The Harvest Read online

  He struggled blindly, sliding on his back across the varnished floor. The devil hounded him, wagging its pulpy tongue. Bill's hands felt splintery wood. The cross. The Lord had provided.

  Bill lifted the cross, the saliva of prayer on his lips, and drove the wooden tip between the screaming green eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  James grabbed the arm of the creature that leaned in the window. Juice spattered on the carpet as it smiled with rotted lips. The creature tried to speak and a drop of thick saliva hit James in the eye. At the contact, he felt a jolt like lightning, and in the same throbbing split second he was rolling, flying, soaring—sweet Jeez Louise—he was flipping out.

  Suddenly he was a white woman and his name was Tamara and this had to be stress taking its toll, grief scrambling his senses, a hammer of the gods shattering the gray jewel of his brain, how else could he explain away these walking mushrooms and wait a second, that was the only explanation, he had to be dying or something, but by God he'd take one of these bastards with him, except hold on here, Mister Wallace, this creature is already dead and what the hell is shu-shaaa and who are you, Tamara?

  Whoa . . . now we're in the "heart-brain," is that right, Tamara? That must be that swollen-looking purple thing there, inside what looks like a disease-ridden sewer pipe.

  And this is your daughter, Ginger? And your husband, Robert. Son, Kevin. Pleased to meet y’all.

  So this is how it feels to be white. Funny, but it's just the same as being black, at least from the inside. Now would you please mind telling me what the hell is going on and why am I here dying inside your dream and why isn't time passing?

  And you? Herbert DeWalt, you say? Okay, let me get this straight. You're dead and you're dust and energy now but you're not going to leave until we kick this shu-shaaa thing’s ass back to whatever black hole it crawled out of, and, gee, what a swell trick this is, let's all walk in your dream, Tamara. And I thought I was crazy before, when the green eyes got worse than white eyes ever were.

  No fooling? You want me to join with you, Tamara?

  Because we all want to live?

  In unity, in harmony? A peoplehood of people?

  Sure, why not, got nothing better to do while I'm waiting to wake up in a straitjacket. Right fucking on and save the whales, sister.

  You think you can beat this thing?

  Yes, but you need my help? Our help?

  Sure. I need some good karma to buy my way onto the soul train, so I might as well go for broke. Because, like you say, hope is our only hope.

  Aaar-on-lee-ohp.

  ###

  "Join with us, believe with us, because we're all one and only one of us can win."

  Tamara's thoughts were exploding, spreading bright and white and thin just like the universe did when it got jump-started by physics, heat, and shu-shaaa. She felt James in her head, she knew him, she lived his life, all in the eye of a needle of a heartbeat. She sensed his ambition, and also his bitterness, his pain. His guilt. And his hope.

  And others crowded behind him, Sarah Blevins, a man named Bill Lemly who held a dripping cross, Chester, Emerland, more people joining in as if answering the call of a distant bell.

  A scythe of doubt cut across her mind.

  Would she fail Robert like she had her father? Would she fail her children? Was she too weak to handle the gift that had been granted her? Would she let them all down?

  "I won't let you fail," Robert interrupted. "I won't let us fail."

  Their minds mingled like streams. She saw his weakness, his frailty, his humanity, but all was forgiven in that moment of mutual need. All that mattered was that he loved her. And the same humanity that was his weakness was also his strength. Their strength.

  Funny, she'd always thought of love as an invisible but real force, only now it was taking shape and texture and color and Ginger was helping, Kevin, too, only Ginger was a lightning rod, she was harnessing and directing tremendous energy without even knowing what she was doing.

  Tamara knew what the energy was.

  The power of love, multiplied. Herbert, Chester, James, a dozen, no, a hundred, now a thousand human minds whose dreams and hopes and consciousness were swelling into a fat golden teardrop of heat that poured out over the shu-shaaa heart-brain, that suffocated and scorched the poisoned, throbbing alien.

