Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (2 page)

N
aturally, Leon had to beat everyone to the door. We let him pass for the sake of our toes and followed him out onto the porch, forming a circle around the dried up skeletal foot.

Henry leaned in close and pointed. “You can see here where the fibula and tibia have been broken off. The ends are cracked and splintered, but not dirty like the rest, indicating that this foot was recently removed. My guess is that it was snapped off of the original corpse in order to bring it here.”

“Hello there, Chuck,” said Chuck loudly. “Boy, it sure is nice to see you again.”

I stood up and shook his hand with a grin. “Hi Chuck. Sorry, but it’s hard to compete with a severed foot, you know?”

“I guess. Why is there a foot on your porch?”

Leon wheeled around and stuck his hand out. “Don’t know. It’s weird, normally it’s just a dead animal. Or a piece of one.”

“Yes,” said Chuck, shaking Leon’s hand. “Normally.”

Anne gave Chuck a quick hug. “He means that we’ve been finding bits and pieces of dead animals on the porch for a couple of weeks now. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, that kind of thing. This is the first time we’ve ever found part of a person. Henry, do you think this is some kind of message? Like a threat?”

Henry pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and gingerly picked up the desiccated body part. “If that were the case, I would expect fresh corpses, something that suggested recent violence. Long dead and dried up things really aren’t very threatening. Still, I’d like to take a closer look at it in the workshop.”

“You go ahead, we’ll catch up after we get Chuck settled in.” I took Chuck’s bag from him and led him into the kitchen. Anne came with us while Leon followed Henry out to the shop.

I paused at the table. “Want some breakfast?”

“No thanks, I ate on the way. Also, severed foot.”

“Right, sorry. Couch okay? All the bedrooms are full at the moment.”

“Yeah, no problem. Thanks for putting me up while I figure out what to do. The rest of my stuff can stay in the car until I find my own place.”

We walked down the hall and into the living room, where I tossed his bag onto the couch. It was going to make sneaking around at night a little harder, but I’d figure something out.

“Don’t thank me, thank Henry. He’s pretty much running a flop house these days. I’m staying here until I decide if I’m going to rebuild my old place on the farm or not. The bags burned it to the ground before we met. I have the insurance money already, but I don’t know how I feel about rebuilding.”

“I’m just here to help out with Leon, I guess,” said Anne. “I wasn’t doing anything before all this started, anyway. I seriously doubt there’s going to be a waitressing emergency that I need to get back to.”

Pretty much the same line she gave me when I asked why she was sticking around. I wanted to press her about it, but there never seemed to be a good time.

I turned back to Chuck. “So what’s your plan?”

“No idea. I’m pretty much starting from scratch here. I got no money, no job, and no place to live. Technically my apartment in Belmont is still there, and I guess there’s no rent now, but that’s because it’s in an abandoned building with no goddamn water or electricity. Also, it’s located in a food-free zone, since all the stores are shut down. I mean fuck, the whole town is just gone.”

“The town is gone?” asked Anne. “What does that mean?”

“It means that everyone who survived that night left. Bailed out. There’s not even any looters, if you can believe that. It’s because the whole place just feels wrong. Even I couldn’t wait to light out, and you know that touchy feely shit don’t mean jack to me.”

“Overnight ghost town? You’re right, that’s pretty weird.”

“You want to hear something even more crazy? When the state finally showed up with the cops, all the bodies were gone. You remember all those dead people that Piotr set up like hostages in the Nail Barrel? All those bags that cut each other into chunks at the quarry? Remember Valerie tied up at Greg’s house? Gone. The cops showed up, helped the last survivors evacuate, and that was it. They declared it a disaster area, but they never said what kind of disaster kills all the people and leaves the town standing.”

Chuck ground his beard against his cheek and took a deep breath. “Nothing’s been right since that night. You know that every place I stopped at on my way here, somebody told me to be careful or to stay indoors at night? Can you believe that shit? People are spooked from Wyoming to fucking North Carolina. It’s like an epidemic of the heebie-jeebies or something.”

