Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (33 page)

“I don’t even have a job. You’re lucky I have this piece of shit. Where’s your phone?”

“Same place as my wallet. At the sheriff’s station in a plastic bag with my name on it.”

Leaves rustled overhead and something fell into my hair. I brushed it away. “Shh, listen.” More rustling.

“Ow, fuck!” Leon danced in place slapping at his clothes. “Something bit me.”

There was a tap on my shirt as a weight landed on my shoulder. I slammed my palm down and it burst open like a stepped on roach, leaving a mix of thick slime and sharp fragments. “Disgusting.”

“You, too?” asked Leon. “What is it?”

I plucked the remains off my shirt. “Some kind of bug. Two or three inches long.”

Anne let out a high-pitched yelp.

A soft pattering sound like rain filled the air as a deluge of insects began to fall out of the canopy onto us.

54

L
eon and Anne began shouting and slapping at themselves as the soft-bodied insects bit into them. All I felt was a light pressure as their needle-like mouthparts failed to pierce my skin.

Panic set in as the number of insects crawling through their hair and clothes increased second-by-second. They bolted into the darkness, heedless of the unseen trees around them. Leon fell almost immediately and began thrashing around on the leaf-strewn ground.

I chased after Anne and managed to snag her around the waist moments before she ran face-first into a tree trunk. She twisted in my grip, shuddering and jerking, and in my flat, gray vision, I could see foamy saliva leaking from her lips.

By the time I got her back to where I left Leon, she had gone still in my arms, only her labored breathing reassuring me that she was still alive. I threw her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry and scooped Leon up off the forest floor. Dozens of insects fell from his unmoving body as I slung him over my other shoulder and ran.

I moved as fast as I dared, barely dodging around trees as they appeared out of the gloom mere feet in front of me. I ran over anything smaller than I was, crashing through like a maddened bull.

In less than a minute, we were clear of the insect rain. I set my friends down gently on the ground and went over them carefully, killing all of the crawling horrors that I could find on their bodies. Most of them were attached like ticks, bodies swollen taut with tiny legs hanging limply at their sides.

The ones that I could reach, I killed and pulled carefully pulled off, making sure to remove the embedded mouthparts. The ones I could feel under their clothes, I simply crushed and tugged loose to stop them from pumping in more venom.

Pressing two fingers to the hollow of Anne’s throat revealed a weak, thready pulse to go with her labored breathing. Her skin was hot and dry. Leon was no better off.

The forest loomed over me, lightless and silent and gloating.

“Fox!” My desperate shout was swallowed up by the oppressive, smothering quiet of the woods. I shouted again and again, knowing that I couldn’t save my friends and that if they died, so too would my will to be more than a remorseless creature of hunger and instinct.

A fleeting image of a barren wasteland passed before me, hollow, crumbling husks of skeletal trees as far as I could see, with black dust billowing up into the gray sky. My lips pulled back from my teeth as I savored the thought of clawing the forest out of the earth with my hands and teeth.

Aching hunger rose inside of me and nearly rendered me senseless, a cresting wave of pain and need.

“Fox!” My scream was part growl. My hands gouged the damp soil under me as I stared upward into the blackness with my head thrown back.

Tiny sparks appeared in the blackness above me, like the phantom flashes that I used to conjure by pressing my thumbs into my eyelids as a kid. As I stared upwards, the sparks grew brighter and more numerous, breeding and swirling until a foggy cloud of them hovered high overhead.

Golden light washed over me, rippling like sunlight reflected on water, revealing a red fox in front of me, silky tail wrapped tightly around its body, gold-flecked green eyes fixed on mine.

55

B
etween one blink and the next, the fox became a woman wearing a silk robe, the collar made of fox tails laid end-to-end.

The forest thrummed and the trees creaked and thickened.

“Hurry. There is yet time to still the birth.” Her voice was low and throaty. And frightened.

“My friends are dying.”

She glanced over her shoulder before replying, out into the dark. “I can wake the Pathfinder. She will live long enough to guide you, I think.” She reached out to touch Anne.

I grabbed her wrist. It felt thin and brittle in my grip. “No. She lives, or I don’t go.”

“Then your people will cleansed from the world. They will die.”

“These are my people, here. The rest can burn for all I care.” At that moment, as the words left my mouth, I knew that they were true. Maybe that truth would be different in another time and place, but not now.

She snarled and the fox darted away from me, vanishing into the gloom beyond the small circle of light.

I waited, listening to the inhalations and exhalations of my friends as they became slower and shallower. I put one hand on Hunger in its sheath and gripped it, somehow finding comfort there.

The fox appeared with a tangle of stems and flowers between its teeth. It dropped them next to me, pushing them out of its mouth with its tongue and shaking its head. I recognized the flowers: pale yellow bells with long, slender stamens inside, each glimmering faintly.

The woman reached down and plucked three flowers and put them into her mouth. Then she picked up one of the insects that I had killed and bit the spiky head off. She chewed the mixture with a grimace. Then she gestured for me to raise Anne up.

I lifted her gently into a sitting position, and the woman leaned over her. She pried Anne’s mouth open with her fingers, and then, biting down hard on the pulp with her neat, tiny teeth, she spit a glob of yellow saliva full of black specks into Anne’s mouth.

I rubbed Anne’s throat until she swallowed reflexively. “Now him.”

“His task is done and there is no time.”

I stared at her and said nothing.

She sighed bitterly and snatched more flowers from the tangle and jammed them into her mouth, all the time glaring daggers at me. I didn’t care. She bit into another insect and we repeated the process with Leon. Before we were finished, Anne was sitting up.

“Oh, God.” She turned her head to one side and vomited. “I feel like shit.”

The band around my chest loosened. “You look worse.”

“Thanks.”

Leon groaned and struggled to his feet, gasping. “Jesus.”

The woman pointed one slender finger at my face. “No more demands. No more waiting. Run.”

The fox bolted out of the light.

56

T
he fog of light, composed of hundreds of tiny wisps, paced us as we ran. Like a cloud, it passed effortlessly through the tangle of branches and leaves overhead, dappling the ground with diffuse, racing shadows.

Even though it drove back the worst of the darkness, it could do nothing about the enmity of the forest pressing in on us. Crackling underbrush and half-glimpsed flickers of movement filled the woods outside of the pool of light. Howling echoed in the distance. From what, I have no idea.

Anne ran beside me with grim determination, sweat streaming down her face despite the cool night air. She would occasionally point without speaking, keeping us on course. Her eyes kept jumping to her left as things wove in and out of her peripheral vision.

Leon ran like a marine, stone-faced and steady, his breath hard and rhythmic like a metronome. He’d run like that until we arrived or he collapsed.

I felt guilty running effortlessly between them, not sharing their burden of pain and sickness and physical effort. I hadn’t felt the bite of the insects, had not been poisoned, and I could run for days and not feel the slightest fatigue or discomfort. As always, the worst of the guilt came from that secret sense of relief that the lucky ones, the survivors, always feel, whether they want to or not.

The Heart beat once more and the forest groaned. The small crack and snap of breaking twigs around us turned into the raucous crashing of heavy bodies smashing through the thickening underbrush.