Ghost Run (23 page)

Listening for any signs of undead, I got down on the ground and looked under and around the hundreds of tires belonging to the Zero Mountain trucks scattered about the parking lot. I picked up a piece of concrete and chucked it far into the group of trucks. It impacted metal with a loud bang and returned a few echoes back and forth between the hillside and me. I again got down to the ground, watching for any movement.

There. A pair of legs started a slow shuffle from behind the tractor toward the rear of the trailer. Then another rounded the hood of a red truck. Both figures moved to where they heard the noise.

These bastards had the uncanny ability to know where sound came from.

I painfully fixed my bayonet and met the first creature with its point. The second was dispatched in the same way. After double-checking the area, I walked around from truck to truck, tapping on tanks with my rifle. There was more than enough fuel to fill Goliath's tanks. I went back, led the GARMR to the ground, and started the rig. I pulled in close to the trucks I'd identified as having fuel and began siphoning tank to tank until Goliath overflowed with diesel. I filled my spare fuel cans with as much as I could hold and stowed them away for a rainy day, which was any minute now, judging by the clouds gathering overhead.

Two trucks were backed up into the loading bays. I limped over to them with the GARMR in tow, clicking its feet on the cracked pavement. At the bays, I grabbed onto the rubber bumper, wincing a little at the stiffness of my hands, and slowly climbed up onto the platform. I reconfigured my carbine with its silencer and flipped on the light to look through the crack between the truck and the bay opening. It was relatively high off the ground and a tight squeeze to get inside the bay. I could hear the thunder rumble and reverberate off the hillside.

I climbed back down and parked Goliath near the bays, careful not to smash the GARMR in the process. It seemed to have basic self-preservation programming: It moved out of my way when I backed into my spot. Now inside the loading bays, I was safe off the ground and I could get to Goliath by jumping from one truck
to the other if I absolutely had to, although my ankle ached at the thought of it.

Two massive rolling shutter doors with chain pulleys separated the bays from the interior of Zero Mountain. After checking the immediate area for anything useful, I began to tug the chain, sending the metal doors up a few inches.

A hundred bony hands reached in unison through the opening at the bottom, gripping the door, pulling up with all the power left in their decaying muscles and tendons.

I couldn't let go of the chain; the creatures were actually nearly bringing me off the ground. I held on to the rusted heavy-gauge chain, hanging by all my weight, and still they managed to pull me off the ground in a bid to raise the shutters and get to me.

I gave the chain one last pull before letting go and exploding out of the bay like a scared animal. I could hear the door roll upward behind me, so I hurried as fast as my ankle would allow for the box-shaped opening ahead. Pallet jacks and banding rolls crashed to the floor, giving chase to the warm body in flight. Squeezing through the opening, I had to go slow or risk hurting my foot in the descent. As my leg touched the ground outside, one of the creatures appeared through the bay opening. I covered my face as it fell toward me.

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.”