The Harvest Cycle (6 page)

    He’d moved on. “As do we,” Bruce whispered into his dog’s ear.

    Macendale came over the radio. “I think I’ve found a mine entrance. This might be the dreamer community we heard about from our infiltrator.”

    “Let’s go, boy!” Bruce called, slapping the dog’s haunches and pulling out his guns.

***

    It was a clean sweep.

    The only one that really put up a fight was a large male who looked as if he was mentally disabled; slamming bots into the tunnel walls and shouting “LUCY!” until he was brought down by a pair of synths.

    “WALTER” was stitched into his shirt. Bruce recorded all this and noted that there didn’t appear to be a Lucy among the dead targets.

6.

The Road

    They were three hours in, cruising on a grassy freeway, when one of the crates whimpered.

    Hitch looked at Ira, who looked at Cutter.

    “Did we all hear that?”

    “The bottom right crate.”

    “West, there anything living among our rations?”

    “Of course not!” West replied. Cutter got down in front of the crate and studied it. “If somebody’s in there, by God, say so right now or I’ll-”

    “All
right!
” Came the sharp cry, followed by barking as Lucy and her puppy came through the crumbling crate wall and fell into a fetal roll on the floor of the van.

    “What? What?” West was yelling. Amanda, looking back, had a half-smile as she cried “Jesus Christ Lucy, and the dog too?”

    “Holy shit,” Hitch breathed. Cutter just laughed.

    “Why’d you do it?” Ira shouted. Lucy put on a pout and cradled the puppy to her chest. “Why, Lucy? What were you thinking? Oh, your father’s going to be beside himself!”

    “He’ll just be sleeping like always,” Lucy said. “I wanted to come.”

    Amanda slipped out of her seat and came back, hugging Lucy. “Baby, this is a dangerous trip. It’s not for fun.”

    “What’re we gonna do, West?” Ira yelled.

    “I’m just fucking driving!” West yelled back.

    “Well, stop!”

    They stopped, in the middle of the freeway somewhere in Illinois or maybe Wisconsin, West couldn’t be sure with most of the signs being eaten by rust. They stopped and got out in the pleasant May weather.

    “We absolutely cannot turn back,” West fumed. “There’s no way of notifying them that - dammit - why would she-”

    Amanda held Lucy’s hand and walked across the freeway, looking at the sun and the sky and the plains. “It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.

    “Yes it is.”

    “I want to live up here.”

    “That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Amanda said, kneeling to touch Lucy’s face and pet the dog.

    “We don’t have supplies for an extra person. We certainly can’t accommodate the fucking dog.”

    “Wait, West,” Hitch said, circling Ira who was doing his best to do nothing while Cutter stretched his limbs on the shoulder.

    “Hell, we may find some supplies along the way. We could even stop to hunt, did you think of that? Was that in your plan?”

    “She wasn’t in my plan!”

    “Well, she is now, so we have to roll with it. C’mon Mike, I know you can improvise in a crunch.”

    “Oh, it’s Mike again,” West spat. “Back to best friends?”

    “I’m just trying to hold our shit together!”

    “This is all
my
shit!” West slapped the front of the van and kicked a tumbleweed down the lane. “
My
plan! I made this! For us, all of us! And I don’t want it coming apart!”

    “All right!” Hitch shouted. “Lucy isn’t going to be a wrench in the gears, Mike. We’ll make do. We’ll be fine. The Plan goes on.”

    “I think he’s right,” Ira offered.

    “Might as well just get a move on,” Cutter muttered, climbing back into the van. “Worse comes to worse we’ll eat the dog.”

    “Thank God Lucy didn’t hear that,” Ira said, always a bastion of the obvious.

    Hitch and West stared at each other, on that overgrown stretch of asphalt and concrete with a light western wind moving the grass.

    “So are we set?” Hitch asked.

    “Why do I feel like God is working against me?” West grumbled.

    “You think about God?”

    “All the time. If Nightmare’s out there you know our God is.”

    “Then where in the hell is He?”

    “I don’t know.” West was crestfallen. He leaned on the van and shook his head. “Maybe He gave up, some time ago. Or maybe it’s just up to us to work things out, but - against the gods, Hitch! Other gods! Where’s that in the old Book?”

    “Guess He thought it wasn’t relevant.”

    “It’s become pretty goddamn relevant. They’re muscling in on His shit and He’s not here to help us.”

    “He gave us free will,” Hitch shrugged. “We do with it what we want.”

    “This is being done to us!”

