Harvest Earth

by J. D. Laird

  There is a scar on Tobias’ left arm where the young man had scratched at himself. Madison supposes at some level it confirmed the story, but she was still reserving her full and committed belief. Rising from her chair, Madison walks over to Tobias and kneels down beside him. He shifts away from her as she approaches, pulling his body in on itself. Tobias tucks his chin into his chest and averts his gaze from her. “Tobias.” Madison says the young man’s name as gently as she is able. “That is a very pretty necklace. Do you mind if I see it?”

  “He won’t let you.” Debra says from the kitchen. The pot on the stove started boiling. Debra starts pouring in a box of macaroni into the steaming water. “He doesn’t let anyone touch his special treasure.”

  Madison just wants a better look at the object. Madison thinks that it might hold the key to what had really happened to Debra’s son. She sits down beside Tobias, trying to show the young man that she isn’t going to hurt him.

  “You said we needed to meet you son.” Madison says, calling to Debra in the kitchen. “Why?”

  “Because he knew that they were going to attack that base.” Debra says, stirring a wooden spoon in the pot.

  “That’s impossible.” Pvt. Hillman chimes in. The Private wasn’t even trying to hide her disbelief. “How could he have known?”

  “Because they told him, I guess?” Debra says. “The night before the attack I found him out front. He was fiddling with the truck. His head was buried in the engine. I tried to stop him but he just pushed me away. I’ve never seen him so energized.”

  “That’s right.” Madison says, a revelation coming to her. “Pvt. Hillman’s watch and her flashlight, all of the electronics at the base, everything had gone out. Your truck may have been affected by whatever hit us. Probably should’ve been effected. It shouldn’t run.”

  “But it does.” Debra turned off the stove and started straining the water out of the pot. “I never knew my Tobias was such a mechanic.”

  “But my flashlight.” Madison’s mind is working hard now. It is solving puzzles that she had previously pushed aside. “The flashlight I had in the maintenance tunnel, it had worked. Why would that be?”

  She says the words out loud, not really expecting an answer. She is therefore surprised when Tobias starts gesturing something with his hand. He is miming with one hand as if he is holding something. He places his other hand on top of the other and pushes down on it. Repeatedly he moves his hands up and down. The one on top forces the other hand that is miming gripping something downward.

  “Down?” Madison is playing along with Tobias’ game of charades. “Something was down?”

  Tobias nods his head in affirmation. His greasy and long hair bobs as his head moves. It excites Madison to finally be getting through to him.

  “The flashlight, it worked because it was down?” Madison’s voice os filled with the anticipation of answers finally coming.

  Tobias nods his head again and rests his hands at his side.

  “So, what the hell does that mean?” Pvt. Hillman wasn’t as excited by the whole exchange. There is a bitterness on her tongue.

  “It means,” Madison says, “That whatever hit us, whatever knocked out our power at least. It doesn’t work when something is submerged underground.” As she speaks Tobias nods his head, confirming her theory. “Your watch and flashlights, they didn’t work because you were up top. You were in the security barracks by the entryway. They were affected immediately by whatever hit us.”

  “That doesn’t explain the truck.” Pvt. Hillman says, her face clearly illustrating her discontent with Madison’s train of reasoning..

  “Well, Tobias may have known what the attack would do.” Madison turns to Tobias. He is continuing to slowly nod his head. The nods rock the young man’s entire body. “He must have known how to fix the truck so that it wouldn’t be affected.”

  “See I told you.” Debra says, emerging from the kitchen with two bowls of steaming pasta. “I told you, you should meet me son.” She hands a bowl first to Pvt. Hillman and then to Madison. There is a fork sticking out of both mounds of noodles. There is no sauce, no butter, just noodles. To Madison’s hungry stomach it looks delicious.

  “Tobias,” Madison puts a reassuring hand on the man’s back. He lets her. “Do you know more about the people that did this? The ones that attacked us?”

  To this Tobias responds with a very slow and deliberate nod.

