The Harvest Cycle (19 page)

    In a split-second motion, he pulled a knife and whipped it with deadly accuracy. The blade choked the barrel of Delmar’s gun.

    Delmar pulled the trigger. The weapon exploded, showering him with chemical fire.

    Bruce turned to see his comrade immolated. He knocked Delmar to the ground, rolling him over to smother the flames - then Macendale was upon him, sending the both of them rolling down the street’s incline. Macendale was laughing again, plunging his hands into Bruce’s torso wound and ripping at his circuitry.

    Cutter caught Macendale, hauled him to his feet and spun him around. Macendale opened his mouth to make a joke. His teeth were shattered by Cutter’s fist, driving all the way into the back of the bot’s throat so that Cutter could sling him overhead like a rag doll before driving him into the asphalt.

    Macendale bit down with the jagged remnants of his teeth. Cutter roared in pain, flaying his wrist open as he wrenched it free.

    Bruce wrapped his legs around Macendale’s head and tore him away from Cutter. He squeezed as hard as he could, intending to crush the bot’s head to pulp.

    Cutter staggered away, seeing blood running in rivers from his arm and hand, trying to tear his sleeve off to stifle the crimson flow.

    “Mister Cutter!” A small voice cried.

    It was Lucy. Still here. Lucy. Why hadn’t she run?

    “Lucy-” He began to shout. And he saw the look in her eyes, the stark terror, that terror which was of only one thing.

    And the Harvester took her.

    It came around the corner in a dark flash, skewering her on five knives, knocking the puppy from her arms, lifting her fragile body into the air, into the dislocating jaws of the scrambling, tumbling, white-eyed thing.

    More surged around the corner, a plague of them, and Lucy vanished from sight.

    “
HARVESTERS!!
” Came Cutter’s grieving scream.

    Bruce released Macendale and threw himself at Cutter, pulling him up the street. “Run!”

    Cinnamon was up then, picking off the front line of Harvesters with her Gyro, ushering Bruce and Macendale to safety within the store. Delmar rose too, in a pillar of smoke, and knocked an oncoming Harvester to the other side of the street with a crippling blow.

    He stumbled over Macendale as he ran for the store; couldn’t see much, could only feel the trampled, broken body beneath his feet.

    The back room of the store. Door locked securely, lights out of course. Smoke still rising off Delmar’s back, the shell-shocked Cutter’s head swimming in that acrid gray and the humid shadows. Cinnamon slumping to the floor, digging at the wound in her head. Bruce bracing himself against the door and listening to the sounds outside as the monsters swarmed through the streets.

***

    They paid no mind to the dog.

    It laid beside Lucy’s body, whimpering, licking the blood from her hands and nuzzling what remained of her head. It didn’t think about the other people, about returning to any sort of home, about going anywhere else. It would stay here.In time, as the Harvesters moved on, it fell into a fitful sleep.

20.

Off

    Jack DaVinci also slept fitfully.

    Somehow, in the second between consciousness and sleep, a scrap of memory was dredged up and played out in something almost like a dream, more like a movie in which he was only a character...

***

    Oxide got frustrated with the leather apron, all bunched up around his chest, and tore it off with a gloved hand before peeling the glove away with his teeth and spitting it across the abattoir. His blood was already boiling and he wasn’t even hard yet.

    The mechanics of masturbation were far more taxing than any part of the acquisition. Fresh meat was easy to come by in this region. The population was thriving, and young women were plentiful in every major junction. Oxide’s clients preferred women of breeding age, if only because of their heightened sensitivity; made it easier to play in their dreams. In the hearts of men, however, each yearned for the freshest meat of all; for its raw, unfettered imagination.

    But they made do with the older ones.

