The Last Blade Of Grass

by Robert Brown

  Ignoring her tone, I nod, and say, “You’re right that people will say anything to make torture stop, but the two I questioned gave the exact same details separately. So they are probably telling the truth, unless they coordinated a fake story before they arrived, which is unlikely. I want to go into Medford with a good sized force and kill or capture the last four of these guys, and I want to go in the next half hour. Does anybody have a good reason to wait or not go at all?”

  Rebecca’s daughter, Rachel, asks, “If you go, someone might die, right?”

  “Yes,” I say and nod. “Anything can happen on a trip like this. We haven’t been off this ranch since the first week this all started. These men have been surviving out there in the city with the infected, so anyone that goes has to understand these men are a real threat.”

  “Well, I don’t think we should risk losing anyone else,” Rachel says.

  Patricia, Randy’s wife, walks over to Rachel, and sits down next to her on the couch. “Sweetie, that’s why someone has to go. If those men stay out there, they will do everything they can to kill all of us.”

  Patricia looks at me, and says, “Eddie, you could have come in here and told us all what we were going to do instead of asking us, and we would have done it out of fear. But you asked what we think and I know you didn’t get lost. I trust you to take care of this and keep the rest of our families safe.”

  “Thank you, Patricia. I can’t do it alone, though.”

  *

  The drive to Medford is quiet so far. We are driving the two trucks our attackers brought and one of our own, a Chevy Suburban that seats nine. When we return to the ranch tomorrow, some of us will probably have to deal with sitting in the cold truck beds if we capture or rescue anyone. Of course, maybe there will be extra room if we lose anyone in a firefight.

  I’m surprised at the number of women that have come with us. Of the fifteen people in our group, five are women, and Ashley Dixon is the most surprising member. She says the infected scare the hell out of her, but she can’t sit back and let regular people threaten us or abuse some poor woman they are holding captive. Her sister’s boyfriend, Daniel Palmer, was an obvious participant due to his being a sheriff’s deputy, and the attackers being based in the smaller sheriff’s office.

  The other four women are all coming with their significant others, but I suspect their reasoning is much the same as Ashley’s. Hell, it’s the same as what we are all thinking. Mindless infected attackers are one thing, but a thinking enemy out there that wants us dead, is heavily armed and captures women to beat and rape, is another story altogether.

  Our worst enemy and greatest threat has always been our fellow humans. I know it’s a naïve idea to believe that a man-eating apocalypse would unite humanity and end the infighting. I guess with the number of guns and amount of ammo I stockpiled, and the distant location of my ranch, I never truly believed people would pull together. Still, there was always a small lingering hope that more would pull together than pull apart. At least we are doing our part.

  The lack of destruction on the roadway is surprising. In a way, I imagine that is a hopeful sign that most of the people that escaped Medford had the gas in their cars to make it somewhere, so they didn’t stall in lanes to cause accidents. I still doubt that many people had a place to go or the means to get there if they wanted. The economy was just too bad the last few years before the fall, and the news blackout that last day really doomed a lot of people to an unnecessary death. If only the alert system had given people a warning of what was happening. Or if the internet and phones were still working…that’s a lot of ifs once again. I guess it doesn’t matter at this point.

  So far the road into the city is scattered with only the occasional abandoned vehicle and one wrecked car. It looks like it landed on the side of this lane after overturning from the other side. No other cars are near it, so it might have been someone that was bitten, and made a hasty escape in their car before the infection turned them. We don’t stop to see if there is still a body inside. Tied up in the bed of the first truck is the third prisoner that I haven’t interrogated. He’s the only one that is physically capable of guiding us to his “hide-out” since he escaped my torture so far.

  We all know where the sheriff’s office is, and Daniel knows where everything is stashed if the men staying there haven’t found it all yet, but there is still a problem in getting there. The guy we brought with us is named Jordan. He says the streets in the city are packed with wrecked cars and there are certain areas where it’s easier to avoid the infected than others. He also told us Highway 62 in front of the sheriff’s office is a parking lot. His group walked all of the supplies to the trucks when they came after us, so he’ll take us to the warehouse on East Vilas Road where they normally park their running vehicles and bug-out supplies.

  The highway is starting to get clogged as we get closer to a small town called Central Point, on the outskirts of Medford. We stop and remove Jordan’s gag to ask him which way we should go.

  “We have to take exit thirty-five and head north on Blackwell. Take a right on Kirtland and follow it to Table Rock Road. Table Rock will take us to Vilas Road, and we’ll go to the warehouse. Then we have to walk to the sheriff’s office from there.”

  Daniel nods. “The roads are all the right direction to get us there.” Then turns to Jordan, and says, “If we run into an ambush, or problems on the way there, you’ll die before your friends can finish us off.”

  He fearfully shakes his head, “None of our guys are out there, and there aren’t any other groups in this area either. This route is the way we came because the roads are the clearest, and the area barely has any infected left since we gathered them to…” Jordan leaves the left unsaid, and we gag him again to continue on our way.

