The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  “That’s it,” Lane says. “We need to have a proper reunion. All of us Boxelder types. Big Sky crew.” He laughs, pulls away. “C’mon, you three.”

  Cael hesitates, then says, “Wanda, too.”

  Lane gives him a look, like, Really? Wanda’s standing off to the side, looking—well, he can’t quite tell what. A little sheepish, but there’s something else there, too—anger and jealousy, maybe, the two feelings warring for dominance. Or maybe calculating together, he can’t say. She’s changed. It’s not just the Blight. She looks taller not because she’s actually gained height but because she’s standing taller.

  “She was crew with us for a little while,” Cael says. “And she’s crew now.” He waves her on. Lane notes that her face brightens, though her eyes do not.

  Seems they all have stories to tell.

  The red wine goes ’round and ’round. An hour in, their lips are purple. They’re all telling stories. It’s silly, but they’re not talking about the last year. They’re talking about back in Boxelder. Rigo tells the story of that time they convinced Wyatt Sanderson to take a shit in Pally Varrin’s hat. Gwennie and Cael talk about when they saved her little brother from that rat-trap processing plant out near the dead town of Bremerton—they both tell the story in tandem, each giving one piece after the other like a team. When they’re done, Lane opens a new bottle of the red stuff and pours everybody a new glass while recalling for them the day that they managed to convince Boyland and his crew of the “priceless scavenge” that was really a busted-up motorvator full of bees—that was back before all the beehives went dead thanks to who-knows-what, chemicals maybe, or some unseen defense mechanism developed by Hiram’s Golden Prolific.

  “Boyland beat the snot outta me,” Rigo says, laughing.

  Cael nods. “Yeah, he lit me up like a bug zapper. Gods, man, he beat King Hell out of all of us time and again. But that day . . .” He whistles. “That day it was worth it. I woulda taken ten beatings like that just to watch him slinking back to town covered in hundreds of those bee-sting welts.”

  “He’s here, you know.” It’s Wanda who speaks up. She doesn’t look to be having as much fun as everyone else.

  Lane straightens. “Boyland Barnes Jr. is in Pegasus City?”

  Gwennie nods. Cael does, too. Rigo’s the only other one who must not have known. His jaw hangs loose like its hinges are busted.

  “Godsdamn,” Lane says. He knows it’s the wine talking, but he licks his lips and says: “I say we all get up from this table, go find his ass, and beat him till he’s blue. We whip his hide like he’s a dirty blanket hanging on the line.”

  “I’m in,” Gwennie says. Her voice slides a little, like a foot planting down on greasy mud—bit of a drunken slur creeping in. “He slunk off with my mother and brother and the others. I owe him a beating, I think.”

  Wanda speaks up: “I saved his life out there, and I’d rather it not be for nothing. If you don’t mind.” It’s then Lane notices: She hasn’t touched her wine. When he poured her a second glass, he just filled her old one to the brim—wine on top of wine.

  “He’s a turd clogging up the pipes,” Rigo says. “Man I wanna break bad on him something fierce.”

  “Wanda’s right,” Cael says. “We should leave him alone.”

  “He almost got us killed,” Gwennie says. “He almost got you killed up there on the Saranyu. I almost had you. And then he—” Her voice breaks. Anger, sorrow, Lane can’t tell.

  Cael sighs. “Maybe. He also saved my ass. You boys remember that hobo? Eben Henry?”

  “How could I forget him?” Rigo says, mouth a mean, flat line.

  “He, ahh, he tried to kill me.” Cael seems rattled, revisiting this. “Put a knife through my hand and pinned me to the ground. Told me that he hated me, hated my family. Said he was one of the original raiders—one of the Sawtooth Seven with my father. Maybe with my mother, too, I’m not really sure—everything from that night kinda runs together like spilled paint. He said he was gonna take from Pop what Pop had taken from him: a son. Boyland saved me. Plain and simple. Beat him down with an oar and then I . . .” He puffs out his cheeks but doesn’t say any more.

  “Pop is alive,” Rigo says.

  Cael lifts his head. “What?”

  “He’s alive. I just—we just saw him. Couple-few nights ago. Your sister, too. Merelda’s with him.”

