The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The hallway seemed colder without the overhead light. Maybe it was colder. Hadn’t been that warm to begin with, Matt thought. He helped Abby distribute blankets.

  Another huge crash shook the hallway, and another directly after it. Christ, Matt thought, what must it be like out there? He tried to picture an exterior world so transformed that Douglas firs flew through the air like javelins.

  At half past eleven there was a new and even louder crash, a rending roar that shook the foundation—the vibration seeming to come from beneath, up through the concrete, through the bedrock.

  “Lost part of the building for sure,” Jacopetti said. “Maybe a whole floor.”

  “You may be right,” Kindle said. He added into Mart’s ear, as nearly a whisper as conditions permitted, “I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble to cure this man.”

  Abby said, “I think I might scream.” She sat down, pale in the lantern light. “Fair warning, people.”

  We must be near the eye wall, Matt thought. A wall of wind harder than brick, wind become a substance: solid, deadly.

  He thought of that wind sheering at the broken stump of the hospital and prying at what was beneath—rooting for these few human lives like a terrier digging up a nest of field mice.

  The foundation shook again. Matt looked at his watch. Perversely, the battery had chosen this moment to die. The display was blank; when he rapped it, the watch said 13:91. “Abby? Do you have the time?”

  It was twelve twenty-five when the wind suddenly paused.

  * * *

  The freight-train roar faded gradually.

  The air stirred. Dust rose from the floor of the hallway and danced in the lantern light.

  “Eye of the storm,” Kindle said. “The building is exhaling”

  “My ears popped,” Abby said.

  Matt thought of gradients of air pressure steep as a mountain, the engine of the storm.

  “Worse,” Bob Ganish said. “My nose is bleeding.”

  There was a dreamlike quality to the stillness. Matt had heard that in the eye of a hurricane you could look up and see stars—it was that clear. He tried to imagine Buchanan, or the ruins of Buchanan, enclosed in a perfect rotating column of cloud… the moon shining on a landscape of wet rubble.

  Warmth, what remained of it, seemed to drain from the basement. Matt wrapped his blanket around himself and saw others doing likewise.

  Abby appeared hypnotized by the calm. “It’ll come again, won’t it? Just as hard. Maybe harder. And all at once. Like a fist. Isn’t that true?”

  Kindle moved onto Abby’s mattress and put an arm around her. “True, but then we’re through the worst of it. After that, Abby, it’s only a question of waiting.”

  Bob Ganish said, “I need some cotton for this nosebleed. I’m a bloody mess here.”

  Matt attended to it. In the dim light, the blood on Ganish s shirt looked dark. Shiny rust. He worked mechanically, still thinking about moonlight.

  “Oh,” Abby said sadly. “I can hear it… it’s coming back.”

  Matt breathed shallowly, listening. She was right. Here it came. That freight-train roar. It was advancing across the water, onto the land, marching uphill to Buchanan General. Impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Vast and ponderous and stupid and malicious. Leviathan.

  “Best sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said.

  My God, he marvelled. Listen to it come.

  * * *

  The Helper—anchored to the high ground where City Hall recently stood—had witnessed the destruction of the town.

  It assembled vision from disparate wavelengths, peering deeply into the storm. It saw what no mortal human could have seen.

  It saw the storm advance. It saw the ocean flood the lower reaches of the town; it saw tornadoes dipping from the dark shelf of the clouds.

  It stood in the calm center of the eye, seeing what Matt Wheeler had only imagined: moonlight shimmering on splintered tree stumps, loose bricks, battered truck bodies, fractured bridge abutments, fragments of drywall, road tar, torn shingles, torrents of rainwater, while the microscopic shells of Traveller phytoplankton hovered in the still air, a silver mist.

  Then the eye wall approached once more from the west, eclipsing the moon—a black horn of wind.

  The Helper saw Buchanan General Hospital as the eye wall devoured it.

  The storm had already sheered away the hospital’s roof and much of its third floor. This new impact was more than the weakened structure could withstand.

  Chunks of concrete whirled upward, trailing rust-red structural rods like severed arteries. Pieces of the hospital joined fragments of other buildings in a stew of airborne debris. Lab coats tangled with tree limbs, bedsheets embraced splintered glass.

  There were human beings in the hollow under the ruins of the building. But not even the Helper’s powerful eyes could see into the earth.

  * * *

  The building came down in a noise of wind and destruction so intense that Matt didn’t register it as a sound. He was simply battered by it. It knocked him down.

  He saw Abby screaming but he couldn’t hear her.

  The others shrank into their mattresses, making themselves small.

  The cafeteria ceiling collapsed. Fractured concrete poured through, the remains of the west wall of the building. Matt saw this clearly from the hallway through the open cafeteria doors. The doors were open because the storm wind, rushing through the lapsed ceiling, forced them open.

  If we had been in there, Matt thought, if we had stayed in the cafeteria—

  A gap had been opened to the tortured sky. The wind penetrated the hallway in a single terrible thrust. Tim Belanger took the brunt of the assault. He had laid out his mattress by the entrance to the cafeteria, a mistake. The wind—heavy with dust, wet, almost tarry—cracked his head against the wall and tossed him aside.

