humvees with armed men on the roof turrets rounded the corner two blocks away toward the other building. Watching through the binoculars, I saw another goddamned .50-cal-armed sniper jump out of a Humvee and sprint to the nearby building, disappearing inside after a few bursts of gunfire from his spotter and a dozen other assaulters. I remained low, watching the noise pull legions of corpses away from my building back to the other one—again, like iron shavings to a magnet, all polarized in the opposite direction.

  The rest of the convoy ran down mobs of undead, stopping in front of my building, firing everywhere.

  These fuckers must have a lot of ammunition stored somewhere.

  I grabbed the tablet and woke up the GARMR. Thankfully it still functioned. After two failed attempts, I backed it out of the revolving door and parked it behind the welcome desk, right on top of a skeleton a few meters away. Through the camera, I could see the revolving door reverse direction as the undead began their outflow in reaction to the situation outside.

  The guns seemed to fire endlessly. Staying low, I could see piles of bodies stacking up on the street below in wide arcs around the vehicles.

  I kept Checkers’ camera trained on the revolving door and turned the audio on. The gunfire on the screen was a half second behind what I could hear from the top floor but it was clear that the group was fighting their way inside, when the revolving door turned yet again in the other direction and muzzle flashes temporarily blanked out the GARMR feed.

  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, g
unfire 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.