As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  Some of the men were detailed to round up and confiscate food. Everything was removed to a former clothing store and guarded round the clock. Now if you wanted to eat, you had to work for Griggson who was starting to see the possibilities of life in this new civil service dedicated to the people.

  He smoked thoughtfully after Dusty left and then stepped on the butt and vanished into the night.

  Albert waited a few moments before moving. He was closer now and he could hear the men shouting and people arguing. The arms and legs and heads silhouetted against the cheering wall of flames almost looked like a sculpture. The stink hung over everything and a black snow of tiny particles settled on the ground.

  He watched as Dusty and half a dozen men forced people into the back of three pickup trucks and roared out towards the highway that led to Grosevnor's warehouse.

  He knew it wouldn't be long before Dusty and his entourage and maybe Griggson too, started wondering about the farmlands and what might be left out there for the picking and that would inevitably remind them of his place on the hill. They had talked to him about it one afternoon when he came out of the hardware store. Then they invited him to join the Liberty Militia where he could be an officer and in charge of-

  "No," he said. Then he added, as an afterward, "Thanks, Dusty. I appreciate you asking me to join but I just haven't got the time."

  It was a long speech for Albert but something had told him to leave the conversation on a friendly note, to disguise his contempt for George Griggson, the fake Colonel who had never served in uniform a day in his life and made his several millions in real estate. George retired early and for want of having something better to do, decided to form a militia unit and prepare for the end of the world. Dusty was one of his first recruits, a superficially friendly man with a large head and a thick pair of glasses. He operated a small septic tank installation and cleaning business which kept him busy and comfortable and well versed in the serpentine silk road of bribery necessary to stay one step ahead of the competition and the state inspectors.

  "Well that's great, Albert" he sang. "Busy, busy, busy. That's what they say about old Albert," he laughed.

  Griggson never took his eyes off Albert but he knew Albert's thoughts and Griggson's smile was very small, almost invisible. They knew each other perfectly having met one time and exchanged no words at all and Albert knew he would kill Griggson the first chance he got and probably Dusty too.

  "Sheeple," he said out loud, as he watched the roundups and the cowed, unresisting mass of former freemen and burghers lining up and obeying their new masters without complaint or comment. The "soldiers" handed out the MREs and he watched the slaves drift off to sit down on the grass where the county music festival used to be held and rip open the bags. He watched them, each receiving a cup of water to mix their flavor crystals in, devouring every single item in the package including the salt and pepper and sugar packets. He watched them, finished, sitting quietly, waiting for the next order.

  He walked the last half mile back to the truck down the middle of the road, unconcerned that he might be discovered. There was no one left. What the hell had happened? He debated whether to turn on the lights or use the night goggles and then put the goggles on the seat beside the sawed-off and brought the truck to life and turned the brights on. He pulled out onto the road and raced down the highway.

  What he hadn't seen on the trip down because he was so concentrated on his right flank, was the farmhouse up a quarter mile gravel driveway that met the county road at a slight angle. The man was a soybean farmer, as Albert recalled and they had run into each other at the Amish farm where Albert bought lumber. They chatted affably and he never spoke to him again. But when he passed on the road, he saw the man driving his International across about three hundred and twenty acres of bean field that had always looked particularly healthy. He turned into the driveway and drove slowly up to the house, which was completely dark.

  He expected a dog or something to make a sound but the world was silent, as he had noticed once before.

  He took out his flashlight and shone it at the front door and then over the face of the building. There were no smashed windows or any signs of a break-in.

  "I'm not here to cause trouble," he called out. "I'm just looking for some women's clothes."

  The idiocy of what he'd just said hit him and he felt his heart freeze for a second or two.

  "What I mean is...uh, I have this girl locked up at my place and she doesn't have any clothes-"

  Jesus Fucking Christ...

  "I'm coming up to knock on the door. My hands are in the air. I will go away if you say so..."

  He banged on the door and waited. Then he banged again. Then he twisted the knob and the door opened and he shone the flashlight into the living room where the farmer was sitting in a lazeeboy, with a rat on each knee and a dozen others scurrying around the room. The man's eyes were gone and his nose and his lips. They had tunneled into his gut and dragged his intestines out onto the floor. The stench was overwhelming and Albert choked and gagged as he flew back into the front yard. He dry puked half a dozen times before his stomach settled.

  He needed a gas mask but there wasn't one in the truck. Instead, he soaked a grease rag with drinking water and held it against his mouth and nose and went back in.

  The home was otherwise untouched. No one had entered the building in weeks. Down a hallway, he found the mother lying in bed with the skeletons of her two daughters. She had starved to death. It was hard to tell whether the girls had died from plague or starvation. He looked closer and saw a bullet hole in each forehead. The girls were about ten or twelve, the woman about thirty five, he guessed. He stumbled over some clothing on the floor and opened a dresser drawer and then the closet. There were a few dresses but mostly pants and shirts. The woman seemed about Ginny's size. He grabbed what he saw and made it back outside. He dropped the rag on the ground and hacked and coughed for five minutes before he could drive.

