Fade to Grey (Book 1): Fade to Grey

by Brian Stewart

  “Black? So far we’ve seen red and that sickly yellow amber,” Andy said.

  “Well this chick had eyes blacker than the ace of spades. She was less than twenty feet away from me and my flashlight was full on her face. It was like, I don’t know, evil. Like I was expecting her head to do a 360. And she was looking right at me, right into me . . . and those soulless eyes kept staring at me as she slowly raised her arm and took another bite, literally ripping off a golf ball sized chunk of her forearm. She freakin’ chewed up and swallowed a piece of her own arm.”

  “Damn!” Thompson said. “What did you do?”

  “I turned her head into an ‘effin’ canoe is what I did,” Sam’s voice was raised in agitation as he answered.

  “Oh snap, that shit is extreme,” Thompson replied.

  “Yeah well, it gets worse. Because as soon as I dropped the exorcist chick, I hear this hissing behind me and I spun just in time to dodge a bear hug from some fat biker type. Most of his face was already gone and I think his leg was broken, but that didn’t stop him from going for me again. And I was backpedaling, trying to put some distance between us because I didn’t want to take a chance on catching some splatter when I shot. I managed to get about a car length from him before I pulled the trigger three or four times. I’m not exactly sure where I hit, somewhere in the face or neck I imagine because he dropped like a bag of hammers. I sprinted the rest of the way to the cruiser. When I got there the guy in the back seat, your guy, was gone. No blood or broken glass, just gone. Maybe somebody found the second set of keys in the front and sprung him, I don’t know. Don’t really care either. All I know is that I fired that puppy up and shot out into traffic.”

  Sam stood up and stretched for a moment before upending the remaining tea into his mouth. He gave a quick shudder before saying, “I don’t suppose there’s an extra blanket around here anywhere, is there?”

  “I’m sorry Sam, I should have asked you earlier. I’ve got plenty, be right back,” Michelle said.

  “Thanks.”

  Thompson and Andy put on more water to boil as Michelle went to retrieve some blankets.

  “Pressure is dropping off even more.” Andy indicated with a nod toward the noticeably smaller stream coming out of the faucet.

  “We should fill every single pot, kettle and pan that we can find,” Thompson said.

  “Good thinking, private. Someday you’ll make general.”

  “Not hardly.”

  After the water had been heated up to sufficient scalding temperatures for a new batch of tea, the four of them reassembled by the flickering light of the single pumpkin scented candle. Andy, Thompson, and Michelle all had their coats on, and Sam was buried under several additional layers of blankets.

  “What do you think, trooper, is spring here or are we going to have a few more weeks of winter?” Andy asked.

  “Huh . . . why are you asking me?

  “Because all I can see is your head poking out from the pile of blankets you’re under, and it reminds me of that groundhog up in Pennsylvania that predicts the weather.” Andy chuckled.

  “You want a forecast? OK, here it is. We’re all about to get butt hurt really bad. Everybody. As in everybody in the world. And I’ll tell you why, because that black eyed lady, the one biting chunks of ‘fillet de’ arm’ from herself, she was setting me up. As in . . . there was a malevolent thought process to her actions. She knew that biker guy was coming up behind me. And I swear she purposely tried to draw my attention. These aren’t just people who are sick. I mean get real. I can understand that a physical sickness with high temperatures could affect the brain in a way that you might get delusional, even violent. But this lady, what she was doing was planned. It was intentional. And there’s something else. You remember the old guy with the canon? Well as I was pulling out into traffic I swear that I saw him standing next to the semi. And if I’m right, then it means this infection—whatever it is—can spread really, really fast.”

  Chapter 35

  The silence in the room was oppressive, and everybody shivered a little to fend off the chill that descended with Sam’s words. Another hundred or so faint clicks from the wall clock in the kitchen passed before Michelle spoke. “Andy, what were you thinking earlier? I know you had something on your mind, you want to share?”

