Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (12 page)

We burned the bodies out back, the wooden corpses providing the fuel for their own pyre. The four of us stood in a circle and watched the fire eat the dead, the flames corrupted with green and purple streaks and the smoke greasy and foul smelling. Henry said a few words about Paulie, but I didn’t really hear them.

When Prime stuck those thorns in my arm, they had shriveled instead of stealing my blood and my soul. I wondered if that was because of the Devourer’s body or if it was because there was nothing inside to feed on.

I’d always assumed that my soul was intact inside of this unnatural vessel, like the last olive rattling around in a jar. Out of place, but still the original item, untouched. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Maybe my body wasn’t the only thing that had been transmuted in the depths of Piotr’s blood pit.

I shivered a little, even though I couldn’t feel the cold.

19

C
huck and Leon returned to the house, leaving me and Henry standing next to the remains of the fire, now down to a pile of crackling, smoky embers. Every few minutes I raked through them with a shovel to make sure that even the coals were burning down to ash.

I leaned on the shovel and asked Henry an old familiar question, one repeated so often that it had become part of our routine before a mission. “So, Professor, how are we going to win this one?”

He answered without missing a beat. “Same as always. Find the bastard and stomp on him until he stops getting up.”

We grinned at each other, remembering other times and places and people, and in the fading light his wolfish smile seemed just as sharp as ever, despite the years etched into the features around it.

I gave the fire another poke, sending green and gold sparks swirling away in the wind. “What bothers me is that I can’t figure what Prime is up to. That ambush seemed pretty half-assed. Prime wasn’t even there for the fighting and he wound up losing two of his four creations. Sloppy.”

“It’s possible that it didn’t turn out the way Prime expected, but I guarantee you there was a reason for it. Just as the creatures raised from Paulie’s blood inherited part of him, I suspect Prime contains more than a little of Leon. And Leon’s one of the sharpest around, tactically speaking. If Prime went out of his way to get you into that lumber yard, then he got something out of it. I’ll think on it.”

“Just like the good old days.”

“Well, the old days, anyway.”

We stared at the dying fire in comfortable silence for a few minutes, just two old men lost in the past. Easy to do when there’s eight decades of it inside of you, and only one thin instant of the present to pull you away. But, of course, that tiny sliver of the now is all we ever really have.

“Been a rough day for Anne,” he said.

“Yeah, she really liked Verna. Made her feel like she belonged. And that business at the construction yard was pretty nasty.”

“You think maybe she needs to talk to somebody?”

“I’ve seen her in worse spots, and she’s always been fine. More than fine, actually. Completely made of stone. None of us were ever that cool under fire, not even Two-Penny.”

“And that doesn’t sound like a problem to you?”

“I guess I hadn’t really thought about it.” I handed Henry the shovel. “Keep an eye on the fire for me?”

Henry nodded. “Of course.”

I found Anne in her room.

A towel was spread out across the bed, covered with pieces of her beloved P250. A bottle of solvent was open with a little bit poured into the cap sitting next to it and a wrinkled, well-used Ziploc bag was next to that, filled with cotton swabs and patches. There was also a small squirt bottle of oil, the label faded and slightly sticky as they tend to get after a while.

She was holding the barrel in one hand, just an innocuous metal tube outside of the gun, and a brush in the other. The brush hovered in the air next to the barrel as she stared into space. It looked like she’d been doing that for a while.

I closed the door behind me. “Hey.”

Her hands started moving. She dipped the brush into the solvent in the cap and ran it through the barrel. The tang of the cleaner was heavy in the air, like a mix of fingernail polish remover and gasoline. “Hey.”

“Mind if I come in?”

She shook her head, making the ends of her hair dance around her shoulders. She put the barrel down next to the cap and set aside the brush.

“Thanks.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched her work. She picked up a dry white cloth, clean but stained with countless gray and black smudges, and started rubbing down the frame. She used her fingernail to hold the cloth in the grooves and crevices, her hands moving quickly and deftly as she turned the frame this way and that. She picked up the next piece, the slide, without really looking at it, her hands never pausing.

When she spoke her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “I’m sorry, Abe. It didn’t work today.”

“Seemed to work fine to me. No misfires, no jams.”

“Not the gun. The gun was fine. Me.”

I didn’t push. Instead I just watched as she cleaned the rest of the pieces, one after another, her hands guided by the habits of a lifetime, her mind far away.

“Did you know that I lied to you when we met? I pretended not to know about my grandfather’s gift or the things that you did together in the war. But I did. I grew up on his stories. I’ve known about the monsters all my life.”