  “Can you show me, Tobias?” Madison is speaking softly, as if to a child. “Can you show me what you know about them?”

  This time Tobias raises his head and turns it towards Madison. It is the first time he has stared directly into her eyes. The young man’s eyes are dark brown. Where they had surely once been full of life, now were deadened. He stares at Madison with a coldness that suddenly made her fearful. Madison fears what this man who had supposedly been taken beyond the stars might have to reveal to her.

  29 Tobias

  At night, after his mother had gone to sleep, Tobias liked to go outside. He liked to sit in the dirt and watch the stars. Sometimes it was too cloudy, too cloudy to see them and Tobias didn’t like those nights. Tonight, however, is a good night. The sky is clear and the spaces between the stars are deep and black. Tobias feels like he can see into these spaces for forever. He feels like he can see into the farthest reaches of the universe, to the last constellation. Tobias can’t do this of course, not truly, but in those moments he dreams that he can.

  Tobias has lots of what he thinks of as waking dreams. He has nighttime dreams too, but the ones while he was sleeping were typically scarier. The dreams at night were filled with dark things. There were creatures that poked and caused him pain. Creatures with round and obtuse heads that would peer down at him with empty eyes. Looking into these creatures’ eyes was like looking into the space between the stars. There was nothing there to be seen and yet Tobias felt the vastness that lay beyond them. These creatures would tell him things with their eyes. They would tell him secrets that he had never wanted to know. Then they would hurt him. He was never allowed to scream.

  Tobias likes his waking dreams much more.

  During the waking dreams Tobias can see and do anything he can imagine. He can lift vehicles over his head or leap over skyscrapers. He saves kittens from trees and punches missiles out of the air. Tobias imagines he wears a flowing cape, a bright red cloth that flutters in the wind while he races from one heroic deed to the next.

  In these moments of pure imagination Tobias also envisions himself toppling those that had hurt him. He imagines himself being able to stop the shadow men, the ones who had come to his house when he was younger. The ones who used to lure his mother into their arms and then poison her lungs and her veins. He dreams that he grabs these men with his powerful arms and squeezes them so tightly that they whisk away into vapor. Tobias wishes he could the same to the others as well, the beings beyond the stars. But these are dangerous thoughts and they tell him not to think that way.

  The beings tell Tobias lots of things. Not all the time, but instead in small messages when he is thinking about something else. While he eating his dinner, watching a candle flicker, or dozing off to sleep. In those moments the messages come. They are never voices, just feelings and images. All of them fill Tobias with a sense of fear..

  The messages show Tobias things. They show him places that are far off. Places that had once existed, ages ago, and that are no longer there. Tobias has seen some of them in his history books. He sees people in these places. They are ancient people, men and women with thick hair and dirty bodies. Then he sees the creatures with them, interacting with them. The creatures give the people knowledge and teach them lessons from beyond the stars.

  In these images Tobias sees a young man, his face is shaven and his head is bare. He is draped in a silver cloak and all around him people are kneeling. Above the young man rises a full moon. As the moon rises the people in kneeling rows are turned grass. The grass then burns.
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br />   In Tobias’ mind he sees other places too. Places he knows still exist. Locations like The Golden Gate Bridge, The Lincoln Memorial and The Empire State Building. These are places that Tobias knows are real. Only when Tobias sees them they have been hollowed out. Holes are drilled into them, scarring their features. It is like some ravenous vermin has scoured the country, the globe even, and eaten its fill by taking small round bites out of every place that people had once existed. Tobias also knows that these vermin are not yet done with their feast.

  “Tobias.” A voice from behind him. Tobias turns, startled. He shields his head up under his arms. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” The voice says.

  It is one of the women that his mother has brought home. It is the nice one that had put her hand on his shoulder. When Tobias had last seen her she was dirty. She had been wearing a uniform that was torn and covered in dirt. Now she wore something more familiar to him, a pair of his mother’s jeans, too short at the ankle, exposing her base flesh just above her feet. She also wears an old sweater, gray with a ketchup stain on the chest that his mother had never been able to remove. On her feet she wears sandals, a simple pair of flip-flops. Dust shifts underneath the flip-flops as the woman approaches Tobias.

