Fade to Grey (Book 1): Fade to Grey

by Brian Stewart

  Michelle took a sip of her water before continuing. “It probably seemed a lot longer than it actually was, but after an eternity Andy said, ‘Let’s not push our luck, OK?’ Well, that brought me out of my trance PDQ and I pulled forward and did a U-turn. Thompson backed out and followed. I took some different side roads as far as I could before catching the last intersection that would take me back to my house without going about fifty miles out of the way. And believe it or not, we were back in my living room exactly twenty-seven minutes after we had left. So now we had the dark blue suit and the black SUV. We still needed some type of passable ID though. The guy that was laying near the truck, his was practically ruined with blood and a bullet hole, but the other guy’s was pristine. Problem was he looked nothing like Andy. So we waited until 6:00 AM and then drove over to talk to Mr. Glass. We knew he had a computer and a generator. I have a computer here, but no generator and none of the programs that Andy thought he’d be able to make a passable fake ID with. Oh, while we were waiting for six o-clock to roll around, we practiced, well mostly I practiced . . . acting tough. To be honest, in hindsight I don’t . . . that is I can’t even believe what we were thinking,” Michelle let out another sigh, accompanied by a barely perceptible shudder before continuing. “OK, so we went over to see Mr. Glass. He was more than happy to let us use his computer, and it had a program that Andy said he could work with. At that point it sort of became a comedy of errors. Andy looked up at me and says, ‘We need to take some digital pictures of our faces. You got a camera?’ Well I did, but it was back at my house, so Thompson and I drove over and got it. When we got back we discovered the battery was dead. So now was another trip back to my house to find the charging cable. That took about ten minutes, and then once we were back at the Glass’s, we had to let it charge up for another fifteen minutes or so. So we finally got some pictures and Andy downloaded them into the computer and did, well whatever he did, and then he hits the print button. Fifteen seconds later out pops two reasonably accurate forgeries of an NSA ID badge. Except they’re in black and white. As it turns out, Mr. Glass was out of color ink. So now it’s back to my house one more time to grab my printer.

  It was about 7:15 AM by the time we had two passable IDs. Andy used, if I may say so, some very artfully applied clear packing tape to give then a laminated look. At 7:30 AM we were ready to go. The Glass’s had a small bible reading and said some prayers with us as we were getting ready to leave. We still had a little time to kill though, for some reason Andy didn’t want to get there too early, so we borrowed some sponges and soap from Mrs. Glass and used their well water to give the black SUV a bath. By 8:00 AM we were back at my house going over some final plans and contingencies. At 9:00 AM we showed up at the school.”

  Michelle went to the kitchen and refilled her cup of water from a spaghetti pot sitting on the countertop. She was still tired, even though it was technically much earlier than her typical bedtime of midnight. Besides, she was itching to know what Andy was thinking. Returning to the living room, it took her less than five minutes to tell Sam what happened from the time they entered the school until the time they pulled out with him in a body bag.

  “I normally don’t say this to a lady,” Sam replied, “but you have a big a set of brass balls.”

  Michelle let out a screech of disbelief. “Are you kidding me? I don’t think I’ll be able to take a shit for the next month because I was so clenched up the whole time I was there. I’ve literally never been that scared in my life, and that’s counting the firefight in my office and at the campground. If Andy and Thompson hadn’t spent so much time grilling me on how to act and what to say, I’d be in cuffs right next to you in the equipment room about now. Heck, I said more prayers in the couple hours we were at that school than I did from kindergarten to grad school, and that includes AP algebra. And let me tell you, I just about sank our boat the first five seconds we were there.”

  “How?” Sam asked.

  “When we got to the school and the first soldier came up to me, I realized I had no clue on how to tell what rank they were. I just about fumbled it right there, because that was one thing we didn’t cover in the briefings. I had to wait for Andy to call it out each time, and unfortunately I couldn’t just pull him aside and ask for a crash course on reading rank insignia. Andy was leaning halfway across the truck trying to get a look at Lieutenant Estes’s uniform when we first got there. It’s a damn good thing that truck had dark tinting or we would have screwed the pooch before we even got in the door. And thank God that Lieutenant Estes, well ‘Captain’ Estes now,” she laughed, “turned out to be the person he was.” Michelle buried her face in her hands and gave a combined sigh and groan. “There were so many things that could have . . . should have gone wrong.”

  “Like what?” the mound of blankets asked.

