A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

He has to do something.

  There is a set of drawers against the wall with medical supplies on top. He grabs a roll of bandages. He will stuff the bandages into her mouth and let her choke to death. Sure, it won’t be subtle, but he’s here and he’s not going to leave without getting the job done. He can’t risk her waking up and remembering what happened.

  He wads the bandages up into a ball.

  Before he can open her mouth, the machine monitoring her heartbeat goes crazy.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Ben hits the staircase, not wanting to use the elevator if there is a fire. He pictures the ground floor ablaze and people trying to reach the roof. He pictures helicopters airlifting patients to safety. He imagines windows being broken and ladders being raised and water being pumped into every room. His imagination throws all these things at him, and in every scenario Erin is burning.

  He leaps the final few stairs, then pulls open the door to the intensive care ward and sees right away that this is where the commotion is centered. He rushes into the corridor, almost knocking over a guy in a baseball cap, his shoulder instantly throbbing from the impact, but he doesn’t look back to see if the guy is okay. None of the overhead sprinklers have been activated. They are designed to go off where they detect heat, which means the fire hasn’t spread to this area yet, even though the corridor is foggy with smoke. He can’t see any flames. People are coughing. People are calling out. The fire department will be on its way, but it’s going to be at least a few minutes. People are saying “Stay calm, stay calm.” He reaches the nurses’ station and can hear another alarm, this one almost drowned out by the fire alarm.

  He reaches Erin’s room. The second alarm is louder in here. It’s coming from the machine monitoring her vitals. If a machine could have emotions, this one’s would be described as angry as hell.

  Erin is dying. He is losing her, and nobody knows.

  He races into the corridor. The doctors and nurses are busy moving patients. None of them can hear Erin’s alarm. He grabs the attention of the nurse nearest him. A young blond guy who looks like he should still be in school. “You have to help,” he says. “The alarms are going off in her room.”

  “There’s no need to panic,” the nurse says. “It’s the fire alarm, if we all stay calm and—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about!” Ben yells, dragging the nurse back towards the room. “You have to help me.”

  “Okay, okay, stop pulling me.”

  He relaxes his grip. The nurse follows him to Erin’s room. “Oh no,” he says, and pushes past Ben. He puts his fingers against her neck. Then he looks back at Ben. “Get anybody you can,” he says. “Tell them we have a code blue.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “Go!”

  So he goes. He grabs the next medical professional he can see, this one a doctor with slicked-back hair and bushy eyebrows so thick they look like they’re growing on top of his glasses. “There’s a code blue,” he says, then pushes the doctor in the direction of Erin’s room. Then there’s a nurse and another doctor, but by now others are becoming aware. Within thirty seconds, half a dozen people are working on her.

  A doctor grabs him by the arm. “You’re the cop, right?”

  “Can you help her?”

  “You can help us. Figure out where the hell that smoke is coming from and let us do our job.”

  He dives into the smoke. Still none of the sprinklers have been activated. There’s a door to his right where the smoke is at its thickest. A doctor is trying to open it with one hand, while in his other he’s holding a fire extinguisher. Ben puts his hands on the door and tests to see how hot it is—he can remember something along the lines that if it’s hot, he shouldn’t open it, then he remembers that if there’s smoke coming out from under the door, he also shouldn’t open it because the smoke is toxic—but then he figures there’s plenty of smoke out here anyway. He puts his hand on the handle, and when he turns it, it doesn’t do anything. It feels like all the innards have been taken out.

  “What’s behind there?” Ben asks, then notices the sign on the door. It’s the bathroom.

  The doctor can’t answer. All he can do is cough.

  “Give me the fire extinguisher,” Ben says. “Grab some wet towels and lay them along the floor to block the smoke.”

  The doctor hands him the extinguisher, then coughs some more and collapses. So much for getting any towels. The fire engines can’t be too far away. At least he hopes so.