She put the cloth down and picked up the tiny bottle of oil. Her other hand plucked a cotton swab from the plastic bag. The tip of the bottle trembled as she held it over the head of the swab. The first drop missed and landed on the bed spread, leaving a dark dot. She touched the tip of the swab to the bottle to get the second drop and put the bottle down.

“This is what I wanted my life to be. My grandfather told me I’d fight for the world, for everyone who couldn’t, and he put fire into my hand and my heart. He said I had a calling. I believed him when he told me that. So I practiced. And I waited. And I let my life sail past me, year after year. No real friends, no long term relationships. No career. Just standing in a restaurant with a tray in my hands, dodging grabby men and going home to an empty apartment. Waiting for my calling. For my life to begin. And now here I am. I got everything I wanted and I can’t do it. I broke today. The monsters came for me and I couldn’t stop them and I broke. If I can’t do this, then who am I?”

She bowed her head and her shoulders shook. Then she threw the swab on the bed and lunged for me, hugging me fiercely around the neck. I was so surprised that it took me a moment to bring my arms up to hold her in return.

Patrick had turned the skill he wanted her to have into a sword and shield both. He’d made the attainment of absolute mastery into an article of faith, a sanctuary against the darkness. He must have known that it couldn’t last. That nobody was untouchable.

I should have realized it back in Belmont when she was changing the ammo in her shotgun. She’d gone strangely calm and remote, submerged into herself, armoring herself in her belief that as long as she didn’t miss, she was safe. But I hadn’t understood.

She clung to me for a few more moments and then pushed away. She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and picked up the cotton swab like nothing had happened, but I knew how deeply she must have been hurt to show it. She’d spent her whole life being forced to prove how tough she was to Patrick and now she didn’t know how to stop, even after his death.

“You panicked today. Big deal. I hardly think that means that you have to give up. If that were the case, we’d have had about three guys on the front lines during the war.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. When Piotr was dragging me around that catwalk with a cord around my neck? I was scared out of my mind. But I still wanted to fight him. I was determined not to let him win. Even if it killed me.” My heart skipped as the image of her jumping off into empty air passed before my eyes. “But this time? I just wanted to quit. Whatever courage I had back in Belmont is gone. They came for me and I would have done anything to make them just go away.”

“You gave up? I guess that’s why you’re in here packing your suitcase, right? Oh, wait. You’re not. You’re cleaning your gun and making sure that you’re ready for the next fight. Not only didn’t you give up, you didn’t even do a good job pretending to give up.”

She looked at the cotton swab in her hand and the parts neatly arrayed on the bed as if seeing them for the first time.

I held her eyes with mine. “Courage isn’t something you have, it’s something you create new every single time. And sometimes it won’t be enough. That’s true for everybody, not just you.”

“How can you sit there and give me a bunch of horseshit about fear and being brave when nothing can hurt you? What do you know about fear, Abe? Tell me that.”

“I know that I have to choose to fight every day, same as you. And some days I feel like giving in. Think about what it’s like to live in the body of some gibbering horror that wanted to eat the whole world. It was never meant to hold a human soul. Is it changing me? If it does, will I even know?”

I took the cotton swab out of her unresisting fingers and started oiling the frame of her gun. The tip left a shiny streak of oil wherever it touched.

“I don’t sleep anymore, did you know that? Not since Belmont.”

I oiled the rest of the gun’s components ran a couple of patches through barrel until they came out the other side clean. Anne let me do it without protest.

“Something else, too. I’ve been wearing a jacket outside so that I don’t look out of place, but the cold can’t touch me anymore. It’s like I’m getting further from the real world every day. I can feel the air on my skin and I can tell that it’s cold, but it’s not the same. It’s just information, like seeing a color. What’s going to happen to me when I can no longer remember what it was like to sleep and shiver and sweat and not be hungry all the time? What will I become if I live like that long enough?”

I reassembled the gun and placed it into her outstretched hand. “Believe me, I’m plenty scared. But just like you, I’ll keep on, day after day. You know why?”

She shook her head.

“Because you and I were born to it. There’s nothing else for us but this. I never cared about anything until I found out that there was a line in the sand between the good guys and the bad guys. Until there was something to defend and a reason to defend it. But as soon as I heard about Pearl Harbor, my whole life snapped into focus. It’s not just the fight that defines us, Anne. It’s the reason for the fight.”

She searched my eyes for a long time and then kissed me on the cheek. Then she loaded her weapon.

20