Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (57 page)

I shook my head. “No, neither of us are carrying a
.38.”

Before I could continue, he blurted out, “What about
.270 . . . or 20 gauge?”

I shook my head to both.

A frown appeared on his face, deepening into a scowl
of resigned disappointment.

“We’ve got some .22 and 5.56 ammo. We might be willing
to part with a very small percentage of it if you have something that will
shoot it.

He shook his head no, and then cast a sideways glance
toward the boat. “What about food . . . can you give us some food?”

Michelle and I looked at each other, both of us
obviously calculating all we’d already given away to Tater and Mia. I held her
eyes, silently willing for her to make the call. After a moment, she turned
toward the boy with the bomber jacket. “Have all of your friends come out here,
and we’ll make a trade for some food.”

The two boys stared at each other briefly, and then
the one in the orange hat low-whistled a passable imitation of a Ring-necked
pheasant. Another pair of boys, both of them wearing tattered baseball caps, crept
out from behind the station wagon. They were younger than the two in front of us,
although not by much, and both were armed—a bloody bat and machete dangled
loosely in their hands.

Michelle repeated our names, and then turned toward
the orange hat leader. “We can give you four of our freeze dried food pouches.
Do you have a way of boiling water?”

All four of them nodded briskly.

“In exchange for the food, I’d like a quick—really
quick—rundown of what you’re doing here.”

The boys traded fleeting looks with each other before
the one with the orange hat spoke. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to find some stuff
that we can use. Food and whatnot, I mean.”

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

The boy with a machete chimed in. “At that farm over
there. There’s a basement in the backyard with a metal lid that we can lock
from the inside. That’s where my sister and the others are.”

Bomber Jacket gave an exasperated whisper. “I told
you, it’s not a basement, it’s a root cellar.”

“What others?” Michelle and I echoed.

The boy with the orange hat pointed towards the one
with a machete. “His sister is there, and two other kids that made it out of
the traffic last week.”

“There’s seven of you in the root cellar?” Michelle
asked.

The haunted look in the four boys’ eyes accompanied
the pause before their leader answered. “We have seven left.”

I let that settle in. Like so many other things that
were erupting through the chaos of my mind lately, it briefly tugged at my
heartstrings before becoming lost in the limbo of unreality.

We walked with the boys down to the creek bank, careful
to not expose ourselves any longer than necessary to the swarm in the traffic
jam, and Michelle fished out seven Mountain House food pouches. I reached into one
of our dry bags and pulled out a box that contained 100 rounds of .22
ammunition. “Have any of you shot a .22?”

Three of them nodded.

“If you happen to find one, this ammunition should
work for it.” I looked south, once again enough below the grade that the large
group of ghouls was out of my vision angle. “Don’t go anywhere near them, and
don’t go anywhere at night. There’s a chance,” I continued, “that Officer Owens
and I will be back through this way sometime in the next day or two. If so,
we’ll stop at the farm and knock on the root cellar door to check on you, okay”

“OK . . . thank you, sir.”

The four of them stood on the bank and watched as
Michelle and I stepped into the bass boat. One of the boys with a baseball cap
whispered after us. “Mr. Coleman . . . why is this happening?”

I looked from eye to eye along the line of boys,
silently shaking my head. “I don’t know, guys . . . I just don’t know.”

Silent waves from their dirty hands followed us as we
drifted out. I let the current catch hold, and we laid down and used the
paddles to push off the underside of the bridge as we drifted through with barely
a foot to spare. On the other side, the creek narrowed and deepened, and we let
the water pull us silently downstream. Neither of us spoke until the bridge was
lost in the distance behind us.

“How much food do we have left?” I asked.

“Are you mad at me?” Michelle didn’t turn around as
she answered.

“Not at all, I just want to keep it squared away in my
head.”

“We have three packs of hot chocolate, about a dozen
tea bags, one freeze dried portion of spicy enchiladas, and a foil packet with
about two-thirds of a strawberry Pop-Tart left.” I was still looking at her
back as she replied.

“Frosted?”

“What?” Michelle half turned.

“Is the Pop-Tart frosted?”

“Of course.”

I reached behind and pulled the starter. The engine
chugged to life and idled steadily. “I’ll take the Pop-Tart,” I said . . . “you
can have the enchiladas.”

This time she turned to face me. The slight smile
creasing her lips was a welcome sight, but it wasn’t reflected anywhere else on
her countenance.

