As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  One by one, all jerked and grabbed by a medusa of hands and arms, the screaming and shouting both of the victims and the perpetrators all mixed together into a roaring expulsion of hate and terror as they moved out into the street and there punched and clubbed and kicked and gouged until every one of them was an unrecognizable bloody pulp. Swathes of purplish blood stained the asphalt and the snow and broken bones and faces and crushed skulls lay deposited over the ground like some left-wing feminist installation at a New York art gallery.

  The crowd was still a unified force as the last foot crushed the last throat and the many-headed monster searched for more prey. The incoherent, garbling of shouts and roars had suffused itself into a kind of thrum that beat at heart speed in the cold air. Eyes caromed off eyes but no one looked at anyone else as they swayed in a mass over their accomplishments.

  Then someone happened to look away, possibly to avert her eyes from the sight of a former human and saw Hector Gonzalez dart between a pair of store fronts.

  "There," she screamed, and the volvox moved off again at a dead run, maintaining its cohesive obliquity by some telepathic process as flocks do, able to surge and flow around objects and yet continue to have form and purpose as it funneled down the alleyway, where Gonzalez was last seen.

  Hector could run. Hector was in good shape. Hector liked to run.

  He broke from the cover of the buildings into a series of open yards in a trailer park and then hurdled a cattle fence and set out across the frozen, lumpy, fall-ploughed ground where the first wheat stubble was poking through.

  He could hear the incoherent gargoyle chant of death behind him and glanced back only once to see the multi-colored monster slicing the air towards him. Then he turned and concentrated on the pumping of his heart and the repeated thud of his boots against the ground and soon enough everything faded except that perfect rhythm and the short gasps of air like a pressure cooker. He had no idea where he was going. Hector Gonzalez was not afraid. He had been here before, running across the Sonoran desert, running along the highways from border guards, running from immigration police...running. He liked to run. Good thing.

  The monster, insatiate and bellowing now with the power it sucked up with each life consumed, roamed the streets of Provost for several more hours, smashing windows in stores and looting whatever it found. It tore up files and destroyed computer equipment in the town buildings and killed every cat and dog it encountered. It finally ran down and began to break apart, first in ones and twos and then in larger groups until finally it was gone, though not gone. Like fire, it had receded underground, it had vanished, but it was not gone and at any time, even something so small as a match head could revive it, all it needed was a crowd crystal, and in minutes it would become itself once again.

  Provost was neither at the top nor the bottom of the curve in these matters. Several towns had rebelled previous to Provost's entry into the history book of social breakdown, and many would come afterwards as the government, unable to control those within its grasp, like the army and its own various departments, relinquished even the appearance of authority in the hinterlands. They retreated to the larger cities, pulling in every available asset to try and stem the destruction that was multiplying daily as the new disease spread across the country. It wasn't all that new, of course. They had know about it long in advance, for they had created it. When the swine flu of 2009-10 had failed to materialize into the great pandemic they had hoped for, military and civilian research labs had begun engineering something that would. It was not the nefarious conspiracy that the tin foil hats clamored about. They didn't want to infect the sacred "People of The United States," simply to reduce population or create an excuse for Martial Law. They wanted the population to incubate a deadly virus that they could then manipulate into an even more deadly virus to be used as a weapon "in case." In case of what? In case they needed some way to kill millions and millions and millions of people on short notice. Using the population as a Petri dish was the methodology that dare not speak its name and neither the government which turned a blind eye to it when it was not actively promoting it, (remember the 399 black men with syphilis deliberately left untreated by the U.S. Health Department long after a penicillin cure was available so they could study the long term effects of the disease?) nor the companies that regularly employed the practice in their endless, ruthless, wanton pursuit of profits would ever com,e clean on the issue.

  All the usual suspects began manipulating and gene splicing the H1N1 virus that had been such a miserable failure. If they could just produce a really, really, really bad virus and turn it loose on the population, they could pull the other hand from behind their back and offer the antidote. It was a time-honored practice by every major drug company in the world going back to the pioneering days of AG Farben and its subsidiary, Bayer, which helped murder more people in Auschwitz than any other single entity other than the SS itself. Bayer wanted to release viruses and illnesses that were selective for Jews, gypsies and homos while harmless to the pure, white Aryan stock. Now GlaxoSmithKlein, Novartis AG, Sanofi-Aventis SA., et al, just wanted to kill somebody - anybody - so that they could sell the federal government little bottles of salvation at three or four hundred dollars a pop.

