Dead Harvest

by Chris F. Holm

  "Funny." I hauled myself up onto my knees. It felt like I was trying to lift a bus. "What about our pilotfriend? He still breathing?"

  "Yeah," she said. "You think he's still a bad guy?"

  "I don't know. If he's out, Bishop's out, so there's a chance Bishop's still around. But if I had to guess, I'd say Bishop bailed the last time our guy came to – I would have. The way that leg's bent, though, I don't think we've got to worry about him giving chase either way."

  "So what now?"

  "Now we run."

  I lifted myself up off the chopper window, now buried in the thick, brown-green muck that lined the bottom of the pond. An earthy stench permeated the cabin, and as I rose, I was surprised to find my clothes were damp with muddy pond water. It bubbled upward from the cabin wall beneath us; it oozed from the control panels. I helped Kate to her feet, and looked down at our pilot-friend, the inky water pooling around him.

  "We've got to take him with us," Kate said. "If we leave him here, he'll drown."

  "The water's barely three feet deep, Kate, and coming in slow. He'll be all right till someone gets here."

  "You can't know that."

  "I don't know that – but it's the best we can do."

  "No, it's not. You can help me get him out of here. I can't do it on my own."

  "Kate, that's nuts – we don't have time."

  "Yeah? Well, I say we do. You plan to sit and watch while I try, the cops approaching all the while? Or would you rather try and drag me off? Carry me or carry him – it's your choice. At least with him, you've got help, and unlike me, he won't be kicking the whole way."

  The way that leg looked, he might not be kicking ever again, but I wasn't gonna tell her that. What I said instead was: "OK. But we'd better hurry."

  First, though, we had to find a door. The one we'd boarded through now lay beneath our feet – not to mention a good inch of pond water. I scanned the cabin. If there was an emergency hatch, it sure as hell wasn't obvious. That left Plan C.

  What was once the left-hand side of the cockpit window was submerged, the water thick with particles churned up in our landing, but the right-hand side was clear, slate sky hanging low above a canopy of leaves.

  "Cover your eyes," I said. Kate complied.

  The gun thundered in my hand, painfully loud in the small, quiet space of the cabin. I, too, had covered my eyes against the threat of spraying glass, burying my face in the crook of my elbow. Once the reverberations died down, I allowed myself a peek.

  The glass had buckled outward, the pane a tangled web of cracks framing a hole the size of a quarter. I climbed atop the now-horizontal seat and braced my good leg against the window, my heel atop the hole, and my back pressed tight against the seatback. Then, with an animal cry, I pushed.

  The pane snapped free of its frame, not in a thousand tiny pieces as I expected, but all at once. It smacked into the surface of the water with a slap. Cool air kissed my face, and carried with it the sound of distant sirens. Been hearing those too often lately, I thought.

  "Grab his feet," I said, looping my arms under the pilot's arms and around his chest. "And mind that leg."

  Together, we wrestled him to the window and tossed him out. He splashed into the water about as gracelessly as the window had, bobbing face-down as we scampered after. The water was bitterly cold. It came up to my waist, and seeped into the knife wound in my thigh, bringing with it a dull, woozy ache that set my head reeling. I pushed past it, dragging the pilot to the shore and collapsing to the grass as Kate emerged dripping beside me. Just a couple dozen yards away, the Fifth Avenue traffic roared and honked, but I barely noticed. I was shivering and exhausted, and all I wanted to do was lay on this bed of grass and sleep. But Kate was having none of it.

  "Sam, c'mon, we've got to go." She grabbed my by the wrist and yanked. I stayed down. She tried again.

  "Sam, those sirens are getting closer. And we've got an audience."

  I raised my head and looked around. Dotting the park were a couple dozen onlookers, watching us with expressions of confusion and surprise. Then, one by one, their faces changed, each becoming a twisted mask of hatred. Black fire raged in their eyes. As one by one they began to approach, I found my feet, putting an arm around Kate and ushering her toward the low stone wall that marked the border of the park.

