Ghost Run (30 page)

The trunk only held a doughnut spare and jack, some road flares, and an emergency blanket. Full of rage, I slammed the trunk, causing one of the creatures a hundred yards on the other side of the barricade to start making its way to me. Seeing red, I
slingshot the charging handle back and shouldered my carbine, putting the dot at the top of the advancing creature's head. The tip of my finger pulled half a millimeter of slack into the trigger. Just an RCH more and the thing will be toast and I'll feel better.

Squeeze.

Nothing.

Fucking safety.
I stepped back and took a deep breath, staring out into the flowing water to the opposite bank before letting it out.

“Breathe,” I said aloud to myself.

I just stared, watching the water churn. Probably a hundred wet corpses milled about on the opposite bank a few hundred meters downstream. They'd have to find another fucking way across; this bridge was mine.

•  •  •

I rolled Goliath slowly through the makeshift barricade leading off the bridge. The vehicles creaked but gave way, their nearly flat muddy rubber tires squelching across the asphalt.

A few miles farther down the road, I came upon a convenience store. I rolled to a stop about a hundred yards out and jumped down out of the truck with my carbine. I released the GARMR and felt comforted by its clicking sound on the pavement as it trailed behind at its programmed rad-mitigating distance. I moved forward, casual at first, but my stance became more defensive as I approached the derelict storefront. The glass in front of the barred windows was smashed out in the front and the automatic door was propped open. Whatever was inside would come out and vice versa. At the door, I nudged the cinder block out of the way and told Checkers to stay as I went inside the darkened building. The automatic door sprung closed behind me with a
thunk
.

I wasn't here for supplies, just one specific thing. The shelves were bare, with only air fresheners, windshield cleaner, and a pack of atrocious black licorice. I took the candy and shoved it in my cargo pants. Maybe the undead would smell it and leave me alone. I hopped over the counter and checked underneath.

Bingo. Phone book.

It was a few years old, but it would do just fine.

I thumbed through it until I found the listings for all gunsmiths in the area. As I ripped the pages I needed, I could hear the GARMR moving around outside the door.

I told it to wait
, I thought.

Looming shadows crossed the bottom of the door.

“Checkers, go to the door,” I commanded into the Simon.

The machine trotted over to the door.

“Checkers, stay until I call,” I said.

I wasn't sure if the machine understood complex commands, but I didn't have time to think about that. I made for the back door and pressed the horizontal bar that warned me that this was an emergency exit only and that an alarm would sound. Doubting that, I pushed it anyway and was bathed in bright light and the smell of a long-full green dumpster. A half-decomposed corpse lay on its back near the dumpster; the only thing still moving was its eyes. Everything else had shut down from advanced decomposition, likely severing critical nerve endings to the extremities.

I quickly but carefully jogged the hundred yards back to Goliath, calling for the GARMR as I escaped.

Strapping the machine back to the rig, I was back up inside and watching the creatures try to open the door, disinterested in Checkers, as it left them moments before. When the rig fired up, they immediately turned and began their approach, signaling my departure from the area.

I was now on my way to Larry's Guns, Class 3 & More.

•  •  •

Class 3 SOT dealers were a strange breed. They sold machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles, among other interesting things. The one I'd found in the phone book was on the outskirts of a residential area a few miles from Atlanta. Whoever Larry was, he lived in a small, nondescript house surrounded by a five-foot chain-link fence with an external building. The building was his gun store, evident by the business hours posted to the door and the dark neon sign that two years ago would have indicated “open.”

I tried the door: no luck. Thumping on it from the outside, I could tell it was a solid hurricane type, with two bolt locks as well
as a knob lock. What else might I expect from a business that sells machine guns and silencers?

The small gun store was coated with dried residue from eye level all the way to the ground. Paying closer attention to my surroundings, I'd noticed that everything was. A horde had been here, cleared everything out. This explained the dented S10 pickup on the street outside. It was beat up on one entire side as if an elephant had used it as a back scratcher.

