Short Story / Tall Grass (PART 2)

We decided that we weren’t going to take any chances with Mr. Hansen.  None of us were positive that Bob Hansen wasn’t going to get up and try to kill us, like in the zombie movies.  So we decided that it would be better to make sure that he wouldn’t. I know that it’s morbid, but Billy, John, and I drew straws to see who was going to have to put the bullet into Hansen’s head.  I drew the shortest straw, making me the winner of that terrible duty.  We brought his body out back so that the ladies wouldn’t have to see it, and I used one of the .38’s to take care of the task.  I turned and vomited into the tall grass after the deed was done.

Mrs. Hastings said the eulogy.  It wasn’t much, most of us only knew Bob in passing, but I think that just hearing the old woman recite the Lord’s Prayer made us all feel a little more at ease.  

We decided that we were going to take turns as sentries.  The first crew was John, Jenny, and Simon.  Sarah was still out of sorts, so she would’ve been no use for us out there.  They watched over the rest of us as we slept, or tried to sleep, that night.  The second crew was Billy, Mrs. Hastings, and myself.  Janet wanted to be a part of the lookout crew, but Billy argued with her that she needed some rest.  She hadn’t slept at all through the night, and an exhausted guard wouldn’t do any of us any good.  Mrs. Hastings stepped in and said that if we need three, we could count on her.  I’ve known Loretta Hastings my entire life, and I know that her and Earl used to go hunting together.  She was still as sharp as a knife, so Billy and I agreed that she could be of some use.  We gave her one of the less powerful rifles, though.  We didn’t want her to fall and break a bone just because the weapon she had was too strong for her.

_

Well, I guess that brings us back to where I started this little tale, doesn’t it?  On Thursday, October 30th, Billy and I were sitting on the front porch, listening to the reports on the radio.  Billy was drinking one of the last cold beers that I’d kept in the refrigerator, and I was sipping from a flask of whiskey.  It had been six years since my last drink, but Billy didn’t complain when John had offered his silver decanter to me.  I set it down on the table and left it there for a long period of time, but ended up nipping off of it at around noon.  It wasn’t much after that when Larry Cummings came through the tall grass.

Larry was my neighbor.  In small town life, though, your neighbor could live ten miles away.  Larry’s homestead was about four miles from mine.  He came staggering through the tall grass at a little before twelve-thirty.  Both Billy and I saw the movement about a hundred yards beyond the edge grassline, so we were able to prepare ourselves.  We were both nervous and afraid as we watched the grass bend and break under the weight of whatever was approaching.  We were very relieved to find that it was only one.

“Fuck!  That’s Larry!”  Billy told me.

“Yup.”  I replied.  Then we both watched as the top of Larry’s head disappeared from the impact of my rifle blast.

“Nice shot, Dad.”

And that’s how it went.  Every time one of the Infected started onto my property, we had plenty of time to see where they were coming from.  The tall grass was a very good security measure.  

When we took down Larry, the others came from inside the house to see what had happened.  The ladies were all pretty shaken up, except for Jenny McEntyre.  She looked like a wolf that had stumbled across a flock of sheep.  Her eyes were vibrant, excited.    

“Are there any more?”  She asked Billy.

“Not yet.”  Bill answered.  “But I can pretty much guarantee that there will be.”

“Good.”  She replied.  “I want a crack at those shitters.”

The others went back into the house after that.  We had some discussion on what to do with Larry Cummings corpse, but decided that it was probably safer to just leave him where he was.  We still weren’t sure how the disease was spread, so none of us wanted to touch the body.  Better safe than sorry, I guess.

Jenny and Mrs. Hastings switched places.  That little girl must’ve thought that this was all just a game.  She practically begged us to let her switch, saying that she slept the whole time that she was inside, that the six hours of sleep that she had gotten was probably more than anyone else was going to get anyway.  There were no objections.  If she’d slept that long, then she actually was much more rested than everyone else.  So we agreed.  She pulled a chair up next to Billy and me and started talking to Billy like they were out on a date.  After listening to her ramble on for a few minutes, I felt sorry for my boy.  I asked if either of them wanted something to eat and went on inside.  

