A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Joshua’s body will be lying alongside the tracks. Blood will be all over his clothes, and his face will appear relaxed and his eyes will be open wide to the wonder of it all. It will take three police officers to hold his mom back, and perhaps they’ll need a fourth. She’ll collapse then, and the officers won’t be able to hold her up. She’ll lay on the ground with her forehead against it as her fists beat the pavement, and perhaps she’ll beat on Ben too for not having done enough to save her family. First she lost her husband and now she’s lost her son, and how can anyone move on after that? How can you possibly pick up the pieces of your life when those pieces are gone?

  Ben will stand next to Joshua’s body, wondering what he could have done differently. All that blood, all those tears, Michelle Logan screaming at him, saying he should have done more to protect her son, and she’s right, he should have.

  He can see it all playing out before it’s even happened.

  The blood. The screaming. The reactions.

  It’s all waiting for him over the next few minutes, but right now he’s still fifty yards away from the train tracks in the car with Vega; they haven’t even gotten to the scene yet. He hasn’t called Michelle yet either, but he knows those wheels are already in motion.

  There are no more furniture trucks. No more congested traffic. If only they had had more time. He thinks what they could have done differently, and there are some obvious answers. He thinks about Helen Archer, and wonders if she knew what her son was capable of. He tries placing her name again but can’t.

  They come to a stop behind the patrol car. There’s an officer talking to a woman in her eighties, gray hair pulled tightly into a bun, hands making big gestures, a steely look on her face.

  “Get the trains shut down,” Ben says to Vega, as he jumps out of the car. He runs up the slope and down the other side, Vega somewhere behind him on her phone. He slows down when he’s a few yards from Officer Walker. He can see legs in the grass, the flash of the school uniform. He was hoping . . . Well, he was hoping Walker was wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” Walker says.

  Ben doesn’t say anything. He reaches the body, praying this won’t be Joshua, that somehow, somehow, if he hopes hard enough, if he gives it everything he has, then . . .

  It isn’t Joshua.

  The knowledge hits him so hard and fast he stumbles in the stones. By wishing the body was somebody else, has he made it so? Has he fated somebody else? Then he remembers: Walker said two bodies.

  “Ambulance is on its way,” Walker says. “So is backup and forensics.”

  “Where’s—”

  “In line with us,” Walker says, “fifty yards further down,” he adds, nodding in the direction of the school.

  Vega catches up with him as he walks down the tracks. He swats at the sandflies that buzz past his face. The neighborhood sounds like it’s about to be overrun by grasshoppers.

  “That wasn’t Joshua,” she says.

  “No, but it’s somebody from his school,” he says. “Joshua is up ahead.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she says.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Back at Vincent’s house, you didn’t want to wait for backup, or a warrant, and I’m the reason we did.”

  She’s right. He wants to be able to tell her it’s okay, not to blame herself, but things would be different if they had broken into Archer’s house the moment they got there. He doesn’t say any of that. He doesn’t need to.

  “I’m sorry, Ben. I’m really sorry.”

  “You get the trains shut down?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And we’re setting up roadblocks at each intersection to make sure nobody walks down here. We’ll get him, Ben, I promise.”

  “I know we’ll get him.”

  “It doesn’t make sense for Archer to kill Joshua and leave his car behind.”

  Joshua’s body comes into view. Like last time, it’s the legs he sees first sticking out of the grass. Only these are in jeans, not the cheap polyester blend of a school uniform. And they’re longer than Joshua’s legs. He breaks into a jog. More of the body comes into view.

  It isn’t Joshua.

  The legs and the jeans belong to Vincent Archer.

  “What the hell?” Ben asks.

  “So where is Joshua?” Vega asks.

  “You hear that?” Ben asks.

  “There’s a train coming,” she says, looking down the tracks.

  “I thought you said you had the lines shut down.”

  “I did,” she says. “Maybe that driver hasn’t gotten the message.”

  “It’s going to ruin our crime scene,” Ben says.

  He hikes up the stony embankment to the tracks. Best he can do is run towards the train and wave his arms and hope the conductor will see him, but already he knows it will be impossible for him to stop in time. The train is going to blast through the scene and scatter some of their forensics into the breeze, and mix dust and dirt into the forensics that remain.

  He runs anyway, the train getting closer, and as he runs, he finally realizes why Helen Archer’s name is so familiar: It came up in the investigation when they were searching for Ruby Carter. Helen and her husband owned one of the cabins about five miles beyond the search zone where Ruby went missing.

  The train isn’t slowing down. He keeps waving his arms, and that’s when he sees him, Joshua, lying in the middle of the tracks fifty yards away with the train bearing down on him.

  Ben is no longer waving his arms. Instead he’s sprinting, desperate to reach Joshua before the train does, but already knowing there isn’t enough time.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Joshua hurts. He hurts from the blow he took to his head. His hands and knees hurt from where he fell. He hurts from Scott punching him. He hurts from being confused, from not knowing where he is. He hurts because his father is dead and there’s a curse picking off his family. He hurts because he saw Scott murdered in front of him.

  Most of all, he hurts from having his eyes removed.

