Ghost Run

by J. L. Bourne

  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.

  The wrecking ball definitely qualified for the top ten of most screwed-up things I’d seen since this started. I wish I’d had a camera, because no one would ever believe this. I had to give him credit: He was actually doing a decent job at keeping them away from the crippled crane until a thousand more corpses stepped out of the woods. The crane operator swung the ball 360 degrees in a last-ditch effort to repel boarders, but he was just too outnumbered.

  I was done here. I boarded Goliath and put it into gear, heading west, away from the insane crane man and then eventually north toward Atlanta.

  Mountain Man

  Three days have passed since I left Tallahassee. In a fit of blind luck, I actually made good distance. I took a secluded and nearly clear highway to within sixty miles of Macon, Georgia, to a storage facility. I ran into some trouble along the way when the shakes, pain, and stupidity got too severe. Pulling the rig into the remnants of a nameless small town, I made a beeline for the drugstore and killed the engine, coasting the rig a quarter mile before rolling it up onto the sidewalk. Opening the rig’s door, I carefully made my way down the steps to the concrete, wincing in pain as I did so. The wound on my hand opened up as I attempted to balance myself on the rig’s handrail, and my ankle felt as if it would snap anytime.

  I limped to the front door of the drugstore with a chain and a climbing carabiner in my cargo pocket. Using the drill, I worked the lock until the batteries went dead. Cursing, I twisted the chuck and pulled the drill free, leaving the bit stuck in the lock like a sideways Excalibur. Footfalls behind me tipped me off to the things that were approaching. I limped over to the rig and pulled my pack from the passenger seat.

  I had time.

  Digging in my pack, I found the sheathed bayonet, naturally at the bottom, and sat it down on the steps near the tied-down GARMR. I reached over my shoulder and pulled my rifle in front of me as the first corpse rounded the front of the truck. Its lower jaw was missing and its tongue hung tragically slack and wiggling from the gaping hole below its upper set of teeth. Straining against the pain, I detached the silencer from my carbine, putting it in my back pocket before fixing the bayonet to the lug. The long, thin shank of carbon steel gleamed, and I wasted no time in bayonetting the first creature through its eye as it advanced, letting it fall from the skinny dagger just as easily.

  Three more now approached. I hobbled to them and managed to spike them all through the head, with the last one getting it in the roof of its mouth; that one fell forward onto the bayonet until the tip of the blade hit the skull from the inside. Off balance, I cursed in pain while forcing the bayonet out of the skull.

  I went back to the drugstore door and flicked out the pliers on my multitool. Using the teeth of the pliers, I backed the bloodstained but precious drill bit out of the lock. Replacing the battery in the drill with another, I was able to defea
t the lock and get inside the drugstore virtually unnoticed by whatever undead no doubt lurked in the alleys and strip mall across the street. I secured the door behind me, attaching the two ends of hardened steel chain together with the carabiner. Inside, I began to clear the store, bayonet affixed to my SBR. The weight of the suppressor in my back pocket reminded me what would happen if forced to fire indoors.

  The place was picked over, devoid of food and other essentials. There was some carbonated water, so I grabbed it and drank deeply from the greenish glass bottle. The hint of lemon in the bubbly water was nice. Too bad I hadn’t found it during winter, when it might have been cold.

  Halfway through the store, I realized that I’d forgotten to let the GARMR off the truck. My hands shook again, reminiscent of the pain and onset of addiction I felt a while back in the Keys. That’s another story. Against my better judgment, I decided to leave the GARMR secured and continue on into the back of the store, where the drugs were usually kept. Looking out over the ravaged shelves to the front, I nervously checked the windows and the chain wrapped between the two front doors. Although a poster covered the glass on one of the doors, I could see through the other.

  Still clear.