  He drives back with the headlights on, the window open. The cold air blows through the truck. He sees the bean farmer sitting in his chair with his eyes eaten out by rats, hump backed little gnomes staring at him with tiny liquid eyes, warm in a thick winter coat of hair, nibbling on the squirming, yellow maggots, scurrying in and out of the shadows, barely noticing him, barely sensing his presence in the midst of such bounty. He speeds up, racing down the middle of the county road, headlights catching in the limbs reaching out past the shoulder and penetrating into the still-bare woodland, there striking the burning eyes of the feral dogs roaming the countryside in the slipstream of death. He slows, gradually, his heart regaining a more even tempo, his breath coming in longer draughts.

  Why am I alive?

  He pulls into Magneson's driveway, the house dark and nothing moving and turns off the headlights. The truck door slams loud in the empty night. His flashlight reflects off the dark windows. He pounds on the door. Nothing. He pounds again until his hand starts to hurt. Nothing.

  The door is locked. A lock only keeps out an honest man. He retrieves a bar from the pickup and levers the door open, old, dry wood splintering and cracking. No smell. Nothing.

  The flashlight leaps around the room, landing here and there, on a sofa, on a lamp, glinting on her polished wood floors in the hallway, racing around the corner of the next room. Nothing. There are dishes in the rack beside the sink. A towel has been folded and hangs over the counter. He doesn't open the refrigerator. He opens the cupboards. Nothing. Old mother Hubbard, went to the cupboard. His boots clunk against the bare floors. The bed is made, the curtains drawn.

  He strides, trying not to run to Magneson's barn. The great wooden door creaks on its iron rollers when he pushes it down the slide.

  They are lying together in a stall, eyes, lips, nose eaten off, guts trailing into the straw where a little brown, furry face stares back neither frightened nor friendly, in fact not even concerned, the way the emperor might look down upon a nameless peasant who
happened to pass before his eyes, cold, incurious eyes, well assured of their ascendancy.

  The truck bounced wildly over the fields because he was driving too fast.

  Go ahead, break an axle.

  He slowed as he made the last twisting hairpin crawl around the limestone and pitched down the field towards his cabin. He saw a light on inside and then Ginny's silhouette in the window. She watched his truck approach and then left the window and a few seconds later the door opened. He parked and stepped down onto the ground and felt her presence as she ran up to him and threw her arms around him in that childish fashion, placing her head against his chest and hugging him.

  "Okay, okay," he sputtered. "You got no shoes on. You'll get sick."

  She wouldn't let go and he had to walk back to the door with her clinging onto him.

  She tried Mrs. Beanfarmer's clothes on and was pleased because they were girl's clothes and she could return his oversize jeans and shirt to him. She stripped right in front of him again and he looked away, giving up on the idea of persuading her otherwise.

  "You love me," she giggled.

  Fatigue was clawing at him. He hung his coat up and poured some whiskey out and drank it.

  "Got any coke?" she asked.

  "No."

  He closed his eyes and saw the pyres with human arms and legs akimbo against the reaching flames and then he saw the two little girls head-shot in their mother's arms and then he saw Magneson and his wife lying in the straw, the bones of their hands still touching.

  He didn't even take his clothes off when he got to his room. He fell on the bed and stared at the ceiling in the fading darkness. Ginny came in and lay down beside him.

  "No," he said. "Go to your own room."

  "Aw, c'mon, mister," she whined. "Have a heart."

  Days pass now without incident, without sound sometimes except what they made themselves.

  The pyres had burnt down and the sky was no longer filled with black smoke and the birds were back, which told him there had not been a nuclear strike anywhere. Whatever had happened was completely terrestrial, viral by the sound of it, just like that old doctor, what was his name...Fuller, Fulton - Fulthy - had predicted. He figured he must be immune as was Ginny and the few hundred people left in town. Thousands of bodies had now been collected and burnt in smoldering piles all over the county and even now, the smell occasionally drifted by on the wind.

  It had taken only a few weeks of regular, if not particularly appetizing meals for her to start looking like a normal human being. The phrase made him laugh. Her elbows and knees had diminished as flesh attached itself to her bones. He had been unable to guess her age in her previous condition but he supposed she was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. She was not a child, as he had feared. He could not imagine what was wrong with her mind. Perhaps some form of autism or brain damage at birth...mother a drug addict? He would have expected her to have some physical ailment concomitant with her mental condition but there was none he could detect. Her lascivious exhibitionism embarrassed him but he started to expect it and accept it as part of the condition, whatever it was. She kept climbing into his bed at night and he would make her go into her own room and then he could feel her moving around the halls a few minutes later and then her slight frame settling in beside him again. So now he wore clothes to bed, but she still pressed against him so he waited until she was asleep and went into her room where he lay down and slept in twenty-minute intervals, waking with sudden panic and listening, the insects starting to come back and the other night sounds, the bats surfing the night air for food and the beginning rustle of bearing trees. He listened and then released the hammer on the 1911 and drifted off for another twenty minutes or half hour.