I tried again. “How about if we play rock paper
scissors, only the loser has to eat the enchiladas?”

This time her smile was genuine. “Deal,” Michelle
said.

I dropped the motor into gear and increased our pace
downstream. The pangs of hunger that already ricocheted from my gut were
swallowed down. A short time later they were forgotten as we passed the first
body that bobbed in the shallow riffles at the edge of the creek. It was a
child—an infant—still strapped in its car seat. But the time we reached Silver
Lake, we had lost count of the dead.

I took the blade of my paddle and nudged the drifting
form that rippled at the lake’s surface. It was an adult female dressed in a
water darkened, pastel flannel shirt and long skirt. Her forearms and calves
were visible below the breeze-chopped swells of Silver Lake, and the exposed
skin still had a putty cast to it. Most of the bodies that we passed were
concentrated where the mouth of the creek entered the southwest edge of the
lake. Some were visibly wounded, others were unscathed as far as we could tell.
Looking northward, the small lake stretched out for over a mile, but our path
was going to take us eastward toward the narrow fingers that widened into bays
as they entered Pelican Lake.

“They had to have washed down from the bridge,”
Michelle said, her face crinkled in disgust at the sight of so many corpses.

“Maybe. I saw a couple that looked like they’d been
hit by gunfire, but most of those,” I poked the paddle toward the dozens that
lined the reeds near the mouth of the creek we’d come out of, “look like they
drowned.”

I idled the boat further away from shore before
dropping it in neutral. Michelle swiveled on her seat to face me as I reached
into my backpack and fished around, coming up a moment later with a pair of
granola bars that were perhaps a bit flatter than when they left the factory.
Another dive into the pack scored my one and only Dr. Pepper. A final reach
brought up a bottle of root beer—Michelle's favorite brand coincidentally. OK,
maybe not so coincidentally. I watched as her eyebrows rose at the sight of my
smuggled goodies, and then I tossed the granola bar and root beer towards her.

Turning to the east I said, “From here we should be
able to cruise. The engine on this boat is way undersized . . . twenty-five
horsepower isn’t going to make it plane, even with the light load we’ve got, so
we’re looking at a top speed of maybe twenty miles per hour, but it will suck
fuel if we keep it pegged, and we’re not sure if we’re going to have to take it
all the way to your dad’s cabin and back. We won’t know that until we get to
the ranger station and see if we can ‘acquire’ a patrol boat. Anyhow, I’m going
to try and keep it around fifteen to save gas. From this point, we’ve got about
a mile and a half until we reach a narrow bay. From there we’re going to shift
to the southeast through the bay for about two miles until we reach the main body
of Pelican Lake. From that point, we’re still going to head basically southeast
across the lake for about, oh, almost five or so miles I guess. There’s a large
island—actually, it used to be a peninsula until the lake level rose—that sits
right in our path. North Dakota Highway 19 crosses that island. If we work our
way around the upper side of the island, we’ll cross underneath the highway and
into Oswald’s Bay. From there we’ll continue curling to the south, and then a
little bit west until we come to the point on that island where the Pelican
Lake ranger station is.”

I took a bite of my granola bar, chewed it a few times
to get some saliva flowing, and then washed it down with a generous swig of my
soda before I continued. “From here, not counting any detours—which I hope we
don’t have to make—it should be a total distance of about a dozen or so miles
to the ranger station.”

Michelle finished her snack and nodded, swishing a
mouthful of the caramel colored, foamy liquid between her cheeks before she
answered. “Twelve miles . . . fifteen miles an hour give or take . . . we’ll be
there in about an hour.” She glanced upward as she finished. “We should still
have a little bit of light left.”

“I hope so.” I dropped the engine into gear and
twisted the throttle. Immediately, the boat leapt forward and accelerated,
smoothing out into a comfortable cruising speed as we headed east. I finished
off my Dr. Pepper, belched once, and then zipped up my jacket and ducked my
chin against the cold wind.

Pop . . . . . pop-pop-pop-pop
. . . The gunfire in the distance sounded
disturbingly impotent, like a pack of dew-dampened firecrackers you’d give to a
younger cousin on July 5
^th
. As the latest series of tiny explosions
echoed across the bay, Michelle turned to me. “That’s got to be rimfire . . .
you think they’re out of any heavy artillery?”

“Actually, I’m wondering who ‘they’ are. Unless
somebody had the same idea that we do, there shouldn’t be anybody there.”

