Shades of Gray (17 page)

Ryan’s eyes moved to stare down that corridor for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Liz sighed and pulled her son to her. As she held him, she purposely made eye contact with the largest and meanest looking of the three guards, giving him her most venomous stare.

You better hope I never make it out of this cage alive
.

The other people within her immediate vicinity gradually lost interest in her and Ryan and went back to studying their own hands, sleeping, or staring at the ceiling. She smoothed Ryan’s hair with one hand while the other held onto him tightly. After a moment she closed her eyes and assumed her previous, fake-sleep position, and thought about her husband.

Oh, Caleb. Please stay alive. We need you
.

She didn’t see the guards outside pulling the Taser from their holsters, or the two scientists walking up to the cage door with a set of keys and several sets of handcuffs. Before she could react, they were inside, stunning people at random, slapping the cuffs onto their wrists, and dragging them out. One guard, the frightening beast of a man she’d been glaring at moments before, stomped right up to her and backhanded her across the face, knocking her out cold.

They ended up taking fifteen people before the screams died down and the sobbing stopped.

Including Ryan.

* * *

“I’ve only been able to make contact with Reedtown. No answer from the others,” John said.

“Nothing from Lane?”

Michael leaned over the desk with his weight on his fists. John simply shook his head. Lane was the leader of a large group roughly twenty miles from the Winchester, downriver. They’d been doing pretty well over the summer since Michael had first made contact with them. It was surprising to both men that they weren’t answering now.

“Damn,” Michael sighed, his head dropping between his hunched shoulders. “All we got is Reedtown then. What did they have to say?” His voice was muffled, but John got the gist.

“Well, they’ve been seeing an increase in activity. Said it started a couple weeks ago.” He laid the mic on the desk and eased back in the chair, his hands resting on the arms of it and his eyes studying Michael.

“Did they say anything about the runners? Did they know any of them?”

John was beginning to worry about his friend: the dark circles under his eyes and the pasty look of his skin made Michael look dead on his feet. No pun intended.

John rocked back and forth in the desk chair. “Yep. Said they knew all the runners. They didn’t all come from their town, but the Reedtown people said they knew the runners from before, either from other survivor camps or from neighboring towns before the shit hit last year.”

Michael’s eyes narrowed. “So it would seem this isn’t a recent development then. There were more people who made it through the first days of this than we had thought. You think the CC was scooping up people even back then?”

John shrugged and raised an eyebrow. “I’m trying not to think. But if I did, I’d say yeah, they were.”

Michael hung his head again and swore. “
Damn
.”

“Yeah,” John agreed in a low voice. Michael met his eyes again and pushed off the desk.

“Get Waters on the radio.”

* * *

The sky was gray and cloudy that morning, a good sign more snow was on the way. It wasn’t cold yet, not like it had been the past week. Waters had left just after sunup with the helicopter crew to head back to the prison and contact his buddies in the other three districts. He’d left orders with the Humvee guys to begin work on building up our fortifications. Which basically meant doing something about the wide gaps between the wall ends and the club. So what they had decided on was a heavy-gauge chain link fence, ten feet tall, brought over from the prison on the back of a flatbed truck. Michael and John wanted concrete blocks instead, but compromised, deciding the fence would do for time being. They had also thrown around the idea of replacing the wooden door in front of the gate with something sturdier, like solid steel. That project had been tabled until the current bullshit could be sorted out.

I was outside with Gus, letting him run off some of the nervous energy he had stored up over the past couple days, and watching the men work on the fence next to the house. My rifle was hanging on my shoulder (I’d retrieved that from the wall first thing that morning), but it was unloaded. The others were inside doing an inventory of all the ammunition. Everyone besides Michael and John. They were on the radio trying to contact the other camps.

I kept my back to the bigass scorch mark in the yard over by the far wall. It was hard enough trying to accept Nancy’s death without being reminded of it by evidence of her cremation. Same with Daisy. Gus ran in a large circle between me and the men by the wall. He didn’t seem to be interested in exploring like he usually did. Every time he stuck his nose to the ground, he’d whip his head up and tuck his tail, then begin his nervous running again. Even though the mess was cleaned up, there was apparently enough residue of death to freak the little guy out.

My eyes shifted slowly from the soldiers working on the fence to the second story windows of the club. Abby was watching me from her room and it startled me a bit. I hadn’t noticed her there, and had no idea just how long she’d been staring down at me. And she
was
staring, not casually observing the activity in the yard as you would expect. I frowned but pulled my hand from my coat pocket and threw her a small wave. My frown deepened when she didn’t wave back; Abby simply turned her back on me and disappeared into the darkness of her room.

It was strange. The longer I stood there the more I realized she’d been acting…off, since the night before. Ever since the troops showed up. I made up my mind to talk to her later, and called Gus in the middle of his twentieth lap. The wind had picked up and it was getting colder. Time to go back inside.

* * *

I followed Gus to the kitchen, my mind still preoccupied with Abby and her weird behavior, and didn’t notice Michael striding through the living room with John on his heels. My fuzzy buddy sat at the swinging door, tail wagging and tongue licking his chops, waiting for me to open it just enough for him to bolt through. It was close to lunchtime and apparently the little guy was hungry. I nudged the door open with the toe of my boot as I unzipped my coat, the smell of deer roast and potatoes smacking me in the face. My mouth filled with saliva automatically; it was the best thing I think I’d ever smelled.

Of course, my nose had been assaulted by the reek of rotting flesh and guts for the past thirteen months, so that roast could have smelled like dog shit and I would’ve slobbered all over myself.