  Andy stood up and rubbed his hands together in an effort to warm them as he spoke. “Like we didn’t even know if it was actually you, and if it wasn’t we were still going to have to come out with a body. I’d like to say we had a plan for that contingency, but like most of our master plan it was following the ‘wing it’ philosophy. And then there was the potential to get into a shooting match. There was absolutely no doubt in our minds that we would lose if that happened. And the worst of that would have been that Michelle may not have been able to shoot back.”

  Even the dim light of the single candle was enough to illuminate Sam’s confused expression.

  “Our hope was that you would be where Thompson thought you would be. And in order to maintain our cover of being bad MOFO’s, we knew we were going to have to shoot you. Lucky for you we weren’t going to use a real bullet.” Andy laughed.

  “Yeah, I’m relatively glad of that myself,” Sam replied. “You know, when I first saw you I was so . . . I don’t know . . . disoriented maybe . . . that I couldn’t put two and two together. I knew where I had seen you before, but as much as I ‘knew’ that, my mind was also telling me that I was about to bite the big one and I was too stupid to figure out why, and how. But then you said the magic words . . . ‘executive conference room’.”

  “I was trying to figure out a way to get a message to you, one that everybody else listening wouldn’t recognize for what it was.”

  “I caught it, but it was still not one hundred percent sunk in when you were chewing me out. And then you came up and whispered to me,” Sam popped his head out of his blankets enough to flash a bright white gap toothed smile.

  “You never told me what you said to him,” Michelle said.

  “He said, ‘If you want to live, get ready to die,’ and then the old fart winked at me like I was a virgin on prom night and he was the captain of the football team,” Sam replied, still smiling.

  Thompson started chuckling, and his deep resonating laughter soon spread to the others.

  “Believe it or not, you wouldn’t have been the ugliest girl that I’ve ever asked out before,” Andy shot back.

  When the mirth had settled down to the occasional snicker, Sam repeated his question. “What were you saying about Michelle not being able to shoot back?”

  “Well,” Andy said, “we had the 22. We had a silencer. But we didn’t have any blanks. So we had to make some. I pulled the bullets out of a dozen shells to start with. The 22 pistol we had was a semiautomatic. You pull the trigger once and the explosion of gases force the slide back, which ejects the spent case and allows another round to be loaded when the slide returns forward. Just like your SIG and about a billion other guns in the world. The issue was that when we removed the powder charge, all we were left with was the ignition charge of the rimfire ammo. That put us in a bind a couple of ways. First off, the force of a little rimfire cartridge with its powder removed wasn’t enough to cycle the action of the gun. So you’d hear a little ‘pop’ but the spent case would still be in the chamber and you’d have to manually rack the slide to kick it out and load another one. We sort of figured that wouldn’t look too professional. An
yhow, the second problem we had was the noise level. With the silencer attached and firing subsonic ammunition, that little gun makes just about the same noise as without the silencer attached and firing a cartridge with no bullet or powder, only the rimfire ignition charge. Somebody seeing us shoot the gun with a silencer would expect a muted sound. On the other hand, without the silencer it needed to go bang. So the problem was how to make it go ‘bang’ loud enough to be believable, but without using loaded ammunition. And on top of that we wanted the gun to cycle the next round into the chamber. The gun holds ten shots in the magazine plus one in the pipe. I pissed around with the ammo I had pulled apart, but the best we were able to come up with was to use about half of the normal powder charge held in place with a thin wax plug. Unfortunately, when we tested the design in the Glass’s backyard, it only cycled the gun about half the time. The other times it would stovepipe the spent case. So there was a fifty-fifty chance that if Michelle had to pull the gun and shoot for real, the first round would of course be ineffective, and the second round may not even make it to the chamber. As it turned out, the one shot I fired worked correctly. Not too shabby for some spur of the moment Yankee engineering.”

  “So, I’ve got one final question before I shut up, at least for awhile,” Sam said.

  Michelle, Andy, and Thompson looked his way and waited.

  Sam shucked the upper third of the blankets off, wedged to his elbows against the couch and propped himself into a slightly more elevated position. Meeting each of their eyes with another nod of appreciation, he said, “Why?”

  “Why what?” Andy asked.

  “Why did you risk your life for someone you barely knew?”

  “We’re kinda dumb that way. I’ve always wanted to spend my retirement dodging bullets and charging uphill against impossible odds, and the young lady here, well, she was hoping she could get a date with some hunky soldier boy before the world ended or she got all old and fat.”

