The Harvest

by Chuck Wendig

  He does this day after day.

  Night after night.

  His body aches. His mind feels like mud.

  Everything in him just wants to give up—like an old dog who can’t dog anymore. I’m tired, he thinks. They have me. I’ll never see the Heartland again, except as a corpse thrown off the edge of this flotilla.

  And that’s if he’s lucky.

  Then comes the night when the wind howls through the bars of the birdcage prison they’ve placed him in, and two men come.

  Frumentarii. Peregrine’s Guard. He’s already met the peregrine of this flotilla—Lirong Yau. An old woman. Bitter and wrinkled as an apricot pit. Dark eyes like chips of flint beyond pinched skin. She seemed tired during their meeting. Like all of this bored her.

  Now, her men have come for him. Two men, each muscled beneath his leather. One looks young, naive, untested. The other is old, grizzled, a lantern jaw speckled with ill-shaven salt-and-pepper hair.

  The old one mutters, “Your presence is requested, terrorist.”

  “By whom?” Arthur croaks.

  It’s the young one who answers: “The Dirae.”

  Then he opens the cage.

  Arthur launches himself.

  The older one deftly steps aside and brings a hard knee against Arthur’s hip—right into the bone spurs that have haunted him since he was a young man. The pain is like sticking a screwdriver into the soft meat of a rotting tooth, except across his whole body. Everything lights up with excruciating agony, and Arthur falls down and crumples.

  They haul him to his feet.

  They step out of the elevator, and things happen fast.

  Something lashes around the young guard’s neck. He claws at it in the darkness, gurgling, eyes bulging. From around the corner steps someone with a gun held against her shoulder—

  It couldn’t be—

  But it is. Gwendolyn Shawcatch.

  She points the rifle, a proper rifle, a rifle Arthur recognizes as his own. The older Frumentarii reaches for the pistol at his hip, letting go of Arthur in the process, but having to do all that makes him slow.

  And Gwennie is fast.

  She jabs him hard in the solar plexus with the rifle barrel. As he oofs and doubles over, the rifle butt comes crashing down against the back of his head.

  He drops, face-first.

  And the young one slumps forward, too, in a lazy somersault against the other one’s hind end.

  The whip-cord vine around his neck withdraws as Wanda steps forward.

  “I told you not to kill him!” Gwennie hisses.

  Wanda shrugs. “He isn’t dead, relax. He’s just taking a snooze.” She turns to Arthur. “Hi, Mister McAvoy.”

  He tries to find words, but none arrive.

  Gwennie thrusts his rifle into his hands. “This is yours, I believe?”

  He nods.

  She smirks. “We gotta move, Swift Fox. Your son awaits.”

  COLONIZE

  THE CANISTER FOAMS OVER.

  All the eggs bubble up and out.

  And they begin to hatch.

  Cael doesn’t know what the hell is happening. He steps back and curses at Boyland: “The hell are you doing?”

  The buckethead scowls, looking suddenly nervous. “I don’t know! I figure we don’t have time to dally so let’s, you know, pop the seal on one of these bad boys, see what’s inside. . . .”

  “What part of secret weapon do you not understand?” Cael looks at Balastair. “Do we need to cover our mouths? Run for the hills? What?”

  But Balastair is frozen in place, eyes unblinking. All he says is:

  “Ants.”

  “What?”

  The eggs begin spilling over. And splitting as they tumble. Little white maggoty things burst out, doubling the volume of the eggs, making the whole pile grow and grow—and then the white maggoty things twist and throb, growing little rubbery leg-stalks and flicking antennas—

  “They’re ants,” Balastair says again. “Oh, Mother.”

  “Kill ’em!” Boyland shouts, and takes a fist and brings it down on the growing pile of ants. They pop underneath his assault—sounds like a string of little firecrackers going off—and then Balastair is screaming for him to stop and is pulling him back, then Boyland is screaming—

  The underside of his hand is blistering, growing red—

  “Ow, ow, shit dang gods it burns.” Boyland, shaking the larval corpses from the bottom of his hand, wiping them on his dungarees—where he leaves a smeary bug-gut trail, the fabric begins to smoke.

