By Jay Bechtol

You’ve run for two days without seeing another person. Through open farmland and unnamed small towns. Only remembering to drink water when the rasp in your throat turns to sandpaper. Rarely stopping. Or thinking. Until, in the darkness, you stagger over a broken wooden fence at the edge of a forest and wade into the sanctuary of waist-high grass, too tired to go any further. The waving field offers safety and a hiding place. The rustling stalks speak to you in your exhaustion. Welcome, the grass seems to say.

Tears blur your eyes as you fall onto your back, the tall grass frames the stars above, and you remember the empty house. Father and sister were gone, but the car remained parked in the garage. Television didn’t work, radio either. No electricity. No phone. You’d waited a few hours before heading down the dirt road to the closest farmhouse. No one there. That’s when the whole thing started feeling bad.

Wrong. 

You stopped at each house on the old dirt road, then ran the last mile into town. The bad feeling in your gut morphed into something worse as you stumbled into Nick’s Café. An empty diner except for the coffee-filled mugs and half-eaten plates of bacon and eggs. No people. Then you heard the first noise. A big noise that, if smaller, might have been the footstep of a large man. It came from down Main Street and around the corner.

Your stomach growled. You grabbed a piece of toast, changed your mind, tossed it on the floor and dodged back to the sidewalk in front of Nick’s. The sound came again. Loud enough this time to make the pavement shake. The hunger in your gut transformed into panic.

Something was coming, and it was big. Had to be to make a sound like that. The ground shook, and the end of the street darkened as if the sun had slipped behind a cloud.

Then you didn’t want to know the origin of the sound, or what made your family disappear. Or how everyone vanished from Nick’s Cafe.

You did the only thing you could do. You ran. Without thought or reason, you fled from the sound and the town with no people. Away from your home and your missing father and sister.

You wipe your eyes, touch the grass, and urge the memories to fade. The night is quiet. 

Exhaustion wins, able to defeat a world of unknown monsters. And, for a few merciful hours, you sleep.

~

A noise awakens you in the morning. Sun and a slight breeze push through the grass that makes your nest. It’s a familiar rumble and you leap to your feet.

From where you stand, the broken fence and the forest you’d run through the night before are behind you. The remainder of the massive field stretches out before you. Giant bales of rolled hay dot the landscape, and a farmhouse glints in the morning sun. Between you and the farmhouse a large machine churns. Giant metal blades whir, spinning through the tall grass and cutting a new path. A gentle gust from the morning breeze pushes through the waving stalks around you. The rustling whisper almost sounds like a warning.

Almost.

“HEY!” you holler and wave your hands wildly. “Hey, I’m over here!” The morning sun sparkles off the glass-enclosed driver’s seat making it impossible to determine if the person inside sees or hears you. 

“Hey!” You jump to catch the farmer’s attention.

The machine turns sharply, abandons its orderly pattern, and bisects the field, aiming its twirling blades in your direction. A black cloud of smoke bursts from its exhaust pipe, and the hum of the giant diesel engine turns to a howl as the monstrous machine accelerates.

You give one more wave, certain that whoever is driving will have some answers, some idea of what has happened. Hope surges for a moment, until the wind shifts and a new noise finds your ears. Just underneath the machine’s grumble is the shearing sound of thousands of grass stalks. It sounds like screaming.

The grass surrounding you whispers again. We told you so.

The monster bears down on you, accelerating, the blades spinning faster and faster, and you realize maybe being alone was better. Somehow the mechanical creature looks hungry, and it is no further away than the length of a football field.

You run toward the forest where the behemoth cannot follow.

You take four, maybe five steps before you stop and see the unseen shape from outside Nick’s coffee shop rising above the trees. The thing moves through the trees with the ease of the wind shivering the grass.The thing is immense and somehow even worse than you imagined. It blocks out the morning sun.  It takes a step, and the sharp crack of splintering wood adds to the morning’s insane cacophony.

You turn again, hoping that whoever is driving the farm machine sees what you see, and will have some idea what to do.

The thing in the forest darkens the morning, casting a long shadow across the field of grass. The sun no longer sparkles off the glass, and you can see inside the machine, to the chair where a driver should be sitting.

Should be.

No one is driving the machine. Like your house, like the neighbors’ houses, like Nick’s Café, everyone has disappeared. Along with any hope you may have clung to that somehow there would be an explanation, some rational answer. Something that would help you understand how you are any different than a rustling stalk in a field.

You hope your sister and father didn’t suffer, and now hope the same for yourself. The ground shudders, another tree snaps, the machine howls.

And all around you the grass whispers its condolences.