Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (23 page)

T
he lobby was empty. I walked to the counter and peered through the glass at the comm center. Coffee cups sat next to busy screens while complicated phone panels blinked and buzzed at no one. The only indication that something had happened here was a single office chair on its side in the middle of the floor.

Anne put one hand on my arm and pointed towards the back of the building. “We’re not alone. There are at least a couple of stick men in here with us.”

Neither one of us mentioned Leon, but we both knew that this had just turned into a race.

On the right side of the lobby was a reinforced glass door leading into the station proper. I could see a beige corridor beyond, bland and utilitarian. The door was locked, requiring either an access badge or someone hitting a switch in the comm center to open it.

I decided to take the direct route and drove my boot into the space where the door frame met the wall. Glass exploded in all directions as the door frame ripped free of the studs holding it in place. Alarms went off and white strobe lights began flashing in the corridor, making the drywall dust hanging in the air appear and disappear in time with their bursts.

Anne ran past me and took the lead. The hall ended in a T-intersection and Anne bolted left without hesitation. As I ran behind her, I saw that the carpet was covered with those same red dots that had been at the dry cleaners. Two tracks of dots curved into a doorway on the right side of the corridor from opposite directions, making a V shape, but Anne ran past it, so we didn’t stop to look inside.

Anne led us into a room at the end of the hall. As stark and utilitarian as the rest of the place, the only furniture inside was two conference tables and a beat up wooden lectern. Clipboards holding thick stacks of paper hung from the walls next to cramped whiteboards filled with rows of names and assignments.

We dashed between the tables and headed for a door on the far side of the room. I could hear muffled shouting coming through it. Anne reached the door first and yanked on the handle without success, then stepped aside.

I grabbed the handle and pulled. The receiving plate for the lock tore through the wooden frame and the door swung open. The room inside was small, containing only a glass-fronted booth and another door. A sign taped to the glass read, “ALL PROPERTY LOGS MUST BE SIGNED BEFORE PROPERTY WILL BE RELEASED.”

The shouting was much clearer now and one of the voices was obviously Leon’s. The door in this room was steel, but a wad of bloody clothes had prevented it from closing all the way. I shouldered it open, making it boom against the wall.

Leon and the thug from Verna’s Diner were pressed against the rear wall of their shared cell. A wooden man was halfway into the cell, stuck between the bars at the widest part of its chest, bloody arms outstretched toward the cringing men. A second wooden man was ripping strips of wood from the first creature’s torso, littering the ground at its feet with bits of broken twig and vine.

As I watched, the first wooden man writhed against the bars of the cell, wood squeaking against the metal loudly enough to be heard over Leon and the thug’s hoarse shouts.

I took one long step into the room, drawing Hunger at the same time. The second wooden man continued to shove with single-minded intensity until the moment Hunger came down across its shoulder, tearing off one of its gore-slicked arms.

The impact spun it around, revealing what I had been looking for, a knot of wood the size of a golf ball between its shoulder blades.

I had its full attention now. It turned to me and charged. I aimed my shoulder at it and charged right back. As vicious as the thing was, it simply lacked the mass to compete. Colliding with it was like a professional linebacker running full tilt into a store mannequin.

I powered it backwards across the cell block and into the concrete wall at the far side. The creature’s wooden chest collapsed with a satisfying crunch and the knot burst open, marking the wall with a syrupy spatter.

Back at the cell, the other creature went berserk, flailing its arms and legs wildly in an attempt to get free of the bars. Chuck walked up to it and grabbed one leg by the ankle, stopping it long enough to put a single bullet through the knot on its thigh. The wooden man collapsed, still stuck between the bars, arms and legs dangling limply in midair.

The big gang member had his face pressed against the bars in an instant. “Open the goddamn door before more of those things show up! Do it now!”

I holstered Hunger and took my time walking over. “Yeah, I don’t even know how to open these cells. Hey, Leon. How’re you holding up?”

“I almost pissed myself just now, but other than that, I’m cool.”

Anne glared at me. “You are such an asshole. I’ll open it.” She walked out of the room. Two seconds later a buzzer sounded and the cell door popped open.

Mr. Personality ran out and grabbed the front of my shirt with both hands. He opened his mouth to bellow something, but he never got the chance. I hit him in the sternum and he sagged to the ground gasping. I had pulled my punch enough to keep from breaking anything, but he’d have a hell of a bruise there tomorrow. If he survived until then.

Leon stepped over him and clapped me on the shoulder. “Thanks.”

Anne came back in the room. “I think you guys are the last living people in the building.”

“I figured,” said Leon. “We heard gunshots and a lot of screaming about thirty minutes ago. Things got quiet for a while, then these things came in looking like they just walked out of a slaughterhouse.” He pointed at his cellmate. “His name is Jamal, by the way.”

I headed for the door. “C’mon, let’s see if there are any guns left in the station.”

“Wait.” Jamal was on his feet with one hand clutching his chest. His voice sounded strained. “Take me with you. If there’s more of those things out there, then you need all the help you can get, right?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think shooting me in the back counts as helping.”

“No, man, listen. I was just freaked out, all right? Believe me, I’m on whatever side is killing those things.”

I looked at Anne. She shrugged.

