Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (81 page)

The thick tangles of Michelle’s long strawberry blonde
hair were still damp from the hurried shower and equally hurried dry time. I
wasn’t complaining, and my nose was buried against her neck as we spooned on
top of our still queen sized, hay bale mattress. Sometime during our showers,
somebody—I’m assuming Walter—deposited a gift bag outside the door to the
tractor shed. Michelle and I found it when we headed for bed. Inside were a
hodgepodge of items, and it almost felt like Christmas morning as we sat on the
straw and opened the bag. We pulled out a pair of the Fish and Wildlife radios,
a windup alarm clock already set for 6:00 AM, two bottles of Dr. Pepper, two
bottles of root beer, a small zip lock bag filled with jerky of some type, and
a Tupperware container that weighed about three pounds. At the bottom of the
sack were several plastic forks, a few napkins, and a handwritten note.

Get some rest tonight. You can have this for a late
night snack, or as breakfast—your choice.

Walter

Both of our hands shot towards the lid and peeled it
back. Underneath was a thick white layer of frosting that topped an entire
container full of homemade carrot cake. It took all of our willpower to save a
pair of minuscule slices for breakfast. The rest went in our belly.

I followed Michelle’s Fish and Wildlife Tahoe as it
bounced up the dirt road toward the cabin, spinning and sliding its wheels in
the soft muck that was the result of a brief but intense rain shower in the
middle of the night.

“I told you to get better mud tires,” I said to
Michelle.

She replied from the copilot seat in my truck. “It
wasn’t my call. Maybe you state boys had some leeway, but Uncle Sam made us use
the tires he supplied. They’re actually pretty good in snow.”

“Good in snow normally equals bad in mud,” I replied.

The winch on the front of my truck ended up being
unnecessary, and both vehicles made it to the cabin just a little before 8:00
AM. Sam and Walter exited the Tahoe, and Max leapt out of the pickup bed at my
command. We spent about an hour and a half at the cabin gathering some
supplies—mostly rice, dried beans, seasonings and spices, and more than a few
boxes of ammunition. We also brought two large glass jars, each of them filled
with an entire gallon of honey. Several packs of rechargeable batteries, as
well as bulky items like commercial sized rolls of toilet paper and other
sundries completed Bernice’s shopping list, and then we headed back to the
marina. This time Michelle led the way in my pickup, and I followed behind the
Tahoe in Uncle Andy’s dually.

It was almost lunchtime when I finished up with Fred.
Her drawing was remarkably accurate to the black-eyed monster I’d seen in the
barn at Devils Lake, and I thanked her and folded the picture into my pocket
just as my radio crackled to life.

“Eric, we’re all heading up to the tractor shed for
the meeting. Bernie and Lynn have got a cooler to bring up for our lunch. Can
you swing by the kitchen and grab it?”
Walter’s voice asked.

“Yeah, I’ll get it and see you in a few minutes.”
I thanked Fred again and headed toward the kitchen.
Twenty minutes later I walked through the door to the tractor shed—cooler over
one shoulder and Max’s leash in my opposite hand. The hay bed had been stripped
of its blankets and now served as an impromptu footstool for the encircling
crowd. Additional bales of straw were positioned as seats, and Dave took the
cooler from my shoulder as I walked Max around the gathering and hooked his
leash between a pair of widely spaced planks on one of the old horse stalls. I
took up residence on the nearest hay bale to Max, and that put me between Dave
and Amy. Besides the three of us, there were seven other people gathered.
Michelle was here, as were Walter, Sam, Estes, Shawn, Doc, and propped up on the
only real chair with his bandaged leg stretched in front of him, was Uncle
Andy. A simple meal was served. Gravy soaked rice mixed with small chunks of
leftover venison, and a large pot of knoephla stew; the traditional North
Dakota dish consisting of potatoes, chicken, and homemade dumplings cooked
together in a thick white sauce. I tossed Max the other half of the deer bone
that Bernice had given me last night. We ate in silence. The sound of forks
scraping empty plates was Walter's cue to fire up an old white gas camping
burner and set a large pot of water on to boil. I was still hungry, but I left
the remaining stew for somebody else and settled for a cup of hot tea. It was
good, but nowhere near the level of ‘good’ that accompanied my distant memory of
hot chocolate. I was only two sips in when Walter took the floor.

