The Harvest

  Chapter 35

  Wounds

  Joey had been doing sentinel duty every night since they crossed the Snake, and he had learned how to listen to the dark.

  Every night, he made a fire to keep himself warm. It was spring and the days were often hot, but after dark the heat bled into the sky, the air grew cold, and the wind cut close to the bone.

  Make a fire too big, though, and the sound of it would obliterate every other sound. At first he burned windfall, roadside trash, loose barn boards or stick furniture from wasteland shacks abandoned long before Contact. Pine knots in the old wood exploded like gunshots, and their sparks threatened to ignite the dry sage beyond the blacktop highway. It was Colonel Tyler who showed him how to light the little cans of Sterno jelly, and Joey had begun to collect them from the sports-supply and general-merchandise shops in the towns they passed. The Sterno burned almost silently, just a whisper as the wind whipped the flames. It gave off precious little heat—with luck, enough to warm his hands. But in his leather jacket he was generally okay.

  The campers were lined up outside the Connor house, and Joey sat minding his Sterno fire on the concrete drive at Abby Cushman’s door, listening.

  He had honed his listening skills quickly. The world might seem empty, but Joey knew it wasn’t. There were animals, for one thing. Dogs: ex-pets, maybe, learning how to survive in the wild; or wild dogs; or wolves—he had heard some howling the last couple of nights. And people. It was amazing, the variety of noises people made on a still night. These camper-trailers had thin walls, and he often heard the murmur of night talk. People talking to themselves, talking in their sleep. Or rolling over in bed, rocking the RV a little. Maybe somebody trotting into the house to use a toilet; somebody else, restless, stepping outside to look at the stars.

  Tonight he tried to calm himself, to make his ears come alive.

  But he couldn’t help rerunning his encounter with Beth.

  It was stupid, what she had said. Joey knew what went on in this camp, especially at night. He knew all about Beth and what Beth did at night: slept alone, mostly; snuck over to the doctor’s RV sometimes.

  Which was bad enough. The mystery of Beth was that he simultaneously wanted her and didn’t. Sometimes just looking at the way she moved across the tarmac in her blue jeans was enough to give Joey a raging hard-on. Other times she was as appealing as a day-old cut of meat. Sometimes he hated to think about her; sometimes he hated to think of anyone else thinking about her.

  He guessed she was fucking the doctor; and as bad as that was, he had begun to live with the idea.

  But the thing she had told him tonight—her dirty comments about Colonel Tyler—

  No.

  It was impossible. Colonel Tyler, Joey thought, was like an avenging angel, a pure and powerful force from far beyond the limits of this ratty trailer caravan. It was Colonel Tyler who had come into the ruins of Buchanan with clean clothes and a pistol on his hip and asked to talk to Mr. Joseph Commoner. It was Tyler who had trusted Joey to walk the perimeter, Tyler who had trusted him with a gun.

  The idea that the Colonel would stoop to some furtive little night fuck with a nonentity like Beth—it was obscene, and he didn’t believe it.

  But the night wore on, and the moon began to rise, and the new Artifact radiated a pale light of its own, and Joey heard Beth’s door ease open—the whine of the hinges above the moth-flutter of the Sterno flame—and he stood and took three silent steps to the corner of Abby’s camper, helplessly curious, and watched Beth moving, a shadow, to the front door of the Connor house and inside.

  Probably she was just using the toilet. But Joey itched with the insult of what she had told him, and he circled around the house to the side, to the window where Colonel Tyler’s light was still burning. The blind was down, but Joey put his face to the glass and was able to capture an angle of vision where the blind gapped against the sill. Colonel Tyler sat motionless in a chair. His pistol rested on the arm.

  Joey touched his own pistol, snug against his belt. He knew the Colonel couldn’t see him, that the lamp and the blind would have made a mirror of the window on a night this dark, but his face was hot with shame and suspicion and his heart was beating wildly.

  He saw Colonel Tyler look toward the door, saw his lips move but couldn’t make out the words.

  The door was at the wrong angle and Joey wasn’t able to see who had arrived… but who else could it be?

