Ghost Run

by J. L. Bourne

  The little things.

  The mosquitoes were bad in the immediate area, but I handled it long enough to chop some branches and cover the rig in such a way that any passersby wouldn’t pay too much attention. I hid the keys underneath the rig and released the GARMR. It ran its familiar diagnostic and cocked its head at me as it’s done a hundred times before. I didn’t think it would ever be possible, but I actually liked the damn thing. It was loyal, reliable, and just shut up and did its job. Before heading out, I went back through the tablet, again familiarizing myself with the machine’s capabilities, being careful to stay away from some of the menus marked with a skull-and-crossbones and fingerprint icon.

  After consulting the tablet map, I plugged the device into the GARMR’s micro power grid and dropped it in its saddlebag. The tablet was down to ten percent and I needed it to be at full capability so I could use it to get to the tower where the cure and Phoenix were holing up. At least, that’s what the recordings said.

  After making a quick sweep of the immediate area, I pulled out the radio and tuned up the HF freq again. I was close enough to nearly see the Atlanta skyline, but the freq was dark. I tuned up the Morse channel and it was also dark. Nothing but silence intermittently interrupted by solar activity beaming in from ninety-three million miles away. It had been twenty-two days since I first picked up the Phoenix signal, and now nothing. This gave me pause for a few moments, questioning whether or not I needed to take another step in the direction of south Atlanta, to the Wachovia Tower.

  After a long deliberation, I slung my Colt Commando across my chest and began to walk. The clicking of the machine’s feet behind me pushed me forward. I wasn’t alone, and that meant a helluva lot out here in the badlands. My pack was heavy, having been replenished with food and drink with Mitch.

  Based on the last Wachovia Tower transmission, the facility was being swarmed by the undead. I had one full mag in my gun, two on my belt, and the rest stuffed into Checkers’ saddlebag. Two hundred and fifty-two rounds of ear-piercing 5.56 millimeter were at my disposal, but the now dark radio call told me it wasn’t enough.

  The sight in front of me was incredible. Both interstate lanes were packed with cars trying to leave. Consulting my maps, I knew that I was about eight miles from the building. As the sun began to set, I climbed up onto this billboard sign and began to plot out my next move. I wrapped my pack straps around my legs and also around a pole on the platform to avoid falling in my sleep. As I drifted off, I smelled them first, then heard them rage through the area like a herd of cattle. They’re starting to thin out; I just hope they’re gone by morning. I had no choice but to take the high ground. Sleeping low is suicide this close to the city. Too many dead things lurk.

  • • •

  I woke up to a morning rain, dousing me to the bone and sentencing me to violent shivers. The mass of creatures was gone, leaving only three in the area. I tried to wring out my sleeping bag and dry off a bit before packing my shit and moving carefully down the ladder. As I went, my Commando clanged against the railing. I cringed before looking over my shoulder. I’d been made.

  They began to converge on the ladder as I reached the last rung and went the rest of the way down with my arms as the ladder didn’t reach all the way to the ground. I’d put a nearby car into neutral and pushed it under the ladder yesterday. As soon as my foot touched down on the vehicle roof, I slid down the back window and across the trunk onto the wet grass. Falling head over heels, I went down the hill and into a small stream that had formed with the rain. The creatures gave chase and tumbled down the hill in pursuit. As they came at me, I pulled myself up and began running upstream, hitting the follow button on the GARMR control beacon as I went. Over my shoulder, I could see the creatures stand up and begin their never-ending pursuit of flesh. They’d chase me for years if I let them. I didn’t want to get into a shootout this early in the day.

  It wasn’t gentlemanly.

