As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  Marjorie spooned out beef stew into each bowl and produced some biscuit-like objects to go along with it.

  "I found the flour," she said, "so I made these biscuits. I hope you don't mind...I really don't know what to do and-"

  "They're great," Albert said, snapping a piece off and dropping it into the stew to soften it a bit before trying another bite.

  "I'll show you where everything is," he told her, including a few cookbooks."

  He tried to retract the comment but his mouth had already opened and let it out and now it was sitting on the dinner table like a big piece of dog shit that everyone was pretending to ignore.

  She looked blackly at him but recovered quickly and a stiff smile clung valiantly to her face as she daringly passed the plate around. Small thank-yous were offered as each biscuit was retrieved.

  When they were finished the boys cleared the table and after she filled the tub with warm water and soap, they washed everything without argument or complaint.

  "Do you smoke?" Walter asked. Albert shook his head.

  "I will go outside then," he said and pushed back from the table. Marjorie looked panicked for a moment to be left alone with Albert but Walter ignored her and went outside.

  "Thank you for that," Albert said.

  "Really, Mr. Smythe, I don't see how you can be thanking us for anything. It's your food, your house, your...everything."

  Albert just shrugged and looked myopically at her. She was a pretty woman with symmetrical features and fairly light hair and complexion and the faintest beginnings of a second chin, a loosening of the facial muscles.

  "How have you managed to...?" she looked around the room without finishing the sentence and stared at him for an explanation.

  He didn't know how to answer her. Should he start when he was a truck driver waiting for the end of the world in 1999 or should he tell her about the magazine article he'd read in a truck-stop toilette that had sent him on his biodiesel quest or the gradual obsession with independence that had taken over his mind the longer he spent alone up here...

  "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he said. She colored even though she knew he did not mean that as it sounded.

  "We-"

  Walter opened the door and came back inside and she seemed relieved.

  "Tell Mr. Smythe how we got here," she said. "Would you mind if I made us some tea," she asked Albert. "I found the tea bags under the counter and...I thought it would be alright..."

  "Whatever you want to do," Albert said. "Really. You don't have to ask me."

  So now he would sit around drinking tea while Deserter and the rest hunkered down in the woods some place trying to avoid a drone attack and children were being taken by bounty hunters and sold to the UN and gangs of killers roamed at will and wild dogs ate virgins for breakfast.

  "We came here about a week ago," Walter said. "We got lost and ended up here. It was Peter who found the place, actually. He was walking along that bluff, that ridge of yours up there," he pointed, "and he saw the cabin and called us over. We would never have even looked."

  "Where were you headed?"

  "South, away. We couldn't face another winter and we were trying to find a place to stay, perhaps find some others, you know? Surely there must be people trying to live normally, someplace!"

  She sat down again while the water heated.

  "You don't sound like you are from around here," Albert said.

  "We started out in Chicago," she said.

  "You walked here from Chicago?"

  "There was no other way. Have you seen the roads, the highways?"

  Albert shook his head.

  "I haven't been more than twenty miles from here since everything started," he said.

  Walter found this surprising and looked more carefully at Albert.

  "You don't know what's going on out there?"

  "Not really," he said. "Just what I've heard here and there. Why? Can't be that much worse than here. We've got UN troops and there are still bodies lying around. Fucking wild dogs...sorry...and gangs. I suppose there's more of it out there, but it's about the same shit all over, isn't it?"

  "There were over two million bodies in Chicago," Walter said.

  Albert laughed involuntarily.

  "Rotting in the streets," she added.

  "The city was destroyed within three days after the trucks started to blow up. You see, there is no food in Chicago except what is brought in by truck. The grocery stores have enough for maybe a day or so and then their shelves are empty. So three million people went crazy and everything broke down. I knew this would happen so we left the very first day, even before the government started to talk about it."

  "Walter worked in inventory control for the Alabaster Food Corporation. Do you know what that is?

  He shook his head.

  "It was the third largest distributor of food products for the Midwest," Walter said. "I knew the freight schedules. I knew that JIT loads of food couldn't withstand any delay at all. There was no room for error. None. One truck of chicken wings coming in a few hours late could cost a retailer his entire profit for the day because people would go elsewhere and then he'd have to try and get them back the following day and so he'd make promises and almost give stuff away so now we've got two days loss; you see how it goes. It doesn't take long. I knew when the first truck blew that it was time to get out so I just went home and we got into our car and drove out of town until we ran out of gasoline. Do you know how long it took for the food and fuel to run out completely? Thirty six hours. I had camping equipment and a few things in the car and we lugged what we could to one of those public camp grounds and set up our tent. But we had no food except what Marjorie had packed from the house and so I killed our Labrador and we ate him. The boys think he was hit by a car.

  "The campground filled up very quickly and fights started among those who had spaces and those who wanted them. The people with guns killed the people without guns and took their spaces and their possessions. So we left our tent and all our stuff and started to walk along the road where thousands of cars were abandoned. We were stopped and robbed about a hundred times. That we had nothing was our only salvation. I finally picked this up from a dead man-"

  He held up a 9 mm. pistol that Albert had not seen before.

