Ghost Run (33 page)

“Aye,” said Doc.

After a couple of minutes, a green rope fell to the corpse pile and unraveled onto the ground at the feet of the undead. They took no interest in it. There was no heat signature; it didn't smell like meat.

“
Gracias.
Can you pull me up? Probably two hundred pounds with my kit,” I said.

“Yeah, we got you, fat-ass,” Doc replied as laughter echoed from the top, further taunting the hungry corpses on the ground in front of me.

Gallows humor.

I approached the GARMR, patting it on the head.

“Good boy.”

The words escaped my lips faster than I could stop them from leaving.

Using the tablet, I sent the machine to the south side, just far enough away from the horde to give it maneuverability.

I looked down at the miniature Simon replica on my wrist and wedged my index finger into the protected red button.

The GARMR's ear-piercing klaxon blared, sending visible shock waves through the undead. The new stimulus polarized the horde in one direction, sending them grasping for Checkers. As the south-side parking lot began to clear out, I used the tablet and dragged the GARMR position a half mile west of the building, drawing the creatures away. I stuffed the tablet back down the back of my cargo pants and sprinted for the building. A hundred meters before, a creature stepped out in front and got the bayonet. My ankle began to ache a little but I wasn't due for another dose yet, according to Mitch's schedule.

It was a clear shot to the ten-foot corpse pile. I began to carefully climb the horrible Twister game gone mad, careful to avoid the gaping maws that seemed to flash at me every step of the way up the hill of corpses, all with head-shot wounds. My left hand had reached the rope and I quickly tied it off to my rigger's belt.

“Ready,” I said into the radio.

The rope took slack and began to pull my pants up higher, squeezing the tablet to the small of my back. The rope tugged again, but my pant leg was snagged on something. I shook my foot back and forth, unable to release it from the snag, when I realized that a bony hand was clutching my pant leg, unwilling to let go. The rest of the corpse was buried somewhere underneath.

“Let me back down: I'm stuck!”

I pulled my blade and cut my pants, releasing the buried creature's relentless grip on me.

“I'm good. Let's go.”

I ascended slowly up the side of the building, using my legs to offset some of the weight as the men tugged. Halfway up the side, I again felt a grip, this time on my right leg. I kicked off with
my left, swinging off the side of the building, dragging a skinny corpse with me through the air. The thing wasn't letting go, so I had no choice but to blast it in the face with the Commando, sending echoes reverberating off the building.

I couldn't hear the GARMR klaxon any longer. Either it was too far away or dogpiled by a thousand undead. Absent the klaxon, the loudest noise in the neighborhood was my Commando, but it was too late. The unholy new tenants of the Wachovia Tower were awake and hyperaware that something alive was nearby. My 140-decibel suppressed rifle blast made sure of that. My ears weren't ringing, but it wasn't a comfortable feeling. The concussion blast from the short-barreled 5.56 slapped me in the face when I was forced to make a second shot. The creature released its grip and tumbled end over end, joining the piles of face-shot bodies below.

“Oh, fuck, you went and did it,” Doc said over the radio.

I could feel the rope surge faster. I tried to use my legs to help ease their effort and was making good headway until a dozen corpses started jutting out of every broken window, grabbing for anything they could get a grip on. I was left with no choice. I kicked hard, swinging my body out, away from the building, and opened up on the creatures that threatened my safety.

Ten shots left the barrel in short order, wasting creatures, leaving their torsos hanging half out of the broken windows.

“Pull!” I screamed to the rooftops.

The rope surged upward five feet in the span of two seconds, revealing another dozen undead hands shooting out of the building to grasp warm flesh. I kicked out again but was too close to the top, my hang time cut short. I still managed to pop some instigators in the face, buying me another five-foot surge.

Breathless and shaken from gunfighting my way up the side of the building, my gloved hand finally reached the top ledge. I reached up to grab it, but a huge, powerful hand reached down and gripped my forearm. My body launched up and onto the roof as if weightless. I lay there for a moment, catching my breath, brought back to the here and now by the intense heat and distinctive jet of a flamethrower.

