Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth)

by Michael Langlois

  If I were anyone else, it would have gone straight through my ribcage and into a lung. I grabbed the end of it before the thing on the other end could try again.

  It yanked, but I held fast. I could hear the hollow scraping of its feet on the concrete as it fought for purchase. After a few seconds of this, the rebar went slack and the other end hit the ground with a metallic jangling sound. The feet clattered a few times on the ground beside me, then above me on the pile of two-by-fours.

  I exhaled as much as I could, grabbed the edge of the rack, and frantically pulled myself free. Once clear I rolled away and yanked Hunger out from under it, letting it crash to the ground. I scrambled to my feet, but I wasn’t fast enough. My skin parted as something sharp raked down my back.

  I swept Hunger behind me and spun. I connected, the impact punching something away and into a stack of bricks. It was a wooden man, but not the original one.

  Like Prime, it was made up of tightly packed vines in the shape of a person. But where Prime’s construction was uniformly dense, the thing in front of me had a tight knot of vines on the right side of its stomach that grew less dense as they spread out towards the rest of the body. The feet and hands were almost skeletal, as were the forearms and shins.

  The exception was the head. There the vines had grown into a tall, flat shape like an African tribal mask, fusing together to give the impression that it was made of a single carved piece of wood.

  The face on the front was horrifically distorted by an inhumanly wide mouth and wild, staring eyes. Its expression was a mix of hysteria, exultation, and terror. Insanity personified.

  It darted in and clawed at me with its long, spidery fingers. The tips were jagged and sharp, but thornless.

  I blocked with Hunger only to be sliced across the back a second time. Another creature had crept up behind me while the first one distracted me with its attack.

  The new one was identical to the first, except that the dense knot of vines was high up on the creature’s chest, near the left shoulder. It had the same face and the same eerie expression.

  I shifted fast to keep both creatures in front of me. My blood soaked shirt stuck to me as I moved.

  The creatures darted in from opposite sides. There was nothing I could do to avoid them both, so I traded a hit for a hit.

  The first closed with me and I lashed out with Hunger, now covered with rows of short, sharp triangles, like shark’s teeth. The impact tore the creature’s arm from its body.

  At the same time the second one came in from my unprotected side and slashed me across the shoulder, cutting me to the bone with its jagged fingertips. My left arm drooped against my side as the shoulder muscle gave out.

  This was bad. The creatures were smart, fast, and coordinated, and I only had the use of one arm. The first was already coming back for another pass, completely unfazed by its missing limb.

  “Hey!” Leon appeared at the end of the aisle behind the creatures and shouted. The second creature looked towards the source of the sound.

  Mistake.

  I slammed Hunger down at an angle into its chest, caving it in and burying Hunger halfway into its body. Splinters and blood flew from the point of impact and hit me in the face. The creature dropped limply to the ground, a lifeless manikin made of sticks. A small pool of dark liquid oozed from under the shattered remains.

  The one-armed creature took advantage of my distraction to dash past me and around a corner. I ran after it, but when I turned the corner it was gone.

  Leon pounded up beside me. There was blood running out of his hair. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks for the help. You?”

  He touched his face. “Grazed by a brick. It’s fine.”

  Before I could reply, two rapid-fire gunshots rang out. Anne. I took off in the direction of the sound, Leon on my heels. Two more shots. Holding my left arm still with my right, I careened through the maze of building supplies until I got to an open space filled with tables.

  Each table but one was covered with black plastic cartons full of tiny plants. Anne stood on top of the empty one, plastic cartons scattered around it on the ground. She held her pistol out in front of her in a Weaver stance and snapped off another shot.

  Two creatures charged at her. One had spots of white splintered wood in its chest at center mass. The other had a hole in the middle of its forehead. They had the same faces as the creatures that I had just fought.

  She fired twice more, putting two more holes in the head of the second creature. It didn’t seem to notice. She fired a third time and I saw something I had never seen before. Anne, weapon drawn and completely focused on her target, missed.

  “Abe!” She screamed my name, not knowing that I was in the room with her. There were tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking, causing the tip of the P250 to jitter erratically.

  “I’m here!” I ran forward and Leon began firing. The rounds he managed put on target had no more effect on the wooden horrors than Anne’s had.

  They had nearly reached her. “I can’t make them stop!” She stepped backwards on the table, her heels dangerously close to the edge. There was no way I was going to reach her before the wooden men. Worse, if they could cut through my unnaturally tough hide, they would rip her to shreds in seconds.

  Why did one creature die when hit, when the other could lose an entire arm without even slowing down? What was the difference? I replayed my earlier kill, seeing Hunger rupture the wooden man’s chest and the blood that had leaked out afterwards.

  “Shoot the knot! Where the vines are thickest!”

  She fired and missed. It leapt onto the table. She fired again and blood burst from the center of the knot. Momentum carried the suddenly limp body into her, knocking her off the table and saving her from the other creature’s wild swipe.

  The surviving creature grabbed a large potted tree by the trunk and whipped it across the room at Leon, who happened to be the only other person in the room holding a gun. He tried to dodge, but got clipped by the heavy terracotta pot in the hip. He hit the ground amid a shower of black soil and triangular orange shards.

