Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (47 page)

“I found this when we were cleaning the cabin. It’s
Garrett’s. I thought maybe . . . since we can’t get into her computer . . .
well, maybe there was some information on here that we could use. When you were
in the shower, I started playing it back.” Michelle's grip eased a bit, but her
green eyes darkened with anger. “They filmed it.” She spit out each word like
they were venomous pumpkin seeds. “Those evil bastards filmed what they did to
Melissa and Samantha.”

I held out my hand immediately. “Give it to me.”
Almost robotically, she placed it in my open palm. Before I changed my mind, I
lobbed it directly into the coals. We held hands as the silver surface of the
video camera began to smoke, then brown. In less than a minute, the plastic
housing burst into a sputtering and spitting black smoke fire. For five minutes
we watched it melt and distort as the flames ate away at the sin within.
Finally, there was nothing left of it. On impulse, I let go of her hand and
spun away, drawing my CZ and dropping to a crouch. Round after round hammered
into the pile of corpses until my slide locked back. As I switched out
magazines and holstered the pistol, Michelle edged up next to me. “Thank you,”
she whispered. I was about to reply, but at that moment Max trotted over to the
bullet-ridden stack of cadavers and lifted his leg, adding his own personal
sendoff. Michelle's stone frown reversed course, and she said, “Amen to that,
Max . . . amen to that.”

We walked back to the cabin and whipped up a quick
lunch. I went with peanut butter and jelly; she chose a tuna and mayonnaise
sandwich decorated with an upper layer of pickled banana pepper rings. Both of
our sandwiches used the squashed rye bread. A large can of chicken noodle soup
was split between us. When we were finished, I started cooking a hefty pot of
rice on the stove for later.

“We need to start planning,” I said.

“I know. Can we go back to the lake for a little bit
first?”

“Sure.”

The walk down to the lake was punctuated with several
throws of a thick willow branch for Max, and by the fourth retrieve, his massive
jaws had shattered the two inch wide limb into splinters.

“You know, we’re not gonna be able to take Max with
us,” I said.

“Why not?”

“You’ll see when I explain what I’m thinking.” I led
her around the eastern edge of Uncle Andy’s lake until we reached the narrow
waist section. “My uncle told me that years and years ago, he thinks that this
was actually two separate large ponds, and that one of the previous owners dug
out part of the gap between them.” She said nothing in reply, and I kept walking
all the way to the far point of the water. Another bench was set up at the
water’s edge—this one made from broad slabs of rock cemented together and
topped with a massive bench seat carved from a single piece of granite almost
seven feet long. I still remembered the day, or rather days, that it took us to
hoist, winch, wedge, and swear it into position. I was twelve years old at the
time, and although most of the swearing came from my uncle and Walter, a few
had slipped out from my own young lips when I had smashed my thumb in between
one of the pulleys on a winch cable. I still have the scar. More important
though was the knowledge that I didn’t cry.

I slid up onto the cold rock surface of the bench and
sat down. For years, my feet couldn’t touch the ground when I sat here. I
didn’t have that problem now, and neither did Michelle’s long legs when she
scooted beside me. The bench had no backrest, and you could sit either facing
north towards the wooded hillside, or south across the low valley that held the
lake and cabin. We chose south.

“I’ve caught a lot of fish from that spot,” I mumbled
in the general direction of the lake.

Michelle’s hand slid around my arm, but she said
nothing.

“But you know, it’s kinda funny, or maybe ironic would
be a better word . . .”

Her eyes tilted toward mine. “What do you mean?”

“I’m just thinking how our minds tend to focus on
certain things.” Her eyebrows arched slightly with impatience. “What I mean,” I
continued, “is that this bench should be fixed in my mind as a focal point of
good times. Helping my uncle, helping ‘the men,’ so to speak . . . sweating,
swearing, and bleeding . . . that sense of accomplishment and pride that
something you helped to build will be here long after you’re gone. And then,
add to that all the fish that I caught from here, including the biggest pike
I’ve ever landed.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that this spot should be fixed in
my mind as a place of peaceful memories and good times, but for years and
years, it wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the tendency of my mind to focus on the
bad things.”

She pulled away slightly, but still gripped my hand.
“Why . . . what happened?”

“The summer after we built this, my uncle and I were
in the middle of a weeklong back country camping trip halfway into Canada.” I
waved a thumb toward the wood line behind my shoulder. “One night his pager
went off, and we had to come back. It took us all night . . . I mean
all
night . . . to make it back to the cabin. I was so tired that I slept—literally
slept—in the bouncing bed of his pickup truck all the way to the marina . . .
remember the dirt road was a lot rougher in those days. Anyhow, he dropped me
off at Walter’s. I spent the next three days there. When he got back, I only
had a few days left of my summer vacation. I remember coming to this spot, both
of us with a fishing pole in our hands, on the very last day of my trip. I
could tell that he’d been distracted ever since his return, but you and I both
know that getting him to talk when he doesn’t want to is an exercise in
futility. Anyhow, it was late afternoon and we threw out our lines. Nothing was
biting, the wind was absolutely still . . . our bobbers just sat there. I
remember the sky was perfectly clear, not a cloud in sight, and my uncle nudged
me on the arm. He apologized for missing some of my vacation. Then he got all
quiet . . . not his normal quiet either . . . it was like . . . I don’t
know—different somehow. I remember him setting down his fishing rod and putting
his hand on my shoulder.

