A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “You have no reason to hurt him.”

  “This is on you, Doctor. Me hurting him, that’s on you.”

  “Don’t hurt him. None of this is his fault.”

  “I’m not hurting him because I think it’s his fault. I’m hurting him because you won’t help. You know, Doctor, I really should be thanking you,” Dustin says.

  “Why would you thank me?”

  “Because I like the dreams. I’ve gotten used to them. I like how they make me feel. I like the new person I’m becoming. The operation opened up a whole new way of life for me—a life I used to think about back when I was blind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The things I’ve been dreaming about, these were things I used to fantasize about. What you’ve given me is the strength to follow that up.”

  “Then why do you want to get rid of Simon Bower’s eye and replace it?”

  He laughs at that. “Oh, you misunderstand,” he says. “I don’t want the other eye that belonged to the cop, I want the one that belonged to Simon Bower. Having both of them will make the dreams even more intense.”

  “You’re insane,” she says.

  He sighs. “I suppose, deep down, I always knew you were going to say no.”

  “Then why go through any of this?”

  “Because I want to turn dreaming into a reality. I want to know what it’s like to kill somebody, and I think it’s fitting that you can be my first. In a way, it’s giving you the chance to make up for all that you’ve done wrong.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Joshua hits the ground outside the bedroom and closes the window behind him to stop the storm getting inside and alerting the crazy man to his presence. He struggles to stay upright as the wind pushes him in the opposite direction from where he’s trying to go. When all this is over—if it’s ever over—he’s going to take up running, he’s going to start exercising, he’s going to go to the gym and he’s going to be prepared for the next psychopath who enters his life. He circles the cabin and hits the road a hundred yards away, where the cabin is out of view. Already he’s puffing. Already he’s soaking wet.

  Pinecones are hitting the ground around him. One clips his shoulder. Leaves and twigs are flying horizontal to the ground. Flakes of dirt and grit hit him in the face. The cabins were half a mile apart. How long does it take to run half a mile? Superfit athletes can do it in under two minutes. He figures they’d run it faster under life-and-death circumstances.

  He reaches the spot where Olillia parked earlier. He’s been running for two minutes. At this pace he guesses the fork in the road is maybe another two minutes away. If there’s nobody home at the next cabin, he’ll smash a window and make his way inside and use the phone. If there’s no phone, he’ll go to the next cabin. Or is it better to run for the motorway and flag somebody down? Somebody would have to stop, wouldn’t they? And that somebody would surely have a cell phone.

  He’s still running and still short of the fork in the road when he sees a flash of light through the trees. It gets stronger as the road straightens out. A car is coming towards him. Hopefully it’s the police. He stands in the middle of the road and waves both his hands in the air. It slows down. It comes to a stop. He can hear it now over the rain. The engine switches off but the lights stay on. He can’t see into the car. It could be like one of those circus cars and have twenty clowns inside and he wouldn’t know. The driver door opens and no interior light comes on. A man steps out. Joshua tries to shield his eyes from the beams that have already half-blinded him, and the half of his vision that does remain has weird colors floating through it.

  “You okay?” the man asks. He closes the car door and walks towards him. He comes into focus. Joshua’s eyes hurt. He doesn’t think the man is a policeman. “Buddy? You okay?”

  He struggles to get his breath. “I. I need. Help.”

  “What kind of help?” the man asks.

  The guy looks familiar. Where’s he seen him from? A dream? No, somewhere real, only the guy was much paler back then, and it was a few weeks ago, but he can’t figure out anything more than that. “We need to call the police,” Joshua says, getting his breathing under control.

  “What for?”

  “There’s a man with a gun,” Joshua says, “back at the cabin. He’s going to kill somebody. We have to call for help.”

  “Calm down,” the man says. Is it somebody from the hospital? One of the doctors or nurses? “Tell me what’s happening, but a little slower this time.”

