Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth)

by Michael Langlois

  Emily sent a fresh man to replace an injured shield bearer, his face torn open by an attack through the open hole where the window had been. There were other injuries, but no other debilitating ones.

  “Abe!” Anne shouted. I looked to where she was pointing and saw that the Scavengers had chewed through the plywood covering the ER doors and were now pouring out of the entrance in a thick stream. The scuttling mass covered the cars closest to the ER in a boiling carpet that was advancing on us nearly as fast as a man could run.

  But we were close. No more than fifty yards separated us from the shelter. One good push would see us there before the swarm could reach us.

  “Time to run!” I shouted. “Chuck and Leon, help the wounded! Shield line, pull in close! Get your asses in gear!”

  We bolted. Emily’s group began to stretch out, the young and the healthy quickly outpacing the rest. To their credit, the shield bearers did a decent job keeping spread out down the line, but there weren’t really enough to do the job with the group strung out the way it was.

  I had expected the wooden men to give chase, but of course, they were guided by Prime, who had Leon’s tactical skills.

  They raced for the shelter.

  By the time we arrived, we were facing two dozen wooden men massed behind a line of parked cars in front of the physical therapy building. The Scavengers were now halfway across the parking lot. All the wooden men had to do was keep us out of the building until the rapidly approaching wave of grasping feet and severing jaws reached us and we’d be ground up between the two groups.

  Chuck massed the shield bearers up front and led the group to the side of the entrance so the shotgunners could fire behind the creature’s makeshift barricade, into the space between the parked cars and the entrance to the building.

  Deprived of cover, the wooden men charged.

  It was chaos. Seconds after the attack began, we had our first breach.

  Two shield bearers went down under a pile of wooden men and the shotgunners were unable to fire on them for fear of hitting the men underneath. One wooden man leapt over them and went for the main body of the group.

  I was too far away to stop it. My injured leg had prevented me from keeping up with the group as they ran for the building, so even now I was just reaching them.

  Chuck and Leon had joined the general melee and were desperately trying to keep the few remaining shield bearers standing. I doubted they even knew that the line had been breached.

  Emily’s group had turned into a panicked mob, people shoving and trampling each other in an attempt to get away. A small boy no older than three or four was thrown to the ground in the path of the charging wooden man, small hands slapping the rough concrete as he fell.

  And then Anne was there. Her shotgun was useless now that our own people were in the line of fire on the other side of the wooden man. The weapon had been a lifeline and a shield, just like her pistol, protecting her from the horrors of this new world. And now she couldn’t depend on it, even as she came face to face with one of the wooden men. I expected her to freeze. There was no way I could reach her in time to save her.

  She threw the shotgun down and tackled the creature as it lunged for the child, her expression a mix of incandescent fury and determination.

  They crashed to the ground together, limbs tangled and thrashing. She got behind it, one arm hooked around its neck. It reached up and raked at her arms, drawing blood, but she refused to let go.

  With her other hand, she reached around and hooked her fingers under the edge of an iron skillet fused into its wooden chest. It clawed wildly over its shoulder, but she ducked her head down into its back, avoiding the worst of it. With a savage jerk, she ripped the skillet free of the ring of tiny tendrils holding it in place and hurled it aside. Underneath was the knot, right where the creature’s sternum would be.

  The creature slammed a sharp wooden elbow backwards into Anne’s gut, making her cry out. Undeterred, she yanked her pistol from its holster and slammed the butt down on the knot with everything she had.

  The creature went wild, jerking and flailing in an attempt to escape. She swung again and the knot burst with an audible crack. The creature went limp in her arms.

  Bloody and gasping, she heaved herself to her feet, pistol in one hand and the corpse of a dead wooden man dangling from the other. She tossed the lifeless sticks aside and helped the child to his feet. Only then did she retrieve her .410.

  There was no order now, just a boiling mass of people and wooden men. The thunder of shotgun blasts was getting steadily quieter as people ran out of ammo and resorted to swinging at the creatures with the now useless weapons, grimly determined to defend their loved ones at any cost. The man in the camo hat and the man in the golf shirt had abandoned their car doors and were now simply each grabbing a wooden man by the arms and holding it down while the man in the tie smashed it to pieces with his car door. It was surprisingly effective, if slow.

  It didn’t take long for the mob to destroy all of the wooden men mixed into the crowd, but they paid a heavy price for it. The bodies of men, women, and children lay scattered across the cold concrete, each surrounded by dark, glossy pools.

  The last of the wooden men had bunched in front of the door to the building, blocking it. Maybe a dozen in all. The swarm behind us was so close I could hear the sound of rainfall as thousands of tiny feet clicked across the concrete. We were out of time.

  I had to move. This body, this god’s immortal vessel, had to serve me. Right now.

  I reached inside, past the hunger and the pain, and forced myself to run. My insides were a bag of razors, the hunger stripping everything from me, turning my bones into a desperate bonfire of agony, but I didn’t stop. I pushed harder and for a moment I had an instant of perfect, excruciating clarity as the clawing, howling emptiness inside of me eclipsed the world, consuming even the tearing pain in my thigh.

