As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  Not a bad way to go, really. Better than cancer. Better than dying alone in a nursing home. Better than suffocating from a thick bolus of blood and stomach contents lodged in the wind pipe. Better than being burned alive. Better than being hung upside down until the brain bursts. Better than being impaled and left for three days to scream. Better than a lot of things.

  Lucky them.

  Albert had gotten a hold of a very powerful set of binoculars and he could not only see in both daylight and dark, now, but could range an object fairly accurately. This way he could stay well hidden in the woods around his farm and scout the area for a long time before he moved. He was ten feet off the ground in the arms of a walnut tree, watching the house and the barns and enjoying the warm air after such a bitter winter.

  He had cleared a lot of the scrub and growth away from his house, pushing the open spaces back almost a hundred yards using his bush hog and chain saw. They could hide farther out but eventually they would have to cross the freshly opened ground that he had prepared for them. The closest trees to his house were at the south side, leading to the driveway, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet. He knew that was his weak side despite the advantage the north limestone ridge might provide to an attacker. The ridge was far away and they would have to cross hundreds of feet of open ground before they got to him.

  But distance wasn't everything. It wasn't very much, in fact because their rifles could hit him from even the farthest points; it just allowed him a view of the incoming, something he believed would help when they came and he was certain they would come.

  They might not attack at night because of the dearth of reliable infrared glasses and scopes and they knew that he possessed both, now. Night warfare was problematic for a number of reasons and he knew it and so did they. They would likely come down from Magnuson's in one group and up from the road in another and try and get a vehicle overland to come at him from the east as well. It would be difficult because they would have to cross-country at least two miles of rolling farmland crisscrossed by creeks, lowlands, fence lines and washouts and a broken axle or a serious snag in a ditch or sinkhole was almost impossible to repair. They might not take the chance with the shiny .50 Cal. they were supposed to have mounted on the back of a pickup. On the other hand, if they could just get it within a mile of him he'd be done for. The thumb-thick slugs would arrive on the scene at the rate of about eight per second and unless he was completely ensconced behind yards of limestone, there was no defense. He'd seen a .50 Cal. Browning punch a hole through ten inches of reinforced concrete in fifteen seconds at two hundred and fifty yards. And who knows what type of at least fifteen possible ammo configurations they might possess.

  The Liberty Militia was in tatters and trying to save itself. Of the original hundred and five members, there were now fourteen left alive, including their fake colonel, George Griggson and his majordomo Dusty Harkness. Actually, thirteen, Albert corrected himself.

  Once they had determined that Albert's place was still functioning with food and water and light, they decided it was in the best interests of the people for it to be turned over to the Militia as a command post from where George and Dusty could strategize in their continuing efforts to serve their fellow citizens.

  Albert knew this was an advantage for him because they wanted the place intact. They wanted the fuel and the food and the clean water, the electricity, the radios and the shelter. They weren't going to blow it up. It was Albert they wanted dead. And they would presume Albert had prepared the property for them.

  A week past, he had been in the woods before sunrise and using his night vision was able to make a complete circuit of the defensible area in total cover. That was when he had caught the intense bright blur of a human form past the effective range of the goggles but close enough for him to make out the man's arms at an angle coming back to his head and the darker nexus of his fingers. The intruder was watching Albert's house with a pair of night-vision goggles or binoculars of his own.

  It took a long time to circle around behind him because he had to cross several open areas where his own presence would be detected if the man happened to turn, so he squirmed along on his belly moving for a few seconds and then freezing until he finally got back into the woods and was able to detour well out of the man's vision. The fellow, by his placement, had traveled overland a long way to find this comfortable nest in the southeast corner of Albert's kill zone.

  He came upon him directly from behind and at about fifteen feet cut the man's legs with a burst of AK fire. The man screamed and flipped on the ground but Albert was on him very quickly and the man stopped rolling and just wept as he looked at his legs. He was young, not twenty and he had been very proud when George and Dusty asked him to come up here and get a bead on Albert.

  "Oh, God, it hurts. Christ. Oooo," he cried.

  "You alone?" Albert asked. "I been lookin around and didn't see anybody else, but maybe you could tell me if there was someone else out here."

  "Please. Oh, man..." he sobbed and whimpered.

  Albert squatted beside him, his AK across his lap and shone the flashlight into the boy's eyes. The boy winced and tried to look away. He was crying almost nonstop.

  "Please tell me if there's someone else out there," Albert said.

  "You gotta help me Mr. Smythe. Please."

  "I'll help you," Albert replied. "First you got to tell me if there's anyone else."

  "There ain't," he gasped through a clenched jaw. "There ain't, I promise. You got to help me, please..."

  "George send you here?" he asked.

  "Please," he wailed.

  Albert pulled the glasses from around the boy's neck and looked at them with the flashlight. They were an expensive set of military quality binoculars, the likes of which he'd never seen. He played with them a minute and then hung them around his own neck.