I nodded. “We know. It’s not showing up in the news much yet, but something is going on. Leon has been helping Henry go through his books with a fine tooth comb to figure out what’s happening, but so far they haven’t had much luck.”

Chuck closed his eyes and sagged into the couch. “I thought we won, you know? Saved the world and all that.”

“We did. Problem is, ever since that night, things have been changing. Who knows how much longer the world we saved is going to look like the one we started out with.”

“That’s fucking great.”

Anne pulled him up off the couch. “Come on, I know what’ll cheer you up. Let’s go look at a severed foot.”

3

T
he workshop out back was made entirely of sheet metal nailed onto a wooden frame the size of a barn. It had been built as a shed for equipment, but these days it was used to store Henry’s books and vast occult knick-knack collection.

Some unwelcome visitors had nearly burned it down a few weeks ago, but after putting on a new door and hosing out all the gasoline and broken glass it was as good as new. Which is to say, still a big tin square with no heat that smelled like damp concrete, old books, and engine grease from the tractor that had been stored in here for decades. The tractor was long gone, but the smell would live on forever.

Homemade pine shelves lined the left and right walls, and two garage sale dining tables sat in the center of the big space. Henry and Leon had cleared off the end of one of the tables for the foot, and were frowning at it. In that moment, I could clearly see the family resemblance in the shape of their faces and the set of their mouths. It made me smile.

“Gentlemen, what do you see?”

Leon slapped one hand down on the table in disgust. “A dried up old foot, what do you think? We’ve been staring at it for ten minutes, like it was going to start talking all of a sudden.”

We gathered around, five adults standing shoulder to shoulder staring at a chunk of bone and gristle. There were no bits of clothing, no marks, and no significant details of any kind that I could see. It was clearly old. And clearly a foot.

“Well, I’m stumped.”

Leon narrowed his eyes at me. “Hilarious.”

Chuck leaned down and squinted at it. “You guys are really getting dead stuff piled up on the porch every day? Where’s it all coming from?”

“Cats,” said Leon.

“We don’t know,” I said, as though I hadn’t heard. “But once it started, it kept on like clockwork. I stayed up the other night to see if I could catch whoever it was, but I didn’t see anything. I left, just for a minute, and when I came back, there was a squirrel tail, right in front of the door.”

“So,” said Chuck, “whoever it was waited for you to leave?”

“I guess.”

What I didn’t say was that I was watching the porch from the living room with the lights off, both inside and outside of the house. To anyone else, it would have been pitch black. Even to me it would have been too dark to see before I had the final immersion in Piotr’s blood pit a few weeks ago, a gory baptism that Piotr claimed had completed my conversion into the avatar of the godlike being called the Devourer. Now the darkest it ever got for me was a dusky gloom.

Leon picked up the foot. “Well, that was a waste of time. I’m going to throw it in the pile with the rest of the pet cemetery collection out back.”

Henry smiled. “I may not be able to tell you who that foot belonged to, or how it ended up on my porch, but I hardly think this was a waste of time.”

I loved playing the straight man for Henry. “Why not?”

“Because I know where the rest of the body is.”

4

“You’re not leaving me here like I’m some helpless invalid!” Able to walk or not, there was nothing wrong with Leon’s lungs.

“It has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the fact that we have to go into the woods.” I didn’t realize that I was using my let’s-be-reasonable voice until it was too late.

“Fuck you, Abe. You don’t even know where the place is. I grew up in these woods, so without me, you can just sit your ass right here. And for your information, the trail is almost wide enough to bring the damn truck down.”

He yanked the passenger door of Henry’s truck open and hauled himself up with one hand on the armrest inside the door and the other on the passenger grip attached to the dash. His forearms and biceps bulged as he lifted his body into the truck. Once on the seat, he used his hands to swing his legs the rest of the way inside, and then slammed the door.

I folded his wheelchair and put it in the bed of the truck without comment. Naturally, Leon had attached a pistol holster to the side and a shotgun sleeve to the back.