Fade to Grey (Book 1): Fade to Grey

by Brian Stewart

  Doc and his improvised medical staff were finishing up with a boy who had cut his leg in the dark, horsing around. He saw us approach and motioned for us to have a seat, almost like we were going to be his next patients. After cleaning the wound and applying a liberal coat of iodine, Doc sent the boy back into the grateful arms of his mother, who was seated next to us in the designated “waiting room.” When they left he thanked all of his medical volunteers, reminding them about the 8:00 AM meeting tomorrow. A few minutes later he was alone with us. We spent the first twenty minutes or so going over what we had encountered with the sweep teams, everything from the dead bodies we found to the live bodies that tried to eat us. We mentioned the encounter with what I was calling the “feral,” the yellow eyed thing that came out of the Gulfstream at site forty-six, as well as Michelle getting pulled under the Fiero and the strange banana smell. Doc took it all in, jotting notes in a composition book, occasionally shaking his head or asking a question. When we finished our “debriefing,” I looked at Doc and said, “Your turn.” He started telling us about the medical exams, no big surprises there, at least nothing he’d consider in the same league as his patient last night. He went over his supplies wish list, basic items like gallons of bleach and latex gloves, as well as medical items from antibiotics to band aids. After he was through Uncle Andy restated our offer about becoming a member of our core group. Doc accepted again, and proceeded to thank us for all of our work today. Pleasantries aside, I said, “Doc, I think you owe me an explanation.”

  He bowed his head and let out a deep sigh. I waited.

  “Eric, I hate to ask you this considering everything that you’ve already done for me,” he began, “but a . . . situation . . . has come up and I don’t really know who else I can turn to.”

  I let some of the aggravation slide off my face, took a long drink out of my water bottle, and said, “Tell me.”

  He looked up at me; I could see the beginnings of a tear as he said, “It’s my granddaughter . . . Emily . . . she’s missing.”

  Doc’s words slowly diffused into my already overtaxed brain. “What do you mean ‘missing’?”

  I watched him close his eyes and sink backwards into the worn out recliner that was part of the camp office décor. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand were rubbing the opposite sides of his temples, the universal sign for “I either have a headache, or I feel a big one coming on.” Sensing what was in the near future for me, I almost mimicked his gesture.

  “Eric, do you remember last night just before you and Michelle left the campground?”

  I nodded, remembering that he told me he had something on his mind, but it could wait until later.

  “So many things have happened so fast since last night that I had managed to put it out of my mind, but now that—for the moment at least—things are calm, I’ve got to admit that I’m very worried,” Doc said.

  I waited for a moment to give Doc a chance to continue.

