Fade to Grey (Book 1): Fade to Grey (25 page)

“The red one has stuff that don’t need refrigerated, the blue
one and the orange one got ice in em’ and some stuff that needs to stay cold,
so I’d eat them ones first. The old beat up one was brand new the last time I
let Andy borrow it, so make sure if he’s going to drop one of em’ out of a
moving truck at sixty miles per hour onto a gravel road, tell him to use that
one. Again,” she added. Michelle thanked her and took the coolers, loaded them
in the back, and then sat in the passenger seat of Andy’s truck while Walter
and Andy went to call Doc on the marine radio, letting him know that they were
on the way to see him. She looked to her left at the shotguns propped up on the
seat beside her, noticed the silenced 22 in a bag by her feet, and felt the 40
caliber Glock on her hip. They were all reassuring, but try as she might, she couldn’t
shake the feeling that they were getting in way over their heads.

Andy and Michelle drove over to Ravenwood, the rope across
the entrance road with the “
CAMPGROUND CLOSED
” sign on it was down again.
Broken this time. When they got to the campground they saw a group of five
people out at the gate, all of them were armed. The only person whose name she
could remember off the top of her head was the preacher “Dave” from Eric’s
sweep team. Other faces looked familiar, but she couldn’t recall their names
off hand.

“Problems?” she asked.

Dave nodded his head, saying, “We had some people who tried
to ‘insist’ that they be let into the campground. If they wouldn’t have acted
like such . . .” As he searched for the words, one of the other people standing
nearby spoke up. “Assholes.” The preacher looked over at the speaker and
nodded.  “Yeah, God certainly gives some people an extra measure of . . .
personality.  Anyway, if they hadn’t acted that way, we might have let them,
there’s plenty of room now. Guard team night told them about the medical check
and quarantine—they refused. Things got a little ugly. Probably would have
gotten worse if VW hadn’t sunk his axe into the hood of their RV. He said, ‘Next
one’s going through your radiator, then your tires, then you.’ . . . I think
they got the point.”

“Guard team night?” Andy asked.

“Yeah,” Dave said, “that lady, Amy, she’s a little fireball—always
running around like some chipmunk on an IV drip of black coffee—anyhow, she’s
been doing a lot of work here, a lot of good ideas. We’ve already got two teams
of guards—guard team night and guard team day—easy to remember, huh? We’re
working on a third team as well. Each team has five people on it. Two of them
stay at the gate and the other three patrols the campground. Twelve hour shifts
right now until we get the third team together. At least that’s the plan as far
as I can figure.”

“Sounds like Amy’s pulling you guys together,” Michelle said.

“Yeah, but the thing that most impresses me about her is that
she’s not an ‘all talk-no action’ person; everything that she’s come up with so
far, she’s always been willing to be a part of as well,” he said.

They talked with Dave for a few more minutes and then went to
find Doc. He was at the campground office building, directing what appeared to
be several projects at once. When he saw them he gave a quick wave and held up
his index finger, the universal signal for “be with you in a moment.” The short
time later he waved them over, indicating that Michelle and Andy should follow
him. They did so, ending up a short walk later at his RV. Once inside, everybody
sat down. The sigh Doc let out immediately convinced Michelle that he’d
probably been on his feet and awake for quite some time.

She took advantage of the pause, hoping to give him a little
down time as she asked, “Do you mind if I make us some coffee or tea?”

“That would be wonderful,” he said while rubbing his eyes and
yawning.

Michelle poked around in the kitchen area and came up with a
small, four cup “Mr. Coffee” machine; some packs of expensive looking Peruvian
blend dark roast, and the other necessities like filters and mugs.

“Does the campground still have power?” she asked.

He nodded, “For now.”

Michelle added water to the reservoir, emptied a packet of
the coffee onto a filter in the pullout tray, and plugged the unit in. A few minutes
later the percolating sounds of the steam bubbling through water accompanied
the fragrance of fresh coffee . . . good coffee.