  Tobias likes this woman. Her name is Madison, he remembers. She is pretty. Tobias had not seen any pretty girls since he had returned from his…travels. He had almost forgotten that girls even existed. To him no women existed except his mother. His mother had hid him away from people since his return, had told him that she was all that he needed. Now remembering that other women exist, and the way they make him feel, the bashful teenager within Tobias comes out. He tucks his head into his chest and turns away from the woman.

  If Tobias could speak he would tell the woman to leave him alone. He would tell her he wanted to be left alone. It was not because he truly did, but for fear that she might see him for the monster he is. The monster that his mother had told him he was for all those years, for so long.

  But Tobias can’t speak, even if he wants to. So instead he tries to ignore the pretty woman.

  “Do you mind if I sit with you?” Madison says from behind him.

  Tobias just shrugs his shoulders.

  “Thank you.”

  As she approaches him, Tobias can smell the shampoo in her hair and the soap on her body. She has showered, removed the grime from her ordeal in the mountain. Tobias tries to ignore the scents. He reminds himself that she smelled like his mother.

  As Madison sits beside him, she places her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. Her body is still in pain, Tobias can tell by the way she twists as she lowers herself onto the ground.

  “It’s a nice night.” She says, sitting in the dirt next to him. She stares up at the stars, only a few clouds passing over, covering a few hundred stars at a time but still leaving millions more bare. “It is so peaceful out here. I wish I had known that.”

  Tobias just stares into the dirt. He kicks a stone onto its back with the toe of his sneaker. He stares at it, his chin still buried into his thick chest.

  “How old are you, Tobias?” Madison turns to him. Tobias can tell that she wants to look into his eyes, into his face. Tobias knows this so he turns away. He lets his long hair hide his features. He wonders how long it has been since he has shaved.

  “I’ll tell you how old I am, if you share your secret with me.” There was a lilt to her voice at the end, the beginning of a giggle.

  Tobias doesn’t care how old she is, and besides, Tobias doesn’t have an answer for her. The last birthday he remembers he was fourteen years old. But he didn’t have birthdays after that. Tobias knows he isn’t fourteen anymore. He is too tall, his shoulders too broad and the hair on his face is too patchy. He had been gone a long time. How long he never took the time to figure out. Tobias doesn’t truly want to know.

  “Fine.” Madison says. Her response is playful. “I’ll keep my secret too then.”

  The woman’s gaze drifts back up at the stars. With the woman’s attention averted, Tobias dares a glance at her from under the concealed position of his own hair. To him, her profile is perfect against the landscape of the starlit desert. Her pale skin is glowing in the moonlight.

  “Do you really think you were taken beyond the stars, Tobias?” She turns as she speaks and Tobias fears she has caught him watching her. He is embarrassed. He turns away again and hides his face in shame.

  If she had noticed Madison ignores it. Instead she says, “Somehow, I think that might have been possible. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but somehow I think it might be true.”

  Madison’s head turns over her shoulder and she looks now to the mountain. The one where Tobias knew she had lived, the one that had been attacked. “Before your mother rescued me, I was trapped in the bottom of the mountain.” She is speaking to herself more than to him. “Trapped with a man I had worked besides for years but didn’t know. He died.” Madison looks down at her lap and strokes her thigh. Tobias thinks there is some significance to this but can’t determine what it is. “Everyone in that base died. Everyone died except Pvt. Hillman and me.”