  Unconsciously at first and now with a small, almost regretful acknowledgement he accepted her presence and his role. He was going to look after her. It was going to keep him on this side of the invisible line. He had a cause, a small cause to be sure, but a cause. He had to stay sane and rational and decent in the midst of this...whatever it was...to look after this girl whose caretaker he had murdered right before her eyes, a fact that didn't appear to have registered on her at all. When she spoke of Mary-Louise it was indifferently, a memory of tasks performed or obscure, apparently significant comments that had no context and therefore were indecipherable.

  He climbed back onto the tractor and proceeded down the slope, all the solar panels from his tomb placed carefully in the bucket. He drove very slowly, the tractor crawling over humps and rocks with agonizing care.

  He had begun to realize how off course his planning had been. It was sufficient, more than sufficient for a brief interlude while the grid was repaired or until the quarantine was lifted from some epidemic; he could last several months, in fact, but there was no long term solution in combustible fuels. It was hopeless. He was running his generator to keep a few lights going and the freezers and when the last of the biodiesel was gone, he'd be no better off than anyone else. The freezers had been a particularly bad idea in retrospect. His entire meat supply was now dependant on fuel for the generator and it was something that couldn't be replaced by anything but electricity in fairly large quantities. The solar panels he was bringing down to the house would supply enough power for lights and if he rigged a holding tank, for water. He could make another three thousand watts from the silicone chips he had in the shed, but that would have to wait. Each chip had to be carefully soldered to the next, each unit properly assembled, tested, installed. It wasn't rocket science but it took time and attention to detail. Where was he going to get the power for the soldering iron if the generator ran out of fuel? The fuel should be saved, protected at all costs for use in the truck or the tractor or heating if necessary. But to burn it up for hamburger and a reading lamp was stupid.

  Once he was able to temporarily transfer three freezers to DC power, he'd thaw out the meat and smoke it or dry it somehow. One by one, he'd empty them and secure the food and then the batteries would give them light and pump water into a holding tank and run a short wave radio or a computer.

  He had awakened, determined to complete the transfer as quickly as possible but soon realized he was short of batteries and would have to go out again and strip them from some of the hundreds if not thousands of abandoned vehicles left behind by the dead. Most scavengers would be after the gasoline but wouldn't think to take the battery out. They could have the gasoline as far as he was concerned; they were just delaying the inevitable.

  She watched him unload the panels and wandered over like a curious dog.

  It was the warmest day they'd experienced in several months, The fields were slopping mud from the thaw and the trees looked fuzzy, like adolescents trying to grow hair. He looked at her and waited but she didn't speak so he went back to unloading the panels and setting them up properly. His south-eastern exposure was clear enough to keep them on the ground, obviating the need to mount them on a roof or in the trees. He'd the run the wires under the house and into her bedroom where he'd store the batteries.

  "Where is everybody?" she asked suddenly.

  "Who?"

  "The people at the party."

  Albert felt his heart rate jump and he knew his face looked gaunt.

  "They went home," he said.

  "Let's party, guys," she said, jumping around with her hands straight up in the air. "Let's party. Get us some beers. Party time! Party time!"

  Then she began dancing, or something akin to dancing, a combination of swaying and waving her arms and then jumping from place to place. It went on for about five minutes during which time he did not move. She stopped as suddenly as she had begun and sat down in the mud.

  "You-" he started to scold her because she would have to wash the clothes, when she began rubbing between her legs. Her eyes were jammed shut and she lay back in the mud and clamped her thighs around her hand, rolling back and forth and moaning. He turned away and concentrated on the panels. His hand was shaking as he tried to attac
h the lead wires.

  When they ate together in the evening, she would bow her head, eyes closed, hands clasped under her chin and say Grace. Sometimes it seemed she almost remembered something and then it vanished, just a shadow somewhere in her mind. He tried to ask her a few questions about herself but she didn't seem to understand the words. He asked her how old she was and she cried, "It's your birthday." And when he asked her where she lived, she looked at him and laughed. There was a limited reel of thoughts that kept rewinding and playing in her head and nothing else could be instilled or extracted.

  She cleared the plates and washed them in a bowl of water but he always had to rewash them later and put them away. She was unable to perform anything but the most superficial tasks.

  "Let's watch the TV," she said.

  He looked up from his book and put it down in his lap. It was the first request she'd made in a long time.

  "I'm going to get a TV tomorrow," he said. He'd been considering it for a couple of days, thinking about the television he'd seen at the bean farmer's, though he didn't relish going back in there for anything. It would give him another reason to go out tomorrow, rather than just cruising for batteries. He couldn't leave her alone, any longer. The weather was too fine and she might wander off or someone could show up here when he was away. There was no doubt whatsoever in his mind about what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of wandering bands or the militia or just about anyone else.