Demon Harvest

by Patrick C. Greene

  Dennis ran toward his mother, tears bursting from his eyes the way his stomach wound bled. “Run, Ma!” he shouted.

  She stood there, perplexed. Bravo appeared, raising his ears in confusion at Dennis’s strange behavior.

  Dennis raised the knife high, just as his mother was pushed against the far wall.

  By Jill. The drummer covered her boyfriend’s mother, her petite back the only shield against the athame.

  Someone else was at the door, with her hand extended toward Dennis. He stopped running so abruptly he pitched over Jill and Elaine like a triple-run hitter gunning for home. He landed directly on his face and lay still, bleeding from his nose into the patterned carpet.

  Violina hadn’t the breath for a gasp. She had stopped laughing as abruptly as Dennis had stopped running, and it made her choke.

  Ysabella stood strong and fierce, just outside her door, wearing an expression of such rage her eyes physically glowed like fire, her hair blowing back from a sudden hot wind.

  Brinke stepped out beside Ysabella, sporting a decade’s worth of fresh crow’s feet and a streak of gray in her hair that matched Candace’s. “Go inside and rest, Ysabella. Let me deal with her.”

  “Together, Brinke.” Ysabella grabbed her hand. “As we should have done from the start.”

  Stella emerged and took Brinke’s other hand, but addressed Violina directly. “You should never have come to Ember Hollow, bitch.”

  Violina quickly got over her shock and regained her imperious smile. “How sweet! The crone, the matron, and…the hippy.”

  She clasped her hands together as if pleading. “I do hope you won’t hit me with an expelliarmus!”

  She swept her hands sideways, unleashing an arc of hurricane wind that peeled the wallpaper and knocked the women off their feet.

  Bravo barked with rage.

  Jill got Elaine back into the suite, grabbing Bravo by the collar as well.

  Brinke recovered first, rising to a knee and extending her thumb and little finger. Twin beams of pink energy flowed as though from a high-pressure hose.

  Violina blew like she was dousing a match, making the pink light disperse into harmless, quick-fading sparks.

  Brinke stood and helped Ysabella to a stand, from which she continued forward, flying like a rocket with glowing hands outstretched.

  “Des Irtix!” Violina shouted. The words turned to a black net that opened to entwine Ysabella. It burned away on contact, but Ysabella continued forward, her hands a battering ram to Violina’s chest, knocking her back into the elevator doors.

  Ysabella, momentarily spent, fell to her hands and knees with a grunt.

  Stella glanced into the suite to check on her frightened little girls, relieved to see Leticia dragging them away from the door.

  “Think iceberg!” Brinke shouted, as she grabbed Stella’s hand.

  A starburst of blue light sailed over Ysabella and fell on Violina like a boulder, spreading across her body. As the glow died, ice remained, trapping Violina, the momentum knocking the frozen witch statue onto her back.

  Ysabella struggled to her feet and stumbled toward the other witches. “It’s not enough! We three must…!”

  A tinkling sound told them Violina had already broken free. She rose like a catapult, her left hand extended and cupped. A violet bubble grew and flew from it, enveloping Ysabella.

  Brinke and Stella watched in horror as the energy blister began to close in on the elder witch like shrink-wrap. Ysabella’s scream was silent within the vesicle, but her pain and terror were plain for all to see.

  The bubble trap crushed in on the old woman at alarming speed.

  Brinke knew how this spell worked, knew that Ysabella would soon be a basketball-sized bag of crushed flesh. “Stop it, damn you, Violina!”

  “Why, of course!” said Violina. “Just relinquish your magic energy to me, and I’ll let her hobble back to bed.”

  “What is she talking about?” asked Stella.

  “There’s a spell of transference,” Brinke said in a defeated voice. “I used it to revive Ysabella.”

  “You too, my fledgling friend,” Violina said to Stella. “You will repeat her chant and grant me your powers…such as they are.”

  Stella glanced toward the little girls and saw they were huddled with the terrified Leticia against the bedroom’s far wall. “All right.”

  Violina stopped the bubble’s shrinking by turning her cupped hand sideways. “Begin.”