  "Sam, what's going on? Who are those guys?"

  "Demons – foot soldiers, I'd guess. Ever since I first failed to collect you, they've been watching me."

  "It doesn't look like they're content to watch you now."

  "No, it doesn't. Mu'an blamed me for the attack at Grand Central – for the war that's brewing now. I'm sure he's not the only one. I suspect they've tired of waiting for me to do my job."

  "So what happens if they catch us?" Kate asked.

  "Torture, death, an eternity of torment. You know, the usual."

  "Let's make sure they don't catch us then, OK?"

  "That's the plan."

  We reached the wall, and I helped her up and over. When she reached the other side, she gasped.

  "Oh, Jesus, Sam – they're gaining."

  A glance over my shoulder told me she was right. There were maybe a dozen of them, approaching at a brisk walk. I noticed then that they were not alone – the park was dotted with figures in suits and trench coats, fedoras worn low over faces obscured as if by an inner light. Angels. They weren't pursuing us like the demons were; they just hung back. Watching. Waiting. For what, I didn't know – and I wasn't about to stick around to find out.

  I vaulted over the wall, and hit the sidewalk at a run, dragging Kate along by the wrist. The pain in my leg wasn't so much forgotten as rendered unimportant. The promise of eternal torment does wonders in adjusting one's priorities.

  We darted into traffic amidst a squeal of brakes and a blast of horns. A dozen shouted curses hurled our way. I paid them no mind. Behind us, the demons had broken into a run, and were one by one hopping the wall, as graceful and powerful as a pride of jungle cats. As traffic resumed behind us, I headed south-west along Fifth. Across the street, our pursuers followed suit. As a delivery truck rumbled past, obscuring us from view, I reversed directions, darting north-east with Kate in tow. She let out a yelp as I jerked her arm, and then got wise to the plan, sprinting beside me with all she had.

  A roar of anger, guttural and animal, sounded from the other side of the street. The demons had spotted us, and once again followed. The truck had provided meager cover, and our head-start couldn't have been more than half a block. The demons ate into our lead with glee, scrabbling across the hoods and rooftops of the midtown traffic as easily as bricks on a walkway. As we reached the corner of Sixtieth, I felt a surge of adrenaline. Before us was a subway entrance, just two narrow sets of steps leading downward to the darkness below. If only we could catch a ride, I thought, we might just shake these guys. Together, Kate and I descended, our feet barely touching the steps, while behind us, the demons closed the gap.

  We were greeted by the warm breath of subway exhaust, stale and sickly sweet. As we descended, we passed beneath a mural of birds in flight – once no doubt brightly hued, they'd been beaten a dull graybrown by years and years of grime. They hovered like vultures, circling in anticipation of a meal soon coming. I hoped to God we'd disappoint them.

  A snarl behind us, a frightened gasp. One of the demons had reached the entrance to the subway stairs. He wore the flesh of a bike messenger, though he no longer moved as if human – he scrabbled along, half walking, half prowling on all fours, his eyes so full of raging darkness that it spilled outward from them, flickering black across the tiles of the stairwell. He pushed aside a woman in a jogging suit – the one who gasped, no doubt – and she tumbled down the stairs, landing in an awkward heap at my feet. Two others joined him at the head of the stairs – a woman in a brown tartan business suit, now streaked with dirt and grime, and an overweight man in a hot-dog vendor's apron, his face sweaty and purple from the unnatural exertio
n, a set of greasy tongs dangling forgotten from the apron tie around his waist. The bike messenger spoke then – just one word, and in no language that I understood, but I recoiled nonetheless. Those two syllables seemed to rise from the pit of hell itself, rendering every curse, every epithet ever uttered by Man a mere shadow, a trifle, a charming colloquialism.

  It was then that they came for us.