  Joshua doesn’t tell him everything—how can he?—but he gives him some basic facts. A man has dragged a policewoman into a cabin up ahead and is threatening to kill her. He has to talk loudly to be heard over the storm, and even then sometimes he has to repeat himself, shouting as he does so. The man is soaking wet now, and he has to keep wiping the water out of his eyes. He looks athletic, like he could run ten miles or swim for an hour.

  “I’m sorry, kid, but I don’t have a phone.”

  Joshua wants to ask who doesn’t have a phone these days, to which the guy would probably point his finger back at Joshua.

  “Is there anybody else in the car?” he asks.

  “Nobody. How far is the cabin?”

  “Not far. A couple of minutes if we run.”

  “Then let’s go take a look.”

  “What we need is to get hold of a phone. We should drive to the next cabin, or go out to the road and—”

  “And it might already be too late,” the man says. “Come on, let’s go take a look.”

  “We can’t. The guy has a gun.”

  “A gun?”

  “Yes,” Joshua says.

  “I’m in the army, kid. Guns don’t scare me.” He walks in the direction of the cabin. After a few paces he turns back to Joshua. “You coming?”

  Joshua is torn between running for the next cabin or going back to the one he’s come from. He tries weighing it up—going back he at least has somebody to help him, going forward he might not find anybody else. Or he could flag somebody down, only to have the police arrive too late. And if this guy is army, then he probably knows what he’s doing.

  He decides to follow.

  “Try to keep up kid,” the man says, breaking into a jog.

  “Shouldn’t we take the car?”

  “In this weather we’d have to have the lights on so we don’t hit a tree, and then he’d see us coming.”

  “What exactly are we going to do?” Joshua asks.

  “Army stuff,” he says. “It’s important you keep up.”

  Once again Joshua is running. Once again his heart is pumping hard and his chest hurts. The rain is thicker now, colder. He thinks he’s made the wrong decision, but they’d lose even more time by turning back. The car Vega arrived in comes into the view. The trunk is still open. The boat comes into view. Then the cabin. It’s dark behind all those windows, and unless the man inside has night vision, it would be impossible for him to see them in the trees. The colors that were floating in his field of vision earlier have disappeared.

  “Should we sneak in around the back?” Joshua asks.

  “I have a better idea,” the guy says. “Let’s go in the front door.”

  “But—”

  “Keep up,” the man says. “I have a plan.”

  The man is still moving towards the cabin, almost pushing Joshua along with him. They’re only twenty yards away now. He doesn’t like this. This guy is going to get them both killed. “No,” he says.

  “Come on, kid.”

  Joshua comes to a standstill. “No,” he says. “This is crazy.”

  “You said the guy has a gun, right?”

  “Exactly. We can’t—”

  “Yes we can,” the guy says, and pulls a gun out from his jacket pocket.

  Seeing the gun makes Joshua uncomfortable. It puts him even more on edge. There’s something here that’s not right, but he can’t say what. “I think this is a bad idea. We should have gone for help.”

/>   “I have a plan,” the man says. “We head to the door, you go in first and draw his fire, then I come in after you.”

  “Wait . . . what? What are you saying?”

  “I said you go in and draw his fire, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “That’s crazy,” Joshua says. “I’ll end up getting shot.”

  “Here’s the thing,” the man says, and he turns the gun so that it’s pointing directly at Joshua, and Joshua goes from feeling something isn’t right to feeling something is incredibly wrong. “You go in and maybe you get shot and maybe you don’t, but you stay out here and you catching a bullet is a definite.”

  “It was you,” Joshua says, remembering him now, “at the hospital. You’re the guy I knocked over with my wheelchair.”

  “You’re right,” he says.

  “You recognized me, but it wasn’t from the newspapers, was it? It was from the dreams. You have the other set of eyes.”

  “I do.”

  “And it was you yesterday, wasn’t it?” Joshua says. “You’re the one who saved me.”

  “Guilty as charged,” the man says.

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  “Shut up, and let’s get moving,” the man says.

  “Are you really in the army?”