  "We left the main road and went into the farm lands where, surprisingly enough, very few people had gone to hide. I don't know why. In any case, we ended up at a house with this old couple and we stayed with them until one day some men from FEMA showed up and confiscated all the food the couple had put away for emergencies and when the old man protested and tried to stop them, they shot him. They left the body right there in the living room along with three cases of MREs and never came back. The old woman died about two weeks into the flu epidemic. And we have been wandering ever since."

  "All the cities?" Albert asked.

  "Everywhere," Walter said. “We ran into people from New York, Philly, you name it. They said you couldn't describe what was happening even if you could believe it when you saw it."

  "Every woman we met had been raped," Marjorie said.

  "And the blacks...Jesus Christ," Walter said, shaking his head. "I mean there is just no way to describe what they did once the lid came off."

  "You can't imagine," Marjorie said. "You just can't imagine."

  Albert thanked her for the tea and he sipped it and then put it aside. He had never liked tea no matter how much he tried.

  "Everywhere you go now, it's complete mayhem, chaos. I mean the army..." Walter quit trying to describe it.

  Albert stood up. "You can stay here as long as you want," he said.

  Marjorie stood up and embraced him lightly. He inhaled her pheromones, unadulterated by artificial scent and stood stiff as a drugstore Indian while she hugged him and pecked his face.

  "Thank you," she said.

  Where was he going to sleep? He thought of the couple in his bed and the two boys in the other room and he
didn't even want to be in the house with them. He could sleep in the drive shed with the tractor. He had done that before. There was an old sofa in there that Ludwig had used. He'd slept in his truck more than once, though it was cramped and difficult and he would wake repeatedly to find a limb gone numb or his back aching and now that the windows were blown out, he wouldn't even be able to stay reasonably warm. Not the tomb. Anything but the tomb.

  "Where are you going?" she said as he headed for the door.

  "There's something I have to take care of," he said, coloring.

  "Please don't," she said. "The boys can stay on this sofa and you-"

  "-I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll sleep on the sofa when I get back, but leave the boys where they are."

  He couldn't get out of the house fast enough. The woman's doting concern unnerved him to the point where his own voice sounded foreign.

  He walked across the field to his truck and opened the door. A raccoon hissed at him from the front seat and he stood aside as it slithered across the bench and leapt out. With some duct tape and a few rags he was able to block the smashed windows and he lay across the seat at a sort of twisted angle, trying to keep his bad leg straight and his neck from bending too sharply against the door. He woke a hundred times and shifted position, but eventually the morning came and he felt he would be in a better mind to decide his next move.

  He ripped the tape from the windows and started the truck. The boys were outside and Marjorie and Walter were hanging up laundry when he appeared.

  Albert spent the day showing Walter and Marjorie where he had hidden everything. He showed them the dried and preserved foods and the home-made wine, the bags of jerky and the smoked meat still hanging on greasy ropes. He showed them how to use the escape hatch in the bedroom if they ever had to and he showed them where the short wave radio was hidden and how to set it up and warned them that broadcasting could alert the UN or FEMA or Homeland Security to this location and they would be arrested. Arrested? What for? Because. He showed them how to switch batteries and maintain the solar cells. He showed them the generator and the biodiesel and the tractor and he took Walter to the drive shed and gave him an AK and a thousand rounds of ammunition and a .22 Machine gun and five thousand rounds and told him to kill anyone who showed up on the property.

  "Anyone shows up here but me is going to rape your wife to death and sell your children to the UN and burn you alive, you understand me, Walter?"

  But Walter was the one who had been out in the world and he didn't need Albert's warning.

  "Then why didn't you shoot me when I came up to the house?"

  "Because I was pretty sure I knew who you were," he said. "I would have done it if I had to," he added, but Albert didn't believe him.

  After the first time, it's easy; but that first execution can be a real drain on the old conscience. The socially ingrained and completely unnatural aversion to killing, even in self-defense, even in the defense of others has become the anchor of civilization, or so we are told. Non-killing is so esteemed and glorified as a religious and social precept, that even self-defense becomes anathema, but not because it shows respect for life but because it shows fear of authority. Thou shalt not kill, is the often repeated injunction but that's incorrect. Good ol' number six correctly translated is: Thou shalt not murder. Public order is the point, not morality. Killing shall be reserved to those who are authorized to kill. And so in the quest for public order which has now supplanted every other objective and exists for its own sake and recognizes itself as surely as blood, the killing of enemies has been turned over to the cool hand of the state. And the state not only does the killing but defines the enemies.