“Eric,” he said, “there’s a lot of things in this
world that are dangerous, but one of the worst of those is ignorance. As you
grow, make sure to pay attention to the world around you. I’m not just talking
about the woods and the mountains. I mean the entire world. Our country is the
single greatest example of what a few determined people who crave freedom—and
are willing to pay in blood for it—can do when they put their minds together.
We’re not perfect by any means, and we’ve made a lot of enemies through the
years, and those enemies are relentless and hungry.”

Even at the young age of thirteen, I could tell that
he was picking his words carefully.

“In school, have you learned anything about the
different wars our country has been involved in through the years?”

I nodded.

“You need to know that whether they make the newspaper
or not, a lot of wars are happening every day. Soldiers are dying on both
sides. It’s been that way all over the world for all of history. The only thing
that changes is our technological advances that allow us to kill—or be
killed—in greater numbers, and with greater speed and efficiency.” His
calloused hand pointed southwest toward where the dirt road entered the
clearing above the cabin. “About seventy-five miles that way is Minot Air Force
Base. Among other things, it’s the home to the 91
^st
Missile Wing. Do
you know what a nuclear weapon is?”

“I guess . . . kinda.”

He gruffed in reply, and said, “Nuclear weapons are
the largest and most devastating of the physical hardware in the United States
military arsenal. They can destroy cities and kill millions of people in a
split second. Over the years we’ve been phasing out our land based ICBM’s—that
stands for ‘intercontinental ballistic missile,’ which is a fancy way of saying
that it’s a big rocket with a nuclear bomb on the tip that can be launched at a
target almost anywhere on the globe. Anyhow, like I said, for strategic reasons
our military has been moving away from land based platforms to more mobile ones
like submarines. Can you guess why?”

“Because submarines are smaller?”

“Yes and no. Yes because they’re smaller, and
therefore harder for the enemy to hit, but the main reason is that they’re
mobile. They move. And you can’t target something if you don’t know where it
is. Does that make sense?”

I nodded again.

“However,” his hand pointed southwest, “Minot can’t
move. It’s still operational, and still home to several hundred nuclear
missiles. No matter what you’ve heard, or learned, about the fall of the Soviet
Union, they are still the number one bad guy when it comes to our nuclear
enemies. Which direction is Russia from here?” he asked.

I thought for a moment, trying to picture a map in my
head before pointing east.

“Yep, they’re east. But—if you think three
dimensionally—it’s actually a lot closer to Russia if you go north over the
polar ice cap to get there. That’s why most of our land based missiles were
located in the northern states like here and Montana.”

Michelle interrupted my story and asked, “So, your
uncle worked with nuclear weapons in the Air Force? Is that the classified
stuff that he never talks about or admits to?”

I hesitated for a second before shaking my head. “No,
that’s not really what he did.”

“Wait . . . what?” Her face puckered into a confused
frown, “So you’re saying that he didn’t work with classified missile stuff?”

“Not exactly . . . not really.”

“Well what
did
he do?”

I barked a short laugh and shook my head.

“What’s so funny?” She asked.

“I can’t answer your question without breaking a
promise I made to my uncle . . . unless . . .” my words trailed off
mischievously.

Her full attention was now directed at me, and she
bobbled her head to try and keep my eyes. “Unless what?”

I laughed again, and Michelle’s face started to
reflect my smile as she probed further, “Tell me.”

“Well, I suppose now that the cat’s out of the bag and
you know about the ‘flying Owens’ photograph, I can probably tell you this. My
uncle made me promise that I’d never tell anyone what he did in the military .
. .” I stopped again and teasingly waited.

“UNLESS?” Michelle’s laughter amplified her voice, and
I caught both it, and the resulting echo that reverberated across the lake.

“Unless they were married to me,” I finished softly,
waiting for her reaction to my answer.

Her laughter stopped and her eyes widened momentarily.
“Are you serious?”

I nodded as I held up a finger. “But wait, there’s
more. According to my uncle, before I’m even allowed to
ask
anybody to
marry me, he has to tell them a certain story . . . a story that may change
their mind about marrying me.”

“What story?”

“Are you saying that you want my uncle to tell you the
story so that I can ask you to marry me?”

Her grin widened as she turned it around, “Are you
saying that you would ask me to marry you if I heard this story?”

“In a heartbeat, if you still wanted to after hearing
it.”

“So let me get this right,” Michelle stood and walked
towards the lake a few paces before pirouetting to face me. “In order for you
to tell me what your uncle did in the military, I have to be married to you.”

“Yep.”

“But, before you’ll ask me to marry you, I have to
pass some mysterious test that involves me hearing something about you that
might, in fact, change my mind about marrying you.”