  The counter and floor behind it were covered with pills of all kinds: purple, blue, and everything in between. I clicked on my light, clenching it in my mouth as I swept a handful of them up in my hand to read them; my hands were shaking too much to make any of them out. Rounding the corner to the back room of the pharmacy, I nearly tripped over a skeleton lying facedown with a syringe embedded in its head. Some half-red, half-clear liquid still remained inside the syringe. I nudged the skeleton aside with my foot and continued into the pitch-dark area behind the pharmacy.

  NOD on.

  Another corpse lay on the ground in front of a large safe. A pistol with the slide locked back was clutched in its skeletal grip and I could see bullet dents on the safe.

  The lack of undead inside the drugstore and the hole in the back of the pistol-packing corpse’s head pointed me down a depressing path. The poor soul at my feet had needed so badly what was inside the safe that, when it wouldn’t yield, self-destruction was the only option.

  True addiction.

  My hands shook from the pain and from my own desires to get inside the metal box and the treasures within. I had a tool kit on Goliath that I could use and I could probably drill the lock. I was far enough into the interior of the drugstore that the noise would be muffled to any undead lurking outside. I pulled the drill and adjusted the settings. I inserted the bit into the keyhole on the safe and began to dig into it. Sparks flew, flashing brightly through my NOD.

  The bit bore about halfway into the lock, when the sound changed as if it hit a different medium. I backed the drill out and brought it closer. Tiny pieces of glass were embedded in the valleys of the tip of the carbide bit, a mechanism fail-safe to avoid brute force entry. The glass would shatter to thwart any would-be thief’s plan at over-torquing the lock.

  Just like I did.

  Desperately, I pushed the drill into the jagged hole and the bit went all the way through the door to the other side. The drill whined loudly with no resistance to slow it down. I pulled the drill out and then turned the safe handle with no success; it was locked tightly in place, untold numbers of steel cylinders engaging all around the door into the steel lips on the inside.

  I dropped the tools on the desk and went back to the truck. As I quietly moved to Goliath from the storefront, I noticed two undead at the intersection. They rotated their heads at a predictable cadence.

  I’d been around them long enough to know they were searching for food, and more would be on the way.

  I quietly took the pry bar and hammer from the truck’s tool kit and limped back to the safe, careful to chain the doors again on my way in.

  I attacked the safe like those things attack living humans. I wanted the oxy as bad as they wanted me. What would Tara think if she could see me now? The thought brought on overwhelming guilt, worsened by the thought of my daughter. I wasn’t thinking straight; the pain, coupled by the early onset of what was likely addiction, pushed me into an anger-fueled rage. I jammed the pry bar into the top left corner of the safe and began to tug. Using the drill, I perforated the corner of the safe door, running the battery dead in the process. Now working the weakened door with the pry bar, I was able to peel it away and reach inside the steel box. At first, I could feel only an empty shelf, but after getting my arm inside up to my shoulder, my fingers grasped a plastic tub. I gripped it and began to pull it to me, to the opening I’d created.

  I was so fixated on what was inside that I hadn’t noticed the banging on the glass coming from the front of the drugstore. I mean, I knew it was there: I could hear it. I just hadn’t noticed it. My incessant drilling and prying and cursing had attracted their attention. I didn’t care.

  “Give it to me,” I growled at the safe, ignoring the sounds of cracking glass. I pulled the heavy tub to the opening and yanked, dropping the tub back onto the shelf inside the safe. The opening was too small.

  “Fuck!” I screamed.

  My hand and arm shook ferociously as I reached back inside the safe. Unable to pull the whole tub out, I grabbed handfuls of whatever was inside and hastily brought it in front of my NOD.

  Tylenol #3. Codeine.

  Just as soon as I saw the label on the plastic bags, I could hear the shattering glass. I stuffed my cargo pockets with painkillers and hobbled out from behind the pharmacy counter. The undead had not yet broken completely through. My hands shook as I detached the bayonet from my carbine. I knew I was running low on ammo. I painfully ratcheted the silencer onto the muzzle brake with a series of clicks and took the gun off Safe. I limped to the front of the store to assess.