  Everything went bright and stark. Every single wooden man turned towards me. They felt something, I don’t know what, but each one of them paused. I didn’t care why. I was beyond thought.

  I slammed into the group blocking the doors and started tearing them to pieces with my bare hands, heedless of my torn skin and flying blood. Wooden limbs shattered under my fists and wooden faces crunched between my teeth.

  That was the last thing I remembered.

  47

  I woke to the hushed murmuring of a hundred voices and the rough scrape of a damp cloth across my lips.

  Anne gave a low cry when I opened my eyes and threw herself across me, hugging me fiercely.

  I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Hey. You okay?”

  She pulled away. “Am I okay? Jesus, Abe. You stopped breathing half an hour ago.”

  “What?”

  “We tried giving you CPR, but we couldn’t get your lungs to inflate. It was like trying to breathe into a statue or something. If it wasn’t for the fact that we could feel your heart beating ...” She stopped and touched her fingers to her mouth, just for a moment. “Anyway, Emily said there wasn’t anything we could do but watch over you.” She squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “Thanks for looking out for me. As usual.” I sat up and took a big breath. I was starving, of course, but otherwise I felt okay. Even my leg felt better.

  “I wasn’t worried,” said Chuck, who was sitting on the other side of my cot. “The shit I’ve seen you shrug off? Besides, no way you were going to die after what you did out there. Dude, that was epic.”

  “You mean clearing the door? Not a big deal.”

  “Are you kidding me? When you hit those things it was like a bomb going off. Seriously, there are pieces of those fuckers on the roof. The roof!” He laughed, too loud in the quiet room, and wiped his eyes. “Goddamn, but that was some shit.”

  “Glad you enjoyed it.”

  Anne lowered her voice. “Not everybody liked it as much as Chuck.”

  I glanced around, seeing the room fo
r the first time. People were sitting in tight groups, and more than a few were clustered around an injured person on a cot. They were staring in my direction, some hostile, some fearful. Most looked away when I met their eyes.

  Anne lowered her voice. “It’s not what you did. I think they realize that without you, none of us would have made it down here. The problem is how you did it.”

  She searched my eyes, looking for something. An apology? Shame? I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I only remembered the fight in flashes of motion and pain, nothing else.

  “Abe, it was inhuman. I just don’t know another word for it. It was like watching an animal attack. You weren’t just fighting them, you were in some kind of frenzy, ripping them to pieces with your hands. And your teeth. Like you were trying to eat them.”

  I touched my lips and felt the cuts that she had been cleaning with the cloth. Cuts from the jagged pieces of wood that I was tearing off of my ... prey? Is this what I had to look forward to? Starving no matter how much I ate, until I no longer cared what I was eating? Or who?

  Leon walked over and tossed me a shiny brown plastic brick from the cardboard box under his arm. It was an MRE, pre-packaged preserved food developed for soldiers out in the field. Shelters were frequently stocked with the things to serve as emergency rations. They were good for years, contained enough calories for a full day of heavy activity, and were a hell of a lot easier to choke down than the c-rations we used to get.

  He gave one each to Anne and Chuck as well, and kept one for himself. Then he looked around and handed me a second package.

  “Emily has a few people passing these out. Group this size can probably eat one more time before we run out. Water shouldn’t be a problem. The taps work and there’s a ton of canned water with the food, plus a couple boxes of bottled water that was probably for the office upstairs. We should be set for another day, easy.”

  We sat on the floor around my cot and used it for a makeshift table. Leon passed out bottles of water from the cardboard box, emptying it. The MREs came with self-heating packs, which Leon insisted on helping everyone with. He poured a good splash of water from his bottle into each plastic heating bag to activate the chemical pack, then slid the food pouch down inside. Then he stuffed the whole thing back in the thin cardboard box that the meal pouch had come in, and propped all four boxes up at an angle to heat.

  Steam began leaking out of the boxes, carrying with it the tang of wet iron. I wanted to wait the ten minutes for the meals to get hot, just sit there patiently like everyone else, but I couldn’t. I tore open the second meal that Leon had given me and started eating it cold. Everyone ignored me out of politeness.

  Leon turned to Chuck. “That was nice work out there.”

  Chuck shrugged. “My momma always said I’d be good at something. Who knew it would be helping people fight off monsters? I don’t have a spider-sense like Anne, and I can’t pick up a dump truck like Abe, but that doesn’t mean I’m useless.”

  Leon bumped fists with him. “Damn straight.”

  I set my empty meal pack down and picked up one that was heating. “Speaking of doing good out there, that was a hell of a flying tackle, Anne.”

  Chuck grinned. “I saw that! You totally took that wooden fuck to the ground.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t going to touch that child. Not while I was alive.”

  “It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that. Is it brave if you don’t remember to be scared?”

  “I think you were scared, you just didn’t care.”

  “I guess.”

  Leon raised his water bottle in a toast. “It counts. Believe me.”

  We all touched bottles and drank. I looked at each one of them, proud to have them as my friends.

  They ate their now hot meals and I dug out the cookies and foam-rubber like cake from mine, hunting through the collection of packages inside each MRE for all of the edible bits.

