The Last Blade Of Grass (23 page)

“I’m actually doing pretty good, Simone,” I say in response. “I feel good, and believe it or not, I am actually looking forward to today.”

She looks at me with a bit of concern, and asks, “You’re looking forward to hurting those men?”

I nod, and say, “Yes. It is the strangest thing, but I’m really good at it, and I’m looking forward to making them cry, and I have no reason for it. Something just feels right about it at this point.”

“And what if these men didn’t do anything to us?” she asks.

I just look at her with a question written all over my face, not understanding what she means.

“Do you think you would enjoy hurting those men if they weren’t the ones that sent the infected here? What if they were just some people that wandered onto our land?”

I think about it for a few seconds. “No, I don’t think I would enjoy it… but then again, I’m not so sure. Anyone that comes here is a potential threat if they leave, so it would depend on the feeling I get from them.”

“So you would still need a reason?” she asks.

“No, I could do this to anyone if I thought it would help us somehow, but I would need a reason to enjoy it. I know these are bad guys. They may not deserve what I’m putting them through, but killing them lets them off, and keeping them as fed prisoners is like giving them a time out. I’m enjoying making them suffer.”

“You should kill them now, Eddie,” she says, nodding her head.

I think,
No, I don’t want to
, and start shaking my head at her. “Why?” I start raising my voice as I question her. “Four days ago, you said I should make them suffer until they die. Now you want me to just kill them and let them off? Why should I?” I yell in her face, making Simone step back from me, with a look of fear on her face.

“You have learned how to be cruel,” she says softly with tears in her eyes.

“What are you talking about?” I say more calmly but with a great deal of confusion.

“Eddie, you were soft…too kind. You have always been a good man, and the people in this world will kill us all if you continue to be the man you have always been. I’ve never been afraid of you in all of our years together, until just now. I wanted you to torture those men so you would learn to be as rotten and vindictive as the people we will encounter. One day you will face men like these, but they will be men that haven’t done anything to us yet. You have to know in your heart what you will do to them or they won’t see it in your eyes. What they see in your eyes is what will keep us all alive.”

Simone walks off crying.

I never thought of myself as soft before. I guess it is true that I always looked to fairness above all else. I know there isn’t fairness in the world, but I did my best to be even handed, and just in the things that I did. She’s right. That isn’t going to work in this new world. Society isn’t going to rebuild itself in our lifetimes with the numbers of humans that are now lost. I need to consider a more selfish path and learn to fight for more than our fair share.

I walk into the stable and say good morning to each of the men before I cut their throats.

Chapter Ten

Rebuilding and Exploring

After killing the last three of our attackers, I rejoined the group, and once again became a productive person on my own land. It was a hard time for all of us dealing with everything that was lost. Over the next week we found the bodies of the rest of our lost members. We buried them in four separate funeral services. Each time it dug deeper into the wounds we hoped would be healing soon. Too much had happened in such a short time for any of us to understand how to deal with it properly. It took two weeks to remove all of the infected bodies from the ranch and burn them.

It wasn’t until a month later, in the middle of March, that all of the work we were doing started to feel like it had any purpose. The winter temperatures stayed below freezing throughout that month, which probably did the most to keep the group intact. A good number of our people would have moved off the ranch, trying to make it on their own during that time, due to the general hopelessness felt by everyone. The unusual cold forced us to continue working together. My behavior torturing those men in the stable played a big part in the feelings of unease everyone was dealing with. No one was quite sure if they could trust me at first. Even Simone avoided me for three more days after I finally killed the men.

She apologized for evading me afterward, but told me even though she pushed me into the state I was in, she didn’t expect me to change so much. I really frightened her and everyone else for that matter. Well, almost everyone else. The kids and teenagers didn’t seem to mind what I'd become. In fact, I spent most of that month with them as if I was a part of their new world more than part of the old one.

Once we reached the turning point in March, and regained the sense of cohesion, we had also made it back to regular maintenance mode. We decided to move the fences farther out from the buildings to increase our defensive perimeter. We finished that large project while we also repaired or shored up the barn, stable, and other outbuildings where they needed work. There was even a stray day of good weather where the sun was shining and the temperature almost reached sixty. That day we all decided it was time to start travelling in groups off of the ranch to resupply, and look for anything, or anyone, that might help us survive.