  We gathered a little bit of history from Jordan and Chad about their attack plans before we left on this trip. Chad developed how to attack my ranch. He was captured by the group at the sheriff’s office two weeks after the outbreak, and they kept him alive because he told them about the ranch and all of the survival supplies we have there.

  Struggling to survive in Medford, the people there realized the infected are drawn to noise above all other things, and that is what Chad used. To stage the final attack against us, they drove cars slowly around the Central Point area leading them to a staging area where some type of bait was used to keep the infected from wandering away.

  Jordan told us that usually the bait was an animal tied to a roof or on some type of tower. However, they used humans as bait the last few days before the attack. They used people they had captured and tied to branches in trees to draw the infected in and hold them there. A few nights before the attack, the men had set up radios in the woods leading toward the ranch. They wired in pressure switches to turn the radios off when an infected steps on it. Once the radio shut off, the infected would hear the next radio in the distance, and travel toward it. It was quite a creative plan, even though it was designed to kill all of us.

  Chad figured they had about 25,000 to 30,000 infected grouped together when they started the last run. He noticed they moved a lot slower and stayed bunched up due to the cold temperatures, but still thought the immense number of bodies he sent after us would finish the job. He should have been right. Only my extreme ammo stockpiling and unusual property setup allowed most of us to survive. I can’t express how difficult it was not to bludgeon Chad to death as he described how he organized the assault.

  The route we are taking is mostly farmland which turns into industrial area as we drive down Vilas Road. There are burned out houses here and there, and wrecked or abandoned cars along the way. Sadly, it looks reminiscent of many disaster or horror movies that were made prior to the collapse. The two things that differ markedly are the feeling and the smell. The feeling I have while looking out the window, at the forsaken landscape drifting past, is what movies and books tried to portray but could never quite accomplish. It’s the feeling of personal
loss and emptiness that the detached storylines and visuals could never convey.

  This place was our home, the houses that we are passing had families that we interacted with in stores and at parks. They were people that I yelled at in my mind while driving behind them on the road. The rotting bodies stuck in wrecked vehicles or in a house’s front yard are the friends and neighbors we’ll never get to meet. There is a feeling of loss that is both real and unreal, like attending the funeral of a person you know is gone, but think will still show up one day.

  The smells are another entity altogether. The lingering odor of smoke as we pass burned houses is familiar enough. It reminds me of brush fires or a farmer burning a pile of trees and rubbish on their land. It is the stench of bodies that makes the drive the most unsettling and is the furthest departure from what books and film were able to represent.

  The foul aroma is different than the usual decaying animal road kill that was present before the fall, how, I’m not exactly sure. It might be that the bodies are larger like deer and never get picked up and disposed of by county road crews. Part of the difference may just be in my head, knowing that they are human remains that I smell. Either way, the stink or rather the stenches, help cement in my mind that the world is not the same in a way any earlier media could ever portray.

  We pull into the staging area our attackers’ group used and park the trucks. The warehouse they keep some of their supplies in is on Industry Drive, next to an auto salvage yard. Timothy and Dianne, along with Donald and Daniel, go into the warehouse to clear it. Jason Anderson and I take our captive, Jordan, in after them to verify where all of the supplies they stockpiled are. While the warehouse is cleared, Jordan tells us that the main doors to the sheriff’s building have all been blocked to prevent easy entry from the outside. The only way in will be the back door and that is only if his partners didn’t block it for the night already.

  The warehouse is empty, or at least human and infected free, just like Jordan said it would be. I still don’t trust him to get us into the sheriff’s office without trying to give away our approach and want to leave him behind. If we could afford to leave guards with him, he would be staying here, but he’ll have to make the walk with us, so I’ve prepared an insurance device to make sure he doesn’t try to run.

  I stand in front of Jordan and explain what I’m going to do with him. I speak to him in a soft condescending tone. “Hobbling your legs would only slow all of us down, and we need you to be able to avoid any infected or other dangers we might encounter. To solve this problem, I brought some trapping wire.” I smile and hold up the wire for him to inspect.

  “This wire is what I use for snares, and I set it up with this nice handle for one of our people to hold, and this loop goes over your head like this.” And I drape the snare wire over his head. “If you try to run or make any effort to contact your remaining group, what this loop will do is tighten down to the size of a silver dollar. It will cut through your neck—effectively severing your head. Do you understand?” I ask, and he nods with eyes wide with fear. “We’re going to leave your gag tied in place for the walk, so if you need to tell us anything, just stop and motion to the person holding your leash.”

  We make a straight march across the empty fields behind the sheriff’s office to the backdoor. There is snow on the ground, and a cold dry wind blowing from north to south. We spread out behind the rear of the building, tying Jordan to a large white fuel tank at the back of the lot. To our fortune, or misfortune, while we are all staged and ready to head into the building to kill the four remaining members of this group, a man starts backing out of the rear doorway, not seeing that we are out here. He is using his back to push the door open, and I’m sure I’m wrong in my assessment, but it looks like he is helping the woman that they are holding captive out as well.

