Grasshopper Season 2: Tree Horn Ridge by Jonathan Moon

2: Tree Horn Ridge

The roar of the battered old pick-up cuts through the silence of the forest like a chainsaw through scrap wood. It’s a pale yellow Forest Service truck that has been up, over, and around all the dirt roads of varying quality which twist and snake their way through the Hoo-Doo County wilderness. The still early morning air bristles with the aggressive sound of the battered vehicle, small forest animals scampering through the sunrise to escape it. The small Ford Ranger pick-up growls and spits rocks from its rear wheels as it rounds every corner. The grizzled old man behind the wheel cares not for the scattershot of pebbles he kicks up with every swerve. His only entertainment and immediate concern is torturing the college kid focusing all his attention on reading the paper while riding shotgun.

The old man, Mark, doesn’t have any one specific thing he dislikes about the college kid, Warren, but rather has pointed the frustration of his life spent in the small singlewide trailer in the same small hick town, where the only difference day to day was the bottle he was swimming in directly at Warren. In Warren he sees someone determined to do more than he ever tried to, and consciously or not Mark wants to make everything as hard for Warren as he can before he is off making better money. Before the two were assigned to work together, Mark already hated everything in his life he just didn’t have anything to focus his misery on so he was just a grouchy old prick to everyone in general.

Mark takes a sharp turn on a wide corner so tight the passenger-side wheels rumble over the rocks lining the road. The paper in Warren’s hands folds inward and crumples into his face, knocking his black-rimmed glasses askew. The fountain soda between his legs bounces up and nearly tips over onto his shoes, but his young caffeinated reflexes save the soda at the risk of taking the newspaper to his face. Without adjusting his glasses, Warren shoots Mark a distrustful look.

“It’s time to work, not to read, School Boy.” Mark snaps.

Warren turns away from Mark, folds the paper and rests it on his lap, then readjusts his glasses. He looks out the window, swallowing his growing fury at the older man’s shitty attitude. “What is our work today?”

Mark wants an argument and is let down enough he sighs when he doesn’t get it. He knows Warren has no hard time going to supervisors, and he knows the book-smart little shit also knows every small rule within the Forest Service legal department. “We are headed up to Tree Horn Ridge, the old clear-cut up there anyway. It’s been three years this week, and we gotta see if it’s ready to be re-planted yet.”

Warren nods his understanding, but doesn’t speak because he doesn’t want to give Mark any openings for the argument he always seems to be seeking. Warren graduated during the winter quarter, spent the holidays with his parents, and then hustled back to the first job he could get with the Forest Service. He’d been working with Mark for two months now, and he knew from the first day the old man was just an asshole who had been an asshole so long without someone whooping him for it he wasn’t going to change. Wordlessly, he refolds his paper and tucks it beside him. When he reaches for his soda again, Mark jerks the wheel back and forth but Warren ignores him still and chooses instead to keep looking at the beautiful forest scenery out the window. They round another corner and tree Horn Ridge comes into view. Warren has been out on the deep forest ridge a few times already but it still takes his breath away every time, as it does now. 

The ridge jutted out from the mountainside at such a sharp angle it almost doubles back on itself with a copse of indigenous evergreen trees lining one side all the way down to a small creek at the bottom of it. Three years ago, Forest Service crews did a cut and burn on a square mile clear cut straight down the left side of the ridge. Where the men usually park the pickup, they can stand and have thick green forest on the right and stump-dotted clear cut so thistle-covered it appears a soft glowing purple on their left.

As the clear-cut comes into view Mark gives Warren the snide words he had worked so hard not to hear. “Ya’ know, School Boy, I’ll be able to tell ‘em as soon as I touch the dirt if it’s ready for replanting, and it don’t take me no eighty-thousand dollar degree. In a year from now you’ll be sitting in an office with a view, while me and Ler and Butch will still be out here busting our asses in the dirt and sunshine.”

Warren opens his mouth to defend himself, but Mark raises the volume of his voice and continues. “So, just keep your trap shut, and you might actually learn a thing or two about a goddamn hard day’s work!”

The old man shouts with so much force his bitter spit speckles Warren’s glasses. For some reason, despite the fact he has been wearing more of his sodas than drinking them and still managed to keep his cool then, staring through Mark’s brown-tinted saliva dripping slowly down his lens bubbles the fury he has so deeply buried up and over. His voice breaks as he screeches the three feet across the cab at Mark, “What the hell is your problem? You old shithead prick!”

