Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending

by Brian Stewart

  “I’ll take that as an ‘OK,’ then.”

  Chapter 25

  They were gathered in the downstairs living room, seated on various couches, chairs, and throw cushions that were scattered across a thick layer of 1970s era carpeting. It was pea soup green, at least in the sections that had been sheltered by furniture throughout the decades. A worn and faded path crossed the room, stretching from the bottom of the stairs past several side doors until finally ending at the heavily built, metal fire door that led to the garage. Only now the garage was being used as a hospital. The low embers from an earlier log pile still faintly glowed through the open door of an ancient cast iron wood stove, and steaming on the stove’s top were three Dutch ovens. One of them held a fragrant mixture of mulled cider, complete with several floating sticks of cinnamon bark. The second pot was half filled with an apparently caustic solution of formaldehyde and turpentine. Whatever it was practically singed Eric’s eyebrows when he peered under the lid. Michelle seemed to like it though, and had a large earthenware mug of the solution cradled directly under her nose. Her eyes were shut, but her dimples gave away the huge smile hidden behind her cup. Eric had gone with option number three—hot chocolate. Judging by the shallow depth of the liquid, so had almost everybody else. He had been formally introduced to the older couple, Bucky and Frederica—Fred for short—a few moments ago, and they had expressed their condolences about Uncle Andy. Eric raised his eyes from the cup of hot chocolate to the garage exit. He still hadn’t stopped to see his uncle. Somewhere inside, it almost seemed that as long as he could keep putting that off, everything would be OK. Or maybe not. He made a silent promise to himself to go see his uncle—and Emily—as soon as the meeting was over.

  Bernice spoke first. “I ain’t much for words, and I’m awful tired, so let me go first and then I can get to bed. Like you know, we’ve been dividing up food and supplies for the people from the campground.” She looked around the room and added, “All of you as well. What I mean is that as long as you stay here, we’ll feed you from the community cupboard—as long as it lasts. If you decide to leave, you’ll walk away with the same gallon of rice and other miscellaneous supplies that we’re handing out tomorrow morning after breakfast. That’s all I got to say besides ‘good night.’”

  She turned to leave but Doc called out, “Bernie, hold up a minute. Before everyone disappears, there’s something that Callie found that’s very interesting. Callie?”

  Bernice stopped her retreat and settled against the arm of the couch as Callie stood. It took her several near-acrobatic maneuvers to step around Thompson and through the seated crowd, but she ended up in the corner of the room by the stairs.

  “It’s really by accident that I found this, and to be honest, Doctor Collins and I can’t shed any light on what it means, other than to say . . . well, you’ll see.” Her golden earrings danced and jangled as she tossed her head and beamed. The backpack riding over her shoulder on one strap was shrugged to the side, and as she reached into the main compartment, her dark brown eyes and brilliant smile turned toward Eric. “Don’t forget I need to take a look at your ankle tonight.”

  Long fingers, still somehow retaining a tan, withdrew her tablet computer from the backpack. After a moment’s fidgeting, the screen flickered to life.

  “Have you ever seen those thick books full of trivia that people keep in their bathrooms? I have a couple that came as a free eBook download when I got this tablet last Christmas. Some of the stuff in those books is pretty funny, by the way,” she added.

  The tiredness in the room was evident with the lack of responses.

  “Anyway,” Callie stretched out the word with a sigh and shake of her head, “I remembered reading something in one of those books about how the human race breaks down, percentage wise, into different categories.”

  “Humor me,” she said, “stand up if you’re left handed.” Scott immediately stood up, and Callie remained standing as well. Her nose slowly bobbed as she did another count. “OK, that’s two people. We have fifteen total people in this room right now. According to the almighty bathroom trivia book, about ten percent of the people in the United States are left handed. Ten percent of fifteen people equals one and a half people. We’ve got two, so that’s pretty close. Go ahead and sit down for a minute, Scott.” She flipped her finger over the screen and scrolled.

  “OK, let’s try this again. If you were born in a foreign country, stand up.” Callie dropped her back against the wall and slid down into a squatting position, taking herself out of the ratio. As she did, Doc, Fred, and Dave stood.

  “Three people, that’s twenty percent. According to this list, we should be around twelve percent. Remember though, we only have fifteen people. If we had ten times that amount, the numbers would probably smooth out somewhat. Go ahead and sit down.”

  “Moving on, I’d like you to stand up if you’ve ever had a pet cat.”

  Doc and Fred stood for a second time. They were joined by Sam, Walter, Bernice, Amy, and to everyone’s surprise, Crowbar Mike.

  “Alright, that’s seven people—a little less than half. According to the book, about fifty percent of the people in the United States have owned a cat, so we’re right on, there. Go ahead and sit down, and we’ll try one more.”

  Amy and Mike stopped at the Dutch ovens for refill before returning to their chairs.

  Callie scrolled again, and then announced, “OK, stand up if you have a tattoo.”

  This time, it was Sam, Mike, Walter, Amy, and Rebecca.

  “OK,” Callie said, “that’s five.”

