The Harvest Read online

  Crosley cruised past the silent, dark trailers, wondering about the tin-boxed lives of the people inside. Probably dreaming about their next handout. Hope none of them come down to fuck up Blossomfest. Maybe they'll hang out here all weekend, swapping out wives and spark plugs.

  He didn't see any prowlers. Nothing worth stealing back here anyway. He decided to pop around the corner to the GasNGo and get himself a Snickers bar and a Penthouse. Then he'd park somewhere and finish off the Black Label before the sun came up.

  He had almost completed the trailer park loop when he saw movement in the bushes that bordered the lot. A dirt trail led into the woods, and lights from the gas station blinked through the trees. The rednecks probably walked through there to buy their two-dollar wine and disposable diapers. He put the cruiser in "park" and heaved himself out from behind the wheel.

  Crosley walked up the trail, his hand on the revolver that swung from his hip. No need for caution. Subtlety was lost on these bastards. He stomped around in the bushes as if trying to flush a covey of quail. "Come on out. I know you're in there."

  A rustle of sprung grass and bent twigs answered him. He unsnapped his pistol strap and lifted his revolver.

  "D—don't shoot me, Mister Policeman,” came a small, sniffling voice.

  One of the yard monkeys. What's he doing out this time of night?

  "I won't hurt you, son," Crosley said in his calm cop voice. "Just come on out into the light where I can see you."

  A boy, maybe eight or nine years old, stepped from beneath the low branches. Moonlit tears streaked his dirty face. Crosley knelt to the boy, hoping he wouldn't catch lice. "What's your name, son?"

  "Mackey Mull, sir. They call me Little Mack.” The boy sucked what sounded like a half pound of snot back up one nostril.

  "Little Mack, huh? Well, what in the world are you doing out here in the middle of the night, Little Mack?"

  The boy looked down at his feet. "You sure you ain't going to shoot me?"

  Crosley realized he was still holding the pistol. He smiled and slid it back into its holster. He almost patted the boy on the head but decided against it.

  "I wouldn't hurt you for a thousand dollars." Unless it was tax-free.

  "I been hiding,” the boy said. “Since way yesterday."

  "Now, little man, what are you hiding from?" Crosley hoped it wasn't a child abuse case. Domestic problems were a hell of a lot of paperwork, and the legal system never changed a goddamned thing. For all he knew, this brat deserved a slap across the lips once in a while. Most of them did.

  "The bad men. With the shiny green eyes." The boy sobbed, small shoulders shaking. "I think they got my mommy."

  "Your mommy? What bad men?"

  "The bad men. Like in the scary movies."

  "Look, son. Don't you worry. Mister Policeman will fix everything right up, now."

  "My brother Junior says policemen are pigs. Are you a pig?"

  Yep. No person alive could resist the temptation to backhand this particular mucous midget.

  "No, son, we're just plain folks working hard to make the town safer for everybody. You live here in the trailer park?"

  "Yeah. Over there." He waved his hand.

  "Okay. Just lead me to your trailer, and I'll make things all better."

  "What about the bad men?"

  Crosley chuckled. "I'll take care of the bad men," he said, but noticed that he was rubbing his stomach. Something the brat had said about green eyes made him think of the Incredible Melting Man.

  The chief followed the yard monkey back down the trail. They were almost into the open gap of worn yards and gravel when he heard limbs snapping. He turned just in time to see his uncle, his military clothes torn and stained. The old bastard usually took pride in his appearance, especially when he was wearing the uniform.

  “Uncle Paul,” Crosley said. “What you doing out this time of night?”

  Uncle Paul took a staggering step forward and lifted his arms. His one eye was shining like a lime lighthouse. Crosley looked into the eye and saw empty carnival nightmares as the wrinkled and slick face pressed toward his own.

  “See, it’s one of them,” the brat shrieked beside him.

  Crosley ordered his hand to lift the revolver, but his muscles went AWOL. Uncle Paul’s rancid stench swarmed his senses and snaked into his nostrils. Then their faces pressed together and Crosley tasted bitter sap. The spores hit his tongue, flooded him, broke and burned him. His mind was already turning, already joining, already halfway there.