  The boy was wearing a holster with a nine-millimeter pistol and a few other leather pouches. He'd dressed himself up out of an issue of Soldier of Fortune. He even had a cheap, Chinese imitation Kabar hanging upside down in a chest sheath. He could see the boy was starting to lose consciousness. He hadn't hit any of the big arteries or veins but the bullets had shattered both his legs and he was going into shock. He needed to be moved somewhere and bandaged and shot full of something from an IV bag.

  Albert stood up. He looked at the boy, trying to remember where he'd seen him before, but he couldn’t place it. He pressed the barrel of his gun against the boy's head and pulled the trigger. The dogs cleaned up the rest in a few days.

  Since then he had expected an attack at any time. They had to know their scout wasn't coming back and they weren't going to waste men one at a time. They would come in a group, probably divide themselves up and try and hit him from two or three directions at once before he could destroy the farm.

  It was turning out to be such a fine spring, after all. Maybe that global warming stuff was starting to kick in. Maybe they were heading to a two-crop growing season.

  He climbed down from the tree and prepared to head north to the ridge. He might even be able to see the tip of Magneson's chimney with these glasses if he got high enough. He'd already checked the Axtell and tomb and switched some battery connections around.

  He sat on the bed for a while and ate an MRE. Ginny liked them. She thought it was like getting a present. She would open the bag and take everything out and lay it on the table or the ground and he'd show her how to warm the entree or mix the crystals in a mug of water. They had liked to eat outside, even when it was cold because it seemed like an event to her.

  Then he thought vaguely of Ludwig and his heart constricted because he missed Ludwig in a way he didn't miss Ginny, who in fact, he didn't miss at all. Ludwig had been a puppy when he got him and they had stuck pretty close together and he didn't have to be trained, really. He just told Ludwig what to do a few times or showed him or corrected him and that was it. Then he couldn't hold it back and he started crying again, listening to hi
s own sobs and gasping in the tiny room. Then it passed, like it always did, even though at times he couldn't breathe properly.

  He had also discovered, that everything they said about hatred and revenge and vengeance and build two coffins first before you go down that road, brother and all that stuff about living well, was trash. Revenge was somewhat satisfying. It helped. Every time he put a bullet in one of "their" people, he felt better. He liked to kill them. He liked to watch them die. He liked it best when they screamed and begged first. He watched them suffering and breathed it in, inhaled their screams and tears and anguish. It made him stronger.

  He worked his way through the woods, stopping every so often and just listening. He knew the sounds to expect depending on the time of year and he knew the difference between a deer rubbing against a branch in passing and a man crunching a stick with a boot.

  He started watching the ground more carefully as he approached a cut in the limestone that provided a good view of his farm and easy access from Magneson's field. He squatted down on the edge and carefully traced several fissures and lines of stones until his eye snagged on a steel pin sticking up about two inches above the ground. His eyes moved from there to the next and the next. Then he made his way to the top of the ridge and looked for the markings he'd left on the trees. He bent down again and traced the thin, almost-invisible wires back to their connections. Nothing had been disturbed. He was reasonably sure they would detonate, but it wasn't guaranteed. This was no military ordnance. The detonators were always the most difficult part of any bomb to design and build. Many pretenders fooling around with acetone peroxide or any number of highly explosive substances had saved the authorities a lot of trouble. And spring-loaded devices that shot a bolt home against a blasting cap or a shotgun primer can slip at the wrong moment and five pounds of steel shards and explosive force appears quite suddenly right in front of the man planting the bomb.

  The mines he'd made with their pins sticking two inches above the surface, for example, had to be set once they were imbedded in the ground. He would grip the pin and pull it straight up against a compression spring and with his other hand, slide a detent into a slot cut into the pin. Now here was the good part. He then lets go of the pin, hoping the detent keeps it from rocketing into the shotgun primer in his pipe bomb. If it didn't catch properly, the pipe bomb says hello. If it works and he isn't dead, it sits there until a foot pushes on the pin, the detent snaps out of the retaining slot and the bolt slams into the primer. He had never seen it work and he had never even tested one. He simply built them and put them in the ground on the ridge and waited for The Liberty Militia to choose this avenue to attack his home and prove that he was right.

  Albert knew he was doomed, sooner or later. He had to win every single time. There would be no surrendering, prolonged negotiations or exciting escapes after being captured. He wasn't going to submit to torture or agree to perform some task in exchange for freedom because they would never allow him to live no matter what he or they did or said. And he didn't blame them one bit. If he could not escape he had to kill himself to avoid a much worse fate than death. He knew this. He could not even afford to be wounded. He would surely die from sepsis unless it happened to be the most superficial graze and even then, his antibiotics could easily run out before he was cured.

  He presumed that just as he was doing right now, they were sitting around a table somewhere looking at the likelihoods and possibilities, determining his likely actions and reactions in any given scenario, planning likely operations and tearing them apart and planning new ones and subjecting everything to constant scrutiny and revision. Then, one day they would appear on the horizon, either as he expected or not, having convinced themselves of their likelihood of success. He would kill them in many different ways until they overwhelmed him at which point he would repair to the house and arm the multitude of explosives he had rigged throughout the building and at a moment considered the most effective he would twist the joystick on a child's radio controlled airplane consul and everything he had ever owned or built or loved or even cared about would rise from the earth, great fingers of exhilaration stretching up and up, reaching heavenward in a gown of flame and debris.

