Ghost Run (16 page)

The undead were almost on top of me when I met the GARMR to corral it inside the hotel. The smell of decay inside was overwhelming. I shot one of the creatures in the face and kicked it back into the group behind it before slamming the door shut and heading for the nearby stair access.

The GARMR had to slow down to climb the stairs, but it handled them a lot better than I thought. Its artificial feet were loud inside the enclosed stairwell. The creatures rampaged outside the side door on the first floor, slamming their bony arms into the metal door. I didn't think it would hold too long, not after I disintegrated
the lock internals to gain access. The GARMR and I were on the second floor outside the door leading to the guest rooms. It was dark in the hallway, so I put on my NOD and peered through the vertical rectangular door window.

The door shook as a corpse smashed its face into the glass from the other side.
Jesus
. I checked my drawers before putting the muzzle of my suppressor up to the glass and ending the thing. The shot boomed in the stairwell; I could hear a door bang open from above and something tumble down the stairs.

I opened the door and walked over the corpse I'd just shot. The GARMR followed, stumbling over the body but quickly gaining its footing. I secured some cordage around the horizontal bar to an adjacent door handle. It would stop one or two, but not the mob outside. The hallway went on for quite a distance and broke off halfway down at the elevator access. I suspected the hotel was shaped like an
H
from above, based on what I saw on the outside as I approached the building. There was likely a whole other wing beyond the elevators.

I checked the locks on the first six doors as I advanced down the hallway in the direction of the elevators.

All locked.

I didn't know how centrally controlled electronic locks worked, but I assumed that they reverted to their locked state in the absence of power. It didn't take long to give a door the drill treatment. The guest room locks were flimsy compared to the metal door below. I was inside in less than thirty seconds. I checked the hallway once more before the GARMR and I ducked into the guest room and closed the door.

I swung the door's steel security latch over, providing relative safety for the time being. A small sliver of light illuminated the area. Satisfied that nothing inside wanted to eat me, I led the pseudo-radioactive GARMR into the bathroom, put it in standby mode, and closed it off from the rest of the room.

Shaking from adrenaline, I stood quietly for a moment before catching sight of myself in the mirror. My chin had stopped bleeding, but the front of my shirt was splotched with blood. In the room's low light, I resembled one of them. Looking away from the train wreck in the mirror, I diverted my attention to the dimly lit room.

Aside from the dust, the place was in pristine condition. The tightly made bed was inviting. The refrigerator was stocked with warm beer, and small bottles of alcohol sat atop the bar on a tray along with stale packages of potato chips and other snacks. I risked a glance outside the curtains and saw a hundred undead spaced almost evenly in the fountain park I'd run through on my way here. If I closed my eyes and slowed my heart rate, I could still hear the faint thumps of them trying to gain access below. But as far as I could see, the hotel was not surrounded.

While studying my situation outside, I heard another round of machine-gun fire. With my second-floor vantage, I observed the undead react like a flock of birds in formation flight. Nearly simultaneously, they changed direction and moved toward the source of the noise somewhere in the distance. It was freaky to behold. Below my window, I watched the corpses that amassed outside the side door peel off and join the horde in search of the gunfire.

I dropped my pack and collapsed on the bed, smiling at the luck brought on by the sheer stupidity of other men.

•  •  •

I lay in the dusty bed until after nightfall, unaware of the actual time. I don't remember closing my eyes, and when my senses returned, they were still open. A sliver of bright moonlight shone through the curtains. I stared at the ceiling and the metallic sprinkler, barely noticing a sign below it that probably warned guests not to hang their clothes on it. My bones and muscles ached when I stood up. Without thinking, I went to the bathroom and tripped over the GARMR before lifting the lid and emptying my bladder into the dry toilet. The tank was bone-dry when I tried to flush. In the darkness of the bathroom, I could see a dim green LED status light blinking somewhere inside the GARMR.

I took the time to draw the curtains tight and lit a small candle. If those bandits had night vision, they'd pick the candlelight out from across the city through an open window. I sipped on a small can of soup concentrate and drank a bottle of water, then checked out the tall building across the way that was about to block out the moon. There were some undead outside the window, but a fraction
of what was there earlier before the gunshots rang out. With the undead dispersed, I decided it was time to make my move.