  It’s hard to tell if something has just been taken from Cael or given to him or some measure of both. He looks to be reeling, like a great big twister lifted him up, whirled him around, and tossed him back down to the ground.

  His eyes gleam, wet.

  “That’s good to hear,” Cael says. Like he’s trying to keep it close to the vest and not wear his emotions on his face. “That’s real good.”

  But then Gwennie erupts. She bursts out crying. Great, gulping, sudden sobs. Her hands ball into fists and she presses her forehead down on them. It’s so abrupt nobody seems to know what to do with it. Rigo is first to her, putting his hand on her back.

  “My father is dead,” she blurts out through a spit-slick mouth. She wipes at her eyes with the back of her forearm. “Lord and Lady, they . . . they killed him, and they did it to get to me. They took him and marched him to the end of the gangplank and dropped him off. I saw him fall.” She turns a piercing stare toward Cael, her sobs damming for a moment: “Just like I saw you fall. You fell, Cael. I don’t know how I’m sitting here looking at you.”

  Cael struggles for words, but it’s Wanda who speaks.

  “The Blight,” she says. “It saved him. I know you’re all scared, looking at us the way you are. I can tell it freaks you out. But it saved his life same as, in a way, it saved mine.”

  “I brought down the Saranyu,” Lane says.

  That revelation—that confession—comes up out of him without his blessing. Like a snake teased out of its hole. Drowned out of its nest by a few glasses of red wine.

  Predictably, everyone stares.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Lane says. “Cael, you know that. After you . . .” Killed Billy Cross and escaped the trawler. “The plan was still the plan, and we came upon that town, Tuttle’s Church, and the Empyrean had already . . . taken over. The people weren’t people. They were machines. They attacked, and several of us died, but me and Killian, well. We, ahh, we made it down below the street and found the control mechanism and—” He winces like this hurts to tell. “I was the one who put the code in. Transmitted it to a raider on the Saranyu. So I guess he was the one who really did the deed, but it came from me. So I’m on the hook for it. I know that it . . . killed a lot of people and didn’t do any of you any favors, and I’m sorry. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen.” A surge of resolve rises in him: “But I’m glad I did it.”

  It’s like everyone has had their throats cut. Silence and a few small sounds like the bubbling whisper of an opened neck.

  Cael’s the one to finally say something. He nods, like he’s found his own resolve (though here Lane wonders if his friend ever really lost it—Cael isn’t known for being wifty about whatever path he’s walking on, even if that path is about to drop him off a cliff). With a sniff and a shrug, Cael says: “Well, so here we are, then. All together again. Guess it’s time to tell you what I want.”

  Lane sits forward. “What you want?”

  “Mm-hmm. Much as I like seeing everybody again, me and Wanda have something we need to do. And I need your help, Lane.”

  “Name it.”

  “Somewhere on this flotilla—now, this city—there’s a laboratory. Belonged to an Empyrean woman named Esther Harrington. She thinks that her lab still contains a . . . well, I dunno what it is, but it’s a weapon. A weapon to use against the Empyrean.”

  “Harrington,” Gwennie says. “Like Balastair Harrington?”

  “His mother, I believe.”

  “Why would an Empyrean woman create a weapon to hurt her own people?” Lane asks. “That doesn’t add up.” He swills an
d sloshes the bottle of wine, takes a pull straight from it. His head buzzes, numb. “And where’d you meet this Empyrean lady anyway? Down here in the dirt? Something smells like road-killed rat, Cael McAvoy.”

  Cael and Wanda share a look.

  Then he says: “It’s the Maize Witch.”

  Gwennie, grief-addled and obviously tired, suddenly laughs. “The Maize Witch? That’s a joke, right? Wait, wait, I can do it, too: me and Jeezum Crow were hanging out at Busser’s Tavern with the Mother of Milk Teeth and the Saintangel Miriam, and then the Lord and the Lady stopped by—”

  “She ain’t a dang fairy tale,” Wanda snaps. That seems almost as much of a shocker to the room as Lane claiming he brought down the Saranyu. Wanda? Angry and snapping? Looking mean as a stepped-on snake? “She ain’t a witch, though. Her name is Esther, like Cael said. She’s the first to be gifted by the Blight. We need to listen to her because she’s the way forward.”

