As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  "What the hell's the matter with you?" he shouted. "You think I'm crazy? You think it's me? Well fuck you! This is my home and you sons of bitches come in here...You got no fucking right!"

  He was screaming at her, spittle striking her face which remained unchanged, fearful but not afraid.

  He began to scream into the air, his fists clenched into a tight ball. No words came out of his twisted, blood-spattered mouth, only rabid, snarling.

  "Why did you come here?" he screamed at her, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her like a child. Her head whipped back and forth until her eyes closed and she gave in to whatever he was planning. He could shake her to death or bludgeon her with his fists and she wouldn't do anything about it. She wouldn't even cry out. She just accepted whatever he did.

  He pushed her away and she fell down again. He didn't pay any attention to her now. He walked around each body, gibbering, unable to contain himself, kicking at Burdock's headless body and then stomping on Slapface, crushing in her dead chest and listening to the ribs crack.

  The first two men killed still had their heads. That will never do. No sir. He quickly finished the job on the first man he had killed and then hacked into the second man's neck, the knife making a dense, wet, chopping sound.

  He looked at Ginny again and strode towards her with menacing determination.

  "I'm going to fucking kill you, understand? I'm going to fucking...Fuck!" he screamed at her.

  He jerked her to her feet and pushed her violently in the door. The sight of the other dead man sprawled on the floor, his head tilted against the wall, stopped Albert and he seemed to remember what he was doing. Ginny had begun to remove her pants and he watched her without understanding what was going on.

  "What are you doing?" he barked hoarsely. His voice cracked from the screaming would only come out in a harsh, graveled whisper. She stopped and looked at him again with that mildly quizzical, apprehensive stare.

  "Put your pants back on," he said and she immediately obeyed him.

  "You thought I brought you in here to-?"

  "It's okay. I like it," she said. "They all do it."

  "Go into the kitchen and get a bucket and some water and whatever you need to clean this place up," he said quietly. "Everything's in the kitchen...over there. You're going to clean this place up, understand? You!"

  She went off to find the kitchen and Albert gripped the corpse by the boots and dragged it outside with the others.

  The sun was up full now and the stink of blood and human feces hung thickly around the door. The blowflies were swarming, hanging like black lampshades over the bodies.

  When he returned, she was wiping the faceless man's brains off a wall and wringing the cloth out into the bucket and then using the same water again to wipe the wall.

  He let her collect the solids and then he took the bucket outside and emptied it. She was sitting on the sofa when he returned.

  His head was pounding and the stink of blood clogged his nostrils. It was stuck in his hair and dried on his face and clothes. He felt himself collapsing and managed to get to the sofa and sit down at the other end.

  Ginny didn't speak. She sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands in her lap and stared, sometimes looking around the room but never looking at him for more than a glance.

  "Who looks after you?" he asked her finally.

  "Mary-Louise," she answered cheerfully. "But she cain't do it no more because you chopped her head off. She's daid."

  You did. You cut her head off. You did. You cut her head off.

  "Haven't you got anybody else?" he whispered. His eyes were closing against his will. He knew what was happening. He was shutting down. He had to fight it off and get up. So he tried to stand up and he nearly passed out and fell back down.

  "Just you," she said.

  "What?"

  He rose slowly and towered over her. She kept her knees jammed together and her hands wrapped around each other in her lap.

  "I'm going to clean up," he said. "You be gone when I get back. You take that red car of yours and you get the hell outta here, understand? You get off my place and you tell everybody what happened here. Everybody you meet! You tell 'em what's waiting for them if anyone ever sets foot on my place again."

  He shouldn't have stood up because it was just farther to fall and he hit the edge of the sofa and wrenched his neck and then banged his head on the coffee table and felt the cool, smooth surface of the oak floor against his cheek.

  When he came to it was late afternoon. His cheek was stuck to the floor with dried blood and his own drool and pulled off like tape. He straightened up and leaned back against the edge of the sofa.

  Ginny was curled up on the big leather lazeeboy, arms hugging her knees and her mouth open slightly as she slept. He listened to her coarse breathing. He managed to stand up and go to the door. It wouldn't be long before the dogs found the corpses. He didn't want them to start coming around because he'd have to kill them too.

  When he looked in the bathroom mirror, whoever looked back was unknown to him. The hair stuck out in thick twisted knots, now impregnated with blood. A thick beard, just like his old license photo, was in the same condition. His eyes seemed to have lost their pupils.

  He washed his face and hands repeatedly, until the hot water ran out. His hair was still bloody but there was no time to do more.

  He strapped on a full-frame 1911 and put extra clips in his pockets and grabbed his AK. Ginny was still sleeping when he walked outside into the waning day.

  The tractor started right up and he threw it into high gear, bouncing wildly over the ground back to the house.

  He lowered the bucket and rolled in the five headless bodies. They didn't look like anything to him. They didn't look dead or gruesome or revolting. They were just a bucket load of trash. He drove more slowly out to the barn, through the cattle gate and into the far field to the charred pyre where Bolivia and the goats and two lambs that had starved to death had been burnt. He raised the bucket and tilted it until the arms and legs flailed like sky divers and the headless torsos thudded to the ground.

