Ghost Run

by J. L. Bourne

The thing was too big to get through.

  Stuck at the waist, it flailed and gave a raspy moan as whatever was in its unused lungs began to spill out of its mouth and down the side of the trailer, down to the rubber bumpers. For a moment I thought I’d been lucky, until the rest of the cast of horrors appeared behind the portly ghoul, pushing it forward toward me like a Looney Tunes character. The GARMR looked at me and at the creatures. I know I’m not crazy and I know it’s only a machine, but I got the feeling the GARMR was contemplating, Okay, what now?

  “Run!” I told it as if responding to the machine’s imaginary communication.

  Back at Goliath, I heard the large creature hit the ground below the bay with a crash, followed by lesser thumps from the rest of the ones that followed. I quickly loaded up the GARMR and jumped into the rig.

  The engine turned over but didn’t start.

  I sat in the rig and listened as every creature hit the ground with a thud and watched in disbelief as they began to surround Goliath in numbers I could not defend. My carbine had barely over a magazine remaining. Thirty-something rounds were useless against the numbers I saw outside my windows, unless I could get them all to be accommodating and stand in line. I tried to start Goliath again. The battery was strong but it didn’t fire up.

  I sat there for a moment, lamenting on how screwed I was, until I remembered the pistol I’d found in the sleeper when I first discovered Goliath. As I was about to jump into the back between the two front seats, a gruesome face appeared in the window next to me. Amazingly, part of the creature’s head was missing but not enough to stop its animation. It was in advanced stages of decomposition but had still found a way to climb up and take a look inside at its prey. I pulled out my Microtech, deploying the blade as soon as my hands pulled it from the sheath. I timed the power windows so that it couldn’t see the spike coming. I jammed it into its head with boxer-like quickness, sending it back down into the developing mosh pit below.

  More were trying to get up.

  I put the window back up and went back to find the Ruger Mark III .22.

  Recovering the heavy steel pistol, I checked its action. Nothing was binding and the sights seemed pretty close to lined up in the rear of the gun. I spilled part of the brick of .22LR out onto the passenger seat and inserted one of the mags into the Ruger.

  Putting the window down to half-mast, I squeezed the trigger on the blaster as fast and accurately as I could. At the distance I was shooting from, the .22LR penetrated skulls with no problems. The first ten rounds were spent fairly quickly, so I slapped the next mag into the gun, tossing the empty in the seat on top of the ammo brick. My ears rang, so I stuffed them with 9mm rounds and continued pulling the trigger. Microscopic brass splinters shot into my right arm and face, and the bright fiber optic sights on the Ruger sent my rimfire projectiles true to their targets.

  I shot, and shot, and shot.

  My thumbs were blistered nearly all the way through from loading the Mark III magazines, which became difficult to load after a hundred shots. The spring tension button on the magazine feeder was nearly impossible to hold back with my thumbs as I inserted the tiny rounds into the metal magazine. Piles of human remains littered the area around Goliath, creating a problem. The remaining dozen or so undead were using the fallen corpses as a stepstool to walk up onto the rig’s running boards. I kept blasting through the pain in my hands.

  With few malfunctions, the Mark III eventually put down all of the undead in the immediate area. The dashboard was full of spent shell casings and smelled of a gunfight. My shooting hand ached and my thumbs throbbed in agony. The Mark III’s barrel was warm to the touch when I sat it down in the seat with nearly half a brick remaining.

  I nearly vomited, thinking of loading the empty Mark III mags; the pain was that intense. With more undead spilling into the parking lot now, I began to pray for the first time in a long while.

  “Dear Lord, walk with me in this valley. Please make the truck start,” I whispered with eyes closed and clasped hands.

  I pressed the clutch and turned the key slowly, not daring to touch the accelerator.

  With twin puffs of black smoke, Goliath’s engine roared to life. I had only a smidgen of food and water left, but I had divine intervention and two full tanks of diesel cross-feeding into the engine, giving me enough range to get to where I pointed the rig.

  Atlanta.

  • • •

  Paradise—that’s the only word I can use to describe this. And, like the Garden of Eden, I couldn’t keep it. Only a short reprieve from what was outside the walls.

  As I made my way north along a back road highway, learning Goliath’s gears and quirks, something caught my eye in the trees to the right. Movement. I slowed the rig to a stop and fished the binoculars out of my pack. Turning the eyepieces into sharp focus, I could clearly see a small wind turbine above the trees, probably a mile or so in the distance. I put Goliath back into gear and pulled off onto the next road leading up the hillside.