  But this time it went wrong, the way all great plans must. Their vaccine and their antidotes couldn't keep up with the accelerated mutation rate of the newly created H1N1VX and before anyone could say 'Bob's your uncle' H1N1VX headed out the door before anyone realized that it was no longer a simple influenza virus but had mutated and combined with Zaire Ebola, old Uncle ZEBOV. It had changed its transmission modality from fuckin', suckin' and conjunctival communion to the much more efficient and productive coughing, sneezing and breathing method. This wonderful new and improved hemorrhagic incubus misnamed H1N1VX to disguise its (possible) Reston, Va., origins and discourage accusations of paternity against the government of the United States and The Big Drug Companies, announced itself, had its own coming out party, as they say, in an army barracks adjacent to Area 51 which does not exist. This is also not the location where other experimental procedures from cancer cures to radioactive poisoning protocols were never carried out against unsuspecting soldiers. H1N1VX killed its first thirty nine victims in forty nine hours from first contact to last projectile expulsion of blood-soaked sputum.

  The panicked companies started producing their unsuccessful, inefficient and insufficient vaccines and antidotes round the clock, (having to charge the government a contingency for the last minute nature of the request, of course, which the government gladly paid by telling the Federal Reserve to send a few extra truckloads of soon-to-be-useless reserve notes over to the various producers.) 'Ha,' they chortled, a chortle being contempt thinly wrapped in false laughter, 'we got 'em there, don't we?' Obama and Geitner and Bernanke and the whole sneering, snickering, masturbatory gang chortled, coughing into their sleeves. They knew the economy was about to implode again and U.S. dollars would be recognized for what they really were: a promise redeemable in regrets and outrage. But the government would have the vaccine and save the people and defeat the Republicans for the opportunity to "rebuild this great nation once again..." Ha. Ha, is right. Who did they think they were foolin? The drug companies replied that they now required their payments in gold and stopped the factories until armored trucks arrived with enough gold bars to crack the axles on a Russian tank.

  They managed to produce enough of the vaccine to inoculate the armed forces and the federal departments of Homeland Security and FEMA and all the politicians in Washington, their families and friends, but only enough to satisfy about ten percent of the public need. Round and round and round the clock they worked and Vroom! Vroom! went the gold trucks as they lumbered along the beltway delivering their holy cargo.

  But alas...

  The vaccine was effective in only thirty percent of those who received it in time. The antidotes worked if administered within twenty four hours of infection and the individual wa
s placed in intensive care with IV antibiotics, fluids and specialized nutritional supplements for ten days. After that thirty seven percent of those patients lapsed into irreversible comma. Effectively, the uninoculated were dead unless they happened to be among that nine per cent of the population that was naturally immune to H1N1VX.

  In its initial, frantic attempts to isolate the natural immunity in the new chosen people, the government and the drug companies infected hundreds of prisoners, city derelicts and problem news broadcasters in secret labs and ended up with four women and three men who survived. They strapped them to gurneys and continued to pump them full of the virus, analyzing their blood, their brain chemistry, their sperm count, ovulation cycles, their favorite color and whether they flossed regularly until all of them finally died as well, without isolating even a shadow of a single indicator.

  "There's a huge bonus for the team that figures this one out," the CEO of RoachSluggDrekk wrote in a memo. "Of course, under the present circumstances we cannot afford to pay overtime hours..."

  The epidemic actually spread very slowly at first, giving some reason to hope that natural immunity in the population was much higher than thought, or perhaps the virus was not as lethal as feared. Perhaps it couldn't keep up its own horrendous pace of mutation and was running out of food and dying. Like a cancer that finally consumes its host, H1N1VX might just be going into its own natural death cycle.

  Then between January 3, 2013 and January 13, 2013, thirty two million people in the United States dropped dead and lay where they fell. Over the next six weeks, another two hundred million Americans died.

