Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (25 page)

Leon gave him the shotgun.

Anne gave me the all clear, so we headed towards the porch. Halfway to the house, a voice came through the darkened doorway.

“That’s close enough!”

Jamal shouted back. “Angelo? It’s Jamal, man. We coming in.”

He didn’t wait for a response, instead he just stalked up onto the porch and through the doorway. We followed.

The living room was destroyed. Pieces of shabby furniture lay scattered against walls covered in bullet holes, with the exception of the couch, which had been used to block the entrance to the kitchen. The carcass of a wooden may lay on the floor, pretty much shredded by gunfire. Nearly every inch of its body was covered with splintered holes, and all of its limbs were broken off.

Two big men were in the room with us. One carried an aluminum baseball bat and the other a short, boxy machine pistol. Both were easily six-foot-five and thick all over. And they were both still smaller than Jamal.

Jamal stepped over the wooden man and traded grips with the baseball bat guy. “I knew those things would be sorry if they tried to get in here. How you doing, Big B?”

“Alive.”

Jamal turned to the other man and bumped fists with him. “Angelo, hand me your piece.”

Angelo did, and Jamal handed him the shotgun.

Jamal pointed the machine pistol at me and said, “Toss me your keys, bro.”

Anne, Chuck, and Leon all pointed their guns at Jamal. He saw the motion, but his eyes stayed on me.

I took a slow step to the left as I spoke, pulling his field of fire away from the others. “They’ll shoot as soon as you do.”

“I don’t think so. Come on out, boys.”

Men came out of the kitchen, pushing past the couch to stand beside Jamal, and others stepped out of the hallway on his side of the room. There were now eight men facing us, all armed with pistols and shotguns. Their eyes were flat and hostile, although more than one guy was staring at Anne, eyes flicking between her and the drum-fed shotgun she was carrying.

Jamal grinned. “You’ll get some of us, but I guarantee we’ll get all of you. Now, keys.”

“Why? You must have a half-dozen cars between you, what do you need mine for?”

“Are you blind, motherfucker? How many cars did you see on the way here sitting on a full set of tires? Angelo, how many drivable cars we have?”

“None, they all fucked up.”

Big B tapped the side of his head with his free hand. “See? Jamal always one step ahead. That’s why he’s the shit and why you’re gonna hand over your ride so we can get the fuck—”

The rest of his sentence was cut off when the wooden man leapt out of the kitchen doorway behind him and slammed into his back. The impact drove him to the ground, knocking the baseball bat out of his hand.

I ripped Hunger from its sheath and stepped forward. The wooden man had one hand buried in Big B’s back. The guy was screaming with a raw, animal intensity that was painful to hear.

A few members of the gang had managed to point their guns at it, but were unable to shoot without hitting their buddy. Most of them just stared with wide eyes, guns silent.

I hit the creature with a rising backswing, right across its jaw. The wooden head shattered and ripped free of the creature’s body. Gang members flinched as it embedded itself into the plaster ceiling with a thud. Anne fired once, neatly taking out the knot with a .410 slug.

The headless body sagged and fell to one side, one hand still clutching the top of Big B’s spine, which it had ripped halfway out of his back.

Anne spun around, facing the front door. “Abe! The car!”

I ran outside just in time to see a Scavenger slice through the right rear tire with its jaws. The tire collapsed with a hissing pop, and the Rover sagged. More pops followed, and it sank low to the ground. Scavengers ran out from underneath the car and scattered in all directions like roaches.

I looked around, and ten gang members had gathered in the front yard behind me. Most of them looked the part, with shaved heads, pierced noses and lips, and tattoos running up their necks, but each and every one of them had the same look in their eyes.

Fear.

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G
uns were in every hand, but pointed carelessly, as though forgotten. I walked up to Jamal and stuck my hand out.

He stared down, easily a head taller than me and half-again as wide, with tree trunk arms and legs. He looked worried when we shook. “We cool? You know, after back there?”

“You still offering to help?”

“Yeah, man. We should stick together.”

“Then we’re cool.”

He nodded, his eyes looking at the empty houses up and down the street. “Long walk to the hospital. Five miles, easy. Go the other way and that same walk could take us out of town, yo. Free and clear.”

I shrugged. “You can make either one by dark, but if you head out of town all that means is being on the highway next to the woods at night. The hospital has a tornado shelter, which I think will be pretty defensible. I also figure that a lot of people ran for that shelter when things started getting out of hand, especially if they had wounded to take care of. There’s going to be a lot of scared people there. A lot of kids, I’d imagine.”

Jamal squinted up into the gray sky. “You got a point. I don’t want to be caught outside in the dark. We’ll go to the hospital.” He raised his voice to a bellow. “Angelo, Netty, Falo! Get the guns and the cash from the house. Leave the shit, we’ll come back for it later.”

Three men nodded at a few others and about half the group ran into the house.

I went to the Rover and held up the two remaining shotguns.

