Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (66 page)

I stood there speechless and numb, finally feeling the
cumulative weight of such violent change from the world I used to know as it
crashed down all around me.

“Eric,”
Michelle said,
“are you OK?”

I let her question pass unanswered as I stared at the
pale skin on Lynn’s neck. It was one of the few places that wasn’t swaddled
under obscuring sheets, and there was a faint pulse throbbing in time with the
distant ticks of a windup clock somewhere in the room.

“Eric . . . are you OK? . . . answer me!”
Her voice had the beginnings of unease showing
through.

“I . . . yeah . . . I’m OK. Just hold on a minute.”
I reached down and turned off the radio’s hands free
option, and then swiveled to face Michelle’s dad. He didn’t return my gaze.
Instead, he was staring straight at Lynn, the same neutral and emotionally void
expression welded on his face.

“Did she get bit?” I asked with all the strength I
could muster. It wasn’t much.

He shook his head.

“Well, what happened then?”

He finally turned to look at me, and then reached into
his vest pocket and removed a cigarette, igniting it a moment later with a
silver lighter that was engraved with his initials and years of service in the
military. I had been with Michelle and Lynn at the jewelry store one Christmas
Eve when they had picked it up after the engraving had been completed.

I repeated my question.

He took a long drag on the cigarette, and then blew
the cone of smoke toward the ceiling. After another glance at Lynn’s motionless
form, he tapped the ashes into his palm and shrugged his shoulders. Then he
told me about Lynn. When he was finished a few minutes later, I closed my eyes
and waited for the call that I knew would come any second now. To my surprise,
it actually took almost three more minutes before the radio at my belt crackled
to life.

“Eric, what’s going on?”

I unhooked it and brought to my mouth, pausing in
uncertainty about which direction I should go.

“Eric . . .?”

“Is the area still clear outside?”
I asked Michelle.

“Yeah, are you ready to come out?”

“No . . . you need to come in.”

“What . . . why? . . . I have nothing to say to him.”
Michelle’s voice was immediately on guard.

My mind was reeling . . . inundated with an overload
of chaos that only seemed to multiply with each second I was still alive. Uncle
Andy’s cabin, Walters’s marina, the campground and the people at Richland . . .
Tater and Mia and the boys by the bridge . . . the feral that almost punched my
ticket at the Pelican Bay Ranger Station, little red-haired Faith and the
promise I’d made . . . and now Michelle’s mom. It was stifling. And yet, and
the very core of me, I was shocked to find that I had never felt so alive. And
there was something else. The tickle of an idea that probably had close to a
zero percent chance of success.

“Michelle, you need to come in. And I need you to
bring your iPad with you.”

I could hear the hesitation in her voice, and I knew
that my picture of her gritting her teeth was probably accurate.
“I don’t
want to see him, Eric,”
Michelle replied, unaware that she was transmitting
into open air instead of my headset. Her dad looked at the radio and shrugged,
and then lit another cigarette.

“Michelle, your mom is here. You need to come inside.”

“Meet me at the back door,”
she said immediately,
“we’re on the way.”

I switched the radio back to hands free mode, and less
than a minute later, both Michelle and Faith were inside the cabin. Faith was
nodding her head, almost falling asleep just standing there, so I carried her
up the stairs and laid her on the bed. It was still made, and judging from the
amount of dust on one of the dressers, I doubted whether it had been used at
all in the past year or so. I covered her with a sleeping bag that I found in
the closet, and then went back downstairs.

“Atrial fibrillation?
What are you talking about? I spoke to mom three months ago after her checkup,
and she said everything was fine.”

“She lied.”

“Well that doesn’t surprise me, since she had you as
the role model for truth and honesty.” Michelle practically hissed at her
father.

