Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (83 page)

I nodded.

“Well, the very first time Michelle and I met them at
the campground, they were playing a video game called Crysis . . . with a ‘y.’ Another
word for crisis is danger, and the hero in the video game goes by the call sign
of Nomad. That was the password for her encryption.”

“Amazing,” I commented.

“Ain’t I though,” my uncle said with a wink.

“No,” Walter added, “Eric means that it’s amazing that
an old fart like you still plays video games instead of going out and getting a
real job . . . and speaking of which, the boys all chipped in and bought you a uniform
for your new career.” Walter reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a
white tee shirt. He unrolled it and snapped it in the air to reveal a series of
large bullseyes that had been drawn with permanent marker in strategic
locations on the shirt. Each bullseye had a crude arrow pointing towards it
with a single word description of the major organ that lay beneath. At the
bottom center of the front, a small arrow pointed downward. Scrawled next to it
were four words, “Too small-don’t bother.”

I busted out laughing, and a moment later I was joined
by everybody else, even my uncle.

When the laughter had settled down, I refilled my cup
of tea and took my seat. Michelle and I tag teamed the next twenty-five minutes
with details of our trip to Devils Lake, and the room got real quiet when I
described my encounter with the black-eyed lady. After I finished I stood and
stretched, and then walked back to Max and sat down next to him as he chewed
and licked on the remaining chunk of bone.

“Anybody got anything else they want to say?” Walter
asked.

I raised my hand and everybody swiveled towards me
expectantly. After a few more pats on his haunches, I left Max alone to finish
his treat and walked back to my seat. It took another minute to compose my
thoughts. I exhaled deeply and looked around at the faces staring back me.
“Take a minute and think about every encounter we’ve had with the infected.
Think about the different ways this sickness seems to affect people. Now add in
what Michelle said about how the ghouls were stationed in the backyards of the
cabins.” I trailed off as they tried to follow my train of thought.

“You want to give us a little bit of a hint about
where you’re headed,” Uncle Andy offered.

“No, because what I’m about to say makes sense to me,
but it might not to you. Now keep in mind this is pure speculation, but think
again about how the different types of infected act.”

“You’re talking about the red-eyed ghouls and the
ferals?” Mike asked.

“Not just them. As far as I can figure, we’ve seen at
least four . . . and maybe five . . . different ‘species’ of ghoul. You’ve got
your basic run of the mill ghoul. Red-eyes, gray skin . . . kind of slow until
they get riled up. These are by far what we see the most of, correct?”

Heads nodded around the circle.

“Then you’ve got the feral. It has yellow eyes to
match its piss poor attitude . . . this one is fast and violent.”

“We’ve also got the one that stinks like rotten fruit
and drools everywhere,” Michelle said.

“Yep, although I can’t say for sure what eye color
they have or what purpose they serve.” I looked around the room as I continued.
“And I’m not sure whether that thing that VW changed into was something
different, or just a larger version of a red-eye, but that brings us to the
last type that we know about—the ones with black eyes like Sam and I
encountered.”

When nobody commented, I repeated my statement from
earlier. “Think about the different types and how they act. What does that
remind you of?”

Estes—quiet up until this point—raised his hand. “It
reminds me of the military. You’ve got your grunts on the bottom, and the ones
up the chain of command that are giving them their marching orders.”

“Exactly, but let me try it another way,” I said.
“When I was in college, there was a grad student—Dwayne Grigsby—who was
specializing in structural engineering. His premise was to look for efficient
examples of engineering in the natural world. Beaver dams, wasp nests . . .
anything at all that might serve as inspiration. He ended up in the biology
department with freshmen and sophomores assigned as his guinea pigs for field
research. I was one of them. That’s how I got to spend two weeks in Africa as a
research assistant my sophomore year.”

“Africa?” Amy said. “Were you studying prides of
lions?”

“No, the creatures we were looking at were about a
thousand times more vicious and organized.”

“Baboons?” Dave offered a guess.

I shook my head. “Remember why we were there . . . to
study natural engineering.”

“Ants?” Shawn suggested.

“Close . . . the creatures that we looked at were
termites. In Africa they build these giant columns of dirt above the ground
that are honeycombed with chambers and passages. I’m not an entomologist, but
it’s pretty cool—which is actually a little play on words, I guess—how the
termites build those towers. The different chambers, tunnels, and exits
function like a natural heat sink to cool the colony. Even on the hottest days
the mound regulates its temperature to within about two degrees. Dwayne was
hoping to use their design to build more efficient skyscrapers. Anyhow, that’s
kind of a side point, because what I’m trying to get at is the social
organization of a termite colony. The bulk of it is made up by the worker class
. . . the grunts. Above them you have the soldiers. These guys are specialized
for warfare. Most of them have large heads and strong mandibles. They can also
secrete a pheromone that triggers the workers and other soldiers to frenzy and
attack. Then you have the reproductive caste, of which the main element is of
course the queen.”

I looked around the room for other questions, but
nobody had their hand raised so I continued. “I’m not saying that the
correlation between the social structure of termites and the way the ghouls
seem to organize themselves is identical, but I do see a lot of similarities. In
Africa, when we located an active mound, we would position a series of probes
at various levels and depths. Those probes would then monitor temperature,
humidity, and airflow fluctuations within the mound. In addition to that, we
also used a camera to get a view inside one of the main chambers to record and
analyze traffic patterns. Believe it or not, there’s a really big push—or was,
I guess—to adapt the transportation dynamics of animals into data migration
systems for computers. Not to get off on a tangent here, but the
telecommunications industry was already basing their cellular routing services
on an algorithm developed by studying the movement pattern of a flock of
starlings. Anyhow, when we positioned the camera to study traffic patterns in
one of the larger chambers of the mound, we generally pissed off the residents.
The workers would try and contain the damage and start repairs while the soldiers
would attack the camera lens. Eventually things would settle down and we’d get
a view inside the chamber. The camera that we used was not a typical video
camera; it was more like a surgical camera for medical procedures and was made
up of three small tubes; one of which held the camera lens in a fiber optic
cable, another one held an infrared light, and the third tube was what we
dubbed the ‘sucker.’ It was basically a hollow flexible line that we could
manipulate toward the lens or the light. The reason we needed it was because
the termites kept trying to cover those with cellulose.”

