The Last Blade Of Grass (20 page)

“What did he mean with the grass, Simone?” Patricia asks.

“It’s just something Eddie used to say when we were talking about people with depression or those that try to commit suicide. I always thought it was a bit silly, but I guess he really means it. He would say, “All I need as a reason to live is to have one blade of grass growing somewhere in the world. That’s enough to sustain him.”

*

On my way to the stable I stop at the shed next to the house and grab a few items; a fishing tackle box, a tool box, and my cordless drill. As soon as I step into the stable and Chad sees me, he starts whimpering and whining about how he is sorry and was forced into staging the attacks.

I stop in front of him and put down my tools without saying a word. He is tied to one of the stalls with his arms and legs spread in the shape of the letter ‘X.’ I don’t want to look directly at him. Not because I am ashamed of what I am about to do, but because I fear that my rage will make me just kill him.

I look at Jake and Hannah, who have been guarding him. “You two may want to stand outside,” is all I say. It isn’t an order or a demand, but I’m sure they understand my meaning that this will be ugly.

I open up the tool box and pull out a heavy duty wire cutter. The kind with two curved blades that make a hole the right size to wrap around a basic electric cable that runs through the average house. The hole on this cutter is also the same size as the average man’s fingers. Chad doesn’t like the look I have on my face while I examine them and starts sputtering and crying.

I’ll need the cutter later, but what I want now is a small box of drill bits for my cordless drill. I grab the drill bit box, remove the 3/32 bit, and put it into my drill. I squeeze the drill trigger to make sure it is still charged, and it screams to life. So does Chad. He is screaming his head off, and I’m at least ten feet away from him.

I walk up to him with the drill in my left hand and punch him in the face several times. He finally shuts up long enough for me to speak.

“Olivia Murphy, age three.”

“What? Who’s that?”

“Olivia Murphy, age three,” I say again, and then crouch and pull off his left shoe and sock. Even though his leg is tied tight at the ankle, I kneel on his foot so it can’t move. Taking the drill, I place the bit at the center of the toenail on his big toe.

He is screaming and bucking with his hips trying to knock me away from his foot, but I won’t budge. I squeeze the trigger, and the drill whines to life, boring a hole through the nail, flesh, and bone of this asshole’s big toe. The scream he emits gives me a warm feeling, like a blush after getting caught looking at a pretty girl. The sound of his agony makes me feel good.

I stand up and look behind me. Hannah and Jake are still here. “Grab that rope over there, and tie him down better. Tie him tight at his waist so he can’t move around so much.” Jake gets the rope and starts securing Chad’s waist while I talk to Hannah.

“Are you sure you want to stay? It’s going to get worse.”

“They were my friends too. Steven and I were close, and Nana. He’s getting what he deserves.”

I nod and know I should feel ashamed of myself for allowing my twelve year old to witness this, but instead, feel proud that she is strong enough to deal with it. I was upset that Hannah was so furious with these people. She has always had a short fuse. She’s very emotional and can get deeply angry over little things, and won’t let whatever issue it is go. Now I know she gets it from me. I know I should rise above this, and be the better man, especially in front of her. I can’t stop. I mean, I can, if I choose to, but I don’t want to stop.

I’ve been the good guy my whole life, always obeying the laws, and following rules. I used to fume at how criminals and the true bad guys in life always got off too easy. I used to say at my gun shop, “criminals don’t belong in jail, they belong in the graveyard.” The criminals won’t get away with hurting people anymore. In this world they will pay, and I get to be the man that makes sure they get more than their fair share of punishment.

It takes me half an hour to go through the thirteen names of our dead. I drill all of Chad’s toes and three of the fingers on his left hand, and say nothing more to him than the name and age of each person that died before drilling each digit. Twice I had to slap him awake, because he passed out from the pain.

During his torture session, there was a rotation of our people walking by the stable entrance with a few staying to watch for a while. I’m not sure who or how many came, only that Jake and Hannah chose to stay the whole time, and remained close to what I was doing.

“Are you awake?” I say and slap Chad in the face one more time.