  Michelle reached into the small bookshelf behind her and flung a book at Andy. Not lightly. The resounding thunk was quickly drowned out by Thompson, Sam, and Andy’s hilarity.

  Chapter 36

  When things had settled down, Michelle turned back toward Andy and said, “OK smartass, time to earn your supper, which was the cream of broccoli soup you ate about an hour ago by the way. What are you thinking . . . come on, spill it.”

  Andy propped the recliner into an upright position, cracked his knuckles and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He started to say something then paused, looking around the room at each of them. Finally he said, “It just doesn’t make sense. I mean I don’t even know where to start. And I know that I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but there’s no way around it . . . we need more information. If I didn’t firmly believe that we had already pushed our luck well past the breaking point, I would have liked to grab a bunch of the dispatch folders and intel reports from the colonel’s office at the school. But even that . . . ahh . . .”

  “What?” Michelle asked.

  Andy held up a hand, silencing Michelle while he composed his thoughts. “All right, hear me out, and try not to interrupt too much because I’m still working this out as I go. This . . . situation . . . sickness, epidemic—whatever the hell it is—I think we knew about it. And by ‘we’ I mean the U.S. government. At least the possibility of the existence of this sickness. If you can believe the original reports we heard, it started off as some chemical or biological weapon released in Korea. From there, ‘x’ number of days later, we heard about outbreaks here in the U.S. While this is going on, we have no Internet, satellite TV or anything really, other than some supposed local radio stations. Now maybe it was different in states with much larger population areas like New York and California, but up here we had squat. And I’m betting it wasn’t any different anywhere else. Since then we’ve learned a couple things. The first thing that comes to mind is that the Internet and television, and even the radio stations did not come back on when the president said they would. That brings us to a fork in the road. On one path we have the question of why it did not come back on. On the other path we have the question of how they got shut off in the first place, at least in what appears to be a very coordinated manner. That Samantha girl—who we need to get in touch with asap—said that at the cell phone provider she worked at, a couple of agents from some dot gov. bureau came in and shut them down. Let me put it this way. Have you ever known our government, hell, any government, to move that fast and that efficiently without some type of standing plan in place?”

  When nobody answered Andy continued, “Me either. And having some . . . ‘experience’ in this area, let me tell you it doesn’t happen without a very carefully thought out and coordinated effort. What I’m trying to say is there is no way, absolutely none in my opinion that what we’re seeing here is a reaction by the Federal Government to a mysterious plague or infection . . . whatever you want to call it. What we are seeing . . . it’s not a reaction, but an action. And that means we either knew about this sickness and its potential, or even worse than that, it might even be ours. And while you’re chewing that one over, remember this—the fax that Sam scooped up before he left the barracks, well hell, they even had a name for it already. MKCP-variant Z. Whatever the case is, our government must have had plans in place for the event of the doggy poop hitting the fan. And I’m guessing those plans started with a coordinated effort to cut off communications. And that brings me to another problem. I’m fairly sure that the majority of communication and media systems were not shut off at the source, but rather at the choke point in the relay satellites. It’s the only reasonable explanation, because without uplinks, most communications are limited to line of sight. But that doesn’t account for the lack of radio coverage. There’s still plenty of FM stations that broadcast from a transmitter tower up on a hill somewhere to their listening audience, in some cases out to one hundred miles away or more. AM can go even further. I’m not even going to get into shortwave stuff. The point is, those stations should still be broadcasting. But they’re not. Everybody at the campground said that all they got was that ‘stay tuned for an important message’ crap. Eric told me that the only station he could get on the way up here was playing country music, the really old kind like banjos and moonshine jugs. When he told me that, it triggered something that I heard a while back. There’s an old coot somewhere south of Ghost Echo Lake that runs his own little broadcast station. It’s kind of sporadic with when it’s on, but I’ve picked it up a few times. I’ll bet that is what Eric tuned in to.”

  “I’m not following. I mean I understand what you said about maybe our government had something to do with this sickness, but you’re starting to lose me with some old guy playing banjo music on his own radio station,” Thompson said.

  “Bear with me, I’m getting there,” Andy said. “If you remember about ten years back, the FCC mandated that all broadcast signals be switched to digital by a certain date. Well, that date was two years ago. So with the miracles of modern technology and everything being computerized, I’ll bet that our lovely Uncle Sam has had the know-how and equipment in place to shut off all digital communications, at least the mainstream ones whenever they wanted. The old guy with the banjo and the jug, I’ll bet he’s still using analog broadcasting equipment, or maybe he’s just too small of a fish for them to worry about. In any event, it all points back to a specific plan.”

