Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (9 page)

“Chuck!”

“I’m serious. Shit’s been fucked up since that night in Belmont. You were there yesterday in the graveyard. The whole place was crawling with corpse-eating monsters. That’s the world we live in now. Whatever Piotr did was fifteen hundred miles away from here, and now we have monsters eating dead bodies, right here in North Carolina. What’s the rest of the country like right now? And that’s not even talking about what you geniuses let loose last night. Maybe Paulie went out at the right time, before he found out what the world was turning into.”

Anne jumped out of her chair and rounded on him. “That’s what you think? That you want to be one of the lucky dead ones?”

“Fuck, no. But you know what I mean. Most people haven’t seen it yet, but things are going to keep getting worse from here on out.”

Emily’s anguished cry sounded from inside the house. She knew her son was dead.

I leaned on the rail between them. “One thing hasn’t changed. Old world, new world, it doesn’t matter. Things don’t get better on their own. I made a mistake. A bad one. So it’s up to me to put it right. Neither one of you are responsible for what happened, so I understand if you don’t want any part of it.”

Anne bumped me with her shoulder. “Don’t be stupid. We’re in it for the long haul, right Chuck?”

He sighed. “If by long haul you mean until the moment somebody finds us shriveled up like raisins on the side of the road, then sure.”

15

H
enry came out of the house with the resigned calm of a man who has faced senseless death and grief for longer than most people have been alive.

Leon did not. “We need to find this thing. Right now. Give me the keys.”

“And then what, drive around in circles?” I asked. “We have no more way of finding it now than we did this morning.”

He glared at me and balled up his fists. I waited. We both knew he wasn’t getting the keys and that taking a swing at me was pointless. He shoved past me and stomped down to the truck.

“Do you need to stay with Emily?” I asked Henry.

He shook his head, but he was watching Leon who had gotten into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind him. “I called some of her friends from the church. They’ll stay with her for a while. I think our time is better spent trying to figure out how to put this genie back in the bottle.”

“Agreed. You mind if we do our thinking over breakfast?”

Ten minutes later we pulled into one of the last available parking spots at Verna’s Diner. It didn’t look like much, just a square box with Verna’s likeness hand-painted on the big windows out front, but that didn’t fool anybody. As soon as the smell from the cast iron smokers behind the building reached your nose, you knew this was sacred ground.

The floor was made of wood instead of tile or linoleum, giving the place the feel of an old fashioned country kitchen. Unlike most diners there wasn’t a bar you could eat at, nor a single booth in the joint. Just lots of long wooden picnic tables with happy people sitting shoulder to shoulder as they ate. The menu items were half BBQ, half breakfast, and all guaranteed to make a cardiologist faint.

The bell over the door clanged when we walked in. Verna was seating people, as usual, and she greeted us warmly. She was a tall, heavyset black woman with close cropped hair under a bright orange kerchief, wearing one of her trademark flower print dresses and an apron. We’d only been coming in for a couple of weeks, but she already treated us like regulars and seemed to have taken to Anne especially. She winked at Chuck.

“Girl, every time I see you, you got another handsome man in tow. Tell Verna now, what’s your secret?”

Anne laughed. “No secret, Miss Verna. I just yell out the window that I’m headed here and they come running. Piece of cake.”

Verna laughed loudly at that, then gestured to the dining floor. “Y’all go ahead and sit. I’ll send Nell around for your order.”

“Thanks, Miss Verna.”

The place was almost full, despite being late in the day for the breakfast crowd. We crossed the floor and sat down at one of the last empty tables in the back. The tables and their benches had been made by hand a few decades ago by Verna’s husband, the rough cut boards dark and smooth from use.

Verna’s daughter Nell stopped by. “How you folks doing?”

She was about twenty, attractive and slender, looking just as Verna must have thirty years ago. Everyone who works at Verna’s Diner is family, either her husband and grown kids, or a seemingly endless parade of nieces and nephews who worked after school.

She recognized us and didn’t bother to hand out menus. The only one of us who hadn’t been here a dozen times before was Chuck, so I made him get what I was getting: Verna’s famous pulled pork sandwich, smothered in spicy BBQ sauce, served on top of a heap of her special hash, which was made with roasted potato cubes and more pork, all tossed with onions and peppers. Anne got the hash as well, but had it topped with a fried egg instead. There was a time when it would have been a poached egg white, but I think hanging out with me is corrupting her.

Nell went to put in our orders.

We watched the other diners and fidgeted with the silverware until I broke the silence. “Seems to me that we’re now hunting five things instead of one. Henry?”

“Sounds right. Four used thorns in the body and four empty planting sites next to it. There would have been five, but Paulie simply didn’t have enough blood to fill the sac on the last one.”

“Are you shitting me?” said Chuck. People turned to look, so he lowered his voice and leaned across the table, as if that were less conspicuous. “Seriously? There’s going to be four more of those things every time wooden Leon kills somebody?”

Henry nodded. “Or more. Depends on how large the person is.”

“Fuck me.”

“Excuse me?” Nell appeared behind us bearing a huge plastic tray covered in dishes. She slapped one down in front of Chuck.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I did mean it, but I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Uh huh.” Nell unloaded her tray until everyone had plates and drinks in front of them, then stalked away.