  It was like the Beatles song, all you need is love, only with looser harmonies, something that sounded like lip service when you said it aloud but became the most real thing in the universe when you actually experienced it.

  And the shu-shaaa absorbed those thoughts, that feeling and strange emotion, reflected them back and absorbed them again, an endless loop like the infinity of two facing mirrors.

  The laws of nature were flexible. Laws were made to be broken. Tamara was a conduit through which the collective energy of human souls flowed. She summoned the extra foot-pound of pressure that triggered the blasting cap of their combined minds a fraction of a second after Herbert DeWalt fired the shotgun.

  And she was, and they all were, Bill Lemly driving a mahogany cross into a monstrous pasty face, because love took many forms, each strange and wonderful and equally awe-inspiring.

  The power of love. Something the alien had never known, not the way a human could know it. A power beyond understanding, a power that was beyond control.

  It was real here in the landscape of Tamara’s imagination where this cosmic war was being waged. And right now, that was the only place that mattered.

  Because love was winning. Love was hope, love was mighty, love was blind, and at the moment, love was a righteous bitch that wanted to survive.

  The golden teardrop exploded with a force that rocked the far corners of the conscious universe.

  And the microsecond flashed forward as she screamed her mind at the exploding heart-brain, as she drew on the power of a thousand other human minds, as the force of hope ejaculated its hot combustion into shu-shaaa, and it collapsed and disintegrated outward.

  Dirt and stones and hunks of thick sludge spewed from the Earth Mouth, and she felt it dying—no, not dying, only changing form, changing back into random atoms and space. She felt the explosion that rocked the foundations of its alien chemistry, felt the poisons blasted to the cold heart-brain of the thing, felt its spores curdle and suffocate, felt its roots spasm and sag, felt its alien consciousness take an uncomprehending waltz into the darkness that was nothing like its vision had promised, a darkness that was only darkness, without any kind of bliss or peace or bottom—darkness and darkness only.

  And it was weeping.

  Then she was rolling away from the falling trees and a fist-sized rock bounced off her shoulder and Chester had his arm around her and he was mentally cussing a blue streak and Emerland and Robert and Ginger dreaming of a rabbit and Kevin person everybody at the same time too many for one brief insane moment her thoughts were out among every organism in the world, an organism orgasm, every bird and bug and dandelion and crabapple and crawfish and lily and paramecium and virus, and it was blinding madness and mercifully the too-long eye blink passed and she was spitting gravel and twigs from between her teeth as the dirt rained down through the dead leaves of trees.

  Then she was Tamara again, soiled and concussed and bleeding in spots, but otherwise, more or less intact.

  ###

  The explosion woke up Little Mack. He'd fallen asleep under the trailer, too tired to cry any longer. When his eyes snapped open, he'd forgotten what had happened and didn't understand why he wasn't in his bunk bed with Junior snoring above him.

  Then he saw his mom, and she had found him, was coming to cuddle him, was crawling across the gravel driveway on her raw hands and knees. But she was too slippery and naked and gross and pukey and her eyes were green but their glow was fading, like a flashlight whose batteries were out of juice, and her skin was getting all shrivelly and Jell-O-looking and was starting to slide off her bones.

  She looked like she was in pain,
but then her upper lip fell away and she looked like she was smiling again and she looked like she wanted to give Mack a good-bye kiss but then her other lip fell off along with the rest of her face and her skull collapsed like a mud balloon and then Mack was screaming and screaming and screaming and his mother was a heap of steaming slime and then she dried under the sun and flaked and lifted away as the wind cleaned up the mess but Mack was screaming and screaming and he wasn't ever going to stop.

  ###

  James’s eyelids flickered open as the creature slid limply away from him. It collapsed in the flower bed beneath the window, crushing the daisies and filling the air with a thick sweet smell. James watched as the creature withered wetly and dissolved. Sirens blared across the hills.

