The Harvest

  Or so she had thought.

  Now, Beth had to admit, things were changing. Now things were beginning to get… well, scary.

  * * *

  She spent Friday night at Joey Commoner’s before they decided to do the B E.

  Joey lived with his father, who was divorced and worked part-time for a building contractor; but Joey’s father had taken off in July to spend a couple of months on a Seattle job and to shack up for a while with his girlfriend, a Canadian-born typesetter who used to secretary for a drywall firm in Buchanan. So Joey had had the house to himself for the summer.

  Labor Day had come and gone, but Joey wasn’t sure when his father would be back. His old man had telephoned three times since Contact, but Joey wouldn’t talk about what he said. Joey, Beth knew, was also a little scared of what had been happening since that feverish Friday night.

  So they sat in the basement, which was Joey’s private apartment, with its own bathroom and even a little kitchenette; and they watched a rental movie and smoked dope.

  Joey was a cautious doper. He was wary of drugs, in a strange way, and limited himself to a once-a-week smokathon, usually Friday night. That was why he always showed up at the 7-Eleven Friday nights, buying frozen pies and ice cream. Marijuana, microwave cherry pies, and vanilla ice cream were Joey’s customary vices. After they got to know each other he had invited Beth to join him in the ritual. When she was transferred to the day shift, she did.

  Beth herself was careful about drugs. Contrary to her high-school reputation, she was not keen to break the law… or hadn’t been, in those days. But she soon learned that this Friday night dope binge wasn’t the scariest thing about Joey—in a way, it was the least scary thing about him. Joey Commoner in a stoned condition was accessible, in some ways even a little more human. He’d kick back and laugh at some TV movie, and they would feast on reconstituted cherry pie and ice cream until their lips looked rouged, and sooner or later they would make love. Stoned, Joey made love to her. Other times they simply fucked.

  So Beth learned to look forward to Friday nights, and would have enjoyed this one except for what they saw on TV.

  The rental movie ended and when Joey hit the rewind button the network came back on: a picture of an octahedron unwinding, this one somewhere in Europe.

  Beth set aside her 7-Eleven cherry pie, and Joey put down the 1970’s-vintage blue plastic bong he had ripped off from one of his cousins, and the two of them gawked at the screen.

  “Holy shit,” Joey said, with what sounded to Beth like a combination of awe and deep discomfort.

  Beth, thoroughly stoned, was especially impressed with a close-up still of what the announcer called a Helper. She remembered, her last year of high-school biology, peering through a microscope at a bread mold, black pin-shaped structures called “sporangiophores,” a word that had eluded her during the final exam but that came back now with the odd precision of a dope revery. That’s what these Helpers looked like. A crowd of sporangiophores spreading over the landscape. Coming soon to your town, if she understood the commentary correctly.

  It was too much. Joey hit the off button and turned his back on the screen.

  Joey was very much into not believing what was happening around him. For instance, Joey did hobby electronics, built hi-fi gear and radios and things, and this had fascinated Beth at first, because—like everybody else—she had Joey pegged as being a little stupid. It turned out he read circuit diagrams better than he read English. There was always a tangle of wire and junk parts in one corner of the basement and often the air reeked of solder. Which was okay; it was interesting. But Beth had come to realize that electronics wasn’t just a skill Joey had—it was a wall, a moat, a hiding place. It shut out everything scary. It even shut out Beth.

  And now, scared by what they’d seen on TV, he began to look restless—like if Beth cleared out he might dip another circuit board in aluminum sulfate or something. Fuck, not tonight, Beth thought. She didn’t want to be alone tonight.

  That was when the idea of the B E occurred to her.

  She thought of it strictly as a means of holding his attention. In the old days Beth had been more or less indifferent to Joey’s attention. Now, suddenly, helplessly, she was hungry for it. Not that there was anyone competing with her; Joey had never shown much interest in other women, perhaps excluding that night with the hooker in Tacoma. What she was competing with was the dense forest inside Joey’s own head. Where he liked to get lost. Where she couldn’t go.

