A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “Yes,” he says, and he leans forward so he can hear her better.

  “When Master killed that other woman, she was screaming and crying and . . . and it was so awful, and through it all I kept thinking, I just kept thinking I was glad it was happening to her and not me.”

  She starts to cry. Before Joshua can say anything, Olillia comes back. She holds up a key. “I found this next to a leash,” she says. “And we can use these on her shoes,” she says, holding up a set of box wrenches.

  Ruby looks up at Olillia. “I didn’t want to eat the dog food, and I swore I wouldn’t, but in the end I had to. I just had to.”

  “You did the right thing,” Olillia says.

  “Did I? If I’d starved to death, this would have been over ages ago.”

  “It’s over now,” Joshua says, and this feeling he has, this must have been how his dad felt when he saved someone.

  “Let me undo the chain,” Olillia says.

  Ruby tilts her neck to give Olillia access to the padlock. The skin around her neck is chaffed and raw looking, speckled with flecks of dried blood. She smells like dog food and vomit. Aware of how she must smell, Ruby says, “It’s been days, maybe weeks since they hosed me down.”

  The lock pops open and the chain falls away.

  “I kept thinking the police would come, but they never did. I used to scream for help in the beginning, but I stopped after . . .” she says, then stops talking. She lifts her left hand. With all there is to look at, Joshua hadn’t noticed it. Her pinky finger is missing. “They cut it off. They said if I screamed again, they’d cut my entire hand off. They used to set up a recording device to catch me out, but I wouldn’t let them catch me out, so I didn’t scream anymore.” She laughs. “I beat them,” she says.

  “You beat them,” Olillia says.

  Ruby gingerly touches her fingers to her neck. Her knees are red and sore looking from when she’s crawled. Joshua picks up the box wrenches and finds them difficult to hold with the bandage on his hand, so he strips it away and stuffs it into his pocket. Then he starts with the left shoe, putting one ring spanner on the bolt, and one on the nut. He increases the pressure, and when he thinks he can’t push and pull any harder, he thinks about where he is, what Ruby has gone through, and it gives him an extra boost of strength, enough to loosen the bolt. He spins it off with his finger and pulls the shoe away. It looks like a metal clog, but it’s designed exactly how Ruby said it was—with a spike coming up from the center that’s two inches long. There are scabs and holes in her foot from where it’s pricked her. Her foot looks infected. If she had tried walking, that spike would have gone through her foot and up into her ankle.

  “Can you walk?” he asks, once the second shoe falls away.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  They help her to her feet. Her legs resist straightening, and even then she can’t support her weight on them.

  “I could crawl.”

  “I’m sure we can manage to—”

  “I want to crawl,” Ruby says, interrupting him. She struggles. “Please.”

  They lower her back to the ground. “The lounge is this way,” he says.

  “I know where it is,” Ruby says. “Sometimes the masters would let me watch TV with them.”

  Joshua’s stomach twists again as she watches Ruby crawling into the lounge. He has the urge to help her, to carry her, to do something. To have spent three months like a dog . . . he knows his dad saw a lot of bad stuff, but he wonders if he ever saw anything like this. He suspects he did. He suspects his dad saw something like this too many times, and it changed him.

  They reach the lounge, but Ruby doesn’t stop there. She continues to crawl up the stairs on her hands and knees. He forces himself to watch her. He wants to feel her pain, as if in a way he can lessen hers by taking some of it. She makes it to the top.

  “I want to see the river,” she says, making her way to the balcony. Joshua is reluctant to open the door, fearful Ruby is going to use the rail to try to get to her feet, then drop herself over it. But Ruby doesn’t show any desire to go outside. She sits on the floor near the window with her hand on the glass and gazes beyond it. “It’s so beautiful,” she says. “The way the sun hits the water, the way the water is always moving . . . it’s an ever-changing view. My masters, what view do you think they had? Would they have seen what we see? Or some twisted version of it? Did they only see dead branches and decaying leaves and mud and dark skies? How can they have seen the sun and the beauty and still have done the kinds of things they did?”

  “I don’t know,” Joshua answers.

  “They’re not your masters,” Olillia says.

  “They’re not my masters,” Ruby says. “You’re right.”

  “And they never were,” Olillia says.

  “Do my friends and family think I’m dead?”

  Joshua drags a coffee table over so he can sit on the edge. Olillia sits next to Ruby on the floor.

  “You said before my old life is waiting for me, but how can it be if everybody thinks I’m dead? How long has it been?”

  “It’s been over three months,” Olillia says.

  “They had a birthday party for you,” Joshua says. “They celebrated you because they were sure you were still alive.”

  “Then why didn’t they come and find me?” she asks, and she doesn’t look at them, she keeps looking out the window as the river moves and the leaves fall. “Why did they leave me out here?”

  “They tried,” he says.

  “They didn’t try hard enough. Nor did your dad.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Why isn’t he the one here finding me?” she asks.

  “Because Simon murdered him,” he says.

  She doesn’t say anything. Her face is expressionless. He wonders how close his dad, or Uncle Ben, came to this house. Did they knock on the door? Or just speak to Vincent’s parents? They had no reason to search it, the same way they don’t search every house in the city when somebody disappears.