•  •  •

After catching my breath, I finally shook hands with Doc and Billy for the first time. Doc was about five foot nine, probably about two hundred and thirty pounds, built like a brick shithouse. His beard was singed, likely by the flamethrower. Billy had blond hair and appeared to be nearly a foot taller than Doc but was skinny like a college basketball player. Doc fished around in his pockets before pulling out a peeled and scratched ID card. He handed it over and I looked down at my younger, clean-shaven face. I felt a wave of nostalgia.

“Thank you,” I said, fixated on the photo.

“Don't mention it. Now, why don't you tell me and Billy Boy why you came all the way up here?” Doc said.

“To give you these,” I said, pulling full 5.56 mags out of my cargo pockets.

“Hot damn,” Billy said, snatching two from my hands, eagerly feeding the mag well on his M4. I heard his bolt go home with a
whack
and a broad smile crossed his face from ear to ear.

“You couldn't have made it down. The rope wouldn't hold more than one person at a time, and that'd take too long,” I said.

“Agreed,” Doc replied. “What the hell was that noise?”

“It was my dog—long story. I have a big rig a few miles from here. Let's get our parachutes on, grab the cure, and get the hell off this building,” I said with as much authority as I could muster.

“That's a good plan, but the coolant canister for the transport container is going to run out soon. The last spare is two floors down. First, the undead are thick down there again, thanks to your gunfire, and second, if we managed to get off the building alive, the cure would dissipate by tomorrow without another coolant canister or an electric outlet,” Doc said.

“I'll go,” said a lab coat from the roof access doorway. “I'm the one that knows exactly where it is.”

“You wouldn't make it ten steps before you were torn apart,” Billy said to him.

“That may be true, but I'm dead already. Gimme the Pig. I wanna get this over with. If we don't do this, what was the whole fucking point?”

Billy said a few words to the already-dead man he called Feel Good before strapping the flamethrower to the man's back and
cinching it down. The heavy tank on the researcher's back was painted with the image of a large pig breathing fire. Doc and Billy asked the lab coat if he was sure, and the man nodded before lighting the pilot on the Pig and disappearing down into the stairwell.

“I'm going to the door with him. Someone's gotta make sure it gets closed behind him,” Billy said to Doc.

Doc nodded and Billy disappeared down below after the lab coat. We spent the next few minutes listening for signs of trouble and checking our chutes. The best side to jump was going to be east, opposite the massive pile of corpses. Curious, I walked over to the west side of the building to peek over and was greeted by a grinning corpse just below the edge, its finger nearly touching the lip of the rooftop. More were making the climb and would soon reach the apex. The last working flamethrower was two floors below, and any gun fired here would speed the advance of the undead up to us.

I checked the bayonet, noticing the blistered and melted duct tape that held the knife to the can. Satisfied it would hold, I jabbed downward, killing the creature, sending it backward into the pile and constructing yet another step by which the undead would advance.

My west-side field trip was interrupted by a three-round burst of gunfire coming from inside the building. A scream echoed from the stairwell and also from the broken windows. Even more undead gathered around the building. Doc and I put on our parachutes and took defensive positions in front of the roof access opening. I dreaded unleashing the Commando again, but the jet of the flamethrower and more gunshots from below were about to make it necessary.

Billy exploded from the opening covered in blood, wide-eyed, with a chunk of his left hand missing from an obvious bite. Blood covered his carbine hand guard but he paid no attention to it as he spun to face the opening alongside us. The researcher, on fire, fell through the opening with what looked like a can of shaving cream in his hand. He fell face-first, dropping the canister. It rolled forward, stopping at Doc's feet. Doc quickly snatched it up and secured it in his cargo pocket.

The burning man came to and began to scream in agony,
“They're coming! They're coming!”

Billy stamped the fire out with his hands, leaving a charred screaming mess in the doorway.