  But the cemetery vandalism last month had seemed to keep him interested—so why not a similar adventure? Similar but more daring? Why not a B E, in fact?

  She posed the question. Joey looked thoughtful.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “The Newcomb house,” Beth said. Sudden inspiration. “You know the place? House up on View Ridge with two lawn jockeys in front? Bob Newcomb used to be my father’s boss at the mill. He’s been on vacation since August first. Some place in Mexico. My father thinks anybody who goes to Mexico in August is an idiot.”

  “Long vacation,” Joey said.

  “They might not be coming back at all.” Because of Contact. But she didn’t say that.

  “Two lawn jockeys and a garden with a sun clock,” Joey said.

  “That house, right.”

  “Stupid fuckin’-looking house, Beth.”

  “There might be something inside.”

  He shrugged. “What do we want?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “We can’t fence anything. Do you know how to fence stolen property?” She didn’t. “We could just mess it up. Or take whatever we liked. The stereo.”

  “Or cameras,” Joey said, warming to the idea. “Or even a video-camera or something like that. Except if they’re on vacation they probably took it with them. ”

  Suddenly he was hooked. Switched on like a light.

  There was a well of restless anger inside Joey, and she had tapped it… but it was a strange talent, the ability to wind up Joey Commoner toward petty crime, and something she was only intermittently proud of.

  The horse, the spur.

  Dangerous, Beth.

  Did she really want to do this? Maybe it was an idea that only made sense in dope-logic, one of those smoke-ring thoughts with no real beginning I or end. Or just a dumb, transient impulse.

  Too late for second thoughts, however. Joey was already putting on his motorcycle jacket.

  * * *

  He drove north along the coast in a misty rain.

  The night had turned cool. The motorcycle stitched through valleys of fog, Beth with her visor down and everything blue with rain. Streetlights seemed dim, the white line tentative.

  There was no traffic. Since Contact, people didn’t go out so much. They stayed inside, especially in bad weather.

  The things in their brains had made them cautious—meek, in Beth’s opinion. Wasn’t it the meek who were supposed to inherit the Earth? { Now is the hour.

  Joey wasn’t meek. The sound of the motorcycle bounced around these sodden hillsides like an announcement of Armageddon. He drove recklessly fast.

  She tightened her grip on his waist and squeezed her thighs around the saddle. Wet face, wet hair, Joey’s leather jacket wet and slippery in the rain.

  He drove to the top of View Ridge and killed the engine, r Beth, still stoned, was suddenly absorbed in the view: tumbling clouds and the foggy ocean downslope to the west! Everything in shades of night gray or night blue except the buzzing amber streetlights. A paper flapped on a telephone pole, a wet photocopied announcement of a meeting of regular human people at the hospital next Wednesday night, Dr. Matthew Wheeler presiding, an event Beth had already marked on her calendar. She thought she might attend, might bring along Joey, see who was left. But that was a daylight plan for the daylight world.

  Joey wheeled his motorcycle down the rain-slick sidewalk, quietly, not talking. Beth felt alternately conspicuous and fog-hidden, paranoid and fuzzily
excited. No one seemed to be watching. There were only a few lights in these big hillside houses. But these weren’t normal houses anymore, or at least not normal homes; the people inside weren’t normal. Maybe, Beth thought, they can see us with some kind of third eye. Maybe they don’t need to look.

  Joey took the Yamaha up the Newcombs’ long driveway and stood it in the shadows behind the garage. The Newcomb house had a light in it, too, the token light people leave on when they’re out of town, supposed to frighten burglars, who are supposed to be that stupid. Beth followed Joey into the backyard. Nothing but shadows and wet grass here. Smell of lawn clippings, garden loam, rain.

  Beth’s paranoia began to peak. The trouble with getting stoned was that sometimes it opened a moment of great clarity, like a window. Too much clarity was a bad thing. She didn’t always like what she saw.

  Tonight she saw herself alone. She felt herself alone on this dark lawn and alone on the planet, as alone as she had ever been.