The smile melts off Mark’s face and he takes his eyes of the winding road to gawk at the kid’s gall. Mark wants an argument, not to be screeched at by someone half his age. Both the men are scowling and staring at each other, each contemplating the next thing they could shout at each other, as Mark takes the final turn to the clear-cut side of the ridge. Warren instantly becomes nervous that Mark isn’t watching the road as it bends around a rocky jutting corner. Mark has been up this same road hundreds of times of his four decades with the Forest Service, and the clear-cut side (even before its trimming) has always been one of his favorite places to visit. He has made the trip in zero visibility, and he isn’t worried about taking his eyes off the nervous Warren as he relies on his muscle memory to handle the wide turn. Warren doesn’t trust Mark’s crusty old man reflexes, and breaks their indignant staring contest to make sure Mark doesn’t crash them into one of the huge tree trunks lining the road.

Mark snorts at Warren’s surrender, and opens his mouth to release a string of mocking snideness but before he can something black smashes into the middle of the windshield.  The eight-inch long black object simultaneously cracks the windshield from the center out while splattering thick orange sludge all the way across the spider-webbed glass. Mark over-reacts and jerks the wheel far too hard to the side, his muscle memory fails and they thump off the edge of the road and bounce down the clear-cut. Mark squints his eyes and attempts to look through the splinters in the glass or the orange slime smeared across it in order to crashing into anything.

The truck bounces over tree stumps and decaying logs, sending dust and chips of bark high into the still morning air as it careens down the side of the ridge. Despite Mark’s best downhill driving several weather-worn tree stumps tear the little pick-up’s undercarriage to scrap. After a wild, blind ride the truck finally comes to a sudden lurching stop high-centered on a large blackened stump.

The engine is still grinding to an angry, yet ready, death as Warren screams at Mark and falls out his door as he opens it. “Damn it! Damn it, damn it, son of a bitch!”

Warren stumbles on unsure legs, distraught and shaken but uninjured. He grimaces when he notices the mixture of sticky Mountain Dew and fragrant urine soaking the front of his Forest Service issued khakis. Angry tears burn in his eyes when he realizes he hasn’t wiped Mark’s flung spit from his eyeglasses yet. He darts back to the truck to retrieve his paper, slipping with nearly every step and cursing his older coworker with every breath. 

Mark has to slam his shoulder into the frame of his door to get it to open. It gives with a horrible scream of metal on metal. At some point during the crash Mark bounced his forehead off the hard plastic steering wheel, and as he escapes the wreckage blood is trickling into his watery eyes from a cut in the middle of his forehead. Mark spins around to say something to Warren, but the younger man scampers back out of the truck again and throws his crushed and empty cup at him instead of screaming through his rage. The cup bounces off of Mark’s face after connecting with pin-point accuracy to the freshly opened gash. Mark blushes and winces at the same time, for once unable to snap anything back at Warren.

Warren sees the old man’s rare speechlessness, but his restraint is spent. “This is your fault, you grouchy prick! You weren’t even looking where you were going, too concerned with being a total asshole to me for no good damn reason. Well, you old worthless shit-sack, I hope to hell it was worth it because they are going to fire your stupid ass after the next time I talk to them!”

Warren dives back into the truck cab, and grabs his paper- ignoring the fact it is damp with split soda, and storms away from the ruined truck and his embarrassed partner without allowing him a single word. Mark lets him go, and when he does he reaches back into the truck to grab his cell phone. He sighs when, as expected it has no service. He reaches in and tries the radio but with no battery power it doesn’t work.

Warren is waving his folded up paper in front of him as he walks to the tree line, slapping grasshoppers out of the air with it. He says nothing, but to him it seems like there is an excessive amount grasshoppers in the high mountain clear-cut. For reasons he can’t explain their song sends chills through him despite the late summer humidity.

Mark watches Warren reach a stump near the tree and sit down flinging his paper open. Mark reaches back in the cab for his typical breakfast of pretzels and jerky. His bag of pretzels has overturned and half have spilled across the floor of the truck, but he rolls the top and tucks the bag under his arm the way Warren had tucked his newspaper away. He walks over to Warren chewing on his jerky and looking from Warren and the ground. Warren doesn’t acknowledge Mark’s presence or look away from his paper.

“Whatcha’ reading about?” Mark asks in the gentlest voice he has ever used in his life.

Warren lowers his paper just enough for him to peek over the top. “Do you really give a half a shit?”

“Yeah.” Mark assures but then relents with another blush at Warren’s raising eyebrow. “Okay, not so much. It is just gonna be a long while before Bruce and Larry head back this way.”

“You can’t call them?”

“No service.”

“You’re an asshole.” The paper goes back up and Warren disappears behind it.

Mark clears his throat and winces through it as if he is preparing swallow razor blade words. “I’m sorry. Ya know, for all of this.”

“I bet. People always remember that moment when they went and fucked off the best job they’d ever have. You’ll be sorry for a long damn time I figure.”