“Fine, but you do what I say, when I say it, or I’ll personally haul you back here and lock you up. Got it?”

“I got it. No problem.”

We went back out into the hallway to start searching for the station’s armory. Leon stared at the bloody dots on the carpet and then looked away, fixing his eyes on the walls instead.

We moved cautiously through the deserted hallways, weapons ready. Anne’s senses were good, but like her grandfather before her, the range depended on how active the target was.

Halfway down the hall I stopped and raised my hand to signal the others. The absence of our footsteps left only the hum of the air conditioner. And one other thing. A very faint rhythmic dragging noise. As I listened, the sound was punctuated by a hollow pop.

The sound was coming from the next doorway in front of us, on the left. The same doorway that the v-shaped trail of red dots curved into. I crept to the edge of the door frame, Anne close to my side. I glanced at her and she nodded, although a bit uncertainly. Whatever was in there wasn’t giving off much of a signature.

The door was open, but the lights were off. Anne raised her pistol.

I reached inside and flipped on the lights.

38

W
hen I was six years old, my father sent me down to the farm’s root cellar to get a jar of preserves for my mother. I ran outside and around the house, running because like most six-year-olds I lacked the patience for walking, and pulled the heavy cellar doors open, one at a time. I only needed to open one to get in, but I wanted to get as much morning light onto the stairs as possible before going down.

The light would paint a bright stripe all the way to the bottom, which was good enough to let me reach the candle and matches that I had hidden under the last step. That way I didn’t have to bring a candle from the house and admit to my father that I was afraid of the dark.

I got to the bottom and walked slowly away from the light, striking my match. It lit on the second try, by which time I was pretty close to the back wall. When the match flared to light, the floor at my feet burst into motion.

One of the jars of preserves had burst as they sometimes do, spilling syrupy fruit on the ground. That had attracted a great pile of roaches, which scattered in all directions when the light hit them, running over my feet and up my pant legs. I screamed and to this day I don’t remember running up those steps to the yard.

Flipping on the light switch in that room brought me right back to that cellar.

The floor was alive with sudden movement. Dozens of glistening red creatures, each nearly a foot long, scattered in the light, running up the walls, into the drop ceiling overhead, and charging out the door between our feet.

Like roaches, they were oblong, flat, and low to the ground, but made entirely out of wood. They skittered along on six spindly, jointed legs like twigs and coming out of their backs was a mass of thin, pale vines about six inches long that curled and flexed in the air. On the front of their bodies were two oversized serrated jaws made of a hard, thorn-like material.

The floor of the room was covered in blood, and as the creatures fled their thin wooden legs left a trail of sticky red dots out the door and up the walls.

The grisly scavengers had been covering a pile of bodies on the floor, and as they scattered I could see that some of them were carrying away chunks of the corpses by holding them tightly with the vines growing out of their backs.

One, apparently a more single-minded specimen, had its pincers clamped tightly to the end of a thigh bone and was rocking back and forth as it twisted and pulled, making the body shift back and forth, creating that rhythmic sound I had heard earlier.

Someone vomited behind me.

As much as I did not want to enter that room, my revulsion at seeing that last creature desecrating a body was more than I could stand. My boots squelched on the carpet as I took two quick steps inside and drove the end of Hunger down through the creature, just behind its front legs. Hunger punched through easily. It went mad, legs flying, so I stomped down on its back to pin it to the floor and proceeded to turn it into kindling. It took a long time for the pieces to get small enough to stop moving. Unlike the wooden men, it contained no knot of blood.

I left the room holding my breath, my skin crawling, and didn’t stop walking until I found the break room. I had one foot up in the sink under running water before the last member of our group even got into the room. The water sluiced down my boot and ran off my heel in a solid crimson stream.

“I’m gonna throw up again,” said Jamal.

Leon shoved him out the door. “Not in here.”

He heaved loudly in the hallway.

Anne crossed the white linoleum floor, avoiding my clearly defined footprints, and sat down at a small plastic table. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her.

Most of the gore was off of my boot, so I switched to the other one. I just concentrated on the water and not on the images in my head. One more thing I’d never be able to forget. One more thing that would jump out at me before falling asleep or while daydreaming in the shower. For the rest of my life. How many horrors could you witness before that’s all you could remember?

Jamal came back in and sat down, making the chair creak under his bulk. I shut off the water and leaned back against the counter.

Leon frowned at me, his head moving side to side as though he could simply say no to what he had just seen. “What the fuck were those things?”

“Some kind of scavenger,” said Anne. “Makes sense.”

Chuck looked at her like she had lost her mind. “What the fuck, exactly, makes sense about what we just saw?”

“Prime is harvesting bones. But he’s limited by how fast those wooden men can work.”

“Yeah, that’s a real shame.”

“Will you shut up? Having each wooden man kill someone, then take them apart, then bring the bones to Prime, and then go out to get another victim, is too slow. Instead, Prime just creates a lot of those scavenger things and lets them loose all over town. Now the wooden men can just kill everyone in an area and pile up the bodies, then move to the next place. The scavengers find the bodies and harvest the bones. If there’s enough of them, Prime gets a constant stream of bones, just as fast as the wooden men can find victims.”