  Besides, loud noises after a night of sleeping in the rain on a metal platform thirty feet above the ground was just not something I wanted to deal with. I began to run, not yet fully trusting my ankle. I’d been following Mitch’s instructions and only craved the codeine a little at this point. I headed toward what looked like a suburban neighborhood from the back side. The GARMR was close behind when I pulled two boards from the neighborhood’s privacy fence and ducked through. The machine came in behind, entering the tall grass of what used to be an American backyard. I saw a rusted barbecue grill, propane tanks, covered hot tub, and a tattered awning waving in the morning breeze. The homes here didn’t have individual privacy fences but one seemed to cordon off the neighborhood as far as I could see in both directions. I stayed as low as I could, grazing the tops of the tall grass as I moved. I could sense the GARMR behind me, but it was sneaking along pretty well and not making much noise. At the very least, hopefully we threw our pursuers off the trail.

  Rounding the house out onto the street, I froze in terror. Forcing myself to act, I got really low. Twenty-seven creatures standing there, completely still, frozen in time. They waited patiently for a stray dog, deer, or foolish human like myself to cross their path, turning their primordial bio-machine switches to kill mode. I low crawled backward and decided to slog through the thick foliage from backyard to backyard until I could circumvent the deadly mob.

  I led, Checkers followed; we parted the foliage into the clearing of the next backyard. I saw a trampoline with a small tree growing through it, a long-dead armadillo, and some week-old drag marks that bent the grass, leading off into the woods toward the privacy fence. The house I was hiding behind had no curtains; I could see the undead in the street as I looked through both the back and front windows of the house. I stood there watching one of them twitch, as if it would wake up any minute and crash through the place to get to me. I was fixated on the creature, its chin touching its chest, its head twitching from side to side, distantly resembling a human in REM sleep.

  My trance was interrupted by movement inside the house. A skeletal creature wearing a police uniform stepped in front, blocking my view to the front windows. It began to slam its arms against the back sliding-glass door. My heart began to race as the street beyond came alive with movement, and a chorus of moans erupted and echoed throughout the neighborhood.

  I followed the drag marks into the trees, chased by the horrible noises of doors splintering and glass shattering. At the fence, I began pulling on boards. None of them were loose enough. I had no choice.

  I tossed my pack over the eight-foot fence and climbed, leaving the GARMR to fend for itself in a neighborhood suddenly gone mad.

  • • •

  After flinging myself over the fence, I grabbed my pack and ran along the neighborhood’s drainage canal. The fence boards on my right moved by rapidly as I ran, giving me moving picture glimpses into the hell beyond. The undead were tearing through the houses and spaces between. The sound of glass and fence boards creaking was so damn loud. In the time before, these types of sounds never happened without being accompanied by large demolition equipment and revving diesel engines.

  The whole quarter-mile-long privacy fence buckled and strained, funneling me into a kill box from which there was no escape. I attempted to dive into a drainage opening but couldn’t fit with my pack. The manhole cover was seated tightly and I didn’t have a key. I cursed to myself on this one as I distinctly remembered telling myself to carry a large bolt with a piece of paracord tied to it. This combination made a wonderful manhole remover, but that didn’t matter at all when I almost broke my finger trying to remove the heavy manhole cover. The bold words on the cover, MADE IN INDIA, were etched into my eyes as I slung my pack off and shimmied down into the concrete drainage catacombs with nothing but my M4 Commando and spare mags.

  The fence splintered and collapsed and the undead spilled forth like a tsunami from the neighborhood. What I’d estimated to be twenty-five was more like two hundred and fifty, or higher. I stayed quiet, sl
owly reaching out of the opening to reposition my pack to cover the rectangular spillway opening. The full pack covered all but a few inches of the opening, so I rotated the pack to expose the zipper to my side and brought out my NOD.

  Switching it on, I checked the cistern surroundings and noticed four-foot-diameter openings heading in two directions. Water trickled from one of the openings, but not much. I felt like the target of a monkey trap, with my pack being the fruit and the opening only large enough for my hand. I couldn’t get my pack through the opening; it was too full and the undead began to close in on my position.

  I tried to look through the small opening for Checkers. It was too risky to recover the tablet and even more risky to set off the GARMR’s sound beacon. It could be nearby and I definitely didn’t want to draw them to this drainage cavern.