Mark is so furious he is trembling, his fists clenching and un-clenching at his sides. Up until today he has been firmly in control of the relationship between Warren and he, and having their roles so rapid and severely reversed just pisses Mark the hell off. Warren is right and it just stokes the indignant fire which seems to power Mark through his days and nights. His feelings threaten to peel back on himself so he simply sits down against the trunk of the tree closest Warren’s stump. Luckily for Mark, Warren isn’t a rotten old bastard and after a few moments of uncomfortable silence between them filled with a pulsing grasshoppers’ song, he feels bad for shouting and throwing his cup at him. He’d rather forgive the old bastard and have conversation to drown out the grasshoppers.

He doesn’t lower his paper but tells Mark, “I’m reading about that farmer that went missing last week.”

“Jerry Armstrong, Alfalfa King.” Mark chuckles grimly.

“Yeah, I think that’s him.” Warren tells him, knowing full well it is because his name is in the title of the front page article.

“Oh, it’s him alright. Does it say anywhere in your article there that his daddy and his granddaddy both ‘went missing’ before him?”

“I don’t recall that.” Warren answers honestly, but the knowledge excites him as if he is part of a deepening mystery.

“Of course not. I bet that reporter is a ‘school boy’ just like you.”

“What the hell man?” Warren spins on Mark, and though he doesn’t jump to his feet he stares his co-worker down with murderous intent glazing his eyes.

Mark shakes his head, old habits are hard to break and old pricks don’t just start smiling after crashing their work truck down a ridge-side. He wonders if he might want to apologize or suffer through Warren’s fury, but when he looks at Warren he sees the kid is doing his best to just calm down. Once he realizes he isn’t going to be attacked, Mark stands up and licks his thumb. Mark is holding his thumb in the air, staring at it with one eye squinted shut like he is staring through a rifle scope. He turns a few degrees to the side, and then spins in a half circle with his lips mumbling silent equations in his head. Warren watches for a few awkward moments waiting for Mark to speak. Mark does speak again and his words send more chills through Warren.

“In fact, the Old Armstrong fields are just on the other side of that copse of trees.” Mark smiles, proud of himself for remembering such.

Warren stares at the grizzled old man but says nothing.

“Would you believe me if I told you one night at the Salty Dog over a round of whiskeys, Old Jerry told me his kin had both been chewed up by grasshoppers?”

“I have a harder time believing people will sit and drink with you.” Warren answers honestly.

Mark laughs in spite of himself, the force of his guffaw forcing him to spit a mouthful of blood onto a nearby stump. Warren can’t help but laugh along, and as Mark is wiping the blood from his chin the two men share the first smile they ever have. If they were looking at the stump Mark spit on instead of each other they would have seen the six-inch long black hopper, fluttering its purple wings and landing in the crimson puddle to splash and kick. Mark speaks again, but has to raise his voice to be heard over the grasshoppers’ song.

“Yeah, some do,” Mark smiles his half-toothless grin at Warren and nods at the truck high-centered on the big tree-stump. “Hell, I’d even buy you a shot or three if we could keep this quiet.”

Warren’s brow furrows, his eyes squinting accusingly behind his spit-speckled lenses.

Mark understands, and amends his statement. “I mean, keep it quiet, because it was all my fault, and I don’t wanna’ get fired and all.”

Satisfied with Mark’s admittance, Warren calms enough to know he really won’t get one of these old timers fired. Shit, they’d all be tons of fun to work with after snitching off their buddy. For the first time, Mark isn’t being a total prick, and Warren sees this as a chance to show the old bastard that just because he went to college he doesn’t have it out for any of them.

“Okay, sure.” Warren concedes to Mark and then unfolds his paper and goes back to reading it.

Downhill from the men a dark shape shifts through the tall brown grass and vibrant purple thistle, unnoticed and inching ever closer.

Warren is sitting on his stump seat, reading his paper. Next to him, the sound of the grasshoppers chirps begin to sound like thousands of tiny screams to Mark. He can’t sit and listen to them so he keeps talking despite every word he speaks filling him with a strange unshakable dread.

“Old Jerry Armstrong, Alfalfa King, ‘gone missing’. He told me ‘nother time about an old shack somewhere up around this selfsame ridge. He said there was a crazy old man who lived in the shack and ate this blood-colored corn that grew around the shed. Called that old man the ‘Corn Eater’ he did. Said this Corn Eater was the reason he was rich and the reason he was sad.”

Warren lowers his paper just enough for Mark to see his raised, quizzical eyebrow.

Again Mark gets the unspoken drift, “Sad on account of the Corn Eater’s bastard grasshoppers eatin’ his kin and all.”

Still holding the paper up, but now using it to hide a slight grin, Warren asks, “So you believe in man eating grasshoppers and corn eating hermits?”