  After a series of wrong turns, I found what I was looking for: a closed wrought-iron gate that looked as if it’d held back great hordes. Fat, gristle, and general slime coated the gate, which appeared solidly holding on to the rock pillars. Nothing short of the rig I was driving could pull that gate off its hinges, and without sufficient weight holding down Goliath’s tires, that might not even be enough.

  I popped half a codeine pill, putting the rest of the meds in the glove box, and stepped out of the rig. The asphalt, though covered in leaves and dead grass, looked recently resurfaced. The gate to the property didn’t have initials on it; only a solid copper crest, a vertical dagger, the tip pointing down and wrapped with a snake in front of a shield. The wall was high and I was about to turn around, when I heard the faint sound of music from the other side of the fence.

  I painfully climbed back up inside the rig and put the grille about an inch away from the iron gate. I released the GARMR, tossed a knotted line to the other side of the fence, and climbed onto the rig’s warm hood before I stepped over the top of the fence and down the rope to the other side.

  The music was barely audible. The click of the GARMR’s heels told me it didn’t like being fenced off. Inside the GARMR’s tablet menu, I programmed the gate area as a new “return home” waypoint for the GARMR, just in case something went wrong and I had to escape the area from another point. I commanded it to wait and began walking down the meandering drive that cut between what looked like a forest on both sides. The path eventually brought me to a large two-story home. The porch lights were still on, likely powered by the wind turbine I’d seen from the highway. Three dead dogs remained on the sidewalk leading to the front door. They were either Dobermans or rottweilers; decomposition made discernment impossible to my eyes.

  Classical music played from an artificial rock sitting in a flower bed overgrown with weeds and saplings. Although it’d been a while since I’d heard the sweet sound of music, I flipped the stone over and yanked the wires, killing the tinny sound.

  The front door was unlocked, and the blast of clean cold air from the inside told me that something besides a tiny wind turbine was juicing the place. There was no way air-conditioning could be powered by it. I reveled in the coolness, something not really practical or even allowed in our outpost in the Florida Keys. Even the two Westinghouse nuclear reactors that provided power to our islands couldn’t supply air-conditioning to the whole colony without brownouts. Electrons were rationed and limited.

  I closed the door behind me, taking in the ornate design of the house. It was relatively clean, the air filters reducing dust and other debris that settled on the floor. I took a few minutes clearing the house and the grounds all around the fence perimeter. The home was surrounded by walls and tall iron fences, impervious to undead assault in small to medium numbers. A large concrete water cistern was positioned at the top of a hill above the house. Walking the ten-acre perimeter, I found no gaps in the fence line and saw only one corpse on
the other side, facedown in a dry streambed. I called out to the creature and threw rocks at it to make sure it didn’t move.

  The detached garage was also unlocked, so I shouldered the door open, ready to fight a platoon of them. The garage held no undead. My luck couldn’t hold forever and finding a place like this was more than good fortune. The large garage held a full-size Land Rover sitting uneven from a flat tire. The thin layer of dust indicated that it had been there since the beginning. I put my NOD down over my eye and proceeded inside. Nearly past the Land Rover, I thought, The house actually has power.

  I went back to the door and flipped on the switch, illuminating the abandoned garage with clicking fluorescent lights. Industrial racks lined the other side of the garage; they were filled with diving gear, motorcycle helmets, and even a few parachutes folded neatly in a bin. Although the Land Rover was appealing because I could actually change the tire on it myself, it lacked the extreme range of which Goliath was capable. I would have needed to find fuel more often, and regular fuel was laced with ethanol, a substance neither good for gas nor internal combustion engines. The Land Rover was locked, but that didn’t stop me from throwing a dive tank through the passenger window and getting inside. I didn’t dare open the door for fear that the battery would still hold a charge that powered the vehicle’s alarm system. I carefully negotiated the sharp glass and reached to the visor to recover what I was after.

  The gate remote.

  With the small device clipped to my belt, I slowly hoofed it back to the main gate. Rounding the last corner before the gate, I could see the GARMR standing there, looking down the path in my direction. I’d told it to wait, but something had woken it up: a small group of corpses milling around the rig. The creatures paid no attention to the GARMR; they must have jarred it from standby out of curiosity and left it alone after figuring out it wasn’t something they could tear to pieces. With only three behind the fence, I rapped the butt of my rifle on the iron bars and called out to them. As soon as they got into range, I stuck them all in the head, careful to do it so I wouldn’t have to drag the heavy meat sacks out of the way when I reopened the gate.

  Depressing the button on the remote, I heard the electric motor tension the chain, swinging the gate inward with a wrenching squeak. I stepped back to avoid getting smashed in the face by the gate, allowing the GARMR to trot inside. I told it again to wait uselessly, expressing that “I meant it this time.”

  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 wou
nds 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.