Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (75 page)

My breakfast was cold ravioli. Partially due to the
fact that I didn’t mind eating it that way, and also because the fuel canister
for my camping stove had been used up between the fish last night and the
multiple pans of coffee this morning. After I ate, our convoy headed out with
Mack at the helm. We kept the boat at a low cruise—fast enough to make
reasonable progress, but slow enough for everyone to get a little more rest. I
remembered to mount the reflex sight on the .22 before helping Shawn and
Michelle reload the empty AR-15 magazines from our one remaining ammo can. After
that, the batteries in our flashlights and radios were switched out. Michelle
took the helm, so I sat back on the bench and closed my eyes for a minute. The
memory of the large swarm of ghouls in the traffic jam by the bridge came to
the forefront, and I dedicated some time to a possible solution. I ended up
with three options—all of them risky. It was a call I didn't want to make by
myself, so I rounded up Michelle and Shawn for their opinion.

“My main concern is that we’ll be spotted by the
swarm. There were at least 150 of them, and they were less than 200 yards south
of the bridge. They could be anywhere by now, even on top of the bridge.
Another concern I have is that
if
we’re able to slip through, I don’t
want to chance leading them to Tater’s house.”

“What about the kids in the root cellar?” Michelle
asked.

“I haven’t forgotten about them either,” I answered.

“It seems to me,” Michelle turned her head to face me
as she spoke, “that we’re trying to plan for an unknown. For all we know, both
sides of that creek could be lined with infected, in which case we’ll be
spending a lot of time in the middle of Silver Lake. On the other hand, it may
be smooth sailing all the way up to Tater’s house. What I’m trying to say is
that we won’t know until we get there.”

“I agree,” I said, “which is why I’ve come up with a
few options. I know which one sounds the best to me, but take a listen to all
of them before you make a decision, and feel free to suggest something else,
OK?”

They both nodded, so I continued. “Option one is for
us to switch the motors on the jon boats and convoy upstream at the same time.
Kind of a ‘once and done’ type of approach. We stay together and deal with any
issues we encounter. Option two is similar in that we all leave at the same
time. The difference would be the tailing boat would stay a reasonable distance
behind the lead, and would proceed forward only when the lead boat—the scout
boat—gives the all clear. Option three is different. We’d leave the larger
motor on the small boat and have two of us head upstream all the way to the
bridge . . . maybe even a bit farther. This would be primarily a scouting
mission to see if the way is clear. If the scouts run into any interference,
they either handle it if it’s small enough, or turn tail and run downstream.”

We talked it over, and both Michelle and Shawn voted
for option three. It had been my choice as well. The rest of the journey to
Silver Lake—almost fourteen miles—passed in relative silence. We made two stops
on the way. The first was a restroom stop for everybody on a small wooded
peninsula. The second one was about a mile from our destination . . . another
potty break for the coffee drinkers, and a sight check for the .22. It was dead
on.

“Michelle, can you hear me?”

“Yeah, but you’re a little crackly. Not too bad
though.”

“We’re at the bridge. We’ve got three ghouls moving
slowly right in front of us, but they’re the only ones we’ve seen so far.”

“Can you take them out safely?”
she asked.

“Yeah, I think so,”
I whispered.
“Give me about ten minutes to make sure they’re alone,
and then we’ll whack ‘em and call you back.”

“10-4.”

I was hunkered down across the front seat of the small
bass boat with the suppressed rifle in my hands. Shawn was with me, and had
proven himself to be a more than adequate pilot as he steered the small
aluminum craft through parts of the channel that had been barely wide enough to
turn around without scraping the bank.

“What do you think?” He whispered over the deep,
bubbling chug of the idling outboard motor.

“Let’s wait and watch . . . see if they’re really
alone.”

He said nothing in reply, and I kept my rifle pointed
in the general direction of the ghouls as I scanned the rest of the area by the
bridge. As far as I could remember, it looked unchanged. The three infected—two
women in their forties and an elderly man—were kneeling by the creek bank next
to the bridge foundation about forty yards ahead. As we watched, they lowered their
faces to the water and drank. When they finally finished, they stood and began
pacing back and forth, like they were curiously trying to figure out how to
cross the water, but were unaware of the bridge just above their shoulders.
Another five minutes of observation brought no changes, so I whispered over my
shoulder.