  Reports began to come in from overseas of massive infection rates as well, though no other country was experiencing the concomitant terrorist attacks that had crippled the American transportation and communications systems. At least not yet. That was to come later. As the bodies began to pile up in Europe, heads turned to Asia where the Chinese and Indians were experiencing about half of the death rate. A thousand years of living in close quarters had gradually immunized those populations against numerous incarnations of disease that attacked western man the way measles killed the native Americans. But the effects were eventually the same. Hundreds of millions of rotting corpses littered every street and parking lot and garden and highway everywhere on earth.

  So the U.S. Government, it's numbers reduced to skeleton basics and its entire arsenal at risk, pulled every enlisted or contracted human being back from their humanitarian duties in smaller metropoli, such as Provost and left these hamlets and miniature cities that they had first stripped of everything the population might need for its own survival, and vanished into Cheyenne Mountain and slammed the gate shut.

  And there was once again darkness over the face of the deep...

  PART 1, CHAPTER

  Albert finally saw them, about a hundred feet into the woods, side by side as they had always been. Mutt was almost completely gone, only some skin on his head any indication that he was once alive and his buddy Jeff was just a few bones and a flap of muscle. But he knew them. They had escaped the death sentence handed down by the gentlemen from FEMA and rather than starve, had jumped the fence or pushed it over somewhere or exploited a deadfall across the wire and headed out into the unknown. Can't really blame the dogs, Albert conceded. They had been following him for about an hour, keeping a respectful distance after he shot the pack leader and wounded the next Alpha. The First Beta jumped right in and had been leading the group of about ten ever since. Occasionally he caught sight of the little chow.

  Stay clear of me and I'll stay clear of you.

  He had been back in his house for over a month but he still couldn't get used to it. His privacy and his place on earth had been soiled by the intruders and even burning the sheets and the blankets and Slapface's red suitcase full of clothing, had not cleared it up completely. He spent a lot of each day as the weather warmed in the woods looking for any sign of Mutt and Jeff and the young nanny and the sheep but he had no real belief he would find them alive.

  Bit by bit, through short-wave reports he got a picture of complete breakdown and total anarchy across the country. The disease was killing people faster than any bomb and their bodies were lying unburied while the survivors wandered the landscape without respite. Around the first week of February he noticed broadcasts becoming harder to find until days could pass without hearing from anyone other than a few Australians and some Chinese. Then he managed to pick up a shortwave station with a familiar voice.

  "You all know me," the broadcaster said.

  Albert lost him for a second and twisted the rheostat until he came back in mid sentence.

  "...telling you this was going to happen, but oh no, you just went on like nothing was happening. Well baby look at you now!" he screamed into the microphone.

  "White Christmas and Happy Times Are Here Again folks. Yessir. Just forget about Poison Chinese Drywall and Poison Chinese Dog Food and Poison Chinese Baby Food and Lethal Mexican Lettuce and the recall of one hundred and forty three million pounds of shit-infested beef - and this is really funny: (after most of it had been eaten!) from Westland Meat in California whose specialty was school lunches. And what did the FDA do? Come now, what did they do? The FDA banned cupcakes, home-canned pickles and preserved pigs’ feet from church suppers. They made bake sales illegal. They passed laws banning gardens and you think I am making this up. You still think so? Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro D-CT Demented Demagogue from Connecticut came up with H.R. 875. I have it right here in front of me. Yes, my friends, the same people who certified Westland Meat and brought you California spinach and Thalidomide decided you can't grow a garden without a permit from the government."

  He was screaming so loudly into the microphone his words were coming across as a blur of static.

  "But there are no conspiracies, ladies and gentlemen; there are no conspiracies.

  "Black Panthers walk around with spiked clubs and the vilest Negrotude at polling stations and the justice department finds "nothing wrong," but God help anybody who ever raised an eyebrow in the direction of a black ACORN stooge soliciting in the check-out line. But there are no conspiracies. The head of the KKK may be an undercover FBI agent, but there are no conspiracies. COINTELPRO may have set up, framed, beaten tortured and murdered the old "New Left," but there are no conspiracies.