“Any news from Eric yet?” Doc asked.

“Hey Doc,” Andy said sympathetically, “I know you’re worried,
we all are. But it’s going to take Eric at least two days just to get up there,
then he’s got to find her.”

“I know, I know . . . I just . . . well, like you said I’m
just worried,” Doc answered.

There was a knock on the door. Andy and Michelle looked at
Doc Collins; he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Come in.”

It was Amy. She looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It almost
made Michelle wonder if she was supplementing her energy levels . . . chemically.
The cop side of her made a mental note to pursue it later. Maybe.

“Hey guys, I’m glad I caught up with you, if you’ve got a few
minutes there are some things I’d like to go over,” Amy said.

They spent the next several hours talking to Amy and Doc. Sally
came by to say ‘hi’ as well, but got called out again a short time later to put
some band-aids on one of the kids who fell at the playground. It appeared to
Michelle that Amy and Doc had been burning the candle at both ends. They’d come
up with several plans, and started implementing the ones that were the highest
priority—security, medical, food and water, comfort, and entertainment. Security
was pretty much the guard team’s for now. Food and water teams were responsible
for coordinating food gathering and sharing, water collection and purification,
and group meal planning if possible. What they called the comfort teams were
basically responsible for gathering as much firewood as they could. Michelle found
it interesting that all collected firewood from the comfort teams was going to
be kept in a central location and distributed as needed each day. Campers were
also encouraged to gather their own, but some, due to age or other prohibitive
circumstances, were going to depend entirely on the comfort teams for firewood.
The entertainment team, led by Amy, was in charge of morale boosting activities.
They were already planning a night of funny stories followed by a talent
contest. Medical was the most interesting to Michelle and Andy though. The camp
office was being converted into a functional medical facility, limited only by
the equipment on hand—which right now was pretty much everything more complex
than a tube of Neosporin and a band-aid. The good news was that the medical
team had gone through every empty RV, tent, and vehicle, scouring them for any
supplies that might be of use. Hand soap, paper towels, gauze—anything at all
that would come in handy. They hit the jackpot in the tent where the zombie fat
guy had come out after Andy’s group. A large duffel bag was inside, filled with
a hodgepodge of prescription medicine—antibiotics, painkillers, blood pressure
medicine—you name it, it was in there. They found an ID tag inside a coat
pocket that indicated the fat guy had worked at an assisted living community
south of Fargo. Assumptions were made that he cleaned out the resident’s
medicine cabinets before he took off. Michelle hoped it was one of the elderly
residents who bit him, it would serve the bastard right. Someone on the medical
team came up with the idea of having a quarantine location, someplace that
could be segregated from the rest of the camp. Anybody who showed signs of the
sickness, or any new people that the residents may decide to let in would have
to go through a quarantine. The team’s solution was to use half of the
combination bathhouse/restroom, the male side. Their reasoning was that it
would be easy to clean, nothing but tile walls and cement floors, only had one
small window located up high, and the door was a solid metal one that could be
locked from the outside. They grabbed some fold-out cots and blankets from the
little storage room in the camp office, moved them into the bathroom, and then
locked the door, hanging a quaint little sign that said “hospitality suite” on
the doorknob.

Even though she’d been on the job less than twelve hours, Amy
had already come up with an updated list of the campgrounds “top ten most
wanted” items, complete with a current inventory. Her number one item was
gasoline.

Amy said, “Chainsaw, generator for the water supply and
purification, another generator for emergency power at the medical clinic, they
all use gas. Right now we’re only running the chainsaw.” Michelle remembered
hearing it in the distance as they walked to the RV. “But we had another power
outage this morning that lasted almost an hour.”

Michelle knew about the large amount of gas that Walter and
Andy had, but they hadn’t decided, or even talked about adding Amy to the core
team. Doc had accepted the offer but still hadn’t been brought up to speed, so
he didn’t know about it either. It was going to have to wait, Michelle thought.
Andy didn’t say anything either.

