Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending

by Brian Stewart

  “So you ran to the veterinarian’s office from there?” Michelle asked.

  I already knew part of that answer, but I didn’t interrupt as Shawn continued. “No, we couldn’t. As soon as we got outside by the lake, I could see—and obviously hear—another skirmish out by the road, so I made a command decision and we went to ground. And by that I mean we hid our butts underneath an old aluminum boat that was laying upside down in Clem’s backyard. I had the pistol and about seventy rounds of ammunition, but only one magazine. Not the best setup for a two mile moving firefight, as I’m sure you can imagine. Anyhow, it took us almost two days to play hide and seek with those sickos and get to the vet. It was literally ‘move ten feet-wait ten minutes’ all the way. There were several times that we almost bought the farm, and by the time we were halfway there, we only had twenty-three rounds of ammo left. We were in a bad situation though. The next piece of cover was over a hundred yards away, and there were about a dozen of those gray things meandering toward the clump of reeds that we were hiding in. Mack’s leg was hurting him real bad, but we didn’t have much of a choice. If we ran, I’m sure they would’ve seen us, so we just hunkered down and prayed. Those sickos walked right up to the edge of the reeds, but they never came in. They were so close I could hear them breathing and smell their stench, but they say that God watches over angels and fools, and He managed to keep the two fools from North Carolina from being discovered. Then He did a few more miracles. A bunch of shooting started up again closer to town, and the pack that was next to us started moving that way.” He swiveled his head back and forth between Michelle and I. “Both of you probably know this already, but I’m sure that noise attracts those things.”

  “Yeah, we’ve experienced that ourselves.”

  “I figured. When that bunch moved away, we made a break for it and ran. The next cover was a mound of old, rotten railroad ties about twelve feet tall. On the backside of those we found the body of some guy in a ghillie suit, although it wasn’t helping him to blend in to the railroad ties very well. He was dead and gray, but I didn’t see any obvious wounds on him. I got the .308 rifle and fanny pack from him. We spent the first night sleeping underneath the crawlspace of somebody’s shed. The next day—yesterday—it seemed like more and more of those things were popping up, and it took us even longer. We had to shoot our way out of a few jams, but we made it past the sewage plant at dusk.” Shawn turned and nodded towards me. “You know the rest.”

  I finished off my cup of tea and told Michelle about what happened. Everything from the veterinarian’s office to the barn, and all the way through our last ditch sprint through the bison field. When I told her about the black-eyed lady, Michelle’s brow furrowed.

  “That’s almost exactly what Sam told us,” she said. “Remember, the lady with black eyes that he ran into in the traffic jam.”

  “I remember.”

  “You wanna tell me?” Shawn asked.

  Michelle and I spent the next thirty minutes or so giving Shawn the rundown on as much as we could think of. When we finished, he sat quietly and stared out across the water. The midmorning sun was warming me up to the point where I had to unzip my jacket, and I leaned back and stretched my arms above my head. Every muscle that I moved protested the intrusion, and after another moment of discomfort I settled into a relaxed slouch with my head resting against Michelle’s shoulder. Her fingers reached down and ran through my hair, and I drifted further down until the back of my neck was draped across her upper thigh.

  I watched as she raised the Styrofoam cup and took a sip, and then tilted her head backwards and stared at the sky. After a few minutes of silence she began to speak. Her voice was low and even, and her fingers continued their absentminded caress as she spoke.

  “The first wave came about an hour after dark. We were all upstairs. The sleeping pills were starting to wear off of mom, and she was sitting up in bed and talking to dad. Faith was cuddling with her rabbit in the corner. I had both of the upstairs windows open just in case I had to shoot, and I was taking turns watching through them with the night scope. I had one of the rocking chairs wedged in the stairway for an alarm, and it had about fifteen empty beer bottles balanced on the seat. Like I said, about an hour after dark I heard some noise from the road. I had been watching out the back window at the time, so I moved across the room and looked out front. There was a . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . a ‘mob’ of those gray things standing on the road seven houses down.”

  Her finger stopped their caress and she looked down at me, holding my eyes briefly before gazing toward Shawn. “These things are not mindless.”

  Her emphasis on the word “not” rang like an iron funeral bell, and the resonations of that thought vibrated in unison with several of my own.

  “There were ferals out on the road as well—at least two that I saw at that point—and I whispered for everyone to stay quiet. I was hoping they’d just pass us by.” Michelle’s free hand ran through her own hair, and she breathed out a deep sigh. “I watched as the pack on the road just stood there milling about for a few minutes. I still don’t know what they were waiting for, but something triggered the ferals, and they split off and crashed through the bottom windows of that cabin. A few minutes later they came out and rejoined the group on the road. Then the entire mob walked and stood in front of the next cabin. Same process—only this time somebody was inside. Gunshots rang out and I heard a lot of screaming . . . and then the whole swarm crashed into the house.” Michelle tapped me on the head and I sat up on the bench. She stood and walked to the railing, staring down into the water for a full minute before turning back to face us. “They were systematically going to the cabins one by one.”