“OK, it looks like we’re going to have to take them
out. On my signal, move us forward and close the distance—not too fast though.
Keep your eyes on them, and the moment you see them notice us, cut the throttle
and hold position. Ideally, I’d like to be pretty dang close before I take the
shots . . . especially from a boat.”

“Got it,” he replied.

I settled into position, and after another fruitless
glance around the area, I motioned the boat forward. We cut the distance in
half before the elderly ghoul tilted his head slightly sideways and began to
moan.

“Keep going . . . get me closer,” I hissed as I tried
to steady the crosshairs on my target. Shawn pushed the boat another seven
yards upstream before angling it toward the opposite bank. As soon as the
bottom of the boat began to slide on the water flattened grass, I braced myself
and focused. With a faint screech, the aluminum boat came to a halt against the
vegetation and silt that lined the edges of the streambed. When the
deceleration sway ended, I lined up the illuminated reticles and brushed the
trigger.

Thack-thack.

The old man with red eyes slumped forward and settled
to the muddy ground as I shifted my aim.

Clack-thack . . . clack-thack . . . thack.

The two gray-skinned ladies fell—one of them pitching
backwards and landing motionless against the concrete of the bridge, and the
other one dropping forward into the current of the creek. Her thrashing, vibrating
body was still churning the water even as she floated face down past us, and
Shawn followed her with the barrel of my AR-15 until her quivering ceased.

“Three down at the bridge. Waiting to see if we
stirred up anything.”

“10-4,”
Michelle answered.

We waited another five minutes with no encounters, and
then using mostly hand signals instead of voices, Shawn and I got the boat
oriented downstream in case we had to make a speedy exit. The engine was left
idling in neutral, and we quietly worked our way up the shallow bank and onto
the bridge. There was nothing. No ghouls, no boys, no movement. Nothing. A
thorough search with binoculars yielded no other clues, and I radioed our
status in to Michelle. When I finished, Shawn and I crept over to the farmhouse
where the boys had indicated they were staying. As we took turns leapfrogging
and covering each other, it was obvious to me this wasn’t Shawn’s first rodeo,
and I made a mental note to ask him at some future point. All of our stealth
amounted to nothing when we found the doors to the root cellar torn off their
hinges. I knelt next to the entrance and shined my flashlight down the
crumbling cement stairs. The picture that greeted me below reminded me of the
time I had seen a dump truck-sized pile of fermenting guts behind the swine
processing plant during a high school field trip with my agriculture class. I
bowed my head and tried to think of something—anything—that I could offer as a
prayer for the kids. I don’t remember what I ended up saying. It was either a
bible verse or the lyrics to a Christian song. Maybe both. I straightened up
and turned to find Shawn staring into the root cellar as well.

“I don’t suppose you know what’s going on . . . I mean
what’s
really
going on and causing all of this.” His voice was dry and
flat as he stood beside me and looked at the carnage in the subterranean
shelter.

I pointed the barrel of the .22 toward a blood covered
baseball hat partway down the stairs. “A couple of days ago, the kid that was
wearing that hat asked me the same question.”

“What was your answer to him?”

“The truth. I don’t have a clue.”

“Some people are saying it was a biological weapon in
our food. I’ve also heard about polluted water, and a terrorist attack on our
blood supply . . . hell, a lady at the last convenience store that I was able
to buy food at was screaming to anybody that would listen about how it all got
started from contaminated toothpaste.”

“You know what that means, don’t you?” I asked him.

“What?”

“If the world’s supply of toothpaste is the source of
this plague, then all you rednecks in North Carolina will probably be safe.”

The look on his face moved rapidly from comprehension
to amusement, and then he cracked into a wide grin and spit a stream of tobacco
toward my feet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

We turned and trotted back to the boat, and a few
minutes later we were motoring downstream. It took us about twenty minutes to
cover the three miles of gently curving creek and make our way back to Silver
Lake, and once there we switched the outboards on the bass boats. Supplies were
moved over, and we arranged ourselves with Shawn and Michelle in the smaller
lead boat, and Mack, Faith, Lynn and I right behind them in the larger boat.
Our trip upstream was uneventful, including the stop to pick up the hidden gas
can and truck key, and a little less than an hour after we started, our two boat
wagon train pulled in behind Tater’s house. A thin wisp of wood smoke drifted
upwards from the chimney, and Michelle hopped lightly to the bank and stood
guard as Shawn and I pulled the boats partway out of the water.