  “It’s not a lot really, just some suspicions and observations really, but if you all don’t mind I’d like to hear how Sam got from there to the school first.

  “There’s not a whole lot more to tell actually,” Sam replied. “I kept driving north, got maybe twelve or thirteen miles from the border before I started hitting gridlock. I was able to use the lights and siren to get another couple miles up the road, but after that traffic just stopped. I don’t know how far ahead the holdup was. If you can believe what I learned later, then it was like that all the way up to the border. Anyhow, I knew that sitting in traffic was not going to help anybody, so I cut across to the median and headed south. It took me about an hour to go a mile, and then it sped up a little bit after I passed a long line of buses sitting on the edge of the road. There was another one laying on its side blocking a lot of traffic, and the only way through was barely wide enough for one car at a time. Another couple miles down the road and I came to a detour that wasn’t there on the way up. It was being garrisoned by the military, our military, if that makes any difference. They had the southbound lanes completely shut and were funneling all the traffic onto a double wide county road that was heading west. I really didn’t know where I was headed, but Fort Hammer was the closest place where I thought I might be able to contact somebody, anybody . . . who might have a clue what was really going on. Amazingly, they let me through the roadblock and I drove on down to the town. It was still raining when I got there about, I don’t know, maybe 10:00 PM. Anyway, they still had power then, and I could see auxiliary lights set up at what turned out to be the school. Well, long story short, I ended up at the school working with the people . . . the mayor and a couple of the council members, local emergency services like the volunteer fire department guys, and a bunch of farmers and such. Let me tell you, things would have been a lot better if those guys would’ve stayed in charge. It wasn’t perfect, but it was functional and smooth and basically organized. They were very grateful for my presence, and my presents—remember the trunk full of guns? And like I said they were getting their shit together. That is until the first Humvees showed up. In less than a day there were about one hundred-odd military and support personnel there repeating the phrase ‘national security emergency’ every two seconds. Oh, they were all nice about it at first, you know the old ‘we’re here to help’ bullshit, but by day two the first of many ‘executive orders’ came down the pike. Things like mandatory quarantine, centralized population, and the ever popular ‘no civilian firearms.’ Then they started refusing entry to the townspeople who were looking for safety. It wasn’t long after that when the first ‘decontamination units’ started shooting anything that moved. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have the answers. Hell, I don’t even know what the questions should be. But I watched these pricks gun down a family of seven who were begging to be let through the fence. That didn’t sit well with me and I let the colonel and those two DHS assholes hear about it. Well the next thing you know ol’ Jed’s a millionaire, and they kindly removed my gun from me, and by kindly I mean with that big douche bag Weaver holding his rifle about an inch from my forehead. I got put in the cafeteria with the rest of the townspeople, and that’s where we stayed. We tried to come up with a plan, some way to maybe talk some sense into Colonel Jordan, but we weren’t having a lot of luck. And then there were the ‘security screenings’ that Weaver and his buddies had with some of the locals. It wasn’t too rough at first, but then they start getting out of hand. People would come back with their eyes swollen shut, parents were being told that if they didn’t cooperate their children would be put outside the fence, and there was just no way to address it. I mean reall
y, cooperate with what? Just what in the hell kind of classified information did they think a forty-seven year old divorced schoolteacher would be hiding from them. Anybody who left the cafeteria, or as they called it, the ‘civilian protection range’ would be shot. I saw it happen twice with people who got tired of the BS and took off. Anyhow, the mayor and one of the firemen were convinced that we needed to do this as by the book as possible, the old ‘let’s not sink to their level’ speech. So they formed a ‘committee’ to present their grievances. Sometime in the middle of the night, I don’t know, it had to be after 3:00 AM—did I mention that they took our watches from us? They also took down the clock in the gym, anything that had a time capability on it, like Ipods, kid’s video games, everything. Still not sure why though. Anyway, most of us were still up, and here comes Colonel Jordan and his posse of flunkies into the cafeteria. He was pretending to care, you know, asking people how they were, if there was anything they needed, that sort of stuff. But I got a good look into his eyes and I swear it was like we were a bunch of cattle to him, just standing by until he decided which one he wanted to slaughter. Well, the mayor wakes up all of his committee members and they start hounding the colonel about their rights, but he’s not listening to a word of it. They even followed him out to the hallway a bit. So did I. Things turned into a screaming match from there and, well, it wasn’t looking good until that National Guard captain, Walker I think his name was, starts sticking up for us. I take it that Thompson has filled you in on how that ended?”

