Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (6 page)

I
sat in the dark behind the shed until well after midnight, waiting. It was cold and damp and boring, but I learned how to be patient lying on my stomach in the freezing mud of Eastern Europe. This was a walk in the park.

My hiding spot was behind the workshop, out of sight of the house, so my first indication that Leon had arrived was the creak of the door. I hoped that he would change his mind and leave, but when I heard the crash, I knew that wasn’t happening.

Inside, I found Leon on the floor surrounded by boxes and scattered books, his wheelchair a couple of feet away. He was at the foot of the shelves where Henry had stashed the lockbox.

I squatted down next to him. “Need any help?”

“Nope.” He showed me the box. The son of a bitch had managed to climb ten feet using only his hands. He was determined, I’d give him that.

I watched as he popped the lid and pulled out the leather tube. He opened it, looked at both sides before tossing it aside, then pawed through the box. After a few seconds, he slammed it down on the concrete.

“Looking for this?” I pulled the seed out of my pocket. It gleamed in the harsh light of the bare bulbs overhead.

“You need to give me that, Abe. Right now.”

The door creaked again and Henry walked in. “I don’t think he does.”

“So you’re watching me now, too?” said Leon.

“Listening.” Henry put a white rectangle down on the table. It had a blunt antenna and several green lights on the front. “Baby monitor. Let’s me keep an ear on my stuff while I’m in the house.”

Leon scooted himself over until his back was propped against the shelves, then folded his arms over his chest. “The seed was given to me. It’s mine. You got no right to tell me what I can and can’t do with it.”

I said, “Unless you happen to be standing next to me with a bomb in your hand. Then I damn well do have a say. You know this thing is bad news.”

Henry chimed in. “Do you want to be responsible for another Belmont? Do you?”

Leon made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Listen to the two of you. You’ve seen exactly one of these things before, used by a man who was clearly insane. You have no idea what this package is for, so don’t pretend that you do. Let me ask you both a question. What if it does what it says. Heals people. What if I’m meant to grow more of these and bring these seeds to the world. Think about it. A hospital would be just a building with a box of seeds in it. No more sickness. No more crippling injuries.” He looked at me. “No more cancer.”

That was low. “So, what? You think you’re going to be the Johnny Appleseed of magic healing plants? Really?”

He shrugged. “Why not? Magic is back in the world. Who knows what’s possible now. But if this can help people, then we have no right to keep it locked up like this.”

“Leon ...” Henry started to say.

“No! We have to try!” He lowered his voice. “I have to try. I can’t. I can’t keep this up. I’m sorry Uncle Henry, but I’m done. I won’t live in that chair.”

The room went quiet.

Henry’s mouth worked, but he didn’t speak. I could see his eyes glisten as he heard the truth in Leon’s words. His nephew was his whole world, the closest thing to a son that he’d ever have, and the thought of losing him was more than he could bear. He looked at me, his gaze holding both a question and a plea.

I looked at Leon. “What if it goes bad?”

“Then you kill me.” He drew his pistol from behind his back and handed it to me. “If this doesn’t work, I’m dead anyway.”

I took the gun from him, but I didn’t hand over the seed. Not yet. I had to let Henry make the call. We’d known each other for longer than most people had been alive, and had been through every kind of fire you could think of together, both figuratively and literally. I’d give my life for Henry, and his hands prove that he’d do the same for me without hesitation. He stared at the gun and then met my eyes. He nodded.

I passed the seed to Leon. He took it from me with trembling fingers and closed his fist around it. A deep shuddering breath escaped him.

“Thank you.”

I stepped to one side and pointed the .45 at his head.

He gripped the seed between his thumb and index finger. The thorn was slick and shiny, as though wet, and the tip was barbed. He stared at it for a moment gathering his courage, and then stabbed it into the thigh of his unfeeling right leg.

He screamed.

10

I
flicked off the safety and stepped back. Both of Leon’s hands were clutching his thigh around a tiny wound that he shouldn’t have been able to feel.

The shaft of the thorn was buried up to the translucent ball on the end, which was sitting on a bead of blood that was welling up around the puncture. As I watched, the ball grew, softening and sagging as it swelled. Leon cradled it with one hand to support it.

It quickly grew to the size of a golf ball. Then a baseball. It kept growing, filling with Leon’s blood, turning from amber to a dark ruby red. Thicker ridges began to show on its surface, causing the skin of the sphere to bulge out between them like the segments of an orange.