    Unbuttoning his pants and shuffling across the room, Oxide removed the towel covering the instrument tray and presented the spread of tools to his client. It was an impressive selection, the sort that few could offer. He could awaken every nerve ending in the girl’s body and set them all on fire, even as she lay unconscious. It was a legitimate art, what he did, prying sensations from the subconscious. He was ready to strip her down and begin, but first he had to review the terms of the agreement with the client.

    The man who’d introduced himself as “Jack” was slouched on a rotten old sofa behind Oxide. He’d removed his coat and draped it over the arm, but his dark glasses stayed on. It was because of shame, Oxide knew, shame brought on by the outdated conventions of a dead world; shame that would shed itself like layers of chitin as Jack gave in to his fantasy. Oxide motioned to the man’s lap, groin covered by folded hands. “You can start whenever you’d like. I don’t watch, I just work. Of course-” Oxide winked “-you understand that I’ll take care of myself, if the need arises.”

    “Fine,” Jack replied in a flat tone. “I won’t be doing anything. Not now. I just want to see.”

    “Are you sure?” Lifting a scalpel from the tray, Oxide turned the polished blade in his bare hands and felt blood rush to his cock. “You know you can’t record this.”

    “Yes.”

    “So you’re content with just the memory of it?” Oxide gave the man a patronizing smile. “Look, in a minute I’m going to go over behind the table and start on the girl. Take off your glasses. Our eyes won’t meet. Her eyes will never open. This is all about you, Jack - so don’t hold back.”

    Running fingers slick with grime through salt-and-pepper hair, Jack pushed loose strands away from the lenses of his shades and pursed his lips. “I prefer just to see.”

    “Suit yourself.” Oxide wheeled the tray over to the operating table. “Memory never, ever matches the experience…”

    The girl’s name was Mary Sue. He’d bought her from some guy who claimed to be her husband (another outdated convention, and a likely lie) in the bowels of the Gotham tunnels. A world in which morality and logic had eroded, despite the efforts of so many to preserve them.

    
Not me
, Oxide thought.
Not me and not Jacky boy
. They’d been victims of society’s mores long enough. Now, they embraced the new flesh.

    Glancing one last time at Jack as he started the girl’s IV drip, Oxide wondered how long it had been for the poor man. When had they taken away his dreams? His imagination? When had they made him soulless and zombie-like, another cog in a machine without power or purpose?

    Jack’s scar was barely visible above his ear. He’d probably been cut on when he was just a boy. For Oxide, it had been only a few years since they excised his nanoplasmic cortex, the supposed “dream center” of the brain. He remembered being awake during the operation. Remembered them telling him that it was for his own sake, for
everyone’s
sake. That the mistakes of the old world. Which had driven them down below, would never be repeated.

    He’d believed it at first. He thought he could live without dreams, that his sanity would endure and that perhaps all the horrible stories he’d heard weren’t true. But they were.

    First he lost his dreams. Then he lost his imagination. Then he lost his soul.

    Mary Sue’s skin was perfection. Not a single blemish. No scar above the right ear. The scalpel blade trembled millimeters from her chest; Oxide took a deep breath, steadying himself against the table, and then began popping the buttons from her blouse.

    He laid open her shirt and took down her pants. She wore no underwear, but her breasts were pert and firm, and her womanhood soft beneath his fingertips. He laid the scalpel there teasingly, in her pubic mound, and returned to the instrument tray.

    She moaned softly. Just for a second, then was silent.

    Blood roared in Oxide’s ears. It surged through his limbs and made his entire body stand erect. He watched her for the slightest movement. Beneath her eyelids, a gentle flutter.

    
She was dreaming
.

    He saw Jack sit rigid from the corner of his eye. Oxide stood over the girl and brandished a serrated blade. “Her name is Mary Sue,” he said, barely above the whisper.

    Then he cut.

    Deftly, with surgical precision and the flourishes of an accomplished master, he filleted several layers of skin from the side of her abdomen. Taking the sheet of flesh in his hands, he peeled it back for Jack to see. The white dermis beneath flushed, turned deep red and began to bleed; he moved quickly to the other side of her taut belly and repeated the stroke.

