Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (70 page)

The impact of the
heavy vehicle on the barn timbers knocked me off of my feet, and almost off of
the loft. It was the flatbed from outside, and someone had set it on fire and
driven it, or steered it toward the ghoul’s retreat . . . and me. It smashed
through the right corner of the wooden structure, crushing and squishing
several infected as it careened to a stop against the center pillar—a fifteen
inch square post probably made from oak at least a century ago. It missed the
raven-eyed beauty. The flames leaping from the truck revealed even more ghouls
scrambling to climb the ladder and stalls, and I blew the faces off of at least
eight of them before the first one crested the rim of the hay loft. My last
shot in that magazine caught it on top of its head, and the brains and blood
exploding backwards peppered the hands of the next three that were clawing up
in its wake. I holstered my weapon and bolted for the chicken wire, crashing
through and snagging my hand into the mesh as I shot straight out into the
blackness of the night air. In the blink of an eye the fencing jerked me to a
stop when it reached the limit of its rusty fasteners, and my outward momentum
rapidly shifted to downward—swinging me back toward the barn and slamming my
shoulder and face into the rough wooden planks of siding. My chicken wire rope
held on for one final millisecond before dropping my ass—along with the rest of
me—into a pile of old lumber, tires, and shingles. I felt the stitches in my
ankle tear, and my shin was in agony over its impact with something hard in the
landing pile, but I forced myself to get up and run.

My flashlight
was miraculously still on and in my hand, and I managed to draw my pistol and
flip out the empty magazine as I sprinted for the vet office. I could hear the
snarls of my pursuers as I pounded across the parking lot, and I grabbed the
last loaded magazine from my belt and slammed it home, dropping the slide as I
charged for the door. I was almost there when the wildly bobbing beam of my
flashlight caught the movement of a pair of ghouls coming around the corner of
the veterinarian’s office on an intercept course. I flung several chaotic shots
their way as I huffed and puffed toward the back corner of the building, and
one of them stumbled and rolled. The other one, a gray-skinned man in his
twenties dressed in the uniform of a flight crew member, reached towards me
with outstretched fingers and managed to snag a pocket on my backpack. The
weight of the tackle twisted me in a full circle and hammered me into the
ground, and I remember kicking my heels into his face as he clawed towards me
with one arm—his other still entangled in the backpack. I pulled away as hard
as I could, but his grip wouldn’t break, so I yanked my shoulder sideways with
as much force as I could muster and managed to roll out of my backpack. That
maneuver also deposited my rifle on the ground next to it. I came to my knees in
a crouch and shot at the backpack thief several times before adjusting my aim toward
a line of five infected that had followed me from the barn. Two of them
crumpled to the ground, and I surged to my feet and leapt for the door as the
other three howled in anger and thudded forward with maniacal faces and
clutching hands. I threw the door open and vaulted inside, pulling it shut
behind me with less than a half step to spare. As the multiple impacts crashed
against the door, the reflected light from my Quark almost made me pee myself.
Standing next to the coffee maker was a tall, skinny woman dressed in light
blue scrubs. She had a stethoscope hanging from her neck, and the partially
eaten remains of one of her coworkers dangling from her hand. I couldn’t help
it—here I was . . . about to die in some back-assed vet’s office with a pile of
infected beating at the door, and the only thought that came to my mind was a
commercial jingle that reminded you to “share a little dark Peruvian blend with
your coworkers after a hearty meal.” Especially if the hearty meal
was
your coworker, I guess. Her red eyes squinted at my light, and I drilled her
through the bridge of her nose.

