Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (29 page)

She threw the shotgun down and tackled the creature as it lunged for the child, her expression a mix of incandescent fury and determination.

They crashed to the ground together, limbs tangled and thrashing. She got behind it, one arm hooked around its neck. It reached up and raked at her arms, drawing blood, but she refused to let go.

With her other hand, she reached around and hooked her fingers under the edge of an iron skillet fused into its wooden chest. It clawed wildly over its shoulder, but she ducked her head down into its back, avoiding the worst of it. With a savage jerk, she ripped the skillet free of the ring of tiny tendrils holding it in place and hurled it aside. Underneath was the knot, right where the creature’s sternum would be.

The creature slammed a sharp wooden elbow backwards into Anne’s gut, making her cry out. Undeterred, she yanked her pistol from its holster and slammed the butt down on the knot with everything she had.

The creature went wild, jerking and flailing in an attempt to escape. She swung again and the knot burst with an audible crack. The creature went limp in her arms.

Bloody and gasping, she heaved herself to her feet, pistol in one hand and the corpse of a dead wooden man dangling from the other. She tossed the lifeless sticks aside and helped the child to his feet. Only then did she retrieve her .410.

There was no order now, just a boiling mass of people and wooden men. The thunder of shotgun blasts was getting steadily quieter as people ran out of ammo and resorted to swinging at the creatures with the now useless weapons, grimly determined to defend their loved ones at any cost. The man in the camo hat and the man in the golf shirt had abandoned their car doors and were now simply each grabbing a wooden man by the arms and holding it down while the man in the tie smashed it to pieces with his car door. It was surprisingly effective, if slow.

It didn’t take long for the mob to destroy all of the wooden men mixed into the crowd, but they paid a heavy price for it. The bodies of men, women, and children lay scattered across the cold concrete, each surrounded by dark, glossy pools.

The last of the wooden men had bunched in front of the door to the building, blocking it. Maybe a dozen in all. The swarm behind us was so close I could hear the sound of rainfall as thousands of tiny feet clicked across the concrete. We were out of time.

I had to move. This body, this god’s immortal vessel, had to serve me. Right now.

I reached inside, past the hunger and the pain, and forced myself to run. My insides were a bag of razors, the hunger stripping everything from me, turning my bones into a desperate bonfire of agony, but I didn’t stop. I pushed harder and for a moment I had an instant of perfect, excruciating clarity as the clawing, howling emptiness inside of me eclipsed the world, consuming even the tearing pain in my thigh.

Everything went bright and stark. Every single wooden man turned towards me. They felt something, I don’t know what, but each one of them paused. I didn’t care why. I was beyond thought.

I slammed into the group blocking the doors and started tearing them to pieces with my bare hands, heedless of my torn skin and flying blood. Wooden limbs shattered under my fists and wooden faces crunched between my teeth.

That was the last thing I remembered.

47

I
woke to the hushed murmuring of a hundred voices and the rough scrape of a damp cloth across my lips.

Anne gave a low cry when I opened my eyes and threw herself across me, hugging me fiercely.

I patted her awkwardly on the back. “Hey. You okay?”

She pulled away. “Am
I
okay? Jesus, Abe. You stopped breathing half an hour ago.”

“What?”

“We tried giving you CPR, but we couldn’t get your lungs to inflate. It was like trying to breathe into a statue or something. If it wasn’t for the fact that we could feel your heart beating ...” She stopped and touched her fingers to her mouth, just for a moment. “Anyway, Emily said there wasn’t anything we could do but watch over you.” She squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

“Thanks for looking out for me. As usual.” I sat up and took a big breath. I was starving, of course, but otherwise I felt okay. Even my leg felt better.

“I wasn’t worried,” said Chuck, who was sitting on the other side of my cot. “The shit I’ve seen you shrug off? Besides, no way you were going to die after what you did out there. Dude, that was epic.”

“You mean clearing the door? Not a big deal.”

“Are you kidding me? When you hit those things it was like a bomb going off. Seriously, there are pieces of those fuckers on the roof. The roof!” He laughed, too loud in the quiet room, and wiped his eyes. “Goddamn, but that was some shit.”

“Glad you enjoyed it.”

Anne lowered her voice. “Not everybody liked it as much as Chuck.”