  They were never really your eyes, he tells himself, which is true, but it comes as no consolation. He has a headache. In the hospital, when he had the itch, it felt so deep it couldn’t be scratched, like a splinter in his brain that couldn’t be pulled. Now something is pulling on that splinter. Maybe it’s the curse. It’s jiggling the splinter back and forth so quickly it’s producing a humming sound. He doesn’t know what kind of technique was used to remove his eyes—whether it was something surgical like a scalpel, or something crude and dirty like a melon baller. He’s too scared to raise his hands to his face to find out, too scared he will find a tangled mess of optic nerves and veins.

  He reaches up and can feel the bandaging around them—and suddenly it all makes sense—he’s in a hospital and the doctors are trying to help him. Only this doesn’t feel like a hospital bed, because the bed is lumpy. It feels like wood and stone, plus . . . isn’t that dirt he can taste? And why would a lumpy hospital bed be vibrating? The humming is getting louder. It’s turning into rumbling. He can hear dull-sounding cars and muffled sirens and somebody somewhere shouting.

  The rumbling gets louder.

  He rolls onto his back. He pulls at the bandage and it comes away, revealing the most beautiful sky he’s ever seen, and he’s relieved, so relieved that his eyes haven’t been taken away, that he can still see, that he doesn’t have to go back into the darkness. The bandage wasn’t a bandage at all, but a flap of his shirt that’s been torn away from the bottom, right up to the collar. Why was it torn?

  He isn’t sure. He closes his eyes. What is the last thing he can remember? The humming in his head is getting louder. The splinter gets pulled, and the memories start tumbling through the hole left behind. He remembers Scott wailing on him. The stranger showing up—only he wasn’t a stranger. He was the man from his dreams—the man with the fishing rod and the girl and the mountain bike. There are patches of memory that are missing after
he was dragged up to the tracks. That explains why his back is hot and sore, and could explain how his shirt got torn. There are glimpses of memory of stumbling along the tracks looking for help.

  He’s holding the knife that killed Scott in his left hand. He has no idea why. When he tries to sit up, he feels seasick. He rolls onto his side, sure he’s about to throw up.

  A horn blares so loudly he’s sure he’s going to start bleeding from the ears. The ground is no longer rumbling, but shaking. The stones are rattling.

  He looks up.

  Even though he’s never seen one, he knows exactly what it is barreling towards him. He rolls to his side and onto the stones as the train races by. He keeps rolling, down the bank and into the grass. Earlier he thought how strange it was that people fell asleep on train tracks, and perhaps this is how it happens—somebody knocks them out first. The knife is still in his hand. How did he get it from the man who was trying to kill him?

  He vomits, barely avoiding his hands. For the first time he notices a deep graze on the back of his left hand, and now that he’s noticed it, it hurts. He tears the flap of shirt off and uses it to wipe his mouth. The last carriage passes him by, the sound going with it, revealing a new sound. Somebody is coming. He can hear footsteps pounding, they sound muted and dull—in fact, everything does. The footsteps belong to the man who tried to kill him. They must. He’s coming to finish him off.

  He can see the man’s shadow. It’s moving across the ground. He holds his breath as the man leans down, and a moment later, a hand lands on his shoulder and tries to roll him over.

  This man killed Scott, and now he’s going to kill him.

  He has to protect himself.

  He rolls over and swings the knife.

  Straight into Uncle Ben’s throat.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The blood is warm and sticky and flows freely and Ben tries to hold on to it, tries to keep it in, knowing that once it hits the ground it will be too late . . . too late . . . just . . . hold . . . on . . . to . . . it. He looks at Joshua, who is almost unrecognizable, this kid with the big scared eyes who narrowly missed being hit by a train. There’s blood on Joshua’s hands and flecks of blood and vomit on his face. His shirt is all torn up, and he’s still holding the knife, holding it in Ben’s direction as if he wants to take another swing.

  The blood keeps flowing, like somebody turned a tap on full, and he thinks . . .

  Hell . . . he doesn’t know what to think.

  “Joshua,” he says, a spit bubble of blood forming on his lips and popping. He stumbles, one foot gets trapped behind the other, and a moment later he lands on his butt with his legs ahead, hands still tightly wrapped around his throat.

  All he has to do is hold on to the blood.

  All he has to do is bleed a little less.

  If Erin can survive falling from a rooftop, then surely . . .

  “Uncle Ben!”

  He opens his eyes. Joshua is moving towards him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ben doesn’t answer him. He can’t.

  Vega reaches them. She has her gun drawn. She points it at Joshua. “Put down the knife!”

  “But—”

  “Put it down,” she yells.

  None of this makes sense, and all of this is escalating at the same rate everything is disappearing, and Ben wants to sleep. How can he sleep with all this shouting going on? He can no longer hold on to his throat so tightly.

  “Put it down!” Vega says again, screaming at Joshua, who, for his part, is looking less feral and more petrified now.

  Footsteps pound the ground behind them. Somebody is coming. Probably Officer Walker. Or the Grim Reaper—he must be in a hurry with all that’s going on around here. Joshua puts the knife down and moves away from it.