  He began to take small, sharp breaths.

  Colonel Tyler spoke, paused, spoke again.

  Joey registered these images but ceased to think about them. He couldn’t think any longer; could only watch.

  Now Beth moved into his range of vision. She was dressed too lightly for the weather. She was blushing a little. She looked nervous and aroused, her — hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

  She came and stood beside Tyler’s chair. Tyler didn’t move. Beth spoke. Words inaudible. She reached for Tyler’s huge hand and took it in her own. She put his hand on her blouse, on her breast, and moved against it in a way that seemed to Joey brutally obscene.

  Joey took his pistol out of his belt and hurried to the front of the house.

  * * *

  Once it was obvious why Beth had come, Tyler felt in control of the situation.

  She wasn’t much different from the hundreds of such women Tyler had hired at various times in his life, and there was nothing very surprising, he thought, about her presence tonight. Apparently he had inherited more than a gavel from the deposed Matt Wheeler.

  She put his hand against her blouse and he felt the shape of her breast, the hard nugget of the nipple. He admired the sight of his hand there, the creviced skin against the flimsy cloth.

  He stood up and pressed her against him. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was tilted back, her eyes half-closed, expecting a kiss. Tyler didn’t kiss—it was a dirty habit. Instead, he tangled his right hand in her hair and pulled.

  Her eyes widened. He warned her not to speak, not to say anything. He didn’t like women who talked.

  He pressed his hips against her, put his left hand under her blouse and explored. He pulled her head back until her throat was exposed in a fine white curve. She wasn’t sure what to make of the pain, seemed to hover between arousal and fear.

  Her blue jeans were closed with a row of buttons. Tyler had opened two of them when Joey kicked open the door.

  * * *

  Colonel Tyler had never been wounded in combat—he had never experienced combat firsthand—and he was surprised when the bullet hit him.

  There was pain and anger but first of all, above all else, an enormous surprise, as if it were an act of God, a causeless momentum that tumbled him backward.

  He caught himself against the recliner with his right hand. The left hand, his left arm, in fact, wouldn’t answer to the helm. It felt as if someone had cut off the arm and replaced it with a fleshy, useless slab of rubber. There was blood all over his shoulder.

  Beth was still standing, though the shot must have come very near her head. Tyler realized that she was screaming, that the sound was exterior to him.

  “Move away,” Joey was telling her—the Colonel recognized Joey’s petulant whine. “Get out of the way.”

  Tyler braced his hip against the recliner and reached for his own pistol.

  He had loaded it earlier tonight. He had meant only to touch its cold steel against his forehead, perhaps taste the barrel with his tongue, as was his habit. Never to pull the trigger. Sissy always talked him out of that. But now someone else had pulled a trigger, someone else had shot him. Joey had shot him.

  He grasped the pistol and swiveled around.

  One foot slid against the polished oak floor and Tyler bumped to a sitting position with his back against the recliner. Joey must have tracked this motion as a fall, or ignored it altogether; his attention was still on Beth. To the Colonel’s eyes Joey looked grotesque, inflated with jealousy to bullfrog proportions.

/>   “Move aside,” Joey repeated, and Beth seemed finally to understand; she took two steps toward the window and turned to look for Tyler. Perhaps she saw the blood for the first time; her eyes widened and Tyler wondered if she would scream again. Beth looked a little ridiculous, too, with her smooth belly showing through the gap of her unbuttoned pants.

  Joey looked at the Colonel and the Colonel shot him in the head.

  There was no precision or elegance in the act, only the raising of the pistol and the pulling of the trigger and Joey falling down and convulsing for a horrible thirty or forty seconds before he died.

  Beth went to Joey and knelt above him and made a choked sound at the sight of his injury. Her hand rested on the pistol Joey had dropped beside him. Colonel Tyler watched that hand. Watch that hand, Sissy instructed him. Sissy was a sudden, nebulous presence hovering near the ceiling of the room, but Tyler didn’t look for her, merely followed her advice, watched Beth’s hand on the pistol.

