Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth)

by Michael Langlois

  The trunk of the tree shivered and rocked back and forth as it tried to reach us at the edge of the clearing, but we were just out of reach. Anne took advantage of her relative safety to get off a few rounds. Black ooze ran out of the trunk where she hit, but the tree didn’t seem to notice.

  She steadied her pistol with both hands and her face went blank. Branches whipped through the air in front of her, but she didn’t flinch. Or even blink. She was unreachable now. The P250 barked and the Heartwood spike jammed through the tree’s tacked-on face twitched, but remained stuck firmly in the trunk. More shots. It jerked again with the same result, then once more. It was stuck fast.

  She lowered the P250 and shouted over the din of the tree. “Somebody is going to have to go in there and yank it out.”

  “You think that’ll kill it?”

  “No idea, but this whole place is threaded through with the scent of the Heart. It’s worth a try.”

  Leon grabbed my shoulder and yelled into my ear, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.” He drew and fired at a Scavenger next to my feet. One of the mandibles snapped off and it veered away.

  They were coming out of the field by the dozens. Most had dropped off the vine before being fully formed and were dragging themselves towards us on stunted legs while the grasping tentacles on their backs writhed and strained in our direction.

  The crack of gunfire joined the noise from the tree as Anne and Leon attempted to disable the closest Scavengers, inching carefully away from the advancing carpet of the things. It only took a few seconds before they were forced to step back into the range of the tree.

  Anne grunted as a branch snatched at her hair, jerking her head back. Another branch slipped under her armpit and wrapped around her shoulder. Leon went down as his feet were pulled out from under him.

  We were out of options. I put one arm across my face and charged the tree. Branches slashed across my body, whipping me across the head and back. I kept going. The tree was fast, but nowhere near strong enough to hurt me. If I had been a normal man, I would have been flayed to the bone under the concentrated assault.To me it was barely a nuisance.

  Realizing that a direct attack was useless, the tree snagged me with a half-dozen branches and yanked me into the air. Smart, but no more effective.

  I grabbed the nearest branch and pulled it to my mouth. It was fleshy and no thicker than a garden hose. Easy to bite through. The tree shuddered and dropped me as if I were on fire.

  The bitter, metallic taste of the black sap brought me to my senses. I barely managed to spit out the thumb-sized piece of branch instead of swallowing it. I was starving, but I still had that much control.

  The tree recoiled from me, its branches held high overhead and trunk leaning away and twisting from side to side in panic as I crossed the last few feet. I took in the pile of severed limbs on the ground. The collection of jewelry stolen from the dead on its trunk. The wave of Scavengers crawling towards my friends, intent on cutting them into pieces.

  And I bared my teeth, black sap running down my chin. The tree flinched. I savored its fear for a long heartbeat before reaching out and tearing the Heartwood spike free.

  The tree collapsed backwards, its whistling cries falling away in pitch and intensity, until the branches and trunk were flaccid and limp, splayed across the ground like a dead octopus on a beach. The Scavenger plants fell outward, forming a ring of flattened stalks around the grove, and the Scavengers themselves scattered, fleeing into the forest.

  The hushed silence of the woods that followed was a relief.

  Anne and Leon threw off the now limp branches and stood up. Guided by years of habit, Anne swapped magazines and reloaded the used one by touch while her eyes moved restlessly around the silent grove. “I told you that would work.”

  “Yes, you’re a genius. Here’s your prize.” I slapped the sticky Heartwood spike into her palm.

  She made a face and turned it over in her hands, then lifted her face and inhaled deeply while turning in a circle.

  “I can’t track it.This whole place smells like the Heart. Sorry.”

  “I guess that makes sense. The Fox said that the Heart would be used to awaken the forest.” I kicked the spongy trunk. “Although I would bet it was never meant to be used to create something like this.”

