Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending

by Brian Stewart

  Both Michelle’s and Walter’s voices came back simultaneously in question. “What did you say?”

  He swallowed, and then tilted his chin slightly down so the transducer microphone was corralled better against his throat.

  “I need Doc Collins to answer a question. Are there any windows in the office?”

  Walters’s voice came back almost immediately. “No, the campground office has no windows. Did you copy that?”

  “I copy, thanks.”

  So much for sneaking around and taking a look, or at the very least having some additional light to shoot by.

  His flashlight had been mounted, almost as an afterthought, to the shotgun that morning, and a newly charged pair of batteries had been dropped in as well. He clicked the tailcap switch on the Quark, and then craned his neck around to the slit in the door. The wafting reek of carrion puffed into his face, but the narrow opening remained dark in contrast to the rapidly brightening day. He eased back against the wall and dropped his chin again.

  “Sam . . . Michelle—I’ve got a definite smell from inside the office. I’m getting ready to kick the door. Is everything else still clear?”

  Her voice came back a second later, “Everything that I can see is still clear . . . no targets . . . but how am I supposed to shoot if something’s in the office? You’ll be right in my way.”

  “I don’t plan on staying in the doorway, but if it comes down to it, just remember not to shoot the tall, camouflaged dude.”

  “Not funny.”

  “It was kind of funny,” Sam quipped, earning him a boot kick to the back of the driver’s seat.

  Eric closed his eyes and tried to picture the interior of the office. He’d been in it multiple times over the past few years, but just a few days ago Doc and the medical team had shifted things around. And although he’d been in the office that same night, it was right after an exhausting search and destroy operation on Golden Eagle Loop. In his mind’s eye, he saw that the internal layout of the office was basically open floor space with no divider walls. The only barriers would be furniture. Through the door and to the left would bring him to the old wooden desk where Doc kept the campground’s ancient computer, as well as the marine band, base station radio. He could picture several file cabinets against the same wall, but he couldn’t remember exactly how many. Three of them, maybe? Through the door and to the right used to be occupied by several shelves that held basic camping sundries like toilet paper, prepackaged snacks, bug spray, and bags of charcoal. Several vending machines had lined the back wall, and another small, glass fronted refrigerator was sandwiched between the vending machines. Decorating most of the refrigerator’s transparent doors were bright yellow and vibrant blue cutouts calling attention to the fantastic prices of the live bait held within. Right now, if his recollection was accurate, all of the shelves that formally held the snacks and supplies had been pushed out of the way and against the far wall. The resulting floor space was now occupied by several cots and a pair of small folding tables.

  Kick the door . . . or a slow push? There were benefits to both. With armed opponents, the element of surprise that often resulted from a 3:00 AM kick of their door usually brought a satisfactory outcome. For some reason, that scenario wasn’t sitting well in Eric’s gut right now. Slow push it was, then. His grip on the Benelli firmed up as he quietly shifted to face the door. The bright white spot from the flashlight cast a slightly oval shape just below the stenciled lettering that spelled out Ravenwood Campground Office.

  “Here I go.”

  Chapter 31

  As soft as a feather fall, he stepped forward into the doorway, nudging it open with the business end of the 12 gauge. The choking wall of stench that greeted him began to trigger his gag reflex, but he swallowed it down, even as the sight within burned a horrible image into his mind.

  Directly in front of the doorway were several . . . sections . . . of cadavers. Some of them were identifiable as previously human, others were not. The back wall—and most of the area that had been occupied by the cots just a few days ago—was now lined with an odd, sloping mound of bodies. The stark white illumination from his flashlight revealed ghastly wounds on many, and it looked like the gruesome tangle of corpses had been intentionally positioned as a sadistic work of art by some deranged serial killer. All of them were situated facing outward—some upright—others oriented sideways or even upside down. Their arms and legs appeared to be woven into a morbid tapestry of fleshy linkage, and each mouth gaped open in a hideous death yawn. There had to be at least thirty bodies piled in the human sculpture, and Eric’s mind recoiled further in shock as his eyes caught a flash of movement in the corner. A huge soup of entrails, blood, fecal matter, and too many other torn and shredded ingredients was sprayed against the walls, floor, and ceiling to his right. Crouching in the center of the horrid nest was a red-eyed ghoul. Its lips smacked and slobbered greedily as it ripped a fibrous segment of flesh from the partially denuded neck held in its grasp. The snapshot vision that tunneled through Eric’s mind brought forth an unwelcome comparison to a praying mantis feasting on the remains of a grasshopper. As his Quark burned through the darkness of the office, the ghoul—formally a forty-something year-old lady with bad teeth and dishwater blonde hair—squinted away from the flashlights intense beam, hissing and spitting bubbles of tissue as she bit again at the neck section. Eric spun a rapid 180 degree arc to the left—finding nothing else moving—before spinning again to lock the shotgun back on the feasting walker.

