Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (82 page)

“I thought you were tired of fish,” Michelle
snickered.

“I am,” Shawn answered as he sat back down, “but I can
just about promise you that everybody will get really tired of rice and beans a
lot faster.”

Twenty seconds of quiet contemplation descended on the
room, and then Sam—still seated with his boots propped on my bed—tapped his mug
with the brass case of an empty 5.56 cartridge. “If no one else can see it,
I’ll be happy to point my finger at the elephant in the room.” He drained his
beverage and then circled his eyes around the gathering. “The fact is . . .
that at some point in the near future we’re going to reach a point of
equilibrium. Either artificially, or intentionally—but it’s going to happen.”

“What are you talking about?” Mike asked.

“It simple math. Somewhere in the not too distant future,
probably much sooner than we’d like, we’re going to have to acquire more
supplies . . . or reduce our consumption load.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Walter answered
dryly, “but we’ve already agreed that we’re not kicking anybody to the curb.”

“I’m not suggesting that we give people the boot,” Sam
answered. “I’m just pointing out a few realities. In order to support our
current load, the simple fact of the matter is that we’re going to need more
stuff, and I’m not just talking about food.”

“Are you thinking about going back to the campground
for the medicine?” Dave asked.

Sam was silent for a moment, and then he shook his
head and ran his fingers through the patch of silver in his hair. “Listen, I
know that we’re all thinking about it on some level, but an hour from now, or a
day, or a week from now when the adrenaline wears off and we hopefully find
ourselves still alive, we’re going to start realizing that our lives would be a
lot easier with some creature comforts of the old world we used to live in. So
yes Dave, we need the medicine, but not just from the campground. I’m talking
about long-term survival. Almost everybody here showed up with pretty much
nothing more than the clothes on their back. Doc is right . . . we need more
medication. Amy is hitting the nail on the head by trying to establish a sense
of familiarity with yesterday, and Shawn is correct about the food limitations,
but I guess I’m talking about the broad view. We can try and survive on the
bare minimum, but that’s only going to get us so far before we go stir crazy.
We need to be thinking
long-term
. We’re going to need everything from food,
bullets and fuel, to medical supplies and equipment. But we can’t stop there.
Basic things that we take for granted are going to become priceless.
Toothbrushes, tampons, and toilet paper . . . books, shoelaces, salt, hand
sanitizer . . . things like that, and about a million more. I know we’re going
to have to make due and make sacrifices—I get that—but a month from now is not
the time to start thinking about what we wish we would have.”

My uncle cleared his throat. “Excuse me for not
standing. Doc Collins tells me that I’m suffering from another bout of lead
poisoning.” A few chuckles lit the room as Uncle Andy adjusted the crutches
across his lap. “Doc is correct. So are Shawn, Amy, and Sam, but it’s about
time that I add a little bit of full disclosure to the mix. A long time ago,
Walter and I decided that we would put back a few things for a time in the
future that we both figured would eventually happen. Well, it’s here. I can’t
honestly say that the current circumstances were one of our ‘most likely to
occur’ scenarios, but the facts are that we’ve got some things—a lot of things,
actually—that I imagine people in other locations are desperately needing. I’m
not saying that we’ve got all of the bases covered, though. Our supplies were a
continual work in progress, and there are gaps—some of them quite large and
obvious. With that said, Walter and I talked a bit this morning, and we want to
put all of our cards on the table. Between here and another location about
twenty-five minutes away, we have enough basic food stocks to support ten
people for two years without any supplemental supplies. If you do the math with
our current population, that equals about six months of ‘very basic keep you
alive-but won’t be the captain’s buffet’ food. We also have a substantial
amount of ammunition, weapons, and other sundries like soap and shampoo. I want
everybody to know this so you can take some of the worry off of your mind. Now,
with that all said, Sam is exactly right. Right now is the time to get our
ducks in a row and start planning for the future.”

A loud, crunching
snap
broke the silence as Max
shattered the deer leg bone he was gnawing on, and then Mike flipped his hand
up. “OK, I ain’t got a whole lot to say, but maybe this will help. I’m a pretty
good welder, and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut that I can get the cargo door
to the half track working again. Right now it’s welded shut, but like you’re
saying, eventually we’re going to need to go out and scout or gather, and I
think it would be awful nice to have that security.”

“Damn straight it would,” Walter answered, “and we
should have all the equipment here that you’ll need.”

“Hey,” I interrupted, “does somebody want to tell me
how we ended up with an armored car?”

My uncle, Walter, and Sam started chuckling, and to my
side I saw Amy grimace and bury her face in her hands with a snort.

“What?” I asked again.

Amy looked my way and said, “Have you heard anything
about Little Jimmy?”

“The sniper?” I answered.

“Yes.”

“Yeah, a little bit from Walter and Sam, why?”

“OK, I’ll start,” Amy offered with a laugh.

She told me about Leah noticing the reflected flash
from the sniper scope, and then I got the story of how Sam and Thompson had
paddled a canoe down the lake before light to put themselves behind his
position. Walter chipped in and told me about the plan to cover Sam’s approach that
night with a counterfeit firefight, and then Sam finished with an obviously
embellished, epic tale of his battle against the rotund monster. Amy took over
again and filled me in with her objections to the methods that were being
considered to extract information from Little Jimmy.

