Harvest Earth (18 page)

Out of the shadow an arm strikes Gabriel under the chin and he flies backwards. Soaring through the air, Gabriel crashes into a wall near a furnace in the corner. His brain rattles inside of his head. The plaster on the wall is cracked from where he has crashed into it. The creature screams and reaches for its weapon. Gabriel knows he can’t let the creature get control of the device.

A fireplace poker leans against the furnace and Gabriel decides to equip it as his new tool. Gabriel grabs the handle of the fire iron and crosses the distance between himself and the monster quickly. Swinging the poker like a bat, choking up on his grip, Gabriel swipes at the creature with the crooked prong of the poker facing his target. The prong chips into the beast’s forehead causing the creature to reel backwards howling. The beast’s dark red blood sprays through the air.

Whatever had protected the creature from Gabriel’s bullets doesn’t stop this blow from his new weapon. Seeing the blood Gabriel feels revitalized. His anger wells up in his chest again, only this time the feeling is richer. The feeling is fuller by having succeeded in injuring his foe.

He charges the creature again, hollering a mighty battle cry. The prong flies through the air again, but this time the creature is ready. It catches the prong with its hand, clamping its claws around it. The creature hisses.

Gabriel tries to pull his weapon free but his monstrous opponent is too strong. With a powerful kick, it strikes Gabriel’s knee and he falls to the floor onto his back.

The fire poker is thrown to the side, the creature dismissing it. Gabriel is vulnerable again, on his back. He reaches for his flashlight. Before he can wrap his hands around it the creature is on him, however, pinning his shoulders to the floor with its powerful hands. Its fearsome reptilian paws press into him, with more force being applied the more he tries the move. The creature looks straight into Gabriel’s eyes. A wicked tongue then creeps out of the being’s mouth and licks Gabriel’s face. Gabriel is helpless to stop it.

Another screech from the creature and the sound echoes off the walls of the empty apartment. The powerful being places a thick and clawed hand on Gabriel’s chest, and wraps its other hand around the side of Gabriel’s head. With his hands free Gabriel strikes out. He punches and claws at the horrid being’s scaled flesh. He attacks its armored arms but only succeeds in breaking the flesh of his own knuckles. Gabriel tries scratching at the creature’s head, but it has reared back its head out of reach.

The hand encircling Gabriel’s head tightens and Gabriel tries to wiggle free. The thumb of the creature’s hand digs into Gabriel’s left eye. He screams as the talon-like finger punctures his eye socket. Pain unlike anything Gabriel has experienced before shoots through his brain and makes his whole body feel sick. His stomach turns and his limbs flail. Over his own screams he thinks he can hear what sounds like laughter coming from the foul being on top of him as it continues to work its thumb into his eye.

Gabriel’s hands gropes for something, anything to save him in the moment. He finds salvation when his right hand wraps itself around something metallic. It is the discarded fire iron. Gabriel brings the poker up and over his head. He then quickly repays the creature for his own pain.

The creature makes its own screams as it falls off Gabriel. From the horrid beast’s own eye socket it pulls the fire poker away. Adrenaline flows through Gabriel from the ferocity of the fight and allows him to overcome the pain that radiates from his eye. He rolls away from the bellowing creature as it claws at its own missing eye. Behind Gabriel is the creature’s weapon. Gabriel crawls for it and snatches it into his hand.

He springs to his feet and Gabriel rounds on the creature who is now charging towards him. Gabriel grips the device with two hands and places both pointer fingers on the trigger. He aims the end of the weapon at the creature and sees the blood running down its grotesque face.

In the half a second that follows Gabriel is transported back in time. For a brief moment he sees himself with his father, back on the plains of Arizona. He is taken back to the day when his father had first handed him a gun and told him to point it towards a tree. Gabriel remembers the lessons that his father had taught him; to breathe out when you pull the trigger, to keep your body relaxed, and to not tense up. Gabriel’s father’s voice reminds himself, “This gun is a tool, just like any other. The pistol is like a hammer and the bullets are like its nails.”

Gabriel pulls the trigger.

36    Madison

It isn’t until they reach St. Louis that Madison is truly ready to believe. Even now, however, Madison’s sense of reality is struggling to incorporate all of the new information she is receiving.

