Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (34 page)

Ahead of us, a massive boar burst from between two trees. Its veins stood out grotesquely under its sparse covering of bristles and bloody spray flew from its nose and mouth as it huffed, adding bright red gore to its exposed tusks. Whatever spirit or force was driving it, there was clearly no concern about the damage it was doing to its host.

It lowered its head and charged, leaves and black soil churning under its flying hooves, two hundred pounds of enraged beast bearing down on us.

I sped up, determined to meet it before it reached Anne or Leon, and braced for the impact. It never came.

Anne’s P250 barked once and the boar went boneless in mid-stride, crashing to a stop in front of me, one eye a bloody ruin.

We ran around the dead boar, smaller now in death. One of its flanks was deeply slashed, the blood still wet and sticky. Had it really been after us or had something in the woods driven it out into our path?

The underbrush became sparser as we ran, until only a thick carpet of dead leaves remained. At the same time, the trees became taller, their trunks thicker, and the canopy overhead more uniform.

It began to feel less like we were running through a forest and more like we were in an unimaginably large vaulted chamber with living trees as columns to hold up the leafy ceiling overhead.

The air carried a hint of ozone, as if a thunderstorm loomed just out of sight, making the already otherworldly character of the forest more pronounced.

The leaves on the ground were disturbed here, their wet undersides exposed in clumps. I gestured for the others to stop as I approached an irregular shape ahead of us. As Leon and Anne stood gasping for air, I squatted down next to it and picked it up.

It was a child’s tennis shoe, pink canvas and white rubber. And ten feet further on was something else.

A camouflage baseball cap.

57

W
e found other personal effects as we pressed on, but I couldn’t shake the image of the man in the camo hat at the shelter, his daughter under one arm, her face pressed tightly into his jacket. I tried not to think about how that tiny pink shoe had come to be out here in the middle of this eldritch, sinister place or what might have happened to the other people that had been with them. The other families. The other children. Aunt Emily. Chuck.

“Guys? We’re losing the light,” said Anne.

I looked up. The glowing fog above us was breaking apart. Tiny blue and gold sparks streaked away from it like erratic comets, zipping off between the trees and out of sight. In a matter of seconds the wisps had departed, leaving us to be swallowed up by the forest once more.

My eyes needed no time to adjust to the oppressive dark. Nothing waited in the surrounding woods, at least that I could see, and even the underbrush beyond my sight was silent now, empty of the creatures that had paced us earlier.

“Looks like this is as far as everything else in this forest is willing to go.”

Anne drew her pistol and flicked off the safety. “Good.”

“No, it’s probably not. Let’s move, there’s light up ahead.”

Leon grunted. “I’ll have to take your word on that.”

I gave them each an arm to hold onto and started walking. The papery shuffle of our feet on the carpet of decaying leaves and the faint rustling of the branches overhead was loud in my ears. I tried not to focus on it as we pressed on through the dark. It sounded like whispering.

I don’t know how long we walked like that, waiting for something to drop onto us, or come charging out at us from between the trees. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but they were the kind of minutes that lingered, second by grudging second, etching themselves into your memory. The kind that you got to relive in future nights, alone and unable to sleep, for the rest of your life.

It ended when we reached a hole in the forest, each of us taking an involuntary breath of relief.

In ring at least a hundred yards across, there were no trees. Moonlight like liquid silver poured through the gap in the canopy, falling from the unnaturally large moon that hung directly over the clearing. It pooled on the raw, barren earth underneath and glistened wetly on everything it touched.

A twenty-foot-high mockery of an oak tree stood in the center of the clearing, created from the bones of Halfway’s dead. Each bone in the grotesque sculpture was linked to the next, obscene runes shimmering as if their carved lines were filled with water that was rippling in the moonlight.

The trunk contained a hollow space just under the fork of the first branches, maybe six feet off the ground. It was deep and arched, like a shrine, and contained a basket made of tiny, delicate bones. Standing upright inside the basket was the Heart.

It still appeared to me like a football-sized brazil nut, only fibrous and sticky on the outside. Pale white roots grew out of a crack in the shell at the bottom and wound through the bones of the corpse tree to disappear into the earth.

In front of the tree knelt Prime: hands raised over his head in supplication, weight on his knees, head bowed. He rocked back and forth ever so slightly, as if chanting.

