Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (31 page)

“Tell her for me. If I don’t come back.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no. Fuck you and your martyr complex. You didn’t choose this, the fox did. She used you. Hell, she used all of us. With what you were going through, are you honestly going to stand there and tell me you had the ability to turn down the chance to walk again? Bullshit. You could no more turn away from that than a drowning man could refuse air. It was the same for Henry. He loves you and there was no way he could deny you this. The only person there that had a choice was me. If we get back, I’ll tell Emily that.”

I walked away before he could say anything.

We hiked through the ruins of Halfway in the waning afternoon light, the bitter wind doing its best to turn the few pieces of falling snow into stinging grit. After about a mile we started seeing cars with tires that were intact.

Prime’s herding strategy had been confined to the center of town and the closest surrounding houses. Like everything else he did, it was shrewd and efficient. Just enough territory to collect the number of people he wanted, but not so much that he would spread his limited troops out too thin. I’d try to remember to congratulate him on his cleverness next time I saw him. Right before I ripped his head off.

Most people had fled, abandoning their homes, so I started looking for dark houses with drivable cars outside.

The first couple of doors I knocked on proved two things: not everyone had left town and the ones who had decided to stick it out were perfectly happy to shoot a stranger through the door on general principles. I couldn’t blame them, last they had heard there was a manhunt going on for a serial killer.

The third house had a baby blue Honda parked on the curb in front of the house and an empty driveway with oil stains at the end. Hopefully the family who lived there had taken one vehicle and left the other. There was no answer at the door, which I unlocked with my boot. A quick search turned up a spare key to the Honda on a hook by the back door and, just like that, we had transportation.

Anne drove while Leon and I checked the ammo in the guns. It wasn’t good. We were down to eleven .410 shells and six 12-gauge. It would have to do, there was no time left to go foraging for more.

Anne kept us moving east, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap, clenched around the piece of bark. Tiny bits of sleet clicked on the windshield as they fell out of the low, gray sky.

She made a left out of town, onto the blacktop highway. Trees lined both sides of the road, a thin strip of pines to our left, between us and the town, and a mix of green pines and yellow-gold beech to our right.

Ahead of us was a set of short skid marks and a wet lump of something that could have been road kill. We pulled off onto the shoulder and Anne cut the engine.

“This is as far as the road will take us. We want to head that way.” She pointed off to the right, into the trees.

We abandoned the car with the keys in it.

Before heading into the woods, I knelt down to take a quick look at the mess in the road. A Scavenger had been run over while trying to cross here. The legs were still quivering underneath the nearly unrecognizable lump of a human forearm. Looked like we were going in the right direction.

The temperature rose sharply as we passed into the woods. Between the curled brown husks of dead leaves hanging from the beech trees I could see small green shoots that shouldn’t have been there for months yet. The scent of humid growth was just noticeable underneath the dusty winter smell of snow.

“Not much farther,” said Anne. We’re getting—” She stumbled.

The woods around us groaned and flexed. Green shoots squirmed out of naked winter limbs and the trees themselves stretched and twisted upwards around us. The movement gave me a sense of vertigo, as if I were falling as the tops of the trees moved further away. It only lasted for a moment, but the effect was profound and disturbing.

I looked at Anne as she straightened up. Her normally dark brown eyes were pale amber, nearly golden. The color faded as I watched. It was so quick that if I had blinked I would have missed it.

Leon had his shotgun raised. “What the hell was that?”

Anne took a deep breath and scrubbed at her nose. “Another beat of the Heart.”

“Can you track it? Where’s it coming from?” I asked.

She raised her hands and gestured at the woods around us. “Everywhere. The whole forest just, I don’t know, pulsed. But I still have a fix on this.” She held up the fragment of bark. “This way.”

As we moved deeper into the wood, the clutter of low bushes and smaller plants that usually filled the spaces between the trees began to thin out. Soon we were walking on a flat carpet of leaves that stretched between widely spaced trunks. The trees were massive, with smooth, ebony bark and dark, glossy green leaves. They didn’t appear to have ever been touched by winter. There were no pines or beech to be seen, only these strange giants.

“Shh.” I held up one hand. Ahead of us I could hear a rustling sound, and underneath that a faint clicking. Leon shrugged at me and Anne pressed on, moving as quietly as she could across the leafy ground.

At first it looked like a cornfield had sprouted up in the middle of the forest, no more than an acre wide, with stalks about a foot taller than me. None of the huge trees grew up through the field.

As we got closer, it became obvious that these weren’t corn stalks. Where there would have been ears of corn were instead drooping vines with fat growths hanging from them. Each growth had six spindly legs that waved in the air and two curved thorns like mandibles pointed at the ground.

It was a half-formed Scavenger and the clicking sound was the snapping of thousands of razor-sharp jaws.

