Shades of Gray (18 page)

Abby took a ragged breath and looked at the pistol in her lap. Her right hand was already curled around the grip. The shakes had started an hour before, the muscles in her arms and legs almost useless because of the tremors. She felt she could do this one last thing…
had
to do this one last thing. To save her friends, to save herself. She didn’t have much time left; her vision was already becoming blurred by streaks of red across her sight.

As the laughter began to fade downstairs, Abby raised her right hand and put the barrel into her mouth. She used her left hand to steady her shaking right, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. She inhaled deeply through her nose, before finally closing her eyes.

Abby squeezed the trigger.

* * *

“Perform an aerial sweep of the area, a hundred mile radius. Radio back if you locate any large swarms. I want direction, location, numbers.” Waters was standing in the center of the communications building, the old prison administration offices, giving orders to Collins and a handful of his men. He turned to the private behind the desk. “If the CC makes contact, ignore it. Understood?”

“Sir?”

Waters stepped up to the desk and leaned closer to the confused face behind it. “Unless a civilian leader or a district commander calls, I want you to ignore it. Pretend you didn’t hear it. Claim you had to piss and missed the transmission, I don’t care.”

The private’s eyes widened. “Y-Yes, sir.”

Waters turned back to his chopper crew. “Let’s get to work.”

* * *

“Waters to Winchester, over.” The big black radio in the Head Room barked over and over. “Winchester, this is Waters. Respond.”

“Someone answer that goddamn radio!” John shouted.

A few of us were in the next room, gathering up as many medical supplies from Nancy’s stash as we could hold. John, myself, and Jonah scrambled about, dropping rolls of gauze in our haste to get back upstairs.

“On it!” Jonah said, unloading his armful into my bag. He bolted out of the room, leaving me and the big man to grab what we could.

“Should be enough. Let’s go,” John said, his voice ripped with panic.

A gunshot only a few minutes earlier had brought us all running upstairs to Abby’s room, where we found her sprawled out on her bed. Blood gushed from her face, which had been completely destroyed by her botched suicide attempt. Mia, Jake, and Michael stayed with her as her body convulsed and seized, while we ran down to Nancy’s makeshift infirmary to find whatever we could that might be of use. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking:
the only thing that will help her now is another bullet,
yet I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

While John and I were running back up the stairs, Jonah was practically falling over himself to get to the radio.

* * *

“Uh…this is the Winchester. Over.” The cowboy was panting and shaking, leaning against the desk for support, the mic quivering in front of his mouth.

“Who am I speaking with?” Waters answered. Jonah swallowed hard and wiped the sweat from his brow.

“This is Jonah. What do you need?”

“I need to speak with Michael.”

“He’s busy, talk to me.” Jonah’s legs were threatening to give out on him, so he clumsily yanked the chair out and fell into it.

“What’s your status?” Waters asked.

Something in his voice changed. He was less demanding now and more suspicious. Jonah being Jonah, he caught that change immediately.

“We’ve got a situation here and I don’t have time to explain. Tell me what you want and make it quick.”

The radio was silent for a moment.

“An undead situation?” Waters finally asked. Jonah laughed, frightened hysteria nearly taking control of him. He almost said “You could say that,” but decided against it.

“No. Nothing like that. We’ve just got…we’ve got a problem with one of our people. She’s been…injured. Now if you don’t mind telling me what the
hell
you want? I need to help the others.”

“Aerial recon shows another large swarm moving north along the river, sweeping through each town along the way. So far our intelligence shows there are no living in said towns, but the Zacks are still aggressively proceeding.”

Jonah took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then told Waters he’d let Michael know.

“Copy that. Waters out.”

“About time you bastard.”

Jonah let the mic fall to the desk and ran from the room. He took the steps two at a time, closing in on Abby’s room and the shouts coming from within. What he found was pretty much the same as when they had all first discovered her. Except now there were four people holding her down while one person tried desperately to slow the blood flowing from her nonexistent face.

* * *

“Jonah, help me.”

I was trying to hold Abby’s right arm down and stabilize her head at the same time, while Michael attended to her face, packing wads of gauze into and around the open cavity. John and Jake each had a leg, while Mia was on her left arm. All of us were in shock, reacting on instinct and not taking the time to think the situation through. Why had she done it? What could have possibly caused someone like Abby to shoot herself? If we had stopped for even one second to consider this, we’d have known what was about to happen.

“Waters was just on the radio.” Jonah squeezed in beside me to hold Abby’s head still as she convulsed. Michael was frantically stuffing gauze, trying to staunch the bleeding, and only glanced up at Jonah.

“And?”

Jonah’s voice hitched with each jerk of Abby’s head. “He said there’s another swarm headed north along the river.”

“Shit. Okay,” Michael said. “Someone take over for me. I’ll run out and tell the men.”

The soldiers outside had come running earlier after hearing the gunshot. Instead of letting them investigate, Michael had ushered them back outside. I supposed they had went back to work on the fence. Or they could have been standing around with their thumbs up their asses. That’s what Todd was doing, standing in the corner of Abby’s room, arms crossed with one hand covering his mouth, staring at us with huge bloodshot eyes.

What an asshole.

“You got it?” Mia asked Jonah after he slid in to take Michael’s place.

Jonah nodded, seeing there was no more room for gauze. His eyes and hands froze for a moment on what used to be Abby’s pretty face, then he finally just pressed his hands down, putting pressure on all the material packed into her sinus cavities and eye sockets. His weight helped to hold her head still, though you could tell he was fighting the urge to puke all over us. If it hadn’t been for all the blood, Abby would have looked like a deadhead, stripped of all flesh, exposing teeth and the bones of her face. The blood helped hide all the grotesquery, but at the same time it added a whole new level of revulsion to the scene.