The pounding
fists beat against the door, and I maneuvered the flashlight into my mouth so I
could dedicate the full strength of one hand to holding the knob. My other hand
gripped the 9mm pistol, and I swiveled my head toward the door that led to the hallway
and waited. Another high powered rifle shot boomed into the night, but it
didn’t seem to affect the three ghouls scratching and clubbing against the
door. Ten seconds of my life flashed past in stop frame slow motion, and I was
blitzed with images of my uncle, and little red-haired, blue-eyed Faith. I saw
the faces of friends that I hadn’t seen since grade school. I saw Max as a
puppy—his eyes still closed and his belly full of milk as he clumsily rolled
over his brothers and sisters. I saw my mother in her casket. I saw the glossy
black eyes of the dark angel looking up at me over the flames of the burning
barn. And I saw Michelle. Her brilliant emerald eyes locked with mine as she
gave her body . . . her
self
. . . to me in the tent just a few nights
ago. And then, as the visions faded, I began to get pissed. I had fought so
hard at every turn, always thinking, always planning, always running and
gunning. I had come so far and risked so much. I had saved my loved ones, and
in turn they had saved me. And the aggravation inside of me festered into cold,
silent anger. Through the haze of my growing fury, I became keenly aware on
some level that the ghouls were so focused on reaching me that they couldn’t
comprehend the door pulled towards them. That thought cascaded into action, and
I dropped the flashlight into my hand and reared back, kicking the door open
and slamming it with meaty
whomp
into whatever was behind it.

My flashlight lit
up the doorway and revealed the other two monsters standing there—bloody hands
shielding their eyes from the intense light—and I half stepped to the threshold
and dropped the hammer on both of them. One of them fell like a sack of rotten
potatoes with a bullet hole above her right eyebrow, and the other one took a
pair of rounds in his throat. A huge cone of bright red blood sprayed backward
with the second bullet’s impact and he dropped to his knees, and then his face
hit the ground hard enough to leave a dent—a sensation that was delivered back
to me with a vengeance as the metal door exploded forward and smacked into me
with the force of a runaway freight train. I was bounced into the room with the
impact, backpedaling momentarily before tripping over a lunch room chair and
crashing against the refrigerator. I remember seeing a tunnel vision of stars
as I fought to remain conscious, and I struggled to my feet, firing the CZ in
the general direction of the outside door as I stumbled toward the hallway and
into the grooming room. My entry was punctuated with the deafening metallic
clash of my 6 foot 4 inch frame colliding with some type of grooming table
loaded with shears and combs. Both the table and I fell together, tumbling to
the ground in a symphony of angry curses and loud bangs. I was on my side,
panting and gasping for air as I struggled to line up my flashlight and pistol
with the door that had somehow closed itself, and that’s the last thing I clearly
remember until just a little bit ago.

I guess I was
out—either unconscious or asleep, maybe both—for about eight hours. OK, that’s
not really correct. I may have passed out initially, but I remember waking
while my flashlight was still shining. I remember dragging myself behind
another grooming table. I remember stuffing the still lit flashlight into my
jacket pocket for a moment. I remember seeing the three faintly glowing dots of
the tritium night sights on my pistol. I remember reaching for the mouthpiece
that led to my water bladder, only to discover that it was missing along with
my backpack. I remember . . . remembering . . . what happened to the backpack.
I remember finding a plastic garbage bag filled with pet hair, and squishing it
into a roll. I remember hurting just about everywhere. I remember whispering a
prayer to God that He would keep Michelle and Faith safe after I was gone. I
remember laying my head on the hair filled roll and feeling my body shut down
with exhaustion. I remember lifeless black eyes dripping with evil as the
flames danced higher.

And that,
ladies and gentlemen, is how I got here. When I woke just a short time ago,
I’ll admit to panicking—just a bit. It was pitch black and silent, and I
thought that I was . . ., well, you know. When I realized that I was still a
card carrying member of the living, I pulled myself into a sitting position as
quietly as I could and began to breathe. Michelle told me that Uncle Andy
taught her and Thompson some basic techniques on their way to Fort Hammer. I’ve
been doing them for twenty years. Not religiously or even regularly, but enough.
I focused my breathing and began a series of stretches, gradually working my
way to the point where I could visualize the storm candle.