“Tater’s coming,” Michelle said as she leaned her head
toward the skinny form walking around the corner of the house and heading our
way.

I helped the passengers off of my boat, and then
swiveled towards the grizzled face that was now standing a few feet away.
“Morning,” I said to him.

“Back at you. It looks like you were fruitful and
multiplied.”

“Well, we had some free time, so we wandered around
and picked up a few hitchhikers.”

“I can see that.”

I pointed towards the smoke coming from the chimney.
“It looks like your stove is still fired up and working.”

He nodded and chewed on his lips slowly, like he was
teething over the missing piece of fresh hay that should have been dangling
there. “Yup, she’s purring like a kitten. Of course, now that you’re back, I
was wondering if you can help me with another problem that has recently
presented itself.”

I sighed deeply at his words, and my peripheral vision
caught Michelle silently shaking her head and tapping at her watch. “What
problem are you talking about?” I asked. Michelle dropped her face into her
hands at my words, slowly shaking her head in exasperation.

“I put out a pair of traps in a beaver run at the
creek yesterday, and both of them scored. So I was wondering if your crew would
mind helping an old feller eat some of it up before it goes bad.”

Michelle’s expression did a reverse course, and both
of her thumbs turned skyward as Shawn’s southern drawl joined the fray. “Oh
hell yeah . . . anything but fish.”

The inside of the old farmhouse bloomed with a mixture
of wood smoke and frying meat—both of them intensified by the air temperature
that was pushing into the mid eighties. In less than a dozen steps our jackets
were piled on the floor, and the odors of our sweat stained clothing and long
unwashed bodies filtered through into our rapidly thawing noses. Mia was
dipping ragged slices of beaver into a bowl of yellow cornmeal, and then
dropping them into a Dutch oven half full of simmering, popping vegetable oil.
When they crisped to a golden brown just a few minutes later, she scooped them out
with a pair of tongs and set them to drain on a wire rack next to the big wood
stove.

“All I got to drink is water. It’s still pretty toasty
from where I boiled it, so we’ll have to wait a bit before we knock it back,”
Tater offered.

“Maybe not,” I said, “do you have any clean
containers?”

He nodded. “I’ve got three of them five gallon buckets
cleaned up to hold water, but so far we’ve been using it up as soon as we boil
it, so they’re all empty.”

“Give me one, and I’ll use my filter to fill it.”

Tater disappeared into another room for a moment, and
then returned with a plastic, five gallon bucket that still bore the label of
the chocolate frosting it had formally contained. I put my jacket on and then
took the handle from his hand. “Be back in a minute.”

Michelle stood and grabbed her AR. “I’ll go with you.”
She swiveled to face Tater and Mia. “Go ahead and start without us . . . eat
while it’s warm.”

“This ain’t for us, young lady. Ever since you left
we’ve been practically gagging ourselves on these little water cows, and dang
if I’m not plum stuffed to the gills. I just didn’t want them to go to waste,
and your crew showed up at the right time.” He turned towards Shawn and Lynn.
“Dig in.”

The aroma drifting up from the fried mountain of North
America’s largest rodent almost physically restrained me. It took Michelle’s
nudging elbow to get me moving. I slung the .22 over my shoulder and let her
lead me out the door.

At the creek I began filling the bucket with filtered
water as Michelle watched the area for danger. The flow rate from the small
hand pump filter was about one liter per minute, so it was going to take almost
twenty minutes to fill the bucket. Midway through the task, Michelle leaned
down next to me and stopped my hands. Placing both of her own hands on the
sides of my face, she tilted my lips to hers and kissed me—gently at first, and
then harder as her fingers slid around to the back of my head. When she started
to pull away a minute later, I reached around and hugged her tight against me, opting
for another moment lost in the illusion that the world was still sane.

“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping me safe from danger
while I get water?” I asked mischievously.

“The worst danger you’ll ever face is if you decide to
leave me again, because I think I’ll just shoot you myself instead of going
through the worry about whether you’re coming back or not.”

“I missed you too,” I smiled as I reached down into
the grass near the creek and plucked an early dandelion, lifting it towards her
nose and her awaiting hand, “but I prefer to say it with flowers instead of
threatening you with a bullet in the back.”

She returned my smile and we went to kiss again, but
our timing was off and we bonked heads like awkward kids at their first prom.
When our laughter finally stopped, I steadied her head in my hands and leaned
forward. This time, we were right on target.