  Everything appeared as he'd left it. There was no indication even of deer or dog tracks in the wet ground. He'd seen an untrained dog detect a live wire rather than a dead one so perhaps they had come this way and smelled the consequences and left.

  He put the glasses up to his eyes and searched the treetops across Magnuson's field. He couldn't see the house and decided it wasn't worth climbing another tree. He was tired and hungry, having been patrolling since three hours before sunrise. It was time to make his way back to the house, which would take another two hours as he crept through the woods and circled around the property in search of the intruders he knew must eventually be there. It was a little unnerving to be waiting for them not knowing which morning would bring the harvest. He almost wanted it to happen, to get it over with like a man on death row who stops hoping to be reprieved and starts waiting to die.

  He brought the glasses slowly around in a broad pan of the property, watching the digital range finder flashing as he focused on different objects. He was suddenly infused with adrenalin as the glasses lighted on a thick, already bushed up maple at the far end of the ridge, a distance apparently of three hundred and seventy six yards.

  He watched the tree intently and saw it again, the slight movement counter to the wind in the boughs about six feet from the ground.

  He pulled back into the woods until the maple was out of sight and started in that direction. He was not properly camouflaged and had to remain in the densest areas where the new growth was most advanced in order to avoid detection. He had to presume the shooter - and that's certainly what he must be - was watching for him. The position of the maple was such that it looked down on the entire expanse of open ground around his house. He would have to be standing on the south side of the building to be out of sight and range of a reasonably skilled marksman. The tree was probably two hundred and fifty yards from his front door, an easy shot for someone with the right skills and equipment.

  He plowed through the underbrush, not too concerned about being discovered quite yet. The man was a quarter mile away. He figured he'd covered half the distance and decided to crawl out to the edge of the ridge and see if he could sight along the tree line. But when he got there he couldn't see anything and had to go back and travel another fifteen minutes and try again. This time, he could see the man in the tree. The glasses told him the man was one hundred and sixteen yards away. Albert had never tried to shoot anything that far before. He was not only not an experienced shooter, he had no real talent for it. His instincts were wrong about wind and elevation and distance. He'd have to get closer. So he crawled along the ridge, just inside the tree line where the spring grasses and ferns were thickest, pulling himself along a yard at a time. Now he was seventy-six yards from the man and he saw his outline clearly and the shape of the rifle. Albert thought he might be able to hit the man at this range.

  He watched the trees for a few minutes but there was hardly any wind. What he didn't have was a clear line of sight. He had to roll another ten feet out into the open, to expose himself completely to the sniper if he was to get a shot. The Ruger 30.06 was a fine deer rifle and he had paid extra for a Leupold scope and a bipod but that didn't make him a shootist and he knew it. At one hundred yards he had fired five rounds in an eight-inch group, about the equivalent of breaking sixty on nine holes. But he couldn't risk getting any closer and he could not lie here indefinitely because the man in the tree, the sniper who obviously had been sent to assassinate him would eventually turn his head and see him. He closed the bolt and sighted the tree but couldn't find the target for a few seconds. Then he caught a slant of leather belt and the exposed skin above the man's hip which was very light against the leaves and the man's camouflage. No wind to speak of, but still, two hundred and eighteen feet or so, enou
gh of a range for the bullet to drop some, even these big military armor piercing black tips he had picked up from a gun show.

  He focused directly on the patch of skin and then raised the tip of the barrel a few inches above it. He inhaled slowly and held his breath. He felt his entire body go still. The reticle in the scope bounced gently with his pulse. He watched it until it was about to fall onto his target and he pulled the trigger.

  The man in the tree did not hear the shot which entered his right side at about eleven hundred miles an hour until the bullet had passed through his liver and embedded itself in a big branch. He began to fall as the explosion passed over him and while it was still echoing back from the wall of cedar trees, he struck the ground and screamed a long scream of surprise and pain. He had never imagined pain like this, even when he watched the glassy shock of death pass over the eyes of the hundreds of wild animals he had killed over the years.

  Albert ejected the shell, folded the bipod and rolled back under cover. He didn't know if it had been a fatal or just a disabling shot. The man might be sighting him in this very second.

  He made a large arc around the tree and came in from behind a full ten minutes after the man had fallen. He saw the tree about fifty feet away through a mesh of branches and saplings but there was no sign of the injured man. He moved closer and then saw an arm covered in army-style camouflage protruding past the base of the big maple. It was a man's left arm. It held a Glock.

  It took him another few minutes to cover the distance between them and then he was at the tree. He stomped on the arm holding the gun and a scream very much like the first one came from the owner. He had broken the wrist. He picked up the gun and making a broad curve, walked around the tree until he could see the man. The man had pulled himself up to the tree and was leaning against it trying to put pressure on the wound in his side. He was going into shock and his face was completely white. His mouth opened and closed like a tarpon trying to gulp the air. No sound emerged other than a high pitched hissing as he tried to force some kind of pressure on the pain in his arm, the hole in his side almost forgotten under the influence of this new catastrophe. He was panting heavily.