Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (37 page)

I
lived because I don’t know how to die. A young woman once shot me through the chest to save her father, but failed to kill me or save her dad. A few days later I drove a shaft of metal through my own heart to stop the Devourer from entering our world. Having my brain pierced by the roots of a fledgling god was no different. I was still here.

Except that it wasn’t trying to kill me outright. It was trying to eat me, hollow me out like the rest. It pulled at me, drawing the strength from my limbs and making my thoughts sluggish. I resisted, but it just dug deeper, sucking at my essence and my will.

I put up a fight. No surprise there. If nothing else I’m a contrary son of a bitch, but I shouldn’t have had to fight in the first place. Things don’t feed on me. I’m the opposite of food. But it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. You just had to be powerful enough to pull it off. But even so, I was able to resist, to slow the process down by sheer cussed determination.

The god tried to sweet talk me into letting go, joining the home team. It had no words, I don’t think it was conscious in that way, but it could still communicate. It injected me with feelings that it thought would sway me. Belonging. Restfulness. Satisfaction. It vomited up images into my brain at the same time, an alien landscape that reached to the horizon in every direction. Slimy gray fungus covered the earth in knots and tangles as far as the eye could see, and towering above it, a mountain of the same material, rising above the clouds. No people, no animals, not even any trees or plants. Just an endless expanse of the god’s flesh, resting on the dried corpse of the earth.

Somehow, that didn’t inspire me to lay down and die. I struggled harder, but I was weakening. It wouldn’t be long now.

Long, slender thorns grew out of the vegetative wall that I clung to, pushing through my body and pinning me in place as the god stole the strength of my limbs. My grip on the vine went slack and I sagged against the thorns, suspended by them.

It burrowed deeper, seeking out the power that fueled the undying vessel that I inhabited, trying to get at the essence of it. Of me.

Of the Devourer.

And then it won. Despite every bit of strength that I could muster, it pierced me, and touched the true center of my being. Voracious, unending, desperate hunger. A void so vast and deep that nothing could ever fill it.

The god recoiled, but it was too late.

The emptiness inside of me took notice of this new thing, this delicious offering, and began to stir. At first I tried to force it back down just as I always had. But thinking about the end of art and music, laughter, of curiosity and wonder, all of mankind’s shared victories over an uncaring and unfeeling universe, I realized that was no longer an option.

I no longer mattered. Not as Abe, old soldier. I had spent so much time trying to deny what I was that I never understood what I could be. This thing that had me, this horror that wanted to sweep aside everything that I loved, only saw me as a man foolishly standing his ground, like an ant defending his nest from a farmer’s boot.

The truth was that I could longer afford to be just a man. Letting go was like letting Maggie’s wedding ring slip from my finger over the ocean. I knew that what I let go of now, I would never get back.

It was worth it. I felt the god’s body through our connection, absorbing trees and earth and towering over me, and I smiled my bloody smile.

Abe was gone. There was only the great void inside of me, rising like a howling typhoon. Hunger uncoiled in my fist, showing its true self now that I had shown mine. The end split into five sinuous tendrils, twisting and grasping at the night air, jagged silver teeth gleaming on their undersides.

Together, Hunger and I reached for the Heart. The grasping tentacles wrapped around the writhing, incandescent mass and squeezed.

Satisfying, delicious power surged into me. I gulped at it, beyond starvation. I could feel the god trying to free itself from the bond that it had forged, to prevent having its own essence consumed like so much raw meat, but it was useless. The flames sheathing its titanic body guttered and went out. And still I fed.

The vessel that contained my soul, that had been destined to be the earthly body of the Devourer and which had been forged in the blood of hundreds of victims, was completing itself. The power that Piotr had gathered had only been enough to create the hollow outline of the vessel.

The Devourer was to have fed himself to finish it, to fill in the hollows and turn a pale approximation into the real thing. As much power as the Heart contained, the hunger was equal to it and more.

The thick, corrupted roots racing outward slowed their growth, then stopped. The forest surrounding the grove wailed in my mind and sagged, the transformation of bark and leaf into the gray god’s flesh slowing and stopping and still it wasn’t enough.

The massive tumor of the god’s new body stopped swelling upward and outward. Vines began to break off, dry and brittle, revealing bones inside that were no longer lit from within.

I pulled harder and the Heart itself darkened and went cold. It burst into a cloud of ashes in Hunger’s grip and I fell, the thorns that had held me aloft now as thin and insubstantial as eggshell.

The grove was still, silent but for the cries of a small girl who was still alive.

63

T
he fox watched me intently as I sat up, its ears forward and nose twitching.

I ran my fingers gingerly over my face and found firm flesh where the empty socket of my left eye had been. Peeling the gummy lids apart proved what I already knew. My eye was restored. Regrown. The old survivor’s guilt touched me, just once, under my breastbone. Hell with it, somebody’s got to be the lucky one. May as well be me.