“I believe there are a lot of the little chirping bastards right now, maybe not killer, but goddamned annoying ain’t they?”

“Yup.” Warren raises the paper to finish the article on a rash of ‘missing persons’ reports from the town of Stillwater leaving Mark to just deal with the grasshoppers and their constant ringing chittering. They sit this way for a moment, Warren reading about vanishing people, and Mark humming classic rock songs in his head to drown out the screaming of the grasshoppers.

The clear-cut is alive with tiny grasshoppers, the air filled with as much of their clacking scattered flights as it is their incessant chirping. Several jump up against the back of Warren’s paper, but he ignores them until a heavy black one smacks into it with enough force to fold it closed in Warren’s face.

“Damn it all!” Warren snaps. He looks at Mark and sees the gap-toothed grin he fully expects.

The six-inch long black hopper on the stump next to Mark has lapped up a fair amount of the blood goober and hungry for more, leaps at Mark’s shoulder. The old man’s head snaps to the side, a look of fear etched on his weathered face as he regards the mutant insect digging needle sharp legs into the meat of his shoulder. Mark’s hand twitches at his side, but before he can slap the strange grasshopper away it leaps again to land on his face.

The black hopper’s feet sink into the leathery flesh of Mark’s face and he screams and slaps at in response. Warren, thinking Mark is being funny, points and laughs at the struggling old man. Mark’s frenzied slaps smack his nose and previously opened wound more than they hit the grasshopper barbed into his face. He does make contact once and it merely angers the insect. The big grasshopper leaps away from Mark’s face with its purple wings clacking and a fan of blood trailing behind it like a tail.

Warren stops laughing when Mark holds up a blood-covered hand. Warren goes pale when he sees the gaping hole in Mark’s cheek so long he can see the nicotine-yellowed teeth underneath. Warren’s stomach threatens to void the rushed gas station breakfast he gobbled when Mark screams at him and his cheek flaps obscenely with each word.

“We gotta get the hell outta’ here!”

Mark shoves off the tree and stumbles forward. He only manages a few sloppy steps before a grasshopper the size of a dog leaps up and crashes into his chest, slamming him right back against the tree trunk. Pinned fast in place, Mark slaps wildly at the monster attacking him as its powerful back legs find purchase in the soft flesh of his beer belly. Mark manages to make a fist and punch the insect once in its bugling multi-sectioned eye. It reacts exactly as the smaller hopper on his face had, and leaps backwards away from Mark. Instead of a mouthful of his flesh the dog-sized grasshopper lets its momentum drag its razor sharp limbs from Mark’s belt line to his stubborn sternum. Mark’s innards rush from him as if excited to flee his toxic personality and self-abuse. Nearly emptied of his vital organs, Mark sways forward and lands on his knees in a puddle of his guts. As Mark dies he has time to see grasshoppers of all sizes feasting on his spilled innards all around him.

Warren is up and running before Mark’s eyes go cloudy. He jumps over stumps and logs, slapping at the grasshoppers suddenly swarming the clear-cut. The air is filled with grasshoppers; all around him Warren sees huge black and purple ones like the nightmare one that killed Mark but only bigger and bigger. All the grasshoppers jump, flutter, and sing at him. As he barrels back towards the pickup he spots a colossal black hopper, bigger than the pick-up they had driven up in, crawling methodically uphill from him and moving eerily in step from its distance. Warren’s eyes dart from the pick-up in front of him to the giant hopper above him until it falls behind. He doesn’t have time to question its behavior and pushes his burning legs forward through the clear-cut. None of the others Warren sees match the size and girth of the giant above him, but several others the size of small dogs leap at him squeaking and chittering hateful guttural noises. Some bounce off of his darting form, their hard exoskeletons leaving instant bruises where they slapped against Warren’s skin. Warren feels their limbs slice at him as they launch themselves at him, and soon blood trickles from dozens of cuts on his arms and torso.

Warren is nearly to the truck when he looks up and sees three black grasshoppers each the size of a bear atop the truck he was praying to seek refuge in. The hopper on the hood flitters its legs at him, glittering purple which strikes Warren as lovely and deeply terrifying at the same time. His eyes go blurry as they fill with tears which slip down his flushed cheeks. He reaches up to adjust his glasses when he hears an incredible crash of wood and earth behind him. He stands there not wanting to step forward or turn around, and small hoppers latch onto him the moment he stops moving. They dangle from his face and arms, falling away greedily sucking at little scraps of flesh they manage to tear away from him.