  “Checkers, stay,” I commanded into the control watch.

  Better to have it folded up into itself, awaiting my command, than to risk it giving away my position.

  Night 26

  The empty cistern began to cool down as night approached. The undead remained heavy in the area, but the cover of darkness was to my advantage. There was no way I’d escape the same way I entered. They’d detect my heat signature and overwhelm me, ripping me to pieces before I left the drainage ditch. There was moonlight; I could see it through my NOD spilling through the small opening into the room. Every now and again, I could see the shadow of a creature break the moonbeam, reminding me of my situation. I was trapped, separated from all of my gear.

  As I pissed into the trickling runoff, I thought about the monkey trap again. My pack wouldn’t fit through the opening as it was, and I couldn’t leave my kit behind. Dehydration and exhaustion were to blame for my ignorance. All I needed to do was carefully and quietly open the top of the pack and bring my kit down with me into the cistern piece by piece before pulling the empty pack through the hole and then reorganizing my kit.

  I moved slowly, as if trying to thwart a motion detector, unclipping the top of my bag. Thank God there was no Velcro. With the top unclipped, I began to roll the waterproof shell open, exposing the inside of the bloodstained pack. I took out the first items, spare mags. Carefully, I sat them down on the floor of my subterranean abode. If I dropped them, the room would act like an amplifier, drawing the miserable sacks of shit to the opening. Pulling out my maps, the paper crinkled some as I took it through the concrete spillway opening.

  In the magnified green moonlight, I could see one of the nearby creatures cock its head sideways and begin to shuffle toward the opening. I stepped away, sinking farther back into the cool cistern, not wanting the creature’s rudimentary thermal sight to pick up any of my 98-degree heat from the opening. I watched as the moon shadow shifted with the creature’s approach. Through the slit, I could see an ankle and then a knee as the thing lowered its undead body to the ground. I pulled my bayonet half out of its scabbard, green moonlight glinting off its venerable blade.

  Time seemed to slow down and I began to move when I saw a skeletal hand reach down. Just as its chin began to be visible in the spillway opening, I thrust the bayonet forward into the roof of the creature’s mouth, up into its head. The blade stopped on the inside surface of the creature’s skull.

  The room was now in total darkness as the impaled head of the corpse blocked the remaining moonlight. My NOD adjusted and I pulled my blade from the gaping mouth of the corpse, careful not to cut my fingers on its jagged and broken teeth. I ran the knife through the trickling runoff water and wiped it off on a piece of wooden pallet from some large storm that happened who knew when.

  I kept working until my pack was empty enough to bring it through the opening. I dragged it at sloth speed, just enough to not register with the creatures still lurking outside. Eventually, I had the pack inside the cavern with me and I began to hastily fill it once more for my trip through this foreboding Morlock realm.

  As I entered the north pipe, I wondered where Checkers was and if it was okay. Was it folded up in plain sight for approaching raiders to destroy? Was it deactivated in some pool of water somewhere, its RTG battery arcing and sparking to oblivion?

  I was worrying about something made of metal and composite, not a flesh-and-blood thing. Damn that: I didn’t care. It was still valuable to me and I wasn’t leaving it. It was mine and it could be trusted; it didn’t betray or die and walk.

  The light began to fade as I opened distance from where I started. I was faced with numerous turns and decisions until I arrived at another cistern with another spillway opening filled with debris, more so than the last.

  I carefully navigated the debris but stopped when I heard something move inside. I stepped off the pile and used the Commando’s suppressor to peel away the layers of pine needles, trash, and other refuse until I came to the source: A severed head and attached meaty spinal column lay in the trash, ripped apart somehow and sent down the drainage system. The muscles and other biologics on the spine moved, resembling a snake along with the snapping jaws. These things would never give up, not as long as their brains remained even halfway in one piece.

  The creature looked up at me with its one remaining eye sunk deep into its exposed skull, and you could see it lock onto new food. Its spine disgustingly and violently wagged and its jaws snapped like a mousetrap. Its brain sent its non-body the signal to attack, but the synapses fired into dead-end nerves. I dispatched it with the bayonet, making sure no other surprises were in the cistern with me before looking through the spillway opening.