  She knew about being alone. She had known about it ever since her fourteenth birthday, when her mother sent her to a clinic in Portland to defuse a little ovarian timebomb set ticking by Martin Blair, her then-boyfriend, fifteen, saved from reproach by the status of his family, the Blair Realty Blairs—Martin who had actually bragged some to his friends: Yeah, he got a girl pregnant… Alone on the suction table and alone when she came back to school, Buchanan’s youngest suburban slut, according to Martin’s schoolyard testimony. Alone sitting by herself at an empty cafeteria table. Alone but daggered with stares, sniggered at in hallways, propositioned in corners by boys who lacked the courage to speak to anyone real. Alone with shame so intense that after a while she lost the ability to blush.

  But that was one kind of alone, and this was another.

  All these houses, Beth thought… empty of families, empty of people, full of something else, something that only looked human.

  Joey broke a pane of glass in the back door of the Newcomb house and reached inside to open the lock. To Beth it sounded like a cymbal crash, a shrieking announcement of their presence.

  Suddenly this wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

  Maybe to have a normal life, do normal things… she had never let herself even imagine that. But it would be better than this. Better than breaking into an empty house on a rainy night. Better than riding Joey Commoner’s motorcycle down some dark highway. Better than any future she could imagine for herself now that the monsters had taken over the world.

  * * *

  The house smelled like a stranger’s house. Broadloom, air freshener, old cooking. She felt uninvited, unwanted, criminal.

  Joey seemed to thrive on the sensation. His eyes were alert, his steps small and agile. The light the Newcombs had left burning was a lamp in the downstairs bedroom; it made long shadows through the doorway. Joey headed for this room first, where he pulled open dresser drawers and tossed their contents, picking out nothing in particular: a handful of twenty dollar bills, probably Mrs. Newcomb’s mad money; an empty keychain with a Volvo tag. Beth was mute, immobilized by her own guilty presence in a bedroom where she didn’t belong. Her eyes registered details she wished she could forget: the Japanese print over the bed, birds on ink-line trees; the oak dresser with cigarette burns clustered at one end; worst of all, Mrs. Newcomb’s nightgowns and Mr. Newcomb’s jockey shorts tumbled together and soaking in the contents of an overturned perfume bottle. Seeing all this was the real theft, Beth thought.

  She said, “This is too weird. I don’t like this.”

  “It was your idea.”

  “I know, but…”

  But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t listening. He was gone, vanished into the dimmer light outside the bedroom, and Beth was forced to hurry after or be left here with no company but her conscience.

  * * *

  The worst part was yet to come.

  She lost track of time as Joey rummaged through the house. He turned on no lights, seemed to navigate by instinct or animal vision. He wasn’t robbing the house so much as possessing it, Beth thought—making it his own through an act of violation. He was fucking it. No, raping it. He left his mark everywhere: tables overturned, doors flung open, closets stripped. She followed in a daze, inarticulate even in the space of her own skull, waiting for him to finish, waiting until they could leave.

  In a hallway closet, Joey found his prize, a palm-size camcorder—since when had he cared about video?—small enough to slip into his leather jacket, which he zipped up around it. Take it, she thought. Then, Christ, let’s go!

  She turned away. Turning, she saw red light wash shadows of raindrops against the wall… saw this light blink on and off and on again…

  Her terror began before she could pin a word on it and name the dreaded thing. She tugged Joey’s arm, almost pulled him off balance. “Joey, the police—a police car—”

  He took her by the wrist and pulled her away from the window. Things were happening too quickly now; there wasn’t time to think. She followed Joey out the back door into the rainy yard. Joey inched along the wall toward the corner of the garage. She kept a hand on his jacket.

  We’ll be arrested, Beth thought. Put on trial. Sent to jail.

  Or—

  Or something worse. Something new.

  Please let it be prison, Beth thought. Not some unhuman thing, bugs in the brain, alien punishment.