I heard six more gunshots while I was in the kitchen making sandwiches for me and my son.  I guess Jenny was so riled up that she couldn’t eat.  When I heard the first shot, all of the others ran outside to see what was going on.  I didn’t.  I’d seen the first, and was sure that I’d get plenty of opportunity to witness more, so I kept right on making those sandwiches.  

I used the last of the bread, and that got me to worrying.  I put the food on a couple of plates and went to the refrigerator to put the meat and cheese back, but I also wanted to see something.  When I opened the fridge, a sense of urgency came over me that was so powerful that I had to hold onto the refrigerator door to steady my wobbling knees.  

Food.  There wasn’t enough food in the house.  For just me and Billy, it would’ve been fine.  At least for a couple of days.  But having six other residents made matters a little more difficult.  I checked the cupboards and found that for eight people, we had enough food for possibly four meals.  

When I went outside, I found that nine more of the Infected had visited us.  I must not have heard the other shots while I was preoccupied with trying to find more foodstuffs.  

“We got us a little problem, Bill.”  I told him as I handed him his sandwich and sat back down.

“Sure do, Pop.  More and more of these things are coming at us.  Pretty soon, I think we may have a crowd like the one in town.”  Billy updated me.  He took a bite of his sandwich and swallowed it down with the last of his beer.  “We need to fortify the property.”

“Damn.”  I said, shaking my head.  It was bad, and I knew it was going to get worse.  “Something else, though.”  I told him after I’d taken a bite of my own sandwich.  “Maybe worse than what you’ve got.”

“Great.  What is it?”  

“Remember when I told you the other day that we were gonna have to do some shopping?”

“Aw, shit!”  Billy already knew what I was getting at.

“What’s that got to do with anything.”  Jenny asked Bill.  Everything she said was always directed at Billy.  

“Well, what it’s got to do with it is the fact that we don’t have enough food in the house, Jen.”  Billy said with a touch of sarcasm.  I think that maybe he was starting to tire of his little lap dog.

“Oh.”

“How much food do we have?”  Billy asked.

“Not much.  Maybe enough for four, maybe five meals.”

“Great.  Just great.”

And that was that.  The three of us sat on the porch, trying to decide what we were going to do about our situation.  Jenny didn’t really add anything valuable to the conversation.  She just kept looking out toward the tall grass, trying to see her next victim.  Every now and then, she would say something, but for the most part, Billy and I ignored her.  We were formulating a plan, and didn’t really need her input anyway.

After deciding what we were going to do, we explained our idea to everyone else inside.  Nobody really liked what we had to say, but everyone pretty much agreed that something had to be done.  The eight of us wouldn’t survive long without food, and there was only one way to get it.  

We had to go shopping.

      
_

The idea was fairly simple.  Five of us would drive into town and head to the Shop n’ Go. Three would stay behind to safeguard the house.  

There was no drawing straws this time.  Billy elected the shopping crew.  He chose John, Sarah, Janet, and Simon to accompany him to the store.  I was to stay behind with Mrs. Hastings and the young spitfire.  Billy laid out the plans quickly because he knew that they would have to leave soon.  The Infected were starting to come to the house more frequently.  Jenny picked off another six while we were inside discussing our plan.  

I told Billy and the others to be careful, and then they were off.  I was going to give my son a hug before they all left, but everyone piled into the truck so quickly that I didn’t get the chance.  I watched from the porch with Mrs. Hastings and Jenny as they drove off.  All five of them waved goodbye as they left.  We knew that there was a very real possibility that some or all of them wouldn’t return, but none of us said so.  The three of us stood there on the porch, and all I wanted to do was give my son the hug that I’d never been able to give to him in the past.  The hug that counts.  The hug that says, “I love you.”

        _

Looking back, it probably would have been best if we had all went, or none at all, but that’s the way it goes with hindsight.  We didn’t know what would have happened.  Maybe we all would have died if we’d gone on that fateful trip.  Or maybe we all would’ve lived.  All I know for sure is that five people left that afternoon, and only three returned.  

We had a lot of visitors while the others were gone.  Not the kind of visitors you’d invite in for dinner, though.  Unless you were offering yourself as the main course.  

