The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  It’s nice to see.

  More laughing around him. Somewhere: yelling, hollering.

  A scream, too . . .

  His vine tightens around his arm, cutting the circulation. He tells himself: Just a few revelers getting out of hand. Though even that could be a problem. Heartlanders aren’t exempt from monstrousness. A few drunks going after some poor girl, maybe. An odd thought: One day you’ll be protecting your daughter from drunks like that. Daughter. Lord and Lady!

  He takes a step forward when, from off to the side, he sees Lane coming up. Cael flags him over. “Hey, Mayor—you got a plan in mind in case folks get too riled up at this thing . . . ?”

  But Lane suddenly staggers into him, almost knocking him over.

  Oh, gods.

  His middle is wet. Gleaming red. Parts of his guts bulging out, cradled in his one arm like a just-born baby. In his other hand, he’s holding a broken bottle upside down—bloodless knuckles wrapped around the bottle’s neck, the base of it jagged and bloody.

  “Gave as good as I got,” Lane says. His words are gummy, throaty, and when he licks his lip, it leaves a trail of blood so dark it’s almost black.

  “Godsdamn, Lane, what the hell—” Cael catches Lane before he falls, props him up, gets his arm around his friend. “Who did this to you?”

  “I don’t know who she was,” Lane says, voice cracking, eyes wet. “Got rats in the walls, Cap’n. They’re in. They’re here. This is them.” He lifts his trembling eyes skyward. “Am I dead? Am I gonna die? Shit. Shit.”

  “Gonna get you some help right now, none of that dying talk,” Cael says. But then Lane points a finger and says:

  “Her.”

  A girl. Younger than Cael, maybe, but not by much. She’s coming up from the side, her skull bloody, the glass shards stuck in her scalp catching the colored lights. The knife in her hand—bloody.

  She’s got her teeth bared. Her stare is as dead as a crow’s eyes. The girl marches forth with her body tilted forward, as if some grim gravity—some unbreakable tether—drags her toward them.

  Cael thinks: She did this to my friend.

  He wishes he had the rifle. But for now—

  He reaches toward her. The Blight knows what to do. It lashes out, quick as a whip, and coils tight around her neck—then it stiffens, halting her momentum and fixing her to the spot.

  Her eyes bulge. She makes a sound like a rabbit, screaming.

  Then the knife flashes.

  It cuts clean through the vine. Pain like Cael has never known recoils through the remaining vine, to his shoulder, to his mind—as the vine thrashes about, spraying dark sap, he feels the strength go out of his legs, and he drops to his knees. Lane collapses with him, crying out.

  The girl tosses the Blight-vine aside.

  She leaps for Cael, the knife hissing through air.

  One minute, Gwennie is leading Scooter through the crowd to go find Balastair—because, as Scooter puts it, “he wants to see the little bird, teach it some tricks,” but the next thing she knows, she’s on the ground, flat on her back, and her little brother is screaming.

  A scarred girl, her hair shorn to the scalp, sits atop her chest, perched like an owl on a roof-peak.

  She has a long knife. The blade twirls in her hand, and suddenly it’s hilt up, blade down, and the girl plunges the weapon toward Gwennie—

  Gwennie jerks her head aside. The knife sticks in the ground. The girl growls, “Your bodies will break! Your blood will water the corn!” then wrenches the knife upward—

  But Gwennie spits in her eye, then rolls her whole body to the side. The girl yelps, scrambles off like a spider before she topples.

  The girl is up fast—too fast, improbably fast, like all her muscles have been trained to be less a girl and more some kind of nightmare, and the knife drops to the ground and a pistol is in her hand—

  By now people are screaming all around—

  The shooter goes off, screaming a sonic wave—

  But before it does, the hand jerks to the side, and the blast craters the dirt inches from Gwennie’s head.

  A small knife-blade sticks out of the girl’s hand. The gun drops.