  Her breath hitched, and she wondered if she might begin to cry. But Joey took her hand and pulled her forward, and she was suddenly too busy for that.

  He jumped onto the motorcycle and kicked over the engine while Beth scurried on behind.

  From here in the shadow of the garage, protected from streetlights, perhaps invisible, Beth had a clear view of the cop car. It was parked at an angle in the street, not blocking the driveway. A Buchanan Sheriff’s Department black-and-white. There was no sound, only that relentlessly whirling dome light. It lit up the street. Red light under dripping eaves, red light spidering up tree trunks and disappearing in the leaves. Nobody had come out to watch—none of the neighbors in their yards or standing in open doorways. Maybe they already know what’s happening, Beth thought. Maybe they don’t have to look.

  The Yamaha’s engine screamed; Beth clung desperately to Joey and the saddle as they roared down the Newcombs’ driveway. Now Beth saw the man inside the cruiser, at least the shadow of his face as he turned to track their motion. The cop car had been silent, not even idling; Beth expected its siren to howl, motor gun, tires squeal, perhaps the beginning of a chase, dangerous on these steep wet streets…

  But the car remained silent, and Joey leaned into the curve as he pulled out of the driveway, came up short, and stopped with one foot on the road, engine idling—what was he doing? Go! Beth thought.

  And then she understood: It was a dance between Joey and the cop.

  Beth looked at the cop through his car window and knew from his joyless but placid expression that nothing more was going to happen: no chase, no trial, no jail.

  Only this shadowy gaze… this observation.

  We know you. We know what you’re doing. A raw shiver ran up her spine.

  Arrest us! She aimed the thought at the cop car. Wave your gun! Yell! But there was only a dreadful silence behind the idling of the motorcycle engine.

  Then Joey twisted the throttle and the Yamaha roared downhill. Crime and punishment in the new world.

  Chapter 15

  Meeting

  Matt found Tom Kindle waiting in the empty hospital boardroom when he arrived. He had staked out a place by the window, lean and patient in his wheelchair.

  “You’re early,” Kindle observed.

  “So are you.”

  “Nurse wheeled me down before she went off shift. There’s hardly any staff in this building anymore—you notice that, Matthew?”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Gets to be like a ghost town at this hour. Kind of scary after the sun goes down. Makes you wonder what they’re all doing w
ith their time. Watching Dallas reruns and eating popcorn, I guess.”

  Matt wasn’t in the mood. He took a notebook out of his briefcase and propped it on the podium, open to the page on which he had outlined every potential emergency and worst-case scenario he had been able to imagine (and there was no shortage) in the last month or so. He checked the clock: 7:30. Meeting was set for eight.

  Kindle followed his look. “Almost time… assuming anybody shows up.”

  “Well, there’s us,” Matt said.

  “Uh-huh. You know, I asked Nurse Jefferson how many people… you know, how many made the decision she did. She said, ‘Almost everybody.’ I said, ‘Well, then, who didn’t?’ She said, ‘About one in ten thousand.’”

  “Really? How would Nurse Jefferson know?”

  “Shit, Matthew, how do any of these people know the things they say? My theory is they’re all hooked into the same library. ESP or something, but I’m only human—I have to guess. Last night I asked the janitor the same thing when he came down the hall. How many people turned down this wonderful offer of eternal life? He leaned on the waxer and said, ‘Oh, about one in ten thousand.’ ”

  “Tom, the night janitor on your floor is Eddy Lovejoy. He’s mute and nearly deaf.”

  “Mm? Well, he isn’t anymore.”

  They looked at each other.

  Kindle said, “What do you really expect to accomplish here tonight? One in ten thousand—so we get maybe five people if everybody who ought to show up really does. Maybe six or seven if the notice got as far as Coos Bay or Pistol River. A pitiful handful, in other words. So what’s the point?”

  “The point,” Matt said, “is that I mean to save Buchanan.”

  Kindle winced and shifted in his chair. “The world’s been hijacked, Matthew. The whole fuckin’ world. In the face of that, how do you propose to save one piddling little town?”