As Wind in Dry Grass

by H. Grant Llewellyn

  "Albert-" she tried but he went right on.

  "You're better off with it blocked, believe me. But you have to understand something, Walter. This isn't going to last, this peace and quiet. I see people every day on the roads, more all the time and there are gangs...toads...demons...everything you can imagine out there looking for a place like this. These guys will be very happy, believe me, very happy indeed to take it away from you. If you are not prepared to fight for it - to kill for it - they are going to murder you."

  This did not shock them as much as he thought it would.

  "We have talked about this," Walter said, going to the sofa and sitting down. Marjorie joined him and they looked at him like a couple of teenagers talking to the priest before marriage.

  "We are not afraid," she said.

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "I will protect what is mine," Walter said. Albert nodded and put the documents back in the desk. He wrote quickly on a piece of blank paper and then looked up at them, genuinely puzzled.

  "Do you know the date?" he asked.

  They looked at each other and laughed. No one had a clue.

  Albert started the truck and looked at them through the windshield he had taken from another truck and framed in with various pieces of metal and wood, rivets and duct tape. It was functional and he had managed to install the contraption without cracking the glass, but he had little hope that it would last. Eventually he would find a parts truck somewhere. The bed was filled with everything Albert expected to need or want for the rest of his life, which in truth, he did not expect to go on for long, considering the plans he had.

  Marjorie seemed genuinely sad to see him go and he wondered why. She had turned it into something personal when it wasn't. He liked her just fine and Walter, though a bit of a fool, was okay too. Albert hadn't donated his farm to who they were but what they were. He probably wouldn't even like Walter under normal circumstances and she was not his type either, so secretive and confident and difficult to reach. He wondered what had attracted them to each other, why she found Walter desirable, for instance. Women had very complicated ways of making these decisions. He thought of Maureen less and less, embarrassing himself with memories of his inane fantasies about her. He took a last look at them and they waved.

  "You'll be dead in a month," he told himself.

  And he was right.

  For several days he probed on foot the area where he'd been attacked before deciding to drive through again on his way to Mason's. No community lasted very long these days, not the egalitarian societies and not the gangs of scavengers and this group was no exception. He found the wrecked vehicles and four bodies rotting in a camp. They had killed each other, probably over the woman whose bound corpse he discovered in a trunk. She had either suffocated or starved to death after they had killed each other off. The maggots had since transformed into butterflies and all that he found was her fetal form, the bones now loose in the stays. He collected the MREs they had left and looked over their weapons, a rough collection of hunting rifles and cheap 9 mm. pistols. This was not the gang that had attacked him. They had fully automatic M16s. There was one Smith and Wesson .357 magnum revolver he took. The rest weren't worth picking up.

  Then he probed the area again from the other side and found nothing to indicate any activity in the area at all. He saw numerous deer that were multiplying rapidly now, in spite of the pressure from feral dogs. The natural culling mechanisms had been eliminated or reduced severely. It didn't auger well for the deer population as any hunter could tell you. They multiply very quickly and start delivering twins and triplets that live and prosper and consume and procreate and pretty soon they starve themselves out and the population diminishes, until they are no longer a viable food source for anyone. America had done this in the Northeast and the Midwest during various periods in the 19th Century. At this rate the population would peak and explode within three years. Of course, who was looking three years ahead?

  The group that had attacked him had either moved on or been eliminated or he'd missed them and they were lurking somewhere, waiting for their next gull. More likely they had moved on to the highways farther south where schools of fools trudged along, following the zombie in front of them. He stayed another night and day but there was no activity at all and he was able to get close enough to a wild turkey that his suppressed .22 killed with one shot. Well, we'll see, he thought and gutted the bird and built a fire. The aroma of the spitted fowl drifted through the trees, calling everyone for a quarter mile but the only guests who came to his party were the dogs, pacing a respectful distance away, growling and flashing their eyes at him in the firelight.