I was down to only four magazines full of subsonic ammunition. Finding 300 Blackout ammo somewhere out here in the ruins would be nearly impossible. I had hundreds of rounds of scavenged .22LR remaining, but I didn't want my survival coming down to a .22 pistol. I topped off my carbine mag and placed two precious full magazines on my belt in their Kydex holster. I put the last one in the outside pocket of my pack, hoping I'd never need to reach for it. With my pack organized, I woke up the GARMR and stood by the guest room door for a few seconds before disengaging the steel lock, slipping on my NOD, and stepping out into the hallway.

The smell of rotten flesh hit me like before; I ignored it and went back for the stairwell, stepping over the creature I'd shot, and peeked through the vertical window. I could hear something moving somewhere down the hall, perhaps trying to get by a cleaning cart.

With the stair platform clear, I slowly clicked the door bar and stepped inside the stairwell. The GARMR slowly negotiated the stairs as I made for the first floor. Nearing the bottom, I had to pull my knife to dispatch one of them coming up the stairs. I kicked it hard in the chest, throwing it backward into the wall and onto the ground. With full force, I stomped down on its orbital socket with a loud crunch. I repeated that until it stopped moving; I stood out of breath by the door leading to the first-floor hallway.

I barreled through the door, seeing three of them turn down the hall and head in my direction. It was pitch-black and they bounced off the walls like pinballs, gravitating to the noise of my escape. I held the door open for my mechanical companion and ran out the side door into the tall grass outside.

The side door closed automatically but the undead were soon upon it, pleading for it to open with their thumps and moans. I stayed low, below the grass, and crawled away nearly on hand and foot. I prayed that I wouldn't run into the legs of one of them out there in the night. I was out of breath and sweating profusely when I looked back at the hotel. The undead were congregating
around the side door, unaware that I was already long gone. Looking ahead, I realized that I stood in the long moon shadow of my objective.

The small courtyard was empty in front of the tall building, so I ran for the front revolving door. Only a bloody piece of rope outside kept the spinning door from giving entrance to the building. I gave the rope a swipe with my knife and stepped inside, pushing my way to the other side. The GARMR looked at the revolving door for a moment before stepping in as well, allowing me to turn the door so it could follow. The rope I'd cut reminded me to do the same, so I threaded two heavy-duty zip ties together and secured the door to a handrail inside.

I passed the brass door elevators on my right, wishing that they were in service. The buttons told me that the building had twenty-two floors, not counting the basement levels. It was going to be a fucking beast of climb. See you at the top, Zig.

Before finding the stairwell, I nearly ran into the architectural model of the building I was currently occupying and read the brass plaque attached to the front of the case:
Florida State Capitol Building
.

“That figures,” I said aloud to myself.

I was actually dumb enough to pick the state capitol building as my communications relay high ground. Of all the buildings to choose, this one would have probably been the most fortified, and occupied when the dead began to walk.

The mockup in front of me was a detailed exterior model of this structure, as well as the old capitol building oriented to the building's east. I shook my head, hoping for the best before stepping into the stairwell that hopefully would take me to the top.

The smell of rot was incredible, even worse than the hotel. I put the GARMR on standby and took the drill out of its saddlebag. Thank God for night vision. I found an old bloodstained shirt in the corner of the stairwell and covered the machine's chassis before abandoning it for the duration of my climb. The wind was blowing in gusts outside, causing something inside the great structure to creak. I passed by the fifth floor, blown away by the number of skeletons and mostly decomposed corpses on the stairs. I had to
skirt around heaping piles of bones and parts; flies and maggots still infested them, squirming under the IR illuminator from my NOD.

I made for the sixth floor and nearly fell through the steps. Someone had crudely taken out the stairs leading up to the next platform. Blast patterns on the concrete and steel indicated shaped charges. If I hadn't been using night vision, I'd have probably broken my neck, or at best my leg, in the fall. I grabbed the metal handrail and edged across the chasm to the next available step. It checked good with some weight, so I stepped onto the metal-reinforced concrete and was on the sixth-floor stairwell.