  “There’s a whole pile of corpses in here. At least twenty-five or thirty stacked in a huge, disgusting heap against the back wall and in the area where the cots used to be. It looks like the ghoul’s are using this building to store their food. And speaking of, I’ve got one living red-eye inside here. It’s looking at me from the corner while it . . . eats.”

  “Kill it.” Michelle's voice was cold and even.

  He paused for a moment as waves of hesitation washed over him. This was different. It wasn’t the amber-eyed feral that had leapt out of the Gulfstream on day one. It wasn’t the iron clawed ghoul that had tried to drag Michelle underneath the Fiero. It wasn’t any of the infected trying to smash into the store last night, or a giant, axe wielding monster leaping out of a boat. It was a lady. Sick . . . yes. Beyond hope or healing? Probably. Still, she was only slightly younger than Eric's mother would have been if she were still alive. His finger eased off the trigger, even as his senses kicked further into overdrive, blasting out a warning that he was still missing something critical.

  “Eric, are you OK?” Michelle’s tone came through his headset as anxiety mixed with caution.

  “Yeah, but I . . .” he trailed off into silence as the dirty blonde ghoul reached to the floor and retrieved a slimy length of tissue. Eric had gutted enough big game to recognize the intestines in her hands.

  The intense radiance bathing her gray skin into semi-translucence also brought a vivid clarity and contrast to the burnt pinks, dark browns, frothy reds, and congealed blood blacks that made up the cannibalistic gumbo she squatted in.

  “Eric,” Michelle started in a voice that now carried faint echoes of anger and impatience, “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not human anymore.” She paused, and then her tenor shifted gears into a much softer quality. “Remember Oggy?”

  Her words brought to the surface a distant memory. Oggy was Michelle’s childhood verbal corruption of “doggie,” a mixed breed mutt that showed a strong lineage of beagle somewhere in his recent family history. He was a very loving, affectionate, and intelligent dog, and Michelle had taught him all of the standard tricks, which he’d perform with eagerness as long as there was food involved. His favorite was cheesy puffs, and judging from his rotund silhouette, he performed quite often. In addition to those qualities, Oggy had been Michelle’s only real pet as she was growing up. The summer of her twelfth year had brought multiple visits to the veterinarian for Oggy’s increasingly geriatric conditions
, and one weekend in early fall it had come to an end. Michelle's father was overseas on deployment, as usual, and her mother was working the second shift at Golden Star, the sunflower seed processing plant fifteen miles west of Jamestown on interstate 94. They had been in her backyard shooting arrows at the three dimensional deer target when Oggy had waddled out from the house and collapsed. He was bleeding heavily from his nose and whining in pain. Repeated calls to the sunflower mill couldn’t locate her mother, so they had wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to her dad’s pickup, which Eric—having just turned thirteen a few weeks earlier—preceded to drive the four miles to the vet’s office. After an examination and blood tests, the white haired doctor had left the room to await the results. Michelle was seated on the floor, still cradling Oggy’s grizzled head in her hands when the doctor returned. The veterinarian had knelt down next to them and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he had said, “there’s not a lot we can do at this point, young lady. Your puppy is old, and his body is shutting down. I could perhaps keep him here on IV fluids and oxygen, but that may only add another few hours, or days, at the most.” The watery blue eyes of the physician had met each of theirs as he gently stroked the panting and wheezing, blanket-wrapped form on Michelle’s lap. His words—spoken perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of times in his career—were forged with both honesty and love, and had been indelibly engraved in the recesses of Eric’s core. “There comes a time,” he had said, “when you’re not doing them any favors by keeping them alive.”

  Those same words now came back to Eric as he watched the ghastly spectacle in front of him. His finger firmed up against the trigger as he remembered the ride back to Michelle’s house, and the next few hours of tears as Oggy, even through his pain, tried to give them licks of comfort and reassurance. Just past sundown, the salt and pepper muzzle had lifted briefly to take a few laps of water from the bowl Michelle offered, and then lowered a final time.