Jenny and I took turns picking off the Infected as they came through the tall grass.  I didn’t care much for the girl, but I gotta admit, she was a hell of a shot.  She sure didn’t waste any bullets.  Every one that she took down was a clean kill.  

At one point, about twelve of the bastard’s came through the tall grass.  I think that the only thing that saved us was that they didn’t all charge us at once.  Four or five of them did, and that was hard enough.  If they all had, I don’t think that I’d be telling this story right now.  

Jenny was aces.  She killed eight or nine of them herself.  I had trouble reloading my rifle.  Not because of nerves or fear, but my damn hand cramped up so bad with the arthritis that I couldn’t hold onto the shells very well.  I must’ve dropped five or six bullets before finally loading up.  By then, there was only one left out of the group, and I watched as her head broke open in a spray of blood from one of Jenny’s shots.

After that, we had a little bit of a break.  We didn’t see anymore coming through the grass for about twenty minutes, which gave us enough time to reload all of our weapons and allow Jenny a bathroom break.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I should’ve taken the opportunity to relieve myself, too.  

_

When the Infected started coming again, they started out in a small trickle.  They came like drips from a faucet, one at a time.  Easy pickings.  That was when I realized that I was enjoying myself.  Sure, I was scared, and the arthritis had come on so strong that I kept having to clench my fists whenever we got a breather, but for some reason I liked it.  After a while, we started making a game of it. Maybe it was just that we needed to make the situation amusing to be able to live with ourselves.  Or maybe it was that there just wasn’t anything better to do with our time.  

Jenny and I devised a scoring system for all of our victims.  This is the way that it worked: 1 point for a kill, unless they were charging.  Runners were worth 2 points.  3 points for forehead shots, 4 for a hit in either of the eyes.  5 points, the highest you could get for one kill, went to any shot that took off a part or all of the head.  

Jenny ended up with 70 points, 20 from 5-pointers alone, when we stopped keeping score.  I had 47.  I told you she was better.

The reason that we quit scoring our victims was a simple one.  There came a point when we had to.  There were too many of them.  When we first started playing, we were only taking on one or two at a time.  Three at most.  But it got to the point where we were seeing five or six Infected breaking through the tall grass at once.  It was even worse than when the large group had broken through the grass before.  There wasn’t any let up this time.  They just kept coming.  We were able to hold them off, but it no longer felt like fun.  It felt dangerous.  

What made it worse was that a lot of the people that we took down were our friends.  People that I’d known my whole life.  There shouldn’t be any danger in that, should there?  I shouldn’t be afraid of watching Danny Ryerson, my old poker buddy, poke his head through the tall grass, right?  But I was.  I was.

_

Jenny even had to put bullets through two of her own cousins and her favorite uncle.  I thought that it would be difficult for her, but she took them down before I even had the chance to offer taking the burden off of her shoulders.  By the time I had even recognized who they were, though, she had put them out of their misery.  

That was a good way to look at it, I decided.  We weren’t killing anybody, we were putting them out of their misery.  And some of them looked like they needed it.  Some of the Infected were so twisted up that it made my arthritis pale in comparison.  It was like comparing a paper cut to getting a limb chopped off.  Their muscles were expanding and contracting so powerfully that some of them had trouble even walking.  People with muscular dystrophy didn’t even have it so bad.  

If it weren’t for the fact that they were trying to eat us, I might have actually felt sorry for them.  But as it stood, I didn’t like the idea of being anybody’s lunch, thank you very much.  

        _

I ended up having to go to the bathroom, eventually.  That was what turned the tables on us.  A simple bodily function caused us to lose an ally.  I told Jenny and Mrs. Hastings that I had to go, and Mrs. Hastings picked up the slack.  She pulled up a chair and set her glass of lemonade next to her, then started shooting at the Infected as they came into view.  I hesitated a moment, but my sphincter made it a point to tell me how necessary the trip was.  I had to practically run to the bathroom.

While I was in the john, I listened to the gunshots echo off into the fields.  I tried to keep myself from counting the shots, but when you’re in the shitter, there isn’t much that you can do to keep yourself occupied.    

