Fade to Grey (Book 1): Fade to Grey (18 page)

A few moments later my hearing was starting to come back, so
I asked Michelle if she was OK, a question she had probably only heard about
300 times in the last five minutes. She was. Her boot was torn, even her sock
underneath the boot was ripped, but by some miracle her skin was unbroken—not
even scratched. Michelle and I were seated next to each other on a picnic bench
across the road at an empty campsite, resting. My team, led by Brenda and Mike
finished the search of site sixty-eight. Only the shredded remains of the shot-up,
red-eyed ghoul under the Fiero were found. Michelle elbowed me in the side to
get my attention, then reached into her pocket and handed me two AA batteries. She
looked up at me and said in a weary voice, “I think I’m going to have to charge
you a little extra for delivery, sir.” We both smiled. The smiles quickly
progressed to giggles then onto full-fledged insane laughter. It earned us a
few looks from the other teams, but the trade-off in stress relief was worth it.

Uncle Andy’s team finished the remaining sites. Nothing else
alive, but he did find something very strange at seventy-three. He called us
over to a stainless steel American Traveler motor home.

“There are three bodies inside; they all passed the stick
test,” he said. “Go in and tell me what you think.”

“You’re not gonna give me any hints?” I said with eyebrows
raised.

He shook his head no. “I’d rather get your first impression.”

I walked up to the motor home and opened the door;
immediately my nose was assaulted by a sickly sweet smell, like a truckload of
bananas left sitting in the afternoon sun. I shut the door and looked at my
uncle. He kind of waved his finger like I should go inside, so I clicked on my
newly regenerated flashlight and went up the stairs. There were three bodies in
there, as described. All of them the now familiar putty gray. The stench of
rotting bananas was strong enough that my stomach was starting to give me
warning signs that it might flip. I examined the bodies with my light, nothing
unusual that I could tell until I got to the final corpse. Male, white—well
grey now—maybe thirty-five, wearing some type of bathrobe over long sleeve
pajamas. The difference was his face. Crusting around his mouth was what
appeared to be massive amounts of foamy pinkish-orange drool. As disgusting as
that was, it was also the source of the rotten banana odor. I backed out. When
I got outside Uncle Andy looked at me and put his hands up in the universal “I
don’t know” position. I shrugged my shoulders as well and said, “Maybe he took
some kind of poison?”

The sweep now finished, we reported in as we were walking
back to the soccer field. The medical team had finished with their exams,
nothing odd to report there, we figured that anybody who was sick already knew
it and took off earlier. A combination of Amy’s organizational skills and the
medical team’s foresight resulted in the assembly of a volunteer team already
set up to remove the bodies. They had somehow managed to scavenge several
plastic raincoats, a box of latex gloves, and two propane lanterns. Doc had
hooked up a little five by eight trailer to the back of the golf cart that
would serve as a body wagon. They also scrubbed out the cargo compartment of
the golf cart with a strong bleach solution. The only thing left to do was to
provide them with a security escort, just in case. VW, Brenda, and Scott
volunteered for that duty. I let Brenda borrow my flashlight.

I had just sat down with my back against a tree and closed my
eyes. I could feel the built-up adrenaline slowly dissipating, giving me
shivers and chills. I took several deep breaths, forcing the air slowly in—slowly
out. Repeat. It hardly seemed like such a short time had passed since I was
sitting on a moss-covered boulder drinking a light beer and listening to Max
crunch up ice cubes. A wave of tiredness washed over me. I looked at my watch,
7:42 PM. At 7:49 PM the power to the campground came back on, the mercury vapor
lights buzzing as they warmed up. A cheer went up over the soccer field, people
were hugging and kissing, congratulating each other on surviving the “great
spring blackout.” I would have liked to celebrate along with them, but I was
wondering how long the power would stay on. Amy spotted me and came over,
handing me three packs of assorted cheese crackers and a bottle of water. She
asked if I had a minute. I nodded.

“First off Eric, I wanted to express my personal gratitude,
as well as relay the gratitude from each and every person here at the
campground. You and your teams did a wonderful and very brave job and we can’t
thank you enough.” She held my gaze as she continued, “I know you have a lot on
your mind, decisions to be made, plans to be laid—and you don’t even stay at
this campground. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken the liberty of speaking
to Doc and Sally, and the little bit to your uncle and Michelle. From what I
gather, we may be basically on our own here for quite awhile. If it wouldn’t be
too much trouble, I’d like to help here at the campground in kind of an ‘organizational
coordinator’ position. I’ve already come up with a list of things that we’ll
need to do to prepare for an extended stay. A lot of it is based on what you
talked about earlier, but I wanted you to take a quick look at it if you don’t
mind, I could really use your expertise here.”