  Using the extinguisher like a battering ram, Ben smashes it into the handle. The handle comes off after the first blow and it’s like he thought—the central piece has gone. This is deliberate. His lungs are starting to fill with smoke. He’s becoming light-headed. The doctor is on the verge of passing out. He punches the fire extinguisher into the door, and after a couple of blows the wood cracks. He gives it a few more, then he kicks at the cracks. The door folds inwards. Smoke rushes out. It feels like it’s coming from the desert. His eyes start to water. He pushes the door open the rest of the way. The room is full of fire. He points the extinguisher into the heart of it and pulls the trigger. White powder sprays out, but it’s not enough. He moves forward but there are too many flames. It’s a losing battle.

  A nurse appears next to him. She points a fire extinguisher into the blaze. They walk farther into the room. A third person shows up. They begin to get on top of it. The fire alarm is still going. The sprinkler system isn’t working in the bathroom, because it’s been disabled: someone has pulled the spout away from the wall and pointed it at one of the sinks, so instead of the water spraying out in an arc to cover the flames, it’s running straight down the pipe and into the basin.

  They kill the rest of the flames. He can’t stop coughing.

  The timing of all this, he knows what’s just happened.

  Somebody tried to kill Erin.

  The same somebody who threw her from the rooftop.

  Out in the corridor someone is helping the doctor who collapsed. Ben makes his way past them. In Erin’s room the doctors and nurses are still working on her. He stands in the doorway coughing. There’s nothing he can do but watch.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Monday does what it does best—it arrives quicker than any other day. Joshua is sure the physics behind that is something neither Albert Einstein nor Stephen Hawking could get a handle on.

  He doesn’t need the alarm clock to wake him, because he’s hardly slept all night. It’s seven when he drags himself out of bed. He dresses in the school uniform they shopped for last week and watches TV for an hour, flicking between the news that he isn’t really interested in and cartoons made for preschoolers. When he sits at the breakfast table he has no appetite. He leaves his bowl of cereal untouched and divides his time between staring at the food and staring at the wall.

  “You really should try to eat,” his mom says.

  “I’m too nervous.”

  “You have every right to feel nervous,” she says. “Anyone transferring to a new school would feel nervous.”

  “I know.” He puts a spoon into his cereal and stirs it around a little, then tries to balance the spoon to see if he can get it to stand on its own. “But knowing that doesn’t make me any less nervous.”

  “The day will go fast, and the next thing you’ll know you’ll be back home, and remember what I promised you?”

  He wants to learn to drive, but first he has to pass the written test, but before that there is something even simpler he needs to learn: to ride a bike. He must be one of the only sixteen-year-olds in the country who doesn’t know how.

  “I miss Dad,” he says. The house has been set off balance in every way since his dad was killed. Joshua can no longer hear his father’s footsteps, his voice, his laughter, he can’t hear him singing in the shower or swearing at a quick-fix five-minute job that takes two hours. He can’t smell his dad’s aftershave in the mornings, can’t smell the odor of fast food that would absorb into his clothes when he
couldn’t make it home in time for dinner, can’t feel the weight of his dad’s hand on his shoulder when he would ask him about his day. He can’t taste his dad’s cooking anymore, which he ate usually every other night because his parents took turns in the kitchen, and he actually thought his dad was the better cook. He has his sight, but there is a sensual void not having his dad around, and he feels it the way he imagines an amputee feels a missing limb.

  “I miss him too,” his mom says, and he knows she does. As much as he misses him, his mom must miss him even more, and he realizes that other than going back to work, his mom has had no other life. She hasn’t seen friends. Hasn’t gone out. She’s dedicated all her time to him. Sometimes he can hear her crying during the night, trying her best to be quiet. He knows she’s being strong for him, and he’s grateful, because her strength is stopping him from curling up into a ball and breaking down every minute of the day. She’s being strong for him, and he needs to repay her by being strong for her.

  Starting now.