  “Maybe they’re jamming the signals somehow,” Michelle said.

  “I thought about that, and while it’s possible, I don’t think it’s likely. At least not in the traditional sense as I understand it. If they have the ability to do a blanket jamming over the entire country, then why do our marine radios work? And the little GMRS and FRS walkie talkies, as well as Michelle’s Fish and Wildlife radios? Don’t get me wrong, I’d bet my third nut that the boys at Langley have some type of gizmo that could jam selective frequencies on a large or even very large scale. I just think it’s more
likely that some type of ‘just in case safeguard’ has been in place and ready to go on all of the major communication systems for quite some time. Think about it . . . they obviously had the capability to turn it back on for the president’s ‘Don’t panic’ speech. And that, boys and girls, brings us to the most important question. Why?”

  “Why what?” Thompson and Sam echoed in stereo.

  “Why . . . would they want to eliminate, or limit public communication? If you think about it, we live in a country where everybody has access 24/7 to information from practically unlimited sources. We depend on it. We need it. In a lot of cases it makes us who we are. I’m not trying to rant about the evils of technology, but there are people who couldn’t even tell you their parent’s, or their child’s phone number. It’s not ‘xxx-xxx-xxxx,’ it’s ‘speed dial two on my smart phone.’ I read somewhere that the average teenager sends over 500 text messages per week. PER WEEK! It’s instant gratification, instant communication, instant access to what’s going on, where it’s happening at, and who’s involved. Except now.”

  Andy stretched, then rubbed the sides of his face with his calloused hands before draining the last of his tea. “Now, we’ve been rocketed back to the stone age information wise, and that same little question still remains. Why? The government had to know that a communication and information blackout would result in a mass panic. Anybody want to hazard a guess at the answer?”

  The faint jangle of wind chimes was the only reply until Sam cleared his throat and said, “I’ll take a shot. When I was a kid I lived on the reservation. There was one television. Not one in our house, but one on the whole reservation. It was a nineteen-inch black and white model that belonged to Miss Rose, the schoolteacher the Feds shipped in to teach us red kids how to survive in the white man’s world,” Sam teased. “One of the treats of my youth was that one Saturday a month we’d get to go to her house and eat popcorn and watch movies. My favorite was Godzilla. Nothing quite like a big dark-skinned creature stepping on a bunch of pasty white dudes,” Sam kidded, but everybody laughed out loud, especially Thompson. “Anyhow, another show that I got to see from time to time were the older reruns of some Twilight Zone rip-off. There was this one episode where they were designing a supercomputer that would defend the earth from alien attack. In order to make it work they had to have an actual human brain wired to it. There was a roomful of candidates. Politicians, generals, doctors, lawyers, a whole mix of the elite, all of them trying to sell themselves as the best choice. There were a few other people too . . . blue collar types. In the end, they chose the brain from a young mother. She had four children. Of course, a short time after the surgery to implant her brain into the computer, aliens attacked. Now remember, this was the classic television episodes I’m talking about. They were in black and white even if you had a color TV. Anyhow, you’d see a clip of laser beams blasting buildings into smithereens, and it would cut to this brain in a jar. There’d be a lot of clunky mechanical sounds and then two options would pop up from the computer. The brain would then have to choose which one, like fire missiles at spaceship ‘A’ or launch jet fighters towards spaceship ‘B.’ With each choice you’d see a flashback memory of the mother with her children. As it went on and on, it became clear that we couldn’t win the war. Then the aliens communicated by telepathy straight to the brain. They showed a picture of a planet-sized spaceship in orbit above the earth. There was a huge weapon getting ready to fire that would totally annihilate the world and everybody on it. The countdown to firing was reading two hours. Well, the computer whirled and buzzed and beeped for quite a while before spitting out the two options the brain had to choose from. The options were simply ‘tell the people they will all die in one hour’ or ‘don’t tell the people anything.’ So the end scene was of this brain thinking back to when she was human. She was tucking her children in at night and one of the kids asked her to leave the light on so the monsters under the bed didn’t come out. Well, the mom was standing in the doorway with her hand on the light switch. She smiled and told her kids that there wasn’t any such thing as monsters, but the whole time she’s telling them that, you can see these glowing eyes underneath the bed, and you know, you just know that she sees them as well. Then she turns out the light.”