“Focus on
the candle, Eric. The flame should be alive, but unwavering. Living, but under
control.”

I stared at
the golden yellow fire that burned on top of the long taper of the holly green
Christmas candle. It was July, nowhere near the Christmas holiday, and I was
sitting on the floor of Uncle Andy’s cabin. I was fourteen years old, I think,
and I had just been stung by about thirty wasps when I had accidentally
destroyed their nest while moving a pile of firewood.

“Pretend
you’re on the roof of a tall tower at the ocean, and the waves are dashing
against the rocks 500 feet below you. The wind and rain are howling all around
and whipping your hair against your face. But there is a single candle standing
in the darkness in front of you. Its flame is snapping back and forth,
threatening to go out at any second from the power of the storm.”

I could see
the vivid imagery that my uncle was painting in my mind, even as the perfectly
still flame of the green candle stood unwavering on the floor.

“Now
concentrate on the flame, Eric. Bend it to your will. The storm does not
control it, you do, and the taller and straighter you make the candle flame,
the weaker the storm becomes.”

As I
focused on his words and the picture in my head, the throbbing, burning
sensations on my arms and neck began to ebb.

The storm
candle now in focus, I held the flame perfectly still as I began a mental
checklist of my situation. No backpack, which means no water, or resupply of
ammunition among other things. I had fallen asleep with my flashlight still
turned on inside my coat pocket. The batteries were absolutely shot. As quietly
as I could, I dropped the magazine from the pistol. The flame of the candle
definitely sputtered when I felt only one cartridge. That, plus one more in the
chamber brought my grand total of available ammunition to two. I have five
loaded magazines for the .22 in the pouches of my tac vest, but that’s not
going to help since the only weapon that takes them is laying down outside. I
still have my Buck knife, and in the pocket of my cargo pants I found my
recorder, but the earbud cord was dangling partway outside and one of the tiny
speakers was missing. Oh . . . something else. My watch is gone. This time
probably for good. I have no clue where it went, but my best guess puts it
somewhere in the pile of debris that I landed in when I jumped out of the barn.
As far as I’m concerned, it can stay there.

So now you know everything. I’m trapped here with only
two bullets left. There’s still at least an hour of darkness left. I’ve killed maybe
a dozen of the red-eyed ghouls. That’s less than half. I only saw three ferals,
and they’re all toast. But to be honest, there could be fifty more that I
didn’t see. And then there’s the black-eyed fiend. I don’t know what to think
about her, other than it frightens me to think about her. Do I wait in here until
the gray ones find me? Or do I go out in a blaze of two bullets fighting my way
to my backpack? Either way the result will be the same. I need to think.

*click*

OK, this is it . . . the last recording I’ll probably
ever make. Whoever finds this, if you have the ability, take it to Walter’s
Marina near the shore of Ghost Echo Lake. If you see a tall, beautiful
redheaded girl there, tell her I love her. It’s 4:55 AM according to the clock
on the phone, and there is definitely something in the hallway. Time to man up
and go down fighting.

I got to my feet as quietly as I could, and the
stiffness of my multiple bruises, cuts, and abrasions all woke up and had a
welcome back party at my expense. The noise sounded again from the hallway—a
scraping sound from the right—and I crept up to the door using the blue light
of the cell phone screen. As quietly as I could, I lifted away the pair of
rolling carts I had placed as a barrier. Unfortunately, one of them had a loose
metal tray that I thought was attached to the cart. It wasn’t . . . and when I
moved the cart out of the way, the tray slid off and banged against the floor.
I cringed and held my breath. A moment later my already hammering heart kicked
up another notch as the dim sapphire glow of the phone showed the doorknob in
front of me starting to turn. The only ghouls that I knew could do that were
ferals. I braced myself and got ready as the door opened.

