Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending (84 page)

“Kind of hard to forget,” Sam answered.

“I know, but what I’m saying is that when you ran the
spotlight along the edge of the lake so we could see what was down there, there
was a ball . . . a cluster . . . of infected. Something was driving them to
congregate together for warmth, and I’ll bet the reason that Scott was seeing
the ones by the road move in and out was because they were switching places
every so often to stay warm. That tells me that there is an instinct for self
preservation  . . . an awareness of self on some level, almost like a hive
mind. As a side note, some species of ants and termites have been known to form
massive clumps made up of thousands of individual workers and soldiers. The
whole swarm continues to move and shift, creating friction that keeps them
alive in cold weather. Honeybees do something similar as well. I know I said
this was the last thing I wanted to mention, but something else just came to my
mind.”

“More good news?” Walter voiced as he fired up his
pipe.

“Not hardly.” I looked around the circle, stopping to
meet as many eyes as I could. “In the campground office, I would have sworn
that the pile of infected was just that—a pile of dead bodies. But the more I
think about it, the more it leads me to believe that these things are somehow
able to become dormant.”

“Like hibernation?” Michelle asked.

“Yeah, exactly like that. Now, even though a lot of
mammals do it, humans can’t. It’s not just as simple as a choice to sleep for
six months. It’s an actual biochemical process that enables it . . . and they
shouldn’t be able to do it.”

I sat back down and let them ponder my thoughts in the
silence of the tractor shed. After a few minutes I absentmindedly brought out
the sketch that Fred had created that morning. The tiny white spots in the eyes
seemed to draw my focus, and my mind flew back to the night in the barn when
she had turned those obsidian orbs toward me.

“What’s that? Amy asked.

“It’s a drawing that Fred did of the lady I saw in the
barn.”

“Can I see it?” she asked.

I shrugged and passed it towards her.

“Spooky,” she commented as she studied the pencil
drawing. When she was finished she passed it back to me, and then Dave held out
his hand for a look. I sat there quietly as Fred’s artwork made the complete
circuit, finally stopping at Sam who held it at arm’s length. A tiny tickle of
warning began to scratch at my gut as he looked from the drawing to me, and
then back again.

“Fred drew this?” he asked.

“Yeah . . . why?”

“And this is the lady you saw in the barn?”

“Yeah.” My hackles began to rise with the look on
Sam’s face, and I nodded towards him. “Why, does it remind you of the lady you
saw on the highway south of Fort Hammer?”

“No.”

“Well what then?”

His eyes lifted and locked onto my face. “No . . . you
don’t understand . . . it doesn’t remind me of her . . . it
is
her.”

Behind me, a leg bone shattered in the silence.

“What?” I
asked as Sam tapped on the drawing in his hands.

“This girl . .
. the picture that Fred drew of the black-eyed lady you saw in the barn . . .
is exactly who I saw on the road that night. The same chick that I blew the
brains out of.”

“How can you
be sure?” Uncle Andy asked.

“Because I was
fifteen feet away when I pulled the trigger and turned her forehead into the
Holland tunnel.”

“Wasn’t it at
night?” Amy questioned hesitantly.

“Yeah, but I
had my flashlight blasting right at her. I know what this sounds like, but I’m
telling you . . . this girl right here,” he poked at the paper again, “is the
same girl that I deep-sixed on the highway that night.”

“Well that
about figures,” Doc sighed heavily. “The more we try and figure things out, the
deeper into the mud pile we get.”

I looked
across the hay table toward Estes. His face was still and neutral, but his dark
eyes were flickering with deep thoughts. “Captain, is there anything you can
add to this?”

Estes looked
over towards me and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen that
black-eyed lady, but after the chopper smashed into the school I was a little
busy trying to avoid barbecuing my ass.”

Estes’ fingers
were drumming out a silent rhythm against the digital camouflage of his newly
washed and dried uniform, and I was just starting to consider another refill of
tea when he continued.

