As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  The Chinese restaurant on the corner, however, was doing spectacularly and had forced the closure of Jim's Cafe, leaving the lunch trade entirely to itself. Mrs. Chinese Woman pretended she couldn't speak English but she smiled a lot and was smart enough to live thirty miles away in the much larger city of Camden, population 13,000, where she was less conspicuous and where she spent all the money she vacuumed up in Provost.

  "Maybe we should check it out," he told Ludwig and started the truck.

  Despite the weather and the obvious failure of the various highways and roads departments to keep the streets passable, the high school parking lot was full. He parked on the street and Ludwig looked balefully at him when he closed the door, locking him inside.

  At least five hundred people had shown up, and all the seats were taken. Heavy clothing interfered with movement in any direction and it all smelled of melting snow.

  Along the stage, the mayor and several town councilors, the sheriff, the chief of police and the town clerk sat on straight-back chairs.

  The mayor stood and took the microphone and made a clumsy test and asked everyone for quiet.

  "I-" was all he managed to say before people began shouting questions and comments from the floor. The police officials looked grave and the clerk pretended to be taking notes.

  "Please...please," he repeated.

  The noise died down and he looked around the room myopically, the neon light glinting on his steel-framed glasses. He wasn't a bad sort, just way over his head. Give him a zoning variance or a stop sign request and he was right on the money. But this...?

  "I know everyone is upset...and we've all been watching what's going on here and I just want to say that your town council is working very hard to-"

  "Never mind the speeches. What are we going to do for food? Wal-Mart’s out. The cops have shut it down."

  The shouting started again and there was no stopping it this time. People kept interrupting, demanding their questions be answered first. The police chief finally took the microphone away from the mayor and in his best authoritarian stage voice, glinting eyes, rigid mouth and all, told everyone to quiet down.

  "Screw this," someone yelled, and people began to exit, their voices an incoherent rumble of anger and outrage. The chief paled slightly as he watched them file out. The people on the stage were dumfounded. In a few minutes the room was mostly empty. Not fifty souls remained, most of them older or living in subsidized housing or just enjoying the afternoon outing. The local reporter crossed her legs and waited to be told what to write down.

  Albert was one of those who remained behind. He took a seat near the back and watched the mayor fumbling with the microphone again.

  "I think we need to stay calm, here, folks. We've been through these things before. I was on the telephone with the people in Indianapolis and they have assured me that there will be no food shortage. The trucks will be running by morning and if not the National Guard will be here to distribute MREs. ..."

  He seemed to lose track of what he was saying and glanced around at the other officials on the stage. The paucity of listeners was an embarrassment and almost everyone in the room was dependent in some way on the town or the state or the federal government for daily sustenance. Confronted with their expectant, entitled expressions, the mayor lost his way. It was those who had left in disgust who needed to hear about the new rules. Those who had stayed would automatically do whatever they were told, the only anomaly being Albert who watched from the back of the room.

  "Everyone should just go home and listen to the radio or the television," the mayor said, lamely.

  The meeting seemed to end without any formal announcement. It hadn't lasted forty minutes. Albert remained seated while the herd shuffled out the barn doors of the auditorium.

  The mayor was looking at him but talking to the police chief. Albert finally stood up and walked over.

  "They said the trucks would be running?" Albert interrupted. The policeman looked hard at him and the mayor swung his eyes down from the stage.

  "Been a lot of panic over nothing," the mayor replied. "People need to just go home and stay put. Enjoy Christmas with your family."

  Even the police chief paled momentarily at such fatuous comment but said nothing. He avoided Albert's gaze.

  "OK," Albert said and turned away. He knew they were watching him. He didn't look back. He just walked out of the building into the cold and trudged back to his pickup. The windows were fogged over from Ludwig's breath.

  He listened to the radio on the drive home but all they did was repeat the same information. The explosions had stopped, apparently. More than five hundred trucks had blown up across the country in various locations. Food terminals, gas stations, construction sites, department stores had all been affected. The highways were jammed and virtually all transportation in the country had been grounded. In a replay of 911, there wasn't a plane in the sky except for the passing streak and shudder of F16s.

  It was four o'clock in Indiana and one o'clock in Los Angeles. No one had made any claims to the attack, at least none that were being reported. The talk of martial law had subsided and even the snow had stopped falling.

  "We are not going to let them spoil Christmas," some politician told a reporter. "We are going to have our turkey and open presents and thank the Lord Jeezus Chrize that we are living in the greatest country on earth..."

  The highway was empty. It seemed strange, lonely, driving past the fields and trees and seeing the occasional yellowish light shining from a farm house.

  Then they started playing Christmas music again. Albert hummed and sang along. The dog glanced at him at first and then ignored him, watching the passing countryside instead.

  "Shoppers are jamming the stores all across the country, forcing local police departments to allocate a large portion of their manpower to crowd control. This has left other sections of the major cities open to gangs..."

  He turned off the radio. The silence settled in a rumbling boil of diesel clatter.