“You get what you wanted?” My tone was caustic.

The fox walked towards me, blurring and shifting with every step. Native American medicine man wearing a coyote mask. Step. African shaman with a spider drawn on his chest in white paint. Step. Asian woman in a fox fur robe, nine bushy tails adorning her collar.

The woman knelt down next to me. She smelled of juniper and fresh rain. “I hope so.”

“Me, too. It’d be a real shame if you caused all of this for nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes and flashed her small, sharp teeth. “Is the survival of your kind nothing?”

“Don’t blow smoke up my ass. You only care because your own survival depends on us.”

She waved away the distinction. “It was necessary. You were weak. Incomplete. So I created an infant god and fed it to you. Now you’re so much more of what you were intended to be. Not enough to stand against the Powers that are waking underneath us, but closer.” She folded her hands inside her robe and turned her face from me. “You should be more grateful.”

“Yeah, thanks so much for creating an army of monsters that killed half the town so that I could be your pawn in some pissing match down the road. I really appreciate it.”

“Would you have preferred starving? How much longer do you think you had left before the hunger stole your mind? That’s what happened to the Devourer, after all. It was simply left alone too long with the hunger that you now carry inside you. Eons of starvation, unable to die. It’s not the least bit evil. Just insane.”

I shivered despite myself. Before I could reply with some sarcastic comment to hide the fact that she’d touched a nerve, she was gone.

I stood up slowly, enjoying the fact that everything worked fine and easy, as if I hadn’t been full of broken bones and ruptured organs ten minutes ago. I drew in a great, clean lungful of air and let it out with relief.

Despite the fox’s unsettling conversation, my body felt good. Rested. Almost peaceful. And it wasn’t because my chest no longer felt like a sack full of broken glass or because I could see out of both eyes.

I wasn’t hungry. For the first time in months, I felt satiated. Content. Almost drowsy with satisfaction. I knew it couldn’t last, but that was tomorrow’s problem.

Anne’s voice cut through the silence with a whoop. Across the glade, she was hugging a familiar man and his daughter both, her arms thrown wide around them, pounding on his back.

I smiled at her, even though she couldn’t see me. People were stirring, saved from being consumed, and she and Chuck were both alive and celebrating the fact.

But sharing in their joy would have to wait. There’s an order, a protocol that the battlefield drills into you. You do your duty to the fallen before you allow yourself a pat on the back for being among the living.

I looked around for Leon’s body. He’d stopped screaming somewhere between the time I had Hunger pulled halfway through Prime’s neck and when Prime’s body had simply unraveled into nothing.

Not too far away, I saw the Eater shaman hunched over something, its muzzle and front hands wet and bloody. A pair of booted feet were sticking out from underneath its muscular body.

I recognized the boots and started running and waving my arms. “Goddamit! Get away from him!” The last thing I needed was to bring Henry back his nephew’s corpse desecrated and half-eaten.

The Eater looked back over its shoulder at me. Between its bloody teeth was a ropy piece of vine, dripping with gore. Leon’s head lifted off the ground and he propped himself up on one elbow. His thigh was a mess of blood and ripped denim.

“Christ, I thought you were dead,” I said.

“Would have been, except that your number one fan here saved me.”

The Eater dropped the vine and licked its chops noisily. “It waited for Prime to get free of you so that my neck would heal up and then it pinned me down and ripped that shit right out of my leg. Remember the night we brought that wooden bastard into the world? When that vine grew between the sac and my leg so that Prime could feed off of me to grow? Well, when I broke it off, the rest of it stayed inside my leg, keeping us connected. This guy figured it out before Prime came apart and I ended up looking like a plate of goddamn spaghetti.”

I turned to the Eater. “Thanks.”

It stared at me with its lidless black eyes, unmoving. Then it bowed low, tucking its chin and touching the earth with its forehead. It stayed like that for few solemn seconds and then bounded away, following the rest of the pack that was already melting back into the remains of the surrounding woods.

I leaned down and held out a hand, but Leon just shook his head. “Can’t. Getting the vine out meant no more healing from Prime. I guess I just traded my legs so that I could keep on living.”

“Glad to hear that your priorities are a little different than the night we used that thorn. Still not going to be easy, though. You okay with that?”

He grinned at me, wide and toothy. “As we say in the corps, oorah, motherfucker.”

I laughed. “Good enough for me.” I knelt and got one arm behind his shoulders and the other under his knees. He came off the ground like a balloon, weightless.

Together, we gathered up the survivors. It was a long walk back to town and I smiled every step of the way.

Henry’s place became a temporary shelter that night, with Leon and his Aunt Emily doing the cooking and Henry doing his best to find space for everyone to sleep, even if it was just a spot on the floor and a blanket. Nobody seemed to mind.