Harvest Earth (19 page)

It was just as Gabriel steps out into view from behind a tree that he hears a gunshot. The beings on the platform don’t flinch. Gabriel wonders if these strange beings had the ability to hear at all. They didn’t have ears. The sound of the gunshot had been distant but unmistakable. Gabriel turns in its direction.

38    Madison

Ever since passing through Cincinnati Madison could feel a sense of anticipation building as she and Tobias approached Washington D.C. She knew that Tobias felt it too, though it seemed to be affecting him differently. The changes in Tobias that Madison had started to notice was more pronounced now. Tobias sat in the passenger’s seat next to her with his shoulders pressed against the seatback and his head erect. He had even found some twine and used it to tie his long hair into a ponytail behind his head. Madison couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the young man had been losing weight as well. His face seemed slimmer and less full of pox. When they had stopped by a drug store to stock up on supplies, Tobias had even found a razor and used it to cut away the stray hairs on his face.  He almost looked handsome.

Yet all of this might have been missed because Madison was so focused on what was waiting for her when they reached their destination. She didn’t know for sure what she would find in D.C., but Madison is quite certain it will be the end of her journey.

Madison and Tobias are still miles out the city limits when they start noticing the tall rows of towering pillars. Even though it is late afternoon and the sun should still be up high overhead, the sky above the pillars is pitch black. Something is blotting out the sky entirely. Madison drives on, the beat-up truck passing through the columns of pillars. Any sense of the world beyond fades as they enter into this new and foreign territory.

Madison flicks on the headlights of the truck as the darkness descends around them. Only one headlight is functioning, the other having been shot out by Private Hillman days ago. Fortunately additional light comes in spurts in the form of what Madison at first thinks is lightning. That is, until she sees the arches of electricity shooting between the pillars. The further on Madison drives the more and more she feels like she is in a dream. She is descending deeper into a strange void beyond reality or reason.

“Did you know that this was here?” Madison is uneasy. The bizarre nature of the scene causes a growing sense of anxiety in her chest, that builds the longer they drive. Any evidence of what had once been D.C. has now either been covered in darkness or has been demolished. Only the pillars with electrify shooting across them remain.

Tobias nods timidly in response to Madison’s question. He seems frightened. It disturbs Madison to see him so afraid. He had been their guide and so sure of himself up until that moment. The young man’s own uneasiness does nothing to help Madison as she herself is doing everything in her power to maintain her composure.

“The pillars, what are they?” It isn’t a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. Madison had gotten good about phrasing her sentences with Tobias in this way. But Madison aks it anyway, more aloud to herself than expecting Tobias to answer.

She is even more surprised when he does.

“It is why they have come.”

Madison slams on the brakes and the truck jerks from the force. She bounds on Tobias. “What did you just say?”

The young man’s expression reflects that of a scared child. Tobias turns to Madison and she marvels that the person she is looking at had been the same man she had met only a few days earlier in New Mexico. He was so different now, more grown-up, and yet even more timid now then she had ever seen him.

“It is why they have come.” Tobias repeats. His voice is weak. He stares at Madison with wide eyes.

“You can talk?” Madison exclaims excitedly, though Tobias seems not as thrilled at the revelation. Madison wonders if this change is for better or worse. The uneasy feeling inside of he continues to grow. Maybe Madison should have never agreed to come here with Tobias afterall. This well may all have been a big mistake.

“I’m sorry.” Tobias says as he pulls his gaze away from Madison. He buries his hands in his face. “I should have never brought you here.”

Madison tries to put a comforting hand on the young man’s broad shoulders, but she bats her hands away with his arm.

“This is a mistake.” Tobias is on the verge of tears. “I thought I could control it. I thought I could trick them, make them think that I was bringing you to them. I just wanted you to see.”

Madison suddenly feels very isolated and alone. The truck idles in the darkness, its sole headlight out of place amongst the darkness. Madison realizes she is in enemy territory. Her search for answers, for healing, has led her down a dark path and she fears what lay ahead.

Tobias then says, “We should drive farther.” His voice is different now. It does not waver. He is staring at the floor. “We have much to see.”

Madison shifts her foot from the brake to the accelerator and she pushes down on it lightly letting the car roll forward. Tobias’s words seem dark, perhaps foreshadowing the doom ahead of them. Despite this, Madison fears what would happen should she try and turn back. Turning back would be a return to true loneliness. All that she would have would be an endless lists questions and sleepless nights. She couldn’t turn around now. Madison would continue forward, if only for a while longer.

The truck rolled onwards down the rows of pillars that bursted with light. Madison squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. The bizarre nature of everything that was occurring was coming to her in spurts. She is lost in a world she does not know. When Madison had set out she had been destined for Washington, D.C., but this new city was nothing like the one she had visited before.

“Tobias.” Madison says the young man’s name in a whisper. It feels in that moment as if to say the name is to summon a dark spirit that had previously been hidden. A spirit that had only shown its true self back on the mesa when Tobias had struck her. “These pillars, what are they for?”

“They are conduits.” Tobias doesn’t even look at her as he speaks. His gaze is fixated straight ahead now, down the long rows of electrified towers that seem to never end. “They are collecting the energy that they came here for.”

“Collecting energy?” Madison furrows her brow. She tries to get a better understanding the cryptic statement. “Like oil or gas?”

“No.” It is the same flat tone, blunt and mechanical. “The universe is filled with such things. No, they collect the only thing that is unique to this world.” Madison doesn’t even have time to ask her next question before Tobias delivers the answer. “Us.”

Madison turns to Tobias. She is trying to read his expression. She wants some validation for what she her mind was telling her was an obscene notion. She pulls her eyes away from the roadway created by the fence of columns and confronts Tobias. “You mean humans! They are collecting humans?”