  "See?” Crosley heard the brat squeal, just before he slid into the blissful fog. "See? I told you there were bad men. Stupid pig."

  Then Crosley was overwhelmed by his uncle's moist slobbering, by the rotten rind of a mouth that kissed him hello and good-bye. As the brat’s footsteps receded into darkness, Crosley entered a different kind of darkness, one that never ended, one he never wanted to end.

  ###

  Nettie crawled across the patio of the parsonage, her belly cold against the flat tiles. Her arms ached, her ankle was swollen, her knees were rubbed raw, and her head throbbed with bright metal pain. But she was alive.

  She might be the last person on earth, but she was alive. She heard the noises from the church as those creatures blew their bubbly praises to the rafters, sang their unintelligible hymns and blasphemed all that was good and holy with the very fact of their existence. If it weren’t for those hellish visions described in the Bible, Nettie would have thought herself insane. A visionary shouldn’t suffer doubt, and this was a sure vision of hell.

  She had seen the preacher's wife sliding across the vestry. She had seen the snake-eyed preacher complete his conversion. She had seen the overripe parishioners crossing sacred ground on their trembling stumps of legs like lepers to a healing. She had witnessed and believed.

  Nettie raised herself to a sitting position, pulled open the storm door, and tried the knob. Locked. Nettie hoped Sarah was home. It was her only chance. She gripped the doorknob with both hands and hauled herself to her knees. Then she rapped on the glass window.

  No one answered.

  A light was on in one wing of the house. Maybe it was Sarah's bedroom. Nettie didn't think she could crawl another inch. She banged again, louder. Her ankle throbbed like a crumbling tooth.

  She was about to knock again when she saw the long shadows of the ones who stood in the distant church door. Those who had turned. Against nature. Against God. Against the light and toward her.

  They shuffled down the church stairs under the quiet stars. The preacher led the way as the creatures crossed the graveyard, his thin twigs of arms upraised in rejoicing. Amanda followed, once again a chastened wife, only now she had the power of a demon. The Painters followed, meek and marshy and jubilant. The unidentifiable dripping stalk that had once been a person brought up the rear, one arm missing.

  Nettie pounded louder and began yelling. The preacher was close enough so that she could see his lightbulb head, now lit with a neon green filament. He smiled at her as if she were a lamb that had hopped between the fence poles of the slaughterhouse holding pen. The musk of the others drifted across the dewy night, a stench of sun-split melons and swamp rot.

  She was about to offer a final prayer for mercy, that she might die before she went to living hell, when a light blinked on in a far window of the parsonage. At the same instant, truck headlights swept up the road and across the parking lot, flashing over the marble teeth of the cemetery.

  ###

  "Hold on just a second," Chester said.

  Tamara and DeWalt gathered around him like oversized scarecrows, their faces pale in the moonlight. Emerland stood by the Mercedes, arms folded. They were back at the Mull farm, about to head up into the dark woods. Chester hoped the other three were as scared as he was, because fear provided the kind of shock absorber that still worked even when corn liquor didn’t.

  Chester gave DeWalt the shotgun and nodded toward Emerland. "I don't reckon he'll be
going anywhere, but just in case. Be back in a minute. I just thought of something."

  "Chester? I think we'd better hurry.” Tamara’s hands were on her bulging pockets, where dynamite sticks poked out of the cloth like fat brown licorice.

  "This might be worth waiting for, darling. We're gonna need all the help we can get."

  He walked across the barnyard to the collapsing shed. He kicked open the door, hoping the wildlife was put to bed. Stale dust and powdery chicken shit filled his nostrils. A shaft of moonlight pierced the blackness where a few boards had fallen off the side of the shed. Stacks of feed, fertilizer, and other bags were piled by the door, cobwebs catching silver light among the moldering paper.

  Concrete statues and birdbaths leaned against one wall like sentries sleeping at their posts. Plastic buckets holding dry dirt and the skeletons of shrubs formed a dead forest behind the feed sacks.

  Enough junk here to open a lawn and garden store. I'm glad I never got around to making Johnny Mack get rid of this mess. Like anybody around here—besides Hattie, God rest her soul—ever gave a damn about keeping the place up. And she would have had a fit if she knew her youngest boy had been packing away stolen goods. I ain't all that proud of having a sorry thieving no-account for a son, but right now I guess I can forgive him.

