Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (36 page)

P
rime dropped to one knee, transfixed by Hunger. The blade had entered between his shoulderblades and come out the center of his chest. An Eater lunged for his face, but ended up with its jaws around his upraised arm instead. Two more Eaters circled, darting in to rake open wooden furrows on his thighs and belly.

The first Eater to die was the one on Prime’s arm. It jerked back and clawed at its open mouth, the flesh inside filled with thorns. The sacs on the end of the thorns began to swell, forcing the Eater’s jaws open until they cracked apart, splitting the skin of its face.

Its claws and fangs punctured the sacs, revealing the black, gelatinous flesh inside, but they could do nothing to stop the process. In seconds, the Eater was reduced to a leathery husk.

Prime swung his newly freed arm and caught a second Eater across the shoulder, leaving black streaks of thorns where he struck. The third darted in under the swing and raked its claws across his bristling skin and picked up its own cluster of thorns in doing so. Both Eaters died in agony.

Prime lurched forward, the sudden motion tearing Hunger from his back, and ran for the tree.

Anne had reached the townspeople, but instead of freeing them, she found herself in the midst of a pitched battle between the wooden men and the Eaters. The glimpse I got of the fight showed me an Eater with its belly pierced by sharp wooden hands, even as its mouth and claws were filled with chunks of wooden anatomy. Anne crouched over a small boy, arms covering his body as an Eater leaped over her.

I looked away and went after Prime, slower now than I used to be, but still faster than that lumbering piece of shit. Coming up from behind, I hit him in the side of one knee, Hunger now back in the form of a baton. There was a crack and Prime stumbled.

I tried to put Leon’s screams out of my mind and hit him again. The knee split apart and Prime dropped, his good knee and both hands driving into the ground.

Even a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have needed two blows. There was so little of me now that the hunger hadn’t taken. The skin on my chest and stomach remained torn, my ribs grated together as I moved, and I was weakening fast.

I threw myself onto Prime anyway. A hundred thorns pierced me when I landed on his back, but they could do no more to me than that.

*I knew it when I first crawled out of the cold ground. That your kind would do anything to keep feeding on the corpse of the world. Maggots in the heart of everything.*

His leg was almost knitted together, so before he could regain his balance, I grabbed Hunger by both ends and slipped it over his head. When it got past his chin, I hauled back with everything I had, the bar catching him across the throat.

I wasn’t expecting that Prime would react like a man, breath trapped behind a crushed windpipe, but I had hoped that wrenching him backwards by the neck would have some effect. Instead he simply stood up, letting me dangle from his back like the world’s ugliest cape. He started towards the tree once more.

*It’s all coming back. The lifeblood of the world will flow again and sweep you from her wounds. There will be beauty and glory and power once more. Because of me.*

I strained harder and he continued to ignore my efforts. Right up to the point where Hunger thinned and sharpened between my hands and bit into his neck. I yanked backwards and Leon’s cries cut off in a wet burble.

I couldn’t let myself think about that now. Later I’d have time for regret and the dull ache of sacrifices done in the name of duty or honor or whatever other bullshit we need to blame our actions on. But right now I concentrated on the strength left in my arms and bite of the blade as it slid deeper into the tough wood of Prime’s throat.

“One man’s glory is another man’s mass grave, jackass. Speaking for the maggots, you’re not touching that goddamn tree.”

He pulled up short and arched his back trying to get away from the blade. His hands came up and clamped over mine. He was able to keep me from cutting deeper, but not able to force the blade out of his neck entirely. Even in my weakened state, I was able to hold on to that much.

He let go with one hand long enough to drive a spiny elbow into my side. The blow landed where my ribs had been grating together. Blood flew past my lips as air was forced out of my body. It was all I could do to hang on to Hunger and not slip to the ground. Black spots crowded my vision and breathing became something I had to work at.

But I hung on. He tried again, but I had moved slightly towards the other side of his back, so the punishment to my ribs was considerably less. So he did it again. And again.

I still hung on. I yanked back on Hunger, a move that sent dangerous warnings from my side and earned me another mouthful of blood, but I did it anyway. Heedlessly. Gladly.

I was past my time anyway, by decades. If I was going to die, then I would be happy to go this way, fighting for something, instead of helpless in bed the way all my friends had gone. The way Maggie had gone.

Prime quit hammering his elbow into me and stood up to his full height, both hands once again clamped over mine. Then he threw himself backwards. Five-hundred pounds of iron-hard wooden flesh wrapped in thorns slammed into me.