  In the last century, the efficiency of the state at unearthing enemies and eliminating them has proven itself time and time again. It has uncovered about two hundred and seventy two million enemies and executed every single one of them using a variety of methods including: hanging, burning alive, burying alive, starvation, deliberate infection, prolonged suffocation and strangulation, drowning, shooting, gassing and the latest craze sweeping the nation, injection. So there is no validity whatsoever to the argument that the prohibition against killing has anything whatsoever to do with the ineptly-named sanctity of life. Where life was truly sacred, no government could take root and the killing that subsequently transpired between individuals would right itself, over time. One can only surmise a world sans the gentle wisdom and benevolent hand of government guiding it through the mists of social evolution and without the great advantage that government-organized killing allows us.

  Albert watched them from his perch on the ridge, panning east to west, barn to drive shed, the digital meter on the distance calibrator spinning constantly. He watched the boys playing a running game with their father who gave up and sat down. The summer had finally come in, soft and bright and here in Albert's enclave there was no indication that anything was wrong anywhere.

  He knew he could not remain there, he had to go back to the Mason camp and see if anyone had survived besides himself but he was afraid to leave them alone. Walter did not take the threat seriously and he was never armed when Albert watched him outside.

  Albert spent most of the day patrolling a large swath of property from this ridge point to Magneson’s and all the way down to the highway. He had watched an increasing train of refugees marching west and south, driving all kinds of bicycles and horse-and-wagon combinations obviously created by people who had never seen a horse before. They trudged past, somnambulant, starving and almost irreducible at this point. Once in a while one of them dropped in the middle of the road or rolled down an embankment into a ditch or sat down against a tree where they closed their eyes and exhaled. The few children he saw were carried in arm and the anomaly of a toddler or a young teenager always caught his eye and reminded him of the two little girls he had helped murder in Brantford.

  He shouldered his AK and emerged from the tree line and started down the slope to the house. The boys saw him and started running towards him. Walter waved and went inside.

  Albert watched them run and it made him laugh because they wouldn't even know they had been running. It was just the way you got someplace. His leg still bothered him but he was walking normally. They called his name and he enjoyed the fact that they always seemed glad to see him. Neither one reminded him at all of his own youth and he often found himself involuntarily comparing their behavior towards their parents and each other with his life at that age. It was not bitter or recriminatory reminiscence but almost the indifferent curiosity of a third party, as though he were examining comparable slides in a text book.

  They reached him in no time. Did he shoot anyone today? Did he see any soldiers? Did the dogs try to kill him? Are there snakes around here?

  It was always hard for him to enter the house now. He almost knocked but realized that would strain their relationship again and it had just reached the point, just beyond civility, where they felt reasonably comfortable in each other's presence. Marjorie always set the table for five and the boys always cleaned up and he watched Walter assist her in the preparations and do whatever she asked.

  He began to see how she had put her spell on them all. Everyone found her curious, even her own two boys. Everyone, including Albert was acutely conscious of her presence all the time and watched her to see what she thought of whatever was taking place, but she seemed to have no idea that this was happening.

  They ate simply and modestly, chatter at a minimum not because of some religious maxim or dictate of etiquette but rather because there was not a lot to say, these days. Albert was a taciturn and awkward conversationalist and all of them had been separated from their previous lives so traumatically, that social chit-chat was too difficult.

  But tonight Albert had to speak to them and he waited until the two boys had been sent to bed. Marjorie and Walter detected his unease and he offered them whiskey as a prelude. He saw the consternation on Marjorie's face and it didn't occur to him right awa
y that his mysterious behavior might mean only one thing to them.

  "No!" he said, suddenly and then realized they were probably more confused now.

  "This isn't about you leaving here," he said. "You never have to leave here if you don't want to. You can have this place. I am giving it to you."

  She seemed relieved but Walter was not assuaged.

  "I don't think we can accept such a gift," Walter started to say but Albert waved him off.

  "It's up to you. I'm leaving tonight and I will not be back. I will write something down that gives this place to you so that if ever it becomes a question...well it probably won't matter but you never know. I don't have a mortgage," he added idiotically.

  "But why are you leaving?" she asked. "There is no place to go out there, believe me. You have no idea; this is heaven, Albert. You have created heaven on earth."

  "I just wanted you to know what was happening," he said finally.

  "But Albert, I don't understand-" Walter tried again.

  "I have some things I have to do and I know I won't be back," he said, sounding much too dramatic for his own taste. "I don't mean I'm going to die or something, well of course I'm going to die some day, everybody dies, but I mean I am not going out there to die right away. I mean, it may happen but not because I want it to or anything like that, I mean I'm not expecting it except, you know, normally...Ah Jesus."

  Marjorie looked sad but she did not cry. Walter looked more like he was going to squeeze off a few drops and Albert looked away in horror.

  He went to the desk and took out his deeds and a map showing the property. They came over and he spread it out for them.

  "Here to here," he said, pointing, "and down to here. That's the big rock, you know where that is?"

  Walter nodded.

  "I got to tell you something. I blocked the driveway off with trees, big trees. Don't try and remove them. I wired a huge fifty pound bomb into the heart of it and it will go off if you release it."