  She stuck the spike in her back pocket. “You don’t know that. I don’t really see Prime going after something pleasant. Just because it’s a force of nature doesn’t mean it’s friendly. Or that it doesn’t hate us.”

  “Maybe it didn’t have a choice in what it turned into.”

  She shrugged. “Who cares? Evil is evil, right? It needed to die.”

  I stared at her and her cheeks reddened as she realized why it mattered to me.

  Leon called us over to where he was squatting by the pile of discarded bones. “Come take a look at these.”

  The bones were clotted with more of the tree’s disgusting black sludge. Leon rubbed a thumb over one, revealing the sigils that had been carved across every inch of its surface. They seemed to twist in my peripheral vision each time my eyes moved, but were completely inert wherever I was actually looking. It was the same pattern as the bones from the cave.

  The ends had been carved into crude hooks. Not particularly sharp, more like the kind of hook that you would use to hang your coat, and less like the kind you’d use to hang meat.

  Leon passed the bone to Anne. She took the greasy body part without hesitation and closed her eyes. We watched in silence as her knuckles turned white around the grisly human remains. She turned her face to the left and opened her eyes. Then she turned to the right and a tear streaked down her cheek. She scrubbed the track away angrily with her free hand.

  “They didn’t bring all of her. The Scavengers took the parts they wanted and left the rest back in town, and some they abandoned on the way here. She’s scattered for miles. Her family will never find all the pieces.”

  She hissed between her teeth. “It wasn’t enough that Prime created these things to kill her. He had them defile the body, cutting it up and throwing the parts away like garbage. I don’t know how, but we’re going to make him suffer for this, Abe. He has to pay.”

  “He will,” I said gently, “but we have to find him first.”

  She stood up and let the bone fall out of her hand. “That way. There are so many more of these bones in the forest and they’re all together. That’s where we’ll find him.”

  Leon wiped his hands on his jeans. “You sure you don’t want to bring these with us? You know, just to make sure you don’t lose the scent?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not just a bone anymore. They turned it into something else, something so vile that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it out of my head. I promise you, I won’t lose the scent. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life.”

  She walked away from us, into to the wood.

  53

  We navigated by moonlight, strong and clear in the strange woods. The sky overhead was thick with stars the way I remembered from my childhood on the farm, before the sky was washed out by the encroaching city lights. The primordial forest was striped with razor sharp shadows that sprang from the bases of the giant trees and flowed over the uneven ground like black rivers.

  As we walked, the crackle of dried leaves and snapping twigs under our feet was echoed in the surrounding forest by unseen things pacing alongside us.

  Leon looked over his shoulder for the twentieth time. “How much further?”

  Anne shrugged. “Hard to say. If it’s a small pile of bones, then we’re pretty close. If it’s a big pile, and I think it is, then a few more miles.”

  “In that case, maybe we should pick up the—”

  The forest lurched around us. Wood cracked and twisted as the trees grew once more. Branches thickened and stretched in the canopy a hundred feet overhead, blocking out the sky and separating us from the moon and stars. It became dark and still.

 
My inhuman eyes could still pick out the towering trees around us, but even I couldn’t see farther than a dozen yards in any direction. Both Anne and Leon had their hands out and were staring blindly ahead.

  “The Heart,” said Anne in a whisper. “That was another beat.”

  Leon’s voice was loud, as if to prove something to the dark. “Why did the trees block out the light? That’s never happened before.”

  “My guess,” I said, “is that the forest is trying to stop us from interfering with whatever deal it has with Prime.”

  I could see Leon tilt his head back, searching the canopy above for any glimmer of light that might leak through. “Well, it’s working. I can’t see shit.”

  The pop of a twig breaking sounded to our left. Closer than before.

  “We need to keep moving.”

  I reached out and took hold of one of Leon’s outstretched hands. He jumped and tried to pull away. “Jesus. You scared the hell out me.” I took Anne’s hand as well. “You can seriously still see in here?”