“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity now
extremely piqued.

“We were in Walter’s office,” Amy said, “and Andy
starts telling me how he’s going to use four things to get the information we
need. I guess I was picturing claw hammers and red hot pokers heating up in a
bed of coals.”

At the other side of the circle my uncle grinned
widely.

“So then,” Amy continued, “Andy rummages around on the
top of Walter’s desk and pulls together a few things that for the life of me I
couldn’t conceive as being dreadful.”

“What were they?” Michelle asked.

“He had a rubber band, a bottle of hand sanitizer, a
little battery operated desk fan, and a paper clip.”

“What the . . .?” The confusion painted on my face
attracted a pointed finger from Amy.

“That’s the same look I had,” she said.

My uncle laughed again and took over. “We had this big
ol’ hoss tied in a sitting position with his back against the picnic table and
his right arm stretched behind him. It wasn’t uncomfortable or anything, but we
had taken his right hand and immobilized it to a piece of plywood with a bunch
of holes drilled through it. So there he was—bag over his head so he couldn’t
see, left arm tied to his belt, and right arm extended behind him with the hand
splayed out and attached to the plywood that was screwed to the top of the
table.”

Sam kicked in. “So then Andy starts in on this guy
about how he’s going to need to tell us everything . . . about how he’s going
to
want
to tell us everything. And then he slathers the hand sanitizer
on the big guy’s fingers. Keep in mind it was about forty degrees in that room.
Then Andy starts spinning some tall tale about a Korean secret police
interrogation technique that intensifies pain receptors. He tells him that they
take a wood chisel and a mallet, and millimeter by millimeter they hack off
somebody’s fingertips until, after about twenty whacks, they make it to the
very first knuckle. Well, Little Jimmy just about wets his pants right then and
there spewing all kinds of information, but Andy turns the fan on and lets it
blow across the guy’s hand that’s covered in the sanitizer. After about a
minute or two he squirts on some more and just lets the fan keep blowing. Then,
just as Jimmy is ready to give us the keys to his girlfriend’s chastity belt
and anything else he can think of, Andy tells him that in order for us to
believe him, he’s going to have to experience the consequences of what will
happen if we think he’s lying.”

“What did you do?” I asked my still grinning uncle.

“Everybody who’s ever got their fingers really, really
cold—almost numb—and then snapped in a trap or pinched in a door can tell you
that it hurts like all get out. So the fan blowing across his hand was
evaporating the sanitizer and cooling his fingers like a North Dakota winter,
and that’s when I used the rubber band to shoot the paperclip against his
fingertip.”

I winced at the description, as well as the memories
of multiple times that I had pinched my own fingers in the cold. Walter and Sam
chortled along with my uncle as he continued. “For all that Jimmy knew, we had
just chiseled off one of his fingertips, and he was most eager to tell us
anything and everything that we asked, and that brings us back to your original
question about how we’ve acquired an armored car.”

“Do you remember the guy that showed up here that
first night with Ray?” Mike asked.

“Wayne . . . somebody,” I replied.

“Yeah, Wayne King—the lieutenant at Richland Fire and
Rescue. Anyhow, he’s the one that told Sam about his suspicions that Ray’s
cronies had somehow sabotaged the mobile radio repeater on the armored car.”

“I remember that,” I said.

“Well,” Mike continued, “it turns out that not only
was that true, but in addition to the intentional disruption of the radio, the
truck also had a bunch of bad internal wiring—not only for the communications,
but also for the joystick controlled .30 caliber rifle mounted on top. What
they ended up doing was bypassing the old systems and running some new
cables—get this—on the outside of the vehicle. Are you with me so far?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, the other thing we learned is that the APC has a
flip up bullet screen that covers the windshield. When it’s deployed, there’s only
a single, narrow slit that you can see out of. I guess it used to function with
a lever and cable from the inside, but we learned that the only way to do it
now was to get outside of the vehicle and lock it in place manually.”

“OK.”

“So Ray’s battle plan, as we learned, was to hold the
armored car at the rear until it was needed for either fighting or
intimidation. Callie and I positioned ourselves where we thought it would park,
and we were pretty close ‘cause it ended up stopping less than a hundred yards
away. When we got the word from Walter, we trotted up and Callie snipped the
cables and cut off their communication and gun, and I jumped up on the hood and
ran a strip of tape across their view port. We could hear them calling on the
radio for help, but of course with the cable cut it wasn’t going anywhere. Then
I knocked on the door and told them that if they didn’t come out slowly and
quietly, we would detonate the blob of C-4 we had just attached to the roof
over their head. As you can imagine, they decided to cooperate.”

“I imagine they did,” I commented.

“What about you and Michelle? Are we going to get the
whole story of what happened at Devils Lake?” Uncle Andy asked.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you that in a minute, but I’ve got
another question for you first . . . not that it really matters anymore, but
I’m just kind of curious.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” My uncle shifted his leg
with a slight groan as he answered.

“I don’t know a lot about computers, but how did you
break the encryption on Samantha’s laptop?”

“I didn’t,” he replied. “Most modern encryption is
relatively unbreakable unless you have the correct key or massive amounts of
computer power to try a brute force attack. I didn’t have either, but Samantha
was smart enough to leave a clue that I could figure out. The hint said, ‘Tell
Andy he’s the hero in danger,’ remember?”