I counted thirty-one shots fired.  I hoped that it was because Mrs. Hastings was a bad shot.  But I knew better.  Loretta Hastings was probably a better shot than me.

I hurried to finish my business and got back out to the porch just in time to see Mrs. Hastings get pulled off the porch by Roscoe Hill, the caretaker out at Golden Ridge.  Roscoe had snuck up on the right side of the old lady.  She never even caught a glimpse of him.  The look of terror and surprise in her eyes will stay with me for the rest of my life, however long that may be.

Her throat was ripped open with such ferocity that her head almost separated from her body.  Jenny was busy firing into the coming Infected, so she never even saw old woman Hastings go down.  

I picked up one of the shotguns and blasted Roscoe in the back of the head.  The impact was so strong that it took not only his head off, but finished the job that he’d started on Loretta Hastings.  

I didn’t have any time to mourn her, either.  With only Jenny firing at the Infected, a pretty large group had amassed.  There must’ve been at least twenty of them, but Jenny was lessening that number with a swiftness I’d never seen.  I fired another shot with the twelve-gauge, but dropped it in favor of my rifle after watching Donny Princeton lose his head.  Donny was the Presbyterian minister at First Union church.  I guess he led his flock all right, led them all the way to my house for supper.  

We thinned out the crowd in less than a minute, and the battle didn’t last much longer than that.  It really wasn’t that hard to take them down if they weren’t charging.  So if you got the runners first, the rest were like ducks on a pond.

After the attack, Jenny slumped into her chair.  

“I don’t know how much more I got in me.”  She told me.  

“Me either.”  I responded.  The two of us were near exhaustion.  “Guess we just hold ‘em off until Billy and the others get back.”

Jenny looked up and fired her rifle.  I saw a woman tumble into the pile of bodies after taking only one step out of the tall grass.

“I just hope they get here soon.”  She said, then fired another shot into the grass.  I didn’t even see a body that time, but I knew that one fell.

“They’ll be back any minute, now.  You’ll see.”  I reassured her.  And I was right.  It wasn’t much longer before they returned, but the price that was paid for our groceries had been too high.  They had been paid for in blood.

        _

A few minutes before I saw the truck rumbling up the dirt driveway, Regina Thomas, Janet’s mother, came pushing through the tall grass.  Billy had described to me how badly the woman had been disfigured, but seeing with my own eyes was altogether different.  Gruesome was the best word that could be used to describe her.  She didn’t look anything like the woman that I’d known for the last twenty years.  Only Billy’s description made me recognize her.  

I lifted my rifle and fired a shot into the woman’s face.  She took a few more steps toward me and Jenny, but then Jenny fired a shot at the poor woman and she went down. I was glad that it was one of us that had done it.  Janet had been through enough, what with killing her father and brother.  I didn’t think that it would be right if she’d have had to put a bullet into her mother, too.  Of course, I didn’t know at the time that Janet wasn’t making a return trip.

“Jesus.”  Jenny said, then turned and threw up off the side of the porch.  It was the first time that I’d seen her react after killing one of the Infected, even after having to put her uncle down, but it made me think of her as person.  Prior to that, I’d kind of looked at the teenage girl as some sort of robot.  Or animal.

“You alright?”  I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said.  “It’s just that Mrs. Thomas was my babysitter.  My parents didn’t trust anyone else with me or my brother.  She sat for us until I was fifteen.”

“Damn shame.” I told her sympathetically, “But you did what was right.  Don’t let your mind trick you into thinking anything else.”

The young girl that I’d started off despising looked at me and smiled.  “Thanks.”  She said.  

Then we saw the truck.

        _

I knew almost immediately that something had gone wrong.  I can’t tell you how I knew that, but I did.  The truck raced up the drive like a bat out of hell, then came to a hard stop, causing dust to fly up off of the driveway and blow lazily away on the wind.

When the dust settled a little, I saw John exit the truck.  From the drivers seat.  My heart dropped into my feet.

“Where’s… John, where’s Billy?”  I asked Durbin as he walked toward the porch.