He was covered in long, sharp thorns like armor and even from here I could tell that he was larger than when I had last seen him at the Halloween bonfire. Much larger.

A crown of tiny bones circled his brow. These bones had not been picked clean by the Flensing Tree and were still clotted with blood and meat. Prime must have collected them himself.

Filling the rest of the clearing were the townspeople that we had saved and left behind in the hospital’s storm shelter. Despite everything we had done, they were here.

They stood with their eyes closed, faces turned up to the strange moon, seeming to sleep standing up. Dozens of wooden men held their enthralled victims in place, their clawed hands sunk into shoulders and waists, staring out with stiff wooden faces that were all too familiar.

The shoes of the townspeople had been taken, and the roots of the Heart had grown up out of the black soil and over their feet like rust-colored netting.

Chuck stood in the front, blood running out of his hairline, his shirt torn, and his knuckles skinned. I felt a surge of pride at seeing him standing there with the signs of his resistance displayed on his body like a banner.

I picked out others: Aunt Emily behind him and, on the other side of the clearing, the man who used to wear a camo hat. His daughter stood next to him, neither one knowing that the other was only a few feet away. I didn’t see his wife.

The Heart pulsed in its shrine and all of the townspeople sagged. The wooden men holding them were forced to shift their grips to bear the weight. The roots flexed and the Heart gave off a dull red light from its center, becoming almost translucent the way a hot coal will do when you blow on it. An acrid smell like burning hair filled the clearing and smoke drifted out of the bone tree.

In the moment that the Heart beat, while the townspeople suffered and the forest writhed, Prime himself shuddered and clutched at the ground for balance. At the same time, Leon clutched at his right thigh, where a slender wooden tendril tipped with a single green leaf was poking through his jeans.

I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could speak I was struck from behind. The force of the blow catapulted me forward and I felt the leather straps of Hunger’s holster break across my thigh as it was ripped from me.

I sailed headfirst into the clearing and slammed into the ground at Prime’s feet.

58

I
landed hard, my hands digging furrows into the packed soil. Hair-thin white roots grew up around my fingers with a stinging, prickly sensation, but they quickly turned blotchy gray and limp as they came into contact with my skin. As Prime learned the night he was born, there is no sustenance to be had from my body.

Behind me, Anne and Leon were being frog-marched into the clearing by hulking wooden men of a kind I hadn’t seen before. Their damp, musty bodies were shaggy with roots and vines, much less defined than the other ones that we had seen. Their heads were crude lumps whose rudimentary features were lost in the deep folds of the warped wood that made up their faces.

Anne’s captor held her gun hand high over her head with one fist wrapped around her wrist. Its other arm was curled around her waist, pinning her against its body. She snapped her heels back into its knees and groin as it hauled her out of the trees and into the light. The monster plodded on without noticing.

The other creature carried Leon in a bear hug, both arms trapping his back against its chest. Leon had no better luck than Anne as he tore fistfuls of moss from the thing’s arms.

A third creature shambled into the clearing behind them, Hunger clenched in one massive fist, broken leather straps swinging back and forth in time with its ponderous footfalls.

All I could see as I leapt to my feet was Hunger in someone else’s possession. A hot, acidic emotion that I could barely recognize squeezed the breath out of me. I’ve never been a jealous man, even with Maggie, but that was the only frame of reference I could find for the surge of vengeful hate that consumed me.

Nobody touched Hunger but me. And for goddamn sure nothing was going keep us apart. That moment of separation kept playing in my mind, needling at me. The heavy slap against my leg and the pop of the parting leather straps. Taking it from me.

Ignoring my friends, my friends who were being held captive right in front of me, I charged, my eyes locked on what was mine. I only managed two steps before I was smashed to the ground by a hand the size of a manhole cover. Thorns raked my back open in long ragged lines.

Prime stepped over me and took possession of Hunger.

I pushed off the ground and stood up, my injuries forgotten. “Give it to me.”

*No.*

Prime’s voice, so like Leon’s, rang in my head. From the reaction of the others I could tell they heard it, too.

“It’s mine. Give it to me. Now.”

*Or what? You’ll hurt me?*

Prime gestured at the creature holding Anne. It shifted its grip on her arm and lowered her gun until it was pointed directly at Prime. Then it hooked the sharp tip of one stick-like digit through the trigger guard and squeezed.