When she first sees the cars abandoned on the roadways, and the holes in them, Madison suspects that maybe there has been an attack from an enemy nation. She thinks that some new weapon has been implemented. Some new terror that cuts through surfaces and blows holes in structures. Madison holds onto this belief for miles until she finally has to let it go. Exit after exit on the highway, car after car, each one has the identical circular cutout. A missing portion of a vehicle where a person had most likely sat. The cuts are too precise and have been done with too much accuracy for a single weapon to target. No weapon could so perfectly target human beings in this way, not to this scale. And the scale is enormous.

All of Madison’s theories, and the theories of her colleagues back at the mountain base, had been close. Yet, none of them had fully understood what had happened.

When they had lost their satellite connection they had suspected it had either been an attack on the base or something wrong with the global satellite network. The more Madison drives the more she is sure that the entire country has been hit, if not the entire world. Power is out everywhere. The electrical blackout had been global, Madison decides. It had affected anything that ran on electricity. None of the clocks, radios or flashlights that she came across so much as flickered with a spark. Madison’s confirmation of the widespread nature of the problem is the downed 747 airplane that has plowed into St. Louis’s civic plaza.

Madison wonders at how terrifying it must have been to suddenly lose power at twenty thousand feet. It is while going through this wreckage that Madison sees her first mast collection bodies. All are dead, many mangled beyond recognition. The fact that they remained behind, that they weren’t missing like the others is significant, but Madison doesn’t yet know how or why.

This was no foreign invader from another nation. There are no ground troops, no planes overhead and no bases of operation. If an enemy nation had attacked they would be ransacking the nation for supplies and for resources. As far as Madison can tell, she and Tobias are the only ones left to explore the forgotten towns and cities that lay along their route. The world is empty and silent.

There are other mysteries that sprang up as they drove too. At a pit stop Madison had tried to drink water from a public faucet but Tobias had charged at her. She was still wary of him, so Madison was prepared for his assault. She grabbed his wrist, used his own momentum against him, and flipped the giant man onto his back. From the ground he continued to claw at her. He was trying to tell her something.

When Madison finally let him up, he ran and got a bottle of water. Tobias handed it to Madison. The two of them had become accustomed to just taking things off shelves. Madison had already helped herself to a change of clothes after stopping by a retailer outside of Columbia.

“So, it’s ok to drink the bottle but not from the tap?” Madison had asked Tobias.

In response, Tobias had shaken his head fervently.

When Madison asked him ‘why’, Tobias held up his hands with his fingers spread apart but his thumbs still touching. He danced his fingers back and forward as he pantomimed the movement of a spider. He then held his pointer finger and thumb close together to indicate that the spiders were small. Madison didn’t know what this meant. She didn’t know explicitly anyway. Yet, from then on Madison resolved to only drink bottled water and stayed away from anything connected to a public utility.

Tobias knows things, Madison was sure of this if nothing else. He knows things that he shouldn’t know. It was odd to have the young man as her guide. He seemed to have an innate GPS guiding them, directing them wherever they needed to go. If there was a blocked road or a collapsed bridge, Tobias always knew a way around. Madison even debated letting him drive once or twice, but then she was reminded by the ache that was still in her jaw that she’d rather maintain as much control as possible.

Yet the closer the two of them got to D.C., the more Madison starts to notice a change in Tobias. It is that night that they spent outside of Columbus that Madison really notices it.

Tobias seems to be more aware and less absorbed in his own thoughts. To Madison, he seems to be less inwardly focused. He lifts his chin now, doesn’t keep it curled into the center of his body. As they sit around a small fire, Tobias even sits with his back straight. It is something that Madison has never seen him do. When she hands him a cooked can of beans, he eats it at a tempered pace. Which is odd because every other meal they have had Tobias was always eating very slowing, as if savoring every bite. Now Madison doesn’t have to wait for him before he hands the can back to her to be disposed of. Something is happening to Tobias. His transformation is just yet another mystery.

Despite this, however, Tobias still doesn’t talk. This makes it difficult for Madison at times. Their journey had been made largely in silence. The only interaction would be when they got lost and he would point in this direction, or that, to re-direct them.

Occasionally Madison would ask him questions. She would try and get clarifications for her own questions, her theories, and he would either nod or shake his head. There were some questions that required more than just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer though. It were these questions that bothered Madison the most. So in the silence of their trip and in the still of the night, Madison would just think to herself. She was trapped in a tangled web of the mysteries in her own brain with little hope of escape.