  My eyes had followed the improvised missile and Leon’s subsequent injury, just for a moment, but by the time I looked back for the creature it had vanished.

  Anne shoved the limp wooden figure sprawled across her body to one side and sat up. Her knuckles were white around the grip of her pistol and her eyes darted around until they locked onto my face. I knelt down beside her and she hugged me, hard.

  Her voice was low and ragged. “He told me that he was making me safe. All my life, that’s what he said. If I practiced enough. If I was good enough. Then they couldn’t touch me.” I felt her shudder. “They’re not supposed to touch me.”

  She buried her face in my shoulder as we sat next to the leaking wooden corpse, surrounded by the stink of gunfire. All I could do was hold her and let her cry.

  18

  As soon as I shut off the engine, Anne jumped out of the truck and went into the house. Henry levered himself carefully out of his seat and headed towards the workshop. “Bring the bodies, I’ll get the door.”

  In the back of the truck were the remains of the two creatures that we’d managed to put down in the supply yard. My shoulder still hurt pretty badly, so I let Chuck and Leon do the heavy lifting while I picked up the arm that I had torn from the first wooden man.

  We left a trail of sticks, dirt, and drops of blood all the way from the truck into the workshop. None of the tables were large enough to hold the human-sized constructs, so we lined them up on the ground in the center of the room.

  Henry pulled up a folding chair, his days of squatting on cold concrete floors long past. “You said that two got away?”

  I nodded. “Mostly. One left an arm behind.” I tossed the wooden limb down next to the bodies.

  His eyes picked over the bodies silently as he thought. Occasionally he would ask us to move them around so he could get a better look.

&n
bsp; When he was satisfied, he got up and fetched a hacksaw that was hanging from a nail on the wall. He handed it to me and then began clearing off one of the tables.

  “One of these is mangled pretty badly,” he said, indicating the wooden man whose chest I had collapsed with Hunger. “So leave that one alone for now. Cut the arms and legs off the other one and bring me the head and torso.”

  I guess it was the fact that the thing looked like a person, but sawing the limbs off was pretty unpleasant, despite just being a bundle of sticks. The head wobbled and shook as I raked the saw back and forth, which made it worse. When it was done, I dumped the rest onto the table where Henry immediately went after it with a hammer and wood chisel.

  Chuck came over and made a face as the chisel bit down into the wooden chest where the bloody knot was located. “That’s just wrong.”

  We watched in silence as Henry split the knot and then began prying it apart. The halves of the knot were connected by a mass of white, threadlike roots growing through it. Henry leaned into it and shoved the knot open with a wet, tearing sound. The interior was spongy and filled with black, sticky blood.

  He sighed and turned the head so that it faced us. Then he pulled his wallet out of his faded overalls and opened it up, revealing several photographs inside one of those plastic accordion inserts that people used to carry around in the seventies. He plucked one out and put it on the table. It was a picture of Leon and another young man, arms around each other’s shoulders.

  “That’s Paulie. Look familiar?”

  “Hard to tell with way the features are distorted, but yeah. It could be.”

  “Prime is taking the blood from his victims to make these stick men.” He ran his fingers over the wooden face, gently, tracing the overlarge mouth frozen in a leering rictus. “How did it act when you fought it?”

  “Fast. Smart. Very aggressive. And as soon as the last one heard me tell Anne that the knots were their weak point, it disabled the only other ranged combatant and ran. I assume that means they speak English. Or understand it, anyway. Why do you ask?”

  Henry frowned and his eyes went hard. I’d seen that expression a few times before. The last time was when Dom had threatened Leon at the hospital.

  “Prime could have just animated this collection of sticks and driven it with its will, but that would have resulted in something less effective. Something that needed constant direction, like a puppet. So instead, he sacrificed Paulie and used his blood and the agony of his death to bind part of his essence, his soul, to this abomination. That’s why it could function so well on its own. In a very real sense, you were fighting Paulie today.”

  “Wait,” said Chuck. “What about that crazy spider thing that you have? Mr. C or whatever. Are you telling me you killed somebody to bring it to life?”

  Henry shook his head. “No, we donated part of ourselves for that. Freely, and just a tiny bit. One drop of blood each. If all of us die, so will Mr. Careful. This thing is different. It doesn’t depend on a living donor, and it has far more capability than Mr. C. It houses part of a man’s soul, and when it was destroyed, so was that fragment. I don’t know if there’s anything waiting for us after this life, but if there is, I don’t think Paulie will get to see it.”

  Chuck backed away from the table. “So if Prime gets us ...”

  “Probably best not to let that happen.”

  Henry sighed and pushed back from the table. “Leon, come over here for a second and let me take a look at that cut.”

  Leon leaned down so that Henry could peer at the wound on the side of his face, where the brick had clipped him.

  “Well,” said Henry, “I guess that answers one question. The bond between Leon and Prime only goes one way. He gets Prime’s wounds, not the other way around. That would mean that the reason they heal so fast is because Prime himself does. Leon reflects the current state of Prime’s body. Any wounds that Leon sustains are his alone.”