“Listen up. Shotguns work a hell of a lot better on those things than pistols. The only way they’ll stay down is if you find and hit the knot on them, like Anne did in the house. Break the knot, and it dies. These are up for grabs if anyone wants one.”

Jamal pointed at two men and they stepped up to me and took the guns. I hauled out the drawer full of shell boxes, and set it on the grass. They filled their pockets, and when they were done, so did Chuck and Leon.

The men came out of the house. They had a collection of sawed-off pistol-grip shotguns, regular hunting shotguns, and a rifle, which they handed out. Angelo had another machine pistol and a small nylon duffel, which I assume was full of cash.

We started walking.

It took all of ten minutes to figure out that we weren’t dressed for a five mile hike in freezing weather. About half of the gang members had oversized padded jackets with giant Lakers or Steelers emblems on them, but for the most part people were dressed to go from inside a building to a car and right back indoors again. No gloves, medium weight jackets, and no headgear outside of a few knit caps pulled low.

It was hardly life threatening, there was no rain or snow and the wind was sharp but intermittent, but I did have serious concerns about people being able to shoot with stiff fingers while shivering.

We moved at a fast walk, since Jamal and Angelo weren’t exactly joggers. Each time we passed a car we checked the tires, and in every case the Scavengers had gotten to it first. It was a sobering thought. How many of those things were out here?

I had the group walk in single file down the center of the street. The sidewalk between the cars and the shop fronts was now a death trap. Not only was it too close to the parked cars for comfort, but all those glass windows were an ambush waiting to happen. Unlike a human attacker, a wooden man would have zero compunctions about stepping through plate glass to get at you.

Anne trotted up to my side. “Abe.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re being followed.”

Jamal overheard us and looked back at the same time I did.

A wooden man ducked behind a truck, too late for us to miss him.

Jamal stopped walking and spoke to Anne without taking his eyes off the truck. “I been right behind you and I know you didn’t turn around and look. How’d you know it was back there?”

“It’s what I do. I can’t explain it.”

“Alright, whatever.” He turned to me. “You think we should take it out?”

I shook my head. “No, let’s just keep going. It knows it can’t win against an armed group this size, which is why it hasn’t approached us. And it can’t sneak up on us as long as Anne is around. Besides, the last time I chased one of those things it led me into an ambush. I’d like to think I was smart enough not to fall for that a second time.”

Jamal turned around and started walking again. “So we just let it creep around behind us? Fuck everything about this, man.”

The closer we got to the hospital, the more we saw signs of mass panic. Shattered windows and wrecked cars in the street became more common and several store alarms were going off, their volume rising and falling as we passed.

Even in single file, the men were bunched up close together, all traces of their earlier swagger and bravado gone. Eyes wide and hands clenched tight around their weapons, they swiveled their heads from side to side constantly, trying to look in all directions at once.

I could see the hospital now, barely bigger than a clinic since it serviced such a small area, but still three stories high and surrounded by an extensive parking lot. We were approaching from the south, directly towards the main entrance, and had another hundred yards to go before we reached the cross street between us and the small campus.

We all heard the shouting at the same time. Cutting across the side lawn of the hospital was a family of three, the man carrying a little girl in his arms, his wife running alongside him, crying. He was shouting, “Almost there, keep going!” over and over again.

Behind them was a wooden man, loping along, but not getting any closer.

They turned the corner and reached the front doors of the ER, which were boarded up. The woman began screaming and pounding on the doors. The wooden man slowed to a walk.

One of the doors opened a crack, then wide enough for the family to squeeze through. Then they slammed shut again. The wooden man turned around and sped back the way it had come, towards town.

That’s why there were so few bodies in the shops and why they had all been broken into. The wooden men had burst in, driving the people out into the streets. If they got a kill, then the bodies were left for the Scavengers. Everyone else had been herded towards the hospital. Prime must have had hundreds of people bottled up in there by now, ready to be harvested.

I held up a hand and stopped the group in the road in front of the hospital. Long brown lines of Scavengers crawled up the sides of the building like oversized ant-trails. They ran from the ground to open windows on the second and third floors, skipping the first floor entirely.

“Anne?”

“They’re everywhere above the ground floor. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many.”

My blood went cold. All this time I had thought that the wooden men were Prime’s army. That they were the real threat. But this killing field wasn’t for them. It was for the hundreds of Scavengers who were about to chew through the floors and fall on top of the tightly packed crowd below, cutting them to pieces.

“We have to get those people out of there.” Everyone fell in behind me as I broke into a jog.

We had just reached the outer ring of cars in the parking lot when the concrete in front of Anne sparked. The slap-whine of a round ricocheting off the ground was followed instantly by the sharp crack of a rifle shot. I looked up just in time to catch a flicker of movement on the roof and the flash of weak sunlight on a scope.

Anne juked sharply to the right as she ran.

The second shot passed through the spot she had just vacated and hit Angelo in the neck.

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