  She took up the pistol and turned it toward Tyler.

  Was she offering it? Threatening him with it? The expression on her face was unreadable, opaque with grief. There was no way to calculate the danger.

  So Colonel Tyler shot her, too.

  * * *

  At the sound of the third gunshot, Matt ran to his trailer and collected his Gladstone bag.

  Kindle tried to restrain him at the door. “It’s stupid to go in there, Matthew. We don’t know what happened. Matthew! Just wait, for Christ’s sake!”

  Matt ignored him, ran past him to the Connor house in its patch of moonlight, and inside, where it was dark.

  Chapter 36

  Prophylaxis

  The girl was a mistake, Sissy said.

  Colonel Tyler, weak with blood loss, climbed from the floor into the recliner and gave his mother’s ghost a weary look.

  It was unusual for Sissy to be out after dark. But she was not merely present tonight, she was almost tangible. Her layered skirts billowed around her large body; her skin was fish-white and her eyes were crazed and attentive. If I walked over to that corner of the room, Tyler thought, I bet I could touch her.

  You shouldn’t have shot the girl. You might have been able to explain about the boy. You might have gotten away with that. But not the girl. “You told me to watch her hand.” Nor to shoot her. “She picked up the gun!” She wouldn’t have used it.

  Tyler began an answer but stopped as the door opened.

  Matthew Wheeler stood there with his Gladstone bag and a dazed expression, obviously struggling to sort out what had happened. His eyes flickered from body to body—Joey, Beth, Tyler.

  Tyler raised his pistol, an action that was almost reflexive, and aimed it at the doctor.

  Now listen to me, Sissy said. If you don’t do this exactly right, everyone will come in here. Everyone will come nosing into this room to see what you did. They’ll know what you are. And we’ll be lost. So listen to me. Listen.

  “Colonel Tyler,” the doctor said, “I can’t treat anyone if you’re pointing a gun at me. Let me come in.”

  But his attention was obviously on Beth. The girl’s breathing was wet and loud in the room. It reminded Tyler of the sound bathwater made as it ran down the drain.

  Tyler held the pistol firmly and listened to Sissy’s urgent whispers. Then he answered the doctor.

  “Come in. Close the door behind you.”

  “I’ll come in if you put down the gun.”

  “You’ll come in or I’ll shoot you, Dr. Wheeler. It’s as simple as that.” Wheeler hesitated, but he entered the room after another long look at Beth.

  “Now close the door,” Tyler said.

  Wheeler did so. He moved to lean over the girl, was fumbling with his bag, but Tyler said, “No—not yet.”

  The doctor’s irritation was obvious. “She needs attention. She’s badly injured.”

  “Of course she is. I shot her. Now go to the window.” Wheeler looked skeptically at the pistol.

  “I won’t hesitate to use this. Does it look like I would? We have two corpses here already.”

  “One corpse,” Wheeler said. “She’s still alive.”

  Tyler nodded impatiently and took more silent advice from Sissy: He leaned forward, though it hurt his bad arm, and trained the pistol on the girl. “So she is. I guess you want to keep it that way. Now go to the fucking window.”

  Wheeler stood erect, finally, and did as he was told. “Pull up those blinds. All the way. Good. Now open the window. Good. And turn off the lamp.”

  “I’ll need the lamp to work.”

  “You’re not working yet, Dr. Wheeler. Turn off the lamp, please.”

  Wheeler switched it off. Now the room was dark, no light but moonlight and a fainter, bluer radiance that might have come from the direction of the human Artifact. Tyler looked out at the space beyond the Connor house. The last RV in the caravan, Bob Ganish’s big Glendale, was framed in the window.

  “I want everyone assembled where I can see them.”

  “How am I supposed to manage that, Colonel?”

  “Use your well-known powers of persuasion. Tell them I have a gun on you.”

  Wheeler leaned through the open window and signaled to Abby Cushman, who was standing not far away.

  Sissy was distracted by the light from the Artifact, which flared brighter as Tyler watched.

  That mountain may be ready to rise.