  His resolve no longer in question, Eric adjusted his aim and prepared to send a cluster of buckshot toward the gluttonous, crouching figure.

  “Movement . . . I’ve got movement from Doc’s camper.” Sam’s warning cut through his headphones—repeated seconds later by Michelle. “We’ve got two . . . now three infected coming out from Doc’s RV. Eric, shoot that thing and get out of there!”

  The gray-skinned blonde gave a snarling hiss as a half dozen of Michelle’s gunshots cracked into the silence. Almost immediately, the hair on the back of Eric’s neck stood straight up when the creature’s hiss was answered with a multitude of dry, throaty gasps. He jerked the shotgun to the left and just about soiled himself as one by one the wall of bodies began to open their eyes.

  Chapter 32

  His burst of profanity was partially lost in the explosion of the M2 as he spun and let the buckshot tear into the face of the hissing blonde woman.

  The echo of Michelle’s AR-15 was mixed with her shouted reply. “I’ve got multiple targets coming out of Golden Eagle Loop. Eric, do you copy. Stay inside the building, repeat, stay inside the building until we clear the area.”

  He backed away toward the door as the mound of bodies began to writhe and squirm, untangling themselves from each other in almost hypnotic surges. Some of the closer ones were already focusing on Eric, struggling to reach him with outstretched arms and snapping teeth.

  “They’re not dead! Holy crap, they’re still alive!” He yelled out as he backed through the doorway. Almost immediately, several of the infected from the pile seemed to dislodge themselves and plunge towards Eric. He fired off two more rounds, dropping one of them with half of its throat blown away. The other was momentarily jerked sideways as the blast of number four shot destroyed part of its lower jaw.

  Eric leapt onto the porch and saw a cluster of shambling figures moving towards the Explorer. Michelle was pouring fire into them, and at least three were already on the ground. Two more were down in front of Doc’s RV, and Sam was leaning across the hood, firing at several infected that had somehow managed to get less than twenty yards away from the Ford.

  Several loud thumps and growls from inside the office refocused his priorities, and Eric skated hard left just as the wooden door burst open. He bounded past the glider and over the dilapidated split rail fence, spinning to a stop next to the ladder. Five more flashes thundered from the M2, dropping three walkers and tumbling at least that many more over their fallen brethren. From the corner of his eye, he saw Michelle’s shocked face register his predicament for a split second before shifting fire almost directly towards him. He saw the flashes bursting from her rifle’s barrel, and almost instinctively ducked before he realized she was firing past his left shoulder. His headset reverberated with her frantic call of, “Behind you!” and a lightning fast swivel in that direction showed a downed walker fifteen yards on the other side of the fence. Another pair were also visible—awkwardly moving, but picking up speed—as they headed on a beeline toward him from the water treatment building. The horde from the office was bottlenecking in the doorway as they spilled onto the porch, and he fired twice more at the closest pair—one of them a shirtless old man with scraggly white hair held in a ponytail, the other was a red-eyed child no older than eight or nine. Her pink ballerina dress and white leggings were dotted with shadowy blotches of dried . . . something . . ., and her left hand still gripped a plastic doll with bright red hair that reminded Eric too much of Michelle. The last round from the shotgun took off the top third of her skull, and she dropped like a stone in a slightly quivering, pink silky heap.

  Bullets were pinging through the air as Michelle tried to staunch the flow from the office, but a tremendous gush of infected tumbled out of the bottleneck when the lead ghoul, a chubby man wearing red flannel footy pajamas, went down under her fire. A glance behind showed Eric that the pair coming from the water treatment shack had closed to within fifty feet, and with no options left, he scrambled up the ladder.

  The tin roof on the porch bowed and flexed unsteadily beneath his feet as he crested the ladder and mounted the sloping metal surface. Two quick steps took him to the joint where the slight pitch of the porch roof tied in to the much steeper angle of the office roof.

  “On the roof and reloading,” he called out as his hand dropped to the shell caddy and retrieved four more rounds of buckshot. With a precision acquired through many years of practice, he instinctively fed them into the loading gate of the shotgun. Another dip toward the second, and last, shell caddy brought another quadruple reload. Michelle and Sam were still firing directly underneath him toward the porch, and Eric used that brief interval to reload both of the 12 gauge speed loaders. Eight fired, eight loaded, eight in the caddies. That left one remaining in his pocket from the box of twenty-five. Another glance in the direction of the Explorer showed a trio of infected less than a dozen yards from its front bumper. Sam was unaware of the threat coming from his left as he continued to fire toward the office.