  “Eric . . . Sally is my second wife. My first wife and I divorced a long time ago, she is no longer alive—cancer. We had a daughter named Elisa, a very beautiful girl . . . very beautiful.” Doc was shaking his head slowly, as if he was reliving long ago memories both sweet and bitter. “Elisa got pregnant before she was married, her boyfriend was a good for nothing . . . well, let’s just leave him out of it. Elisa’s daughter, Emily, was born on Valentine’s Day. She was the spitting image of her mom, and had her grandmother’s temper, a more precocious child I have never experienced. When Emily was fourteen years old, Elisa was killed in a car wreck. Emily came to stay with us. We did our best to raise her right, but a fourteen year old girl has a mind of her own, and with the sudden loss of her mother, she withdrew from . . . well, everything. Two years of waiting, hoping, and praying that she’d snap out of it and be done grieving, that she’d take an interest in something—anything. We tried everything from counselors to horseback riding lessons but nothing seemed to work, even the things she showed a slight interest in never lasted. Don’t get me wrong, she was a sweet girl, still loving to Sally and me, near the top of her class in school, never in any trouble. She just didn’t seem, and I hate to use this word considering what we’ve recently been through, but she didn’t seem alive, no zest for life if you will. Until the day she was helping Sally move some old boxes out of storage. One of those boxes had an old thirty-five millimeter camera in it. I remember coming home from the office that day, Sally pulling me aside as soon as I stepped through the front door. She put her finger up to her lips and motioned for me to follow quietly. She took me to the breakfast room and pointed through the plate glass window that looked onto our pool deck. Emily was sitting Indian style on the end of a lounge chair, a small beverage table in front of her. Scattered about the table was that old camera and various lenses, accessories, and whatnot for it. She was reading the manual, trying on the different lenses, adding different filters, learning. Sally said that she’d been out there all afternoon. To make a long story short, that camera was the key to finding our little Emily again. Over the next several months she opened up, blossomed. She became involved in photography clubs, learned to develop her own film and even had a few of her pictures published in a local nature magazine. When she was eighteen she headed off to college, majoring in photojournalism at the University of Maryland. College life is hard on a lot of freshmen, but not our Emily. She charged head on at any challenge presented to her, especially those revolving around photography. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Nikon—the camera company—offers a single paid internship each year at their U.S. headquarters in Virginia. Each year they have several thousand applicants. Emily got it in her senior year.” He paused for a second, looking around the office as if he had misplaced something. Not finding what he may have been looking for he returned to the story. “I said college life wasn’t hard on Emily. It was hard on Sally and me though. We hardly ever got to see her. Every Christmas for a few days, sometimes once or twice during fall break, those sort of things. Every summer she always volunteered at some magazine or newspaper; I remember she spent the summer of her junior year on a cruise ship, documenting people and places for her professor’s ‘diversity in action’ seminar or something. When she graduated we were so proud of her. We flew out to Maryland for a week with the idea of helping her get her own apartment, something that she had talked about almost nonstop for the last year. Plans change however, and our sweet granddaughter Emily took Sally and I to one of those Renaissance Festivals, with the knights and sword fights. All three of us even posed behind one of those plywood cutouts that you stick your face through for a funny picture. Emily ended up being the cavalier in that picture, I was the horse, and Sally was the dragon.” Doc chuckled a bit as he said, “I have that picture on my wall. Anyhow, we ate dinner in one of those tents decorated to look like a medieval tavern, I think the only thing on the menu was turkey drumsticks and beer though. Emily was quiet, pensive—almost like the time after her mother’s death. I asked her what was wrong and she said that she’d been giving it a lot of thought, and hoped we wouldn’t mind if she moved back with us until she got a job. I didn’t know what to say. Of course Sally and I were overjoyed and told her so . . .”

  Uncle Andy cut in, “Hey Doc, remember the ‘long story short’ part.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I’m just worried about her.”

  “Just tell me how I can help,” I said.

  “Emily moved back with us while she put in applications for various jobs. She was very specific in her desires though, she wanted to be with a national publication, she wanted control over her subject matter—a lot of things that your basic applicant wouldn’t even think of asking for. But Emily wouldn’t take no for an answer. She drove all around the country taking her proof book with her, meeting with publishers and other photographers, always searching for that perfect job. Sally and I tried to talk her into accepting any one of the dozens of offers she had already received, but she wanted something bigger. She
wanted to start at the top and go higher. And then one day it came, a phone call from Washington, DC. Emily was being offered an interview with National Geographic. Apparently some senior big cheese there got a hold of some of her work, liked it and wanted to talk further. Her interview wasn’t until the following week, so she was going to take her car and drive out, visiting some friends along the way. She had a little Subaru station wagon that had seen better days. I told her that if she got the job I’d buy her any car she wanted, within reason. Two weeks later she came back to North Dakota, walked into my office as my last patient was leaving for the day and said, ‘So let’s go buy me a new car.’ She spent the next, oh, I guess ten to eleven months in DC cutting her teeth on small little local projects. During that same timeframe I had just retired and Sally and I came up here to be the campground hosts.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “About two weeks ago, Emily called us out of the blue and said she had great news, her big break had come and it was in North Dakota, at least to start with. She had been offered the chance to spend a month along the Canadian border photographing wildlife, specifically moose and cougar. National Geographic was going to provide her with a production assistant and a guide, as well as a helicopter to get them on site, not to mention all the equipment and supplies they’d need. They even rented her team a brand new Gulfstream motor home to use as a base camp.”