We were both studying the ranger station through our
binoculars. It was still about a half mile away, and the rapidly fading light hinted
that our arrival would coincide with darkness.

“I don’t see any boats . . . do you?” Michelle asked.

“No, but you wouldn’t from here. The dock from the
ranger station juts out behind that bank of cattails. We won’t be able to tell
if any of the patrol boats are there until we get right up on it.”

“But if they’re there, you have the keys for them,
right?”

“Um . . . no. I said I had keys for the ranger
station. The keys for the patrol boats should be inside hanging on a wall . . .
also the keys for the fuel depot . . .” I trailed off as I tried to picture the
exact set up in my mind.

Another pair of tiny
pops
traveled faintly across
the water as I frowned in concentration.

“What?” Michelle jabbed quickly, obviously as tired of
complications as I was.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, and
it might end up being a non-issue, but it takes two people to refuel the boats,
although I suppose you could do it with one if you had to.”

Her silent stare greeted my eyes as I continued. “The
fuel depot used to be located right next to the dock. Last summer, one of the
tanks developed a leak and dropped about 200 gallons of gas. Most of it was
caught by the containment wall, but enough got into the lake that the EPA got
involved. Anyhow, they made us put in a new fuel depot. It’s now about sixty
feet away from the dock, and one person holds the nozzle while the other person
turns the crank.”

“Well, let’s just hope that the boats are there and
already fully fueled.” Michelle sighed as a solitary gunshot made it to our
ears. I nodded and opened the throttle, turning the boat in a tight half circle
before bee lining toward shore.

The last vestiges of twilight faded as we nosed around
the cattails, and I kept the motor chugging along at a crawl as Michelle
searched the area with her night scope. When we crested the point where the
thick clumps of russet colored stalks finally gave way to the deeper lake
bottom, the squat silhouette of the Pelican Bay Ranger Station came into view.

Rebuilt just a few years ago at a minimal cost to
taxpayers, the station was a simple block construct about thirty feet on a
side. The sloping metal roof dropped from a height of twenty feet at the back
to only a dozen or so above the front, and only, door. Two pairs of windows
broke the monotony of the blocks, and were interspaced on the front side,
halfway between the door and the corners of the building. A single mast antenna
rose above the metal roof, eclipsing it by at least eight feet. Surrounding the
building in a haphazard oval pattern was a thick spray of coarse gravel that
served as the station’s parking area, and branching off from the gravel was
another chert roadway that followed a slow arc before ending at the storage
facility—a metal sided pole building with a pair of large garage doors in the
front. It was used to store the patrol boats during ice over, and housed the
snow machines and ATV’s that were brought in for seasonal use. Surrounding the complex
were a half dozen metal light poles topped with high intensity floodlights—another
similar light was mounted at the roof peak of the maintenance building. Like
everything else, they were dark and silent.

The murky shadows of the cattails and my memory were enough
for me to navigate into the cove, and I backed off the throttle entirely,
letting the boat drift for a moment.

Michelle’s excited voice came back in a hissed
whisper. “Both of the patrol boats are here, although one of them is beached
pretty high up on the bank, like somebody ran it straight up the launch.”

I reached down and fumbled for my own night vision
equipped AR-15 as Michelle continued to dictate. “There’s a pickup truck parked
on the left side of the building, and a pair of cars . . . maybe more than that
. . . that are wedged behind it. It doesn’t look like a wreck, though.”

As I powered up my night scope and tried to steady
myself in the slightly rocking bass boat, Michelle kept up her descriptive play
by play. “I don’t see any movement, but if I’m looking at this correct, there’s
a form—a body—crumpled below the far right window. Check that—I’ve got movement
coming around the left side of the building.”

I shouldered my rifle and looked through the
generation three night scope. The panorama in front of me glowed green with
light amplification, and I could clearly see a solitary figure half stumbling
against the block building, but at a distance of almost fifty yards, it was
impossible for me to tell with certainty whether it was a ghoul or not.

Both of us watched as the figure continued onward,
passing in front of two windows and the door before hesitating momentarily.
Whatever caused its delay was lost on us, and a moment later it stumbled
forward, passing the third window before tripping on the body in front of the
fourth, and last window. It went down hard, and we watched as it thrashed about
on the gravel before latching on to the corpse. A moment later there was no
mistaking what it was as it began to feed.

“Eric there’s a . . .”