  When he pulled the truck into Mason's he could detect no change from when he'd left it with the group to attack Brantford almost three months previously. He walked the grounds carefully, but there were no vehicle tracks that he could detect. It was another mile down the log road to the camp and it did not appear than anything had driven there in months. He bounced along for a hundred yards before he came to a barrier. It wasn't much, a six-inch poplar laid across the path at an angle. The leaves had never sprouted indicating it had dropped in the spring before the first bud. The root had pulled right out of the ground but there was no evidence of saw cuts or slashes from an ax or machete. It took him an hour to satisfy himself that it wasn't wired and then five minutes to pull it out of the way with his winch and keep going. A few minutes later he was parked once again in the small clearing alongside the Nissan. Either they were out or dead because there was no way he could have gotten this far into the site before. The vehicle engine was cold and the little pickup bed was empty. He opened the door and turned the key half way. The dash lights came on so the battery was good. He struck through the foliage and picked up the short trail to the camp. It showed a little more recent use. Then he smelled the smoke and stopped and listened. He heard voices and the rattle of tin dishes, the scraping of a spoon against aluminum. Then a voice called out:

  "Come on in, Albert. It's okay."

  It was Rumplestiltskin and Albert moved warily the last ten feet down the overgrown trail and emerged into the familiar campsite, his rifle still poised. Rumplestiltskin and a dozen others were sitting around a fire on which a large cook pot had been set. He saw steam coming from it.

  "We been watching you all morning," Rumplestiltskin said. "You are a very careful fellow."

  Albert recognized one of the others, a heavy-set man around his own age who nodded and then ignored him. The rest were newcomers Rumples had collected along the way. Many were ex-military and one was a state trooper still wearing remnants of his uniform. There were three women this time.

  "They have moved their operations out of here," Rumples explained, handing Albert a tin cup of forest coffee; a mixture of bark, leaves, pine needles, berries and honeysuckle petals that had been boiled for about an hour.

  "Pretty good, huh," he said.

  Albert spit it out and put the cup back on the stone fire pit. Rumples shrugged.

  "Okay, fuck you too."

  Albert poured some water into the cup and dumped in a packet of flavor crystals.

  "You don't think they are still scouting this area with drones?" Albert said.

  "They've had to divert just about everything to the big cities," he said. "All that's left around here is UN mercenaries and a few of those Blackland Corporation cock-suckers with FEMA or Homeland, you know, just the usual baby-raping maggot scum. We did run into a bunch of BatFaggots last week, six fuckers all dressed up in flack jackets and Halloween masks but they got away."

  Albert set about opening his food packet.

  "What happened?" he asked finally. Deserter wasn't here so he was obviously dead. He wanted to know how. Rumples told him and Albert was glad it had been quick, at least.

  "Shit, a .50 cal. doesn't even hurt," Rumples said. That was true enough. You didn't feel a thing. One CBM shot would likely blow your chest out from throat to belly button; you don't
hear it, you don't see it and you don't feel it.

  "We got the tank and one of their Humvees and I think we killed about ten of them all told, but we lost everyone except you and me and Mayflower, here."

  Mayflower turned his head and looked at Albert, his eyes lit.

  "What the fuck happened to the train?" he said, no attempt to hide the accusation in his voice. Albert didn't answer right away. His belligerence gland had activated and he was already filling up.

  "All three of the mines failed to go off," he said briskly, looking back at Mayflower now and inviting him to take things to the next level. But Mayflower seemed to accept the explanation and stood up and walked away.

  "He'll get over it," Rumples said.

  "Fuck him," Albert replied and Rumples laughed ironically.

  "Home made explosives are just that: home made," Albert said. "Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Most of the time they blow their creators to kingdom come."

  "Ya," Rumples said, looking at the fire sadly. "Eleven of those kids got killed. You know the ones hiding under the fucking tables in the playground?"

  Albert nodded.