  “You’re right,” he says. “About school. It will go fast, and I know it’s going to be great.”

  “You’ll make friends in no time,” she says.

  “I know. I know I said I’m nervous, but I’m excited too,” he says, which isn’t true at all. He’s just nervous, but his mom doesn’t need to hear that. Not anymore. “I’m actually looking forward to going.”

  “Good, Joshua, that’s really good.”

  He picks up his spoon and eats his breakfast, which makes his mom look a little happier, and then it’s time to leave.

  There’s lots of traffic on the roads—typical for this time of day. The one thing he’s discovered about traffic is that it’s less annoying when you’re blind. There are lots of students about, some walking, some on bikes, others waiting at bus stops, all wearing school uniforms of various colors. His mom has told him that you could drive a circle through this and the neighboring suburbs and you’d pass primary schools, secondary schools, and high schools all within walking and biking distance of each other, a dozen of them in total. He sees kids who can be only five or six years old walking with their parents holding their hands. He sees ten-year-olds on bikes carrying bags almost as big as they are. The young boys and girls look full of energy and ready to ask questions and run into traffic and chase cars. The high school students look moody and cool, totally apathetic and as though they wished they were anywhere else but here. Some of those older ones are wearing the same uniform he is. He wonders if he’ll be in the same class with any of them, whether or not he’ll become friends with some of them.

  When they’re two blocks from the school campus, he asks his mom to pull over.

  “You’re embarrassed to have me drop you off at the gates?”

  “Umm . . . it’s not that . . . it’s—”

  “I’m pulling your leg,” she says, and brings the car to a stop. She smiles at him while he reaches into the backseat for his bag. “You’re going to be okay,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I’ll be back to pick you up when school finishes.”

  “I can walk home,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

  “I’ll be here,” she says.

  “It’s not that far. It’ll only take me an hour at the most. Please, Mom, I want to walk home. I think it will be good for me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Completely. I want to do this.”

  She gives him a smile almost as big as the one she had at the hospital when his bandages came off.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Ring me if you change your mind.”

  He opens the door. “It’s going to be okay,” he tells her, the same words Principal Anderson said to him when all this began, and he’s starting to think Mrs. Templeton got it right. Things will never be the same, but eventually they might just be okay. “Really, it will be.”

  “Be careful,” she says.

  “I will be.”

  “And call me if you change your mind, or get lost.”

  He climbs out of the car and begins walking, turning around to briefly wave good-bye. It isn’t long before he’s surrounded by the noise of the schoolyard, the buzz of a thousand students talking and laughing and arguing. Some of the kids start to take note of him, but no one says anything. He goes to the administration block. He talks to a receptionist and she tells him to take a seat. The bell goes off to mark the start of the first period. A few minutes later, Miss Franklin appears.

  She gives him a big Monday-morning smile and looks even more full of energy than she did on Friday. “Nervous?” she asks.

  “A little, yeah.”

  “Understandable. How did you get on over the weekend?”

  He’d spent time over the weekend going through the textbooks for his classes and trying to play catch-up. Roger helped him. The school year was two months old, and even though some of the curriculum he had already learned at Canterbury, there was plenty that was new territory for him. He’s studied so much over the last two weeks that his brain wants to explode from it all.

  “It was okay,” he says. “And my tutor is happy to keep helping me.”

  “Remember, all the teachers here are aware of the situation. Nobody is expecting any miracles, and none of them are going to be calling on you in class to answer something in front of the other students. It’s not our goal to embarrass you, Joshua, but to help you. If you’re stuck on anything, don’t be frightened to put your hand up and ask, or hold back at the end of the lesson and ask then if there’s time. Everybody here wants the best for you.”

  “Okay,” he says, and it’s a relief to hear all that.