Getting to leave the ranch, I think, was the final turning point. It helped all of us realize there was still the possibility of having a life in this world. None of us had realized how much we all felt like prisoners on the ranch. Trapped here by an infected army of guards that would eat us if we stepped out of line.

We had to go, if not for the peace of mind, then for the supplies we were running low on. Running the tractor constantly for two weeks drained the large gas tank I have on the farm. Our generators keep the electricity on. That is a luxury I know most survivors don't have. Greg told us how difficult it was for him to survive before joining us, and I don't want the same struggles at the ranch.

There were several important things that we needed to accomplish in our trips out of our safety zone. We were good on guns and ammo, but still needed to attempt a trip to Medford’s police departments and to the larger Sheriff’s office off of Mistletoe and 8
th
, to scavenge anything left there. We also needed to check on friends and acquaintances that might have survived the upheaval on their own. The final thing we desperately needed was radios. I had stockpiled a bunch of short wave radios, walky-talky type things, but no Ham systems that would allow us to communicate with other survivors around the country and the world.

Once we made it off the ranch, we happily discovered a world that was safer than we had imagined. Notably free from danger even compared to that first trip, when we had travelled to Medford and saved Jessica. The extreme low temperatures continued after the large attack, and they combined with strong sustained winds that we were only partially protected from by the surrounding woods and hills. That combination with the non-arrival of spring in March was finally freezing the infected solid.

On one trip during the last week of March, we drove to check on Billy Underwood at his property. Billy was one of my prepping customers and would get into heated debates with me about the existence of God. Unfortunately, Billy and his people didn’t survive the outbreak, which means Jessie Corrigan is most likely dead as well. Jessie was one of the four customers that arrived at my store on the day of the outbreak and was supposed to join the group on Billy’s ranch.

We did get quite a vision on the drive to Billy’s property. His land and the area surrounding it were dotted with human statues. Most of them were standing in various poses of frozen motion, but some had fallen over from where they had frozen while taking a step and weren’t stable enough to remain upright.

Billy’s land was close to Medford, in the northeast, which is probably the reason for it being overrun. Of course, Billy did mention that most of the people he was taking in were senior citizens from around his place, so it just may be that they didn’t have enough capable bodies to mount the proper defenses. His land is also open ranch land, without the forest to block the winds like at my place, so I’m sure the combination of the cold temperatures and freezing wind is what froze all of the infected on his land while in motion.

We did have to shoot many of the infected that were still somewhat animated, but they were moving so slowly it was like shooting at mounted targets. We had no fear of being overrun or surprised by any of them.

I found the Ham radio equipment I needed at Billy’s place, and over two days and several trips, we returned to his place to pick up all of his leftover supplies. Fortunately, Donald was able to get his big rig running, or we would have taken a lot longer making the trips with the smaller pickups.

The apparent die-off of the infected and the lack of mobility on those remaining alive prompted another point of joy for everyone at the ranch. We were all able to return to our pre-disaster homes and pick up personal items that we wanted. The first few days of April were marked by photo album sharing and family remembrance. We shared stories of those we know we lost, and those we hope are still safe. There weren’t many things left for Simone and I to recover from the house we had the store attached to. The place was ripped to shreds by people trying to find survival supplies after we left. Fortunately, we kept all of our important things, like documents and pictures, at the ranch, and only wanted to get the remaining photos from the walls.

On one of our outings, Michael, our resident EMT, suggested we bring one of the frozen infected back to the ranch and thaw it out. He was concerned that the petrified ones might thaw out and come back to life like some insects will. We did four different tests, and each one proved that once the infected are frozen solid, they are truly dead. I was happy, as I’m sure everyone else was as well, that whoever created Zeus didn’t make the infected impervious to the cold.

The temperatures have finally started regularly getting into the fifties and sixties. This is still a problem though since we should be averaging the mid-seventies for temperatures by now. We also recorded that the weather got progressively colder from December through April, almost as if the winter was not only prolonged, but shifted its coldest days by almost two months.

Even though the weather was horrible it helped us out a great deal. If spring had hit when it was supposed to, we would not have made the scavenging runs to all of the police departments. We discovered two weeks ago that once the weather did warm up during the day, that the remaining infected returned to their normal walking pace.