  “So I can’t kill myself to take him out,” said Leon. I couldn’t tell if he sounded relieved or not.

  “No, and we wouldn’t let you even if you could,” replied Henry. “And what about you, Abe? How’s the shoulder?”

  “Hurts, but not as much as before. It’s getting better.”

  “I see. Been over an hour, though, hasn’t it? I’ve seen you recover from worse in half that time.”

  It was true. By now I should have been fully healed. I couldn’t complain, though, it was still miraculous by human standards. The thing that really bothered me was that even though I had just eaten a huge meal at Verna’s, I was already ravenous. That much food should have carried me to dinner with only mild hunger pains, but now I was sure that I would raiding my dwindling stockpile of canned beans before then.

  I rolled my shoulder. “It’s fine. Be good as new by tonight. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Alright, just keep an eye on it. Now, let’s get rid of these things. I don’t want to look at them anymore.”

  We burned the bodies out back, the wooden corpses providing the fuel for their own pyre. The four of us stood in a circle and watched the fire eat the dead, the flames corrupted with green and purple streaks and the smoke greasy and foul smelling. Henry said a few words about Paulie, but I didn’t really hear them.

  When Prime stuck those thorns in my arm, they had shriveled instead of stealing my blood and my soul. I wondered if that was because of the Devourer’s body or if it was because there was nothing inside to feed on.

  I’d always assumed that my soul was intact inside of this unnatural vessel, like the last olive rattling around in a jar. Out of place, but still the original item, untouched. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe my body wasn’t the only thing that had been transmuted in the depths of Piotr’s blood pit.

  I shivered a little, even though I couldn’t feel the cold.

  19

  Chuck and Leon returned to the house, leaving me and Henry standing next to the remains of the fire, now down to a pile of crackling, smoky embers. Every few minutes I raked through them with a shovel to make sure that even the coals were burning down to ash.

  I leaned on the shovel and asked Henry an old familiar question, one repeated so often that it had become part of our routine before a mission. “So, Professor, how are we going to win this one?”

  He answered without missing a beat. “Same as always. Find the bastard and stomp on him until he stops getting up.”

  We grinned at each other, remembering other times and places and people, and in the fading light his wolfish smile seemed just as sharp as ever, despite the years etched into the features around it.

  I gave the fire another poke, sending green and gold sparks swirling away in the wind. “What bothers me is that I can’t figure what Prime is up to. That ambush seemed pretty half-assed. Prime wasn’t even there for the fighting and he wound up losing two of his four creations. Sloppy.”

  “It’s possible that it didn’t turn out the way Prime expected, but I guarantee you there was a reason for it. Just as the creatures raised from Paulie’s blood inherited part of him, I suspect Prime contains more than a little of Leon. And Leon’s one of the sharpest around, tactically speaking. If Prime went out of his way to get you into that lumber yard, then he got something out of it. I’ll think on it.”

  “Just like the good old days.”

  “Well, the old days, anyway.”

  We stared at the dying fire in comfortable silence for a few minutes, just two old men lost in the past. Easy to do when there’s eight decades of it inside of you, and only one thin instant of the present to pull you away. But, of course, that tiny sliver of the now is all we ever really have.

  “Been a rough day for Anne,” he said.

  “Yeah, she really liked Verna. Made her feel like she belonged. And that business at the construction yard was pretty nasty.”

  “You think maybe she needs to talk to somebody?”

  “I’ve seen her in worse spots, and she’s always be
en fine. More than fine, actually. Completely made of stone. None of us were ever that cool under fire, not even Two-Penny.”

  “And that doesn’t sound like a problem to you?”

  “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it.” I handed Henry the shovel. “Keep an eye on the fire for me?”

  Henry nodded. “Of course.”

  I found Anne in her room.

  A towel was spread out across the bed, covered with pieces of her beloved P250. A bottle of solvent was open with a little bit poured into the cap sitting next to it and a wrinkled, well-used Ziploc bag was next to that, filled with cotton swabs and patches. There was also a small squirt bottle of oil, the label faded and slightly sticky as they tend to get after a while.

  She was holding the barrel in one hand, just an innocuous metal tube outside of the gun, and a brush in the other. The brush hovered in the air next to the barrel as she stared into space. It looked like she’d been doing that for a while.

  I closed the door behind me. “Hey.”

  Her hands started moving. She dipped the brush into the solvent in the cap and ran it through the barrel. The tang of the cleaner was heavy in the air, like a mix of fingernail polish remover and gasoline. “Hey.”

  “Mind if I come in?”

  She shook her head, making the ends of her hair dance around her shoulders. She put the barrel down next to the cap and set aside the brush.

  “Thanks.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her work. She picked up a dry white cloth, clean but stained with countless gray and black smudges, and started rubbing down the frame. She used her fingernail to hold the cloth in the grooves and crevices, her hands moving quickly and deftly as she turned the frame this way and that. She picked up the next piece, the slide, without really looking at it, her hands never pausing.