  “Pegasus City is the way forward,” Lane says. “But okay, fine, whatever. Let’s say there is some kind of secret weapon here. What’s it do?”

  “Well—” Cael starts to say.

  But Wanda gives a sharp shake of her head and what sounds like a warning: “Cael—”

  Cael, though, has always been a bull with blinders on and keeps charging forward. “It’ll kill the corn.”

  “Kill the corn.”

  Rigo offers a low, holy shit whistle.

  “Yup. Don’t know how, but she swears it’ll kill every last stalk of Hiram’s Golden Prolific. Then the Empyrean won’t have fuel for their ships. It’ll be like cutting their knees out from under them. They need the corn, so we take the corn away. Lickety-split.”

  King Hell and Old Scratch, Lane thinks. The wine now has him pickled good and proper, and he almost seizes on what Cael’s saying like a dog smelling chicken blood, because my-oh-my what a glorious thing. To rob them of their fuel. To destroy what’s been a plague upon the Heartland: the godsdamn corn. Hiram’s bloodthirsty invader. Kill it all. Burn it. Laugh as all the flotillas fall out of the sky like birds popped with slung shot.

  But then he hears Luna’s voice in his head. And Killian’s voice. For once they seem to agree inside the echo chamber of his own skull, and they remind him: The Sleeping Dogs need the fuel. If they’re going to fly this flotilla again, if they’re gonna take Pegasus City to the skies, they need the corn. They need it for all their air-ships. All the motorvators. Every last bit of it.

  Better to steal it from them than to destroy it.

  And so it is with some surprise that he hears himself say to Cael: “I can’t let that happen.”

  Cael goggles. He looks like he just got punched. “Sorry, what?”

  “We need that corn,” Lane says. “For now, at least. The fuel runs things for us, too, don’t forget. Hell, even now we got this extruder machine? Makes plastic out of the stuff. Soon as we break that dang blockade, we’ll get back to Fort Calhoun and get the motorvators running again.”

  “You’re an ass,” Cael says. “We used to talk about this as kids—oh yeah, hurr hurr, we’re gonna spit in the Empyrean’s eye and kill all this fool corn. Swatting at the stuff as it sliced at a leg or a bicep, took a taste of blood from us. Back then it was just some dumb fantasy, but suddenly it’s maybe really for real and you’re pissing all over it? What in King Hell, Lane?”

  “I grew up,” Lane says, sticking his chin out. “Became an adult with real responsibilities instead of running around like a sheep-headed idiot. Maybe you oughta do the same, McAvoy.” He pops air from his lips—lips he can’t feel, lips taken by the wine. “Everybody, get out. Go on. This little reunion’s over.”

  “Lane—” Rigo starts, but Lane waves him off, too.

  “You’ve changed,” Cael hisses.

  Lane nods. “You bet your ass I have.”

  AN IDEA OF SALVATION

  “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID,” Pop says. He winces when he speaks, as if the dancing light of the fire hurts his eyes.

  Agrasanto looks up, a glop of gruel ration on the tip of her thumb, then pops that thumb into her mouth like a lollipop to suck it off. The taste is bland, like eating wet clay. Hunger is hunger, though. “Do you, now.”

  “Boxelder. You helped those folks.”

  “Did I.”

  He leans forward—she can see that he’s changed since last they met. There’s a wildness to him now, like he’s just a hair more animal than man. Or maybe that’s how he always was, and all this has brought it back out. Don’t worry, Arthur, I’ve changed, too. He says, “Some of the Boxelder folks ended up with me and my people. They told me what you did for them. Those who left survived. Those who stayed, they were turned into—”

  “I know what happened to them.”

  “You obviously don’t approve. Or didn’t then.”

  “Still don’t.” A shudder runs through her at what the Empyrean has been doing to people. She’s seen it, at a distance. Wrangling up Heartlanders. Marching them onto these . . . processing ships, ships that look like black beasts dragging fat bellies across the tops of the corn. They do the processing right there in those boats—they don’t even bring the Heartlanders onto the flotillas anymore. Security risk. The screams that come out of those ships . . . the fire can’t make her warm, can’t burn that memory out. Instead, she reaches down, picks up the wooden gun case, runs her thumbs across the snaps. “The Initiative is a brutal solution. Inhuman.”

