Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (73 page)

“So you ran to the veterinarian’s office from there?”
Michelle asked.

I already knew part of that answer, but I didn’t
interrupt as Shawn continued. “No, we couldn’t. As soon as we got outside by
the lake, I could see—and obviously hear—another skirmish out by the road, so I
made a command decision and we went to ground. And by that I mean we hid our
butts underneath an old aluminum boat that was laying upside down in Clem’s
backyard. I had the pistol and about seventy rounds of ammunition, but only one
magazine. Not the best setup for a two mile moving firefight, as I’m sure you
can imagine. Anyhow, it took us almost two days to play hide and seek with
those sickos and get to the vet. It was literally ‘move ten feet-wait ten
minutes’ all the way. There were several times that we almost bought the farm,
and by the time we were halfway there, we only had twenty-three rounds of ammo
left. We were in a bad situation though. The next piece of cover was over a
hundred yards away, and there were about a dozen of those gray things
meandering toward the clump of reeds that we were hiding in. Mack’s leg was
hurting him real bad, but we didn’t have much of a choice. If we ran, I’m sure
they would’ve seen us, so we just hunkered down and prayed. Those sickos walked
right up to the edge of the reeds, but they never came in. They were so close I
could hear them breathing and smell their stench, but they say that God watches
over angels and fools, and He managed to keep the two fools from North Carolina
from being discovered. Then He did a few more miracles. A bunch of shooting
started up again closer to town, and the pack that was next to us started
moving that way.” He swiveled his head back and forth between Michelle and I.
“Both of you probably know this already, but I’m sure that noise attracts those
things.”

“Yeah, we’ve experienced that ourselves.”

“I figured. When that bunch moved away, we made a
break for it and ran. The next cover was a mound of old, rotten railroad ties
about twelve feet tall. On the backside of those we found the body of some guy
in a ghillie suit, although it wasn’t helping him to blend in to the railroad
ties very well. He was dead and gray, but I didn’t see any obvious wounds on
him. I got the .308 rifle and fanny pack from him. We spent the first night
sleeping underneath the crawlspace of somebody’s shed. The next
day—yesterday—it seemed like more and more of those things were popping up, and
it took us even longer. We had to shoot our way out of a few jams, but we made
it past the sewage plant at dusk.” Shawn turned and nodded towards me. “You
know the rest.”

I finished off my cup of tea and told Michelle about
what happened. Everything from the veterinarian’s office to the barn, and all
the way through our last ditch sprint through the bison field. When I told her
about the black-eyed lady, Michelle’s brow furrowed.

“That’s almost exactly what Sam told us,” she said.
“Remember, the lady with black eyes that he ran into in the traffic jam.”

“I remember.”

“You wanna tell me?” Shawn asked.

Michelle and I spent the next thirty minutes or so
giving Shawn the rundown on as much as we could think of. When we finished, he
sat quietly and stared out across the water. The midmorning sun was warming me
up to the point where I had to unzip my jacket, and I leaned back and stretched
my arms above my head. Every muscle that I moved protested the intrusion, and
after another moment of discomfort I settled into a relaxed slouch with my head
resting against Michelle’s shoulder. Her fingers reached down and ran through
my hair, and I drifted further down until the back of my neck was draped across
her upper thigh.

I watched as she raised the Styrofoam cup and took a
sip, and then tilted her head backwards and stared at the sky. After a few
minutes of silence she began to speak. Her voice was low and even, and her
fingers continued their absentminded caress as she spoke.

“The first wave came about an hour after dark. We were
all upstairs. The sleeping pills were starting to wear off of mom, and she was
sitting up in bed and talking to dad. Faith was cuddling with her rabbit in the
corner. I had both of the upstairs windows open just in case I had to shoot,
and I was taking turns watching through them with the night scope. I had one of
the rocking chairs wedged in the stairway for an alarm, and it had about
fifteen empty beer bottles balanced on the seat. Like I said, about an hour
after dark I heard some noise from the road. I had been watching out the back
window at the time, so I moved across the room and looked out front. There was
a . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . a ‘mob’ of those gray things
standing on the road seven houses down.”

Her finger stopped their caress and she looked down at
me, holding my eyes briefly before gazing toward Shawn. “These things are
not
mindless.”

Her emphasis on the word “not” rang like an iron
funeral bell, and the resonations of that thought vibrated in unison with
several of my own.

“There were ferals out on the road as well—at least
two that I saw at that point—and I whispered for everyone to stay quiet. I was
hoping they’d just pass us by.” Michelle’s free hand ran through her own hair,
and she breathed out a deep sigh. “I watched as the pack on the road just stood
there milling about for a few minutes. I still don’t know what they were waiting
for, but something triggered the ferals, and they split off and crashed through
the bottom windows of that cabin. A few minutes later they came out and
rejoined the group on the road. Then the entire mob walked and stood in front
of the next cabin. Same process—only this time somebody was inside. Gunshots
rang out and I heard a lot of screaming . . . and then the whole swarm crashed
into the house.” Michelle tapped me on the head and I sat up on the bench. She
stood and walked to the railing, staring down into the water for a full minute
before turning back to face us. “They were systematically going to the cabins
one by one.”

“Damn,” Shawn voiced.

Michelle nodded in agreement and continued. “I watched
it happen with a third cabin, and by then I was sure that they’d eventually get
to us, so I figured our best bet would be to make a break for Dad’s bass boat
and get out on the water. I don’t know if we would have been able to pull it
off, but in any case it was a moot point because when I looked out back, I
could see five or six ghouls spread out in the back yards of the cabins. Do you
understand what that means?”

I did, but it was Shawn who volunteered it first. “It
means they were containing their prey before they attacked . . . cutting off
the escape routes.”