Madison runs through everything that had happened over the past few days. The full scope of everything was still difficult to articulate. Madison tries to remember what it had been like to know a routine. She tries to remember waking up in the morning so certain of what both the day and the future would hold. There was a time when she knew where her breakfast was coming from, what she was going to wear that day, and what she was going to do. The comfort of sitting down at the same computer, sorting through people’s conversations, logging them, taking lunch, returning to work, and then returning to her quarters. All of it had been so comfortable in a way that Madison knows she will probably never feel again.

From the moment the servers went down and the base had been hit to when she had opened herself up for the first time to a man who was dying on her lap, that had only been a few days ago. Yet, even as traumatic as it had been, there is still more waiting for her. There is more to be worried about, more mysteries to solve, and even perhaps some things to be hopeful for.

Madison has climbed up through the ventilation system, exhausted her body and fought off claustrophobia. She had been rescued, only to need to be rescued again, only to meet a young man who would capture her for a final time.

Now Madison is free. She is free and on her way to find answers. It is the only way that she can move on, she knows. All of the instances of physical imprisonment were nothing compared to the prison of ignorance. It would be the imprisonment of the mysteries that would kill her. It would be living a life in a world vanished that would drive Madison to her death. It is why Madison needed to get to Washington D.C. She knows what is waiting for her there may very well be more abuse. Yet, Madison needs to find answers.

Somehow, she senses that Tobias knows this.

37    Gabriel

From the second that Gabriel pulls the trigger to the creature’s weapon everything changes. There is a flash of light, only not the green and exploding one that Gabriel is expecting, and the light doesn’t fire towards the creature. Instead, a white light envelopes Gabriel. In a flash, Gabriel finds himself in another place entirely.

Gone are the apartment and the bloodied creature. Gone is the collapsing fire escape. Gone is anything that Gabriel recognizes at all.

He is in a field of pillars. Some of the pillars are taller than others, but each stands at least two hundred feet tall. From the towers, there are bolts of what appears to be electricity jumping from pillar to pillar in brief and sporadic arches. For miles around there is nothing but these pillars. They are arranged in rows and Gabriel seems to be in the middle of an endless field of them.

Gabriel’s whole body nearly collapses as a combination of confusion and pain from his eye overtakes him. In his hands he still holds the strange weapon. It is stretched out before him just as it had been in the apartment. Gabriel pulls the device towards him and studies it. He looks at the nobs and dials on the side of it and studies the screens with their strange symbols. He wonders if any of them had been changed or had been moved. Gabriel debates throwing the device aside, abandoning it in this strange place that he has now found himself in. Instead, however, he holds onto it. It is heavy and dragging his arm down, but he grips it more tightly to compensate.

The ground is hard but it is dark so it is difficult to make out the texture. Gabriel holds up one palm and applies pressure to his punctured eye socket. The site is throbbing, along with his head. He presses on the wound firmly and the compression seems to relieve some of his suffering. Gabriel wishes he had a third arm so that he could pull out his flashlight. On second thought, he thinks, maybe it was better not to draw attention to himself.

Standing in the middle of a maze of strange conduits, with no clear idea about how he got here, but assuming it had something to do with the alien device, Gabriel debates his options. He could do nothing, just lie down and wait for some terror in the dark to come to him. Though the thought of having another reptilian creature assault him in that moment seems draining. That leaves two more options.

One is to pull the trigger on the device again. Doing so might send him back to the apartment with the creature. If that were the cause then Gabriel could finish what he had started. Yet, there was also a chance that using the device would send him somewhere else, somewhere worse and more foreign. It was risky. Instead Gabriel decides on option three, to explore. It is the only option that if it doesn’t work out he could still fall back on the other two.

And so Gabriel starts walking in no direction in particular. He just walks down one of the rows that are laid out with pillars jutting electricity to either side. The experiences that follow are bizarre and foreign, but that has become the nature of Gabriel’s life recently. Since Gabriel had awoken in the basement everything had changed. The world had changed and so had he. Gabriel wasn’t the same man. He wasn’t the same one who said ‘yes, ma'am’ and ‘no, sir’ to every request. That person had disappeared along with the old world. This was the new Gabriel, the one who identified as a survivor and a fighter. He even had a battle wound to prove it.