It all comes to her then. The circular impressions Madison had seen in all the major cities and roadways they had crossed. The way the cars in the highways had been gutted in the areas of driver’s and passenger’s seats, where travelers had once been. How the only evidence of people Madison had seen were those that were already dead. Madison studies Tobias looking for confirmation. She studies him for some sense of what he is thinking. Her only data to draw from, however, is his blank staring ahead of them.

“They are farmers.” His voice is like a metronome, each syllable falling in-time. “Seeding this world, watching us grow. They then manipulated us in just the right ways. They controlled our leaders and nudged our societies in subtle ways. All to ensure that we reached our max potential as a species. That we reached maturation. We are the fruit of their labors.”

“We are not plants to be harvested!” Madison yells back before turning angrily to stare back down the rows of towers. She can’t look at Tobias. His blank expression only made his lies more painful. “We are human beings!” She hollers, gripping the wheel of the truck more tightly. Madison’s foot grows heavier on the accelerator pedal without her realizing it.

“To be human is to be naïve.” Tobias speaks but Madison feels someone else’s mind behind the words. “To be human is to be ignorant, to live blindly. To live with a purpose derived from what one is told to do by others. Humans are not the free thinking beings they claim to be. Even this is an illusion they have fabricated for us. No, rather, humans obey what they think is true, and all truth is merely what they have fed to us. Humans were designed to be obedient.”

“Designed?” Madison says the word softly under her breath. She feels angry and confused, but can’t tell if one isn’t causing the other. It is too much. It is too much truth all at once. Madison resists it, perhaps just like she was programmed to do. Or is this what Tobias, or whoever is speaking through him, wants her to think?

“You’re wrong.” She says abstinently.

“The harvest was nearly perfect.” Tobias says. “People grouped together in major metropolitan areas made it easy to collect large groups at once.”

Madison remembers the scenes she had seen in the cities they had passed through.

“Then the humans polluted the Earth, as they were told to. This created a global warming event that was the perfect cover for a rehydration campaign. They encouraged people to consume water supplied by public utilities without the awareness of the tiny nanobots that they were ingesting.”

Madison remembered the way that Tobias had tried to stop her from drinking from water tap at a rest stop. She remembered the way he had signaled to her that spiders were somehow involved.

“These nanobots then attacked the central nervous system of their hosts and were all triggered at preciously the right moment to make nearly the entire population docile.”

Madison remembered the analyst that had passed out in the control room, and the stories of the others at the base who had sudden become unconscious at the precise time that the base had lost power. She also remembered how all those affected had recently been on vacation. Whereas the rest of the base drank from a sheltered supply of water, these people had been outside and exposed to the same water as the public. These people had been infected.

“Taking out the electricity was merely a fail safe.” Tobias almost seems to smile as he continues to speak. There is an arrogance in his tone that Madison finds instantly terrifying. “Humans have become so reliant on electricity. Globally it has become as essential as food and water. To cut us off from it was to remove the power plug from civilization. Even if some people do survive this reaping, there is no hope of rebuilding what has already been lost.”

“No!” Madison hollers, her voice echoes off the walls of the truck’s cabin. “You’re wrong!” Madison’s mind is fighting that lies that are being fed to it. “If everything was so perfect then what about my flashlight? The one that still worked underground?”

“A necessary risk.” Tobias replies, unnerved by the raise in volume of Madison’s voice. “They did not want the pulse that affected our devices to accidentally injure the Earth. So they launched a surface attack and probe only.” Tobias turns to Madison now, but she was too unnerved to bring herself to look at him. “After all, they need the planet intact. They plan on using it for harvesting again.”

The implications of everything that Tobias was telling her was more than Madison could rationally organize in her head. All she feels are the emotions, but even those are so conflicted she has difficulty keeping them all in check.

“Humans are more than just programmed machines. We have free will! We’re strong!” If Madison screams loud enough it will make the statements true.

Tobias doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react to Madison’s screams. “All illusions, part of the design. This is the harvesting.” Tobias says. “Your eyes are the proof.”

Madison identifies for certain that she feelings angry now. The truck barrels forward at reckless speeds. Madison wants to get to the end, She wants to reach the end of the maze of columns to where the answers lay, at the labyrinth’s heart.

The one headlight catches something, motion, and Madison slows. “What was that?”

There is then more movement behind one of the pillars. Madison slows the truck to a crawl to get a better look. A pair of eyes, lit up by her headlights, peer back at her from the dark. Behind the eyes are a large form, at least seven feet tall. It has hunched shoulders and whipping behind it is a tail. Its face is not a face at all, just two slits where a nose should be and a long mouth with a row of pointed teeth poking out between from scaly lips. The creature’s skin looks hard and green. The being stares at Madison and doesn’t move.

Madison’s heart is racing. Everything is happening much too quickly. The horror of everything overwhelms Madison. She feels the need to fight back.

Tobias too sees the creature and for a moment shifts from his trance. He turns to Madison with the same terrified look in his eyes that she had seen when they first arrived to the strange place. “I should not have brought you here.” He says again.

Grabbing his head, Tobias screams as he appears to be suddenly struck with immense pain. Madison sees that the shard of metal the young man wears around his neck is glowing. It is glowing with a green light seemed to radiate from within it.

“We are fulfilling our purpose!” Tobias screams as he says the words. Madison knows that the words are not his own. Something has a grip on him.

Madison is ready to fight. She wants to fight against the questions and against the darkness.  She wants to fight against the monsters that have taken the world away from her. The same ones who had killed her coworker, Dale, and had killed everyone else she had ever known.