  “Damn,” Shawn voiced.

  Michelle nodded in agreement and continued. “I watched it happen with a third cabin, and by then I was sure that they’d eventually get to us, so I figured our best bet would be to make a break for Dad’s bass boat and get out on the water. I don’t know if we would have been able to pull it off, but in any case it was a moot point because when I looked out back, I could see five or six ghouls spread out in the back yards of the cabins. Do you understand what that means?”

  I did, but it was Shawn who volunteered it first. “It means they were containing their prey before they attacked . . . cutting off the escape routes.”

  Michelle nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, and that means there’s a thought process that’s driving their actions.”

  “The ferals?” Shawn asked.

  “That’s what I figured,” Michelle answered. “I’m just going out on a limb here, but as much as I can recall, every time we’ve encountered a group of infected, they seemed, I don’t know, ‘not very driven’ unless we stirred them up . . . or . . . if there was a feral with them.”

  Michelle’s words were striking chords with my own unspoken thoughts, but I kept quiet.

  “I didn’t have many other options, so I decided to take the battle to them. When they came out of the next cabin, I took out one of the ferals. The other one disappeared off my radar for a few minutes, and the rest of the pack began acting really agitated—like they had been wound up but not pointed in a direction. The second feral showed himself about a minute later, and I scattered his forehead across the rear bumper of a beat up Mustang parked down the road. I don’t know what I was hoping for . . . maybe that the other ghouls would just scatter or wander away with the ferals out of the picture. They didn’t.” She walked over and sat once again on the bench, shaking her head and staring at her shoes. “There was a third feral. I caught a flash of movement, but I couldn’t get off a shot before it bounded out of my angle. In any event, the jig was up and the pack headed for our cabin. I started firing.”

  I reached out and put my arm around her waist, pulling her close as she continued. “It’s really just a blur from there. They managed to get into the cabin pretty quick, and I put Dad at the top of the stairs with the other AR-15 and a flashlight. Mom was reloading
magazines as we used them, and Faith was ferrying the empty and full magazines back and forth. I was trying to thin the numbers before they got to the cabin, and it seemed like the fight went on for hours. It was probably only a few minutes though. The second wave came about midnight.”

  I scooted even closer and moved my hand to her shoulder. The gesture wasn’t lost, and Michelle laid her hand over top of mine. “It was bizarre,” she said, “like they already knew that the first three cabins had been gone through earlier that night. I watched the pack come down the road and stand in front of our cabin. One of the stinky ghouls that foam at the mouth was with them, and there were at least two more ferals. They didn’t come here right away though; they went into the cabin where Faith’s grandparents lived. I pretty much figured we were toast anyhow, but I had a wild idea that I wanted to try. Dad had an old compound bow in the closet upstairs, and we wrapped a few pieces of cloth around some arrows, and then sprayed them with bug repellent. As I got ready to fire out the window, Dad lit the cloth. My first shot went way off target, but the next two were close enough.”

  “To what?” Shawn asked curiously.

  “To the propane tank underneath the barbecue grill on the front porch.”

  “Seriously?” Shawn’s eyebrows arched skyward.

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure if it would work, and it didn’t really, at least not like I had hoped. It would’ve been nice if the whole place would have blown up like you see in the movies, but like I said, that didn’t happen. I shot the tank with the AR, and it punctured and started wobbling. It was still attached to the grill with a piece of short hose, and as it was skipping around some of the gas made contact with the flaming arrows. Like I said—no big explosion. It was just a little ‘poof,’ and then a fireball about the size of a small car went up. The tank didn’t blow, but it started shooting out a torch of flame about four feet long. That flame didn’t last long, but it did manage to catch the cabin on fire. I’m not sure if that helped or not in the long run, but it lit up the whole street for a good two hours, and I was pretty damn busy during that time. I don’t know where they were all coming from, but it seemed like a never ending line. Two of the ferals somehow climbed up the cabin wall and almost made it through the front window, but then the porch roof gave away and crashed down. I probably wasted a lot of ammo, but it got to the point where I almost didn’t care. The third wave came about 4:30 AM. There weren’t as many—maybe seventeen or eighteen total—but there were at least five ferals, and they didn’t come down the road . . . they came in from the side toward the lake. I didn’t see them until they were almost on top of us. Just a few minutes into the attack, a pair of those amber-eyed monsters managed to push through into the stairway just as Dad was changing magazines.”