I said, “Amy, I’d be glad to help you out anyway I can, on
one condition.”

“Sure, just name it,” she said.

“Tell me what you did for a living before the world turned to
mush.”

She smiled as she replied, “I was a civilian contractor with
the Department of Defense. I taught interpersonal dynamic, inter-relational,
objective team building skills.”

“You must have had a heck of a long business card to fit all
that on it,” I said.

“We usually called it by its acronym.” Her hazel eyes
glittered as she watched my tired mind crank out the solution.

I buried my head in my hands, groaning. “You taught . . . idiots.”
Her musical laughter soon had me smiling as well. “So you taught the idiots in
the military team building skills?”

“For seventeen years now,” she answered.

“Well, then you’re just the right person for the job you have
in mind . . . go for it,” I said. She handed me her list of ideas and we spent
the next ten minutes or so adding and subtracting from it. When we finished,
she scampered off to another part of the field. Just based on her energy level,
I could see why she worked in the field of teambuilding. I felt lucky to have
her here. I also felt I had some unfinished business and went to find Doc.

I munched down the packs of crackers as I walked across the
soccer field. At the sand volleyball court I found Michelle and Uncle Andy
talking to each other. They paused midway in their conversation to ask me how I
was holding up. After grunting the standard “mmm” in response, I threw the same
question back at them. Uncle Andy gave me a thumbs up gesture and Michelle said
that her right leg felt longer, but other than that she was good to go. I
wasn’t sure if I believed her, but it was a moot point in any case. In my mind,
this was fast approaching a point of no return situation. A few days ago I’d
have been buried in a month’s paperwork for firing my weapon even once; now
we’ve got dead, and maybe not-quite-so-dead bodies piled up in the campground
amphitheater, and it’s just kind of like the “elephant in the room” saying. Eventually,
probably sooner rather than later, we’re going to have to deal with this on oh-so-many
levels. All of us. I shook my head to clear out those thoughts, then gave my
uncle and Michelle a rundown of the discussion I had with Amy. They agreed she
was the right person for that job.

“Do you know where we can find Doc?” I asked.

“Last I heard he was up at the campground office,” my uncle
said.

“Well then,
one more thing to do before we head back to Walter’s,” I said as I walked
towards the office. Michelle and Uncle Andy followed me.

Doc and his improvised medical staff were finishing up with a
boy who had cut his leg in the dark, horsing around. He saw us approach and
motioned for us to have a seat, almost like we were going to be his next
patients. After cleaning the wound and applying a liberal coat of iodine, Doc
sent the boy back into the grateful arms of his mother, who was seated next to
us in the designated “waiting room.” When they left he thanked all of his
medical volunteers, reminding them about the 8:00 AM meeting tomorrow. A few
minutes later he was alone with us. We spent the first twenty minutes or so
going over what we had encountered with the sweep teams, everything from the
dead bodies we found to the live bodies that tried to eat us. We mentioned the
encounter with what I was calling the “feral,” the yellow eyed thing that came
out of the Gulfstream at site forty-six,   as well as Michelle getting pulled
under the Fiero and the strange banana smell. Doc took it all in, jotting notes
in a composition book, occasionally shaking his head or asking a question. When
we finished our “debriefing,” I looked at Doc and said, “Your turn.” He started
telling us about the medical exams, no big surprises there, at least nothing
he’d consider in the same league as his patient last night. He went over his
supplies wish list, basic items like gallons of bleach and latex gloves, as
well as medical items from antibiotics to band aids. After he was through Uncle
Andy restated our offer about becoming a member of our core group. Doc accepted
again, and proceeded to thank us for all of our work today. Pleasantries aside,
I said, “Doc, I think you owe me an explanation.”

He bowed his head and let out a deep sigh. I waited.

“Eric, I hate to ask you this considering everything that
you’ve already done for me,” he began, “but a . . . situation . . . has come up
and I don’t really know who else I can turn to.”

I let some of the aggravation slide off my face, took a long
drink out of my water bottle, and said, “Tell me.”