“What did you do, Abby?” Jake whined. “
What
the
fuck
did you
do
?”

“Keep it together man,” John panted next to him, locking eyes with Jake as Abby’s legs yanked and jerked them around.

For a dying girl, she sure was strong. I was having a hell of a time just holding her arm. Sweat dripping off my face, I looked across to Mia, who had already been staring at me. She mirrored my apprehension, a hundred questions flying through both our minds.

“Did she say anything to any of you before?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Mia’s. A long silence from everyone told me she hadn’t.

“Maybe she just couldn’t take it anymore?” Todd spoke up from his corner. For once, no one told him to zip it.

Jonah shook his head, the motion exaggerated by his upper body being yanked around by Abby’s head. “No, she wouldn’t have done this. Not Abby. She had to have had a better reason than that.”

Mia’s eyes widened only slightly enough that I would notice. I began yanking up on Abby’s shirtsleeve.

“What’re you doin’?!” Jake asked, his voice picking up that shrill edge.

“Check her!” I shouted back, a fresh wave of panic spreading through my chest.

On one hand, I knew we should just put a bullet in her brain. That would take care of two birds with one stone. But on the other? This was Abby, not some stranger. Could we put her down if she wasn’t infected? Should we? Or should we let her die on her own, assuming she hadn’t been infected?

Mia pulled the left sleeve up, saw nothing, and then moved on to the lower hem of Abby’s shirt. She used her knee to pin the seizing girl’s arm, checking the skin on her abdomen and sides, then further up. Abby’s torso was clear, no bites. The arm I was holding was fine as well. John and Jake were having a harder time, trying to hold Abby’s legs as they kicked while jerking on her pant legs.

“Todd!” I craned my head around to find the idiot still huddled in the corner. “Get over here!”

“Hold her leg,” Jake said, moving to the side so Todd could slide in. While the idiot latched onto her leg, Jake began sliding the pant leg up. He was only able to push the material to her knee, but her calf was uninjured. “Fuck! Should we take ‘em off?” he shouted.

My voice was short and clipped. “No time. Check the other.”

He grabbed the leg again as Todd turned and helped John on the other. It didn’t take long to find what I was afraid of.

Abby’s ankle looked as though gangrene had set in. How we had missed the smell before, I have no idea. As soon as John lifted the pant leg, the reek hit him, Jake, and Todd square in the face. Let alone all the pus oozing and dripping onto the floor. Todd gagged, let go of the leg, and fell backwards in his attempt to flee the room. The rest of us just stared at Abby’s ankle. Her seizing had quickened and become stronger. My mind instantly recalled the speed with which the Warden’s bitch had turned, in the infirmary back at the prison. It would happen faster with Abby, since she had unknowingly jumpstarted the process by blowing her face off. At least now we knew why she’d tried killing herself.

“Damnit, Abby,” Mia said.

“How’s she…what’s going on?”

Michael hurried through the doorway, running into the back of Todd and almost falling over the guy. Five pairs of eyes glued onto Michael’s, and whatever he read on all our faces was enough to drain what color he had left in his cheeks. His eyes slowly shifted to the disgusting wound on Abby’s ankle.

“Christ…”

Silence.

Abby’s body ceased to move, suddenly and without warning. The convulsions hadn’t slowed to a trickle. They just—stopped.

“Back! Get back!”

I threw myself off the bed to get away from the thing that had been Abby, while at the same time drawing the handgun on my side.

Everyone scattered.

Jonah fell off the edge of the bed and hit the floor with a thud, Mia slid off and slammed herself against the wall. John and Jake moved faster than I’d ever seen a man move, knocking Michael back through the doorway in their panic to get away. I raised my gun just as Abby sat up. Her arms were limp at her sides, her face a caved-in hole. Unfortunately for us her brain was still intact, or else she wouldn’t have risen. I aimed at the side of her head and realized that Mia was in my line of fire. If the bullet exited Abby’s skull, which it would have, then it would have nailed Mia in the chest. Just as I was about to scream for her to get down, voices from the past filled my head─

“You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

“Good at killing your friends. Good at killing your family.”

“Why did you let me die, Kase?”

“Why did you leave me?”

Ben and Zack stood next to me. I could see them out of the corner of my eye. My heart tripled its pounding rhythm and my breathing threatened to jump into hyper speed. I whispered for Mia to get down, trying and failing to ignore the ghosts of my lost friends. She must have heard me, or read my lips, because she hit the floor in a snap.

Abby’s head turned in my direction.

“Kasey! Shoot!” someone shouted.

I pulled the trigger before I could pass out from fright. The bullet exited Abby’s skull and embedded itself in the wall behind her, a couple of feet above where Mia lay on the floor. Abby’s body fell limp onto the bed. Ben and Zack vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

I held the gun with both hands, still in a shooting stance, tremors moving up and down my arms as my lungs drew in ragged breaths. The next thing I knew, Jake was snatching the gun away and shaking the shit out of me.

“Hey…hey! Kasey! Snap the hell out of it! Hey!”

“I’m okay,” I whispered. Mia and Jonah were getting to their feet, mouths open, gaping at Abby’s corpse.

“Guys?” Todd stood up and edged his way to the back of the room. “Her blood. You’re covered in it.”

For some reason this observation made everyone spread their legs and hold their hands out to the sides. It was at that moment a whole new level of “holy shit” was reached.

“Uh…” Jonah mumbled.