  “Stay right where you are,” Vega says, and holsters her gun. She moves to the knife to secure it.

  Ben no longer has the strength to stay sitting. He falls onto his back and looks up at the darkening sky. The stars don’t come out. Vega comes into view.

  He wants to tell Vega that it was an accident. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t want to die. That he doesn’t blame her for the decision she made back at the house that delayed them, because it’s his fault for not trusting his gut and kicking in the door and shaving ten minutes off the investigation. It’s his fault, and Mitchell’s too, because everything they’ve done has led to this. Perhaps this is karma. He wants to tell her to tell Erin he loves her, and that he was thinking about her in this moment.

  “Hang in there, Ben,” Vega says. “Promise me you’ll hang in there.”

  He promises nothing.

  Officer Walker appears. He pulls off his shirt. “Ambulance is on its way,” he says, then balls up the shirt and crouches down. He pushes it hard against the wound. “Hold on, Detective,” he says, and then he says something else, and Vega says something else too, but he can’t hear them anymore.

  It’s okay now, Ben wants to say, but can’t. I feel fine, he wants to add. It’s true—he does feel fine. False alarm, everybody. He’s going to be okay. He needs a nap, that’s all, a little shut-eye and then he’ll be as right as rain.

  He watches the light disappear from the sky.

  There are still no stars.

  FORTY

  Joshua is shaking. It wasn’t that long ago that he was sweating and destroying sandflies against his forearm with his hand. Now he’s cold. A man and a woman are kneeling over his uncle. The man has his shirt balled against the side of Uncle Ben’s throat. The woman is holding on to Uncle Ben’s hand, telling him to stay with them. He can see a thin mist of dirt in the air, brought up from the ground by the train.

  You did this, Joshua thinks. You stabbed your uncle in the throat and now he’s going to die.

  Or maybe he’s dead already.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he says, and if they can hear him they don’t acknowledge it. He can see his uncle’s face, how pale it is, his eyes open and staring. The only signs of life are his twitching fingers—and even that might not be a sign of life, but nerves firing after death. He’s read that that’s a thing. His hearing is returning. He can hear sirens. An ambulance comes to a stop by the tracks, its doors fly open, and two paramedics sprint towards them, each of them carrying bags.

  “Move aside,” one of them says, and the two officers helping Uncle Ben make way. The paramedics talk quickly to each other using incomprehensible medical jargon. They pull instruments from their bags that Joshua can’t identify. More police cars arrive. An officer is carrying a stretcher towards them. A cell phone is ringing. It’s coming from Uncle Ben’s pocket.

  “Is he going to make it?” the woman asks, and now that she’s not shouting at him, and that his hearing is returning, he recognizes the voice. She’s the detective who picked him up from school the day his dad died.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” one of the paramedics says.

  “Is he going to make it?” she asks again.

  The paramedic doesn’t answer. Gently they move Uncle Ben onto the stretcher and then slowly carry him towards the ambulance, each footstep carefully placed. The detective turns towards him. The look of anger on her face has disappeared. She looks tired, and sad.

  “Joshua,” she says. “You probably don’t remember me, but—”

  “From school,” he says. “Detective Vega.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “I’m sorry I pointed the gun at you. I’m sorry I yelled.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he says. He feels numb. He wants to cry. And scream. “I thought . . . I thought it was . . .” he says, but suddenly the energy required to talk disappears. He doesn’t have the strength to stand. He sits in the grass and pulls his knees up to his chest. He feels stupid and angry with himself. He swung the knife without checking to see who he was hitting, and what kind of person does that? “I didn’t know it was him.”

  “I know you didn’t,” she says, and she crouches down so she can
face him. There is blood on her blouse, and a smudge of it on her cheek, and it’s all over her hands too. He looks at his hands and sees the same, some of the blood his uncle’s, some his own. He studies the graze on the back of his hand. It’s the first time he’s ever seen a wound on his own body. His hands are shaking badly.

  “Is he going to die?”

  “The doctors are going to do everything they can to save him.”

  “That sounds like he’s going to die,” he says.

  “He might,” she says.

  “Is my mom coming?” he asks.

  “I’ll call her, but first I need you to tell me a few things. The other boy, who is he?”

  “His name is Scott,” he says. “He goes to my school. Is he . . . is he dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, Joshua. Did you stab him?”

  “No.”

  “You had the knife.”

  “There was another guy—I don’t know where he is, but he attacked us.” He looks behind him, looks up and down the path running parallel to the tracks. “That’s who I thought was behind me when . . . when I . . . I hurt Uncle Ben. We have to be careful, because that other guy might be around.”

  “You’re safe,” Vega says.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do, Joshua. How did you get the knife?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you do know.”

  “I know I might have just killed my uncle,” he says. “I know it’s all my fault. I know I just want to curl up and die.”

  “Tell me what happened,” she says.

  He tells her everything, from walking home with Olillia to being chased and punched by Scott. He was dragged up onto the train tracks, but he was so far out of it he hardly even noticed he was being moved. He walked down the line for a while, but isn’t sure why. He thinks he passed out again. He thinks his shirt got all torn up from being dragged.