Harvest

HARVEST

Steve Merrifield

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Steve Merrifield

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for Rob

who encourages and supports me

in all that I do

HARVEST

Steve Merrifield

Prologue: End
of Days

The Year 60 CE

The centurion ran. Slipping and
sliding in the mud that sucked at his bare feet. His sandals had
been claimed by the boggy ground at the start of his race through
the trees. He had sacrificed the shelter his tall shield offered
against the onslaught of rain for a burning stake to light his
pursuit through the darkness. The guttering orange light plucked
twisted trees clawing out of the dark. The branches were buffeted
by the bitter wind that drove the deluge of rain into his face. His
frantic fingers plucked at the clasp on his shoulder and he
shrugged off the burden of his waterlogged cape. Beyond his arena
of light, the bold moonlight became his ally and he picked out the
shadowy shape of the white-haired old man he hunted.

The armed natives that had
defended the camp had largely been unskilled in war, and had fallen
easily to the centurion’s forces in a short bloody battle. However,
the remaining tribe had turned on the raiders. In an unsettling
nightmarish skirmish, the weak, the old, the women – some with
babes in their arms, and the children themselves, had all flung
themselves at the soldiers with wild eyes and chilling screams.
They had desperately grabbed and clung to his soldiers, giving up
their chance to flee; sheathing his men’s swords with their bodies,
to ensure the elder of their tribe could escape.

The centurion had not been so
easily distracted; he had left his men to slay the remaining
natives while he chased the feeble old man. “Feeble”, yet the old
man had somehow overcome the miring mud that was almost defeating
him; a soldier of the empire in his athletic prime.

The soldier was stopped by the
shock of icy water washing over his bare feet, and he suddenly
realised the rushing sound of a stream beneath the constant hiss
and drum of the rain. Angling his torch down he could see the
shallow stream driven into a wild race by the lashing rain and the
dark mounds that dammed and channelled its flow. The shapes were
corpses, boars, deer, horses, cattle – from what he could see each
had a deep glistening rent in its throat or a dark puncture wound
in its head. Sacrifices. Offerings to the water of the earth, or
whatever Gods these people worshipped, exchanges for potency of
power and magic. Sacrifices that spread as far as he could see in
either direction of the stream. More offerings than he had seen
before. He didn’t let the sight stop him, but used the corpses as
stepping-stones to cross to the other side, as the elder had surely
done. It hadn’t been the first disturbing sight of the night – that
had been when he and his men had uncovered the bodies in the
tribes’ camp. The seven scouts he had sent out over the last week.
Their heads missing.

The centurion found himself in a
grove of oaks and sycamores that lead to a broad dark clearing. The
old man stood in the middle. The soldier slowed his pace so that
the sounds of the storm would hide his approach.

Many of the resistant native
tribes had been massacred in the past months; those that remained
were scattered and ineffective, their leaders slain, their shamans
and holy men fleeing their homes and lands on the island to head
across the sea into the west and exile. This elder and his tribe
were organised, and had headed away from the coast and a chance of
escape, so that they could travel to this place. There had been
whispers among prisoners taken in the lead-up to this raid, rumours
that this shaman was opposed to co-operation and to retreat and was
set on a course of action unsupported by the other mystics.

The soldier blinked the rain
from his eyes and wrapped his fingers around the wooden hilt of his
weapon as he marched with quickened determination. Whatever reason
this elder had come to this land so foolishly close to the port of
Londinium, he would not escape. The centurion would end his life
and finish his mission: his part in the completion of Governor
Seutonius Paulinus’s plan to cleanse the land of the barbarian
native resistance. His senses focussed on the night air, crisp
around him, and the continual rapping fingers of rain on the
shoulders of his leather tunic and his helmet.

Blue light flashed with
magnesium brilliance from the sky and a ribbon of energy dumped
itself into one of three chest-height misshapen standing stones
positioned just paces from where the old man stood.

The soldier gathered himself
from cowering, recovering from the crater in his resolve that the
sudden explosion of shock had left. The old man was still there,
unscathed and unmoved. The centurion returned his grip to his
weapon, withdrew the wide flat blade from its sheath, and made his
final approach with a quickened step. The old man’s foreign lyrical
tongue danced on the wild air.

The centurion’s torch guttered
and crackled with the deluge, weakly picking out the details of the
man as its radius of light encompassed him and gave away the
soldiers approach, yet the frail man made no attempt to escape.

Another blast of light hit the
second stone in the triangle with a similar spray of sparks,
lighting up the area and revealing seven bloody heads with wild
eyes piled on a large fresh swelling in the soil that seemed to
move and undulate in the midst of the stones. The soldier blinked
away the blue vein of light from his eyes in time to see the old
man cast small items on to the swelling.

The old man’s poetic voice died
abruptly, his tongue stilled in his palette. The last breath he had
drawn drifted out of him in a slow exhalation. The shaman’s head
lolled forward, staring at the foot of bloodstained sword that
jutted from his chest, its wickedly angled tip pointing into the
darkness. His legs buckled beneath him and a golden sickle tumbled
from a gnarled hand. The soldier angled his skewering blade toward
the ground and the elder slipped from the sword into a bloody
sprawl of robes at his feet.