The grasshoppers’ song is reaching a crescendo Warren feels like toxic shock in his soul. The three hoppers on the pick-up flutter their purple wings at him and he spins around from the monsters. As he turns slowly around Warren starts thinking again about the way Mark had kept saying ‘went missing’. Less than ten feet away is the mammoth grasshopper that had been up hill from him. Up close its black exoskeleton has an oily sheen as if rainbows of neon are swimming in its shell.

The monster hunkers down and leaps at him. Warren raises his arms instantly to defend himself, but they are both quickly severed by powerful mandibles and feed into a hole like mouth lined with hundreds of tiny teeth. Warren swoons as he watches his forearms disappear into the grasshopper’s deadly maw, but it catches him with its head as it leaps towards the truck. Warren folds over the insect’s head as if hit by a speeding vehicle as it soars through the air. His ribs shattered, his lungs deflating and his spine shattered in several places, Warren slips from its face and falls onto the destroyed pick-up. The other three giants jump out of Warren’s way at the last possible second, and as he makes contact and sends gore and broken glass all over the thousands of grasshoppers overtaking the clear-cut they flutter their purple wings and join the feeding frenzy.  

Next 'episode' posted up on Monday March 17.

You can find more of my works HERE

Grasshopper Season 1 by Jonathan Moon

1: Grasshopper Season

Jerry Armstrong has lived in the Hoo-Doo County mountains long enough to know seasons aren’t just marked by corporate holidays and calendars or even the weather. His momma loved the flowers and that’s how she grew up knowing what season she was in between the snows. Tulips and pansies bloom in early spring and most are dying off before the mid-summer lilies and snapdragons which are losing their luster as the hollyhocks really begin to blossom at summer’s coming end.  About the time those tulips are opening up and revealing the beauty of their petals the warm air is filled with the humming buzz of bees during the days and the irritating swirling buzz of the mosquitoes during the nights. When grandmothers are squeezing snapdragons into flora puppets for starry-eyed grandchildren, the wasps and hornets are out in force- aggressive at the smell of summer BBQs. Grasshoppers don’t start pestering the farmers of Jerry’s rolling mountain region until mid-summer.

You almost forget about the yearly hoppers, until you’re standing there admiring the lilies lining the irrigation ditch and somewhere in the browning weeds around you a chorus of chirps erupts. Around the time most farmers are readying for their first run of bailing, tiny hoppers by the millions are nibbling on an assortment of tasty regional crops and growing in fat crop-devouring nightmares. It seemed natural for Jerry Armstrong, Alfalfa King, to be an enemy of the high mountain grasshoppers and a fan of the time-off the snows guaranteed the hay farmer.

But, Jerry hates the winter and the summer both. He hates the winter because that’s when Margret died and Christmas ain’t no damn fun when you’re all alone. He kept that to himself from anyone who would ask and would instead just share the honest truth of his wrists and knees swelling up something fierce when the cold nights came. Jerry hates summer because it is grasshopper season. And Jerry hates grasshoppers because they ate his Grandpa. Then, they ate his Pa.

He didn’t see them do it, so he couldn’t prove it. But knowin’ and provin’ are two totally separate things to the Armstrong men. Just the same, no provin’ meant no talkin’ and Jerry ain’t never told anyone about the true causes of his kin’s terrible disappearances, except for when he’s had a few drinks in him.

His Pa never fully explained to Jerry what happened the day Grandpa didn’t come back from the field, he just mouthed for Jerry to fetch him some whiskey and then he disappeared in his room for the night leaving Jerry to wander out into the field for his self.

Jerry remembers now, as he did then, his grandfather’s stories which his Pa used to roll his eyes at. Grandpa told Jerry there was something dark out past the ridge at the edge of the property. His Grandpa told him it made the soil rich and the crops heavy. It was basically, the old man confided with an ashamed whisper, the secret to the family’s success. Grandpa explained every few years it would ‘burp’ and everything in the proximity of the ridge past the property line got a little out of control; crops would over grow and begin rotting before harvest, the mountain creeks would taste of flowers and poison man and beast alike, and the late summer grasshoppers would grow frighteningly large and carnivorous.  Pa didn’t like the stories but he’d tolerate them, as long Grandpa didn’t start talking about the Corn Eater.

Grandpa told Jerry there was a creepy old man who lived in a tiny shack deep in the forest surrounded by stalks of strange corn. These stalks, Grandpa swore, grew thick and purple and barbed. As Grandpa’s story went the corn itself was black and red and when the old hermit would feast on it the crimson juices would drizzle down and stain his waist-long beard. According to Grandpa this Corn Eater controlled the crops and their bounty or lack thereof. There was no way to appease or reason or barter with the strange old man as he has gone quite insane over his years in the forest.