  I would say they came like animals, but that's not exactly true. Animals must abide by basic laws of nature and physics, but these things hold no sway over a demon. No, they came at us like death, like damnation, like the devil himself. They clawed and scratched their way down the stairs, crawling and bounding along the floors, ceiling, and walls – as if all three surfaces were the same, as if all three had been put there for the express purpose of conveying them to us. Soon the stairwell was filled with the dust of broken tiles and the spatters of their vessels' blood, the vessels that were so much more fragile than the monsters they disguised. I'd like to say I fought, or schemed, or even ran, but the truth is, in the face of their imminent arrival, I did nothing – just stood there, stock-still, watching. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I surrendered to my fate. I'm not proud of it. I'm not even ashamed. At that moment, there was simply nothing else that I could do.

  Lucky for me, Kate didn't feel the same. Maybe it's because, deep down, she still had hope to cling to, where I had nothing but regret. Maybe I was just a coward. Maybe it doesn't matter, because when she yanked on my arm, she shook me from my dazed and sorry state. We hopped the turnstiles and sprinted together across the platform, in that moment denying the inevitability of our fates. Whatever had come over me had passed. But that didn't mean we were out of it yet. We were cornered, and they were coming fast.

  Scratch that – they were here.

  The platform was crowded with afternoon commuters, serious folk in business suits jostling for position with uniformed wage slaves as they waited for their trains to arrive. At least, that was the scene when we arrived. What happened next was more of a nightmare.

  As we shoved through the crowd, no goal in mind but to get away from the demons at our heels, we were greeted with muttered curses and the occasional elbow in return, so annoyed were they to be disrupted in their routine. But when the demons reached the platform, that annoyance became fear. A scream rang out, and then another, and soon, the entire crowd jostled to get away, pressing tight to the far end of the platform as if those precious few feet would save them from the monsters that stood before them.

  It didn't. The three demons, that followed us down the stairs tore into the crowd with savage delight, rending limbs and gouging flesh before tossing them aside like so much litter. I watched in horror as they took to the walls again, climbing toward us with chilling ease. Others charged across the crowded platform, pausing only long enough to toss aside whoever stood in their way. Though they were clad in human clothes, their vessels no longer looked human in the slightest, so warped were they by the demons within. They were impossible, horrible; their shapes refusing to resolve themselves in my borrowed eyes, my borrowed mind.

  A cry rang out in the center of the crowd, quickly silenced. What replaced it was a low, wet gurgle, and as I wheeled to see what had happened, I saw an older gentleman in a blue blazer holding a girl in a waitress uniform up by her neck. She scratched and kicked at him to no avail, while he cackled with delight, black flames dancing in his eyes. His eyes met mine, and he threw the girl aside, starting toward me through the quickly parting crowd.

  Beside me, another cry – this one from Kate. I wheeled toward her in time to see the woman beside her writhe as a demon overtook her, spilling sick across the floor as her eyes filled with dark flames. She reached toward Kate, who stumbled backward into me, narrowly avoiding the demon's grasp. My hand went to my shirt pocket, fumbling for the last remaining cat-shard, but it had been pulverized in the crash – that, or my fight with Bishop – and nothing remained of it but dust. Instead I dragged Kate through the crowd, the demon trailing behind.

  Screams reverberated off the station walls, and the yellowed tile was streaked with blood. One by one the commuters fell, or worse, were possessed as yet more demons joined the fray. One by one the lights went out, smashed by accident or design I didn't know. Soon, though, it would be black as pitch, as death, and there would be no one left alive but me and Kate. If that happened, we were as good as damned, and this world was damned as well. The problem was, I couldn't see any way around it.

  My foot came down on something soft and round beneath me – a leg, limp and unmoving – and I pitched forward, dragging Kate with me as I fell. I braced myself for the impact against the concrete, for the sudden grasp of the demon just behind us, but neither came. Instead we just kept falling, eventually slamming to rest some six feet beneath the level of the platform. Something hard and uncomfortable jabbed into my ribs – a subway rail, I realized. Above, the slaughter raged, but down here, all was quiet, with nothing but the occasional discarded body to keep us company.