  A shape moves fast from the side. Squirrel screams, leaps bodily atop the girl like some kind of shrieking demon, and begins to stab at the scarred girl with a knife—

  The attacker makes no sound. She twists her body and flings Squirrel off her. The smaller girl hits the ground hard and rolls, the knife clattering away as she remains still. Gwennie yells for Scooter to run—“Go find Mom!”

  Then she scrambles to stand. She manages, just barely—

  Turns to run—

  The girl yanks the other knife from the back of her own hand. A jet of blood follows in its wake, but her face barely registers any pain at all.

  The scarred girl turns the blade around, then comes for Gwennie with it.

  Gwennie picks up a hunk of dry earth and wings it toward the girl—she bats it away like it’s nothing, because it is nothing, and suddenly Gwennie is thinking, Don’t let her kill you, you can do better than this—stay alive!

  The girl emits a banshee wail, then runs forward with the knife twirling, dancing, cutting air with a whisper-hiss—

  But before she reaches Gwennie, she’s whipped up into the air. Legs kicking, arms thrashing—

  A thorn-studded vine coiled around her head and neck.

  Gwennie remembers a time when Cael’s father caught a rock dove out by their chimney. Fat-bellied birds. He said a small apology to the bird before covering the bird’s head with his hand and giving the bird a little shake—same way votaries of the Lord and Lady’s manse might shake holy water onto those they are attempting to bless—the bird’s neck broke with an audible snap.

  This is like that, but worse.

  The vine gives the girl a hard shake like she’s just a toy, just a doll. The neck breaks like the sound of a tent pole snapping. The head goes sideways, and the vine tosses the body down like it’s naught but a broken tool.

  Wanda steps forward, eyes gone all green.

  The vine comes from her open, outstretched mouth.

  It retracts into her maw. Her throat bulges as it becomes part of her.

  “Oops,” Wanda says.

  “Thank you,” Gwennie says, gasping, trying to find air. “For saving me. I know you didn’t have to.”

  For a moment, Wanda just stares. Then, shaken from it, she says: “Check on the girl. Then we need to find the others.”

  It hurts less than it should, all these cuts, all this blood, because Boyland Junior’s so deep in his cups that even his teeth are numb. He squeals and staggers backward, his big arms thrown up in front of him like a wall—beyond his arms, the knife slashes again and again, cutting through his flesh and muscles, maybe down to the bone. Blood comes off his arms in red curtains.

  He’s not even sure what the hell is happening. One minute he was standing there looking into the crowd of people, letting his mind wander and his vision drift so that every person had a ghosted doppelgānger—one, then two, then three. Four of everybody, he thought. My own version of King Hell.

  Somewhere, people started screaming. He registered that, but couldn’t quite pull any meaning out of the mire, nor any concern.

  Then four versions of one girl stalked up to him.

  Took a second to pull his gaze back together, and by the time he did—uttering something that sounded like, Wuzza, who you?—she started moving her arm in a figure-eight motion like she was trying to hit him all fancy-like, except he realized all too late that her hand wasn’t empty and, in fact, held a very sharp knife. A knife that, even now, is slicing his arms up like they’re lamb sausage.

  His heel suddenly catches on something—a crumbled bit of rubble, a tent peg, a stubborn shuck rat—he has no idea what and never finds out. All he knows is first he’s vertical and then he’s horizontal.

  The girl, this knife-wielding psycho, stands over him. She’s not smiling. No s
ign of her being happy about this at all. Her face is just a scarred-up mask of grotesque indifference. His father, the Boxelder mayor, used to look happy when he laid into him with a belt or a book. (Only thing a book is good for, the elder Barnes said, is beating the donkey I call a son.)

  Gods, just thinking about that, thinking about his father—thinking about how right now his arms are slick with blood and maybe he’ll never use them again, thinking about how Gwennie is lost and gone and how all his life has broken apart like turds out of a goat’s ass—

  He starts bawling.

  His head flops back and he sobs so hard it’s like the grief is being pulled up all the way from his toes to his heart and then to his eyes, a journey that hurts. A strange thought goes through him:

  Grief is poison.

  Then for a half second, the tears clear and the hitching sobs stop, because the girl is just . . . standing there. Struck dumb by his display.