  Cael grabs the hem of his own shirt, uses it to clean off Boyland’s hand. His own shirt starts to smolder and fray. The scent in the air smells acrid, acidic, like the contacts of an old motorvator battery.

  He affords another glance at the ants, still foaming over and spilling out of the cylinder in a white tide—

  The little legged larvae start to change now, too.

  They shimmer, iridescent like the blue of peacock feathers.

  Ants. They’re growing into ants. Hatching, pupating, swelling. Now what spills out of the top of the cylinder are proper ants, not just eggs, not just maggots—little insects, each the size of a pin’s head.

  They begin spilling out over the table. Thousands of them. More, even. Balastair and the others backpedal toward the elevator.

  “Those little sum-bitches!” Boyland shouts.

  “Bal,” Cael asks, “what is happening?”

  “Those are my ants,” he says, looking horrified, shell-shocked. “They were my first. Mother said to begin with something small, something with a simple code, a creature that can breed quickly so that the results of my meddling would be plainly seen. She wanted me to work on little vinegar flies, but I said, oh no, I’ll show her, I’ll impress her—and I cheated. The first thing I changed inside my little ant specimens was how fast they bred. From egg to larvae to pupae in a matter of moments, not days or months.”

  “The hell’s he talking about?” Boyland asks Cael, still shaking his hand like he just burned it in a campfire.

  But Balastair continues: “Mother wasn’t impressed, or didn’t act that way, and so I kept pushing limits with these little ants. I kept making changes.”

  Across the room, the ants are spreading out, a shimmering blue pool shifting and rippling. They move fast. They’re already at the far wall, crawling toward a metal vent like a stream of water defying gravity.

  “I . . . used them to attack my mother’s lab. I was angry. Impudent. I upped their formic acid content, concentrated it to create a defense mechanism against anything that would attack them—assassin bugs, other ants, even a crushing hand. Then I made it so that they hungered for the corn—that was what my mother was working on, and so I thought it would amuse me and upset her if their greatest desire was to tear apart the corn by stalk, by leaf, by root, and use it as material in their nests. And finally, I made it so they were attracted to anything electrical. They chew apart microchips. Eat wires. They form their own conduits, creating short circuits all their own.”

  Suddenly, the lights of the room begin to go out, one bulb at a time. Each buzzes, then flashes, then goes dark.

  “All in an effort to hurt my mother.” Balastair makes a desperate, sad sound: somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I give you my first creation: the Blue-Jeweled Reaper Ant.”

  He turns and slams the elevator button once, twice, three times.

  Bam bam bam.

  “That’s her weapon?” Cael asks. “Ants?!”

  Balastair babbles: “She destroyed them. Or said she did. Gods, she kept them. And bred more of them. Colony after colony.”

  That’s her weapon, Cael realizes.

  “Do they hurt people?” he asks. Balastair doesn’t answer him as they hear the elevator rumbling and clanging behind the doors. “Do they hurt people?”

  “No. No, not unless you crush them. . . .”

  Cael bolts back down the aisle, meeting the coming darkness.

 
He hopes the canister Boyland opened is now empty of its insectile payload—before the lights went out, he saw the ants streaming up toward not one vent, but several. In the dark, he feels around, finds the crate.

  The witch wants her weapon.

  And Cael’s going to give it to her.

  He hoists the crate—it’s lighter than he expected—and heads back toward the elevator, half expecting his shoes to begin to smoke and melt.

  In the center of the room, a golden square as the elevator opens.

  The other two hurry in, and Cael slides in just as the doors close. Cicero the bird chirps at him, as if angry.

  The Elevator Man rumbles to life. “Ah! Mister Ha-ring-ton. Your destination today, s-s-s-sir?”

  “Down. Down!”

  The doors shudder closed.

  And the elevator begins to crawl downward.

  “We may want to get off this flotilla,” Balastair says.

  “Why?” Cael asks.