  “You ready to go to your first class?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Remember, any problems you come and see me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She leads him into another wing and down a corridor where there are lockers on one side and classroom doors spaced out on the other. He wonders if the Canterbury School for the Blind looks the same. The lockers have stickers on them and names and dates and symbols scratched into them; the floor is scuffed by the hundreds of feet that walk on it every day; and there are posters on the walls reminding students to wash their hands and not to litter. Every surface looks like it needs a fresh coat of paint. There are drinking fountains spaced out every twenty yards and bathrooms every forty. There is nobody else around. Their footsteps echo down the hall. Miss Franklin knocks on a door near the end of the corridor and opens it and he suddenly thinks of Mrs. Templeton and the morning she pulled him from class. He follows Miss Franklin in. Thirty students all turn to look at him. Miss Franklin chats with the teacher. There is a murmur as some of the students talk among themselves, until the teacher asks them if their brains are so scrambled from the weekend they can’t remember how to be quiet. Then he looks at Joshua, then addresses the class.

  “Everybody, this is Joshua, who I told you about on Friday. Or do you prefer Josh?”

  “Josh is fine,” Joshua says.

  “Josh, this is everybody, and I’m Mr. Stone,” he says, and Mr. Stone looks athletic and young and the male counterpart to Miss Franklin. Perhaps they studied here at the same time. He has brown hair that’s eight or nine inches long tucked back behind his ears. He looks like he should be behind a guitar instead of in front of a blackboard. “You’ll find everybody here quite accommodating, wouldn’t you say, everybody?”

  There is the general murmur of forced consent.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Miss Franklin says, and she smiles at Joshua before disappearing.

  “So, Josh,” Mr. Stone says, smiling at him. “Welcome to our little neck of the woods. The students know a little bit about you, but how about you tell us a little bit more about yourself?”

  “Umm . . . sure, okay,” he says, and turns towards the class. He’s never looked out at a group of people before. Back in his old school, they had to give speeches, and he hated it. On days
when he knew they had to do it, he’d act sick at home, hoping he wouldn’t have to go to school—not that it ever worked. The only way he got through them was by pretending there were only two other people in the class. When you’re blind, that’s something you can do, but he can’t do that now. Not unless he closes his eyes, and even then he doesn’t think that would work. Somebody says something near the back that he can’t quite hear, and a couple of students laugh. “Umm . . . my name is Joshua Logan. I . . . I, umm . . . well, I used to go to another school but . . . umm . . . but now I go here.”

  He stops talking. The class looks at him expectantly. When he doesn’t add anything else, Mr. Stone takes over. “Well, I’m sure there’s more to tell, but how about we tackle our Monday morning and get some work done. Josh, why don’t you take a seat, there’s a desk down the back waiting for you.”

  He walks to the back of the room, feeling everybody watching him, some with curiosity, some with hostility, some with amusement, some with looks he hasn’t learned how to read yet. He takes a seat. He’s in the middle of the back row, there’s a girl to his left who keeps looking straight ahead, and a boy to his right who is running a fingernail over his desk back and forth, as if trying to scratch a hole through it.

  “Okay, class, it’s Monday morning, so you know what that means, right?”

  There’s a murmur of consent, and everybody reaches into their bags.

  “That’s right, it’s biology time,” Mr. Stone says, and Joshua figures he’s saying it for his benefit.

  Joshua reaches into his bag and flicks through the books. His heart beats fast and then almost stops. He can feel himself turning red. He puts his hand up.

  “What is it, Josh?”

  “Umm . . . I must have left my textbook at home.”

  Some of the other students laugh. Mr. Stone smiles. “No problem, Josh, I got a spare one here. Start handing this back, would you?” he says, and hands a textbook to the student at the front of the row, who hands it behind him and so on until the book reaches the student seated directly in front of Joshua, a boy much bigger than him, with short spiky hair and lots of pimples on his face. He hands the book back but doesn’t let it go. He mouths a single word, but Joshua doesn’t yet have the ability to lip-read. Joshua has to tug at the book to get him to release his grip. The boy sneers at him, then turns back towards the front of the class.