I was worried about how much blood the thing was taking. It was large enough now to contain two pints or more. Henry must have had the same thought.

“Leon ...”

“It’s fine, Uncle Henry,” he said between clenched teeth. “I think it’s slowing down.”

The three of us watched the swelling, pulsating mass with trepidation. When it was nearly half the size of a basketball, it came off in Leon’s hand. He gasped and swayed against the shelf. I took the sphere from him before he could drop it. It was hot.

“The sheet says to sow it in the earth. So now we need to bury it. Outside,” Leon said between gasps.

I handed the rubbery sphere to Henry, who cradled it in both hands as though the slightest jostling might burst it. Then I fetched Leon’s wheelchair and lifted him into it. After he was seated, I pointed at the patch of bloody denim on his leg.

“You mind?”

He shook his head. I pinched the fabric with the fingers of both of my hands and pulled, tearing open a large hole over his thigh. The swollen flesh around the wound was a bulge the size of an egg. The puncture was clearly visible, but the thorn was not. Likely it was somewhere deep down in the muscle. I wondered if we were going to have to cut it out later.

“It’s fine,” said Leon. “Let’s go.” He wheeled past me, nearly running over my toes in his haste to get outside. Henry and I followed him. I grabbed a shovel from the row of gardening tools hanging by the door as I passed.

The chill was turning bitter outside, made worse by the constant breeze. Overhead, thousands of stars glittered in the empty sky and shone their indifferent light down on us. We made our way to the edge of the grassy field that surrounded Henry’s house all the way out to the tree line.

I hacked out a good size hole in the frosty soil. Henry knelt and gently deposited the sphere, then pushed dirt over it with his hands. I had to help him up afterwards. The three of us surrounded the hole and watched it in silence.

“Well, we did it,” I said. “We’ll check on it in the morning. Come on, it’s cold.”

Leon shook his head, eyes still fixed on the little mound of dirt. “I’m gonna stay out here for a while.”

“C’mon, Leon. Are you really going to wait for something to sprout? You know how long it takes for a plant to grow from a seed?”

A broad grin broke out across his face. “About sixty seconds?”

Thin gray sprouts were slowly unwinding out of the ground. They grew taller and thicker as I watched, curling and wavering in the wind. At about a foot high, the stalk bent under its own weight and drooped to the ground. It was pointed towards Leon.

We watched as it snaked towards him, the tip always raised into the air, weaving back and forth as it moved. It touched Leon’s wheelchair, and then grew slowly up the side until it reached his lap. At that point it turned and headed for the wound on his leg.

I stepped forward, but Leon held up a hand. “Wait. This is supposed to happen. Just give it a chance.”

The tip of the vine dipped into the hole in Leon’s leg. His hands clamped down on the armrests of his chair and he drew a sharp breath. “It’s okay, it doesn’t hurt. Just feels weird is all.” Then he laughed. “Can you believe that? I can feel it!”

The vine began to darken, starting at Leon’s wound and traveling swiftly back down to the spot where we planted it. As it got darker, it also began to swell, growing thicker and more rigid.

The ground around the vine bulged and cracked. Loose soil shifted with every spasm from underground as the bulge grew.

When it was three feet across a hand burst from the ground.

The earth churned and another hand appeared, followed by arms and a head. The hands clawed and shoved against the ground and a torso appeared. As it dug itself free, I could make out the shape of a man. The vine growing out of Leon’s leg was connected to its stomach like a vegetative umbilical cord.

Every part of its body was made of overlapping and entwined vines of different lengths, exactly imitating the contours of a human body. Thicker vines bulged where large muscles like biceps and pectorals would be, while groups of tiny vines simulated smaller structures like fingers.

It stepped out of the deep hole that its birth had gouged into the earth and flexed its neck and shoulders, shedding dirt as it moved.

It had Leon’s face.

11

L
eon stared at the bizarre replica of himself with a mixture of wonder and fear. And hope. He rubbed his hands across his thighs nervously and his throat worked as he swallowed.

I understood a little of what he was feeling as he considered trying to stand. In those last moments before you know something for certain, you’re still at a place in your life where hope lives untested. Where things haven’t yet failed and nothing has been lost. Once you know, and fail, you can never get that back. The best of us can find new hope elsewhere, but that doesn’t make the pain any less.

As I watched, Leon’s feet twitched and jerked on the wheelchair footrests. Then, ever so slowly, the soles of his shoes slid across the ribbed metal, one inch at a time, until they slid off the sides and thumped lightly onto the ground.