  "Perhaps there really are two or three consecutive generations of Americans who have never even heard of The Pentagon Papers and so take Mr. Bushleague, our favorite talking chimp and his photographic negative successor, Barry Sutoro at their word. Let's just keep invading other countries and sending American kids out to die for Halliburton. You know who supports the wars all of a sudden? The new "New Left." You know why? They say it's different. Before it was "them," and now it's "us." But there are no conspiracies. Don't know what the Pentagon papers are? Look it up you fools. Never heard of the Gulf of Tonkin? Fifty five thousand Americans died in Vietnam over a lie, ladies and gentlemen. Stop getting your history from television. Television is all lies. Lies, the whole lie and nothing but the lie. It makes you believe because you think you are actually seeing the truth. But there are no conspiracies.

  In 1992, President George H. W. Bush told an interviewer - and this is mainstream, folks...this is the White House Press Corps, we're talking here; this isn't some conspiracy site. You know what he told her? He said, and I quote: "'if the American people ever find out what we have done, they will chase us down the streets and lynch us.'" But there are no conspiracies.

  Lee Harvey Oswald fired one bullet that struck JFK's neck at an upward angle, turned around in mid air and went back down into Governor John Connally's back but came out of his chest, sliced into his wrist, shattered it and then went looking for more targets and burrowed into his thigh where it decided it was uncomfortable and so plopped out onto the hospital cot and waited to be found. Sounds possible. No conspiracy there. And Sirhan Sirhan, acting alone was able to fire at least ten bullets from a gun that held
eight bullets without reloading and the girl in the polk-a-dot dress screaming: "We just killed Bobby Kennedy," was really J. Edgar Hoover doing undercover work for the LA Police Department of which he was so fond. Okay. No conspiracy. Forget Timothy McVeigh and the Murrah Building. No conspiracy. And Ruby Ridge and Waco. Remember Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who killed Vicky Weaver with a shot through the head? Charges of manslaughter brought against him were dismissed three days after 911 and in 2008, he was featured on an ad campaign by H-S Precision Rifles, endorsing their sniper products! But there are no conspiracies...

  The radio cut out and Albert tried twisting the dial again but all he got were static and whale sounds. Then he broke in again.

  "They're looking for me right now, folks. They're out there with that helicopter and when they find me they are going to blow this place to hell. But I am not going to stop talking until they kill me! You know where they sent Horiuchi next? WACO! Remember Waco where the FBI and the BatFaggots burned twenty children alive to protect them from child abuse? But it is not a conspiracy. Oh lord. And after Nidal Malik Hassan murdered thirteen American soldiers at Ft. Hood, Gen. George Casey, THE COMMANDING GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY said: "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I think it would be an even greater tragedy if it [affected] our diversity." Which means of course, that the tender little feelings of Muslims are much more important to the U.S. Army than the lives of a few crackers in uniform. Thank you Gen. Casey. You may be a scum-sucking pig, but there is no conspiracy. Nosir! And there are no false-flag attacks and no conspiracies to cover them up. Allen Dulles and The Joint Chief's of Staff of the United States Armed Forces under the chairmanship of Lyman Lemnitzer in 1962 did not concoct a plan called Northwoods in which American interests and civilians would be attacked and murdered by U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives to create a reason for the invasion of Cuba. This plan was not devised and sent to the Secretary of Defense. Well, okay, it was. It's all true. But it's not proof of conspiracy and false-flag operations. Nosir! I'll give it all to you. The real and the imagined. Take it all, every reported and verified and debunked claim of conspiracy and false-flag operations and dump in the Birthers and the Truthers and the 911-was-an-inside-job-ers and the Illuminati Illiterati and the Jewish Conspiracists and the Holocaust Deniers and the Obama-is-the-antiChristers, AIDS-was-a-plot-to-kill-blacks-and-homo-ers, Aliens-live-among-us-ers, The-Moon-Landing-was-a-fake-ers,...the whole pathetic asylum load of unintelligible, gibbering lunatics, flapping like demented kookaburras on the edges of rationality; treat them all the same. No quarter! "There is no conspiracy."