Spent brass blanketed the entire platform, rattling around underfoot. I reached down and examined one of the casings: M855 “green tip.”

Military-issue.

They were trying to ban this shit before the dead walked.

I raised my NOD and panned my gun light around the platform. A terrible fight took place here long ago. The brass casings were dull from tarnish and dust. Dried blood splattered the nearby walls, and smeared handprints tracked along the bottom edge of a jagged, broken window. What appeared to be intestines were draped over the window shards like garland over a bannister. I peered out the opening to the ground below and saw a pile of body parts, bones, clothing, and other unrecognizable filth. There must have been hundreds below. It was difficult to imagine what exactly took place here, but it was a safe bet that a military unit tried to hold the capitol building. They were up against untold hordes, enough to form a human staircase up the destroyed stairs and onto this floor. I don't see how anyone could have made it out alive.

I pulled another industrial zip tie from my pack and secured the bullet-ridden sixth-floor access door before continuing my ascent. The stairs remained littered with brass all the way up to sixteen, about the same time I ran out of heavy-duty zip ties. Transiting up to floor seventeen, I saw a rifle on the stairs and picked it up. Its action was locked back, magazine gone. Peering into the action, I could see that the gas tube was melted to the point of failure. Either the gun ran dry or the shooter was doing mag dumps and the gun's gas system failed from heat fatigue. On the end of the gun was a
blown-out suppressor; nothing remained but the can that held the baffle stack. This gun fought hard before its master abandoned it. I disconnected the upper receiver from the lower and placed the lower in my pack, along with the bolt carrier assembly. Could come in handy.

I arrived at the twentieth floor and noticed the door was propped open by a long-dead corpse. It was dressed in multi-cam and wore a flat dark earth-colored climbing helmet. Most of its neck was gone, probably torn out by one of the creatures. A look of terror was somehow preserved on its mostly decomposed face; its jaws gaped and its dried eyelids were slit open. A shriveled tongue hung out of its mouth. Peering into the dark hallway beyond the corpse, I could see no signs of undead, so I dragged the body into the stairwell for examination.

A large, scoped AR-10 rifle was slung across the soldier's chest. I popped the mag and verified the caliber: .308. The mag felt about half full. Reluctantly, I slung the heavy AR-10 over my shoulder and continued up the stairs.

As I rounded the stairwell, leaving the twenty-first floor, the scene of a last stand was before me. Sandbags covered the top of the stairs and shell casings once again littered the area—this time larger-caliber 7.62mm brass. As I crunched through the casings, the silhouette of twin crew-served machine guns came into view. The barrels were bent and shot out from extreme heat, reminiscent of Elmer Fudd's hunting rifle after Bugs plugged it with a carrot. The windows on the stair platform were gone. It appeared as if the soldiers gunned down the undead in waves and tossed the corpses out the window. I noticed that explosives (sans detonators) were attached to the stairs leading up to the sandbag pillbox on the twenty-second floor, where the stairs stopped.

I climbed over the sandbags into the pillbox and stepped on a female corpse dressed in full battle rattle. An M9 was stuffed into her mouth, locked to the rear from expending the magazine's final round. The 9mm exit wound was hidden by the Kevlar helmet, still chin-strapped on her skull. Sadly, both ammo cans feeding the machine guns had quite a few rounds remaining. The guns failed from high rate of fire, and the poor soldier must have pulled a service pistol, using the last round. A new barrel was sitting on
the ground near the gun, but who could have possibly had time to change it out when hundreds of undead were advancing up the stairs?

I felt pity for her. She courageously held her line as long as she could. A picture of a middle-aged man hung halfway out from the shirt pocket on her camo blouse. She was the last gatekeeper to the twenty-second and final floor. The metal door behind her firing position was damaged from the unimaginable force but remained solidly locked. I checked the corpse for keys and found none, but did find four detonators and put them in my pack along with the explosives.