About two hundred yards into his walk Gabriel has to stop. His eye is still aching and the pain is mounting again. The blood flow seems to have stopped, however, which he is grateful for. Gabriel sits down in the middle of the row of pillars and begins working at the threads of his shirt. Using his teeth as a cutting instrument, he is able to tear away a long strip of the fabric at the bottom of the shirt. Gabriel then uses the tattered cloth as a dressing, wrapping it around his head and over his eye. He pulls tightly, making a secure knot. Gabriel then pads the bandage around his eye with excess fabric to absorb any additional blood.

Standing again, Gabriel continues his march into the unknown. The strange device still dangles in his hand at his side. He walks for at least a mile, and sees nothing new, nothing to help orient him to the scene. There are just the pillars to his side and the occasional stream of light as electric currents arch overhead. Everything about his life is now so surreal that Gabriel feels numb to the oddity of it. He is too exhausted and too emotionally overloaded to take it all in.

It is after this first mile of walking that Gabriel decides to change course, for no particular reason. He turns and starts walking to his right. What direction was he heading in? Gabriel has no idea. The sky is black. Not the kind of black of a night sky either, just pure darkness overhead. There is not even a hint of gray or weak light. Gabriel has no way of knowing where he is going or how to get his bearings. Everything looks the same to him and all of it is a maze.

Something lights up on the ground ahead of him then. It is a small slither of metal, it glitters as an arch of light shoots across the columns overhead. The glint of the metal fades immediately as the arch passes. Gabriel jobs forward to investigate the discarded on the ground. He reaches for his flashlight, now that he has a free hand, and flicks it on.

On the ground Gabriel sees a rectangular object, about two feet in length. There are indentations in the object where words have been pounded into it from one side. Gabriel flips over the object with his boot and the item makes a metallic clinking sound as it hits the ground again. Shining the flashlight downwards, Gabriel reads the sign unresponsively at first. He has to read it several more times before his brain finally processes the information. Then Gabriel feels a mixture of excitement and panic. His legs come alive and he runs off. Gabriel runs down the row of pillars with his flashlight shining wildly as he searches for something. The sign, it had read ‘Pennsylvania Avenue’, and to Gabriel that only meant one thing.
Gabriel only has to run a short while before he has found what he was looking on his right-hand side.

There is a fence, a gap in the pillars where they hadn’t been placed. Within the fence is mass of people. People standing shoulder to shoulder with unblinking eyes that are wide open. All of these people are staring at Gabriel. Their faces don’t respond as he shines the light of his flashlight on them from the other side of the fence.

Beyond these people stand a structure. It is an iconic building that Gabriel had grown up seeing and knowing the name of. It was a mansion built for the rulers of ‘the free world’. The building is painted white.

Gabriel takes a few steps back away from the scene, his mouth agasp. The front lawn of the White House has been converted into a corral. It is full of people with empty gazes, all just looking out at Gabriel. At first, Gabriel response is fear, but this quickly turns to anger. Anger is the only emotion that Gabriel can identify with anymore.

What had these creatures done? Why were they doing this? Gabriel doesn’t really care about getting the answers, anymore, he just wants to make those responsible pay. Then Gabriel thinks of his daughters and his anger is momentarily masked by the veil of something Gabriel thought he could never feel again, hope.

Running up to the fence’s bars, Gabriel pierces through the wrought iron with the beam of his flashlight. He looks at and studies the faces of those that he can see. He looks for the faces of his daughters.

When Gabriel can’t find them he runs farther down the length of the fence. He continues his search. Gabriel scans every face, searching for his children with his flashlight and his remaining eye. None of the bodies respond, none of them seem to even know he is there. In that moment, Gabriel doesn’t care if someone, or something, discovers him or not. The only thing he can think of was his daughters.

Gabriel makes a right turn where the fence ends and runs farther down, following the fence where it bends. He searches and searches past the White House itself and into the South Lawn when a realization strikes him. There are no children in the fenced in portion, just adults. As the thought forms, Gabriel slows his pace and catches his breath. He places his hands on his knees and bends over trying to catch his breath. His children aren’t here. They likely were gone for good.