Even after all these years, Jerry never questioned his Grandpa’s story, even back when Pa used to scoff at them both. Right now, Jerry’s eyes are closed but in his mind he is twelve years old again and walking through the field. The image of a circle trampled down in the alfalfa, flies buzzing above the blood-soaked swath, is forever burned in his mind. He can smell the blood, thin and rusty on the hot dry air. Jerry can see tiny drops of Grandpa’s blood leading out in all directions from the flattened crimson center. The silence of the scene is terrifying after weeks of grasshopper chatter and chirping. Before he snaps back to the present he always sees blood drying on a stalk of dry uncut hay. He watches the bright red dry to a moldy brown in the heat of the sun, and then he opens his eyes and hopes tears aren’t slipping out already.

The grasshoppers are singing now.

Jerry sighs and lets the memories continue to play out. He and Pa remained after Grandpa’s death, which baffled investigators and took nearly three years to yield Grandpa’s sizeable life insurance policy. They couldn’t walk away, business was far too profitable. The modest family farmhouse took up only a sliver of the fifty acres, which left the majority of their nutrient-rich land for the high-priced alfalfa they grew. ‘Armstrong Alfalfa’ was a booming business in the aged mining and logging region. So booming, in fact, Jerry didn’t walk away even after they ate his Pa in much the same fashion.

The grasshoppers got Pa clear out near the tree line. He had been moving the bailer, preparing it for the bountiful harvest they were looking to reap the next week. Jerry had been driving back in from the Ag Depot in Stillwater, since St. Jim’s didn’t have anywhere that could get the massive parts they needed. He was stiff from his day on the road, and irritated with the sound of the pop country radio so he was riding in silence when he came back in range of the farm and the walkie-talkie Pa forced him to carry came alive with the terrible sounds of his Pa’s dying screams. By the time Jerry reached the edge of the field, all he heard were wet chewing sounds. The bright green John Deere bailer was speckled with dots of his Pa’s maroon blood and the air was silent save for the buzzing of the flies. The only scrap of his dad he could find was the old fella’s badly chewed boot five feet away from the blood-speckled bailer. Jerry could feel something like eyes watching him from the ridge that day, and he shivers now as fiercely as he had then at the reek of malevolence and blood on the breeze.

Learning from his Pa and Grandpa before him, Jerry refused to walk away. Armstrong Alfalfa continued to grow and Jerry invested his profits into more land to farm, buying out ranchers and farmers who were once competitors. Jerry Armstrong has raised his family’s business into an alfalfa empire but continued to live in the same farmhouse Grandpa had built. Jerry could afford to tear it down and rebuild it in three times the scale and still have land and money left over, but Jerry didn’t need or want to leave. He enjoys the quiet of the farm’s remote location and the strong tie to his childhood from living in the same house his entire life.

He would spend his days working on the fleet of tractors and bailers and swathers, and dealing with purchasing orders and trade deals with local consumers through a vet’s office and two different stables in the region. Come evening he’d be sitting on the back porch, sipping on whiskey and watching the tree line. He would wonder if he’d ever see the Corn Eater in the darkness of wood and earth. Jerry would wonder how the crops would turn out.

Every summer Jerry would pay to have the surrounding acreage, once the most profitable, sprayed with so many pesticides it would hardly produce any longer. Recession hit, and Jerry couldn’t afford to have the home fields bathed in the proper amount of toxic pesticides to keep them silent.

The grasshoppers are singing now.

So now he is drunk at noon and sitting in a lawn chair on his back porch with a shotgun across his lap. Jerry scratches his grey neck-stubble and squints into the sun. The constant chirping of the grasshopper’s songs overwhelms any other sound he could possibly be hearing. Jerry leans back in his chair, closing his eyes in a desperate attempt of sleep. Deep down, he knows if he can’t get any shut-eye in the dead of night there was no way he was going to catch any in the heat of the mid-day sun. With his eyes shut tight all Jerry can see is fields; tan dry and ready to cut. The exact same thing he would be seeing if his eyes were open except behind his eyelids he sees no grasshoppers. It is beautiful to Jerry, so very beautiful.

A smile cracks his whiskered face seconds before a grasshopper lands on his cheek. Jerry kicks and flails his arms to get the insect the hell off of him, firing the shotgun into the field at the end of the porch on accident. At the same time the gun is blasting away, Jerry is slapping himself so hard in the nose it makes his eyes water, but he manages to knock the small insect of his face. He tries to get a good look at the field in front of him, because the near-constant chirp of the grasshoppers has finally, sudden and ominously, ceased but his vision is too blurry through his fresh tears. The ring of the newborn silence harmonizes with the dying echo of the shotgun blast reverberating off the mountain ridge side at the edge of the property. The sound stirs something in Jerry’s gut, and sends a painful chill up his spine.