  “I want to ask you something, Ruby, okay?” Joshua asks. “You said before you were glad I came back. What did you mean by that?”

  She finally turns to face them. “I want to go now,” she says.

  “We’ll call the police,” Olillia says. “We’ll have to wait here.”

  “No,” Ruby says. “No, we have to go. I can’t stay here.”

  “But—”

  “No,” she says, and she starts crying. “Please, please, no. I have to go.”

  “There’s no way she’ll be able to walk all the way out to the car,” Olillia says. “I should go get it.”

  “Are you going to be okay?” Joshua asks.

  Olillia gives a brief nod, gets up, and quietly makes her way down the stairs. He wants to run after her and hug her.

  “Ruby, when you said before you were glad I came back, what did you mean?”

  “I want to go,” she says.

  “We will, I promise. Olillia is getting the car. What did you mean?”

  “What?”

  “When you said earlier you were glad I came back.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ruby says, “because you came back today.”

  “Please,” he says. “Just tell me.”

  “It was maybe a week ago. Somebody started knocking on the wall outside the room I was kept in. It was you.” Ruby turns back towards the river. She picks at a piece of skin sticking up from the side of her fingernail. “You didn’t knock anywhere else. Just that wall, like you knew where I was going to be, and when you knocked, you asked, ‘Are you really in there?’ ”

  “It wasn’t me,” Joshua says.

  “Then who was it?”

  “Did you answer them?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I thought it might be Vincent testing me, and I didn’t want to lose any more fingers and all I could think about was what had happened to that other woman . . . so I held my breath and said nothing.”

  “Wha
t did he say next?”

  “He said, ‘I’ve been having these strange dreams about you. I think they’re real.’ He told me it confused him, and he thought he was going crazy. He begged me to speak to him. He told me he’d come all this way to speak to me, and that if I proved I was there, he would help me. So I told him. I begged him to help me.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. He left. I thought . . . I thought I must have imagined it. All of it.”

  “You said he was dreaming about you,” Joshua says, and his skin has gone cold and a lump has formed out of nothing and gotten stuck in his throat. He is thinking about his own dreams. Things he’s seen from his father’s eye, things he’s seen from his father’s killer.

  If he has one of each, then doesn’t it stand to reason there is somebody else out there with the other set?

  Somebody else who is having the same dreams?

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m sure of it.”

  What he doesn’t understand is why the person who came out here would save him from Vincent Archer, but not save Ruby Carter. He knows he’s been seeing the world the way his dad has been seeing it, but in what way does the other recipient see it? “I need to make a call,” he says, and that’s when he realizes he’s lost his cell phone.

  SIXTY-TWO

  It’s been a long day. A stressful day. Dr. Toni canceled a surgery because her nerves were so shot that she couldn’t keep her hands still. She’s pushed scheduled appointments to later in the week. This morning she woke with a stomachache and a headache that made her feel a hundred years old. She’s struggling to think straight. She couldn’t eat breakfast, and then threw up on an empty stomach, and then crawled back into bed and considered not coming into work at all, but she had to—she couldn’t hide from what she had done. She hadn’t really known that Mitchell and Ben were executing bad people for the parts they could provide—because she didn’t want to know, which, she admits, isn’t really the same as not knowing. She wonders if Michelle knew. She’s always liked Michelle. They were never close, but she always enjoyed spending time with her back when they all used to hang out together, her and Mitchell and Ben, back before everybody grew up and everything changed. She can’t imagine Michelle ever being part of those conversations. Can’t imagine Michelle being complicit in what her husband was doing, or every day dealing with the risks that Mitchell could be hurt, or caught. But maybe she did know. Maybe she was there that day when the conversation between Mitchell and Ben turned dark, and the idea for all of this was born. Toni never asked. There’s a lot she’s never asked. All she wanted to think about were the lives she was saving, not cold-blooded murder. Detective Vega was right about that.

  So she came to work and felt nauseated the entire day, waiting for the authorities to show up and arrest her, waiting for her career, her life, to be over. She didn’t tell any of the others she knew of who were involved. She didn’t think there was any reason to alarm them with something that may not even happen. But either way, whether she’s arrested or not, everything they’ve been doing has already come to an end. It did the second Mitchell Logan was pushed out of the fourth floor of that building.

  And now, standing outside in the parking lot, she finds that her day has gotten worse. The tires on her car have been slashed. She leans against it and covers her face in her hands. She doesn’t know what to do. Someone out there—the universe, perhaps—must be teaching her a lesson. Officially paranoid, she wonders what else might be waiting for her. Maybe a bomb strapped to the engine. At the very least she knows Karma is going to throw her a string of red lights once she does get to drive home.

  She can’t deal with this right now.

  What she can do is find a bar, have a few gin and tonics, then get a taxi home. Sort everything out tomorrow.