    Her virgin flesh parted with ease. Red droplets welled along every exposed inch, and she began moaning again; still unconscious, held captive by the chemical drip, her mind translated the pain into new sensations, dream sensations, and her breath quickened as her eyes flitted rapidly.

    Oxide plucked the scalpel from below her abdomen and made a series of paper-thin cuts to the underside of her breasts. The blood ran like tears down the side of her body. Of course, Oxide didn’t make this association in his mind; he couldn’t contrive such a comparison in his deadened mind, devoid of imagination; he could recall ideas and images from his pre-op life but they were meaningless. Rather than losing himself in the work like a true artist, he simply repeated a well-rehearsed series of cuts; he traced the scalpel around her breasts, bisected her nipples, listened to her gasp and exhale as he laid her nerves bare and prodded them with the very tip of the blade.

    Jack was silent. Oxide reached his free hand into his pants and grasped his cock. He watched the girl’s face as he continued to cut.
She’s dreaming. What’s she dreaming of? Anything. Anything.

    Subtle passes of the blade across her lips, and the redness seeped from them. He nicked her throat, a little deeper than he’d intended. Blood pooled in the hollow of her neck.
Get a grip
, Oxide told himself, unaware he’d made a joke, and moved to her arms.

    He cut in time to a song he’d heard as a child. It had been a piece by a man named Beethoven, comprised of slow, sensual movements followed by sweeping energy. It was perfect for vivisection. Music had once brought him pleasure, he thought as he took hold of the girl’s elbow and wrist and, with his thumbs, spread open the series of incisions he’d made there. Each tiny wound yawned pale and began to fill with crimson. He crossed her other arm over her chest, so that Jack could see it, and took from the tray a length of tubing. This was tied off just below the elbow. Then, he laid the rust-colored teeth of a bone saw against her wrist.

    Her head rolled back and forth, soft sounds escaping her lips. Oxide bore down on her arm and sawed rapidly.

    She let out a whimper. Her head turned to face him, and her wet lips parted and she said, “
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
”

    Oxide felt himself approaching orgasm and paused in his cutting to tug on himself. He leaned towards her, feeling her breath hot on his face as she whispered unintelligibly. The boundary between their worlds was being breached; she was bringing him, he and Jack, into her dream, letting the blades steer her imagination through the recesses of her mind, and she was speaking to Oxide in a tongue he could never understand, in a language stolen from him, and before he knew what was happening he’d plunged his hand into her mouth and dug his fingertips like talons into that squirming strip of meat and he was pulling as her eyes opened and she screamed.

    He tore the tongue free and felt cum rush to the head of his cock. Sucking the tongue into his mouth, he groaned as he ejaculated across her stomach. She gurgled, thrashing her head, blood flying everywhere as it poured into her mouth to fill it again and again and again.

    Jack rose from the couch. Still cumming, Oxide saw through his haze the bulge in Jack’s pants and urged him to take it out. “Do it! Let go!”

    “She’s
alive!
” Jack yelled. Oxide didn’t hear him. He grabbed one of the girl’s flayed breasts and twisted, listening to her scream as it swelled to a crescendo unrivaled by Beethoven.

    Then, a thunderclap. The room shook. Oxide fell back, stunned, and landed on the floor and then he was just a dull-eyed, shiftless zombie with cum cooling in his hands and blood dripping from the operating table onto his bare feet.

    Her chest had exploded. The hand that had held her breast was ringing with pain, and Oxide lifted it to see that his index finger was gone, a blackened stump in its place.

    Jack lowered his gun and stood over the dead girl. Brushing a few errant strands of hair from her face, her beautiful face, he sighed. “Mary Sue.” He pointed the gun at Oxide. “That was her name, wasn’t it?”

    “What - what did you do!?” Oxide shrieked. “
What have you done to me?
”