  “SAM . . . TO YOUR LEFT . . . LOOK TO YOUR LEFT!”

  Eric watched as Sam and Michelle both rotated their AR-15’s at the oncoming threat. A millisecond later, bursts of 5.56 projectiles slammed into the three walkers, dropping two of them immediately. The third kept coming forward as round after round tore into its body.

  A metallic clanging shook Eric’s attention back to his own dilemma, and he saw the ladder shake and slide for a moment before pasty gray hands reached up and grabbed the top rung. Immediately dropping to a crouch, he kicked out with his left foot, connecting with the ladder’s aluminum side rail but only shifting it by a few inches. The ghoul’s head and shoulders heaved upwards as it both climbed, and was pushed, from below. From his squatted position, Eric fired the M2 almost point blank at the monsters face. The heavy lead buckshot, lethal on deer-sized animals out to almost thirty yards, had no problem turning the creature’s central nervous system into a backwards blasting funnel of crimson froth. Almost in slow motion, its hands loosened finger by finger before the rest of its
body slumped away and fell. It was instantaneously replaced by two more of its foul companions.

  “Reloading,” Sam shouted through the headset, and Eric risked a fleeting look in his direction before backpedaling up the incline of the office roof. A mob of ghouls was gathering at the base of the ladder, and their weight was keeping it locked against the tin as they scaled the rungs. The lead creature took a blast from the Benelli and cartwheeled off to the side, crashing eight feet downward and smashing through another section of the decrepit split rail fence. In its place, a teenage boy with moppy brown hair and severe bite marks all over his face clawed to the top. Eric’s stomach flip-flopped in recognition as the boy’s scalded crimson eyes glared at him in hunger. It was Marty. With surprising quickness, the infected boy scrambled onto the roof as more ghouls lunged higher on the extension ladder. Eric lined up the M2 with Marty’s face, and with a whispered “I’m sorry,” he pulled the trigger.

  Both Sam and Michelle called out “Reloading” as Eric scooted backwards, fighting to line up the shotgun with the next available target that was already on the porch roof and scrambling his way. With one more stretch, he pushed himself to the ridgeline of the office building and spun to his knees before sending three more rounds thundering into the porch top monster. It went down in a heap, but flopped and vibrated against the tin in a crescendo of bangs and crashes before finally rolling off the edge. A clamoring behind him caught his attention as he rammed four more shells into the magazine tube. At the backside corner of the roof, one of the infected had managed to climb the base station’s antenna pole and was scuttling up the roof slant towards him. Eric swore as he rapidly searched for options. None were good, but staying right here was worse. Two more shots—one in front of him, one behind—and he flung the shotgun over his shoulder and tightened the sling. He needed to get out of their reach to a defensible position, and that left only one option. Eyeing the furrowed bark of the oak tree, he calculated the distance to the lowest limb as an easily reachable, seven or eight feet above the tin roof of the porch. From there, it would be a fairly simple climb through the more numerous branches until he reached a spot about fifty feet above the ground. Once he was in that position, any approaching ghouls could be easily dispatched with well placed shots from the 10mm pistol. He took another glimpse at the terrain, mentally laying out the route like a pole vaulter studying his approach. Four or five quick, but careful strides down the incline should be followed by three—four at the most—accelerating sprint steps. At the end it was an easy leap—probably even within reach of his extended arms—to the limb. Another pair of pasty gray hands was cresting the drip edge near the antenna when Eric took off. Heavy thumping steps carried him down and across the angle of the office roof as he bounded onto the tin and raced toward the oak tree. Two deafening bass drum footsteps on the tin sheeting lined him up for the third and final mark that would function as his leaping point . . . or would have, if the rafter that supported that section had held under the increased G forces from his pounding treads. But it didn’t. His third step initiated a loud CRACK as the rafter split, and the sudden shift dropped Eric hard against the tin. His impact destroyed the last undersized beam at the edge of the roof, and the entire front third of the porch covering collapsed, sluicing him to the ground after a jarring thump against the initialed oak. From underneath the wreckage, an outcry of angry hisses erupted as the barrage of infected searched for their meal. It didn’t take them long to find it, and faces began to appear at the edge of the fallen debris.