The soldier had expected a third
strike of lightning on the remaining stone in as quick a succession
as the other two, but was grateful that it hadn’t – the two strikes
had been unnerving enough. In the flickering light of his torch the
centurion cast an eye over the small engraved tablets the elder had
cast on the mound along with acorns and sprigs of holly and
mistletoe. The heads of his scouts were gone. The soldier
re-sheathed his blade, now cleaned by the rain.

The swelling in the earth sagged
and the broken clods were quickly re-knitted by the flow of water
chasing along the ground as the downpour continued. Confused and
unsure of what he had plundered into, he flashed the standing
stones with a cursory glance of his torch, and saw that each
monolith was marked with an identical trident-like symbol that
meant nothing to him. The soldier kicked and stamped the old man’s
tablets and offerings into the soft ground, and took satisfaction
in the completion of his mission.

The Present

The daytime sun had baked the
concrete towers that reached up for fourteen stories into the north
London skyline. The communal gardens and walkways between the three
tower blocks had been cast in shadow all day, but offered no relief
from the unrelenting heat. The night offered little change in
temperature.

The night-time June air was
thick with a heat and a heaviness that weighed down upon everyone
on the estate. It made sleeping difficult and bedclothes
impossible. All waited for the distantly rumbling storm to clear
the life-draining veil that had smothered the residents for several
days and nights.

The Heights had once stood
proud among the typically low-level buildings that surrounded it.
It was to be the start of new life in the community, offering a
better standard of living, there to solve the problem of a growing
city population. Now, forty years old, the buildings of the
high-rise estate stood like depressed giants of a forgotten time
and abandoned ideals. The shops that had been built into the base
of the east tower had been gutted by fire and had never re-opened.
The boarded-up windows and sealed doors of the shops gave a
depressing view to those who headed to the flats themselves.

The Heights didn’t have
the reputation of the local Somers Town area for its social
problems, nor did it have the desirability of the period apartment
buildings of Kentish Town and Highgate, or the more modern
purpose-built flats that had developed.
For those new
to seeing the estate it could easily share the stereotypical
reputation of buildings of its type as being dirty, dangerous,
poverty-filled and rife with drugs. However, there was a difference
within the towers: there wasn’t a drug problem on the estate, most
residents had jobs and supported themselves and its tower design
ensured security; the only danger would be from the residents
themselves and those that were invited in, and as a result it was
more secure than most homes.

In the same way that the locals
had lobbied to keep the inadequate Camden Town Underground station
for fear of changing the character of their town, there was rumour
that the three towers were being considered for a preservation
order. Their height afforded some of the resident’s views and
glimpses of the areas that drew people to Camden, and if you were
high enough, a panorama of the city basin, important considerations
in the growing gentrification of the City’s more rundown suburbs,
and for buyers not wanting to pay a fortune for that always
desirable view.

More importantly than all these
aspects there was a sense of community, a community of casual
smiles of recognition, a general familiarity with the people that
shared floors or met regularly in the lifts and stairwells.

Veins of brilliant white light
chased each other down from the sky, disappearing in the horizon,
leaving a brief purple, red and blue memory of its pattern in the
eyes of those who watched. Thunder creaked through the air like
slowly splintering tree trunks before the sound opened up into the
shuddering booms of falling bombs. After a short while a rushing
noise and an uplifting cool breeze swept through the estate, chased
by a wall of rain that slammed against the parched earth and paving
and ran off in rapid currents.

The three towers stood amongst
the dancing shafts of light that ripped the sky asunder, conquering
the local skyline solid and strong, weathering the rage and power
of nature. A bolt of energy lanced through the sky with blinding
light and fury, striking the east tower. The raw power flashed
through the narrow copper conductor running the height of the
building and pounded into the ground with a dull wet thud and a
spray of sparks. The tower plunged into darkness. The full 20,000
volts passed harmlessly into the ground. The energy radiated out
and enriched the soil with its nitrogen, finding forgotten bones
and ancient flesh buried deep down. Completing a forgotten ritual
and giving them life.

It reached out from its flesh
and bones with It’s mind and senses. The air was thick with smells
and tastes, and charged with noise and energy. Altogether different
from the world It had fleetingly experienced so long ago. It could
feel the minds of those above. The energy of so many lives. The
world was brimming with life, while It was so weak. Too weak to
reach them. It would grow stronger. The balance would change.

Part One: The
Reaping Begins

Chapter
One

Craig Digby checked his camera
and adjusted the angle towards the schoolchildren being corralled
into place in the sports hall of the school by their teachers. It
was strange being back at the secondary school he had left eight
years previously. He concentrated on preparing his equipment but he
felt self-aware, caught by the flaws within himself that high
school had fleshed out. The headmaster strolled up to him.

“
Digby?
Digby, isn’t it?”

Craig couldn’t believe it
– Benchman was
still
head
teacher at the school. Craig had maintained a dislike for him until
the day he had finished his final exam and left the secondary
school. Benchman had put on his final report that Craig was
an
under-achiever
.
The man still wore cheap bland grey suits that emphasised the
aura of falseness about him. Yet now his hair matched his
suit.