“We gotta get out of here.”  John told Jenny and I.  But he hadn’t answered my question.

I yelled at him.  “God damn it, John!  You answer me!  Where’s my son?”

John Durbin stopped on the first step of my porch.  He looked up at me, but didn’t say anything.  His silence was not what I wanted as a response.

“No.”  I whispered.

“Sorry, Roger.”  It was Sarah.  She had walked up and was standing next to her husband, who was not able to speak.  He hung his head and wiped his eyes with his left hand.

“No.”

“There were too many of them.”  She said.  “They overwhelmed us.”

“No.”

“They busted the driver window and dragged him out.  They got Janet too.  She tried to hold on to Billy, but they just pulled her right along with him.”

“No.”

“We’ve really got to go, Roger.  They’re coming up the road.  There’s about a hundred of them.”

“No.”

Sarah turned to Jenny and said something.  I’m not quite sure what it was.

“No.”  I said again, mostly to myself.  

There was a commotion.  Everything was a blur.  I remember that someone grabbed me by the hand and tried to drag me off of the porch.  I wouldn’t let them.

“No.”

I watched as John, Sarah, Jenny, and Simon piled into Billy’s truck.  Somebody yelled something in my direction, but I didn’t say anything.  Or if I did, it was probably “No”.

The truck reversed and John turned it around.  They sped off along the driveway, and I never even moved.  Fear and disbelief had overcome me, and I was frozen in place.  The truck turned right at the end of the drive, and disappeared behind the tall grass.  They were gone.

I watched as they left, wiping tears from my eyes.  “No.” I whispered to myself.  But only one audience had only heard my denials: The Infected that were slowly approaching me after coming through the tall grass.

        _

I don’t know how long I stood there on my porch, but luckily it wasn’t long enough for any of the Infected to get to me.  When I finally snapped out of it, two of them were coming up the porch stairs.  Mostly on instinct, I lifted and fired my rifle, reloading somewhere in between.  Both of them fell.

The property was swarming with the sick people.  I don’t know how many there were, and I wasn’t going to try counting them.  I looked down and was going to grab another rifle, or the shotgun, or anything else, but all of the weapons were gone.  Apparently, the Durbin’s had taken everything for their own protection, leaving me without any other defenses but my rifle.  I hadn’t even noticed until just then.  The group knew that the Infected would overcome me, but they left me up creek without a paddle anyway.

I reloaded and fired my rifle a few more times into the crowd of Infected and backed into the house, slamming the door once I was inside.  And for the first time in the twenty-five years of living in my house, I locked the door.  With the deadbolt.

I turned and looked around the living room, hoping that my son had actually come back with the group.

“Billy!”  I called into the house.  “Billy, quit messin’ around, boy!”  There was no answer.

I walked through the first floor, searching for my son.  He wasn’t there, so I advanced up the stairs and looked through the bedrooms and bathroom.  I still didn’t find him.  I think that maybe I was hoping he’d crawled under his bed and hid from me, the way he used to when he was a child.  After checking underneath all of the beds, I decided that it was all really happening.  My son was gone.  

Throughout my entire life, I was a bad father.  Only during the last few days, when it seemed that the world was coming down around our ears, did the two of us start to get close.  And now there was no more time.  No more time to make up the lost years.  

I sat down on my son’s bed and began thinking about all of the times that we fought.  There was so much that we wasted away, arguing over petty differences.  I had spent most of my adult life drowning at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, instead of raising my only child.  When his mother had passed, it didn’t help any, either.  In fact, things got worse in many ways.  Before she had passed, all I ever did was ignore Billy.  After she died, I finally started paying attention to the boy, but it was the wrong kind of attention.  I never physically hurt him, but I sure as hell verbally abused him.  

After Billy went away to the Army, I thought that I’d never see him again.  I made a promise to myself and to Melissa that I would quit drinking, and I did.  When Billy came back home from boot camp I tried to reach out to him, but that had not gone well.  For three years, I’d been trying.  I was almost ready to give up when all of this stuff started happening.  We’d gotten closer over the last couple of days than we’d been for all of Billy’s life, and now he was gone.  

And I never even got the chance to hug him.

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