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“Let me guess,” said Leon, staring at the squirming crop in front of him. “We have to march directly through that shit.”

Anne rubbed the bark between her fingers. “Looks like it. But we’re close now. See that?” In the center of the field of Scavengers we could make out the top of another tree, wide and squat. “I think that’s where we’re going.”

“There’s no way. We’ll be chewed to pieces inside of ten feet.”

I pulled Hunger from its sheath. “If the lady says we go forward, then we go forward.” My first swing at the tough, fibrous stalks just folded them up in place, but the second left a wide swath of sheared off stumps. Hunger had flattened out into a machete-like blade that was wickedly sharp.

I took the lead, cutting a knee-high path through the terrifying field. Behind me, Anne and Leon stepped carefully to avoid the blindly snapping Scavenger buds. As we moved forward the stalks got thicker and taller and the Scavengers growing from them bigger and more defined. The snapping grew louder.

Sometimes when the stalks fell after a cut, the Scavengers would pull against the vines and break free, disappearing into the field. I tried hard not to think of them swarming out from between the stalks like a flood of rats fleeing a tractor.

I focused on hacking at the stalks in front of me and watching where I stepped, falling into a rhythm that lasted until I swung and there were no new stalks in front of me. The last of them toppled away, revealing a large circular clearing.

We stepped out of the field onto a mat of roots that covered the ground, running outward from the gnarled tree in the center only to turn upwards behind us, becoming the stalks of the Scavenger plants. The tree and the field surrounding it were one enormous creature.

Unlike the towering giants that surrounded the field, the tree in the center was shorter and devoid of leaves of any kind. The branches were spindly, rising up only a few feet from the top before curving down to the ground all around the trunk, like the legs of some colossal spider.

When the wind shifted, it brought us the stench of rotting meat.

The branches on this side of the tree were swaying and twitching aimlessly, but the ones on the far side moved with a purpose. Even the trunk seemed to be bent forward slightly, as if hunched over whatever the branches were doing.

We circled the edge of the clearing to get a better look, staying just far enough from the Scavenger plants to avoid being bitten. As we moved, we saw a fully grown Scavenger dart out of the field and scurry towards the tree. It was carrying a human forearm, sheared off between wrist and elbow. A spark of light glinted from a delicate silver watch still clasped around it.

The scavenger crossed to the front of the tree and flicked its grisly cargo onto a pile of fly-swarmed body parts. Without pausing, it scuttled in a tight circle and ran back into the field and, I assume, town.

A branch whipped down and snatched this gift from the top of the pile, coiling around it tightly enough to make the flesh bulge. The tip of a second branch began picking at the metal watch band again and again, scrabbling against the edge of the clasp. At last the clasp popped open and the watch sagged loosely on its previous owner’s wrist.

The branch plucked the watch free and held it close to the trunk, hovering in front of a human face that had been stretched tight and nailed to the tree. There were no eyes, but the branch turned the watch this way and that in front of the stiff, dried skin nonetheless.

With a deft economy of motion, the first branch stuffed the forearm into a hole in the trunk that was just underneath the face. Scraping, sucking noises came out of the hole.

Another branch swung around and began digging at the side of the trunk. It trembled and scraped against the bark until it had gouged out a piece of wood as long as my finger. One end was still attached to the tree, while the other leaned out into the open air. Black sap ran out of the wound in long rivulets.

The watch was draped carefully, reverently, on the piece of wood. I could make out other bits and pieces all around it, each hanging on its own peg. Bracelets, rings, and at least a dozen other watches glimmered in the failing light.

The tip of the branch stroked the watch gently, touching the glass face, now dull with dried blood, and making the metal band ripple and clink. A low crooning drifted out of the tree, just audible under the sucking, chewing sound. Rising and falling.

The branch drifted away from the watch and both the crooning and the sucking sounds stopped. They were replaced by an awful scraping, crunching noise, like someone grinding their teeth together until they cracked.

Seconds later, two long bones came out of another hole at ground level, pushed out with a chunky black sludge. Branches plucked out the bones and shook off most of the sludge, then tossed them carelessly onto a pile of similar trophies.

Each bone was deeply scored with symbols that crawled in long spirals around them, and the ends had been carved into crude hooks. The pile of bones shifted and the new additions tumbled to the ground. It looked like nobody had been picking them up for a while.

The branches began digging through the rotting pile of body parts once more.

Anne tapped herself on the forehead and then pointed at the tree. There was a spike of wood jammed through the dead face, a few inches above the nose. It was about a foot long and slightly curved, clearly not part of the tree itself.

She whispered to me, “That piece in the face? It smells like part of the Heart.”

When she spoke, silence fell over the grove. The branches of the tree froze, then the snapping of the Scavenger crop faded away. The trunk jerked and twisted, swinging the face in our direction.

The tree screamed.

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