  The wind picked up the battery lanterns and threw them down the corridor. Tom Kindle managed to snag one, but the rest winked out as they struck the stairwell door. Kindle waved the single lantern, beckoning with it, shouting something inaudible.

  Matt fought his way upwind to Tim Belanger. The City Hall clerk was unconscious. Matt took a breath full of grit and dirty rain and began dragging Belanger away from the cafeteria, toward the faint beacon of Kindle’s lamp.

  Breathing was the hard part. Everything would be okay, Matt thought, if only he could extract enough oxygen from the moist sludge that had replaced the air. Every breath filled his mouth with grit and drove a dagger into his lungs. He fell into a rhythm of inhaling, hawking, spitting, exhaling. The dead weight of Belanger became an intolerable burden, and several times Matt considered leaving him behind. It would be the wise thing to do, he decided. Save yourself. Maybe Belanger was already dead. But his hands wouldn’t let go of the injured man’s arm. Traitorous hands.

  He bumped into Abby Cushman, who gestured left: a doorway. Matt pulled Belanger over the threshold. Kindle was braced against the wall, holding his lantern into the corridor; he saw Belanger and said, “That’s it! Matthew, help me close this door.”

  They wrestled it shut. Kindle hawked and spat a black wad onto the floor. “Grab that two-by-four, we’ll nail this thing shut. Then see how people are doing.” Kindle took a hammer from his carpenter’s belt. He drove nails into the framing of the door while Matt braced the two-by-four and struggled to clear his throat.

  This was some kind of furnace or plumbing room, from what Matt could see—concrete floor, exposed pipes, a huge water heater. The air in the room was dense with suspended particles, but it was relatively still. Eventually some of this garbage would settle out; in the meantime—“Any of you having trouble breathing, try wrapping a cloth over your nose and mouth.”

  Jacopetti, weakly: “This isn’t the linen cupboard.”

  “A hank of shirt or something. For those who feel they need it.”

  With the door barred, Matt set about investigating injuries. He took the lantern from Ki
ndle and called Beth to help. Tim Belanger first: the City Hall clerk beginning to recover from a bad blow to the head. His hair was sticky with blood, but the injury didn’t appear to be severe—as far as Matt could tell under these primitive circumstances.

  Miriam Flett was having trouble catching her breath, but so were they all. He encouraged her to spit if she needed to: “We’re not being formal tonight, Miriam.”

  She managed, “I can see that.” She held a ragged plastic shopping bag clutched in her left hand—the journals.

  Jacopetti had suffered some recurrence of his angina, but it wasn’t crippling—“That’s normal, right, Doc? I mean if a fucking building falls on you?”

  “I think we’re all doing pretty well.”

  “We don’t have blankets,” Abby said mournfully. She coughed, gagged, coughed again. “We don’t have anything.”

  “There’s water in that tank at the back,” Kindle said. “I checked this place before the storm. Maintenance guys used to come down here for their breaks. We got a card table around the corner and a coin machine full of candy bars.”

  “Do we have any change?” Abby asked.

  “No,” Kindle said. “But I got this hammer.”

  * * *

  The wind howled on. But the storm was breaking, Matt thought. That was the basic fact. They had come through the worst, and now the storm was wearing itself out on the heel of the continent. Morning would come in a few hours.

  Overhead, the wind still gnawed the raw ruin of the building; but the wind had begun to ease.

  Tom Kindle joined Matt, sat down wearily with his arms on his knees. Kindle had been a great strength, but he was starting to show his fatigue. His face was caked with dust; his hair was a gray-black tangle.

  “If the hospital’s gone,” Kindle said, “there can’t be much left of Buchanan.”

  “I guess not,” Matt said.

  “Knowing the sentiments of people, once this storm clears, we’ll probably be heading east.”

  “Probably.”

  “Pity about the town being gone.”

  Was it gone? Matt had avoided the thought. But it must be. What could stand up to the wind? Commercial Street: gone. City Hall: gone. The marina: washed out to sea.

  Dos Aguilas: gone. Old Quarry Park, a wilderness of mud and fallen trees.

  And his house, the house where he had raised his daughter, the house where Celeste had died. Gone. But—

  “That isn’t the town,” Matt said. The thought came to him as he spoke it, rising out of his fatigue and his sorrow. “The people in this room are the town. We’re the town.”

  “Then maybe the town survived after all,” Kindle said.

  Maybe it did, Matt thought. Maybe the town would live to see morning.

  Part Four

  The Harvest

  Chapter 25

  Traveller

  The boy had come a long way.

  He had the skinny body of a twelve-year-old, toughened by his time on the road. His eyes were blue, his hair a dusty brown. He wore jeans, a plain white T-shirt loose at the waist, and a fresh pair of high-top sneakers.

  He liked the sneakers. Laced tight, they braced his ankles. They felt good on his feet, a second skin.

  He rode an expensive Nakamura mountain bike he had found in a store window in Wichita. The bike had grown dusty as he pedaled north on 15, crossing the border from Utah into Idaho. Last night, camped at an Exxon station, the boy had cleaned the bike with a damp rag. He had oiled the freewheel and the brake calipers, the cables and derailleurs. He had tightened the chain and the crank arm and adjusted the bearings. This morning, the small Nak ran like a dream.