  The guy laughs at him. “No, I wasn’t, kid, and stop stalling for time. We’ve got a job to do.”

  The rain keeps getting into Joshua’s eyes, and he has to keep wiping it away.

  “Hurry up, kid. Remember, if it weren’t for me yesterday, you’d be in a hundred pieces by now.”

  “Why save me?” he asks, “just to do this?”

  “Listen, kid, I don’t owe you any explanations, okay? Now cut the chitchat and let’s get this done.”

  There’s a real sense of betrayal—how can somebody who has part of his dad treat him like this? There’s another flash from the sky and this time the thunder is almost immediate, the heart of the storm directly above as it moves towards the city, the thunder so loud it makes him jump, and for a second, just a brief second, he thinks he’s been shot.

  They exit the trees and approach the door. The ten yards become five. Then two. Then they’re there, with his hand on the handle and a gun jammed into the center of his back and Olillia hopefully fifty miles away by now and the police maybe on their way—or maybe not. He has to play for time.

  Slowly, he turns the handle.

  Slowly, he pushes open the door and waits to be shot.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Dr. Toni can’t break the plastic ties. They dig into her wrists as she pulls against them, tearing skin and drawing blood. The last thing Dustin said when he exited the car was to stay low and be quiet. He said if she called out to Joshua, he would kill him. She stayed low and quiet, but not low enough that she couldn’t peek over the dashboard. She felt like a coward as she sat there watching them talk, but she believed him that if she tried anything, Joshua would bear the brunt of his anger. She could see the outline of the gun in his pocket the entire time. Nobody would hear the shot over the storm.

  Where they’ve gone, she doesn’t know. She didn’t even know anything was out here, other than rivers and trees, but there must be something for Joshua to be out here too. Seeing him made no sense, and still doesn’t. What the hell is going on? Why would he be out here? The headlights are still on, and they light up trees and dirt and swirling leaves and swirling rain, but nothing more than that.

  She can’t stretch her fingers to open the door, but she thinks maybe she can get to the handle with her feet. She kicks off a shoe and twists her body as far as she can, getting her foot up to the door. It’s easier than she thought, and a moment later the door opens.

  And now what?

  Good question. She’s still attached to it, only now she’s getting wet too. She needs to find something she can cut the plastic ties with. She uses her foot to pop open the glove compartment. Inside there’s a box of tissues, some CDs, a pair of women’s sunglasses, and a paperback. Nothing useful.

  She opens the door fully and the wind gets hold of it, pulling it all the way and pulling her out in the process. Her knees bang hard into the ground. There’s a flash of white as the sky lights up, and five seconds later comes the rolling thunder. She knows there’s a way to figure out how far away the thunder is by counting the seconds between the flash and the rumble, but it’s one of those things she’s never been able to commit to memory. She gets to her feet, leans into the door, then uses her foot to pull up the lever next to the seat, making it swing forward. Balancing herself on one foot, she reaches with her other into the backseat and hooks her toes under the handle of her handbag. She settles it onto the ground outside. She uses her hips to put the seat back into place and sits down. She empties the contents of the handbag on the floor of the car and flicks through it all with her foot.

  Her phone isn’t in there. Dustin must have taken it out earlier. She looks through the contents for something to cut the plastic ties.

  Nothing.

  She looks back through the glove compartment.

  Nothing.

  She looks as best as she can through the car.

  Nothing.

  Another flash of lightning, and this time the thunder is closer.

  She thinks back to the contents of the glove compartment, and the CDs she saw in there. She uses her foot to pull one out. Johnny Cash. She places it inside the doorframe of the car and apologizes to Johnny, then closes the door on it, breaking it into several pieces. She uses her toes to transfer one of the bigger pieces to her fingers. She angles it towards the plastic tie. It’s not exactly a scalpel, but she wouldn’t be a surgeon if she wasn’t an expert with a blade.

  She goes to work.