  Brinke wept as she did. “Crotus Keemay Kah…”

  Stella regretfully repeated.

  “Sunoo Gemma Kah…”

  Stella felt a pull, a draining from her solar plexus, like a powerful vacuum hose was pressed to it. “Sunoo Gemma…”

  “’Scuse me.” She was shoved to the side.

  Dennis stood beside her, his chin and shirtfront drenched in blood from his broken nose. In his right hand was Matlida Saxon’s athame, held aloft.

  Dennis slung his arm like a baseball pitcher. The athame appeared in Violina’s throat. As if by magic.

  Stella stared at him in astonishment.

  “I took a mail order ninja course when I was Stuart’s age,” he said, sounding congested.

  Violina grabbed the handle of the athame and began reciting an incantation, which came out as mere lip movement. This quickly trailed off as the baneful witch toppled face-forward, plunging the knife point through the back of her own neck as she landed face-first.

  The bubble around Ysabella dissolved to a fine mist. She gulped fresh, glorious air. Dennis went to her, offering a helping hand. “I ain’t trying to be no nick-of-time cowboy here,” he said, “but I owed that bitch.”

  He took a black bandana from his pocket and wiped his bloody nose and chin. “Besides, you ladies are gonna need all the magic you got for our real problem.”

  Jill blindsided him, driving him against the wall as she laid a kiss on him that seemed shockingly violent to the onlookers. Their age of celibacy was quickly coming to an end.

  Chapter 31

  Walk Among Us

  Trapped at dead center of the Community Center’s gym floor, Reverend McGlazer, the Stuyvesant siblings, Bernard Riesling and Timbo formed a tight circle facing out. Timbo chambered another round in his rifle but held off from shooting, considering the ratio of bullets to assailants.

  The pumpkin goblin at the window just above them opened its mouth so wide its unsettlingly human teeth began to space out from one another. It squeezed its eyes shut in a sick farce of human pain—and vomited.

  Reflexively, the survivors stepped back from the yellowish splash of pungent water and pulp. Kerwin’s grunt reminded them that there were tentacles waiting for them if they fell within reach.

  Then came another stream of pumpkin puke. Then another. The goddamned squash monsters were trying to hurl on them for some reason. Timbo raised his rifle, gratified to see the wretched, retching horrors quickly duck out of range.

  “Oh, God,” Mayor Stuyvesant whispered. “No…” She clutched her brother by the sleeves.

  The first puke puddle was…doing something.

  The seeds clumped amid the pools went into a hyper-fast growth stage, expanding to small mottled green spheres, then yellow ovoids, quickly darkening to orange as they swelled.

  “They barfed up babies or something!” Stuart exclaimed, nearly running backward from the weight-room window.

  Pockets set off a choir of frightened whining.

  “Oh, man…” DeShaun saw for himself, and instantly regretted, for the kids’ sake, the defeated tone in his voice. “I mean…um, this might take some…wait!”

  “What!?”

  “In your backpack. The…”

  “Atomic Corndog!” Stuart interrupted. “Hells, yeah!”

  DeShaun knelt and grabbed Pockets by the s
houlders. “Listen, buddy. There’s a job you gotta do, okay?”

  Pockets shook his head vigorously. “No!”

  “Everybody’s depending on you!”

  Pockets started bawling as he nodded his affirmative, regretting that he was rising to the occasion.

  * * * *

  “What about your friend?” Ophelia asked Pedro, as he pulled up in front of the sheriff’s office.

  Wrapped in a blanket, Deputy Yoshida lay in a cramped heap in the back of Pedro’s Honda, while Ophelia and her mother sat crunched together in the passenger seat.

  “Keep it down. It’s been a while since he had some decent shut-eye.”

  Thunder sounded. Pedro glanced back at Yoshida, both relieved and concerned that the crash did not wake him. “Come on, ladies. Let’s get you inside.”

  “Will you stay with us?” Ophelia asked.

  Pedro saw the memory image of the girl’s father, lying broken and dead in their living room. He realized she probably didn’t even know what had happened to him—or wasn’t facing it. “I’ll catch up with you in a little while,” he answered.