I was sunk in a chair at center court for the father
daughter reunion, and did my best to not get involved any more than necessary.
There’s a reason why the most dangerous calls for law enforcement officers to
handle are domestic situations, and this one was shaping up to be no different.
Cold anger battled resigned apathy, and the flames of intensity in their words,
or lack thereof, were being constantly fanned by the mere presence of the one
lady in the world who held the power to function as an olive branch. But she
was sedated. I thumbed through one of the books I had seen on Michelle’s
tablet, searching for the answer that I was hoping I’d find while the battle
raged.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Your mom found out, oh, I guess about three years
back.”

“Feel free to volunteer some information without me
specifically asking, Dad.” Michelle put a special helping of venom on the word
“dad.”

“This isn’t my fault. You can blame me if you want,
but it won’t make a damn bit of difference. But if it makes you feel better, by
all means heap it on me,” he shot back with the first tinge of life in his
voice that I’d heard from him.

Michelle had dragged a wooden kitchen chair to the
side of the sofa bed, and was lightly caressing her mother’s hair as she
sparred with her father. “Tell me,” she said.

He took a hit off of cigarette number seven, and then
shrugged his shoulders again. “Like I said, Lynn found out ‘bout three years
ago. She was having a few fainting spells, and some discomfort in her chest and
throat during her exercise class, so she went to see the doctor. A couple weeks
and a zillion tests later, he tells her she has an inoperable heart valve
issue. Said it might be from way back when she had a couple bad cases of
pneumonia as a kid. No way to tell, though. Anyhow, because of the valve . . .
whatever . . . ‘thing,’ your mom ends up with a diagnosis of
atrial
fibrillation. You know what that is?”

“A little.
It’s like a fast heartbeat.”

“Yeah kinda .
. . the doctors explained it to us . . .”

“You were with
Mom?” I couldn’t tell if the slight change of tone in Michelle’s reply was
caused by increased suspicion or a momentary thaw.

Her dad nodded
in reply. “Yeah, I went down to be with her when she was getting all the tests
done.” He was silent for a short time, and I took the fact that Michelle didn’t
throw another dig as a positive sign. “Anyway,” he continued, “atrial
fibrillation, or ‘A-fib’ as they were calling it, causes an irregular
heartbeat, and a lot of times it can get really rapid. The other thing it does
is make her a pretty good candidate for blood clots. Your mom’s got a pretty
bad case of it, they said, but the good news is, or was, that it can be mostly controlled
with medication.”

“What do you mean ‘was’?” Michelle asked, the danger
level creeping back in her tone.

Her dad took a final drag, almost burning the
cigarette down to the filter before he lifted his eyebrows and shook his head.
“Lynn’s on two medicines. One of them is for thinning the blood to help prevent
clots—
warfarin I think it’s called. She’s got almost a year’s supply of
that one over there in her purse, and in a pinch, the doc said she could maybe
get away substituting aspirin.”

“And the
other?”

“It’s the more important one. It helps to increase the
blood flow and balance her heart rhythm. An antiarrhythmic I think they call
it. The one she uses is called
diltiazem. Without it, they said she’d
start getting her fainting spells again, and then a lot of other things could
happen. Things like heart damage or worse.”

“Where’s that
medicine?” Michelle moved to the edge of her seat.

He shook his
head and reached for another cigarette, tapping it into his hand but not
lighting it. “She left it in her car. When all this started a few weeks back,
she called me and said that she was coming up to ride out the flu stuff that
was all over the news. Anyhow, she gets here, and a couple days later one of
the neighbors comes over all crying, saying that her baby was out of formula
and yada yada yada . . . so of course, you know your mom, and she lets her take
the car. Only your mom forgot to get the new refill out of the glove box.” He
flipped the lighter cap open with his thumb and rolled the flint wheel, sending
a shower of sparks to the wick. The tiny, dancing flame jumped skyward, and he
lowered the cigarette until it caught fire. His eyes sought out mine
—
briefly holding my gaze
—
and then turned towards his daughter. They hovered on her for a
moment of contact before skipping across the room to rest on his former wife.
“She’s been out of that medicine for six days.”