  SIXTY-NINE

  If there’s a way to get through to him, to convince him not to hurt her, Detective Vega doesn’t know what it is. She will stay calm and keep trying, because at the very least it’s buying her some time. Joshua will get hold of the police and then her colleagues will save her. Soon they’ll be sneaking through the woods and training sniper rifles into the cabin and, if they have to, they’ll take this man down. She hopes they can take him alive. He hasn’t killed anybody, and what’s happening to him isn’t his fault. It could be that with therapy and drugs he can go back to being the man he used to be.

  Stay calm. Stay patient. Don’t make him mad. Don’t make him upset. Those thoughts are on a loop. The storm is in full force now, with flashes of lightning so low she keeps expecting one to turn the cabin into kindling.

  Her captor is staring out the window. She doesn’t even know his name, but tomorrow it will be splashed all over the papers. Every time there is another flash of lightning, she can see his reflection against the glass. With her hands in front of her, she has access to Joshua’s cell phone, but for now it can stay in her pocket. If he catches her reaching for it, he’ll take it off her. Maybe he’ll even kill her. Of course, the other possibility is that somebody might call it, and if they do it’s going to vibrate. But with the storm raging at the walls, he might not hear it if it does.

  When the sky and forest light up again, Vega sees two figures moving through the trees. Both she and her captor jump when they see them. One of them is Joshua. The other person she doesn’t recognize. Why didn’t Joshua call the police? What was he thinking?

  “Well, this is a shame,” Mr. Bad says. “It means this cabin isn’t as secure as I had hoped. It means maybe I can’t keep a pet out here after all. I didn’t even get to name you, but you know what they say, right?”

  She doesn’t know, but she does know he will tell her.

  “It’s easier to kill something that doesn’t have a name.”

  “Don’t hurt them,” she says. “They’ve done nothing wrong. They’re probably seeking shelter from the storm. All you have to do is tie them up, and then we can leave. I’ll go willingly with you, whatever it is you have in mind.”

  “There is nowhere else.”

&nbs
p; “I have a name,” she says. “It’s Audrey.”

  “Well, Audrey, I hope it brings you comfort knowing you’ll live on in my thoughts.”

  He turns back to the door. She reaches into her pocket and slips the phone out of the evidence bag, only to be confronted by the need for a passcode, brought about by the phone being inactive. What can she do? Well, she can crawl, but what will that do? Sneak up behind Mr. Bad and bite him on the ankles? She tries to loosen the bolts, but even with a thousand years of strength training they would be impossible to undo with only her fingertips.

  The front door opens. The storm intensifies. She can see Mr. Bad’s arm pointing ahead, but cannot see beyond that. He pulls the trigger without any hesitation, and no doubt he will pull it again before turning it on her.

  He’s probably killed one of them, and he’s about to kill the other, and then he’s going to kill you. You know what you have to do.

  She does know.

  She puts her notebook into her mouth and bites down hard before driving her feet down into the floor. The pain races through her nervous system. She knew it would be bad, that it would be the worst pain she’s ever experienced, and she prepared herself for it, only there’s no way she could really have prepared herself for it. It’s far, far worse than anything she could have imagined. Her mouth tightens so hard her teeth are in danger of breaking, but she doesn’t scream. There will be time for screaming and throwing up and passing out soon enough, if she’s successful. The pain radiates up through her legs. It feels like every bone between her toes and her hips has been broken. Her knees feel like they’re going to pop. Every cell in her body is screaming at her to sit back down and slide her feet off the spikes, but if she does that she’s going to die. If she does that, then standing up in the first place was for nothing.

  She runs for the door, hoping the ringing gunshot and the storm will mask her approach. The angle changes and she can see Mr. Bad is now pointing the gun at Joshua. Joshua has his hands up. He says something, but she can’t hear what. All she can hear is the storm, and the blood pumping through her body as it carries nothing but pain with it. Her feet are stomping across the ground, the spikes widening the holes and leaving behind a trail of blood, the metal shoes banging heavily with each step.