“Very few of
my guys made it out of the school. Perkins, Keene and I were already out in the
depot yard when the Black Hawk came down. Part of the wreckage hit the fuel
bladders, and all three of us would have been toast if we hadn’t dove into the
M113. After the initial blast, I got on the horn and
tried again to get everybody to head to the trucks. If anybody heard, they
didn’t answer. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyhow, because
those things massed against the fence and just pushed it over. It was  . . .
gruesome. We made it out with one truck and one hummer, and over the next day
we lost about half of the people with us, most of them from injuries they’d
gotten in the escape. I lost several more just trying to get onto that damn
highway out there.”

“Captain,” I asked, “how many infected were in the
group that pushed through the fence?”

Estes shook his head. “I don’t know exact numbers, but
before the helo went down, its spotlight was showing a whole line of them.
Rough guess—maybe 300 plus.”

“That’s a lot. Michelle and I saw a group just a
little bit smaller near the bridge we crossed underneath heading towards
Pelican Lake, and Shawn had a group of about 2000 in sight at the Devil’s Lake
airport.”

“If that many show up here, we’re going to have a very
bad day,” Dave said.

“Yeah probably, but something else relating to that
has got me worried.”

“Explain,” my uncle said as he adjusted his wounded
leg.

I looked toward Amy. “Amy, if you were going to do
some type of semi-complicated team building exercise for a thousand people
crowded in an outdoor amphitheater, what are the odds that you’d only have to
give them the instructions once?”

She answered immediately. “Probably about zero. If you
take a crowd of a thousand people, even if you give them a base level command
like ‘stand on your left foot,’ only a small percentage will do it as you
envision.”

“As you envision? What do you mean?” Walter asked.

“You’ve got a thousand people. Your command is ‘stand
on your left foot.’ In most crowds, less than half are actually listening to
you, so now our rough potential is five hundred people. For easy math, let’s
break down those five hundred people into equal groups of one hundred each.
Call them groups A through E. Here’s what will happen. Groups A and B will just
stand there and look at each other for a second, and then ask each other for
some type of confirmation. ‘What did she just say?’ . . . ‘Which foot are we
supposed to stand on?’ Group C heard you clearly, but most of them will ignore
you. Group D will make halfhearted attempts to follow your command, but most
will quickly lose interest while they go back to thinking about whatever else
was a priority in their mind when you issued the command. And that brings us to
group E. They heard you, they’re interested, and they stand on their left foot.
But,” Amy shook a finger towards the ceiling for emphasis, “because your
command can be interpreted differently, roughly twenty-five of the people in
group E are not standing with their right foot off of the ground. What they’re
doing instead is standing with their right foot resting on top of their left
foot, because your command was ‘stand on your left foot.’”

“Yeah,” I nodded and stood. “Now think again about the
infected. Whether it’s been just a pair of them walking up Walter’s driveway,
or a few dozen that erupted from the campground office, or the hundreds that
busted through the fence at Fort Hammer . . . how often have you heard them
make any noise besides hissing or groaning?”

Nobody answered.

“And yet,” I continued, “in every instance that I can
recall, the ghouls have operated with a level of organization that goes far
beyond just a primal instinct.” I stopped and looked around the room. “So how
are they communicating?”

“That’s a good question,” Uncle Andy said.

“Yeah, but I don’t have any answers.”

“How do termites communicate?” Mike asked.

“I think it’s through a complex pheromone system, but
that brings us back to something else that would biologically violate
everything we know about human physiology.”

“Maybe that’s part of our problem,” Michelle
responded. “I mean seriously . . . we’ve got ghouls that can withstand insane
amounts of physical damage without slowing down. We’ve got ferals that can
vault six feet in the air. What else is it going to take before we get our
thumb out of our ass and realize that our preconceived notion about how these
things
should
act is going to get us killed.”

Across the room, Estes frowned and shook his head.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one to notice.

“What is it, Kevin?” my uncle asked him.

“Honestly, I feel like I’m 0-2.”

“About what?”

“I’ve had two opportunities to find out some
information about this infection, and both of them ended up with me walking
away carrying nothing but jack squat.”

“What do you mean?” Doc Collins said.

“Back at the school . . . just a few minutes before
everything turned to crap, I was sitting down talking with
Major
Sullivan. He was one of the doctors in the med unit.”

“I remember
him,” Uncle Andy said.