“Last night,” he said, “I asked all of you to be
thinking about some things to share with the rest of our group. Of course, I
didn’t give you specific assignments. I’d rather just hear whatever is on your
mind. I don’t know why, but we’ve all been brought here—together—for some
reason. Some of us are new acquaintances, and others are old friends. But no
matter what, we’ve all had a little bit different row to hoe in the past few
days, so I’m of the opinion that we should bring each other up to speed and
maybe some things will come out in the wash. Anybody want to volunteer to go
first?”

Doc raised his hand. “We’ve finished categorizing the
medicine that Eric brought back from the vet’s office. It’s a major score of
antibiotics and some procedural pharmaceuticals, and I for one am extremely
grateful to have it. With that said, there are still a couple . . . well, more
than a couple nagging loopholes in our medicine stockpile. We now have enough
insulin to last about a dozen diabetics for a year or two, unfortunately—or
maybe fortunately—we don’t have any diabetics here. That’s actually
statistically odd, and I’m not sure if it somehow relates to this sickness.
What we’re also missing are a lot of the common prescription level medications
that some of our residents here are taking. High blood pressure med’s
primarily, but also few others. The upside to this issue is that there’s a
relatively large supply of those medications somewhere at the campground. Do
you remember the stash we found in one of the tents? Well, it has roughly fifty
percent of what we’re looking for. Unfortunately, the last place I saw it was
in the very same office where Eric found a pile of those creatures. For right
now, we should be OK. In the very near future however, some of our extended
family are either going to need replacement medication, or weaned off of their
prescriptions. Neither option is ideal, however. In other medical news,” Doc’s
head bobbed towards Shawn, “I was able to remove the bullet in Mack’s thigh
this morning. It was a small caliber weapon, probably a .22, and assuming the
infection clears up, he should make a full recovery.”

“Have you done any more thinking about the sickness .
. . anything that we haven’t covered already and is outside the norm?” Sam
asked.

“There is nothing normal about the sickness, and we’re
still pretty much flying blind. To be honest, I’ve been so busy putting out
small ‘medical fires’ so to speak that I really haven’t had time to dedicate a
lot of thought to the base problem.” He paused for a second and scratched his
chin. “There is one thing that does come to mind though. It’s the children. I
can’t really say for sure why, but it seems like—statistically speaking with
what we’ve observed so far—that children are more susceptible.”

“What makes you say that,” Amy asked.

Doc took a sip of his tea as he answered. “It’s simple
really. With this many people here, there should be a lot higher number of
children among our ranks. Now, there could be a lot of reasons for this. Maybe
families with children were easier prey for the infected, or maybe they just
didn’t want to leave their kids. It’s also possible that a child’s immune
system isn’t developed enough to fight off whatever’s causing this. I just
don’t know, but my gut is telling me there’s something odd about that
particular train of thought. Anyway, in an unrelated note, I’ve reset the
broken arm on Sergeant Thorn, and it looks good, although without an x-ray
machine we’ll just have to wait and hope. I’ve also stitched up another guy,
Perkins I think his name was, that came in with Captain Estes. The wound was
pretty nasty, but I think he’ll be alright in a few weeks . . . and that’s
about it for medical.”

“What about the goop?” Walter asked.

“The what?” I said.

“Yeah, you two were gone when we figured that one out,
although it was Michelle that got us started,” Walter mumbled.

The expectant look stayed on my face until Doc
continued. “The goop, as we’ve been calling it, is what happens to the infected
after they’re killed. We didn’t discover this until, um, I think it was the
night that you left for Devils Lake. The dumpster where we had deposited all
the bodies from the firefight in the parking lot turned out to be, well, no
longer filled with bodies. Instead, it had a hairy, greasy blackish substance
about a foot deep covering the bottom. There were actually two bodies still in
it, though. Do you remember when we told you what happened that first night
when everybody showed up from the campground?”

I nodded.

“Well, the guy that died . . . and his wife that
committed suicide with pills . . . were both still corpses in the dumpster.
Every other body that we threw in there had degraded into some type of
enzymatic sludge. Our hypothesis is that if you become infected—and by that I
mean a full blown infection, not the people who get infected and then pass away
before they develop into what you’re calling a ‘ghoul’—anyhow, some type of
cataclysmic tissue breakdown takes place sometime after death. I’m assuming
that temperature plays a factor in the degradation, but the closest timeline I
can give is roughly three days after death considering the current
environmental factors.”

“Is this sludge . . . this ‘goop’ infectious?” Shawn
asked.

Doc shook his head. “Unknown.”