I decided to take more drastic measures with the door, as I didn't want to be here any longer than absolutely necessary. I attached the tow strap securely to the window bars of Larry's store and pulled the damn thing out of its frame. Nothing about this was quiet. The sun was positioned to shine bright beams into the gaping hole of the tiny gun store. A corpse sat on a cashier's stool, held in place by the counter in front of it. It wore blue jeans, a plaid shirt, blue blockers, and a ball cap, complete with the exit hole of a large-caliber round from the pistol still in its bony grasp.

I quickly untied my makeshift breacher straps and climbed through the jagged hole into the store. I looked around but immediately fixated on the M4 in the display case. The handwritten paper placard below the gun said:

Transferable 1967 Colt M-16 Commando,

carried in Vietnam by USAF PJs,

registered during NFA amnesty, 1968.

The price tag attached to the trigger guard demanded a shocking $37,500. Movement from the corner of my eye caused me to get low behind the jagged opening near the suicide corpse. Four creatures came into view, scanning their surroundings, their decaying brains reduced to only primordial-level calculations. They were using what little cerebral capacity they had remaining to find me.

I waited for them to pass before moving Larry's rolling stool out of the way to get to the display case. It was of course locked, so I reached for the keys on the corpse's belt, realizing they were attached via a small retractable cable. I pulled the cable down to the lock, inadvertently pulling the body down on top of me. Pushing it off, my hands sank into its soft gut, penetrating its bloated skin
and organs inside. Dry heaving, I rolled over, removing my slime-coated hand and wiping it all over Larry's clothing.

After regaining my composure, I looked outside again and discovered only one creature remaining in the streets. I pulled the keys and went through them one by one until I found the key that would open the display case. After sliding the door over, I reached in and recovered the weapon that was literally worth its weight in gold both before and after the dead walked.

I checked the action on the relic, noting that it functioned just like my modern carbine with the same auto sear holes and other mechanical markings. The only difference was that this was a 5.56-caliber gun and Larry's shelves were full of that ammunition. After loading up the Commando, I brought my gun to the back and cranked off the silencer, removing the upper receiver. After torquing the upper receiver tightly in a vise on Larry's gunsmithing bench, I removed the silencer's proprietary quick-detach muzzle device. After taking off the Commando's oversized moderator muzzle device, I went to twist on my device, when the whole thing fell down onto the collar of the Colt's barrel.

Wrong thread diameter.

The damn threads on the Colt were smaller than my gun, so my eyes quickly shifted to the other glass display case full of silencer boxes. With the keys, I finally got the second display case open and began rummaging until I found what I was looking for: a direct-thread silencer. After hand-tightening the new silencer down on the Colt Commando, my anxiety began to drop and I knew I could once again kill those creatures without bringing all of Atlanta down on top of me. The antiquated markings on the Colt were of another age that I couldn't connect with, but I knew some would. I was now downgraded to iron sights but, hey, at least I got a carry handle.

I loaded everything I deemed valuable from Larry's store into Goliath's passenger seat and closed the door, revealing a corpse snarling at me from three feet away. It must have turned the corner around the front of the truck. I had a thousand rounds of ammunition, so I decided to test the antique. I stepped back as the creature lunged forward. I pulled the charging handle back, checking that I had remembered to chamber a round and clicked the receiver
from safe into semi mode. Shouldering the gun, I peered just over the top of the carry handle through the sight aperture of those old-school irons that probably pointed to Vietcong long ago. As the creature went to lunge again, I kicked the selector switch back another position to auto and pulled the trigger.

The gun proceeded to empty the entire mag, walking up the torso of the corpse so fast that I nearly needed to reload. The last three shots of the thirty-round mag tore through the creature's head, sending skull and brains flying when the bolt locked back. The sound was uncomfortably loud, even with the silencer attached. My ears were on the verge of ringing as smoke billowed from the end of the silencer and out the receiver's open dust cover. I pulled the empty mag, replacing it quickly with a new one from my back pocket. Twenty-eight rounds of 5.56 was clearly not the best way to kill one of those things, so I made sure to leave the Commando in semiauto unless I really needed to get it on.