He looked up at me; I could see the beginnings of a tear as
he said, “It’s my granddaughter . . . Emily . . . she’s missing.”

Doc’s words slowly diffused into my already overtaxed brain. “What
do you mean ‘missing’?”

I watched him close his eyes and sink backwards into the worn
out recliner that was part of the camp office décor. The thumb and forefinger
of his right hand were rubbing the opposite sides of his temples, the universal
sign for “I either have a headache, or I feel a big one coming on.” Sensing
what was in the near future for me, I almost mimicked his gesture.

“Eric, do you remember last night just before you and
Michelle left the campground?”

I nodded, remembering that he told me he had something on his
mind, but it could wait until later.

“So many things have happened so fast since last night that I
had managed to put it out of my mind, but now that—for the moment at least—things
are calm, I’ve got to admit that I’m very worried,” Doc said.

I waited for a moment to give Doc a chance to continue.

“Eric . . . Sally is my second wife. My first wife and I
divorced a long time ago, she is no longer alive—cancer. We had a daughter
named Elisa, a very beautiful girl . . . very beautiful.” Doc was shaking his
head slowly, as if he was reliving long ago memories both sweet and bitter. “Elisa
got pregnant before she was married, her boyfriend was a good for nothing . . .
well, let’s just leave him out of it. Elisa’s daughter, Emily, was born on
Valentine’s Day. She was the spitting image of her mom, and had her
grandmother’s temper, a more precocious child I have never experienced. When
Emily was fourteen years old, Elisa was killed in a car wreck. Emily came to
stay with us. We did our best to raise her right, but a fourteen year old girl
has a mind of her own, and with the sudden loss of her mother, she withdrew
from . . . well, everything. Two years of waiting, hoping, and praying that
she’d snap out of it and be done grieving, that she’d take an interest in
something—anything. We tried everything from counselors to horseback riding
lessons but nothing seemed to work, even the things she showed a slight
interest in never lasted. Don’t get me wrong, she was a sweet girl, still
loving to Sally and me, near the top of her class in school, never in any
trouble. She just didn’t seem, and I hate to use this word considering what
we’ve recently been through, but she didn’t seem alive, no zest for life if you
will. Until the day she was helping Sally move some old boxes out of storage. One
of those boxes had an old thirty-five millimeter camera in it. I remember
coming home from the office that day, Sally pulling me aside as soon as I
stepped through the front door. She put her finger up to her lips and motioned
for me to follow quietly. She took me to the breakfast room and pointed through
the plate glass window that looked onto our pool deck. Emily was sitting Indian
style on the end of a lounge chair, a small beverage table in front of her. Scattered
about the table was that old camera and various lenses, accessories, and
whatnot for it. She was reading the manual, trying on the different lenses,
adding different filters, learning. Sally said that she’d been out there all
afternoon. To make a long story short, that camera was the key to finding our
little Emily again. Over the next several months she opened up, blossomed. She
became involved in photography clubs, learned to develop her own film and even
had a few of her pictures published in a local nature magazine. When she was eighteen
she headed off to college, majoring in photojournalism at the University of
Maryland. College life is hard on a lot of freshmen, but not our Emily. She
charged head on at any challenge presented to her, especially those revolving
around photography. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Nikon—the camera
company—offers a single paid internship each year at their U.S. headquarters in
Virginia. Each year they have several thousand applicants. Emily got it in her
senior year.” He paused for a second, looking around the office as if he had
misplaced something. Not finding what he may have been looking for he returned
to the story. “I said college life wasn’t hard on Emily. It was hard on Sally
and me though. We hardly ever got to see her. Every Christmas for a few days,
sometimes once or twice during fall break, those sort of things. Every summer
she always volunteered at some magazine or newspaper; I remember she spent the
summer of her junior year on a cruise ship, documenting people and places for
her professor’s ‘diversity in action’ seminar or something. When she graduated
we were so proud of her. We flew out to Maryland for a week with the idea of
helping her get her own apartment, something that she had talked about almost
nonstop for the last year. Plans change however, and our sweet granddaughter
Emily took Sally and I to one of those Renaissance Festivals, with the knights
and sword fights. All three of us even posed behind one of those plywood
cutouts that you stick your face through for a funny picture. Emily ended up
being the cavalier in that picture, I was the horse, and Sally was the dragon.”
Doc chuckled a bit as he said, “I have that picture on my wall. Anyhow, we ate
dinner in one of those tents decorated to look like a medieval tavern, I think
the only thing on the menu was turkey drumsticks and beer though. Emily was
quiet, pensive—almost like the time after her mother’s death. I asked her what
was wrong and she said that she’d been giving it a lot of thought, and hoped we
wouldn’t mind if she moved back with us until she got a job. I didn’t know what
to say. Of course Sally and I were overjoyed and told her so . . .”