  I climbed gingerly to my feet, and extended a hand to Kate. She took it, and I lifted her wobbily upward. She was filthy, and a little dinged up, but she looked mostly OK. I looked around. Two sets of tunnels extended outward to our left and to our right – a commuter rail nearest the platform, and beyond it the express. We stood atop the tracks of the first of them, closest to the platform, the tunnel's overhead lamps a string of Christmas lights, disappearing into the gloom on either side of us. For the first time since the demons had arrived on the platform, I allowed myself a ray of hope. If we could reach the tunnels unnoticed, we might just get out of there alive.

  But as the demon on the platform spoke, I knew that we'd have no such luck. It was the messenger again, or what was left of him, now that the creature inside had had his way. Again, it said only one word, but this one I understood just fine.

  "Collector."

  My eyes met the demon's, but this time, I did not freeze. I wrapped my arms around Kate and pulled her close. Her jaw was set in fierce determination, but she was shaking like a leaf, and her heart fluttered in her chest.

  The demon eyed the two of us and smiled. "Give us the girl, Collector, and you and I have no quarrel."

  "Go fuck yourself," I said.

  "Actually," the demon said, "I had a certain someone else in mind." It licked its lips, and a chill worked its way along my spine.

  "You don't know what you're doing," I said. A cool breeze buffeted my face, and I realized the chill I'd felt was not from the creature's words alone.

  "I rather think I do. The two of you have brought war upon us. I intend to set things right – to restore the natural balance. They shall sing my praises in heaven and hell both. And all for the pleasure of devouring this lovely little morsel."

  "The girl is an innocent," I said. My eyes were filled with the grit of dust suddenly disturbed. I blinked it back, tried not to react. "These skirmishes you've seen are gonna seem like a holiday compared to the world of shit that'll rain down on you if you devour her soul."

  "Do you dare attempt to deceive a deceiver? I know what the girl has done. Nothing you say can change her fate. The only hide you can save today is your own."

  "Actually," I said, as the rush of air became a roar, and the glare of headlights kissed my face, "I think I'm gonna have to disagree with you, there."

  I threw Kate backward with all I had, lunging after her as the train roared past the place where we'd just stood. It screeched to a halt at the platform, blocking the demon's path, and the walls shook with a wail of fury so pure that there was nothing Kate and I could do but cling to each other, trembling, as we lay sprawled across the second set of tracks, its darkened tunnels stretching off to either side around us.

  But as the echoes of the demon's cry faded into nothingness, we found our feet, and sprinted hand in hand into the darkness.

  28.

  Keep running, I thought. Don't stop. Don't think. Just keep running.

  The
air in the tunnel was cold and dank, the tracks uneven beneath our feet. Above us, sickly yellow lights pushed back the darkness at regular intervals, and cast long shadows of the tangle of pipes across the filthy concrete walls. The space between the rails was narrow, forcing us to run single file – Kate in front, with me scant inches behind, my thigh twingeing with every step despite the doctor's numbing agent. The lights of the next station were lost in the gentle curve of the tunnel. It could be fifty yards from where we stood; it could be five hundred. I told myself it didn't matter where it was – we just had to keep running. But of course it mattered. That train wasn't going to block their way forever. They'd find their way around it, or through it if need be. And when they did, they'd be coming for us. If we didn't reach the next platform before they broke through, we'd be trapped in this concrete tube with a horde of pissedoff demons. If that happened, I didn't like our odds.

  Kate let out a yelp, and tumbled to the ground. Something squeaked angrily in the darkness. A pair of beady rodent eyes looked up from where she'd just stood, and then disappeared into the gloom. I dropped to a knee, panting, beside her.