I sipped my tea as the room settled to consider Doc’s
words. After a full minute of silence, Dave stood and nodded at the other
members of the gathering. “I guess you know that I’ve been elected to represent
the people who came here from the campground, as well as a few others I suppose.
I don’t really know what to say other than I’ve been offering an ear to anyone
that needs it. About the only people that haven’t come up to me and unloaded
their troubles are the people sitting right here. I know we’ve all been busy,
and I don’t expect that’s going to change very much in the near future, but
take my word for it—you weren’t made to carry these burdens all by yourself. My
door, that is if I had a door,” Dave chuckled, “is always open. In addition to
that, I’m planning on having a small church service every day for anyone that
wants to attend. Once you guys figure out a semi-permanent schedule, I’ll try
and fit the service into the best time slot.”

When Dave sat down, Amy popped up a like she was on
the opposite end of a seesaw. Her overall countenance appeared much more rested
and vibrant than the last time I saw her, and she circled the hay table and
handed each of us a printed piece of paper. “On the sheet I just handed you,
which, like so many other things is the courtesy of Walter’s electricity, is a
list of the top twenty activities that people participated in before whatever
happened . . . happened.”

I glanced at the paper in my hands. Number one on the
list was work/employment. It was followed by family, friends, social media,
organize sports and games, social entertainment, video games/electronic
entertainment, and then it itemized the remaining thirteen in descending order.

“I’m not very handy with a gun,” Amy quipped, “but I
know people. Before this infection, everybody here lived in a different world
and had a different life and different responsibilities. Even soldiers like
Captain Estes could plop down in front of their laptop after a hard day in the
field and video chat with their loved ones thousands of miles away. I
understand that we’re all still playing catch up, and that the situation so far
has been fluid, but if we don’t find a way to offer our ‘family’ some much
needed normalcy, I can guarantee that we’re going to start paying a heavy
price.”

“What do you have in mind?” Uncle Andy asked.

Amy nodded towards Walter. “I’m going to have to get
with Walter about some issues—specifically power and equipment—but I’d like to
start with something simple. For example, we could hook up a laptop to that
projector and show some movies on the screen. There’s a whole box of DVDs that
Walter showed me upstairs. Most of them are westerns and classics, but it has a
few kids’ movies and cartoons mixed in as well.”

Several nods of agreement circled the room as Amy
continued. “Another thing is cell phones. Believe it or not, almost everybody
here still has their cell phone, although I’m pretty sure they’re all drained.
The point I’m trying to make is that we need to try and round up some chargers
and get those devices working. I’ve already got Bucky and C.J. on that project”

“Who are they going to call? There’s no cell service
anymore,” Mike commented.

“I know,” Amy said, “but most people have those little
smart phones, and even though the telephone function won’t work anymore they’ll
still be able to access pictures, videos, and music, not to mention passing the
time with little games and such. What I’m trying to say is that everybody has
been thrown far out of their zone of familiarity, and we need to look at ways
to put some of it back.”

“Can you coordinate it?” Walter asked.

“I’ll do my best.”

“OK, unless anybody has any objections, I suggest we
put Amy in charge of keeping everybody from going too squirrelly,” Walter
offered.

Another round of head nodding followed, and then Uncle
Andy lifted up one of his aluminum crunches and pointed the rubber floor grip
towards Shawn. “Eric told us a little bit about what happened after the vet’s
office, but is there anything you can add?”

Shawn’s stocky form reminded me of a cleaner cut
version of Crowbar Mike as he stood and drained his cup of tea. “Well, the
first thing I’ve got to say is ‘thank you’ for patching up Mack. It’s a huge
weight off my mind, and I am grateful to all of you for making it happen.” Doc
nodded in acknowledgement for all of us and Shawn continued. “The second thing
is more of a cautiously optimistic question. I’m just wondering how long we can
hold out here, even if we’re not attacked by those things. Eric told me a
little bit about your resources, but by my count there’s at least thirty people
here, and that’s a lot of mouths to feed every day.”

“Actually, our total population is thirty-nine,” Amy
said.

“Even worse then,” Shawn answered. “But I guess where
I’m going with this relates to the location. This is a marina, apparently
mostly for sport fishing from the looks of it, but I’m wondering if we have any
nets available . . . big nets, I mean . . . that we could use to supplement the
food stores with fresh fish.”

“That’s forward thinking, young man,” Walter said,
“and I like that. But to answer your question, I don’t have any commercial
fishing nets. The closest place I can think of that may have some is on the
Canadian side of the lake.”