*click*
OK, I’m back. I don’t know what it was . . . or is . . . but something whomped into the outside wall of the office. I better speed this up, because I can literally feel my time running out. I wonder if I’ll get the “condemned man’s” last request? If so, I want my Benelli shotgun and a couple hundred shells. And I want it to be daylight. And I want Michelle and Max to be by my side. Oh, let’s not forget the blueberry muffins . . . sigh . . . The clock shows 4:51 AM. Sunrise is still about an hour away. Maybe a little more if the clouds hang around. I better finish up this recording, because my gut tells me something is coming down the pike. Soon. Anyway, I skipped the lab and moved down the hallway. The next door was labeled “storage,” and that’s exactly what it was. Only not the kind of storage I needed. Cleaning supplies, disinfectants, blankets, and other sundries occupied the wall length shelving system on the right. The shelves on the left were stacked floor to ceiling with various animal foods in bags and cans. I left it all alone and headed to the next door. It was locked, but unlike the solid wooden door that led to the room with the desks, this one was a simple hollow core interior door. Twenty seconds with the pry bar and I was inside. Paydirt! It was a square room about fifteen feet on a side. Every wall except the back was organized with columns of freestanding metal shelving units—the solid ones, not the ones made out of the wire grid. The back wall had two upright refrigerators and one chest freezer. The last shelf on the right side was a locked sheet metal cabinet, but with the pry bar it only stayed that way for about three seconds. High security was apparently not what they had in mind when they designed this room. I wasn’t complaining though. There were no windows, so I shut the door and wedged it with the little wrecker bar while I searched. I had made a list of anything and everything that I thought might be useful, but the number one priority was of course, diltiazem. I found it in less than a minute thanks to the alphabetical organization of the pharmaceuticals in the room. One of the things that I had done . . . OK, it was actually Michelle that suggested it . . . was to empty out Faith’s large duffel bag and take it with me. Her clothes and toys got temporarily moved to a giant sized, contractor grade garbage bag. I removed the duffel from my pack and unrolled it, and then I switched my flashlight on high and looked around the room. Whoever was in charge of this room, maybe Austine for all I know, was a very detail oriented person. Laminated, computer printed three by five cards were attached with Velcro tabs to a strip of Velcro backing that ran along the front of each level of shelving. Like I said, everything was organized alphabetically by name, and that name was at the top of the card. Underneath that it was classified further by the type of pharmaceutical it was. Antibiotic, antiviral, diuretic, immunosuppressive agent, laxative, ophthalmic anesthetic, topical antifungal cream, vaccination. . . you get the point. There was a lot. The card data continued on with the prescription’s fine print—things like milligram strength, quantity per container, date of arrival, stocking quantity, and a whole lot more that I didn’t take the time to read. The bottom of the card displayed a bar code for scanning. There were four large plastic bottles filled with buffalo sized dosages of Lynn’s medication, and five smaller boxes—each containing a correspondingly smaller milligram dosage of pills. I took them all, and then I went shopping. The formerly locked cabinet primarily held narcotic analgesics, and the refrigerators were stocked with cartons of vials. A hasty glance showed that most of the drugs in the refrigerators were antibiotics in suspension, although there were other classifications as well, including several large cartons of insulin. It was cold enough in this room that I was certain it wouldn’t matter that the power had been out for who knows how long. I left the freezer alone, though. Twenty-five minutes later I had the duffel filled to bursting with all manners of medication, including every antibiotic that I recognized the name of, and even quite a few that I didn’t. Inside my pack I keep a nylon stuff bag with a drawstring closure. Mostly it gets used for storing a pile of “whatnot,” which almost always turns out to be dirty clothes or damp towels. Today I filled it with about forty pounds of pharmaceuticals before topping off with a few double handfuls of miscellaneous medical supplies like syringes, and then I slid it closed and got ready to leave. The large duffel bag probably weighed almost seventy-five pounds, but the ballistic webbing handles made it an easy lift. The nylon stuff bag was also workable, as long as I kept my fingers through the mostly closed drawstring hole. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to make two trips, that meant I’d be crossing fences and buffalo enclosures without the night scope. Consequently, that would also mean I wouldn’t have a gun immediately accessible either. My own night vision was good, but the clouds were heavy, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to come all this way only to get stomped to death by a bison that I collided with in the dark, so I decided to take my booty outside before I made a final decision. I dropped the Quark on to its lowest setting and let my eyes adjust for a few minutes before stalking down the hall and through the lunchroom. I set both of the bags on the long table and then snuck over to the door—flashlight now off and night scope turned on. As I got to the threshold, the sound of faint voices—screaming and shouting mostly—began to filter through. I’ve got to admit that a huge chunk of my self preservation mode was practically begging the rest of my body to just hold the door shut and wait for the noise to go away. I probably would have if a lot of the voices hadn’t sounded like children. I opened the door and slid outside. That’s when the shooting started.