Jerry struggles to his feet, blinking his eyes and wiping away any excess moisture. He nearly falls directly back down in his seat when he sees the giant grasshopper blown in two twitching halves in front of him. The insect would have been the size of a feisty old barn cat if Jerry hadn’t squeezed off his accidental shot. The dead insect bleeds a thick orange sludge down it mottled black exoskeleton. Jerry pokes the carcass with the tip of his shot gun and it moves just enough for his to see a folded and bent length of bright purple wing tucked under it.

While his tired old eyes are focusing on his strange kill, he sees blurry movement all around him. He steps away from the dead grasshopper, each step crushing several grasshoppers under his work boots as he leans for the door. The porch is crawling with grasshoppers, but other than their swarming behavior they are no different than those Jerry has seen every summer of his life. But beyond the porch, off in the tall dry alfalfa there, several dark shapes scuttle forward before leaping simultaneously forward, a charging brigade of insectoid terror.

Before he realizes what he is doing, Jerry kicks the big carcass off his porch and takes aim at the shadowed shape nearest him. Dirt and tacky orange slime erupt into the sky. The booming echo of the new blast awakens the grasshopper chorus again. Their song is chiseling away at his sanity as he discharges the spent shells and loads two more. As Jerry sees the dog–sized grasshoppers jumping in his direction, he begins laughing like a man comfortable in the numbing grip of madness. With his eyes wide and rolling over the advancing shadowed shapes Jerry tucks the shotgun in the crook of his elbows, and then flips both his middle fingers up at the field teeming with movement before readjusting his shotgun and reiterating his gestured sentiment with buckshot.

Jerry wings one of the big hoppers, but another leaps over the destroyed corpse hissing as it lands a mere three feet from where he stands. Jerry sees a glimmer of malice in the grasshopper’s eyes, and he feels it readying to leap more than he notices its body hunch down and prepare for launch. Jerry is too close to get a good shot, so he takes step back as the hideous creature springs at him. With pure dumb panicked luck Jerry swings the shotgun by the barrel like a baseball bat, knocking the airborne grasshopper ten feet to the side of the porch. It lands with a clatter and Jerry sees the field behind it and the dozens of large black and purple grasshoppers leaping towards him. Jerry stomps into the house, paying attention to the grasshopper he batted aside as it twitches in a spastic circle and not noticing the hundreds of normal-sized grasshoppers covering the outside windows and walls of his house.

Jerry disappears into his house and slams the door closed behind him without looking back. In the following instant the porch is crawling with enlarged black and purple grasshoppers, none smaller than a cat and several the size of large dogs. Their song is rattling the shutters, even before they begin throwing themselves at the walls.

Inside the house, Jerry is yanking drawers from their slots and throwing them across the room in search of his bargain box of shotgun shells. He spins away from the empty shelves, and tips over a cabinet before he finally finds the extra-large box of ammunition. The grasshoppers’ song surrounds him, his hands trembling as he reloads the spent shell. He drops the remaining shells from the box to the side and front bib pockets of his overalls. He stomps back the way he came but stops in the hallway when he notices the hoppers crawling over the window in such great numbers they’re blocking out the noonday sun.

“Waiting on me, huh? Ya bastards!” Jerry bellows as he spins away from the back door and storms out the side door instead.

Jerry slaps the screen door open and it in turn slaps dozens of normal sized hoppers out of the air as it swings wide open. With every stomp back in the direction of the back porch Jerry’s boots are crunching grasshoppers into goo. He rounds the back corner of the house with his gun held low, and he fires without slowing his step. Two big black hoppers and dozens of smaller ones disappear in a puff of acrid smoke and neon orange slime from the rear of the porch. A big hopper in the doorway of the now splintering back door squats as if he is planning to leap at Jerry, but after Jerry lets loose the second barrel only a slime crusted crater remains.

Big hoppers jump in all directions, scattered by the gunfire. Thousands of normal-sized grasshoppers flitter through the air around Jerry as he struggles to reload his shotgun again. Before he can slam the new shells in all the way he is forced to stagger back from a cat-sized hopper jumping at him. He slams the butt of the shotgun down on the creature’s head with as much force as he can muster. Hardened wood smashes through black exoskeleton to splatter Jerry’s legs with putrid orange slime. Out of the corners of his wide eyes Jerry sees the dozens of larger grasshoppers charging through the field towards him. He slams the shotgun closed and raises it in one smooth motion as he has hunting since he was a little boy. He fires at the closet grasshopper and it explodes skywards, a steaming geyser of orange goo.