  Something started clicking in my head.

  “She drove up here in her new car, a yellow Volkswagen Bug,” Doc said.

  Crap . . . I was thinking it, so I figured I better go ahead and ask, “Site forty-six . . . that was hers?”

  Doc nodded. “Yes, that’s hers. Anyhow, her production assistant was named Anthony, the guide was Derek. Six days ago they got on a chopper that landed right out there in the soccer field. They had a satellite phone with them as well. When they got up to wherever they were going, they set up camp and the helicopter left. The day after that they had to call it back to evacuate Anthony, he was having some type of allergic reaction and they weren’t sure what was causing it. Derek rode back with Anthony, I’m sure at Emily’s insistence. She called me on the satellite phone to let me know everything was OK, and that Derek and Anthony were going to return in a few days, and she’d be perfectly fine until then. Three days ago she called again, told me that apparently Anthony’s problem was a reaction to the dye in the fabric of some clothing he had borrowed for the trip, but it was all straightened out now and they’d be headed back up shortly. That same day I noticed the Xterra parked beside her Bug. I had to run into town and so I just assumed the helicopter had come and taken them back to where Emily was.”

  Doc stood up and started pacing. “Then all of this stuff started about the sickness, the President shutting down the Internet, all that. I tried to get her on the satellite phone but nothing would go through. Yesterday afternoon I was talking to Sally, asking her if she thought Emily would be OK now that the helicopter had taken her guide and the other fellow back up there, and she said that no helicopter had landed when I went to town. She had been up manning the gate the whole time I was gone, trying to organize the big rush of campers entering Ravenwood . . . she’d have heard it. I went down and knocked on the door of the Gulfstream. No answer. We were getting swamped then, everything was very chaotic, as you know. Since that time I’ve had zero sleep, I don’t imagine you’ve had much either.” He stopped pacing and looked at me. “Eric, what if Derek or Anthony were infected the first time they went up, what if their symptoms didn’t develop until a few days later? Or even the best case scenario, what if Emily hasn’t been exposed . . . even that would mean she’s still up there in the middle of nowhere, all alone.”

  “There’s a lot of country between here and Canada,” I said. “Do you have any idea where she’s at?”

  “I don’t know the name, or even if it has a name, but she said there’s a series of small lakes near where they set up their tent, one of the lakes she said looks like a crescent moon. I know it’s on this side of the border and . . .”

  “Do you have any idea how many hundreds of small lakes are between here and Canada?” Uncle Andy said.

  “ . . . And, as I was saying,” Doc continued, “she gave me the GPS coordinates of where the helicopter dropped them off at; she said it was about two miles from where they planned on setting up the tent.”