“Yeah, I
figured you would. Anyhow, he was just starting to tell us about the infection
when we got the call that the Black Hawk was inbound.”

“What did he
tell you?”

“Not much. He
got cooked in the explosion and died in the back of the truck a few miles
outside of town. All I can remember was that he asked me if I knew what was
really
going on, and that his specialty was neuroimmunology. Anyway, that was one
chance that didn’t work out.”

“What’s the
other?” Dave and Mike asked at the same time.

“Oakley.”
Estes tilted his hand in the general direction of the marina.

“What about
Oakley?” I asked.

Estes took a
few minutes and filled us in about the conversation he’d had with Oakley in the
back of the cargo truck. “So now besides a dead doctor,” he continued, “I’ve
got a glorified nerd that
could
have helped us and
would
have
been able to explain the shit, except he doesn’t actually
know
anything.
0-2, like I said.”

“Hold up there, chief,” Uncle Andy cut in. “Exactly
what did Oakley say about why he didn’t know anything?”

“He said that he didn’t have the information yet. He
was supposed to review it before the conference they were flying to in Canada.

“Were those his exact words?” my uncle asked.

“Uh . . . maybe . . . maybe not. It might have been
something similar. Why?”

“I’m just thinking that your little pet geek might
still be holding out on you.” The gray rubber crutch tip poked at Estes.
“Kevin, this might be really important. Take a minute and try to think of his
exact words. Did he really say that he didn’t have the information yet?”

I watched as the captain closed his eyes and rubbed
his forehead. After a moment his eyelids creaked open slowly, and then his
eyebrows furrowed in aggravation. “No, that’s not what he said. His actual
words were that he ‘hadn’t yet been able to access the information,’ and that
he ‘didn’t currently have access to the information.’”

“We need to get him up here pronto,” Uncle Andy said
coldly.

“Yeah, so I can kill him,” Estes hissed.

“Where’s he at right now?” Walter asked

“My sergeant has him down in that big warehouse where
we parked our vehicles. Sergeant Keene is pretty good with an engine, and he’s
going through the hummer and the A3 to make sure they’re not going to let us
down. He’s got Oakley with him for an extra pair of hands.”

“Eric, take Captain Estes down to the marina and fetch
the mysterious Mr. Oakley, would you?”

I stood and nodded. Estes followed my lead as I headed
toward the door.

“Low key . . . keep him friendly and unaware,” my
uncle’s voice chased us.

In less than ten minutes we were back in the tractor
shed, accompanied by Sergeant Keene and the mousy-haired Oakley.

I returned to my seat, but after whispering something
to his sergeant, Estes stood and glared at the scrawny man who sat nervously in
the center of the circle.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Uncle Andy asked.

“I can only assume that you want me to tell you what I
already told the captain.”

“No,” my uncle exhaled heavily, “not the whole thing,
just the ending.”

“The ending?”

“Yeah,” Estes barked, “tell me again why you’re
useless.”

Oakley gulped uneasily. “I’m sorry sir, I’d like to
help but I’ve already told you that
I don’t currently have access to the
information you’re looking for.”

My uncle smiled and shook his head. “You see, Captain
Estes . . . it’s all about asking the right questions.”

I watched Uncle Andy grimace as he dropped his leg and
twisted towards Oakley. “Lieutenant, I know that your behavior has been drilled
into your head over and over again. I get that, and I understand the national
security implications that would have applied under different
circumstances—under normal circumstances. From all accounts you’re a pretty
sharp fellow, and I know you’re not blind to what’s going on. These are not
‘normal circumstances.’ You’ve got nothing left to lose, and no panels of
military brass to report to. It’s just us, of which you’re a part of, and
them—the infected. Do you understand that?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes sir, I understand.”

“Fair enough. With that understanding, let me rephrase
Captain Estes’ question. What I want to know is, ‘how can we get you access to
the information?’”

Oakley looked around the room. Eleven sets of eyes
bored into him. The twelfth set, golden with flecks of silver, also looked up
from the final shard of bone to join with the others. After another moment
consideration, Oakley dropped his head into his hands and mumbled. “We’re going
to need a pair of pliers and some rubbing alcohol.”