Ghost
The pounding on the walls of the bunker never stopped. Night or day, it was always there. Burke wondered if the hordes of creatures outside took turns. Surely it couldn’t still be the same ones who had first started the damn noise. By now, would those first creatures even have anything left of their hands?
A vision of rotting bodies with the white of bone protruding from battered and crushed wrists, slamming them repeatedly against the metal of the only door to the bunker came alive in his head. He shuddered and tried to continue opening his lunch, pushing the mental image out of his mind. He was down to the last dregs of the bunker’s supplies and the can of meat his was opening, he knew from experience, made the thought of cold, greasy Spam even sound appealing in its place.
Burke hated his visions. He’d been born with the ability to see things that others couldn’t. Sometimes, he could watch faraway places through his mind’s eye like a gazing through a crystal ball. He could also reach into another person’s mind and read their thoughts as if they were his own.
On his most clear of days, he could sometimes even catch glimpses of the future. It had been hell growing up with his “gifts". He’d spent most of his thirty-odd years of life bouncing in and out of various asylums. He’d had his first visions of the end when he was only four years old. His parents had thought it was just a nightmare induced from his love of horror films but the visions kept coming and soon they were frightened by the images he’d described of men eating men, women being ripped apart, and rotting dead things that didn’t stay dead.
When he’d finally gotten free of the last institution, Burke had felt it in his bones that the end he’d been seeing for mankind was near. Using his gifts, he’d conned and forged his way into the military. Burke had no wish to die and the way he saw it, the military would hold out longer than anyone else in a world destined to be overrun and eaten by the dead. Of course, things hadn’t exactly worked out as he had planned.
His unit had been assigned the duty of trying to hold the containment line around Richmond. The battle had been raging for days when he and his fellow troops arrived to offer reinforcements to the poor souls who had held it during the early days when humans still emerged from the city intermingled with the dead as they tried to flee. The army was fully dug in around the city fighting a pointless war. The containment lines around New York and many other places had fallen.
There were rumors of nuclear strikes on American soil in places where the lines had failed to retrain the dead but no one believed them and hearing or seeing actual news was a thing of the past. Most civilians were too busy just trying to keep breathing, journalists included.
Burke fought with his unit two days before things began to fall apart. They were taking heavier losses each day as their arms stockpiles grew smaller and the dead pushed closer with each wave of rotting flesh leaving the city in search of new meat. People began to desert the line in droves, heading off in search of their own families, whether to say goodbye or to try to start over, Burke had no idea. He stayed to the end until only he and the commanding officer General Stark were left.
They enclosed themselves in the fortified walls of the command bunker and took pop shots at the dead still flowing from the city out into the world beyond. Stark’s thoughts of gloom and hopelessness cut into Burke like a razor more and more with each passing hour.
There was no way he could shield his mind from them trapped in such close proximity. He had no choice but relieve the General. He’d blown the man’s brains out with a point blank shot from his sidearm. He felt no guilt over it. He knew it was what Stark wanted and would have done himself if he’d been able to give him the time to.
Burke had never been a long-range telepath but he tried now. He spent his time attempting to understand his gifts and force them to grow. He would sit perfectly motionless with his eyes closed and reach out into the world seeking someone else alive. He always saw death in his visions and never heard a single other thought which wasn’t his own. In fact, all he could feel in the world was a coldness which seeped into him and made him consider following Stark on to the next life every time he awoke from one of his trances. Today was no different.
His mental searching left him hollow and the food he was opening turned his stomach. He listened to the pounding outside for a moment once more and then let go, simply willing his heart to stop. Burke blinked or would have if he’d still had eye lids in a normal sense. He looked down at his body on the floor of the bunker as shock flooded his mind. What the hell had he become? A ghost?
He didn’t know but he was sure this wasn’t what death was supposed to be like. He reached for his weapon but his fingers glided through it as if the metal wasn’t there. It began to sink in that he was no longer part of this plane of existence though he could see it. He laughed silently at the madness of it all. Deciding he would make the most of God’s little joke on him, he walked out of the bunker and literally through the horde of mindless dead outside to bear witness to the last days of the human species. He hoped deep down that maybe he’d meet another ghost like himself.
DeadTown
The scent of the corpses littering the ground stank to high heavens. The flaming summer sun baking their rotting flesh and us as we stood there didn’t help matters none. I can sympathize with Peter. He didn’t ask for this job like I did. He’s just the sheriff, not a professional killer.
I can tell from the slight glint of tears in his eyes he wants this all to be over with. That this massacre is all it will take to right the world once more. But it’s not. These poor bastards were just the beginning.
Others will smell the blood here or sense the life in Springtown in the valley below and they will come again.
Next time it likely won’t be a few dozen either. It never is after they find you. It will be hundreds, maybe thousands. I have been on the run from them for a while now since I saw the first ones walking around in Mexico. I move north from place to place always warning the folk of what’s coming in my wake and offering them my services. Never found a town that’s held against them yet even my guns added to theirs. But Hell, the money’s good and I ain’t dead yet.
I spit into the face of the closest corpse at my feet as Peter finally gets it together and starts barking orders. Dillon and his brother, Jack, are the only two others left alive in our little hunting party. Peter tells them gather up the bodies and burn them. I don’t bother to help. No one says a word to me about it. Those dead things are scary, but people like me are scarier. That’s why we’ll be the last to die.
Besides I know the whole thing is a waste of time, seen it done before. If Peter wants to try to clean up our tracks and lower the odds of more of the dead things coming down out of the hills, who am I to crush his hope. I think deep down Peter knows the truth too on some level though he would never admit it to the folk in his town or even to himself.
Peter watches the fire as the “brothers dim” get our horses and the sun falls from the sky then we’re all in the saddle on our way back to Springtown. Too bad for us, they have beaten us there. I can smell the dead before our horses crest the hills around the town and we see the fires burning. One glance at the mess below would be enough to tell any sane person to get the hell out of dodge and make dust in another direction, any direction but down there, only Peter ain’t sane when it comes to his town.
He’s got to try to save them. He kicks his horse’s sides, charging down the hill, so fast it surprises even me. The brothers follow him. I pause for a second, taking the time to light up a smoke, weighing my options. The town’s already paid up, no reason for me to go down there but I decide to play the good guy anyway and do them all a favor. I hear the sound of metal scraping leather as my revolver comes free of its holster. My first shot splatters Peter’s skull open before anyone so much as hears the shot.