Michelle nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, and that means
there’s a thought process that’s driving their actions.”

“The ferals?” Shawn asked.

“That’s what I figured,” Michelle answered. “I’m just
going out on a limb here, but as much as I can recall, every time we’ve
encountered a group of infected, they seemed, I don’t know, ‘not very driven’
unless we stirred them up . . . or . . . if there was a feral with them.”

Michelle’s words were striking chords with my own
unspoken thoughts, but I kept quiet.

“I didn’t have many other options, so I decided to
take the battle to them. When they came out of the next cabin, I took out one
of the ferals. The other one disappeared off my radar for a few minutes, and
the rest of the pack began acting really agitated—like they had been wound up
but not pointed in a direction. The second feral showed himself about a minute
later, and I scattered his forehead across the rear bumper of a beat up Mustang
parked down the road. I don’t know what I was hoping for . . . maybe that the
other ghouls would just scatter or wander away with the ferals out of the
picture. They didn’t.” She walked over and sat once again on the bench, shaking
her head and staring at her shoes. “There was a third feral. I caught a flash of
movement, but I couldn’t get off a shot before it bounded out of my angle. In
any event, the jig was up and the pack headed for our cabin. I started firing.”

I reached out and put my arm around her waist, pulling
her close as she continued. “It’s really just a blur from there. They managed
to get into the cabin pretty quick, and I put Dad at the top of the stairs with
the other AR-15 and a flashlight. Mom was reloading magazines as we used them,
and Faith was ferrying the empty and full magazines back and forth. I was
trying to thin the numbers before they got to the cabin, and it seemed like the
fight went on for hours. It was probably only a few minutes though. The second
wave came about midnight.”

I scooted even closer and moved my hand to her shoulder.
The gesture wasn’t lost, and Michelle laid her hand over top of mine. “It was
bizarre,” she said, “like they already knew that the first three cabins had
been gone through earlier that night. I watched the pack come down the road and
stand in front of our cabin. One of the stinky ghouls that foam at the mouth
was with them, and there were at least two more ferals. They didn’t come here
right away though; they went into the cabin where Faith’s grandparents lived. I
pretty much figured we were toast anyhow, but I had a wild idea that I wanted
to try. Dad had an old compound bow in the closet upstairs, and we wrapped a
few pieces of cloth around some arrows, and then sprayed them with bug
repellent. As I got ready to fire out the window, Dad lit the cloth. My first
shot went way off target, but the next two were close enough.”

“To what?” Shawn asked curiously.

“To the propane tank underneath the barbecue grill on
the front porch.”

“Seriously?” Shawn’s eyebrows arched skyward.

“Yeah. I wasn’t sure if it would work, and it didn’t
really, at least not like I had hoped. It would’ve been nice if the whole place
would have blown up like you see in the movies, but like I said, that didn’t
happen. I shot the tank with the AR, and it punctured and started wobbling. It
was still attached to the grill with a piece of short hose, and as it was
skipping around some of the gas made contact with the flaming arrows. Like I
said—no big explosion. It was just a little ‘poof,’ and then a fireball about
the size of a small car went up. The tank didn’t blow, but it started shooting
out a torch of flame about four feet long. That flame didn’t last long, but it
did manage to catch the cabin on fire. I’m not sure if that helped or not in
the long run, but it lit up the whole street for a good two hours, and I was
pretty damn busy during that time. I don’t know where they were all coming
from, but it seemed like a never ending line. Two of the ferals somehow climbed
up the cabin wall and almost made it through the front window, but then the
porch roof gave away and crashed down. I probably wasted a lot of ammo, but it
got to the point where I almost didn’t care. The third wave came about 4:30 AM.
There weren’t as many—maybe seventeen or eighteen total—but there were at least
five ferals, and they didn’t come down the road . . . they came in from the
side toward the lake. I didn’t see them until they were almost on top of us.
Just a few minutes into the attack, a pair of those amber-eyed monsters managed
to push through into the stairway just as Dad was changing magazines.”

Michelle paused to catch her breath, and then she
steadied herself and continued. “He was pulled right out of his wheelchair,
like he was sitting there one second, and then in a flash he was gone. Somehow
he managed to throw the rifle up the stairs, and as they were tearing into him,
he was blasting away with his pistol. I remember screaming and running over
just in time to see him . . . his body . . . get pulled away over top of the
mound that was already in the stairwell. One of the ferals that had gotten him
was dead, and the other was trying to climb upstairs, but there was something
wrong with it. Maybe Dad had managed to shoot it in the spine or something. I
don’t know. I dumped an entire mag into its face. I don’t remember much after
that. I was just sprinting back and forth between the windows and the stairway,
shooting at anything that moved. When the attack finally stopped, so did I. Our
ammunition was almost gone, and I remember hugging Mom and Faith, and then I
moved a dresser into the stairway to at least buy me some time if something
else came from there. I shut the back window and moved to the front where I
could look out onto the road, and I just kind of collapsed against the wall and
waited for a pair of gray arms to burst through. I was so damn tired. The last
thing I remember thinking was that you should have been back a long time ago,
and that meant that you were probably dead. I can’t recall anything else until
I heard your voice coming from my headset.”

“Hey,” I said as I hugged her tightly, “I’m not dead.
And neither are you.” She tilted her amazingly green eyes toward my face and
stared like she was double, or even triple checking my statement as I
continued. “And Faith and your mom are safe, and we’ve even scored a pile of
medicine that I’m sure is going to be worth its weight in gold, or at least
ammunition in the near future. Heck, we’ve even picked up a pair of southern
boys,” I nodded toward Shawn, “that probably know which end of the rifle barrel
to point at the squirrels.”