  The driveway was partially frozen and he had to throw the pickup in four-wheel drive to climb the hill. The lights in the house were on and the generator stack was still blowing smoke. The power had been restored to the town but obviously there were still lines down in the countryside.

  He entered the generator shed and watched the machinery whirling and chattering. The fuel tanks were full and part of the energy from the generator was diverted to a small heating unit that kept the fuel from gelling and also kept it above the wax point. The problem with biodiesel made from vegetable oil was still unresolved. Long before the fuel stopped being pourable, wax flakes precipitated out and clogged the fuel filters and the fuel pumps. It was a serious flaw in his system and he knew it. Down to 32 degrees he could probably keep the system running but if the temperatures dropped, the chances of the generator shutting down were high. There was nothing he could do. There probably wouldn't be any fossil diesel deliveries to Provost any time soon. His own elevated tank showed half - about a hundred and fifty gallons. Seventy five hours. Three days at full run. He had three thousand gallons of biofuel in drums and totes but nothing lasts for ever.

  He went inside and shut everything in the house down except for a light and his computer. He thought about the water lines in the barn. Without the heat tapes the lines would freeze almost immediately. He put his coat back on and went outside. The day hadn't fallen yet and light streaked the west. He walked to the barn and pushed the frost-free valve closed. Then he opened all the valves and drained the lines. Everyone watched him curiously because it wasn't time yet for milking or an evening bag of grain. They knew better than he did what time it was. The water trough was full and clean.

  The Internet wouldn't load so he shut the computer down and turned on the small crank radio. It took a while to find something clear but he managed to land on a local NPR rebroadcastor out of Kentucky and settled down with a cold glass of whiskey to listen.

  It was five o'clock and
it had been several hours since any explosions had been reported. They were speculating already that all the trucks had spent the night at one of eight possible truck stops where the explosives had been attached. They were crude pipe bombs with make-shift detonators and timers, but they had worked perfectly well.

  It wouldn't take much, Albert knew. A watch with a metal pin drilled through the face and a wire attached to the hour hand can complete a circuit just as well as a light switch. All it takes is a nine-volt battery to light the igniters from an Estes rocket engine and...bang. So anyone with any knowledge at all and a sponsor could produce something infinitely more powerful and sophisticated. Eight truck stops? Two-man teams could prowl the lot almost without notice. Each man carries a sports bag with let's say ten or fifteen small bombs. Tuck it into the frame somewhere. You could even seal it and drop it right into the fuel tank. No one ever does the mandatory walk-around before leaving their overnight parking spot. They get up, they shit, they grab a coffee and they ride. The truck could easily be a hundred and fifty miles away when the bomb goes off. The trucks could be heading in any direction, carrying any kind of cargo.

  There was nothing new in any of it. How many nights parked in Buttfuck Idaho waiting for a swap did he chat away on the CB with guys just like himself who knew intimately what kept the cities operating! They all knew where the food came from, how it got to the grocery stores, how close the delivery times were to empty shelves, how easily a store could find itself without stock. They all knew that the truck stops were open to anyone, that it would only take twenty or thirty or forty dedicated individuals to bring the country to a standstill in twenty four hours. If sixteen Ragheads could keep 9/11 secret for years in advance, forty could do it for a few months while they made their bombs and selected their targets.

  How are they going to check three million trucks, which is a conservative estimate of how many are operating on any given day? When they start lining up all the just-in-time loads and checking manifests and testing locks and wanding them down with explosives detectors the ice cream is going to melt. And by the time the truck gets to the store, the rioters will have taken over. And who is going to drive a truck that might have a bomb tucked under the fender? That's why the abandoned semis lining roads and streets across the country were even more of a problem. What if there were more bombs with longer timers? What if they missed one during an inspection and the damn thing blows when the driver opens the cargo doors before he backs into the dock? What happens when the forklift operator raises a pallet and starts to back away, pulling the trigger?

  It wasn't over. In fact, it hadn't really started. Anyone capable of pulling this off knew they had to press their advantage, they had to use the confusion and turmoil as a cover for a next phase. Depending on how organized they were and how large an organization, they could still do a lot of damage. The best way would be to allow a few hours respite like they were doing. Allow the population and the government to catch it's breath, to relax a bit, to believe maybe the worst of it had passed and then begin a second round. Another few hundred trucks exploding overnight and the system would fail, utterly. The Guard would be called in, ostensibly for riot control and food distribution but it wouldn't be long before the overwhelming task of managing three hundred million people in a panic would become clear. Martial Law, shoot on sight orders, advance immunity from prosecution for guardsmen and crooked cops alike. And of course, it won't work. They will end up concentrating everything around the large population centers including holding camps and no-charge prisons for anyone the authorities decide they don't like. And then they will find that not working because the public will be out of control and the two hundred million privately owned guns and several billions of rounds of ammunition will come out of the closet. The authorities will be stupid enough to shut down militias and all the known, public, infiltrated organizations which will first draw resources away to deal with individuals who are not much of a threat and basically just want to be left alone and then keep those resources pinned down with imprisonment and interrogation. They will dig up an M50 here and there and a stash of ammonium nitrate and a stolen RPG from some military base and the real bad guys will all escape. It was a predictable and certain scenario. There was no way the federal government from the NSA to FEMA would be capable of making the right decisions under these circumstances. It was set up to fail and it would fail, massively.