  A look crosses her face.

  He knows that look. His own mother’s worn it in the past.

  He mumbles, words so slurred he’s not even sure they’re words:

  “Don’t you feel bad for me.”

  And then something slams into the side of her head and knocks her over like a scarecrow. Takes a little bit for Boyland’s brain to catch up to what he’s seeing, but he licks his lips and wipes a ropy strand of snot away from his face with a blood-slick arm, then asks: “Cozido?”

  Rigo stands there, holding his leg like a bludgeon. Same way he held it earlier that day when he almost brought it down on Boyland’s head.

  He hobbles a bit, then stoops and refits the prosthetic to his stump.

  He offers a hand. “We have to go,” Rigo says. “We’re under attack.”

  The girl with the golden scars screams as she leaps for Cael—her shriek is a wildcat’s cry, a sound that contains multitudes. Cael’s there on his knees, and a thought flashes crystalline in his mind—I have to stay alive. His daughter needs him. She’s just this little thing without any protection of her own. A tiny un-person who needs him and who needs Wanda, too.

  Wanda.

  He’s going to have to kill this girl.

  The Blight-vine’s flopping uselessly by his side.

  The rifle’s back in his room.

  But he’s got the old standby.

  He reaches back, feels the slingshot tucked in his back pocket and draws it, scrambling with his other hand to find a piece of stone or shattered brick, and he scoots backward as the girl rushes him—

  His hand finds a stone, but then fumbles it—

  The stone drops away—

  At her feet, fast movement.

  Lane.

  The mayor of Pegasus City slashes out with the broken bottle—

  The girl howls as the glass cuts across the back of her ankle—

  She drops. Lands hard on her shoulder. The knife flicks away.

  Part of Cael thinks: Grab her, throttle her, ask her who she is.

  But there’s no time. Because Lane is bleeding out. His guts are shining under the electric lights. If he’s going to save his friend, he has to move fast. Cael gets under Lane, lifts him up carefully as he can, and begins to move.

  The Harpy was once named Bellique Killane. She was a child of great privilege—her mother, an engineer on the Saranyu who ran a team of programmers (a team that also contained her father) responsible for crafting the network by which visidexes communicate with one another. Twenty years ago, that was not a possibility between flotillas. Today, it is.

  Because of her mother.

  Because of her father.

  Both of whom lived on the Saranyu.

  Both of whom are now dead.

  Bellique was not on the Saranyu at the time—some who were on the flotilla escaped with their lives, hurrying to yachts or skiffs as it fell. She was with her sister, Chantal, on the Oshadagea, learning how to be a vintner. That was her dream, and her parents supported it. Because that is the glory of the Empyrean. See what you want to be. Be what you want to be. All of life infinite in its potential. Until the attack on the Saranyu changed that.

  It robbed her of her family.

  It robbed her of her name.

  No. That’s not correct. She gave up her name.

  There are some days she cannot even remember it, but she remembers it now as she creeps into the room to kill an Empyrean man. A traitor to the Seventh Heaven, as much a traitor as the Saintangel Cipher was to the Lord and Lady (Cipher thought he could fly higher than they could, build a house so far into the sky that it was a manse not in the clouds but in the stars, but he learned that wings made of wax melted under the heat of the sun).

  Here, this man: Balastair Harrington.

  Sitting by a window in his chamber, separate from the rest of the celebration. Already she knows her sisters are down there, doing what they must under the directive of the Dirae. This is their calling. The Harpies have died along with the Saranyu. They are now waking ghosts. Angels of vengeance. More monster than man.

  He sits in shadow. Lights off. Just a silhouette.

  Bellique—no. No! She has to stop thinking of herself as somebody. As a person with a name. The Harpy—that’s it, yes, just the Harpy—creeps forward, drawing the knife, a knife whetted with an electron-sharpener, a knife so sharp it’ll cut through bone if allowed the chance.

  Her feet are silent on the floor. Silent even in the rubble.

  They are silent because she has been trained to be silent.

  Trained for over a year now. To stalk. To creep. To kill.