Three others loop around to get at his blind spot, but Jerry spins on his boot heels to face them first. Jerry smiles down the barrel at them and fires. Two are close enough to each other to both be melded into a combined mess of shell and sludge. The third escapes the brunt of the blast to drag itself towards Jerry’s boots, missing two of its back legs to buckshot. Jerry calmly digs in his bib pocket for more shells, while slamming the butt of his weapon into its head which cracks open like a rotten pumpkin. The sound of the grasshoppers chirping swallows his next shot even as the largest hopper yet explodes clean in half from the force of it. Small hoppers are crawling all over Jerry but he does his best to ignore them until one bites his earlobe hard enough to draw blood with its small mandibles.

Jerry slaps at the tiny grasshopper dangling from his ear and dripping with his blood. The larger grasshoppers quicken their pace at his momentary distraction. Jerry manages to remove the insect from his ear and others climbing through his hair and on his whiskered cheek, just as a giant jumps at him. He doesn’t have enough time or space to fire, but manages to use the hopper’s momentum against it and impales the jumping demon in mid-air with the barrel of the shotgun.

They are singing as they swarm him, and they are coming too fast for him to kill them all. He raises the shotgun, with the impaled hopper still twitching fiercely at the tip of it, aiming it at the largest cluster of monsters and pulls the triggers as he starts running. He swings the shotgun around as he flees to reload it and flings the scorched remains of the impaled hopper at his feet as he catches it with both hands. Jerry reloads as he runs to his bright red Dodge Ram one-ton pick-up. Hundreds of tiny grasshoppers creep and crawl over his truck and he has to wipe them away from the handle to get in. As they fall away from his hand, he can’t help but think how much is truck looks like the color of fresh blood drying in the sun.

As he shimmies into the cab, hundreds of grasshoppers jump into the tailpipe. They scamper blindly up the narrow pipe to the trucks engine, their numbers so great they clog the passage with their squirming bodies. Jerry turns the key and the hoppers in the exhaust pipe martyr themselves but their carcasses block the exhaust enough the engine seizes and dies with a shudder.

Jerry grabs his shotgun off the seat next to him and reaches for the door. He draws his hand back because a dog-sized grasshopper smashes into it. He rocks back, pointing his shotgun at the fresh inward dent and uttering a silent prayer. He reaches a trembling hand into his bib pocket to find it empty. He pulls one shell out of his side pocket, and curses aloud when he realizes he must have dropped the rest during his frantic escape. He grabs the keys from the ignition, a smile teasing at the corner of his mouth as he feels the oddly shaped swather key.

With a glance through the grasshoppers scurrying over the windshield he sees the big red machine used for cutting the field for harvest resting a mere forty feet away. Without closing his eyes he sees visions of the giant black and purple hoppers being pulled under the machines heavy spinning blades and brutally sliced into thick chucks of orange goop and shimmering black exoskeleton. Jerry uses the vision as fire for his charge, thinking about it as he opens the door.

Right outside the door he spots the hopper that smashed into the door and it staggers in his direction with orange slime dripping of its wounded face. Jerry raises the shotgun and sends the hopper to hell.

Before he can take another step a grasshopper the size of a bear cub leaps up and smashes him hard enough in the ribs to crack and break each one it hits. Jerry wheezes in agony as he falls back with the hopper clutched tight to his torso.  The giant insect grips with its legs, digging into tender flesh with its sharpened limbs as it smashes down on Jerry’s chest, smashing his sternum down into quivering lungs. It sits on his chest and chitters excitedly inches from his face. Jerry’s head rolls to the left and he sees the shotgun where he dropped it. Just beyond the sprawled weapon it seems is the swather.

Jerry turns back to the monster leaning closer to his face. Despite the screaming agony it cause he raises his arms and slaps weakly at the grasshopper. It leans in past his weak defense and nips his throat open with its powerful mandibles. Jerry’s blood gushes from the wound, spurting in great burps when he tries to scream. His body goes rigid and his thumb presses down on the panic button for his truck’s alarm system on his keychain. The blaring beep of his truck’s alarm covers the thick slurping and wet ripping sounds of the grasshoppers feeding. When the battery for his truck finally dies the sun is drooping in the pink and orange sky and the mountain air is eerily quiet. 

Next Chapter- Friday, March 14.

You can find more of my works here. 

Grasshopper Season 0 by Jonathan Moon

0: Poison the Soil, Poison the Pupas

It is happening.

Deep in the darkness of the Hoo-Doo County woods something wicked stirs. Hidden away from light and populace stands a tiny wooden shack; its weathered slats the color of bone and malevolence leaking from between them into the thick evergreen forest surrounding it. No insects buzz, no birds chirp, no winds disrupt the dry pine branches.

In the dark of the shack, something glows terrible neon colors.

It pulses in dark, and it forces itself into the soil and trees and brush. 

It glows in its rhythmic pulses, and it reflects in the tiny wet orbs leaning over it and weeping at its greatness.








(Next Chapter Saturday March, 8th)