Uncle Andy cut in, “Hey Doc, remember the ‘long story short’
part.”

“I’m sorry . . . I’m just worried about her.”

“Just tell me how I can help,” I said.

“Emily moved back with us while she put in applications for
various jobs. She was very specific in her desires though, she wanted to be
with a national publication, she wanted control over her subject matter—a lot
of things that your basic applicant wouldn’t even think of asking for. But
Emily wouldn’t take no for an answer. She drove all around the country taking
her proof book with her, meeting with publishers and other photographers,
always searching for that perfect job. Sally and I tried to talk her into
accepting any one of the dozens of offers she had already received, but she
wanted something bigger. She wanted to start at the top and go higher. And then
one day it came, a phone call from Washington, DC. Emily was being offered an
interview with National Geographic. Apparently some senior big cheese there got
a hold of some of her work, liked it and wanted to talk further. Her interview
wasn’t until the following week, so she was going to take her car and drive
out, visiting some friends along the way. She had a little Subaru station wagon
that had seen better days. I told her that if she got the job I’d buy her any
car she wanted, within reason. Two weeks later she came back to North Dakota,
walked into my office as my last patient was leaving for the day and said, ‘So
let’s go buy me a new car.’ She spent the next, oh, I guess ten to eleven months
in DC cutting her teeth on small little local projects. During that same
timeframe I had just retired and Sally and I came up here to be the campground
hosts.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “About two weeks ago, Emily
called us out of the blue and said she had great news, her big break had come
and it was in North Dakota, at least to start with. She had been offered the
chance to spend a month along the Canadian border photographing wildlife, specifically
moose and cougar. National Geographic was going to provide her with a
production assistant and a guide, as well as a helicopter to get them on site,
not to mention all the equipment and supplies they’d need. They even rented her
team a brand new Gulfstream motor home to use as a base camp.”

Something started clicking in my head.

“She drove up here in her new car, a yellow Volkswagen Bug,”
Doc said.

Crap . . . I was thinking it, so I figured I better go ahead
and ask, “Site forty-six . . . that was hers?”

Doc nodded. “Yes, that’s hers. Anyhow, her production
assistant was named Anthony, the guide was Derek. Six days ago they got on a
chopper that landed right out there in the soccer field. They had a satellite
phone with them as well. When they got up to wherever they were going, they set
up camp and the helicopter left. The day after that they had to call it back to
evacuate Anthony, he was having some type of allergic reaction and they weren’t
sure what was causing it. Derek rode back with Anthony, I’m sure at Emily’s
insistence. She called me on the satellite phone to let me know everything was
OK, and that Derek and Anthony were going to return in a few days, and she’d be
perfectly fine until then. Three days ago she called again, told me that
apparently Anthony’s problem was a reaction to the dye in the fabric of some
clothing he had borrowed for the trip, but it was all straightened out now and
they’d be headed back up shortly. That same day I noticed the Xterra parked
beside her Bug. I had to run into town and so I just assumed the helicopter had
come and taken them back to where Emily was.”

Doc stood up and started pacing. “Then all of this stuff
started about the sickness, the President shutting down the Internet, all that.
I tried to get her on the satellite phone but nothing would go through. Yesterday
afternoon I was talking to Sally, asking her if she thought Emily would be OK
now that the helicopter had taken her guide and the other fellow back up there,
and she said that no helicopter had landed when I went to town. She had been up
manning the gate the whole time I was gone, trying to organize the big rush of
campers entering Ravenwood . . . she’d have heard it. I went down and knocked
on the door of the Gulfstream. No answer. We were getting swamped then,
everything was very chaotic, as you know. Since that time I’ve had zero sleep,
I don’t imagine you’ve had much either.” He stopped pacing and looked at me.
“Eric, what if Derek or Anthony were infected the first time they went up, what
if their symptoms didn’t develop until a few days later?  Or even the best case
scenario, what if Emily hasn’t been exposed . . . even that would mean she’s
still up there in the middle of nowhere, all alone.”