  “A little. Enough to keep us from bumping into anything.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “One, and if you don’t put it down, I’m going to leave your ass here.”

  “Just checking.”

  I led them forward at a walk. “Anne, let me know if I need to change course.”

  “Really? That never would have occurred to me. I was just going to let you lead us around in a big ol’ circle until we died.”

  “I hear sarcasm, but no directions.”

  “Just keep walking.”

  It was slow going. Every few feet either Anne or Leon would stumble over a root or piece of uneven ground and several times I had to move around brush or branches blocking our way that I hadn’t seen until we were only a few feet away.

  “This is bullshit,” said Leon after nearly falling for the tenth time. “Even if I don’t break a leg, at this rate it’ll we’ll die of old age before we get there.”

  “Let me try something,” said Anne. She dug her phone out of her pocket and pushed a key. The tiny postage-stamp-sized screen lit up, but the light was too weak to even reach the ground at her feet. “Worth a shot.”

  “You seriously need a better phone,” said Leon.

  “I don’t even have a job. You’re lucky I have this piece of shit. Where’s your phone?”

  “Same place as my wallet. At the sheriff’s station in a plastic bag with my name on it.”

  Leaves rustled overhead and something fell into my hair. I brushed it away. “Shh, listen.” More rustling.

  “Ow, fuck!” Leon danced in place slapping at his clothes. “Something bit me.”

  There was a tap on my shirt as a weight landed on my shoulder. I slammed my palm down and it burst open like a stepped on roach, leaving a mix of thick slime and sharp fragments. “Disgusting.”

  “You, too?” asked Leon. “What is it?”

  I plucked the remains off my shirt. “Some kind of bug. Two or three inches long.”

  Anne let out a high-pitched yelp.

  A soft pattering sound like rain filled the air as a deluge of insects began to fall out of the canopy onto us.

  54

  Leon and Anne began shouting and slapping at themselves as the soft-bodied insects bit into them. All I felt was a light pressure as their needle-like mouthparts failed to pierce my skin.

  Panic set in as the number of insects crawling through their hair and clothes increased second-by-second. They bolted into the darkness, heedless of the unseen trees around them. Leon fell almost immediately and began thrashing around on the leaf-strewn ground.

  I chased after Anne and managed to snag her around the waist moments before she ran face-first into a tree trunk. She twisted in my grip, shuddering and jerking, and in my flat, gray vision, I could see foamy saliva leaking from her lips.

  By the time I got her back to where I left Leon, she had gone still in my arms, only her labored breathing reassuring me that she was still alive. I threw her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry and scooped Leon up off the forest floor. Dozens of insects fell from his unmoving body as I slung him over my other shoulder and ran.

  I moved as fast as I dared, barely dodging around trees as they appeared out of the gloom mere feet in front of me. I ran over anything smaller than I was, crashing through like a maddened bull.

  In less than a minute, we were clear of the insect rain. I set my friends down gently on the ground and went over them carefully, killing all of the crawling horrors that I could find on their bodies. Most of them were attached like ticks, bodies swollen taut with tiny legs hanging limply at their sides.

  The ones that I could reach, I killed and pulled carefully pulled off, making sure to remove the embedded mouthparts. The ones I could feel under their clothes, I simply crushed and tugged loose to stop them from pumping in more venom.

  Pressing two fingers to the hollow of Anne’s throat revealed a weak, thready pulse to go with her labored breathing. Her skin was hot and dry. Leon was no better off.

  The forest loomed over me, lightless and silent and gloating.

  “Fox!” My desperate shout was swallowed up by the oppressive, smothering quiet of the woods. I shouted again and again, knowing that I couldn’t save my friends and that if they died, so too would my will to be more than a remorseless creature of hunger and instinct.

  A fleeting image of a barren wasteland passed before me, hollow, crumbling husks of skeletal trees as far as I could see, with black dust billowing up into the gray sky. My lips pulled back from my teeth as I savored the thought of clawing the forest out of the earth with my hands and teeth.