  He felt as if he'd awakened from an odd dream, one of the dense kind where you were a character in somebody else's movie. Except he somehow knew that it was real. His fingers tingled and he looked at the slick stains on the window ledge. Yes, it had been real.

  Because he could still hear Tamara in his head.

  "We won," she said. "We won."

  Right on, lady. United we stand. Brotherhood of man, sisterhood of woman. A peoplehood of people.

  He'd seen the explosion, a bright flash of green on the slope of Bear Claw. He'd suffered that quick slice of telepathy, and something strange had dashed across the bottom of his psyche, leaving footprints. He knew he'd never understand what really happened, but that was fine by him, because he wasn't sure he wanted to.

  But he wanted to know if the victory was final.

  "We can always hope,” Tamara said in his head.

  Hope?

  Yes, he hoped. Didn’t someone once say that hope was the only hope?

  He had seen, in that one long heartbeat, what life had to offer, and what the options were. Things could always change for the better. His aunt was gone, hopefully to a better place, but the living had a duty to live.

  His mind felt clear, absent of color. Maybe he’d been the racist one, had taken an attitude too far, had shut himself away and enslaved himself to the very prejudice he loathed.

  He sensed that the nightmare was over, that whatever had caused the horror had gone to its crazy grave, that today was the first day of something, that it was time to pick up the pieces and start all over again. It was time for a change.

  Maybe sometimes people could change.

  The trees looked vigorous and revived, as they did after a spring rain. James went out into the clean morning sun to see if anyone needed help.

  ###

  Bill looked down at the stain where the devil had lain dying. The Lord had come to Bill in his moment of need, come on a white horse, no, as a white cloud, no, just pure goodness, shedding Bill of sin and darkness. The Lord had triumphed. Now Satan was back in hell, where he would lick his wounds for the next thousand years or so before he got up the nerve to try again.

  But Bill wasn't worried. The Lord would always find a servant to work through, would always recruit somebody to serve as the right arm of God. Might made right, and right made might.

  He took off his shirt and wiped the blood away from his neck and then cleaned the slime from the scarred cross. He carried the cross to the back of the dais and hung it gently on its hook.

  Then he knelt and gave thanks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Chester sat on his porch and watched the government trucks and research vans and men in foil suits crawling over his property. He didn't reckon their fancy meters and screens and snoop dishes would turn up much hard scientific evidence. All that was left was a damned hole in the ground. Everything else the alien had touched had flaked off and disappeared. Still, Chester knew the goddamned government liked to make a big show when it got the chance.

  They'd tried to evict him and declare his farm a disaster area, but he told them in no uncertain terms that he wasn't leaving, that they'd have to send up a tank and roll over his ass before he would get out of his rocking chair. They could dig in the dirt and scrape the trees and bottle up creek water all they wanted, but Chester wasn't going to set foot outside his property for at least a couple more weeks. He just wanted to rock and stare off into space and forget.

  Alien invasions were rough on an old-timer.

  He lifted his moonshine to his cracked lips. He still had a few jars of Don Oscar's finest stowed away in the pantry, but soon he'd have to find a new bootlegger. He was going to miss Don Oscar.

  His puppy sat at his feet, grinning around some wet leather. The little guy wasn't Boomer, but Chester figured one droopy-eared gasbag hound was the same as another. Chester had let him have Junior's abandoned footwear to gnaw on, to get his young gums toughened up.

  The telephone rang. Chester had moved it out on the porch in case Tamara called. He liked the sound of her voice, especially when it was outside his head.

  "Yuh-ello," he said.

  "Chester. It's Emerland. Listen. Four million, how about that?"

  "I told you the first ten times, no sale. Ain't changing my mind."

  Emerland had broken both legs when a tree had fallen on him during the explosion. It had taken Tamara and Chester half the morning to carry him out, with him bitching and griping and threatening to sue every step of the way. Now the greedy bastard continually rang Chester from his hospital room, upping the ante.