  She turns back to Tobias now, he hasn’t stirred. Tobias doesn’t want to get caught staring again. “I don’t know who attacked us but I think it was because we posed a threat somehow. I also don’t think we were the only ones.” Madison’s gaze now drifts back up to the sky, only this time the bewilderment in her eyes is gone. Something else is there now, Tobias can’t be sure what. “My job depended on working with satellites. There are hundreds of them orbiting the Earth, and just before we were hit they all stopped working. What could do that?” Tobias recognizes the look on Madison’s face now, it is one he has hidden most of his life. “Only something evil. It was something that wanted all of us to suffer. Not just the U.S. but I think that something attacked all of us.” Madison turns to Tobias. His assumption of the woman’s expression is confirmed when he sees her full-on. Her face bears the signs of someone who is angry, the signs of rage. “I think that someone attacked the Earth.”

  Tobias remains silent and in that moment he is glad he can’t speak. The silence persists. Only the sounds of the wild on the mesa keep them company; the gusting of the wind, the rattling of the sparse bushes, the chirping of the insects, and a distant coyote’s howl.

  Madison is chewing on the skin around one of her fingernails. Tobias sees this and mimics her. He is not quite sure why. His body sometimes does things now that he doesn’t understand and can’t control.

  Out of the corner of her eye Madison must have noticed the mimicry because she stops her own action immediately. “Nervous habit.” She says, her tone softer. Madison rests her hands, one in the other’s palm, in her lap.

  “Before the attack, your mother said you had done something to her truck. Something that you knew would protect it.” Madison stares into her lap. She is staring into her open palm. Tobias can’t help but do the same with his own hand.

  “I want to believe you.” The words are said softly, like one says a prayer. “I don’t know what happened but I want to believe you.”

  Tobias wants to tell her the truth. He wants the pretty woman from the mountain to trust him. Tobias wants her to know about the dark men, both the short ones with the black eyes that poked him and the big ones that held him down when he screamed. He wants to tell her about the big ones that looked like lizards and little ones that looked like children. He wants to tell her about the nightmares. He wants to tell her about the messages and the feelings. He wants to tell her about the metal thing in his arm, how he had felt it. Felt it under his skin and how he had felt the intense need to pull it out.

  The pretty girl is looking at him, Tobias realizes. His fingers are clutching the metal shard around his neck, the one his mother had told him to wear to protect himself. The real reason Tobias wore it though, is as a reminder. It is a reminder of what is real. It is tangible evidence that his nightmares are real.

  Tobias meets M
adison’s gaze. Her eyes are a deep brown, dark like his, only softer and filled with less pain. But that wasn’t entirely true. It was a different pain. She was a survivor of her own trials, her own journey.

  “Back in the house,” Madison says, never breaking Tobias’ hard-earned eye contact. “You indicated to me that you knew things. That you knew about who attacked us. Can you show me what you know?” She holds her hand up and strokes Tobias’ face. He lets her. “I made a promise to myself to no longer lock myself away. I want to connect with people, Tobias. I want to trust them and I want to believe you.” She says.

  The woman is pleading with him, Tobias sees it. She is looking for an explanation, something to make everything that has happened to her make sense. Her life has been torn apart. Everything that she knew is gone now. People that she knew are dead. She had lived through the tragedy and now is looking for answers to the question of why. Tobias has felt the same way. Every day he feels it. He knows the grief that comes from living when you’ve already told yourself you are dead. This was their afterlife.

  Tobias wants to give Madison the peace of mind that will allow her to move on. He hopes that she can achieve something he will never have, to be born again. He wants this for her as much as he wants it for himself. For Tobias, though, there is no salvation. The messages in his head are a constant burden. They restrict and limited him. He wants to share the messages with the young woman who was kind to him in a way that no one else had ever been. He wants to tell her all that he knows, but Tobias’ mind is shackled. Its secrets are hidden away from the outside world.

  It is for this reason that Tobias strikes Madison across her face with a closed fist. His massive hand collides with her skull and causing her to topple over. Madison tries to recover quickly but Tobias anticipates this. He has caught her by surprise so he is able to move quicker than she is. His heavy form climbs on top of Madison, pinning her frame to the dirt. Her body on its stomach, Tobias crushes her with his knees. She tries the scream but Tobias wraps his thick trunk of an arm around her throat. He pushes his other arm under her elbow, holding the woman in a vise.