  “Yeah, they know,” Thompson said.

  “Well, then you know that after I thumped the suit, the rest of his buddies thumped me. Then they threw me in the cage with the mayor where they spend some quality time with us. And then, just when our hero was about to make a daring escape, he was shot in the back of the head and thrown into a body bag by the fair princess and her valiant champion.”

  “Your daring escape?” Michelle snickered.

  “Yep,” Sam replied, “I was just waiting patiently for that radioactive spider to bite me so I could develop superpowers and bust out of the chains.”

  Everybody chuckled at Sam’s joke, and then the room fell silent again as the information was processed in the semi-darkness. Thompson was the first to speak.

  “So what now?” he said.

  “Andy?” Michelle asked.

  After another pause Andy shook his head, saying, “There’s just too much information we don’t have. And what we do have, minuscule as it is, doesn’t really add up.”

  Sam piped up from underneath his self-mummification of blankets. “You want to start by telling me how you saved my ass?”

  Andy looked at Michelle and said, “Why don’t you tell him, you’re much more eloquent and charming.”

  “Damn straight,” Thompson echoed.

  Michelle smiled at Thompson as she stood. It took about ten minutes to fill in Sam about what had transpired between the time he had left them all the way up until they had found out that Sam was a prisoner. Taking a brief pause, Michelle made a trip to the kitchen and scooped out a large glass of water from one of the filled pots. She had drank so much tea in the past few hours that it was turning her stomach acidic. Water would help. A brief question around the room confirmed that everybody else would stay with the hot beverage. She returned to the living room and continued.

  “So once Thompson told us about you, and we were really just making an educated guess, but who else could it be? Anyhow, Andy came up with this plan that he seemed to think would have a pretty good chance of working . . . provided that is, that we would be able to pull off a couple props. He grilled Thompson, nonstop it seemed like, on as many details as he could remember about the colonel, his command staff, and the school layout—everything.”

  “Yeah, I thought he was going to waterboard me next,” Thompson added.

  “We didn’t have enough water for that,” Andy laughed, “and I feel I should point out that we currently have zero water pressure at Casa de’ Michelle.”

  “So don’t flush the toilet if you pee. Got it,” Sam added.

  “Andy’s plan required us to impersonate somebody from DHS, and that made it essential that we have three things. The first was a suit. Easy enough thanks to my neighbor and a pack of printer paper that Andy swiped from my home office. The other two things were not quite as easy. We needed a black SUV with government plates and a DHS name tag, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Fortunately, we had a good idea where they could be located. Unfortunately we had to go back into town to get them. We didn’t know what we’d run in to, but it was the only way that we could think of. Our plan at first was to haul ass downtown, pulling up as close as we could to where Thompson said the SUV was parked, which was also near where we hoped the bodies of the DHS guys would be, which coincidentally should be where the keys for the truck and the ID badges were. Once we got there we’d assess the situation, and if it looked safe enough then Andy and Thompson would get out of the truck and grab the name tags and keys. Then one of them would drive the SUV out of town. We’d meet back at my house and get everything ready to go. If we ran into any resistance downtown, we’d fight it out if possible, but if there were too many we’d bail and try to think of another plan. Or maybe forget about the whole thing. That was our first plan. And it was actually the plan we went with. Until we got to town. I drove Andy’s truck since I was a lot more familiar with the layout of the streets. That left Andy and Thompson as our primary shooters. We came in some side roads and finally edged out onto the main highway about one hundred yards south of the strip mall where my office was, also where the two guys and the SUV should be. It was really kind of eerie, not that waiting for some zombie to jump out of the darkness and pull your legs off was an everyday occurrence. But the smoldering fires and wrecked cars, and all the buildings with broken windows made it look like a war zone to me. Not that I’ve seen that personally except on television. It was just kind of surreal. I had managed to drive there with just the running lights, no headlights, and as soon as we hit the main drag Thompson says, ‘There’s the truck. One of the guys should be laying right next to it and the other should be on the sidewalk about twenty feet away.’ There was enough light for me to navigate, so I killed the running lights and turned right. Part of our plan was to not draw attention to ourselves if at all possible. You could still hear the occasional blast of gunfire from scattered locations, but we wanted to be as unobtrusive as we could. I pulled up right behind the SUV and we sat there idling, looking in all directions. All we saw at that point though were fires, smoke, and bodies. Thompson and Andy opened their doors and ran to the body by the truck.”