  Pedro wrestled Yoshida onto his broad shoulders and ran though the rain with Ophelia and her mother to the station-house door, where they were met by Hudson and Deputy Astin, both lugging boxes of ammo. Military-grade guns were strapped across their backs.

  “Petey!” Hudson said. “Am I glad to see you. Is Yoshi okay?”

  “He’s done his fair share for the night.”

  “All right, then. Get these girls and that sexy sack of Kobe beef back there safe in a cell and come with us.”

  As Pedro started toward the holding area, Astin stopped him. “Thought you might want to reunite with your old friend.”

  Pedro had not seen his scarred ten-gauge in a year.

  * * * *

  “Okay, Pocky.” DeShaun death-gripped the weight room’s decades-old push broom and set it like a hockey stick. “On three, you open, we’re out, you close it. I’m on defense, Stuart bolts next door to get that backpack, we scram straight back. You open and close it fast.”

  Stuart took up a runner’s starting position a few feet back. “If one of ’em gets in…” The other kids raised five-pound plates, dumbbells and short bars. “Right.”

  “One…”

  Pockets clasped the weight-room doorknob in both little hands.

  “Two…”

  He swallowed such a deep breath it made his eyes open silver-dollar wide.

  “Three!”

  Pockets screamed like Debbie Rochon as he jerked the door open. DeShaun went first, with Stuart barely out before Pockets slammed the door behind him.

  DeShaun ran to the nearest cluster of baby pumpkins and bulldozed them with the broom, sending a half dozen sliding across the floor.

  Stuart jumped over one and hit the office door in one motion, calling, “Behind you!” to DeShaun.

  “Got it!” said the other boy, as he sideswiped the creature with a golf swing that sent it into the wall—and into pieces.

  Stuart was out the office door with the backpack. “Aaaaagh!” he cried, as he fell to his back to avoid the leaping arc of a screeching squash.

  DeShaun intercepted it in a perfectly timed smack with the wooden side of the broom head.

  Red blood and white seeds splashed across the weight-room door. Hearing Pockets’s muffled squeal, the boys hoped he hadn’t abandoned his post.

  DeShaun helped Stuart up and shoved him toward the door. Pockets was as good as gold, swinging it open as he called, “Hurry up, you guys!”

  DeShaun dove in, breaking his fall on Stuart’s back.

  More panicked cries rose from the children. DeShaun and Stuart turned to see one of the basketball-sized monsters halfway in the door, its vines flogging at little feet. Pockets pushed the door against it but froze when two vines, then a third, wrapped around his leg.

  “You know what to do, Pockets!” DeShaun yelled.

  Pockets looked at DeShaun and, in that microsecond, went from terrified to determined. He took a step back with his free leg and thrust it into the door with all the power his fifty-pound frame could muster. The would-be invader was reduced to mush.

  “Good job!” praised the big boys. “You’re a hero!”

  Pockets stared at the dead strand around his leg. Stuart yanked it off and tossed it behind him with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “This time, everybody’s gonna hafta soldier up.”

  Chapter 32

  Children of the Damned

  The vomited seeds grew to normal-sized pumpkins in less than two seconds.

  Realizing what was happening, Timbo quickly loaded and raised his rifle—then screamed to wake the dead, as a volleyball-sized assailant leaped ten feet and clamped onto his shin with its jagged baby teeth.

  Kerwin yanked the rifle out of his hands and swatted the thing away with the butt.

  Before Timbo could thank him, another had jumped onto his back and wrapped a thorny clothesline-vine around his throat.

  Mayor Stuyvesant, a soccer forward in college, caught an incoming monster with a powerful punt that sent it into the wall, where it burst apart in a gory explosion.

  Bernard swung a pallet board, hoping to catch his attacker with the same athletic timing and finesse as the mayor. He missed.

  The thing bit into his forearm and quickly wound its tendrils around his wrist. The engineer stumbled backward, bumping into McGlazer and knocking him into the waiting, writhing tangles of an adult demon.