  This time the group was more formally organized with Rumples the nominal leader, a leader by consent, but the leader and he gave orders to a certain extent and they were followed to a certain extent. One of the women came over and hefting her M16 told him that she was going to relieve Monkey down at Mason's and he nodded and told her to be careful and she said she didn't need that advice, thanks.

  "Marines," he said to Albert by way of explanation. "So what are you doing back here?"

  "I just wanted to know if anybody made it."

  "Took you long enough."

  "Ya." That was the end of that line of questioning.

  "Well now you know."

  "Ya."

  "We're a little more organized this time."

  "I can see that."

  "Can you handle it?"

  Albert nodded a few times and looked around. It was a fair question.

  "If I can't, I'll let you know."

  He set up his tent and unloaded some kit including a few personal items and the usual weaponry and clothing. The ability to have a fire made all the difference to living out here. When he walked around the campsite he found two large deer hanging from a branch. One was a fat doe and the other an eight-point buck. They had been skinned and gutted and they twisted gently. So they were hunting. Several men nodded at him but no one introduced himself or came forward to make contact. In that respect nothing had changed. This was still a collection of schizoid personalities with guns and various motivations.

  Then one man signaled him over and Albert joined him at his own small cooking fire. He sat cross-legged, poking the meager flame and ash with a stick.

  "I know you," he said.

  Albert looked hard at him and tried to remove the heavy beard and the streaks of ingrained dirt and listened to the voice again in his mind but couldn't place him.

  "Kirby's," the man said, looking across at him.

  Albert's mind went back to the Kirby's Corporation loading docks in New Jersey, where he had seen his first sign denying truck drivers access to the bathrooms. He had turned around to leave and another driver had started calling out the dock foreman.

  "Come on down here you faggot and tell me not to use that bathroom," the man shouted. "Come on you goddamn Nigger," the man shouted.

  The black dock foreman looked at the truck driver and very calmly asked him to leave.

  "Fuckin Nigger," the man shouted. How'd you like it, Nigger? No dawgs, no truck drivers, no Niggers. That sound good to you?"

  Albert, along with half a dozen others stood back and watched as the BBMF got down from his elevated desk and walked over to the man shouting at him. They stood chin to forehead for a few seconds and it was clear that the dock foreman was going to pick up the little truck driver with the big mouth and throw him about fifteen feet across the room, out the dock doors and onto the pavement. Nobody moved to help him.

  "Fuckin assholes," the man spat and walked away. "What's the matter with you bastards?" he shouted at everyone.

  He climbed back into his rig and jerked it out of the slot, half the cargo still inside. He gunned the rig and burned out of the parking lot, air horns on full volume.

  "Getting as bad as New York, ain't it?" a man spoke behind Albert. He turned and another driver waiting to get unloaded grinned and shrugged. They laughed about the incident and swapped stories for a while about trying to stay alive in New York in the summer heat.

  "Shit, I'm at this rest stop and it's like a hundred degrees, you know that shitty, dripping New York swelter that rots your fuckin brain? I'm down for four hours. I cannot even drive to another truck stop and hook up, you know? And this cop, big fat motherfucker climbs out of his big air-conditioned Crown and waddles over to me. 'Hey driver, you been idling more than ten minutes. Now you shut her down or get movin.' So I tell him I'm out of hours. 'Well that's not my problem.' Well how am I supposed to sleep in here without the fucking air conditioning on in this heat? 'Not my problem. Shut her down, or drive on.' Fuckin asshole. Drags his big fat fuckin ass into that big fat fuckin air-fuckin conditioned Crown fuckin Vic-fuckin-toria and sits there! Sits there with the fuckin cold air on, watchin me!"

  Albert sat down and they shook hands.

  "That was a long time ago," Albert said. They caught up for a while and the man looked around and then offered Albert a cigarette. He seemed very relieved when Albert declined.

  "Smart," he said. "I don't know about smokin this damn camel shit. Better than nothin, I guess. Where were you?" he asked, lighting the hand rolled tube and inhaling it deeply.