  The air was cool. The sky was a hard, glassy blue—the color of a marble he had once owned.

  The boy wheeled through sagebrush plains where Interstate 84 followed the Snake River, humming to himself, as absentminded as a bird. He liked the way the wind tossed his hair and snapped his T-shirt behind him like a flag.

  In eighty days, he had seen a great deal of the country. He had crossed the Mississippi at Cairo, rolled through Arkansas into Texas, and sheltered for three weeks in the empty city of Dallas while storms raged overhead. He had skirted the Mexican border at El Paso and headed north along the Rio Grande, then west again on 1-40 across the Continental Divide.

  He had pedaled through the immense deserts of the southwest, landscapes as large and strange as the moon. A cloudburst caught him in Arizona, filling the arroyos, spiking the arid hills with lightning and drenching him before he could find shelter. But he was never ill; he was never tired.

  Now he was looking forward to the Salmon River Mountains, some of the most impassable territory in the continental United States—a wilderness of larch and hemlock, cedar and spruce.

  At noon, he stopped at a nameless little farm town for lunch. He broke into a gas station cooler and pulled out two bottles of Grape Crush, drank one immediately and saved the second for later. In some towns, like this one, the electricity was still working—the soda was cool, if not icy. In the Handi-Mart next door he found TV dinners still preserved in a working freezer. That was unusual. The freezers didn’t always last without maintenance, even if the electricity was on. The TV dinners were past their best-by date, but only a little. The boy opened one and heated it in the store’s microwave oven. It tasted okay. He drank the second bottle of Grape Crush. It turned his lips purple.

  The boy carried some items in a bag attached to the rear of the bike. After lunch, he opened the bag and took out a hat—a khaki bush hat from a hunting-and-fishing store back east. It didn’t fit too well, but it kept the afternoon sun off his face and neck.

  He climbed onto his bike and pedaled down the white line, the precise meridian of the empty road. The wheel bearings sang a high, keen note into the silence.

  He passed irrigation farms, big Ore-Ida potato plantations gone brown in the absence of humanity, then more sage prairie as he followed the Snake westward.

  Near dusk, as he was thinking about breaking camp, the boy came around a slow curve into another tiny road town where a number of trucks and campers had parked in a string. He saw the motion of people among the vehicles.

  The boy realized he knew a few things about who these people were and where they were going.

  Their presence was troubling. It demanded a decision.

  Paths diverged here. One way: the Salmon River Mountains, a last dalliance before he went Home. The other way: a less certain future.

  It was perhaps not an accident that he had come across these people.

  The boy stood with his bike between his legs, frowning at the choice.

  Then he sighed and walked his bicycle to the nearest camper.

  * * *

  The camper was a dusty Travelaire. The rear door was open and an elderly woman sat in the doorway with a book across her knees. She wore a baggy cotton print dress and a blue quilt jacket over it. Her hair was gray and sparse. She was reading by the light of the low sun, squinting at the ricepaper pages of a King James Bible.

  She looked up at the tick of the Nakamura’s oiled bearings. The boy stopped a yard away. He stood beside his bicycle gazing at her.

  She gazed back.

  “Hello,” she said at last.

  Cautiously, the boy said, “Hi.”

  She set the book aside. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I was riding this way. From the east.”

  “Are you alone?”

  He nodded.

  “No mother? No father?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s too bad.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  It had been hours since lunch. He nodded.

  “I have some food,” the woman said. “Fresh eggs and cured beef. And a little stove to cook it over. Would you care to join me?”

  “All rig
ht,” the boy said.

  He followed her into the camper. There was a propane stove inside. She lit it and put a skillet over the flame. The camper began to warm up. The day had been sunny and fairly nice, but nights were cold this time of year. The boy looked forward to sleeping inside.

  He looked around the camper while she cooked. There wasn’t much to see. A few books, including the dog-eared Bible. A stack of scrapbooks that must have soaked up water at some time in the past—the covers were round, the pages wrinkled. Some clothes, unwashed. He sat at a small table, the folding kind.

  Eggs sizzled in the skillet. The woman hummed a tune. The boy recognized it. It was an old song. “Unforgettable.” Nat King Cole made that one famous.

  Long time ago.

  He waited while she said grace, then tucked into a plate of scrambled eggs. “Here’s the salt,” the woman said. “Here’s pepper. I’m boiling water for coffee. Do you drink coffee?”

  He nodded, mouth full.

  “I suppose I’ll have to introduce you around.” She picked at her own eggs. “We’re a travelling group. We’re going east. There are other people east. We’re from Oregon. The coast. There was a terrible storm, and then—oh, but it’s a long story. You can hear it all later. Tell me, are you tired?”

  “A little.”

  “You must have come a long way on that bicycle.” He nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll introduce you tonight. There’s a meeting. Sort of a town meeting. If you call us a town. We can leave early if you like, but I think people will want to know you’re here… My Lord, I don’t even know your name! Pardon my manners. I’m Miriam. Miriam Flett. And you are—?”

  “William,” he said.