  “The ants. They’ll get in everything. They don’t—they’re crazy! They don’t colonize properly, they won’t go to a single location and make a single nest—they spread out, and breed wantonly, and—” He pales. “That’s what she wants. That’s why they’re her weapon.”

  The lights in the elevator dim.

  “Aw, hell,” Boyland says. “No, no, no, c’mon, c’mon.”

  The Elevator Man says: “I appear to be, be, be, be—appear to be, be, be having tech-nick-al diffi-diffi-diffi-culllll—”

  Cael spies the little blue shimmer peeking through one of the holes in the auto-mate’s speaker-mouth.

  One tiny Reaper ant.

  But there’s never just one ant, is there?

  A second ant head emerges. Then five more. Then all the speaker-holes have ants pushing out of them, and soon a whole stream of them disgorge from the auto-mate’s mouth as if it’s vomiting them, and it makes a sound like pollen hissing against a screen door—

  “Don’t move!” Balastair says. “Do not move.”

  The lights go out in the elevator.

  Boyland screams.

  THE HALF-LIFE OF ANOMALOUS MATERIALS

  “I ASSURE YOU,” Lirong Yau says, scowling, “things are under control.”

  “They most certainly are not,” Enyastasia says, stepping up to a bank of monitors splayed out in a beveled curve. Each screen is touch-capable, a visidex all its own, and she reaches out and begins to touch screens, bringing up maps, alerts, guard reports. The two evocati augusti guardsmen turn their horsehead helmets toward each other, giving a quizzical look and shrugging. “You have terrorists on board this flotilla. Might I remind you of the last time that happened? I’m sure if I could conjure the corpse of Percy Lemaire-Laurent, Peregrine of the Saranyu, he would tell you all about it.”

  “You are mistaken. And let me be the first to say I am disgusted by your assumptions—this is a breach of authority, Dirae.” Enyastasia hears the way the woman says that word. In her head she translates it as: You stupid little girl. “I can speak for all the peregrines and all the praetors when I say we are growing tired of your micromanaging. You have not yet earned your—”

  One of the screens flicker.

  Miranda Woodwick’s face appears. Her mouth is a severe line, her silver hair sternly, freshly trimmed almost down to the scalp. “There you are, Miss Ormond.”

  “Not now, Miranda.”

  “Don’t not now me. You have to pull back. Our own people are rebelling. This is too much for them. You must see that. We have pushed too hard, and now they’re pushing back—but we can stop this. We need to make some concessions; we cut out the tumors with a hard, sharp knife, but now it’s time for a softer hand.”

  Enyastasia sneers. “I am your hard, sharp knife. I don’t do ‘soft hands.’ You wanted all this? Now it’s done. You don’t just put me back in a box, Miranda.”

  “Enyastasia, please, listen—”

  “No more listening.”

  She thrusts a finger at the screen and kills the call.

  When Miranda’s face is gone, she sees it—

  The last report from two Frumentarii. “Look, Peregrine. Here. Two of yours went off investigating what they thought might be refugees from the Heartland. That was hours ago. Care to speculate on when they checked in to report last? When they called to let you know that oh, false alarm, nothing going on here—?”

  “H-have they?”

  Lirong Yau’s bewilderment would be precious if it weren’t so dire.

  “No. They have not.” She touches the screen of one visidex, calls up a hierarchical tree; she highlights two names on it, Bevins and Gormley. The two men she sent to procure Arthur from his cell—Arthur, who would be an excellent hostage to draw the Heartlanders out of hiding. She knows they’re here. When the blockade closed in and the Empyrean fleet appeared at the shattered wall of Pegasus City, it didn’t take long to hitch a ride and, on the way, look for docking anomalies—one appeared even as she was scanning for it. On the Ilmatar, of all places. She assumed they were coming to rescue Arthur McAvoy, and now that the two Frumentarii sent to fetch him have failed to answer, well, that is an answer all on its own, isn’t it?

  Rage claws its way up her throat. She growls.

  “Get everyone,” she snaps to the peregrine. “Every evocati augusti. Every Frumentarii. Then send a message to the other flotillas. Tell them they need to send reinforcements. This flotilla is under attack from the inside. We will go door-to-door. We will tear people out of their beds until they yield the terrorists to us. We’ve got rats in our walls, Yau. Go! Find them!”