  Albert explained that he had quit driving a few years ago and was milking his cow when he heard.

  "Should've got out, believe me. All fuckin Wetbacks and sand-Niggers now anyway."

  "I know it."

  "Guess where I was?"

  "Oh shit," Albert said and the man nodded.

  "I was in Brooklyn at the Newlandenberg warehouse. You been there?"

  "Sure. Cluster fuck. Streets about a foot too narrow."

  "Shit. That's nothin. Fuckin truck beside me exploded when the forklift grabbed the first pallet. You should have seen it. Blew the sides right off the trailer. We didn't know what was going on and nobody thought this was a bomb, you know. I thought the propane tank on the forklift had exploded. Anyhow, you know the rest. But I am telling you, gettin out of there was something you wouldn't believe. I mean I'm right outside of Crown Heights, right there on Ralph Avenue and it didn't take two hours before the place went haywire. Fuckin Niggers come across from Bed-Stuy like a God damn oil slick. Fuckin Jews are running around screaming and the Niggers just laid right into 'em. I mean they must've killed ten thousand people down there. I kid you not."

  Albert listened, remembering the neighborhoods in that area which had been fairly benign when he delivered to Newlandenberg. He liked the food.

  "Women, kids, every fuckin thing. They tore the whole city to pieces in about ten hours and then downtown, a bunch broke into that big building of theirs down in the Battery and burned the fuckin thing."

  "Who. What are you talking about?"

  "Goldman Sachs, that big Jew law firm or whatever it is that fucked everybody. I hear they had someone on the inside, like an eight dollar security guard who lost his whole fuckin life while those shit-eating kikes cleaned up and he let them in. They hosed the whole place down, killed five thousand of the fuckers."

  Albert shrugged. He didn't invest and he didn't care one way or the other about Jews. But he knew what Goldman Sachs had pulled off a few years previous and figured they deserved it.

  "Looks good on them if you ask me," Wilcox said. "Fuckers."

  The man smoked in silence for a while, his long greasy hair constantly getting in his face.

  "Got to hand it to the Jews, though. They got their shit together finally and they went through Crown Heights like
a fuckin combine. There was Niggers flyin ever-which way," he laughed. "Shit. My mother used to say it was rainin Niggers and pitchforks. Shit."

  "How did you get out?"

  "I unhooked in the dock and bobtailed all the way to the Buckeye at about thirty miles an hour. Don't ask me how I got through. I don't know. I ran out of fuel around Canton and then just walked away. Been walkin ever since. Man, I can't tell you what I have seen. It ain't possible to describe just how fucked up things are out there. Remember how after 911, drivers used to talk all the time about how easy it would be to just go through a truck stop and wire every fuckin rig you could see?"

  Albert laughed.

  "Of course."

  "I mean they park almost a thousand trucks at Iowa 80 alone, for Christ's sake. You wouldn't even have to go anywhere else. Just put little magnetic bombs on the first three hundred rigs and bingo, you got yourself a national disaster."

  "There was a guy I met, old Nam vet who wrote it all down and sent it to Homeland, told them exactly how it could be done and they pulled his license and put him on a list. Totally fucked his life up for about three years. Then some lawyer got him back on the road...wonder what he's thinking?" Albert said.

  They sat for a while.

  "How long you been here?" Albert asked.

  The man thought for a minute and said, "Two weeks, I think. Don't keep track any more."

  "I hear that."

  "It's alright. We go out and kill people every few days and most of us come back. It's a living," he laughed.

  That evening Rumples called them together.

  "This is Albert," he said. "He's been with us before. Now Roadrunner has something to tell everyone."

  Roadrunner was a big man with a long, pointy nose and a cowlick that earned him his name.

  "They have moved their operations to Provost from Brantford," he said. I saw them setting up on the outskirts of town in an old warehouse."

  "That's Grosevnor's," Albert piped up.