“I think she likes you,” I said around a huge mouthful of spicy pork bliss. Chuck flipped me off. “So, if the thorns draw blood and create more creatures, why didn’t that happen with me?”

Anne snorted and said, “Probably because the god whose body you’re walking around in was called the Devourer, not the Donator. I doubt anything that wants to feed on you is going to have much luck.”

“That’s probably true,” said Henry. “But even though you appear to be immune, the rest of us need to be very careful when dealing with these things. There’s no reason to believe that only the Prime creature is capable of injecting these seed-thorns.”

Before anyone could reply to that, there was a crash from the rear of the restaurant. I looked back to see Nell standing next to an upside-down serving tray on the floor, a spray of food escaping from underneath it.

A man wearing a wife-beater under an open Lakers jacket had one arm around her waist and had pulled her against him where he sat at his table.

“Let me go, KC! Right now!” We could hear Nell clearly, even from here.

Leon jumped up and stalked towards her.

Henry looked at me. “You mind? That’s KC Bowden over there, the upstanding citizen who sent Paulie to the ER the other day. This might not be the best time for Leon to get himself arrested for assault.”

“Got it.” I stood up and followed Leon across the now silent diner. Anne was right behind me.

I reflexively clamped down on an anger that wasn’t there, just like I’ve tried to do every day since Belmont. That constant irrational rage that had been part of the original ritual, goading me into killing Piotr and using his sacrifice to power the beacon that summoned the Devourer. It had never been meant to last longer than the ritual itself, but once it had burrowed into me in 1944, it had remained for over sixty years. Only in the last couple of months had I been free of it.

But like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I couldn’t seem to break the reflex. But it was a good feeling to find myself in control without the struggle. I still got angry, of course, but at least now it was my anger. It felt cleaner somehow.

I reached the table and sized up its occupants. KC, the man holding on to Nell, looked to be in his early twenties. He was lean and muscular, and had a mustache that grew down the sides of his mouth to his chin. He was grinning into Leon’s face.

His friend was a giant and glared at us from under a knit cap pulled low over his brow. He tossed down his fork and crossed his massive arms over his barrel chest. He played the role of the silent, scary enforcer pretty well.

I started to speak, hoping that I could pull everyone’s attention to me and keep things from getting out of hand. So, of course, Leon punched KC in the mouth.

KC’s head snapped back and he shoved Nell away from him. He bounced up out of his seat and swung a vicious right hook that caught Leon on the side of the head. He was fast.

Leon took the hit and shuffled back a few steps. He didn’t seem particularly fazed by the blow.

KC’s mouth was bleeding and his eyes were wide. “You have some kind of death wish, motherfucker? You know who you’re messing with?”

If that was KC’s best shot at intimidation, he was in trouble. The last person you want to try and scare with your gang reputation is a Recon Marine with two tours of duty in Iraq under his belt.

“You’re the piece of shit that’s about to get his ass kicked for laying hands on my cousin Paulie.”

“That punk got what he deserved for sticking his nose in my business. What, now he’s too scared to come down and take a swing at me himself?”

He pointed his chin at Anne and me. “He has to send you and your girlfriends over here to do it for him?”

The gorilla threw a smirk my way, just in case I missed the part where KC called me a girl. I ignored him.

Leon said, “Paulie’s dead.”

KC hesitated, just for a second. “Good. I told him something bad might happen to him if he didn’t stay out of my face. Maybe you need to be careful that the same thing doesn’t happen to you and your little friends.” His eyes flicked to Anne. “Or something even worse.”

Anne’s face went hard. “You really don’t want to bring me into this.”

The big man took exception to the tone Anne was taking with his boss. “You shut your mouth, whore, before I find a better use for it.”

“Why, KC not enough for you anymore?”

“Bitch.” The man’s jaw and fists bunched up, and he started to surge to his feet. He was thick all around, and he carried some extra weight on his belly the way truly big men often did. Even though he was sitting down I could tell that he was tall, probably six and a half feet, and strong as a bull.

As those tree-trunk legs powered him upwards, I clamped one hand on his shoulder and slammed him right back down. “You need to sit this one out.”

He looked up at me, pissed and little shocked. He set himself to shrug me off and heave upwards once more, so I hooked one foot under the bench for leverage and bore down hard.

He collapsed in on himself, air and spittle exploding out of his mouth. His legs gave out and the two-inch-thick wooden boards underneath him snapped. He hit the ground.

KC spun to face me, eyes wide. “Back off!” He reached into his jacket.

If Anne hadn’t been standing exactly where she was, to the side and slightly in front of me, I would have missed it. In that split-second, as KC made his move, I could see the other Anne take over. The one burned into her by Patrick in his zeal to protect her. The one with no expression and flat, cold eyes.

His hand was clearing his jacket and I could plainly see that he had a gun in it, some kind of chrome automatic.

Anne drew in a blur. KC froze in mid-draw, right eye staring directly down the barrel of Anne’s P250. I’m faster than any human being has a right to be, but I couldn’t have done it.

The atmosphere in the room changed. This was no longer a brawl, but something uglier.

A man sitting next to us screamed, “GUN!” and dropped to the floor. Everyone else in the diner starting yelling and crouching, or hunching over their children to protect them.