  I counted five of them trying to smash their way inside. Part of the entrance was already giving way to the left and a near-skeletal head peeked through, its white-orb eyes locking onto me as its arms began to flail on the outside of the glass. I limped over and shot it at point-blank range; it plugged the hole in the safety glass like a cork. The sound of my gun increased the excitement of the others as they began to beat the glass and doors, rattling the chain that held them together. The sharp pain in my ankle and hands briefly dissipated my brain fog, allowing me a few moments of clarity.

  Bandages.

  Antibiotic cream.

  Idiot! What the fuck were you thinking?

  I hurriedly grabbed a shopping cart and went around the store, dumping bandages, ointments, and anything else I could find inside, along with the remaining carbonated water. Not wasting any time, I shot three more undead before my carbine bolt locked back, indicating I was empty. Using the bayonet, I waited for the last creature to put its head behind a weakened portion of the glass before ramming the spike into its skull, my hand searing in agony. The body hung there, balanced on the blade, using the glass as its fulcrum. Strangely, through the smeared glass, I could see the creature’s white eye move about, searching once more before its body went limp. The large poster-covered glass pane shattered as I pulled the blade, revealing the approach of more creatures from down the street. I quickly unchained the door and wheeled the squeaky cart to the passenger side of Goliath, tossing the contents haphazardly inside.

  I climbed up into the rig and reached inside my cargo pocket. Tearing the plastic, I half chewed, half swallowed one of the pills laced with codeine. I sat there for a moment letting the drug be absorbed into my system, reminded of what pain can make a man do. The drug took, but not nearly as strong as the oxy. I put the truck in gear to the sounds of countless undead beating on its exterior, clawing for purchase to get inside the cab with me.

  I remember the pain fading away and my eyelids sinking as I traveled down the road a few miles until I discovered a closed off-ramp that led somewhere away from the main thoroughfare. Smashing through the orange and white barrels with dangerous disregard, Goliath coasted along the ramp into an overgrown pa
rking lot with a small building. The sign in the front said:

  REST AREA

  CLOSED

  • • •

  One of the last things I remember was shutting down the rig and fading out into drug-induced sleep. I remember the heat as well as the tall grass and the tree I saw that seemed to grow into the rest area office window and out the skylight. Like so many places along the way, the green was winning alongside the undead. Give it enough time and there would be no trace of us, unless whoever was looking got into it with an excavator.

  I woke up to pain when the moon was high in the night sky. Coyotes howled and carried on somewhere beyond the rest area.

  Not smart, not at all. They should know better.

  Grimacing, I reached in my cargo pocket and popped a pill, swigging it down with half a bottle of water. I needed to piss pretty badly, but the shadows moving around outside kept me in the rig. I attempted to go into the water bottle but got most of it on my pants and hands. I screwed the plastic lid on the half-full bottle and tossed it onto the passenger seat floorboard with a thump.

  I tried to make sense of the shadows but knew better than to turn on my headlights. I was asleep again before I could put too much thought into what I thought I was looking at.

  The morning sun rose over the roof of the rest area, warming my face and awakening me to more pain. My hand instinctively reached for my cargo pocket and pulled out the already open plastic bag. Using every atom of willpower, I stopped myself from taking another pill.

  I had necessaries that needed tending.

  Checking the windows, I could see no undead save for a few specks moving about on the highway three hundred meters distant. I quietly opened my door and stepped down onto the cracked concrete being slowly separated by grass and ice. Rounding the front of the rig, I threw open the passenger door and pulled out my drugstore haul. I made for the concrete picnic table; its benches were concealed, its tabletop slab being the lone platform in the center of a tall grass sea. I sat on top of the table and began to sort the bandages, ointments, and other tinctures I had taken in a hurry. I dealt with my hands first, as I’d need to use them for everything else.