“What the hell’s going on in here?” I asked as I stepped inside.

Apparently they finished the inventory
.

The swinging door slammed shut on Michael, who had the presence of mind to throw his hand up at the last minute to stop it from hitting him in the face. I was too engrossed with the two people hovering around the stove, and the contents of the large pot on top of it, to notice Michael and John enter behind me. Gus skittered to the corner and glued himself to his food bowl.

“Smells good, huh?” Jonah stirred with a long handled wooden spoon. Mia pretended to help.

Man, that girl’s got it
bad
. I bet the chickenshit still hasn’t told him how she feels.

Jake and Todd were sitting at the table. Michael and John edged over to them and started talking in low voices. I followed my nose to the stove.

“Damn right it smells good. Since when can you cook?” I leaned over the pot, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Well now…that’s a story for another day, isn’t it?” He smirked, then winked at Mia.

I thought it was nice, everyone trying to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Pointless, but nice. I shrugged and turned my attention to the four huddled around the table, taking note that Abby was not present.

Still in her room
.

I grabbed a chair, pulled it out, and sat down. Jake was biting a nail, something I had never seen him do.

Well, that isn’t foreboding at all
.

Michael, who was leaning down with his palms flat on the tabletop, sighed and looked over at me. I’m sure we all had that same look. You know the one. Weary eyes, puffy and black underneath. Wrinkled forehead, semi-permanent frown. Pale complexion. But on Michael, it was downright ominous.

“No contact with the other camps. Except Reedtown.” He shifted his weight to his other arm. “Waters made contact with his counterparts. Evidently, this isn’t an isolated thing.”

The new chefs had become interested and were standing behind me, listening as Michael went into detail concerning what Waters had found out. Jake was biting his nails like a man possessed, so I kicked him under the table. He grunted, looked at me, crossed his eyes as he looked at the finger in his mouth, then slid it onto his lap with his other hand. Todd…well, Todd was his usual dumbass self.

“What thing?” he said.

Now, I hadn’t known Mike, the idiot Ben and Jake had traveled with back when this thing first started. From what Jake had told me about him, I figured Todd had to be Mike’s long lost twin. Being forced to tolerate the resident asshole for as long as I had, I completely understood the lack of mourning that had taken place when Mike had finally bit it. Or was bitten, as the case turned out.

The look on Jake’s face at that moment was not only priceless, but it told me that his nails had been forgotten. “Todd?”

“Yeah, man?”

Everyone else fell silent, mostly because we didn’t have the energy or motivation to tell him to shut up…again.

“I want you to do me a favor.”

Jake wasn’t even looking at Todd; his head was tilted and his eyes were closed. Todd, of course, was suddenly enthusiastic. Someone was paying attention to him, talking to him, and for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t being yelled at.

“Sure thing, Jake.”

“I want you to go outside. Now, when you get outside, I want you to get up on the wall. Then I want you to jump off. If you don’t break your legs, I want you to head down the driveway.”

At this point, Todd’s enthusiasm was wilting.

“If you don’t run onto any deadheads, keep walkin’. When you get to the end of the driveway, head on down towards the main road. If you don’t run onto any deadheads by then, keep walkin’ towards Blueville. You keep goin’ ‘til you find one of those zombie sonsabitches, and when you do, Todd…” Jake turned and gave Todd one of the meanest, scariest looks I’d ever seen on Jake’s face. “I want you to jump up its ass. All the way up in there. Now, do you understand? Or do I need to explain it again, a little
plainer?
” With that, Jake twisted in his seat, one balled-up fist on his hip, the other on the table, clenched so tightly his knuckles cracked.

Todd got the point.

We waited until he left the room, stumbling and tripping over his own feet, before giving our attention back to Michael.

“Yeah…I don’t even know what the hell I was saying,” he said after several long seconds of silence.

That turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The kitchen filled with laughter, so loud and long that the soldiers outside stopped what they were doing to listen for a few minutes, unsure what the commotion was all about, convinced the Winchester group was all very much insane.

* * *

Abby sat on the edge of her bed, listening to muffled laughter coming from downstairs with a faint smile on her lips.

Good. They deserve a moment of happiness
.

She had drawn the curtains and turned out the lights. Anything brighter than twilight hurt her eyes now. She’d changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean t-shirt after straightening up her room and packing her belongings. Her suitcase and rifle were by the bedroom door, patiently awaiting her departure. She didn’t want to say goodbye to the others, never being one to show emotion very easily.

It’s better this way
, she thought.
I hate long goodbyes.

She had been bitten by what Kasey lovingly referred to as a “snapper” during their run from the wall to the house. Of all things, her ticket had been punched by a goddamned snapping head. Abby hadn’t thought it too much to ask to go down in a blaze of glory. At least that’s how she had always imagined her death, in Z-World. Running toward a pack of deadheads like her ass was on fire, guns blazing, laughing maniacally. No, her death sentence came at the hands of (or in this case, the jaws of), a runner who’d had the legs broken right out from underneath him.

The bite was sickening to look at. Just above her ankle, the skin surrounding it mottled black, the wound itself oozing a green and brown pus. Tendrils of faded purple trailed up and down her leg, radiating out from the bite. She’d given up on cleaning it; disinfecting now was a senseless waste of supplies. She was beginning to show other signs of infection as well, and had been keeping a log of it in the notebook on her desk. Even though she knew she was dying, she wanted to leave a detailed account of how it happened. Maybe it would help the others understand this virus better. Maybe not. Either way, she knew her time was almost up.