  Thompson jumped in. “No keys, and the ID badge had a bullet hole right in the middle. But we grabbed it anyway. Andy kept guard while I opened the door of the black truck. Just our luck, no freaking keys there either. I’m looking under the mat, above the visor-nothing. Then I hear this little clack . . . clack-clack.”

  Michelle said, “Yeah, I’m in Andy’s truck trying to look in every direction at once, still remembering the feral that clawed down the hallway of my office toward me, and I see Andy raise his shotgun and point it toward the street, kind of over the bed of his pickup. I was waiting for the blast, but a few seconds later he leans the gun against the truck and pulls out the little silenced 22—no laser this time—and he starts popping rounds at something I couldn’t see.”

  Andy cut in. “It was definitely an infected . . . thing. I saw her, a lady that is, shuffling towards us. She walked right through the edge of a little fire. I figured I’d try the noiseless way at first. The third shot put her down.”

  “I knew what he was doing, but I couldn’t see what he shot at and that freaked me out,” Michelle said. “Then I saw Thompson come out of the SUV and say something to Andy. Thompson then took off towards the sidewalk where I could see there were a couple of bodies. A few seconds later he came back over and hops in the SUV and starts it up. As soon as that happened I saw movem
ent, shadows really, in the little strip mall office right in front of us. I yelled at Andy and he grabbed the shotgun and jumped in the passenger side of his truck. Well the next thing I saw was Dr. Sarovol, the chiropractor from the office near mine. He was walking down the sidewalk, still dressed in his blue scrubs. He had a gun in his hand, some type of little revolver I think. Anyway, he stepped over the bodies on the sidewalk where Thompson just was, and then he stops. He just freezes for a few seconds and looks up, like straight up at the sky. And then he takes a little gun and puts the barrel right against his chest and pulls the trigger. It was muffled, but obviously small caliber, probably a 22. But he didn’t go down, he just half crumples over and drops the gun. And then the shadows that I saw before in the office right in front of us came crashing through the window. There were three of them . . . a skinny guy and two kids. They started lurching after the Doc—who’s still stumbling around holding his chest—and I’m just sitting there staring at the scene in front of me. The Doc managed to push the skinny guy away for a moment, but then he tripped over one of the bodies on the sidewalk and went down. The little kids were on him in a heartbeat.”

  “Yeah,” Thompson said, “I grabbed the keys and the ID badge from the guy up on the sidewalk and jump into the SUV. It started right up, but damn it, Andy’s truck was blocking me in. And I didn’t want to lay on the horn for obvious reasons. So I’m sitting there, squirming in my chair because we never checked the back of the SUV for occupants, and I had this creepy feeling that something was going to reach up out of the darkness from the back seat and tear into me. But I also didn’t want to move. I figured if I did it might attract some unwanted attention, so I just sat there with my hands on the steering wheel and eyeballs locked on the little kids having a Doc burger.”