  "Dammit, Chester," Emerland said. "Can you imagine the publicity this is going to get as soon as the story leaks? Do you know just how much cash Alienworld will rake in after I get a theme park up and running? Can you just imagine?"

  "No, Mister Plaster Pants. Ain't never had much imagination. Just gets a feller in trouble, as far as I can see.”

  "Okay, four and a quarter, you old bastard. With residuals. You know, a stake in the profits.”

  Maybe Chester could part with the place for five mil. It was only his birthright. Only dirt and weedy fields and falling-ass-down buildings and memories, and not all the memories were good. Every man had a price. But having Emerland swinging in the breeze was almost as much fun as a shitpile of money.

  "Don't reckon so. Bye, now.”

  "But, Chester—"

  Chester hung up. He wanted the line free in case Tamara called. Of course, for a while there, she hadn't needed a phone. She just spoke right into his head.

  And that was creepy as hell, but kind of natural once you got the hang of it. Except her "powers," as she called them, were fading, growing weaker day by day. So she'd started keeping in touch by phone. And that was okay, too.

  He looked up at the thick white clouds, good solid April clouds a body could stick a pitchfork in and twirl around like cotton candy. He wondered if DeWalt was up there, part of the clouds, part of the sky.

  The government men had taken his chickens. He didn't mind the least little bit. Fewer mouths to feed. He flexed his drinking arm.

  He spat toward the yard but came up short. His porch had a new stain.

  ###

  James was cleaning out Aunt Mayzie's things, packing them so his mother and her family could decide how to divide them up. With the funeral so fresh in everybody's mind, it wasn't a good time to dwell on material things. Still, Mom would want the saltshaker collection. She liked little knickknacks.

  James looked at Aunt Mayzie's chair. A depression in the vinyl seat cushion made it look as if her ghost were sitting there. James sat in the ghost's lap and opened the coffee table drawer. It was full of dog-eared spiral notebooks and curling legal pads.

  He pulled a notebook off the top and opened it. It was Mayzie's handwriting. He read the first page.

  FOR JAMES: SNOW ON FLOWERS

  On hyacinth winds,

  April walks a barefoot whisper across tilted fields

  At the shore of warm green seas, she sneezes and mourns

  the coming of the hummingbirds and counts the tides with watered eyes

  as butterflies cut yellow trails

  Her ice blue heart melts

  under the volcano-glass st
are of the far fallen sun

  she glistens with reluctance

  As night again collects its threads

  she breathes the mint of cooling hope

  and pulls the fabric, winters past,

  across her moondark skin

  In dreams she cries the dew.

  Poetry. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of poetry. And she'd never told him. He read some more, his heart pounding with excitement. Some of it was good enough to be published, as far as he could tell. Certainly better than some of the stuff he’d read in college textbooks.

  Aunt Mayzie must have been writing for years, if not decades. And she'd never said a word. Here was her life, in a million syllables and fragments and broken thoughts and taped-over rips and smeary eraser marks. The symbols of her soul. He wondered if she would mind if he mailed some of it off. He had a few literary contacts from his days at Georgetown.

  Maybe he could repay her in this way, by showing her work to the world. It was the least he could do. He was starting to come to terms with his guilt. Maybe he hadn't failed her. Maybe she had just been ready to go home to Uncle Theo and Oliver.

  And maybe he'd stay in Windshake a while. He'd met Sarah on the street, when the press and the scientists and the National Guard had stirred up the town and started combing through the wreckage, trying to catch some of the drying flakes of the dead. He wouldn't mind getting to know Sarah a little better, and she'd had her own losses. Maybe they could need somebody together.

  And besides, the place needed a town nig—no, make that an African-American. Or maybe just another human being.

  Dignity wasn't a gift given by others, and there was no easy ticket into utopia. Dignity came with consciousness and breath. Compassion was more important than life or death, or those terrible states of existence in between. And utopia had its own problems.