As soon as I stepped to the corner I saw the headlights from several vehicles at the “T” intersection between the lemna plant and here. One of the vehicles was definitely a scaled down version of a bus. What looked to be a pickup truck or maybe a smaller flatbed was angled next to it. I couldn’t tell what the third vehicle was because its headlights were pointing directly my way. The illumination from the vehicle lights was enough that I could see a large pack of ghouls circling at the edge of the darkness. They were behaving strangely though . . . like they seemed to be waiting for something. Every few seconds a gunshot would flash from one of the bus windows, but if it was having any effect, I couldn’t tell from here. The entire scene was being played out almost 150 yards away, and that was too far for me to even consider using the .22. I looked to the right at the bison pen—envisioning the boat beyond and my chance at freedom—and then back toward the bus. More gunshots punctuated with the high pitched wails of children sounded across the distance, and for a split second the image of Faith looking down on me as I slaughtered the chain of infected prisoners came to my mind. I reached into my jacket pocket and felt the cord of red hair looping around my fingers, and then I took off across the parking lot heading for the open barn.
There was barely enough light for me to navigate across the blacktop and over to the barns without using the night scope, but I made it just as the gunfire increased its tempo. The partially open door stood in front of me, and I raised the rifle and skulked through into the electronic green panorama brought to life by the scope. Immediately I was hit by a wave of foul air—a combination of feces and rot that penetrated down my nose and threatened to force my gag reflex. The gun dropped against my chest and I pressed myself against the interior wall, as much for cover as for stability in case the stench knocked me completely over or buckled my knees. It was probably only a few seconds later that I heard a low snarl. My rifle snapped back up and I searched, trying to locate the source of the growl. It was easy to find. A ghoul was emerging from one of the cattle stalls—the broken shaft of a pitchfork still impaling his upper thigh through the denim overalls he wore. I was about to drill him through the forehead, but something inside of me delayed my finger from the trigger. OK, lesson time for anybody who finds my body, or at least this recorder. Advance night vision equipment, like the scope on the .22, is an absolute power shift, or “force multiplier” as they say in some circles. In other words, if you don’t have it but your enemy does, in general you’re pretty much hosed. That said, there are ce
rtain limitations with the use of night vision equipment. I don’t have a lot of time to get into the different generations or systems for seeing in the dark, but a lot of people confuse “night vision” with “thermal imaging.” They’re totally different. Thermal actually sees heat radiating off of your target . . . night vision, well, you might understand it better if I said it another way. It’s not “night vision,” but rather “light amplification.” I’m not a tech geek, but the simple way to explain it is that the scope gathers the available light and intensifies it into an image that’s bright enough to see when you look into the viewfinder. Each generation gets better at doing this, with generation three being the current military standard. Where am I going with this? Well, the green field of view that you see while looking through the scope can also create a dim “back splash” of light reflecting off of your face. This isn’t normally a problem in most combat situations, but it can be an issue if you’re a solitary sniper in the dark of the desert surrounded by your enemies, or a tired North Dakota game warden staring at a red-eyed monster in a pitch black barn. Fortunately, there is a partial solution. Most of the latest generations of scopes and goggles have a specialized eyepiece that opens the aperture when you press your forehead against it, thereby creating a seal that keeps the back splash to a minimum. Do you understand where I was going with this, and why I held off from pulling the trigger? When I snapped the rifle to my eye, I effectively eliminated the possibility that “Farmer Pitchfork” could ferret me out by noticing the dim green back splash. But I was cautiously curious to find out how an infected person behaved in total darkness. I’d already seen the ghoul stumble over the body at the ranger station, so I was reasonably sure they didn’t gain any mythical cat vision to go along with their change in appetite, but I also learned years ago that the best way to learn about the true behavior of a creature—human, animal, or otherwise – was to observe it when it was unaware it was being watched. And so I kept my finger on the trigger and the crosshairs on the ghoul’s head. Its crimson eyes were darting back and forth in the wedge of the barn where I was standing, like it had me, and then lost me . . . and then it began to stumble forward. I was almost a million percent positive that it couldn’t see me, but the echo of screams and gunshots from the outside convinced me that my experiment had gone on long enough. I shot it through the left eye and followed it down, adding another round into the top of its head for insurance, and then I moved over to the built in wooden ladder that climbed upwards to the loft. Five seconds later I was up and tiptoeing toward the back wall.