I was upstairs, seated on the floor and leaning
against a wall next to Michelle. Her quiet sobs were being muffled by my
shoulder as I held her tightly. On the bed, Faith was sleeping heavily
underneath the pickle bag, a name my uncle had imparted to me the first time
he’d shown me one of his Vietnam era surplus sleeping bags. It was almost noon,
and both Michelle and her father were exhausted from their hour long
mudslinging. I turned my neck and looked out the window onto the road. A trio
of infected, all of them teenage girls, had walked past a few hours ago. Since
then I’d seen only two more. One of them, however, was a fast moving feral that
leapt through the front window of a cabin four lots down. I heard vague
screaming, but no gunshots. About twenty minutes later, the feral exited the
cabin and slunk away. My stomach rumbled audibly, but I ignored it and tried to
focus on the options in front of me. Truth be told, I wasn’t fond of any of
them, and I honestly felt like I was trapped inside of a cheesy video game
plot—every time I managed to survive the onslaught of enemies and obstacles and
reach the goal, some villainous voice would sound in my head saying, “Sorry
Eric, but your princess is in another castle.”

Michelle stirred in my arms, and then mumbled into my
chest. “What am I supposed to do, Eric? We go through all of the trouble and
danger to reach this place, not even knowing if she’d be here, and then we end
up in the wrong cabin with another life in our hands.”

“I know,” I said, “but if we hadn’t found Faith, we
would have never found your mother.”

“But that’s what I mean. It’s like I don’t know what
to believe anymore. We make it here, yippee-ki-ay, but her car isn’t here. One
step up, two steps back. We find a child still alive and unhurt, somehow
surviving in a house with ghouls in the basement and dead—and dying—grandparents
upstairs . . . and she’s able to tell us about my dad’s cabin, and because of
that we find my mom—step up. But now I find out that my mom is going to die . .
. not because of some red-eyed monster, but because somebody didn’t bring back
her car. Two steps backwards. Again.”

I started to say some words that were meant to
comfort, but she shut me down with a finger to my lips. “Don’t say it,” she
murmured, shifting around to sit cross legged in front of me. Both of her hands
reached across the distance and held on to mine. “That’s the other thing. You.
I’ve already told you that you’re the one constant in my life. Everything else
has always swirled, shifted, and changed, but not you, and that’s what I need
more than anything else.”

I looked down and away . . . knowing what was coming
but feeling trapped in the situation nonetheless. Her hands shifted to the side
of my neck, and she tilted my head up until I met her eyes.

“I love you Eric . . . but I also know you,” her
thumbs brushed my earlobes gently. “And I’ve seen that look on your face
before. You’re planning something. Something that you think will save me, but
will probably end up killing you. I can’t have that. I don’t want that. I . . .
need . . . you.” Her emphasis was slow and direct, and she shook my head
lightly with each word.

I understood what she was saying, and my own heart was
screaming at me to just shut up and hug her. All of my heart, that is, except
that one tiny piece at the very core that would give anything . . . do anything
. . . and pay any price if it kept Michelle safe or happy. It was that part I
had to listen to.

“Michelle . . .”

“Don’t say it.”

“Michelle . . .”

“Eric, don’t say it . . . because whatever it is will
be logical and practical and make sense, and then you’ll be gone and I’ll be
alone.”

“It’s not that bad.” I was lying, and both of us knew
it.

Michelle looked at me, her cheeks already puffy and
red from the emotion fraught morning, and I watched as a fresh tear welled up
and descended after its brothers.

“‘Chelle . . . I think I can save your mom.” My words
ended and her tears began. I slid forward and wrapped my legs around her waist,
pulling her tight against me and letting her cry. A moment later I felt a tiny
nudge as Faith, apparently awake now, nestled against Michelle and I. Her
innocent child’s whisper caressed our ears as she attempted to hug both of our
necks.

“Don’t cry. Everything will be all right.”

I reached out an arm and pulled her into the hug. “I
know it will Faith . . . I know it will.”

Now I just had to convince myself.