  Every time Sylvester drove his Bryson Feed Supply truck up to the farm, back before he’d moved out for good, Johnny Mack had swiped some of whatever happened to be in the truck bed. Johnny Mack didn't give a damn whether the products had any earthly purpose or not. He stole for the same reason a rooster crowed, just to celebrate the fact that the sun had come up again.

  The rats had torn at the sacks of sorghum grain and the chickens had worked through the open holes until the meal had gotten so stale even the vermin wouldn't forage in it. But the other bags were mostly intact, covered with thick dust. Chester knelt to a pallet covered by smaller bags, his arthritic joints laughing pain at him and calling him a foolish old sonuvabitch. He'd have time to ache later. Or else he wouldn't give a damn one way or the other.

  Chester glanced back through the door at the others. They seemed glad for the delay. Nobody looked overly anxious to go into the woods where the Earth Mouth gaped and the mushbrains crept around like mildewed snails, even though the three people paced impatiently. DeWalt held the shotgun down beside his waist like a city slicker, but Emerland didn't seem interested in making a run for it. He'd been quiet ever since that mushbrain had pressed itself against the fence back at the construction compound.

  Chester wiped the grime away from one of the labels. "Screw a blue goose," he muttered. "Shoulda thought of this right off."

  He lifted the sack, sending dust rising in the moonbeams like floating worms. He wasn't sure he could carry the twenty-pound sack through two miles of dense woods, but he had a feeling he had no choice. If they were trying to exterminate something that had come from God-only-knows-where, they'd better throw everything at it they could get their hands on.

  Chester tossed the sack on his shoulder, then staggered for a moment until he got the load balanced. He wouldn't be able to take a drink with both hands occupied, but the corn liquor hadn't done him much good anyway. He’d gotten more sober as the night wore on, no matter how many sips he’d taken. He'd mostly been drinking out of habit anyway, taking comfort in the familiar way it burned his throat.

  "What's that?" DeWalt asked when Chester stepped out of the shed.

  "Sevin. Fungicide. What you put on the tomato plants to kill off mold and such."

  DeWalt's mouth fell open and Tamara smiled. Chester liked her smile. If he were thirty years younger . . . hell, she'd be thirty years younger, too.

  "I know the shu-shaaa thing looks like some kind of plant-creature," DeWalt said. "But how do we know if its chemistry resembles that of earth vegetation?"

  "I think it adopts some of the host's chemistry as part of its mimicking," Tamara said. "Like the old saying, ‘You are what you eat.’ Maybe in the thing’s natural state, it’s invincible. But I think it's vulnerable right now, at least compared to what it's going to be. If it gets smarter by absorbing from the environment, maybe it absorbs some weaknesses, too."

  "Just the way it adopted the language of humans after it, uh, converted them?" DeWalt said.

  "Yeah. And shu-shaaa also speaks the language of plants and rocks and dirt and water. Remember that strange music you heard?”

  “Mushy shit,” Chester said. “Like what old Don Oscar was saying. The thing fucks big time with their brains, that’s for sure.”

  “Besides, what do we have to lose?" DeWalt said.

  "They's some more stuff in here," Chester said. "If y’all are up to toting it."

  DeWalt and Tamara walked up to the shed. Emerland followed with his head down. The developer had removed his tie and didn't seem worried that his fancy shoes would never serve in high society again. But the rules of society had changed, even a rock head like Emerland could see that, and the Earth Mouth didn't give a rat's ass how much money a man had. It would gobble him up and use his shoulderbone as a toothpick.

  Emerland looks like a man who's had the truth slapped upside his head. Like a man finding out the kids he'd brought up had been made by somebody else. Or that cancer is eating away his guts and there's not a damn thing to be done but pass blood and pray. Or that God didn't give two shits about the human race, or else He wouldn't let such bad things happen to it. A truth that ought not to be, but is.

  Tamara went into the shed, then DeWalt followed. "Hey, here's a five-gallon can of Roundup," Tamara called to Chester.