  Eric looked over at Michelle and cleared his throat. Loudly. When she didn’t respond, he added a few thunderous, whooping coughs. The spectacle wasn’t lost on anybody present, and Rebecca pointed an accusatory finger at Michelle.

  “Ohhh, Michelle . . . did that fair skin of yours suffer under the needle?” She teased with a laugh and several shakes of her finger.

  Michelle shot Eric piercing laser beams of guaranteed payback from behind her mug as Amy chimed in, “Michelle is an inky? Well I never . . .”

  Dave, his son Scott, and Callie began to chuckle as Michelle blushed, and then Thompson’s deep voice cut through the mirth, “Show us.”

  “Yeah,” Eric choked out, “show us!”

  Michelle’s face turned beet red as she tried vainly to compress her entire body behind the coffee cup in her hands.

  The crowd erupted in laughter at Michelle’s predicament, and Eric joined them as he thought back to the story of her tattoo.

  Michelle and a few of her girlfriends in college had traveled to San Diego for spring break during their junior year. When they arrived, she realized that a certain “area” had been neglected—grooming wise—during the long North Dakota winter. Her girlfriends had talked her into getting a professional job at a local salon before they hit the beach, only the obviously foreign salon worker had misinterpreted her directions and waxed everything. Eric chuckled almost uncontrollably as he remembered Michelle, bug-eyed and silently mouthing a repeated exclamation of, “Everything.” The last night of their vacation, and after way too many drinks, the girls had wandered into a beachside tattoo and piercing boutique. In a fit of temporary insanity, Michelle had let the girls decide on the design for her—something to remember their trip by. It was a classic. A one inch tall stick figure pushing a lawn mower. Down there.

  The laughter and good natured ribbing went on for a solid minute longer, and then everybody gradually settled down as Callie continued. “OK, five,” her eyes rose toward Michelle, “plus one more, equals six. That’s forty percent. According to the book, about thirty percent of people have tattoos, so we’re maybe a little higher there.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Bernice asked with a yawn.

  “Yes ma’am, I’m getting there. Down at the store I had all of the campground residents fill out a single page medical form. This was before the firemen showed up and any decisions had been made, or even tal
ked about. At least that I know of. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about, because each of you filled out the same form earlier tonight. Once we collected all the forms, I started entering them into a little spreadsheet program on my tablet . . . just so we’d have something in place without shuffling through the individual papers. Overall, it was a fairly typical mix that you’d expect to see in a random cross section of medical patients. Until you looked at one column.”

  Callie glanced at the screen for a moment before continuing, “Last time . . . stand up if you have type O blood.”

  Heads swiveled left and right, but nobody moved.

  Callie pointed a finger at the tablet. “I have several medical books and study guides on here. Most of them deal with physical therapy and various aspects of patient rehabilitation, but some of them are from my short stint as an EMT. In one of those, I found a reference to the spread of blood types across various ethnic backgrounds. If you don’t take into account ethnicity, then about forty percent of the people in this room should have type O blood. It’s the most common blood type in the world.” She looked at Thompson. “African Americans have an even higher likelihood—about fifty-three percent—of having type O blood. Hispanic people are even higher, and the Native American population,” she turned to Sam as she finished, “is almost exclusively type O.”

  Eric thought back quickly to his recent count. “We have sixty-two people. That count consists of everybody at the store and up here—including my uncle and Doc’s niece. How many—total—type O people do we have?”

  Callie shook her head. “Zero.”

  “What are the odds of that happening?” Fred asked in her slightly accented speech.

  Doc shook his head, “It doesn’t. Or at least the odds against it are so astronomically high that the statistical likelihood borders on winning the lottery ten times in a row.”

  “Why didn’t we catch this earlier,” Michelle asked, “I mean, it’s not like we haven’t been busy trying to stay alive, but everybody here also filled out the first medical form on the day we swept through the campground.”

  “Two reasons,” Doc quipped, “the first one is that we barely had time to take a hard look at those original forms. And the second one,” he did a quick scan around the room before shaking his head, “is that it wasn’t on there. I photocopied those forms from a blank one I had laying around—one from my practice. Think about this, when is the last time you had to list your blood type on any medical form unless it was for a surgical admittance? What I’m trying to say is that the question of ‘what blood type are you’ isn’t a standard question. The only reason we even included it on the new ‘short form’ was because Andy ended up getting a small transfusion from Eric. Andy still wears his military dog tags which list his blood type, and Eric’s is the same.”

  “How did you know?” Eric asked.

  Rebecca nodded towards him. “You told us.”

  “I did?”

  “You were exhausted,” she answered, “and probably don’t remember.”

  Eric said nothing in reply, but glanced again toward the metal door.

  “OK,” Walter turned to face Doc, “does this knowledge help us in any way?”

  A quick shrug accompanied his answer. “I don’t know. Again, the likelihood that this is an accident does not seem remotely feasible. Therefore, we can make a broad assumption that this infection is somehow related to a person’s specific blood type. I want to caution you on assuming that because you’re not blood type O, you’re immune to this pathogen.” He stood and frowned, trying to meet each of their eyes as his own expression dropped into dead seriousness. “Brenda,” he stated firmly, “was blood type B.”