  Michelle paused to catch her breath, and then she steadied herself and continued. “He was pulled right out of his wheelchair, like he was sitting there one second, and then in a flash he was gone. Somehow he managed to throw the rifle up the stairs, and as they were tearing into him, he was blasting away with his pistol. I remember screaming and running over just in time to see him . . . his body . . . get pulled away over top of the mound that was already in the stairwell. One of the ferals that had gotten him was dead, and the other was trying to climb upstairs, but there was something wrong with it. Maybe Dad had managed to shoot it in the spine or something. I don’t know. I dumped an entire mag into its face. I don’t remember much after that. I was just sprinting back and forth between the windows and the stairway, shooting at anything that moved. When the attack finally stopped, so did I. Our ammunition was almost gone, and I remember hugging Mom and Faith, and then I moved a dresser into the stairway to at least buy me some time if something else came from there. I shut the back window and moved to the front where I could look out onto the road, and I just kind of collapsed against the wall and waited for a pair of gray arms to burst through. I was so damn tired. The last thing I remember thinking was that you should have been back a long time ago, and that meant that you were probably dead. I can’t recall anything else until I heard your voice coming from my headset.”

  “Hey,” I said as I hugged her tightly, “I’m not dead. And neither are you.” She tilted her amazingly green eyes toward my face and stared like she was double, or even triple checking my statement as I continued. “And Faith and your mom are safe, and we’ve even scored a pile of medicine that I’m sure is going to be worth its weight in gold, or at least ammunition in the near future. Heck, we’ve even picked up a pair of southern boys,” I nodded toward Shawn, “that probably know which end of the rifle barrel to point at the squirrels.”

  Shawn grinned and then cleared his throat. A rather large volley of tobacco juice sailed over the railing, and then he turned to face us. “There’s something else. Something that maybe neither of you are thinkin’ about.”

  “What’s that?”

  He tilted his head toward Michelle. “Your girlfriend, with a little help from her father and a defensible position, managed to take out probably seventy or eighty of these sickos, not to mention about a half dozen of the fast ones. And that tells me that the right people with the right equipment and some forward thinking don’t have to just lay down and die.”

  He was right, and I nodded in agreement with his words. Even through the haze of exhaustion and emotional overload, Michelle managed a slight head bob as well.

  “So what now?” Shawn asked.

  It was my turn to pace, so I squeezed Michelle against me and planted a brief kiss on her cheek, and then stood up and walked to the rail. Every muscle in my back and legs joined a union and voted to strike against any further movement, but I somehow managed to remain upright despite the stiffness and soreness. Or maybe because of it. The surface of Devils Lake had minimal chop, and the sun shone brightly against my face as I looked across the water. For a moment, I could almost imagine myself flipping a lure into the depths, searching for the elusive bite of a walleye too big to fit in a frying pan. That daydream, like so many others of late, was brutally pummeled aside and kicked into the corner with the reality of our situation.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking—feel free to jump in at any time though.” I started rolling my neck in a gentle circle to stretch out the kinks as I spoke. “Right here in the middle of the lake is probably one of the safest places to be. We’re all—everyone of us—beat up and tired. We’ve been kicked around, chased, scared, and inundated with so many physical, mental, and emotional challenges in the last few days . . . even weeks . . . that we’re not going to be able to go much further without some rest. And there’s very few places that I can think of that are as safe as right here, right now. We can’t stay here forever though. Theoretically, we have unlimited fresh water by using my filter. Theoretically again, we have unlimited food by using the fishing tackle that’s in the bass boat from the cabin.”

  “Great,” Shawn laughed, “more fish.”

  “Remember I said it was theoretical. As far as I know, you might starve to death if you had to depend on catching your own a dinner with a fishing pole.” My smile accompanied the joust, and Shawn’s chest shook with amusement.

  “I might at that,” he replied, “Mack is the one who was nailing ‘em left and right most of the time.”

  Our laughter faded after a moment, and I continued with my assessment. “So as I was saying, in theory we could spend a substantial amount of time catching our breath and regaining our sanity, but that’s where theory begins to clash with reality. Mack’s leg can’t wait forever, and like it or not, we can’t just stay here while other people are holding down the fort without us.”

  “What are you thinking?” It came from Shawn, but was echoed almost in unison by Michelle.

  “We spend the rest of the day and the tonight anchored right here. I’m tired, but at least I got a little bit of a shuteye when I was fading in and out last night, so I’m good with the first watch. Neither of you two have slept at all, and believe me, it’s showing. Anyhow,
we use today and tonight to rest in safety, and then tomorrow morning we move to Silver Lake and get ready for the final run up the creek to the farmhouse. Once we’re there, we head north to the marina.”

  Both of them nodded in agreement, and then Shawn pointed at the tow line that trailed behind the patrol boat. “I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, and I’ve got a suggestion that might help out.”

  “We’ll take any suggestions we can get,” Michelle replied.