  Good, Tyler thought. Then we can go to Ohio.

  And no one will know what we are.

  Except these few.

  Who mustn’t go with us.

  How to stop them?

  You know how.

  It’s an awful lot of people to kill, Tyler thought. We’ll be clever, Sissy said. We’ll think of something.

  * * *

  Matt waved over Abby Cushman and told her to assemble everyone in the space between this window and Bob Ganish’s Glendale. “Have them stand there where the Colonel can see them, Abby.”

  She stood a wary distance from the window, squinting at him. “What’s this all about? Matt? Is anyone hurt?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  She took another step forward. Her eyeglasses reflected the moonlight. She looks like an owl, Matt thought. A frightened owl.

  He thought of vaulting this windowsill, joining her outside and leaving the Colonel to tend his own injury. But Beth was under the Colonel’s gun and badly hurt. He heard her terrible, stertorous breathing. He wanted to finish with all this menacing foolishness and get on with the business of helping her.

  Abby came close enough to see Tyler in the dim room, the pistol aimed at Beth.

  “Dear God.”

  “Just do as he says, Abby. Get everybody in one place. And try not to worry.”

  She pressed her fist to her mouth but nodded and turned away. “Now stand back from the window, Dr. Wheeler,” Tyler said. He did so. “May I treat the girl?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She may be dying.”

  “Probably,” Tyler said. “But let’s get our ducks in order first.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tyler!” It was too much.

  The Colonel gestured with his pistol at Beth’s prostrate body. “If you mean to be uncooperative, it would be easy to resolve the issue right now.”

  Looking at Tyler was like peering into an open cesspool. In a single day this man had killed two people, and he might be killing a third by delaying medical attention. Obviously, some internal restraint had snapped. Obviously, Tyler was mad.

  It was vital to watch what he said, to weigh his words before he spoke. “I’ll need more than what I have in my bag. I’ll need bandages—”

  “In due course. Be quiet.”

  The Colonel’s attention was focused beyond the window. Abby had begun lining up people in front of the aluminum moonglow of Ganish’s RV. Matt counted them off impatiently. Abby, Bob Ganish, Chuck Makepeace, Paul Jacopetti… the count seemed short.

  Kindle, he thought. Where wa
s Tom Kindle?

  But wait: Kindle had come back into camp only an hour ago; Tyler wouldn’t expect to see him in the line up. As far as the Colonel knew, Tom Kindle was still absent.

  Okay—nevertheless, where was he?

  Abby gestured for his attention.

  “Go back to the window,” Tyler said. “Slowly.”

  He did.

  “Wave her over.” Matt waved. “Tell her there’s someone missing.” Matt gave Tyler an involuntary stare. Somehow he knows about Kindle. Tyler said, “The old woman—Miriam Flett.”

  * * *

  He relayed the message to Abby.

  “I know!” Abby said. She stood at the window with her eyes fixed on Tyler’s pistol, obviously hating it, hating him. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Miriam’s in her trailer. We can’t wake her up.”

  Christ almighty! The last thing he needed was another casualty—and where was all this light coming from?

  “Very well,” Tyler was saying. “Tell Mrs. Cushman to take everyone inside that Glendale and close the door.”

  Abby said, “I can hear you quite well, Colonel Tyler. For how long?”

  “Until further notice.”

  “Go on, Abby,” Matt said. “Everything will be fine. I promise.”

  She stalked off and herded three sullen figures into the RV: Ganish, Chuck Makepeace, Jacopetti, the last sullen remnant of Buchanan, Oregon. The door closed behind her, and Matt felt suddenly much more alone.

  He was about to turn away from the window when his eye tracked a glimmer of moonlight (or whatever peculiar light this was) at the right rear corner of the Glendale. He might be mistaken… but it looked like the barrel of Tom Kindle’s rifle.

  Had Tyler seen it?

  Apparently Tyler had not. Tyler’s uniform was sodden with blood. He must be weak, Matt thought. He ought to be in shock, by all rights. There was something more than frightening about the Colonel’s calm facade; it was almost supernatural.