  “How do we know that? She didn’t fill out one of the new forms.”

  “She had a medical information card. I found it among her personal effects . . . after.”

  Silence descended over the room as they digested the new information. As they sat lost in their own thoughts, Walter stretched to his feet and refilled both his pipe and his mug of cider. Once again, the aromatic essence of scented smoke coiled through the room, pausing only briefly to dance with the simmering liquids on the cast iron stove.

  Sam raised his hand. “Just so you all know, earlier this evening Eric asked me to escort one of the firemen back to the truck, with a brief stopover to take a look at the practically brand new winch that Eric lied to the paramedic about.”

  “We needed to get him away from Ray for a minute.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was inside the store the whole time they were talking. I heard everything. Anyway, Wayne . . . that’s Lieutenant Wayne King from the Richland Fire and Rescue Squad . . . seems to be a pretty straight shooter. He wasn’t very forthcoming about details though. If I had to guess, I’d say that he was worried about repercussions if they found out he spilled the beans.” Sam took a drink out of his cup as he pondered for a moment. “What I did find out was that he definitely does not like Ray Ingram. At all. Apparently there have been several ‘incidents’ at the shelter that Ray was directly involved in. There also seems to be, if I read him right, a growing faction within the shelter that Mr. Ingram is grooming as his personal voting bloc / enforcement squad.”

  Mike flipped up an index finger for attention. “I want to kick in some food for thought. Don’t misunderstand me though, OK?” He took a sip from an ivory colored ceramic cup stenciled with a large blue jay before continuing. “I’m not saying I like the guy. As a matter of fact, he reminds me of the non-union ‘supervisors’ they used to bring fresh out of college and onto the rigs. Guys that ain’t never seen a wrench that wasn’t in a textbook. Little snot nosed desk jockeys that think they know everything about working oil, but end up getting somebody hurt before they run home crying to mama.”

  “Good thing you’re keepin’ an open mind about ‘em.” Thompson cut in.

  “Yeah, well, you know what I mean. Anyhow, like I said, I don’t like the guy. But it just occurs to me, if I was in the same situation, with the same resources . . . what would I do different? Here we are, circling our wagons and doing our best to stay alive. And we have what, maybe a hundred people at the campground that might possibly be infected. They’re over in Richland with the likelihood that thousands of ghouls could show up at their door. Again, I’m not trying to defend the dude. And I don’t like him. But, you know what they say about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

  “Well,” Sam interrupted, “while you’re walking in those shoes, let me throw out a few speed bumps that the lieutenant managed to slide in. Remember the other shelters? The ones they lost contact with? Well, it seems ol’ Ray was in charge of the security team that was supposed to provide cover as the other shelters were moving supplies. That little armored vehicle that he mentioned has a mobile repeater unit to increase their radio range. Coincidentally, it stopped working during the move in, and that’s why Ray’s team supposedly never responded. Could it have happened that way? Sure, but the lieutenant found it awful convenient that some of Ray’s posse were manning the APC at the time. Plus, just before it all went down, one of Wayne’s firemen friends overheard a certain bearded paramedic making plans to move all of the weapons and ammunition into shelter Yellow. And did I mention the APC repeater works fine now.”

  “I told you he’s a scumball,” Callie sneered.

  “Uh-huh,” Sam nodded.

  Preacher Dave spoke. “Those people that voted to go to the shelter need to know this. They might change their mind.”

  “If you tell them, it will most definitely get back to Ray, and I’m guessing that would be very bad for Lieutenant King.”

  “Why don’t you offer to let him stay here?”

  “I did,” Sam answered, “and he immediately refused. Wouldn’t say why, though . . . but I’m guessing it has something to do with his family.”

  The soft pop and hiss of the embers filled the empty space of the sudden quiet that settled over the room. The stillness dragged on for a solid minute
before Walter cleared his throat. “Well, that’s food for thought.” He brought his hand to his mouth and gave a short smoker’s cough. “One more thing ‘afor we break up. I’m told that Michelle, Thompson, Sam,” he inclined his head toward the garage, “and Andy have already talked about this. But I want to be on the same page.” A deep, throat wetting gulp of hot cider, followed by several puffs on his pipe interrupted his speech momentarily. “I don’t want to be one of them things. Neither does Bernie. If either of us come up sick, we got no hard feelings if you put us down. Don’t give us the opportunity to hurt no one. Does everybody understand what I’m saying here? Does anybody feel different?”

  Nobody did, and a quick show of hands confirmed everybody’s wishes.

  “Alrighty then, that’s settled.” Walter turned to sit but paused halfway, adding, “Now, don’t any of you impatient youngsters with itchy trigger fingers pop me before my time. I’m old. Not every part of my body works like it did when I was twenty, but just because I’m an old fart, that doesn’t mean you have to fight to be first in line with a bullet each time I cough.”