The undead began their assault on the roof and Billy's gun barked loudly, holding back the tide. They'd taken the building. Some of them stopped to take a bite out of the charred man. Paying little attention to the inevitable, Billy's carefully placed shots bought us a few seconds of preparation. I pulled the tablet from my pants and manually called in the GARMR. I flipped on its camera and watched it negotiate through a sea of undead legs and thighs. Through a break in the creatures, I could see our rooftop and the gunfire flashes from Billy's carbine. The moans of the undead were growing loud in response to the weapons fire, and every creature for miles seemed to converge on us.

I reengaged Checkers' klaxon with the press of the red button on my wrist, but nothing happened. I thought the machine must have been too far away, but when I got a visual on it and still couldn't hear its blaring klaxon, I knew something was wrong.

Glancing west, I could see hands reaching up over the lip of the edge. More undead erupted from the access stairs, but Billy's carbine kept cutting them down. It wasn't long after this that Billy ran dry and dropped his gun. I was about to toss him another mag when he reached down to his waist, pulling out an axe of some sort. Maybe a tomahawk. He began cutting into the dead with well-placed hacks and slices, sending them back down the stairs on top of the creatures behind them.

“We stay, we're dead. We jump, we're dead!” Doc screamed over the sound of the screeching horde below.

I had no choice. I had to make the call. Placing the GARMR in a position I thought would do the most good, I navigated through the skull-and-crossbones–adorned menus to the machine's RTG self-destruct protocol. After ignoring three warning menus, I entered my thumbprint and set the delay for thirty seconds.

“Get low!” I screamed.

Billy ignored my words and kept slashing at the undead coming up the stairs.

Doc and I huddled close as the thud of Billy's tomahawk cracking skulls could be heard over the chorus of the creatures.

I closed my eyes tightly, trusting Billy to keep them off us while I waited for my mechanical friend to sacrifice itself for the greater good.

Then the bright flash came, followed by the deafening crack of an unholy thunderclap. The flash temporarily blinded me, even through my eyelids, just before the blast wave hit the building, collapsing half of it in a matter of seconds. Looking over, I saw that the storage container containing the cure was carabinered securely to Doc's chest harness. Debris filled the air and I pulled my shemagh up over my nose and teary face, attempting to hold my breath.

The building was going over.

My last sight from the roof of the Wachovia Tower was Billy still slashing the undead, even while the building tilted and turned uncontrollably.

“Jump!” I screamed loudly as we tossed our chutes out into the air in front of us.

Then we were airborne, hanging from our risers when the building fell out from under us, pushing an updraft of thick dust and debris into our chutes.

“Guns out!” Doc screamed over the sound of the collapsed building's wrenching metal and crumbling concrete.

Doc's gun blasted, popping heads long before his boots hit the scorched earth.

I followed suit, picking out targets through the iron sights of the ancient Commando carbine. I hit the ground first in a dust storm, unable to see five feet ahead of me; I just ran forward blindly, following my wrist compass to our planned rally point at the playground, shooting everything that looked fucked-up. Somewhere between the crumbling building, second-order explosions, and raining rocks and dust, I could hear Doc behind me.

“My optic's dead; what the fuck was that?” he asked from somewhere over my right shoulder.

“Small nuke!” I yelled over the background noise.

“Small, my ass!”

Doc had the cure and the coolant; now all we had to do was fight our way south, to Goliath and eventually the seaborne safety of
Solitude
.

We cut our chutes and disappeared into the tree line, leaving Atlanta forever as I held back the tears of the day's incredible loss and monumental gain.

Day 35

The sea is unforgiving but a welcome reprieve from the dead mainland. The trip from Atlanta to
Solitude
was not filled with conversation. Doc didn't speak a mention of Billy. Our silence was sometimes punctuated by gunfire as we fought, making our best speed south with the cure container plugged into Goliath's inverter. Doc did reminisce about BUD/S Class 199, Hell Week, OEF, Afghanistan, and his miraculous escape across Pakistan when the shit hit the fan. I suppose he was just looking for a way to deal with the tragic loss of his friend. I never saw him break down, but I never followed him topside, either. Although I'd only had Checkers for a month, I did miss the loyal machine and felt that it should have been on board
Solitude
, along with Billy.