  I was crumpling up all my empty plastic wrappers and stuffing them inside one of the larger pouches when a young girl walked up to the cot and took a seat on the floor next to me. She was wearing jeans and a white hoodie, both of which looked new except for the streaks of dirt on them. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old. One cheek was scraped and when she pushed her hair back as she sat down, I noticed that so were her hands.

  Anne smiled at her. “Hi, honey. Do you need something?”

  The girl looked at me and as she spoke I noticed that the pupils in her light brown eyes were vertical slits.

  “You are ensnared, Hunter. Trapped here while the Harbinger already has his prize.”

  She picked up my bottle and poured out a handful of water onto the cot. Instead of soaking into the cotton, the water pooled on top of it, a tiny silver lake. Reflected in the surface was an image of the hospital, just the way it had been the last time I had seen it. With one exception.

  Snaking out of the shattered windows on the second and third floors were thick trails of Scavengers, like ants carrying food back to the nest. Their bloody legs left so many sticky red dots on the white wall that long reddish-brown stripes ran down the face of the building. Every Scavenger carried a body part, and there were hundreds of them.

  48

  The water soaked into the cotton fabric and became nothing more than a dark patch.

  Leon squeezed his eyes shut. “They didn’t evacuate the hospital. The upper floors were still full of people. Abe, did you know?”

  “I suspected it. There aren’t enough people here to account for everyone in the hospital, and most of them are obviously refugees from town. There are only a handful of people with ID bands on their wrists or wearing hospital gowns. My guess is they were on the first floor when the attack came.”

  He opened his eyes and glared at me across the cot. “Motherfucker. You didn’t say one word. You just, what? Decided to let those people to die?”

  I struggled to keep my voice down. “Those floors were already filling up with Scavengers when we got here. We were too late. As it is we barely got the people on the first floor out in time. What did you want to do? Run upstairs and get cut to pieces ourselves?”

  “Fuck! We could have done something!” Heads began turning our way.

  “Tell me. What could we have done? Maybe you haven’t figured this out yet, but Prime has been running the show from the beginning. Who was his first victim? A man with ties to you. Where did he make the kill? Right next to your house. And guess what? He just happened to get seen at his next atrocity so that the police could have a nice description of you for the manhunt.”

  “So he got me arrested. Big deal. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Leon, he knows what you know. Which means that he knows that of everyone in town, Anne has the best chance of tracking him down and I have the best chance of stopping him if she leads me to him. All he needs is enough time to finish the harvest and use the Heart, right? So, he puts you in jail and attacks the town. And, of course, we go straight for you instead of him, giving him time to round up as many townspeople as he can at the hospital. You remember how we knew to come here?”

  He nodded. “Aunt Emily had a police radio. From a dead cop with a broken neck.”

  “Yeah, how many dead bodies have you seen since this started that have been in one piece?”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit. Led us right by the nose to the hospital, but only after he was ready for us, where we focus on the survivors instead of what Prime is doing. So now here we are, bottled up by a swarm of Scavengers with a bunch of people to protect. Prime kept us busy with this crowd while he gutted the rest of the hospital and now we’re trapped with them while he finishes whatever the fuck he’s up to.”

  Leon turned to the fox-eyed girl and pointed one thick finger at her. “Why did you give me that seed?”

  “The gifts choose their recipients based on their needs an
d desires.”

  “Bullshit. No way am I the first person in thousands of years to lose his legs and be willing to do anything to get them back. Hell, I met people worse off than me in this very building, every day that I had physical therapy. So don’t tell me that the package chose me because I wanted it the most. If you had given the package to anybody else, Prime would have done his thing without anyone to stop him. Tell me that’s a coincidence.”

  The girl’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “It may be that there was ever only one gift, and that the Ravenous Seed was not it.”

  “Then why?” I asked.

  Her quick gaze flicked to me and her expression remained one of quiet amusement, but there was nothing human in her eyes. I was looking at a mask and the only true thing I could see were the eyes peeking through at me, potent and strange.

  When she spoke, her voice was different, less childlike. “Because as humanity goes, so do I. Those who bound my will forced me to deliver the Devourer’s Gate, but they cannot compel me to accept the consequences.”

  She touched my chest with one chipped pink fingernail. “You are incomplete. You will either become whole or we will both perish. Along with the rest of your people, of course.”

  She then reached across the cot and took one of Anne’s hands in both of hers. “He is the deadly arrow, but you are the bow. Use this to guide his flight. It will lead you to the Flensing Grove, where you will find guidance to the Heart.”

  She pulled her hands back, leaving Anne holding a piece of bark, black and smooth. “I would have provided you with more, had I been able, but the Grove is watchful and greedy. I—”

  Both the girl and Anne moved at the same time. The girl tilted her face upwards, like a hound scenting the air, and Anne pressed the back of her hand to her upper lip, then lowered it.

  Anne looked around. “What was that?”

  The girl bared her even, white teeth. “The first beat of the Heart. The Womb of Bone is complete and Prime has placed the Heart within it. Hurry.”

  She stepped away from the cot and walked past the man with the camo hat. I only lost sight of her for a split-second, but that was enough. She was gone.