Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (7 page)

Eyes closed, he pushed. Feet against the ground, hands rigid on the armrests of his chair, sweat in his hairline. He leaned forward, and in one sudden movement, surged to his feet.

Afraid to open his eyes or move, he just stood there swaying ever so slightly with his fists clenched. And then it was real.

He threw his head back and let out a cry of unbridled joy and savage victory at the heavens. His shouts echoed back at us from the surrounding woods and tear tracks shone on his cheeks in the starlight.

He pushed his wheelchair away with one foot, a little more forcefully than necessary, then said to me and Henry, “Thank you both. You saved my life tonight. And thank you,” he said to the wooden man standing ten feet away.

The wooden man inclined its head in acknowledgement, then gripped the vine growing out of its stomach and broke it off with a sharp twist. It tossed the end to the ground with a flick of its hand and then stood still facing Leon.

Imitating his wooden doppelganger, Leon gripped the vine growing out of his thigh and twisted it. He grunted in pain. Getting a firmer grip, he gave it another wrench. It tore free, leaving behind a bulge in his skin where the end was still lodged in his leg.

The wooden man swiveled its head to look at me, then Henry. It looked back at Leon and raised two fingers in the air. Then its face broke into a smile and it made a short bow with one hand over its heart. It was hard to tell, but the gesture appeared to convey both gratitude and sarcasm.

After the bow it strolled over to me, relaxed and in no hurry. I stood my ground and let it get within arm’s reach. It was amazingly detailed for something made entirely out of wooden vines. I could hear them squeaking and rubbing against each other with each quick, graceful movement.

It stopped in front of me and leaned close, as if examining me with its blank wooden eyes. Then it reached out and gave me one hard slap on the shoulder and then another on my thigh. I felt like a prize cow at a livestock auction. It gave an appreciative nod to Leon.

It took hold of my left arm. At first it was just creepy, but within moments it had tightened its grip. I tried to pull away.

It squeezed tighter. Black thorns sprouted from the tips of its fingers, long and razor sharp. Blood welled up around the punctures.

“That’s enough!” I grabbed its wrist and pulled, but the creature only bore down harder. Its fingers dug inwards and I felt the thorns scrape bone.

That was the end of my tolerance for Wooden Leon. I tugged harder, but it resisted. It was clearly stronger than a human being. Which was fine, it’s been a long time since I was human.

I quit trying to be gentle and yanked the hand free. The creature’s wrist broke at a ninety-degree angle with a crack of splintering wood.

Leon cried out. His hand was dangling at an unnatural angle from his arm and stark white bone was protruding from his wrist.

The creature jumped back. With a grimace stamped on Leon’s features, it used its other hand to straighten the broken wrist. Vines writhed against each other and within seconds it was good as new. The whole time it never looked away from my arm.

The thorns that the creature had driven into my biceps with its fingers were still there, each buried in the muscle with only the tops still visible. Unlike the large amber head that had been on the first thorn, these each had a smaller clear bead. They began to swell, just for a moment, turning pink as they filled with my blood. An instant later the beads turned a dull milky gray color and their smooth shiny surfaces began to wrinkle and shrivel. Within seconds they were nothing but tiny crumpled sacs.

The wooden man’s mouth fell open and it took a step away from me. Then it turned to Leon, who was rubbing his own wrist, now also fully healed.

It pointed at me and then raised its hands, palm upwards.

“I don’t know what you want,” said Leon, “but don’t do that again. No more thorns, understand?”

A look of incredulous anger appeared on its face. It pointed at me, then Henry. Then it slapped its chest with one hand. The message was clear.
Mine.

Leon shook his head. “I said no.”

It spun and charged at Henry.

I lunged after it. Hunger leapt into my hand and I swung. Wooden fragments flew as the otherworldly weapon caught the heavy creature across the shoulder and gouged out a deep furrow. I looked at Hunger and was surprised to see that it had sprouted sharp metal teeth all down its length.

The creature was flung violently to one side. Leon howled in pain and clutched one bloody shoulder. I felt bad about that, but I couldn’t let it grab Henry. It would have shredded the old man in seconds.

Despite its weight, the wooden man was incredibly nimble. It turned in midair and rebounded off of the ground like a spring, darting straight back at Henry.

Two sharp cracks heralded Anne’s arrival. The wooden man staggered back, its head snapping to one side.

Henry flinched as blood sprayed across his face. Leon collapsed.

“No!” I slapped Anne’s gun down. She looked confused and horrified, staring at Leon’s still form. I’m sure I looked the same way.

By the time I managed to tear my eyes away from Leon, the wooden man had vanished.

12

I
reached Leon in time to see his eyes flutter open. The right side of his face was misshapen and slick with blood.

As I watched, his cheekbone and jaw knitted themselves together under his torn skin, which became whole and smooth. It was both fascinating and disturbing at the same time. I wondered if other people felt that way when I recovered from what should have been fatal wounds.

Anne knelt down beside him. “Oh my God, Leon! I thought I killed you! Fuck!”

Leon just beamed at her. “Anne! I can walk!”

“Leon, look at me. Half your face was missing a second ago. You sure you’re okay?”