“Yes, yes please. I’m awake. Please stop! Please.”

“I’m going to start asking you questions, Chad, and if you don’t answer me, or if I don’t like the answer you give, I will start making this painful for you.”

He actually chuckles a bit in disbelief when he hears me say that last part.

“What? Don’t you think this has been painful for me?” he says with desperation.

“Do you remember the morning I turned you away from my store?”

Chad just nods.

“Do you remember what I said to you, Chad? I told you I would shoot you and tell the sheriff you were bitten, and you knew when I said it that I was telling the truth.”

“I remember.”

“I grab his chin and lift his head so he has to look into my eyes. I drilled one hole in you for each person that you killed on my ranch, and I promise you that whatever you felt while I drilled you was nothing compared to the pain I will make you feel if I don’t like what I hear. Do you believe me?”

He says,
Yes,
and tries to nod his head, but can’t until I finally let go.

“Okay, then. Let’s get started.” I put a small hay bale in front of Chad and sit on it. “How many more people are in your group besides those that came today?”

“Four…” He hesitates, “Well, actually, five.”

I shake my head and grab the wire cutters and a rag. He is yelling, “Wait! Wait! Wait!” when I cram the rag in his mouth and start cutting.

I snip his pinky finger off of his right hand in three chunks, one snip at each knuckle.

I wait for his screaming and crying to subside before remove his gag and talk to him again. “It is important that I get the right answers from you, Chad. If you hesitate I will assume you are lying or trying to hide something, and you will lose more fingers and toes. Please take the time to think about your answers before spitting them out.

“Now how many more people are there in your group besides those that came today?”

Poor Chad looks terrible. His face is covered in sweat, tears, blood and his left eyebrow is slightly swollen. He is shaking and crying while he talks. “I was trying to tell you. We have four men, but there is a woman that they captured and are holding.”

“They captured?”

“Yes, yes, they captured her, but we as a group have been holding her.”

“Why didn’t the other four men come with your group today?”

“Gerald, our boss or leader, he didn’t want them along. They were loyal to Lloyd since they came in with him, and Gerald thought Lloyd might try something once we captured this place.”

“More specifics, Chad. I don’t know any of these people.”

“Lloyd wanted the top spot, and Gerald knew it. Lloyd was in our truck and was standing up in the back when we drove in. Gerald thought Lloyd and his men would try to kill him once we captured this place, so he made Lloyds men stay at our base.”

“When do Lloyd’s men expect your group to return? Or are you expecting them to show up here at some point?”

“We’re supposed to return there tomorrow. We didn’t know how many infected we’d have to clear out of here before we could check for supplies and didn’t want to travel back at night. We took the only running vehicles we had, and those four guys were completely drunk when we left earlier today, so they wouldn’t be able to make it here even if they wanted to.”

“Is there anything else I should know about your group and its base?”

“I’ll tell you how to get there—”

I raise my hand and cut him off. “One of you will show me how to get there. Is there anything else I need to know?”

“We have lots of guns and ammo. I mean, we brought a lot with us in the trucks because we thought… well we sent about twenty-five thousand of those things here—”

I slap him again. “Get back on track, what about the guns?”

“Our base is the sheriff’s office. We have all of the guns and ammo they had in their little armory. Lots of riot gear, shotguns, rifles handguns and ammo, but also weird stuff like grenades, night vision scopes, all kinds of stuff. I found some transfer documents that a bunch of this stuff was Homeland Security allocations. We don’t have much food or water, though, and the city just has too many of those things for us to stay.”

“And so you told them about my ranch, didn’t you?” I can’t help but punch him several more times in the face.

“Hannah, Jake? Can you two tell whoever is watching the other two prisoners to bring one of them here to the stable? It’s time to verify this imbecile’s story.”

“I can go myself,” Hannah says.

“I don’t want anyone walking around out there alone. Even I shouldn’t have come here by myself. There is still the occasional gunshot out there taking out an infected, the grounds aren’t secure, and won’t be until we clear the land and mend the fences.” She nods and they both walk out.