  It took an hour to round up the wood and tires that he would need to immolate them all. People think it's better to burn from the bottom up but it's actually just as effective if not more so to burn from the top down. He placed the tires over the bodies and then dumped two bucket-loads of collected forest debris on top. He doused the whole thing with five gallons of fuel and dropped a burning rag onto the pile.

  He drove slowly back to the house, turning once at the gate to check on the fire. Flames were already reaching ten feet over the top and he could hear the sizzling roar of the burning rubber. Once it caught, it was almost unstoppable and burned at ferocious temperatures, though not enough to consume the gallons of poisonous oils and zinc and carbon and sulfur that were released. These all curled into a thick black braid of smoke that could rise a thousand feet before fanning out.

  He stopped the tractor in front of the house and lowered the bucket and then went around collecting the heads. He threw them into the bucket and they banged like wooden blocks when they hit the steel or each other.

  Ginny was standing in the door, hugging herself against the drawing cold and watched him.

  "I thought I told you to git," he said.

  "I cain't drive," she said, and whirled around and went back inside, slamming the door.

  Albert's mouth hung open for a moment and then he got back on the tractor and pushed the throttle and took off. He steered the big Kubota down the driveway, bouncing over the ruts and just missing the overhanging tree limbs with the bucket. It was a long, thousand feet and the cold was moving in fast. He switched the headlights on before he got to the bottom.

  The tractor idled while he used the powerful headlights to illuminate his work space. He selected a scrub cedar about six feet tall and three inches across the butt near the edge of the road and slashed away at its upper branches, baring the top foot of the trunk. He sliced aw
ay at the tip with the machete until he had formed a crude point. He repeated this three more times with trees about ten feet apart. He was exhausted and panting heavily when he finished. He wanted a drink and he was shivering from the precipitous decline in temperatures that always followed bright, February days.

  "I never did anything to you," he said, as he jammed Burdock's big, fat head onto the first stake. His eyes were squeezed shut, so Albert pushed them open and they stuck that way.

  "I told you not to come back," he told Mary-Louise as he mounted her next. "Why did you bring these people to my house?"

  In the tractor headlights, the four heads shimmered and the eyes seemed to be watching him.

  The tractor was safely locked in the shed and he'd made his flashlight rounds of the buildings without a coat. He was shivering uncontrollably when he finally got back into the house.

  The house was dark and he saw Ginny sitting in the lazeeboy again, waiting for him.

  "I'm hongry," she said as soon as he stepped in the room.

  "Get outta here," he snarled at her. "Get outta my house. I don't want you around here."

  He grabbed her arm and jerked her from the chair and led her roughly to the door.

  "No," she wailed. "It's too cold...come on mister, have a heart...have a heart mister," she wailed, fighting back for the first time since he'd laid eyes on her.

  He let go of her and she pulled her arm back.

  "I can make a sangwitch," she said. "Peanut butter and jelly is good if you got that."

  Albert saw where this was going but he was too tired to deal with it. He just turned away from her and walked down the hallway.

  The hot water tank was replenished and he got into the shower, noticing for the first time that his arms and legs were covered with bruises and he could barely close his left hand without a striking pain running up his arm. They had fought back but he just hadn't noticed. He hadn't felt their blows or kicks or heard anything they might have said. He was in a complete fugue through the entire episode.

  All Albert Smythe ever asked of anyone was to be left alone. Nothing more. He earned his money hard, carrying other men's loads when they didn't want to lift them or couldn't or just plain wouldn't. He took their base wages and their contempt and their lies without complaint or comment. He paid cash for his land in a country that preached property ownership as a prime tenet of its civilization. He even paid his taxes up ten years in advance so they wouldn't come around and bother him, though they did anyway, measuring his buildings and sticking him up for a few more pennies here or there. He cut the trees for his home from his own land and notched out the dovetails with a chain saw and a mirror and ate the food he had pulled from the ground himself. He didn't vote, read newspapers, attend town council meetings, donate to charity or belong to any church. He paid cash for everything. He never negotiated price with anyone at any time. Whatever they demanded, he paid. He had never asked a favor or offered to help anyone. He didn't put dimes in the jars at the gas station counter "to help little Jimmy get a new iron lung." He didn't care about Jimmy or anyone else. He just wanted to be left alone. Every day he used to get up and think about his life, which was all his own, which belonged entirely to him and decide what to do with it. He could sit in his chair and read or go out to his shed and tinker or fix a tractor or make a batch of fuel or plan another project. In five years, he had never left the property to go farther than the two hundred miles to pick up the giant culverts for his tomb. The delivery services didn't even come up his driveway. They left packages in a cupboard at the edge of the road. He had done everything by the book, by their book. They said to get a permit for this or that, so he did. They said don't hunt deer without a license, so he religiously bought his licenses and his turkey stamp at Lee Baker's hardware store. He kept his truck registration papers and proof of insurance in the glove box along with his pistol permit and a .38 Special. He never allowed his license to expire or applied for a passport or filed a late income tax return. He had never been cited for speeding or an overweight load. He never owned a credit card, never bought anything on time and never had a debt he didn't pay. He did everything he possibly could think of to keep the outside world, outside. He gave them no cause and no excuse to visit him or pursue him or make enquiries.