I took another look around the room and didn’t see
anybody with the ‘deer in headlights’ look, so I kept going. “Here’s what I’m
getting at—sorry for being wordy. When we first used the ‘tricamera’ as it was
called, the sucker tube was actually a blower tube. It was designed to get rid
of the dust on the lens and light, and it also worked for blowing termites off
the camera system. The problem was, when we knocked the worker off the camera
lens, it triggered an aggressive response that would spread throughout that
section of the mound. The next thing you know, we’d have soldier termites
swarming the tricam again. When we reversed the airflow, we were an able to
vacuum off the workers one by one when they started blocking the view . . .
without triggering an aggressive response. Everybody with me?”

Heads nodded all around.

I held up the suppressed Ruger .22. “I think the same
rules apply with this. Every time we’ve had to engage the infected with typical
weapons, we trigger some type of reaction that brings the whole pack down on
us. But when we’ve been able to use stealth and suppressed weapons, it’s almost
like we can take them out of the picture without causing a ‘swarm’ response
from the rest of the ghouls—even when we’re dropping them right in the middle
of the pack.”

“Interesting point,” Walter said.

“How many other silencers do we have?” Sam asked.

Walker exchanged a glance with Uncle Andy before
answering. “We have a grand total of two. The one on Eric’s .22, and the one that
came with the submachine gun we took from Ray . . . ahem, ‘officially.’”

“What do you mean?” Amy asked.

“He means,” Uncle Andy replied, “that before the crap
hit the fan, the only legal way you could possess a suppressor was by paying a
special tax and applying for a transfer with the ATF. After you were approved,
which usually took about four months, you’d get your silencer.”

“And . . .?” Amy threw a questioning look at my uncle.

“Well, Walter is quite the wizard with a metal lathe,
and I’m pretty sure he’s got the schematics and materials to build several
others.” Uncle Andy looked around the room with one eyebrow raised. “But of
course, there would have to be some type of change in the federal laws, or
maybe even, oh . . . I don’t know, a global catastrophe . . . before he would
consider doing that type of work illegally.”

“Yeah,” Walter nodded towards Uncle Andy, “what he
said. Plus, there are several other considerations that we’d need to factor in,
like the time required to build each one, as well as scrounging or reloading
subsonic ammunition.”

Sam grunted and looked at Amy. “We can talk more about
this later, but for now let’s file it under the ‘good idea’ heading and move
on.” He turned and nodded towards me. “You were saying?”

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts. “Where was
I?”

“Shooting ghouls and sucking termites.” Sam’s response
didn’t skip a beat.

“Right . . . so now let’s look at the ghouls. There’s
definitely some type of social structure that they’re operating under. I don’t
really understand it, but I can promise you it’s there. Another thing that
bothers me even more is how we’re starting to see examples of strategy and
cunning. Maybe I’m wrong here, but from everything I’ve heard and experienced,
I just can’t escape this creepy feeling in my gut that these things are
learning . . . adapting.”

Several murmurs and nodding heads were my answer.

“Now with that in mind, let me slip back to social
structure for a minute. As far as I can tell, your basic red eye ghoul, or
creep, or sicko—whatever you want to call it—is kind of like the worker
termite. They’ll respond with enough stimuli, but in general they don’t think
or act too well on their own. However . . . if you put them in a large group
and then add some soldier termites—or in our case, ferals—they become a
formidable force. Also, when ferals are added to the mix, we start to see a
more intense and organized response from the ghouls. An example of that would
be when I popped into the campground office. I was fifteen feet away from a
ghoul that didn’t immediately attack. As a matter of fact, it basically left me
alone until Michelle and Sam started firing outside, then, of course, the shit
hit the fan. You all know what happened in there.”

Estes raised his hand. “I don’t know what happened . .
. you mind filling me in?”

I spent a few minutes telling him about our search and
rescue mission at the campground, and our narrow escape by ditching the
Explorer in the lake.

“I’ve got one last point to share, and then I’ll shut
up.” I stood and refilled my cup again, and then stayed upright and paced as I
went on. “Doc is much more versed in the medical field then I am, but there’s a
few things, well, a lot of things happening that to my understanding are
physiologically impossible. We’re all mammals. We’re warm blooded, live
bearing, milk producing creatures with hair. Our physical and mental
capabilities are regulated by our bodies’ complex and interconnected systems,
and they have to function within a very narrow range. If they get out of whack,
we get sick. Too far out of whack and we die. We gain our energy by our dietary
intake, and our body uses what it needs and gets rid of the rest. We sweat, we
spit, we poop. When we’re tired we sleep, and when we’re cold we put on winter
clothes or sit there shivering. If we don’t eat, we starve. What I’m trying to
say is that for whatever reason, we’re not seeing the infected follow the path
that all of our understanding tells us they should. It’s been below freezing
for several nights recently, and yet we’re still running into ghouls that are
walking around without shirts on. You’ve all heard about the horrific injuries
that some of them have sustained—and basically ignored. All of that bothers me
in ways that I can’t even begin to describe, but that’s not all. Do you
remember that first night down at the marina when we went to investigate the
ghoul standing by the road and ended up getting into a major firefight?”