  It hauled him up to the window with dizzying speed. McGlazer braced himself on either side of the window frame with his feet, immediately feeling his thighs and hamstrings tingle from the stress of fighting the pumpkin thing’s strength. Soon, his legs would fail, and he would be raggedly ripped in at least two pieces, starting from the groin.

  The creature’s face appeared in the window—and McGlazer realized, with blooming despair, that he recognized it.

  Below, Kerwin crashed to his back—atop a newborn monster—as he caught the next attacker in both hands, just inches from his face. Despite his peril, he felt both disgusted and gratified that he had crushed one of its siblings underneath with his fall.

  Thin vines circled his arms, then wound around his throat, generating leverage that brought those awful little square teeth ever closer to his face. Kerwin jutted his false chin up like Stallone, allowing the little monster to bite into it harmlessly. As it applied pressure with its teeth, he did so with his hands. Terrified surprise crossed its face just before Kerwin crushed it into bloody pie filling.

  Pain exploded at his ear as a newborn nightmare bit into it—and tore it off.

  His sister, the mayor, lined up another big kick right into the thing’s mouth, but this more-mature fiend had faster reflexes. It snapped down on her toes with perfect timing, piercing Doris’s shoes, bringing instant, exquisite agony.

  Kerwin rolled behind her to break her fall, coming within grasping range of one of the adult horrors’ flailing tendrils. He wished for a scream to mourn his leg, as the vine squeezed into it like thin twine wrapping sausage.

  The fearsome face that McGlazer knew from his tortured inner vision projected centuries-old scorn at him, as its tiniest strands entwined his head and stabbed into his temples. McGlazer shrieked in an agonized falsetto.

  “Silence,” said the familiar invading voice, that of Conal O’Herlihy.

  McGlazer could not quiet his own anguish, yet he heard Conal above it, nonetheless.

  “Within you again, I am!” mocked the sinister Celt. “This time, I have no need to share your body, preacher.” The steel-cable vines pulled McGlazer nearer the window. “So I will simply shred it to bits.”

  The weight-room door burst open just ahead of a high-pitched war cry. DeShaun held a lighter to the end of the thick, gray mega-sparkler
the boys affectionately referred to as the Atomic Corndog.

  With the stamping of little sneakers, a horde of yelling children swarmed through the door, each wielding a bar or dumbbell or plate, cylinders and circles of heavy metal.

  “Remember, you guys!” DeShaun said, as the sparkler burst into cascading flashes. “Don’t look at it!”

  “Now go make the biggest mess ever!” added Stuart.

  The army of evil orange gourds dispersed, clearing away from the brightness that blinded them.

  Pockets was just strong enough to swing the four-foot curl bar he held, scoring a hit with his first at-bat that shattered his blinded demonic target into many disgusting pieces.

  The other children, finding fun where there had just been fear, followed suit, smashing pumpkins with relish and aplomb. Stuart brought up the rear with the push broom. He slid it into the scrambling pumpkin babies, robbing them of leverage to leap away. Their little vine legs intertwined the broom handle as they accumulated against the advancing bristles.

  Stuart gained speed as he deftly swept them toward the foot of the stage. Then a mighty final push sent most to abrupt and messy deaths. A few of the goblins escaped, rolling and sliding in all directions.

  The children grew bolder, descending on the disoriented demons, stomping and squashing them as they essayed high-pitched war cries.

  Conal’s giant orange face, bleached white by the mega-sparkler’s blaze even at this height, twisted into a furious grimace.

  He dropped McGlazer like a bag of trash.

  The minister hit the hardwood floor with a sick thud, landing mostly on his hands and knees. The former stung, and the latter radiated more dull pain than McGlazer thought possible. But experience told him he would be all right and ready to rejoin the battle in a few minutes.

  Conal lashed his longest tentacles at the kids who were destroying his kids.

  DeShaun rushed in front of the children protectively, waving the mega-sparkler to ward off Conal’s grasping tendrils.

  Freshly promoted General Pockets and a pair of his new soldiers skirted around DeShaun to destroy the blinded baby pumpkins.