  “Dr. Coleman!” The voice is familiar, but still makes her jump. She turns towards it. It’s Dustin Moore. The second patient she operated on the day Mitchell Logan was killed, though she didn’t perform the entire operation. Her colleague Dr. Holland removed the first eye, and after Joshua’s operation was complete, she attached the first of Dustin Moore’s new eyes before napping for a few hours before she was required to attach the second. It was the longest day of her career, yet today has felt longer.

  Dustin is smiling and waving. He’s in his midtwenties, with thick dark hair pushed back by his fingers. He has a day’s worth of stubble and a tan you don’t get without real commitment to the sun. He’s wearing a white linen shirt that looks ruffled, and blue jeans, and he looks like he’s been on an adventure somewhere. He’s a good-looking guy, and it’s hard to imagine he’s the boy she first met when he was thirteen and his parents brought him in to see her. He was having problems with his vision. She diagnosed with him Coats’s disease, a disease that affects one in every hundred thousand people that damages the blood vessels behind the retina. In most cases it affects only one eye, and in rarer cases, both. Dustin had one of those rarer cases. Year after year he came in for a checkup, and year after year there was nothing she could do other than monitor the progress as his vision faded. He was legally blind by the age of twenty.

  Now he has Simon Bower’s eyes. She wonders if he has his dreams too.

  “Hello, Dustin,” she says.

  “Is that your car back there?” he asks, reaching her.

  “Sadly, it is.”

  “Boy, somebody has it in for you,” he says. “You want a hand with it? I mean, I can’t really do anything on account of the fact I don’t know anything about cars, and I’m guessing you only have one spare wheel and you need four.” He shrugs, and gives an embarrassed smile. “I guess I can’t really give you a hand.”

  “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  She starts walking. He walks with her.

  “How are the eyes?” she asks.

  “Good,” he says.

  “Sorry I had to cancel your appointment this afternoon.”

  “Hey, it’s no problem, it freed me up to do other things.”

  She stops walking. He stops too. “Let me ask you something,” she says.

  “You want me to give you a lift? Sure, more than happy to. I’m a pretty good driver. Was one of the last things I learned before I became legally blind, and one of the first things I was desperate to do once you gave me back my sight. I owe you everything, Dr. Toni. Everything.”

  “I appreciate that,” she says, “but that wasn’t what I was going to ask. Have you . . . Have you experienced anything strange?”

  He frowns. “Strange? Like what?”

  “Like . . . strange, is all.”

  He laughs. “I think you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Forget I said anything.”

  “You mean like headaches and stuff? Blurry vision? My left eye still doesn’t work, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No. It’s not that,” she says.

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing,” she says. She starts walking again. He falls in beside her.

  “Hey, look,” he says. “Let me be a gentleman and give you a lift,” he says.

  “It’s fine. I’ll get a taxi.”

  “You sure? I’d drive you to the moon and back if I could. Everything you did for me . . . My mom says I should be offering to mow your lawns and paint your house and make you lunch every day and deliver it to you.”

  Dustin is reminding her exactly why she has been doing all of this—to help people. Instead of focusing on the bad things that got her here, she needs to focus on the reasons why. The positives. “Your mom sounds like an extremely intelligent woman,” she says, and they both laugh.

  “I’ll be sure to pass it along. But seriously, Mom would give me one humongous kick in the behind if I didn’t help you out here. A pretty doctor with all her tires slashed? Hell, Mom would try to ground me for a month if I didn’t help yo
u out.”

  Maybe it’s because she’s tired and stressed, maybe it’s because Dustin is making her smile, or maybe it’s because he called her pretty and nobody has said that to her in a while—whatever it is, she smiles. “Okay. A lift would be good. I really appreciate it.”

  “Car’s over here,” he says, smiling back. “Word of warning, though, it’s my mom’s car—it’s not quite as flash as yours. But at least the tires haven’t been slashed.”

  She laughs. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she says.

  They walk to a red four-door sedan. He unlocks the doors and they climb in. “So where to?”

  “Home. It’s been a long day. Time to relax and get some sleep.”

  “Yeah? That’s a good idea,” he says. “Sounds really good, actually. However, I have something else in mind.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Well, I kind of fibbed a little back there,” he says. “About when you asked me if I’d noticed anything strange.”

  Her smile disappears. He pulls a gun out of his pocket, and Toni has never seen one before, not in real life. It’s amazing how something so small has the power to instantly provoke fear. She actually flinches when she sees it, and tries to pull back a little, but there’s nowhere to go. In that moment Toni knows that it wasn’t Karma or the Universe that slashed her tires. It was Dustin.

  “I’ve been having these strange dreams,” he says. “And they come with some pretty strong urges.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  Joshua pats his pockets one more time. He looks at the floor, at the couch, on the stairs. It has to be here, doesn’t it? And if not here, then in the car, or back home, or in his schoolbag, or . . .

  Or at Vincent Archer’s house. That was the last time he used it.

  “Oh no,” he says.

  “What is it?” Ruby asks, looking panicked.

  “I’ve left my phone somewhere I shouldn’t have,” he says, and she looks relieved that’s all it is, and he can’t blame her. If he has left it at Vincent Archer’s house, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to be telling Detective Vega everything anyway.