“What about food?  Eric said he might be able to get us some
help in that department. Most of the people up here have fishing rods,
apparently they issue one to you at birth in North Dakota,” Amy said with a
laugh, “but I’m still trying to work out the logistics of supplying a
campground day to day with fish.”

Andy said, “There’s a dozen five gallon buckets filled with
rice in the back of my truck for you. It ain’t gonna be like eaten’ prime rib
and blueberry pie, but it will prevent you from starving. I guess I don’t need
to tell ya that it will have to be rationed like everything else.”

Michelle could see Amy doing the math in her head. Whatever
figures she came up with seemed to make her happy though. “That’s great, thank
you very much!” Her face took on a serious tone and she said, “I know you have
other projects to get to today, but I’m a little out of my element . . . a
little unsure how to handle the next item on my list. Guns. By my count there
are six guns . . . that I  . . . ‘officially know of’ . . . in the campground.”
She looked at Walter and Michelle, “Present company excluded. VW and Brenda
each have a shotgun—I don’t think they use the same bullets though. Jason
Lambert has that deer rifle and a little pistol, I think it’s a thirty-eight. Another
lady—I’m sorry but I can’t think of her name right now—has an old double barrel
‘squirrel gun’ as she called it, so I guess that’s another shotgun, right?”
Andy nodded. “Number six is one of those black guns like the army uses. A guy
named William Andrews has it. He’s kind of a strange bird though, didn’t
volunteer for any of the security teams, stays in an RV at site twenty-six and
pretty much keeps to himself, although to be fair, it’s really only been about twenty-four
hours since the poop hit the fan, and I’ve been really busy with other things,
but as far as I know, and I’d know, he’s not on any of the teams—security or
otherwise.”

Michelle replied, “I’m not sure how we need to handle this. To
me it’s the same as food. And admittedly, this whole ‘situation’ that we’re all
in right now is kind of making everybody fly by the seat of their pants, figuring
out things as you go. As of right now—if I understand it correctly—food sharing
is an encouraged but not enforced issue. I think the same needs to go for all
of the other concerns. We can’t force him to join a security team, the same as
we can’t, or rather shouldn’t in my opinion, kick open the door of every tent
and RV, confiscating every scrap and can of food for a community supply. Off
the top of my head—and again, this is without me really thinking too much about
it—I’d say that the biggest effort should be applied toward the ‘encouraging’
aspect.”

Andy waited for Michelle to finish then added, “Yeah, hold
out the hoop and let them jump through, don’t slam it over their head. Besides,
a lot of these folks are totally lost. They’re scared and confused about what’s
going on in the world. Heck, so am I. Until we get a grip on the ‘big picture’
I’d just keep doing the fine job that you are, organizing these people into
some type of, I don’t know, ‘self supporting and mutually dependent . . . group.’
Remember though, just yesterday they all got the speech about ‘everybody needs
to help,’ so if you see folks intentionally ducking out of stuff that they need
to be doing, that needs to be handled before it becomes a major problem. But I
guess you already know that.”

Amy smiled and said, “Been there—done that.”

Michelle took another refill of coffee and asked Amy to
explain the “officially know about” remark. Amy replied, “Again, I’m sure that
there are a lot of things that we don’t know about our Ravenwood residents. We
don’t even know if the names they’ve given us are their real names. We could
have doctors here, engineers . . . police officers—whatever. But if they don’t
share that with us we may never know. Like you said Andy, a lot of people are
in shock about what’s happened. They’re in denial—like it’s only a movie and in
a few hours they’ll get up, throw away their empty popcorn bucket and walk out into
the bright sunshine of the movie theater’s parking lot on the way to their BMW.”
Amy leaned her forehead against her upraised palms, the first sign of weariness
that Michelle had noticed in her. “Anyhow,” she continued, “as I said, right
now we’ve got those six guns officially, but there is at least one more that I
personally know about. VW has it. It’s a handgun, black metal with what looks
to me like rubber…uh . . .” She made a ‘squeezy’ motion with her hand.