I called him an imbecile. I know it isn’t much of an insult to the average person, but this guy was a newspaper reporter, and from what I remember, completely full of himself. That word combined with his current situation might hurt him almost as much as what I’ve done to him physically.

I shove the rag I have back into his mouth and wait for the next captive to arrive for questioning.

Donald and Joshua bring the next guy in, and he reeks of the guts and corpses that were piled on top of him. “Take a good look at what happened to Chad’s hands and feet. I want you to take these and hang on to them for him, okay?” I say and show him the three pieces of Chad’s pinky before shoving them in the new guy’s pants pocket.

The guy looks nervous but so far is completely silent. There is a far greater reaction from Donald and his son to what I’ve done. They seem completely mortified, but Donald still whispers to me, “This guy was so terrified of being under those bodies that I think he may be in shock.”

“Tie him up across from Chad here so he can look at him while we talk,” I say and I pick up the drill and rev the motor a couple times to make my point. His eyes open wide so I know he’s paying attention, but still doesn’t say anything.

Donald and Joshua leave after they tie this new guy up, and after I put an empty feed bag over Chad’s head, I move my hay bale over to sit in front of the new guy. “You are covered in infected blood right now, so I can’t do the same type of questioning with you as I did with Chad. As you saw, I drilled a few holes in his fingers and toes, and removed his finger for him. But until we get you cleaned off, I can’t afford you getting infected, so I’ll have to drill you somewhere that doesn’t have any blood on it yet. Do you know where that might be?”

He shakes his head no.

“Your mouth,” I reply with a smile. “If you don’t give me the answers I want, or if they don’t match what Chad said, then I will start drilling into your teeth. Trust me when I say there is a good reason dentists use injections to numb the mouth. Drilling into the root of a healthy tooth will be quite painful. So my first question is, Are there any people in your group beside those that came here today?”

I’m not sure what particular brand of stupid this guy is, but for me personally, if I had walked into a room where someone was missing a finger and had holes drilled in him all over the place, I would have been more forthcoming with any answers I gave. This guy just looks at me and instead if giving me a firm answer like he knows he’s telling the truth, he asks me, “None?” as if he is trying to guess the state capitol for a teacher in school.

So, I force his mouth open with a horse bit, and tie it in place behind his head. I shiver a bit as I drill into one of the upper molars on his left side. The smell of burning tooth reminds me of that horrible odor while sitting in a dentist chair. He yanks his head away screaming and my drill bit jumps around in his mouth, cutting up his gums. I stop and tie his head back to the post and finish drilling through until I know I’ve hit the root, because blood comes out and the pitch of his scream changes.

He answers every question after I drill his first tooth, and apparently, Chad was telling the truth. I think this man got the worst treatment so far. After he answered all of my questions, I re-secured his head, and quickly drilled into thirteen more teeth after telling him his victims’ names and ages, like I did with Chad.

Chapter Nine

Finishing the Job

I don’t bother questioning the third man. I just have Donald and Joshua bring him into the stable and tied up next to the other two prisoners. He has enough fear put into him from the other men tearfully explaining what I did to them that he won’t be a problem if I need to question him. And if he is a problem, I’ll just torture him as well. For now, though, I think we should act on what I’ve found out so far.

“Donald, could you and Joshua please tell Arthur, Conner, and Samantha to come to the main house? We all have something to decide. Hannah, Jake, come on back with me. These three aren’t going anywhere,” I say and point to the three limp headed captives tied to the stalls.

*

Back at the house after getting cleaned up yet again, I am facing the whole group, excluding Hannah and Jake, who took the watch position on the roof for Brian and Melissa.

I head right into my explanation of what I found. “There are four more of them out there holding up at the Sheriff’s office, if the information I got is accurate. They also have one woman that they captured and are…keeping her there against her will. Those four men aren’t expecting the group that attacked us to return until tomorrow and are supposed to be totally drunk right now, or at least they were five hours ago, when this group left their base to come here.”

“How can you be sure they aren’t lying? I’ve heard people will say anything when they’re being tortured,” Rebecca says derisively.

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.