  There were no undead in the area, so I tried to remember how long I’d moved through he pipe. Thirty minutes? Maybe forty-five—no more. Satisfied the area was clear, I stepped up onto the center concrete platform and put my back into the manhole cover.

  The damn thing didn’t budge. I pulled my composite cleaning rod from my pack frame and pushed it up into the manhole key opening. It went about eighteen inches before stopping against something metal.

  A fucking car was parked on the lid.

  Cursing, I stepped back into the northwest tunnel, checking my wrist compass often, using its bright tritium lamp as a lantern in conjunction with my NOD. I went for two or three hundred meters based on my steps, when the tunnel ahead got so bright that my NOD had to once again compensate and adjust to the beaming moonlight. I kept moving slowly, my back aching from being hunched over. I approached the source of the light and hit Follow on the command watch as I saw where the moonlight was coming from.

  The drain was washed out completely up ahead and the whole road above it had collapsed into a sinkhole. An overturned cement truck lay far down into the ditch, its intense weight probably responsible for the spillway damage. I felt like Andy Dufresne, crawling out of that nasty sewer pipe outside of Shawshank Prison. The air, although laden with flesh rot, was fresh. I climbed upon the overturned cement truck and waited. Consulting my maps, I knew I was only a few short miles to my objective at the tower.

  The game was afoot.

  The Path of Charon

  The GARMR didn’t show up. I hysterically rummaged through my pack from atop the concrete mixer truck. Rushing to turn the tablet on, I unlocked it and attempted to connect with the machine’s video feed. I went through every single menu realizing that find my mechanical dog wasn’t an available option. Panicking, I kept switching spectrums on the machine’s optics and was continually greeted with attempting connection each time. I impatiently waited for two hours, watching the moon rise up over the trees before making a decision. I held my wrist up high, pressing the follow button multiple times in the hopes that Checkers would receive my signal and come to me.

  Through my NOD, I could see figures moving in the distance and moans were carried on the wind, reminding me of the danger I was walking into on my way to the distress signal. Reluctantly, I slid down the side of the overturned concrete mixer truck into the tall grass and disappeared north into the thick foliage adjacent to the gridlocked road.

  • • •
>
  The wind shifted out of the west, bringing their smell to me. The pungent odor of forty thousand dead washed over my body, coating every cilium inside my nostrils. I pulled the shemagh up over my mouth and nose in a bid to somehow abate the rancid stench of death. I walked into the wind, all the while listening for the bellows of an army of dead as well as hopefully the clicking of synthetic GARMR feet. With the shift of the wind once more, the smell intensified to a level I didn’t think was possible, and the moans I expected to hear based on the radio transmissions were carried to me in that rhythmic way in which they travel, infecting the dark fear recesses of the living mind. I imagined that the creatures were speaking telepathically to each other and what they might have to say.

  Come to us, let us embrace

  Like old friends meet face-to-face

  What’s living is bad and what’s dead is good

  Give us the chance to be understood . . .

  The creatures’ moans were infecting my logical thought, their smell driving me mad. I wanted nothing more in the moment than to raise my gun up into the sky. Come and get it, motherfuckers, come on!

  My anger at the undead grew as I stomped forward without my metal companion. At about four in the morning, I crested a hill and was met with the terrible sight of a tall building. Writing it like that may not seem terrifying to whoever may pull this journal from my bony (un)dead hands, but the building had a companion, a great cancerous growth that rose from the base, rising to an apex near the roof itself. It was too dark to see the grisly details, but it was great stacks of corpses. Thousands and thousands of them had been dispatched, forming a massive pile. I studied the scene in disbelief, realizing that the corpses had formed a giant biological ramp. This is impossible, I thought. My epiphany arrived simultaneously with the great flamethrower blast that shot from the building’s roof down to the top of the advancing creatures.