  Randy and Joshua Langford are to the right of the door, and Michael and Megan Palmer are to the left, with the rest of us spread out in a fan shape behind the first four. We all raise our guns and aim at the man making his exit.

  Megan Palmer, standing the closest to him, puts her gun to the side of his head, and says, “Let her go, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  The man freezes in place but doesn’t release his victim. “I can’t let her go, she’ll fall,” he says.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t... I’m not with the men here. I came to rescue her,” he says, pleadingly.

  I don’t want to trust his words, but his actions seem to be telling the truth. He is carefully holding the unconscious woman up rather than dragging her someplace. “Secure that man and help the woman,” I say, and we separate the two and all move away from the door.

  “Talk quick!” I say to the stranger as half a dozen guns are pointed at him.

  “Are you with the men here?” he asks.

  “No we aren’t, now talk! Who are you, and what were you doing with that woman?”

  “My name is Greg Munoz. I came here to rescue her, her name is Jessica. I killed two men inside, and there are two more that were passed out, so I tied them up.”

  I bring Jordan over, and he says he’s never seen this guy before, so we send most of our group into the building with Greg in the lead to show us where the men he claims he killed and tied up are. True to his word, two men are bound, and two are dead; one from his throat being cut, and the other with a knife sticking out of his chest.

  We all head into the building and begin securing it for nightfall. The two men that Greg tied up are retied more securely, and Jordan is tied up with them. The woman that Greg claims is named Jessica is unconscious and looks like she was severely beaten. Melissa and Megan are using some of the water we brought to clean up Jessica’s face, and they have placed her in one of their sleeping bags to keep her warm. There isn’t anything more we can do for her other than try to keep her comfortable and hope that she wakes up.

  Greg asks us what we are doing here, and we tell him the story of the attack on the ranch, and our plan to kill the remaining men here and to hopefully rescue the woman they held captive. Greg tells us his story once we finish with ours.

  “I ran into two girls about a month ago, Jessica, and Lilly. I was searching for food and saw them running from some of the sick people. They were being followed by only three of them so I thought the girls could escape, but they got trapped in a backyard. It is dangerous to help people, especially when you are by yourself like I am, but I couldn’t let them get attacked, so I ran up behind the sick ones and knocked them down with my stick.” Greg has a large yellow crowbar that he calls his stick. “I didn’t say anything to them then, I just nodded at them, and walked away. I was still afraid they might hurt me. It was two of them and only one of me, and they are young. The young people seem to be the most dangerous.

  “I continued looking for food and noticed that they were following me. They were keeping their distance and just watched what I did. After a few hours, I collected enough food from the houses in the area. I collected more this time because I thought these girls would need something to eat as well, and it isn’t safe to go out collecting every day, so my cart was pretty full. They followed me back to the street where I was staying, so I decided to talk to them. I told them there was no one on this street, and if they weren’t going to hurt me they could take any house they wanted, except the one I was staying in. They didn’t say anything, so I just put some of the food I had on the sidewalk for them and went to my house. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking those girls were going to break in and kill me, or bring back some friends to do it.

  “For two weeks they stayed in the house across from mine, and I would collect food and water and leave some for them outside their door. Jessica finally decided to speak to me. They were just as afraid of me as I was of them, maybe more so because I’m a man, and they had lots of troubles with men since the sickness spread. I didn’t ask what happened, and she didn’t say, but you could tell that they had been hurt and were barely surviv
ing when I found them. We did all right for a while, with me gathering supplies, and them keeping watch for strangers and the sick ones.

  “We started hearing cars and trucks driving around two weeks ago and thought hopefully someone might be putting the world back together. We finally saw the men that were driving around when they came through our street. Once we saw them we knew something was wrong. They were driving slowly with music playing loudly and getting lots of the sick people to follow them. Getting rid of the sick ones is great, but the looks on the men’s faces let us know they weren’t good men. They just seemed evil.

  “One of them must have seen us looking through the window at them, because they came back looking for us later. Six days ago I went out to collect more supplies. When I came back, Lilly told me the men had come, and they had taken Jessica. Jessica made Lilly hide in the attic and gave herself up to the men so they wouldn’t find Lilly as well. Lilly is only sixteen.

  “The next day, I hid on the roof of a taller house, with binoculars, and watched for the driving men. I would see them drive and then run closer to where they were. I was being careless not watching for the sick ones and would have been killed if those men didn’t clear the area of them. I just wanted to get Jessica back. She was a good neighbor, and Lilly needs her.

  “I saw they were staying here in the sheriff’s building, but they had too many men. There was nothing I could do for Jessica with so many men keeping her, and I didn’t know if she was still alive. I was hopeful, though, and stayed the night in that building across the field.

  “This morning I watched a large group of the men walking out the back and carrying lots of guns and bags with them. A few of them were staying by the building, but I could hear they were yelling at each other and sounded drunk. I knew this was my best chance to get Jessica, but I had to wait until the drinking men went back inside, or they would see me leave the building I was hiding in. I’m ashamed to say it took me another two hours after the last man went inside for me to build up my courage to go to the back door and go in.