Gabriel wants to cry again, and knows it would probably be the healthy thing to do. But, Gabriel has no tears left. So instead, Gabriel pulls himself up straight and grips the alien device in his hand more firmly. There is another arch of light between the conduits of pillars, only this time it seems stronger. Gabriel can feel the air alive with electricity. About a half-mile away, standing over five hundred and fifty feet tall, Gabriel sees the tallest of the pillars shoot out an arch of electricity in all directions, electric currents are then carried by the pillars farther down the line.

Flicking off his flashlight and returning it to his belt loop, Gabriel dash towards the largest of these pillars. He moves as stealthily as he can as he runs. He recognizes this pillar. It is as iconic to him as the white house to his side. It was a monument built to honor someone who had fought for freedom. It had be constructed for someone who had been a warrior like Gabriel now strived to be. Yet, these invaders had turned the monument into some perverted instrument of their own design.

The Washington Monument lights up in what appears to be consistent intervals. There are flashes every ten seconds by Gabriel’s count. Running from the monuments base are large cables. They are large enough to be tunnels that he might be able to walk through. The cables run to the west, towards the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool. Gabriel creeps close to them and dared to place his hand on one of them. It feels metallic and smooth, but it doesn’t have a temperature or a shine to it. The large cable’s surface reminds Gabriel of the cyclopean triangular vessel had seen in the sky on that first day when he had awoken. This cable too is also matte black and seems to absorb beams of light.

Following the cables to their destination, Gabriel finds himself overlooking the Reflecting Pool. What he sees then fills him with what is becoming a familiar mix of horror and anger, the same that he had felt overlooking the Front Lawn.

There are bodies. The pool is filled with still bodies. All are laying their backs, staring up at the sky. They are floating towards him, towards the large cables and the monument. When they reach the cables they were sucked inside. A short while later, The Monument bursts with light.

They are feeding it, Gabriel realizes. These people are somehow generating the electricity that shoots out of the Washington Monument that is then was fed to the surrounding pillars.

Peering farther down the pool Gabriel saw that the Lincoln Monument has been removed. In its place is a ramp. Body after motionless body is being slide down the ramp and into the water of the Reflecting Pool. The bodies then float in a current that is being generated by a small motor at the base of the ramp. Gabriel crouches down. He suddenly notices that he is not alone in observing the horror before him. There are shapes, beings on the far side of the pool. These figures seem to be monitoring and overseeing everything as it occurs.

Using the cover of the darkness, Gabriel creeps along the edge of the pool. He is careful to hide every few seconds when the sky is lit up from the arches of light. The closer Gabriel gets to the beings on the other side of the Reflecting Pool, the more he comes to realize that his suspicions are correct. These things on the platform aren’t human.

Yet, these new beings aren’t like the creature Gabriel had encountered earlier either. There are about a half-dozen of them. They are smaller beings, about five feet tall. Each is dressed uniformly and to Gabriel they look identical. There are no distinctive features between them. Each is wearing a jumpsuit, like Gabriel’s old maintenance overalls, but more form fitting and made of a matted fabric that Gabriel can’t place. Their bodies are slender and they have  thin arms and legs that have no identifiable muscle tone. Their most distinguishable feature are their heads.

The beings’ heads are large and oblong. They thinned at the chin, but grow larger as they near the top of their skulls. Their eyes are two large portals, black and unblinking. There are no signs of noses or ears, and yet they have mouths, though they never open. Their skin is gray.

They are focused and attentive to their tasks. The small beings have electronic tablets where they are presumably making calculations and jotting down notes, Gabriel can only guess. None of them seemed to be communicating with one another, at least not that Gabriel can notice, and yet of them appeared to get in one another’s way.

These are the masterminds, Gabriel concludes. The overseers. Whereas the creature that Gabriel had faced had been sheer animalistic rage, these beings were detached, emotionless and task-oriented. They are the ones who orchestrated it all. And in that moment, Gabriel wants nothing more than for them to find him so that he can make them all dead.

These beings are small and weak, and Gabriel is full of rage. He won’t bother trying to communicate with them or ask them any questions. All Gabriel wants is to make them suffer and to know that he is the one to bring that suffering to them.

Gabriel holds the strange device that he had recovered from the monster before and places his finger around the trigger. He debates using the device to blow all of the creatures off the platform, but decides against it for fear that using the weapon would merely transport him somewhere else again. No, Gabriel will use his hands this time. He will use his knuckles, shins and teeth to exact his revenge.