  The peregrine hesitates. She’s not used to being bossed around by anybody but her own praetor.

  But then she offers a clipped nod and leaves.

  “And where will I go?” Enyastasia asks. She ignores the pain in her bandage-swaddled ankle, ignores the headache that feels like it’s trying to rip apart her skull at her scar-seams. Again she pulls up a list of alerts.

  What’s that?

  A contamination alert.

  A little red pulse in the Archival District.

  Right over the Palladium Tower. And spreading.

  It reads: ANOMALOUS BIOLOGICAL CONTAMINATION.

  “That is where I need to be,” she snaps to the two horseheaded guardsmen on each side of her. “The two of you, come with me. I have something to get, and then some Heartlanders to kill.”

  BOTTOM FLOOR

  “NO ONE’S HERE,” Gwennie says, pressing flat against the door of the Palladium Tower. She puts her hand on the door—nothing happens. Door doesn’t open. No lock emerges. Nothing. “They should be here by now.”

  Arthur looks up. “Is my son in there?”

  Wanda nods, because she can feel him. “He is.” Somewhere in the middle of the tower, she senses Cael—a tangle of cells and neurons, each a shining diamond, a flickering firefly. His lights call to hers, and hers to his.

  She can feel what he feels. Transmitting to her, bright and clean and sharp. Panic. She senses panic. Which raises her own panic level. But there’s something else there, too—hope.

  “He has what we came for, I think,” she says. “But something’s wrong.”

  Arthur stands, his face wearing the rictus of great pain, and then he feels around the winged statues. “Perhaps we can use one of these to lever—”

  The door wrenches open.

  It wrenches open because Wanda wants it open.

  Another moment that strikes her as curious. What I want, I can have. Just by taking it. She marvels for a second, then continues to use a writhing web of tendrils like fingers to pry the door open the rest of the way.

  Then she leans forward into the gap, bites down, and winces as she reaches up into the space—she closes her eyes. The vines snake up the walls, and what they feel, she feels. The smooth texture. The delicate rivets.

  The bottom of the elevator.

  She coils around the base of it and yanks.

  Pain blooms in her shoulder, but she ign
ores it as the elevator drops down out of the tower. As if she dislodged food from a choking man’s throat.

  Cael, Balastair, and Boyland hurry out of the darkened, dead elevator. Boyland is whimpering—his one hand is covered in blisters, and a few stray blisters mark his neck, his cheek, his forehead. And his clothes are pocked with holes—as if someone took a burning cigarette and cooked away the fabric.

  Balastair and Boyland swat at themselves, swiping their hands furiously against their bodies, panicked. Cael sets a crate down—gently—and does the same. “Godsdamnit. Godsdamnit!”

  “Son, what happened?” Pop asks.

  Cael stops mid-motion. He straightens up. “Ants,” he says.

  “Ants?” Pop asks. “That’s a helluva thing. Why would ants—?”

  But Cael doesn’t give him time to finish the question. He launches himself at his father, and Arthur wobbles as he accepts the hug.

  “I missed you, Cael,” Pop says.

  “Gods, I missed you, too, Pop.” Cael pulls away, gives his father a good looking-over. “They kicked King Hell out of you, didn’t they?”

  Pop smiles, but Wanda sees that the smile betrays agony. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just glad the lot of you is alive.”

  “Lane is dead,” Wanda says.

  Pop looks to Cael. Cael nods.

  “We’re gonna be dead, too, if we don’t move,” Gwennie says.

  “Back to the temple,” Balastair says. “Gwennie is right—we’ve little time to waste.” As he steps forward, the Empyrean man puts a hand on Pop’s shoulder. “It is good to see you again after all these years, Arthur.”

  “You’ve grown up quite a bit—”

  Near them, one of the light-posts sparks and goes out.

  Pop makes a quizzical sound. “Curious.”

  Another goes out, ten feet away. Bzzt. A flash, then darkness.