  Pop chuckles, a dry, raspy sound, like footsteps on dead leaves. “Last we met you were brutalizing me pretty good, Proctor. Getting your kicks in. Calling me a terrorist. Threatening me and my family.”

  “Then you may also remember that I said your people were not dogs. They were children. You were to be a lesson for those children.”

  “What happened to you, then? What changed? I bet I know. You got a little Heartland dirt under your fingernails, on your tongue. In your blood. You started to see maybe we weren’t all bad.”

  “Don’t presume to know me.” I’m not a book you can read.

  “Why’d you help, then?”

  She hesitates. “I don’t know, Arthur. I did what I felt was right.”

  “Does it still feel right?”

  “It does, but feeling right doesn’t always make it right. Doing the right thing is a good way to get wrong.” She sniffs, tells him: “They came, that night. My people. They found me there in your little rotten cob of a town, and they took me up and interrogated me—politely, painlessly. For a little while my lie had traction. But eventually they gathered up some of the others from your town and put them to the question, and they owed me little, if anything, and so someone sold me out. The Empyrean hurt me. Jailed me. Were going to hang me, actually. That’s what they do to traitors. They hang us from the bottom of the flotilla until the birds pick us apart.” Her mouth forms a stern line—a knife-slash of anger. “But I escaped.”

  “And now you’re an exile.”

  She snaps open the lid on the gun case. “I am between worlds, Arthur. A one-eyed queen in the land of the blind. Caught between the clouds in the sky and clods of Heartland dirt. That means I have to make a choice. I have to pick a side. Truth is, I’m just not that strong. I want to go home. I want to talk to my husband again. I want to look down on you all with the cocksure contempt I was born with.”

  Pop shrugs. “They say you can’t go home again.”

  “They better be wrong because I’m going to try.”

  Agrasanto removes the fat-barreled revolver. Her hands bow under its weight. “Heavy. Really very inelegant. A man’s weapon. Men always think they need something more than they really do. They want the ax instead of the scalpel. The big gun instead of the effective one. Still.” She thumbs open the chamber after some fumbling, begins slotting bullets into the cylinder. Click. Click. Click. When it’s full-up, she eases it shut with the heel of her hand. “I admit it’s impressive. ‘Heavenkiller.’ Some name.”

  “A promise, maybe.”

  She po
ints the gun at him, then thumbs the hammer back.

  He stiffens. But he sticks his chin out anyway—she’s not sure if it’s faux bravado or a courage that even she doesn’t possess. King Hell, maybe it’s something deeper, something worse. Maybe Arthur McAvoy just wants to die. No—she doesn’t buy that. He knows his son and daughter are alive. He must want to remain so, too.

  “If I was meant to be a lesson for children then,” he asks, “what am I now?”

  The gun barrel hovers, its black eye staring beyond the firelight.

  “A ticket back to heaven.”

  “How’s that?”

  She decides to tell him. She doesn’t owe him, but the night is long and dark, and this conversation is a stone to break up the river.

  “You’re a terrorist, Arthur. A wanted man. Now more than ever. I can buy my way back in with you on a pewter platter.”

  “Alive? Or as a corpse?”

  Her finger curls around the trigger like a worm around an apple stem.

  “The gun has a lot of power,” she says. “I can feel it. I get it now.”

  She removes her finger from the trigger, eases the gun back into the box, still loaded. She closes it, then says:

  “You get to live, Arthur. Things are changing up in the skies, and I don’t yet know who will be the one to take you off my hands and give me my pardon. But as soon as I figure that out, I’m taking you straight to them, and they can do what they want with you. Ask you questions. Cut you open. Throw you off the back end of the new war-flotilla I keep hearing about. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore except putting all this behind me.”

  “What you want is a dream,” Arthur says. “You can’t put the snakes back in the can, Proctor.”

  She shrugs. “I’m going to try.”

  FOUR CONVERSATIONS AND A FISTFIGHT

  SLEEP IS A GHOST Cael chases but cannot catch. The room they give him here in Pegasus City isn’t much more than a closet—the towers of the Saranyu crumbled and collapsed when they fell, and what remains standing are stunted, broken fingers, crooked and strange. The rooms shoulder against one another like old wooden fences that would fall to pieces if they didn’t have the others to lean on.