  Deep breath.

  She slices out with the knife.

  The blade meets little resistance.

  The man’s head comes off at the shoulders and rolls to the ground.

  Everything seems to go slow. It’s chaos now. They’ve stepped over bodies. Hurried past them. Squirrel is with her. Scooter, too. She’s holding both of their hands, pulling them through the crowds, Wanda following close behind. More screams, somewhere. Sonic trills. She can’t find her mother. Doesn’t want to lose her. A little voice says, You’ve already lost her, you pushed her away after what happened up there, you’ve left her alone—but she can’t go down that path, not now, not with everything going on—

  The power goes out. The electric lights go dark one by one in quick succession. More gasps. More screams. Raiders yelling, We’re under attack!

  Then the lights come back on, flashing, strobing. Electric buzz-snaps—crackling, popping, hissing above their heads like locusts in a burn barrel. For a moment, the crowd parts—

  And there stands Rigo and Boyland.

  Boyland looks like the walking dead. Gray-faced. His arms dark with blood. Face, too. All of him, soaked and sodden. Red lines, darker and deeper, mark his forearms, his biceps. Cuts. It runs off his fingertips like runoff from rain-gutters. He’s looking in her direction in horror, and so is Rigo, and then both of them are calling out—

  But they’re not looking at her. They’re looking past her.

  Gwennie turns, sees Wanda standing there.

  Clutching an opened throat, her eyes bulging. Fingers grasping at the wound, coming away wet with red.

  One of the girls stands there, teeth bared, knife out.

  The girl raises the weapon again—

  Gwennie’s wrist flicks before she even realizes it.

  A small throwing knife embeds in the scarred girl’s temple.

  The attacker lists sideways and hits the ground, dead.

  Wanda. Throat slit. The child inside her—Gwennie hurries over, crying out, everything going slower and slower. She rushes to Wanda, catches her by the arms, holds her up. The girl’s eyes are unfocused, going empty, her tongue lolling out over her lips. There’s this moment, and Gwennie recognizes it because it’s right there on Wanda’s face, when Wanda realizes what’s happening, and this look of utter sadness crosses her face—everything crinkled up like she wants to cry but can’t, and she makes a sound in the back of her throat, a terr
ible animal sound.

  Gwennie hears herself saying, “Wanda, Wanda, Wanda, no—no! You can’t, you have to, oh gods, no, please—”

  Wanda’s eyes snap to focus.

  They look at Gwennie.

  Clarity. Awareness. Fear and sorrow wiped away.

  It doesn’t even register at first—Gwennie thinks it’s just more blood, or some strange effect of having one’s throat opened, but what she sees there in the hissing, blood-bubble gap isn’t human. Little tiny tendrils—small vines like searching threads, like inchworms venturing off a leaf’s edge. They rise from the bottom of the wound and reach down from the top of it, too.

  They meet in the middle. Little stems and shoots curling around one another, tying in knots—

  Pulling taut.

  She’s fixing herself.

  Or maybe: the Blight is fixing her.

  The wound suddenly closes up. A scar, ragged and green as moss, marks the space where her throat had just been opened.

  Wanda blinks.

  Then clutches at her middle.

  “The baby,” Gwennie says.

  “She’s fine,” Wanda says. “I’m fine.”

  She pushes past Gwennie, moving toward the others—but all Gwennie can think is: None of this is fine, and none of us are ever going to be fine again.

  The Harpy turns away from the Empyrean man’s corpse.

  The air is suddenly filled with this sound—she recognizes it as the rustle of bird wings followed swiftly by panicked squeaking—just before something hits her in the face and begins to peck and claw at it.

  She swats at it, but the little bird is far faster than she expects. It flies up, around, left, then right, then back to her face again, pecking, scratching.

  Another whistle from beyond the bird.

  And then the little creature is gone.

  When the Harpy regains her vision once more, she sees him standing there. The Empyrean man. Balastair Harrington.

  The thing she thought was his severed head—really just a hollow container—rolls at her feet.

  “Who are you?” he asks her.