The barn itself was constructed out of the typical materials you’d expect to find in older barns everywhere—thick sawmill lumber, heavy square posts, and layers of overlapping tin for a roof. Also, like almost every barn I’d ever been in, it was a depository for all manners of strange, obscure, antiquated, or leftover materials too bulky or rusty to be stored elsewhere. Several stacks of forgotten hay bales fought for space in the loft with a sloping pile of rusty cages; both of them seeming to erupt from an ankle deep layer of old feed bags. Directly in front of me as I crested the ladder—guarded by a barrier made from loosely hanging chicken wire—was the outside opening to the loft level. The shutter-like doors that would normally be opened when you loaded or unloaded hay bales were missing, and the chill night air was breezing unimpeded through the wire. So were the screams. I tried to dodge around the obstacles on my way to the chicken wire, but ended up knocking over a stack of empty paint cans that were balanced on some loose pet carriers. They banged and rolled and bounced with all the delicacy of a marching band, and I cringed along with the ruckus I made, half expecting a pile of ghouls to materialize out of thin air and shred me. None did, so I layed prone on the floor and poked the suppressor through a ragged hole in the chicken wire. It took me almost another minute to shift and squirm into a position with a good rest for the rifle, and then I began to search for targets. I had at least a half dozen ghouls standing in a ragged line about sixty yards away. They were facing the bus, which put their backs almost directly toward me. It was odd, though, and I wondered why they weren’t moving forward. My answer, such as it was, came a few moments later. I started with the target on the far right. At this range and with a steady rest I almost couldn’t miss, and he collapsed into the low grass and was still. The next one in line followed fifteen seconds later. He kicked and spasmed after being shot, but eventually his thrashing ceased. I was lining up on number three when I saw it . . . when I saw her . . .
You know, I still can’t seem to wrap my head around what’s happening. I have a basic knowledge of microbiology and infectious disease, partly due to the curriculum requirements when you’re a biology major, but also because of the genre of television that I watched when I had time. I’ve even read a few books, believe it or not. But there is nothing that I can think of that can even remotely explain what’s happening with this disease, or virus, or whatever it is. Of course, the fact that I’m bruised and bloody and tired and hungry and . . . and . . . and . . . OK, I’ll stop, as Uncle Andy puts it, “bawling like a calf.” Where was I? Oh yeah, lining up on number three. I was shifting the crosshairs to the third ghoul in line when the small bus shook with impact. I jerked the trigger anyhow, but missed. The bus shook again, and then from out of nowhere it became swarmed with a layer of scuttling, grasping infected, like it was a giant face that had all of a sudden sprouted clumps of moving, shifting hair. My targets began walking to the left, and I managed to drop another one—the one I had missed a second ago—before they . . ., well, I don’t even know what to call it . . . “began gathering” maybe? The illumination from the headlights showed enough of the scene that a cold hard ball of icy dread began to form in my gut as I watched. A group of at least ten infected were moving away from the bus and towards the edge of the light, each dragging the struggling form of a child behind them. Some of them had two children. Like a macabre dance, they merged with the remaining three walkers that I hadn’t shot, and then their group swelled again as another eight or nine joined them from out of the darkness. There were several ferals in with that group. All of that was bizarre enough, but it was nothing compared to what happened next. As the groups compounded their numbers, they began to swirl and sway, all of them seeming to focus toward the highway and the darkness beyond. I angled my scope through the chicken wire, and the lime green radiance revealed a solitary figure moving slowly toward the undulating swarm. It was definitely female, and wore the tattered remains of a camouflage uniform. Something about her sent another wave of chills coursing down my spine, and I found myself drawn to the spectacle as it unfolded in front of me. She walked toward the wavering mob of ghouls, and they parted at her approach like a group of fat boys at the pool when the hot lifeguard walks past. Once she was in the middle of the swarm she stopped . . . and then all of the ones that weren’t holding a child surged forward—and I swear to you—began to lick and bite at her. As stomach churning as that was, I forced myself to line up the crosshairs on the monsters that were holding the children. Two of them fell silently with a single bullet in the side of their heads, and the children that were in their grasp struggled away and ran. I took out another one that was holding a pair of kids, and then the opportunity presented itself for a shot at a feral that was crawling on all fours toward the ghoul I had just killed. As my crosshairs stabilized on his face, his entire head exploded in a spray of bones and brain. A millisecond later, the thundering CRACK-BOOM of a high powered rifle reached my ears. I had no idea where the shot came from, and judging from the reaction of the swarm, neither did they. The center mass of monsters dissolved sideways, and then the entire mob began loping across the grass, heading straight for the barn I was in. I was stunned on so many levels that I literally froze in place, unable to even take a shot at the horde of infected that were trampling my way. I vaguely recall hearing another rifle shot, but I have no clue if it scored. It didn’t really matter, because just a few precious seconds later the ghouls began to enter
the barn.
Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending Page 58