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I walked out to my truck and got my laptop, then returned to the camp office. I turned it on, entered my password and let it load all the startup programs. My battery meter showed thirty-eight percent remaining so I plugged the adapter into the outlet, once again triggering the thought of how long we’d have power this time. A minute or two later I was ready to go and asked Doc for the GPS coordinates. He read them off to me from a small yellow Post-it. One of the advantages of working for a state law enforcement agency was the ability to get a lot of software for next to nothing. Especially when it related to your work, and we all know that anything can be justified as “relating” to your work. My personal laptop had several of those “relating” programs installed. One of the programs uses hi-res satellite imagery overlaid on USGS topo maps. The neat thing about this program was you didn’t have to be connected to the Internet to use it. I had the entire state of North Dakota, each of the bordering states, and part of Southern Canada already saved on my laptop. Of course with the Internet down I was pretty much SOL for getting any further image updates. I clicked on the box that said “LOCATION” and opened the sub menu where I had a choice of finding a location via address, zip code, or GPS data. I chose GPS and entered the coordinates that Doc gave me, moved the mouse cursor to the “FIND AND ZOOM” button, and clicked. Doc, Michelle, and Uncle Andy had migrated to look over my shoulder. The picture on the screen was an aerial view of a Chinese buffet in Fargo, the last place I had used this software to find. I had been down there for an in-service training, and both the training and the buffet turned out to be a waste of time. The picture zoomed away from us like we were taking off in a rocket, then our ascent slowed and we began a warp speed journey to the north west. A few seconds later we slowed and descended, the green and brown blur becoming clearer as we fell. An elevation counter on the bottom right gave us our approximate viewing height, the numbers ticking off quickly until we reached 5,000 feet, then slowing slightly. Water showed as black glassy areas, and as the landscape below raced up towards us we saw dozens and dozens of lakes. Plunging further and further downward, the software finally stopped our descent, holding at an elevation of 300 feet above the coordinates. All we could see in our field of view from that height was a brush-studded grassy area bisected with a small creek. A box popped up, asking for a password.

  “That’s kind of like using Google Earth,” Michelle said.

  “Yeah, but unlike Google Earth, this program has a few classified bells and whistles. Unfortunately, those bells and whistles are not available if I’m not online. If the Internet was still working I’d be able to enter my password and get access to the most recent high-res image of the area were looking at, as well as a bunch of different stats and figures about that area.”

  I closed the password inquiry box and clicked on the "IMAGE DATA" tab, bringing up a window that displayed a bunch of relatively useless information, but also the date that particular satellite image was taken. It was almost ten years old, but, considering the location, probably still fairly accurate. I used the scroll wheel on the mouse, one click in reverse and we shot up one hundred feet, widening our overall field of view. Then another click, and another. At 700 feet we saw the edge of a small lake. At 1,500 feet we saw several small lakes in their entirety. At 1,700 feet Uncle Andy said, “Hold it . . . Eric, I think I know where that place is . . . zoom out a little.” I turned the mouse wheel two more clicks.

  Uncle Andy said, “Stop . . . look there—can you zoom in a little . . . ahh, move aside there boy.” Uncle Andy slid me aside and took over the mouse; I was a little
too tired to argue. He shifted the screen several times, panning and zooming, muttering to himself all the time until he finally said, “That’s what I thought. Eric, I’ve been there, and so have you.” I rubbed my eyes and took another look as he continued. “Do you remember three years ago when we tried to find a lake up near the border that your boss told you was full of trophy sized perch?”

  That jarred a few memories loose in my tired mind and I took another look at the map. My uncle was pointing to a thin dark line saying, “See, here’s that old logging road, and if we follow it down . . .” He zoomed out and panned south-southeast, fiddled around a bit, and then zoomed in . . . “Ta-Da, there is the cabin.” He was right.

  Doc wedged himself in between Michelle and the laptop. His excited voice added fire to his eyes as he talked. “You’ve been there? You know where she’s at?”

  Uncle Andy met my gaze, both of us thinking along the same lines. He beat me to the punch though. “Doc, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the clearing where the helicopter landed is only about . . . oh . . . I’d say eighteen to twenty miles from my cabin, as the crow flies. The bad news is that Eric ain’t a crow, and there’s a lot of bad country between point A and point B, which brings us back to the good news. There is a logging road, more of an overgrown firebreak now, that starts on the west side of Ghost Echo Lake. That road winds around and passes within a mile of my cabin, then meanders generally north all the way up into Canada. If you look here on the map, you can see where that road passes only five or six miles away from where the helicopter landed. Which brings us back to the bad news. That road is impassable in anything short of a tank this time of year. The Forest Service runs a crew in July or August that will push aside or cut through all the trees that fall over the winter and block the road, but it ain’t July.”