After Hourglass, there were still remnants of the United States government remaining. I know because I sent the tech we recovered to a classified site. I wasn't told where it went, but I knew it went to some type of research facility. That node went dark a few months ago, along with the last remaining A-10 Thunderbolt squadron. Our base in the Keys did not have the resources to find out what had happened, and no one was going to volunteer for that shit show “rescue.” I was asked, but my response was
What is the point?
Without a distress call, I'd get all the way to the coast of Texas looking for what was left of an air base and probably get killed myself. If I were those Warthog pilots, I'd probably get airborne and land in the pasture closest to my home of record at the first sign my base was getting overrun. As far as the facility where we sent the Hourglass tech, all I knew was that it was hundreds of miles inland and that the facility had gone dark. No one liked to give locations for covert facilities over the radio. The raider element was very much out there and they were listening 24/7. Any indication of a viable government facility with power, water, and even limited infrastructure and you could bet that they'd be headed that way to wreak havoc, just like those fucks in Tallahassee tried to do to me.

I will forever have the scars to show for it.

Right now I am on board Goliath, tracing my path on the map to the Wachovia Tower somewhere south of downtown Atlanta. It's my best assumption based on the radio recordings that the CDC has set up their site B there. If the transmissions are true and there is a cure or even a vaccine for this, well, my adrenaline kicks up every time I think about it.

Day 25

2300

I'm up on a billboard sign, watching them pass through my NOD. They smell food but don't know I'm here. If I make a sound, they'll never leave and neither will I.

I'll die up here of exposure, as the nine magazines full of 5.56 won't be enough to push them back to offer me an escape route through the masses. Not quite a horde, but not quite a baker's dozen, either. The torn and faded billboard represented some law firm, but I can only see the letters
nnarah
. The rest of the name was torn off long ago. Underneath the peeling law firm's banner was a car dealership advertising zero percent interest. The GARMR is dormant in the ditch a hundred yards away. If it comes to it, I'll use Checkers to help me get back down.

The moon is reflecting the sun's light, casting a glow over the whole area. The blue halo around it is unnerving but beautiful. Looking up, I think about the American flag there and how the living dead will never disturb its majestic flight. I find some comfort that man created something beyond the undead's reach. This thought brings my spirits up a bit.

Rolling toward south Atlanta this morning, I encountered lines of traffic headed out of the city in both lanes. For the first time, no amount of pulling cars out of the way would let me get Goliath through the impasse, bookended by a giant wall closing off access to Atlanta. I thought back to those days when this first started, using the robotic arm in my mind to recover my own personal memory tapes, to somehow recount what I did in the aircraft. Fighting through the fog of PTSD, addiction, and other terrible things, I remembered flying over Atlanta in an EP-3, an FBI agent on board. I picked up CDC comms. Atlanta wasn't City Zero, but it was City One in the U.S. The anomaly spread from here quickly, after they brought the patient back from China to Maryland and eventually moved patients nearby to the Atlanta CDC.

As I pulled Goliath up to the wall of cars, I knew it was time to walk. I found a place to hide the rig just off the road and marked
a nearby tree with a can of orange spray paint. Goliath had well over a quarter tank of diesel and was in good mechanical condition. I really hated to leave the rig, my source of air-conditioning, safety, and transportation (emphasis on air-conditioning). The sinking feeling in my stomach increased as I stepped down out of the rig into the southern U.S. heat with my cumbersome ruck and ear-piercing Vietnam-era Commando carbine. The beast was ten times louder than my 300 BLK gun and packed a wallop on my hearing, even with the can cranked on. I suppose the only use it had was preventing fast location of the shooter. The supersonic crack of the 5.56 round let out an omnidirectional boom that made it tough to know the shooter's location, as the muzzle blast was heavily attenuated. At least I'd found this titanium silencer at Larry's that made the muzzle sweep a little faster than my heavy Stellite alloy can.