“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?”
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 wha
ck 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?”
Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending Page 71