Everything went soft and hazy and dark.

When the world came back, Prime had reached the tree, arms outspread. The tree blazed with spectral fire and the branches flexed, the bones grating against each other with the movement.

Prime reached a hand out, reverently, and placed it on the Heart. The fire leapt to his body, outlining him in shifting silver flames and black smoke.

The tree swayed in place as if caught in a strong wind, and then all of the outspread limbs snapped down around him in a shocking instant, engulfing him.

The world of man began to end.

61

I
flinched when the first of Prime’s screams ripped through my head. There was no intelligence there, no sense of self, nothing left of the creature that had worn Leon’s face for the last week. Just raw, animal anguish. And then nothing.

Prime had been one of the Fox’s victims all along. He’d gotten to the end of his road, but instead of being rewarded with godhood he turned out to be just another sacrifice.

Prime unraveled in the embrace of the tree, losing the form and substance of his body to become one with it. The vines that had been so compactly sculpted into Leon’s image burst apart, snaking around the bones of the tree and plunging into the white-hot starburst of the Heart.

They thickened and coiled around the tree, racing up the limbs and down the trunk, until the bones were no longer visible. The ground rippled as fat vines punched down and out, burrowing under the grove in all directions.

The trunks of the surrounding trees split with gunshot reports as the invasive vines climbed up through their trunks and thick tumors of gray fungus burst outward. The sound raced away in all directions as the contagion of the tree spread at incredible speed.

Shadows raced across the ground in dizzying patterns as the forest writhed under the gigantic moon overhead, branches reaching and stretching out towards the center. Trees that had stood a hundred feet tall or more bent and split and joined with other trees, creating a landscape of thrashing chaos in all directions. Branches disappeared under the spreading fungus until the weight of it began to cause them to sag and break.

The Heart blazed with a harsh, actinic light and rose into the air as the corrupt god that Prime had played midwife and sacrifice to grew.

I witnessed all of this while lying on the ground in a pool of my own blood, trying to suck air into my one functioning lung. To make things worse, my left eye seemed glued shut until I touched the ruined socket with one shaky fingertip and discovered that it was gone. Must have been one of Prime’s spikes when he landed on me.

Fuck it, not really my body anyway. I rolled over, slowly at first, until I toppled onto my face, and got my hands planted on the ground. Pushing up to my knees was all I could manage, and I won’t lie, I was pretty damn proud of myself for managing it. I crawled to the center of the grove.

A column of vegetative and fungal mass slowly pushed itself from the earth, rising inexorably, foot by foot. I pulled back the hand that still clutched Hunger and drove the shaft in deep. Hunger rose with the growing mound, pulling me into the agony of a standing position and then, because I wouldn’t let go, lifted me off the ground.

I shouldn’t have been able to hang suspended like that, my chest pretty much a sack full of loosely connected broken bits, but it seemed like this vessel that I had been forced into was capable of a kind of hellish endurance. No respite from the pain, oh no, but still subject to my will, past the breaking point of ordinary flesh.

Above me the Heart burned and smoked in its socket. Below me Anne and Chuck pulled survivors into a tight knot, protected from the grasping tendrils erupting from the nearby trees by a ring of Eaters. A ring that was shrinking as the invasive vines plunged into their bodies and consumed them one by one, turning them into empty husks in seconds.

I wanted to let go and plummet to the earth. To join them in their final moments and rest.

But I couldn’t. The Heart was calling me now, the blue-white burning star above me singing silently, somehow resonating through my body and drawing me upwards. I clamped my free hand onto one of the fat vines making up the body of the new god for leverage, then yanked Hunger free and plunged it back in higher. Hunger’s barbed shaft anchored in alien flesh that was no longer wholly plant-like as had been its progenitor.

My chest heaved as I climbed, blood flowing freely from my mouth. Force of will drove me, flogging my dying body past all endurance.

I reached the charred socket where the Heart was embedded and hung next to it, the heat blistering the skin on my face and lips. Inside the silent conflagration of silver flame, the heart pulsed and throbbed, translucent with its own light. Its power washed over me, a physical pressure against my body.

Holding tight with my free hand, I drew Hunger back, prepared to ram it into the Heart, but the nascent god was ready for me.

A white-hot tendril burst from the surface of the Heart and plunged into my empty eye socket and into my brain.

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