I glanced around, seeing the room for the first time. People were sitting in tight groups, and more than a few were clustered around an injured person on a cot. They were staring in my direction, some hostile, some fearful. Most looked away when I met their eyes.

Anne lowered her voice. “It’s not what you did. I think they realize that without you, none of us would have made it down here. The problem is how you did it.”

She searched my eyes, looking for something. An apology? Shame? I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I only remembered the fight in flashes of motion and pain, nothing else.

“Abe, it was inhuman. I just don’t know another word for it. It was like watching an animal attack. You weren’t just fighting them, you were in some kind of frenzy, ripping them to pieces with your hands. And your teeth. Like you were trying to eat them.”

I touched my lips and felt the cuts that she had been cleaning with the cloth. Cuts from the jagged pieces of wood that I was tearing off of my ... prey? Is this what I had to look forward to? Starving no matter how much I ate, until I no longer cared what I was eating? Or who?

Leon walked over and tossed me a shiny brown plastic brick from the cardboard box under his arm. It was an MRE, pre-packaged preserved food developed for soldiers out in the field. Shelters were frequently stocked with the things to serve as emergency rations. They were good for years, contained enough calories for a full day of heavy activity, and were a hell of a lot easier to choke down than the c-rations we used to get.

He gave one each to Anne and Chuck as well, and kept one for himself. Then he looked around and handed me a second package.

“Emily has a few people passing these out. Group this size can probably eat one more time before we run out. Water shouldn’t be a problem. The taps work and there’s a ton of canned water with the food, plus a couple boxes of bottled water that was probably for the office upstairs. We should be set for another day, easy.”

We sat on the floor around my cot and used it for a makeshift table. Leon passed out bottles of water from the cardboard box, emptying it. The MREs came with self-heating packs, which Leon insisted on helping everyone with. He poured a good splash of water from his bottle into each plastic heating bag to activate the chemical pack, then slid the food pouch down inside. Then he stuffed the whole thing back in the thin cardboard box that the meal pouch had come in, and propped all four boxes up at an angle to heat.

Steam began leaking out of the boxes, carrying with it the tang of wet iron. I wanted to wait the ten minutes for the meals to get hot, just sit there patiently like everyone else, but I couldn’t. I tore open the second meal that Leon had given me and started eating it cold. Everyone ignored me out of politeness.

Leon turned to Chuck. “That was nice work out there.”

Chuck shrugged. “My momma always said I’d be good at something. Who knew it would be helping people fight off monsters? I don’t have a spider-sense like Anne, and I can’t pick up a dump truck like Abe, but that doesn’t mean I’m useless.”

Leon bumped fists with him. “Damn straight.”

I set my empty meal pack down and picked up one that was heating. “Speaking of doing good out there, that was a hell of a flying tackle, Anne.”

Chuck grinned. “I saw that! You totally took that wooden fuck to the ground.”

Her eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t going to touch that child. Not while I was alive.”

“It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“I don’t know about that. Is it brave if you don’t remember to be scared?”

“I think you were scared, you just didn’t care.”

“I guess.”

Leon raised his water bottle in a toast. “It counts. Believe me.”

We all touched bottles and drank. I looked at each one of them, proud to have them as my friends.

They ate their now hot meals and I dug out the cookies and foam-rubber like cake from mine, hunting through the collection of packages inside each MRE for all of the edible bits.

I was crumpling up all my empty plastic wrappers and stuffing them inside one of the larger pouches when a young girl walked up to the cot and took a seat on the floor next to me. She was wearing jeans and a white hoodie, both of which looked new except for the streaks of dirt on them. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old. One cheek was scraped and when she pushed her hair back as she sat down, I noticed that so were her hands.

Anne smiled at her. “Hi, honey. Do you need something?”

The girl looked at me and as she spoke I noticed that the pupils in her light brown eyes were vertical slits.

“You are ensnared, Hunter. Trapped here while the Harbinger already has his prize.”

She picked up my bottle and poured out a handful of water onto the cot. Instead of soaking into the cotton, the water pooled on top of it, a tiny silver lake. Reflected in the surface was an image of the hospital, just the way it had been the last time I had seen it. With one exception.

Snaking out of the shattered windows on the second and third floors were thick trails of Scavengers, like ants carrying food back to the nest. Their bloody legs left so many sticky red dots on the white wall that long reddish-brown stripes ran down the face of the building. Every Scavenger carried a body part, and there were hundreds of them.

48