“I see it,” I whispered as a faint light blossomed
inside the ranger station. The light source, artificially brightened by our
night scopes, momentarily flashed the windows vivid white. It was gone a second
later.

“What now?” Michelle asked.

“Why is nothing easy?” I shook my head in frustration
as the latest stumbling block lined up in front of us. My question, rhetorical
as it was, still sent me fuming, and I lowered the rifle across my lap and took
some deep breaths.

The waves lapping at the sides of our aluminum boat
stirred me out of my self-imposed pity party a moment later, and I began to
think of our options. Michelle had known me long enough to recognize my mood,
and she waited silently as I brooded.

“I’m an idiot,” I whispered.

“Sometimes,” Michelle answered, “but why now?” Her
reply was soft and neutral, but even in the darkness I could sense her
restrained grin.

“We need to back out of here and get some distance . .
. somewhere that we can figure this out quickly.”

“OK.”

I twisted the throttle gently and spun us out of the
cove at slightly above a snail’s pace. When we passed the cattails, I opened it
up just a bit and the engine thrummed, pushing the craft on an angled
trajectory through the low slapping chop. After a solid two minutes, I spooled
the throttle to max, and the work prop dug in and pushed us out towards the
open water. I let the boat keep that pace for only a minute before idling it
down and taking it out of gear. The night scope confirmed that we were about
300 yards offshore, and I scanned a full circle around our momentarily
stationary position. I saw no other boats on the water.

“I’m sorry Michelle, I should’ve anticipated this.”

“What . . . that the ranger station might not be a
walk in the park?”

“Huh? . . . no, not that. I mean about our time frame.
But we can fix it, I hope.”

“What the heck are you talking about?”

I held up the AR and nodded towards it. “This. Back on
Silver Lake, it should have occurred to me that we might need to use the
silenced .22 after dark. I should have switched out the reflex sight for the
night scope.”

“How . . . or what do we need to do to make this
happen?” Michelle’s tone was all business now that the problem had been
identified.

“We’ll need to land somewhere and set up a quick
target. Then we’ll have to fire a few rounds and adjust the zero. The mounts of
the night scope and the reflex sight are different heights, so I’m sure they
won’t have the same point of impact until we sight it in.”

She lifted her AR and scanned the shore. “You know
this area, I don’t . . . but what about that little promontory over there?”

I lifted my night scope to the area she indicated. It
was about a quarter mile from the ranger station, and from what I could
remember, held little besides the rusty remains of a long forgotten farm
tractor. “I guess that’s as good as any—probably better than most, now that I
think about it.”

“Do what you have to do right now to get ready,” Michelle
said, “that way we can just land, fire, and then get back on track.”

I nodded in the darkness—the action bringing forth a
thought that I shared. “You know, not counting all of the uncertainty that we
seem to be mired in, but now at least something seems to be working in our
favor.”

“Explain,” Michelle answered as she fumbled around
with her seat cushion life preserver.

“That ghoul—the one back at the ranger station—it
tripped over the body by the window, so that means that no matter what else
changes about them when they become infected, they’re still as night blind as a
normal person.”

“Yeah well, let’s hurry up and do this, and then we
can show them just how unlevel the playing field is when you have generation
three night vision equipment.”

The landing operation went as smooth as we could have
hoped for. A scan from just offshore revealed no intruders except the rusty
tractor, and as soon as we disembarked, Michelle trotted over to the old
International Harvester and wedged her life preserver in a gap above where the
tractor’s weight plates used to hang. She jogged back and took up a position to
the left of where I was lying prone.

“You’re at twenty-seven yards from the muzzle to your
target.” Her statement was blunt, and I knew from the loss of several wagered
sodas through the years that her assessment of the distance would be spot on.
Never bet the distance with someone who shot competitive archery.

“That’s just about perfect,” I mumbled as the bright,
sea green landscape materialized through the night scope. The clarity was
amazing, and I could easily make out the pattern of nickel-sized dots that
Michelle had drawn on her seat cushion. It took nine quiet shots to zero the weapon,
and I was careful to count the number of adjustment clicks that I’d had to make
for the scope’s eventual return to my AR. It wouldn’t guarantee a duplication
of the point of impact, but it should be close.

We collected the target and hopped on the bass boat.
True to Walter’s promise, the motor fired up on the first pull, and once we got
oriented, I opened the throttle halfway and headed back to the ranger station.