  Aching hunger rose inside of me and nearly rendered me senseless, a cresting wave of pain and need.

  “Fox!” My scream was part growl. My hands gouged the damp soil under me as I stared upward into the blackness with my head thrown back.

  Tiny sparks appeared in the blackness above me, like the phantom flashes that I used to conjure by pressing my thumbs into my eyelids as a kid. As I stared upwards, the sparks grew brighter and more numerous, breeding and swirling until a foggy cloud of them hovered high overhead.

  Golden light washed over me, rippling like sunlight reflected on water, revealing a red fox in front of me, silky tail wrapped tightly around its body, gold-flecked green eyes fixed on mine.

  55

  Between one blink and the next, the fox became a woman wearing a silk robe, the collar made of fox tails laid end-to-end.

  The forest thrummed and the trees creaked and thickened.

  “Hurry. There is yet time to still the birth.” Her voice was low and throaty. And frightened.

  “My friends are dying.”

  She glanced over her shoulder before replying, out into the dark. “I can wake the Pathfinder. She will live long enough to guide you, I think.” She reached out to touch Anne.

  I grabbed her wrist. It felt thin and brittle in my grip. “No. She lives, or I don’t go.”

  “Then your people will cleansed from the world. They will die.”

  “These are my people, here. The rest can burn for all I care.” At that moment, as the words left my mouth, I knew that they were true. Maybe that truth would be different in another time and place, but not now.

  She snarled and the fox darted away from me, vanishing into the gloom beyond the small circle of light.

  I waited, listening to the inhalations and exhalations of my friends as they became slower and shallower. I put one hand on Hunger in its sheath and gripped it, somehow finding comfort there.

  The fox appeared with a tangle of stems and flowers between its teeth. It dropped them next to me, pushing them out of its mouth with its tongue and shaking its head. I recognized the flowers: pale yellow bells with long, slender stamens inside, each glimmering faintly.

  The woman reached down and plucked three flowers and put them into her mouth. Then she picked up one of the insects that I had killed and bit the spiky head
off. She chewed the mixture with a grimace. Then she gestured for me to raise Anne up.

  I lifted her gently into a sitting position, and the woman leaned over her. She pried Anne’s mouth open with her fingers, and then, biting down hard on the pulp with her neat, tiny teeth, she spit a glob of yellow saliva full of black specks into Anne’s mouth.

  I rubbed Anne’s throat until she swallowed reflexively. “Now him.”

  “His task is done and there is no time.”

  I stared at her and said nothing.

  She sighed bitterly and snatched more flowers from the tangle and jammed them into her mouth, all the time glaring daggers at me. I didn’t care. She bit into another insect and we repeated the process with Leon. Before we were finished, Anne was sitting up.

  “Oh, God.” She turned her head to one side and vomited. “I feel like shit.”

  The band around my chest loosened. “You look worse.”

  “Thanks.”

  Leon groaned and struggled to his feet, gasping. “Jesus.”

  The woman pointed one slender finger at my face. “No more demands. No more waiting. Run.”

  The fox bolted out of the light.

  56

  The fog of light, composed of hundreds of tiny wisps, paced us as we ran. Like a cloud, it passed effortlessly through the tangle of branches and leaves overhead, dappling the ground with diffuse, racing shadows.

  Even though it drove back the worst of the darkness, it could do nothing about the enmity of the forest pressing in on us. Crackling underbrush and half-glimpsed flickers of movement filled the woods outside of the pool of light. Howling echoed in the distance. From what, I have no idea.

  Anne ran beside me with grim determination, sweat streaming down her face despite the cool night air. She would occasionally point without speaking, keeping us on course. Her eyes kept jumping to her left as things wove in and out of her peripheral vision.

  Leon ran like a marine, stone-faced and steady, his breath hard and rhythmic like a metronome. He’d run like that until we arrived or he collapsed.