  "That would kick like a damned donkey, all right, but that'll get mighty heavy mighty fast," Chester said, his words gurgling around his chaw. He spat and gummed rapidly, excited despite feeling every single one of his sixty-seven years. Or was it sixty-eight now? Or a hundred-and-sixty-eight?

  "I can handle it, Chester," she said. "I know what's at stake more than anybody."

  Chester figured this wasn't a good time to haggle about equal rights and that other uppity horseshit he'd heard about. That was big-city worry, as far as he was concerned. In Windshake, women knew their place, for the most part. Didn't stir up trouble. Still, she was probably in better shape than him and DeWalt put together.

  If she really could read the alien zombiemaker’s mind—and Chester found himself believing all kinds of things that he used to laugh at when he saw them on the magazine covers in the grocery checkout line—then he might be wise to trust her judgment.

  "Have a go at it, then,” he said. “That's some Acrobat M-Z in the brown sack, DeWalt. Experimental stuff that's supposed to kill blue mold on tobacco. Got to have a permit to buy it.” He laughed, choked on tobacco juice, spat, and continued. “But not to steal it, I reckon."

  "It's concentrated poison," DeWalt said. "It says on the directions that one tablespoon of this stuff makes a gallon of fungicide. Making this bag about a thousand gallons worth."

  "Maybe we can volunteer Emerland to bring it along, seeing as how your hands are full with that dynamite rig and the shotgun. What say, Emerland?"

  Emerland stared vacantly ahead, then nodded as if he were a dummy on the knee of a stoned ventriloquist. He shambled into the shed, doing a pretty fair imitation of one of the mushbrains.

  "Every little bit helps," said DeWalt. "Or hurts, if you want to look at it that way."

  Emerland showed surprising energy in lifting the forty-pound sack onto his shoulder. Chester figured he probably worked out in one of those fitness clubs, with wires and weights hanging from metal bars and sweat seeped into the carpet. Probably hadn’t done an honest day’s work in his entire life, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, in Chester’s opinion. Emerland's jaw clenched and his eyes shone with either grim determination or madness.

  They gathered outside the shed, all looking silently toward the faint green glow on the far ridge. An owl hooted in the barn, lonely and brooding in the high wooden rafters. A wind tried to stir the
brown leaves from the corners of the fence but gave up, too tired after a long winter's work. A dog barked, followed by another’s, and the sound echoing off the cold mountains reminded Chester of old Boomer.

  Tamara broke the peace of the waiting night. "Chester, can I use the telephone real quick?"

  Chester looked up at the deep sky, at the gorgeous bright lights jabbed in the roof of forever, like holes put there so the world could breathe. He found himself wondering how many more of these Earth Mouth bastards were up there, riding the black wind on their way to wherever such as those were meant to be. He hated trying to look at the Big Picture, or worrying over the fuck-all Why. That was for preachers and college boys. Some things were just too big for a broken-down dirt farmer to understand.

  "Power's out. Phone might be out, too. Tree musta fell on the lines," Chester said.

  "I have to try," Tamara said. “My husband’s probably worried sick by now.”

  "Better let me come with you. Might break your neck in that mess.”

  He laid the sack of Sevin across the Roundup can and led Tamara across the yard, wondering if all the chickens had turned by now, whether they were sitting with their stupid heads under their wings, their green eyes shut against the world. Probably dreaming of laying tiny rotten plums in their nests, come morning.

  Chester wondered what might hatch out of those tainted eggs.

  Or if he'd still be here when the sun pissed its yellow light down on the world again.

  ###

  Little Mack crawled deeper under the trailer, his face pressed in the dry dirt. He was scared.

  He could hear voices, only they weren't making words. Just wet sounds. And he sort of recognized his mom's voice. He wondered if she was one of them now.

  Because he'd seen them fall out of the trailer, slide out of the door while he'd still been hiding in the bushes, just as the sun went down and he'd first started really getting lonely.

  Jimmy, the mean one he'd seen lying naked on top of his mom that time, had walked like a drunk man across the yard and went into the Wellborns' trailer, and Mack had heard screaming and yelling inside, then the Wellborns were walking like drunks, too, Sue and Grady and their little girl Anita, as they scattered and stumbled into the woods.