  He thought of Jeff Monteith again, imagined him with unrestrained authority, imagined his blow-hard, bellicose father strutting around like a Chinese mandarin.

  "On the first Noel...the angels did say...

  The carol was interrupted by the panic warning again and the stern voice of the NPR announcer with the "latest developments." A sundown curfew was now officially in place and reports of abandoned trucks suddenly exploding were starting to come in again. A couple of looters had pried open a locked dry van parked on a south Chicago side street and the explosion had killed them and blown the windows out of two houses. The van, containing household chemicals for WalMart was on fire, belching lethal smoke and fumes over the neighborhood. Jesse Jackson told ABC news that he had it on good authority that the van had been deliberately parked in the ghetto to kill as many black citizens as possible. Louis Farrakhan said the chickens were coming home to roost - again - only this time they weren't going to leave.

  Albert allowed the report to fade into the moaning drivel it was, an annoying grey noise in the background.

  PART 1, CHAPTER 2

  Albert woke in his clothes, lying on his bed with Ludwig sprawled out beside him. There was a quarter bottle of Turkey on the table. It had been full last night. His head was pounding from repeated lightning strikes and he was gasping from thirst.

  He barged into the bathroom and splashed water into his mouth for about two minutes. Then he felt like vomiting but it subsided. He turned on the shower.

  In the kitchen he found the crank radio was dead. He turned on the Bose in the middle of an update on the disaster that was not so slowly spreading across the country. There had been numerous explosions overnight, including trucks, docks, warehouses and fuel stops. It was estimated that drivers had walked away from half a million rigs in the last twenty-four hours and they were scattered along highways, abandoned in parking lots and untended in loading bays at every major depot in the country. Periodically some idiot breaking into a van or lifting a pallet would pull the trip wire on another bomb but for many the risk was worth it. A van load of big screen TVs, after all, could be worth a few hundred thousand dollars. That money and TV sets were quickly becoming worthless seemed to have eluded them entirely. The opportunity to loot was too compelling.

  The country was shutting down, piece by piece. Any store that dared to open was immediately mobbed. There had been dozens killed overnight defending their Chinese trinkets and looting had resulted in more than three hundred deaths. The Guard had orders to shoot on sight and in several states they were taking it very seriously. Al Sharpton told CNN the government had declared open season on black men and women. Two hundred and sixty nine of the three hundred and eleven looters shot by police and guardsmen were black.

  The NPR news reader continued for five minutes, detailing atrocities that had been reported in every state. Trucks sporadically continued to explode. Food deliveries to the cities were halted while the reefers were checked, but it took at least half an hour to clear each truck and an armed escort then had to follow it to its delivery point. A guard unit had already been ambushed and a truck hijacked on its way in to deliver what was believed to be a load of frozen chicken. The attackers killed three soldiers and the driver for what turned out to be a reefer load of Mexican lettuce. And mobs had tried to storm trucks in the process of unloading food at terminals. But every commander knew the Guard was not a solution. If they really had to start shooting fellow Americans and imprisoning them en mass, there would be resistance. Guard units would face significant desertions and possibly open rebellion.

&nbs
p; The highways were jammed with people trying to escape the big cities, though most of them couldn't have told you where they were going. Their mini-vans stalled in the snow and terrified occupants sat inside with the motor running, soaking up what heat they could before the gasoline ran out. Then they could choose between sitting there and freezing to death in the minus seven degree temperatures or getting out to walk with no more compass direction than the hunched apparition in front of them. Christmas Eve Day on the New Jersey Turnpike was a twisted catenulate of abandoned vehicles, frozen bodies and refugees. It was estimated that one million five hundred thousand people were stuck on the highways leaving New York, alone. About four a.m. a tanker exploded under an overpass at the Pulaski Skyway, collapsing the upper levels and killing seventy people when the twelve and a half thousand gallons of gasoline on board poured out the breach from an eight-inch black powder pipe bomb wired to a nine dollar watch and a two dollar battery. Flames shot two hundred feet into the air.

  The Guard units had given up trying to turn people back and instead, simply sat on their tanks and Humvees and watched. As more and more cars were abandoned, people began to walk, dragging useless possessions and holding onto screaming children or trying to force mother and granddad to pick up the pace a little and lift their feet over the snow. The wind cut in at a steady 18 knots, more than enough to freeze the tears on their faces.

  At nine a.m. Eastern Time, the Posse Comitatus Act was suspended and Martial Law was declared (Congress took eleven minutes to turn the country over to the federal government) and Guard and regular army units were deployed with instructions to maintain order, ostensibly under the direction of civilian authorities.