As soon as it swung halfway, I flipped the phone open
to light the screen and thrust my gun around the door frame. My finger was on
the trigger and ready to fire as I aligned the front sight on the corrosive
yellow eyes staring back at me. Only they weren’t yellow, and they were pointing
the very large looking bore of a handgun right back at my face. The shock of
the situation froze both of us for an instant, and we stood there in stunned
indecision as the seconds ticked by . . . him bathing in the blue light of my
phone, and my own face reflecting a dull rainbow from the screen image on the
phone that he held up for light.

I tilted the muzzle of my CZ skyward, and he followed
a moment later with his, now obvious to me as a stainless steel .45 caliber
automatic.

“Your battery’s low,” he whispered in a slow, easy
voice that carried a faint southern drawl.

“What?” I replied in confusion.

His head, mostly balding but with the remains of a
crew cut still visible, nodded toward the phone in my hand. “You’ve only got
one bar left. Better charge it up.” He accompanied his jab with a smile and a
spit of tobacco on the floor of the hallway.

The beginnings of a grin crept on to my face and I
nodded. “Yeah well, I’ve noticed the cell coverage has been kind of spotty
around here, so I’ll probably just wait until I get home.”

He nodded and smiled again. “I’d shake your hand, but
unless we get out of here pretty damn soon, neither of us are going to have any
hands left to shake.”

In the dim glow from our phones, I gave him a quick
once over. Medium height, maybe 5 foot 10 inches, early to mid thirties,
thickset neck that sat on muscular shoulders, and a face that studied me back
with the same scrutiny that I was giving him. My gut said I could trust him.

“Got any 9mm ammunition you can spare?” I asked.

He shook his head no. “I got seven rounds of .45 left,
and one full mag of 308.”

The pistol he was carrying was obvious, but I didn’t
see any rifle. He noticed the question in my eyes and bobbed his nose over my
shoulder. I turned to look and saw the figure of a young boy bracing against
the wall. A scoped AR type rifle was held across his chest, and the steady look
in his eyes convinced me that he knew how to use it. The screen on my phone
timed out and dimmed, so I mashed a random button and brought it to life again.
It revealed a blood soaked bandage wrapped around the young man’s upper thigh.

The look on my face when I turned back was answered
without any fanfare. “That’s my son. He got hit by a stray round two days ago.
The town is overrun by those things, but the owner of a fishing cabin we were
renting told me about this place before he got yanked out of the window and
torn apart.”

“You came here for some medicine?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, his leg is getting infected, so I figured
we might be able to find some antibiotics here, but it looks like somebody
already beat me to it.”

I swiveled to look at the boy briefly before turning
back towards the man. “Can he run with that leg?”

From behind me I heard a young, but firm “Yes.”

The father’s eyes flicked towards his son for an
instant, and then turned back to me. “He’s tough, but he’s hurt pretty good. I
was hoping maybe to hole up here for a few days, but the guy that rented the
cabin to us didn’t tell me about the airport across the road.”

“What about the airport?”

“It’s ground zero for those freakin’ bastards,” he
answered. “It took us almost a full day to sneak from the fishing shack to
here—less than two miles. We hid ourselves in a thicket of scrub by that sewage
plant yesterday afternoon, but we never had a clear shot to run over here.
There were always groups of those things breaking off from the horde at the
airport. Then just before nightfall, it looked like they’re all beginning to
assemble close to one of the hangars, and even the roamers were shambling that
way. I told my boy that we’d wait until after dark and try to sneak over. About
then a couple vehicles came barreling down the highway—zigzagging like they
were drunk or something. They turned onto the road out there, but when they
figured out it was a dead end, they tried to turn around and got tangled. Of
course that attracted some attention and ruined our chances for getting over
here. One of the vehicles was a school bus, and when we saw what was happening,
well, we decided to just hang around and help out, even though it probably
meant we were going to buy the farm.”

The events of last night were coming together with his
story, and I looked behind me again at the rifle in the boys’ arms. “You were
the ones that shot the feral?”

“The what?”