In April, since it had not warmed up yet, we were able to scavenge the Medford police departments, the main sheriff’s office, and the Central Point police department. As much as I am a fan of stockpiling necessities, the amount of arms and ammunition we retrieved from those three locations is staggering, and borderline obscene. It makes me smile when I think about it, and as much as we have, I would personally love to have more.

The National Guard Armory was toast. It looked like that place had been hit in the early days of the disease. Until our group came through, no one had been to the police departments, because of the huge numbers of infected in and around them. We were the first group to search those places while the infected were still as slow as snails—because they were partly frozen. It would be a much scarier proposition trying to go into one of those buildings today with the warmer weather.

The infected in the streets and open areas are almost all dead and will fall to the ground and rot in this warmer weather. Some of the infected inside the buildings we entered were frozen solid as well, but most were insulated enough to survive. That means any open doorways or broken windows will allow the housed infected to now walk free.

Even with the returned threat of the defrosted infected everywhere, if we didn’t retrieve the guns and supplies from Medford yet, I would still try to get them. We have what we need for defense on the ranch, but I don’t want any more groups like those guys Chad was with getting this stuff.

It took a while for the Ham radio to be hooked up and for someone to figure out how to use it. Donald and Randy have been running the radio and have spoken with people around the country, and a few around the world. I know they have contacted people in England, Germany, Canada, Greece, and someone in Brazil. It is the same situation everywhere. Most of the population is dead, and those that are left are barely holding on, both by starving and not having defensible locations to stay.

I feel the most empathy for the plight of the people in Europe. Without easy access to firearms like most of the locations in the U.S. had, they had survival by hand to hand contact from the beginning. I imagine the same situation played out in all of our country’s anti-gun states and urban centers. Having high populations of unarmed people to fight hand to hand against a disease ridden violent enemy is not a recipe for survival.

At least the deep winter freeze we’ve had here seems to be all over the northern hemisphere, and the big die off of the infected is happening even as far south as Greece. If the next few winters repeat their long runs and stay as cold as they did this past season, then the long term implications of growing food, and keeping warm are not good at all. So much for the dire warnings of “global warming” destroying life on the planet. I think the climatologists of the 1970s were right in their prediction of a coming ice age. They were just off by several decades.

For the last two weeks all exploratory trips off the ranch have been on foot or by bicycle. Having the numbers of infected down to reasonably safe levels and the warmer weather made us decide to conserve whatever fuel we could for next winter. There are plenty of abandoned vehicles to siphon gas from for stockpiling, but the fuel will only stay fresh for a finite amount of time, even with the stabilizer we are adding to it. There won’t be any more oil or gas exploration in our lifetimes and probably no refining either.

Another reason we don’t take vehicles as often anymore is because we don’t want to alert anyone to our location by having regular vehicle traffic coming and going from the ranch. The trucks also draw out more infected than silently going by on a bike. We aren’t able to carry as many supplies, but the return trips with vehicles end up just as slow since we need to clear the roads of the infected that were drawn out when we passed by earlier.

The survivors of the world will be travelling mostly on foot or bicycle until the entire infected population has died off. Travelling by horse attracts too many infected, and when gathering supplies, guards are needed to stay with the horses to keep them from getting attacked. We found that out the hard way with the two remaining horses we have that returned to the farm after we were overrun.

On the last two trips we took this week, Simone and I have taken all of our kids with us. The first time we went on just a day trip, but the second trip was an overnight stay. We are trying to learn how the world is now, as well as teach the kids how to survive in it at the same time. Our plan is to take a three to five day trip on our bikes into Central Point. There are some businesses there that we want to check out that could have some items that would make life a bit more convenient for us. Central Point is also a great place to go with our kids, not just because it is between us and Medford, but because it was largely cleared out of the freely mobile infected by Chad and his group when they prepared the attack on our ranch.

The place I really want to see if it is still stocked, is an archery shop the phone book shows is on Pine Street in Central Point. If we can clear out a fully stocked archery store we won’t have to worry so much about the noise all of our firearms make. Also, our kids and the other young people will need to learn archery to survive in their future. Without modern manufacturing, the world will eventually run out of bullets, primers, powder, and the shells necessary to make them on our home presses. Our children’s and grandchildren’s lives will most likely be one of defense with assorted swords, clubs, and bows.

If the weather remains as good as it is right now, we will leave in two days with our bikes, trailers, kids, and guns to check on that shop in Central Point.