  Now he was a mass murderer. He had murdered nine people and mutilated several bodies. You can't kill the sheriff because he's enforcing the law on your property and you can't kill a policeman because he shoots your dog and you can't kill a woman and saw her head off because she came back to your house against your wishes. You can't. There is no society that allows you to kill people because they are interfering with your personal freedom. Your personal freedom is subject to the imperatives of your society that all may walk as freely as possible under the circumstances. Apparently. And in pursuit of this cause, the government may decide one day to come and shoot your dog and your cow and take your food and lodge its minions in your home and you cannot object because it is for the good of the people. The government can force you to pay for its expenditures and can prohibit you from objecting to those expenditures because the people shall acquire the benefit of your sacrifice. The government will kill you with impunity because it has determined that you are to die and you have no appeal because the government does not answer to anyone but God and it has been decided that it is in the peoples' interest that you be torn from its bosom. First there is a God, then there is no God, then there is. No matter, for the government remains and while God does not exist and therefore does not interfere in the events of man, the government most certainly does and there is one situation that no government anywhere can possibly tolerate. Oh, surely, one may be forgiven anything?! We, the people, have seen it. Anything - any perversion, any greed, any perfidy that human ingenuity may concoct in pursuit of any ambition human vanity may conceive, any malfeasance, any betrayal, any horror visited upon any other and any lie that conceals it. Anything may be forgiven and forgotten by a humbling before Gog and Magog, anything but one: A man who will not submit cannot be endured. His actions may be counted criminal or insane or incomprehensibly defiant or they may be idiotic and willful but they are all equal before the great law, the first commandment of civilization: There can be no power before me. A man on his own is a threat greater than any government can tolerate and a mass of men unaffiliated by cause other than their own freedom is a treason no government will abide. You may choose your poison, sir, but drink you shall.

  The water turned ice cold and he cranked the taps closed. When he looked in the mirror, his hair was flat against his head and the splotches of blood and bits of brain and skull were gone. He dressed slowly, painfully and went back out to the main room where Ginny was sitting at the table scooping peanut butter out of a jar with her fingers and licking it.

  He sat down at the table opposite her and she continued as if he wasn't even there. She had thick streaks of peanut butter on her tongue and she licked and sucked her fingers clean and then plunged them back into the jar.

  "What is your name?" he asked her.

  "Virginia May Rollins."

  "Don't you have parents?"

  "They left. Do you want some?" She pushed the jar at him.

  "No thank you."

  She had had enough and licked her fingers clean but there was peanut butter around her mouth.

  "Do you have coke?"

  He rose and retrieved a jug of water from the fridge and poured her a glass. She sniffed at it but drank it anyway and wiped her mouth.

  "You can't stay here," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want you here. I live by myself."

  "Me too."

  "I'm going to show you to a room - you probably already know where it is, come to think of it. You can sleep there tonight and I'll give you something to eat in the morning and then you have to leave, understand?"

  She didn't reply. He told her to get up and she fell into the robotic, obedient, low-affect mode that he had
come to associate with her. The bed was dirty from the previous residents but she didn't seem to notice or care.

  "Good night," he said. She lay down in the bed fully clothed and pulled the thin, worn blanket over her and was asleep before he left the room.

  The stink of burning human flesh woke him at dawn. It smells like barbecue pork. Some say it smells like chicken. You'll know it when you inhale and your stomach muscles involuntarily contract with sudden violence and bile shoots into your mouth. The first time or two, anyway.

  The wind must coming hard from the east and blowing smoke from the smoldering bodies in his field across the front of the house.

  He went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror and still did not completely recognize the one who looked back.

  What have you done?

  He stepped outside and his eyes glanced over the heavy blood stains on the ground but were soon drawn to the chimneys of smoke rising over the town. He could see the point at about a thousand feet where the black cloud flattened and spread and headed in his direction. The stink was from the town, not from his meager hay-field catafalque. Three distinct columns rose straight up and fused into one vast, roiling mass that moved like a giant flotilla on the east wind. He thought they must be burning the town and-

  But that didn't explain the smell.

  Ginny was standing in the great room looking dazed and sleepy when he got back. She came over to him with a friendly smile and before he could stop her had thrown her arms around him and hugged his chest to her cheek. He balked at the foul odor emanating from every pour in her body and her clothes and her hair. It mixed with the stench of burning flesh and he looked around for a place to run. He pried her off and held her away from him. She was still smiling and sleep had left her eyes puffy and red.

  "Go take a shower," he said. "You stink to high heaven."

  With that she raised her arm and sniffed and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  "Come on," he said and she followed him back down the hall to the bathroom. He reached into the stall and adjusted the water.