“The fast one out by the wreck. When they dragged the
kids out of the bus and were heading toward the . . . lady . . .”

His eyebrows rose. “Yeah, that was us.” His face
tightened in realization and he continued, “Was that you that dropped the other
ones . . . the ones that were holding the kids?”

I nodded. “What seems like a lifetime ago, I had a
suppressed .22.”

“Where were you shooting from?”

“I was up in the barn loft . . .”

He cut me off. “No shit . . . really?”

I could tell he was genuinely surprised, but also
rather congratulatory in the typical southern redneck fashion that I had been
initiated into while at college in Tennessee. Kind of like,
“Dang Rusty,
sorry you were in the swimmin’ hole when I threw in the stick of dynamite, but
hey, look at all the fish we caught.”

“I’m guessing that you’re the ones that torched the
barn,” I said with a chuckle.

“Sorry, I had no idea anybody was in there. When we
popped the fast one, that whole little herd hot footed it to the barn, and I
figured maybe we could toast them all. And before you say anything, it would’ve
been a lot cleaner death for any of the kids that were still alive.”

The tone of his words convinced me that he was still
struggling with that decision, so I laid it on the line for him. “None of the
children were still alive in the barn when the truck crashed through. You did
the right thing.”

He took a deep breath, and then nodded at me.

“How’d you end up making it here?” I asked.

“When the barn caught fire it lit up the whole area,
so we just dug in and waited for it to burn out. That took almost three hours.
Since then we’ve been hunkered down and waiting for an opportunity, but little
pockets of those sickos kept getting nearer and nearer to where we were hiding,
so about an hour ago we decided to risk it. We made it to the side door, but it
was locked so we snuck around and lucked out with the front door.
Unfortunately, at least a few of those things saw us come in.”

A bang from down the hallway startled both of us, and
he looked that way and said, “I found a dog leash in the waiting room, and I’ve
got it tied across the latches of the double doors out front, but one of the
glass partitions on the doors is already cracked pretty bad. It won’t hold for
long.”

“How many are out front?”

“Probably seven or eight by now. Do you know if
there’s a back door to this place?

“Yeah, that’s the way I came in, but it’s probably
swarming with them as well.”

He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe
not. When the barn torched, I had a pretty good view of most of the area. I
couldn’t see the back wall of this building, but I could see a lot of the area
behind it. There were only two or three of those things back there. Of course,
a lot of time has passed since then. But I guess it doesn’t really matter,
because there’s no way we’re going to make it past the horde at the airport.”

That was the second or third time he’d mentioned the
ones at the airport, and I was curious about his choice of the word “horde.” My
phone dimmed again, and I let it stay there as I asked. “How many are at the
airport?” I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe fifty or sixty . . . maybe
even hundred . . .

“Rough guess . . . probably about two thousand.”

My eyes bulged at his answer, and he closed with, “I
hope you’ve got a lot of ammo.”

I closed my eyes for a few seconds, forcing the
survival instinct to kick in one more time as I digested all of his
information. When I opened my eyes again, he was staring straight at me with a grim
look on his face “You feel like making a stand with us?” he asked.

“Hell no, I feel like getting out of here, and with
all three of us and a lot of luck, we might just make it.” My whisper seemed
almost like a shout in the shadowy hallway, and his eyes narrowed at my words.

“Just tell us what we can do.” The sound of breaking
glass punctuated his answer, and he capped it off with, “But you better make it
fast.”

I holstered my gun briefly and stuck out my hand.
“Eric Coleman.”

He shifted his gun to the phone hand and shook. “Shawn
Allen, and that’s my boy Mack.” I spun and clasped hands with the young man,
then drew my CZ and darted across the hall into the lunchroom. Both of my bags
full of medicine were where I had left them. “If we make it out of here, your
boy will have all the antibiotics he’ll need.” I patted the duffel.

“That’s great,” Shawn said, “but just how do you plan
on not getting eaten?”

“We’re going to call the cavalry.”