A wide grin split Leon’s face as he stood up, then flexed his knees a few times. “I can’t even explain it. I feel like I’m gonna laugh and cry all at the same time. I’m whole. You don’t know what that means to me.”

“You used the thorn.” Now that she was sure that Leon would live, her tone was a lot less friendly.

“It was a calculated risk,” I said.

She jabbed me in the chest with a finger. “You completed a ritual from one of those packages without the faintest idea of what would happen. That’s not calculated, that’s stupid. I’m standing out here in the freezing cold in the middle of the night, in my pajamas, because the stink of whatever you did out here woke me out of a sound sleep. It was that strong. The last time I smelled anything like that was when the sky opened up over Belmont.”

Everyone glanced upwards, just for a moment. The sky remained empty and placid.

“Like Belmont? You sure?” asked Henry.

“Yes.” Anne’s eyes narrowed just a bit. She was never much for having her judgment questioned. “It’s not as bad right now, but it still reeks.” She leaned close to Leon and made a face. “So do you.”

He shrugged at her, completely unapologetic.

She turned back to me. “So you created a monster and it attacked you, which I’m sure was very surprising to everyone. What did it want?”

I flexed my arm. The thorns were still there, deeply embedded in the flesh. I was going to need something to dig them out with. “It seemed to think that Henry and I were some kind of offering from Leon.”

“Yes,” said Henry. “And it clearly felt betrayed when Leon didn’t cooperate. As if it were outraged more at the breach of protocol than anything else.”

“I don’t know what it was after, but judging from my arm, I think we can rule out anything pleasant. We’re going to have to hunt it down before it can try again on someone else.”

Leon peered into the dark tree line ahead. “I get that. But once we find it, how do we put it down without killing me?”

I pulled his .45 out of my waistband and handed it back to him. “We may not be able to.”

We went back into the house. Leon got Chuck out of bed, Anne got dressed, and Henry fetched his tackle box from the shed. When he returned, he grabbed a mason jar from under the sink and sat me down at the table.

He rooted around in the filthy tackle box, pulling out tangles of clear string still tied to red and white bobbers and a handful of deformed lead sinkers. Eventually he found a pair of needle-nose pliers at the bottom, the teeth stained with rust.

I put my elbow on the table and rolled up my sleeve. “You want to wash that off? It still smells like fish.”

“You haven’t been sick since 1943. I doubt a dirty pair of pliers is going to be the end of you.”

The pliers slipped off the end of the thorn several times as Henry tried to get a grip on it. He finally had to jam the pliers into the wound to get enough purchase to pull it out.

He dropped it into the jar where it landed with a tiny click. It was an inch long, slightly curved, and shiny and black as a piece of onyx. The shriveled bead on the tip was soft, almost flesh-like.

I winced as he started on the next one. “This was a mistake, Henry.”

“Could be.”

“Could be? We just let a dangerous, intelligent, probably homicidal creature loose into the countryside. All in exchange for Leon’s legs.”

“In exchange for his life. There’s no doubt in my mind that my nephew would have killed himself sooner or later, just like he said.”

He put the pliers down and looked me in the eyes. “We don’t know what the creature wants. So far all it’s done is stick you with thorns, and for the record, that didn’t kill Leon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Maybe it’s simply trying to reproduce, with the side effect of healing whoever donates the blood? Perhaps all we’ve done is let loose a wave of self-replicating healers.”

“You believe that?”

He shook his head. “No. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible. We chose to prevent the sure death of a loved one over a completely unknown consequence. And Leon’s argument was sound. Piotr had to choose to do evil with what he was given. There was no reason to believe that this would be different.”

“I should have known better.”

“Abe, no matter what your body has become, you’re still human on the inside. And like everyone else, all you can do is make the best choices you have and live with what comes afterwards. Maybe this will be a mistake that we can correct before it’s too late.”

“You don’t believe that either.”

He picked up the pliers and leaned over my arm. “Be still.”

The others gathered in the kitchen one by one. By the time all five thorns had been removed and the jar sealed, we were ready to go. Anne, Chuck, Leon, and I headed out to search, while Henry stayed behind to examine the thorns. At his age, a pre-dawn manhunt through the woods was no longer something he was capable of.

It was still dark out and bitterly cold. The air had a dusty tang that promised snow.

We entered the woods with flashlights and low expectations. The four of us managed to cover a pretty wide patch of woods, acres in every direction, but between the darkness and the difficult terrain, I doubt we would have noticed signs of the wooden man’s passage even if we had walked right past them.

Anne detected no trace of the creature, other than the stink of the incident that spawned it, and despite the obvious connection between Leon and his wooden double, he had no sense of its location. We gave up as dawn broke over us with a rosy warmth that we could see but not feel.

On the way back to the house, Leon’s phone chimed. He glanced at the screen, then stopped in his tracks.

“What is it?”

Instead of answering me, he just showed me the screen. The text was from Paulie.

Guess who I met on the road?

We both jumped when the phone rang. Paulie’s name appeared on the screen. Leon answered it and put it on speaker.

“Hello? Paulie?”

There was no answer. An idling car engine could be heard in the background. A second later the phone erupted in a grating squeal, like fingernails being pulled across a blackboard, only louder and harsher.

Then there was a loud clatter and the sound of receding footsteps.

13