    “Maybe we brought it on ourselves.”

    “Oh. No. Have you ever heard even the
suggestion
that we summoned Nightmare and the Harvesters? That we wanted this to happen to us?”

    “I’m not saying willingly! Jesus Christ, you’re the doctor, stop and think! I don’t know, what if our dreams became so mad and dark and chaotic that it was just the right time - we were ripe?”

    “We’ll never know,” West said, throwing his arms in the air.

    “People like Mandy might know.”

    “You mean people who can connect with Nightmare? Would you trust anything that came from that...thing?”

    Hitch could only brush back his oily hair and hold out a wet palm. “Seems to me that we’ve got the better minds. It envies us, Mike. Maybe it would tell us the truth, if it thinks it can get what it wants.”

    “Well, I’m not putting Mandy’s sanity on the line to bargain for information,” West said. “I just want her to keep us appraised on Nightmare’s mood...I don’t expect this year’s Harvest just yet but it’s not a science. Can’t be predicted.”

    “Chaos.”

    “Yes.”

    “I’ll drive for a while.”

    “Really?”

    “We’re staying on this freeway, why not take a load off? You and Amanda can sit in the back. Be nice to Lucy.”

    “All right, all right.” West trudged over to Hitch and said, “They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Maybe this’ll turn out to be a benefit.”

    “We’re gonna be okay.”

    “Let’s roll.”

***

    About a half-mile back, Jack DaVinci put down a beaten-up set of binoculars and leaned back in his seat. He tried raising Gotham on the radio again. Static.

    His jar of cortices was secure in the glove box. No one knew about his little friends, those seeds of inspiration that time and again had made him the best detective in North America. He swallowed a couple of pickled nodules, waited for the rush, and tried the radio again.

    “Anybody read me? This is DaVinci.”

    “DaVinci?”

    “Yes! Who’s this?”

    Static.

    Son of a bitch. Jack rolled his head over his shoulders and relaxed. At least he knew they were still alive.

***

    “Let’s make it a small strike team,” Bruce said to Delmar. “You, me, Cinnamon and Macendale. We’ll pick up DaVinci and come back. He knows where the other hives are. He moves from city to city. We’ll catch him on the road and then we’ll have them all.”

    Bruce nuzzled his dog and looked to the sky, gray with black towers of smoke.

    
Nightmare, see this. Another crop you won’t reap. We are more efficient and we are always on task. You will lose. Stop now.

    
And...

    
Then...

7.

The Run

    “Do you know what Mount Rushmore is?” West asked Lucy.

    She shook her head. Still had the dog in her lap as a guard, still wary of the men around her. Hitch and Cutter were in the front, Ira and West in the back.

    “It’s a mountain,” Amanda said, “Where they carved out the faces of four great Presidents of the United States. Long before the First Harvest, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln were honored for their leadership in America.”

    “America was when everyone lived outside,” Lucy said.

    Amanda nodded. “We’re about ten hours away from Mount Rushmore. I think we’re going to stop there and camp for the night. But you look like you need a little nap right now.”

    “We’re tired,” Lucy yawned, pulling the puppy to her chin. He’d lapped up a bit of water earlier, from Amanda’s canteen, and she supposed that was all he needed for the moment.

    Up front, Cutter elbowed Hitch at the wheel. “Why’d you let her go?”

    “I don’t want to get into it.”

    “C’mon. Your best friend? What’re you, some kind of pussy?”

    “What? Piss off Cutter.”

    “I’m just askin’.” Cutter had a round, scarred chin that made his shit-eating grin all the worse. He tousled his greasy curled hair and shifted in the passenger seat. “Did you three have some sort of thing going on?”

    “No.”

    “Fuck, I’d share a piece as long as I could have ‘er. Haven’t gotten off in something like three years, not counting the self-help.”

    “That’s great.”

    “You still think about her when you jack off?”

    “Are you trying to start shit?” Hitch smiled wryly at Cutter. “Yeah, you’re trying to start shit. Why’s that? Does it fuck with your worldview when people get along?”

    “I just think you’re a pussy is all,” Cutter said. “And if it comes down to it - I mean, if it gets bloody out there, and we’re counting on each other - I ain’t countin’ on you.”

    “I ain’t countin’ on you either, Cutter.”

    “You think you can’t trust me with your life? You haven’t seen the shit I’ve seen. I’ve been neck-deep in Harvesters, man. I’ve seen the whites of their eyes. I’ve touched the fucking things. They’ve touched me. They cut me-” He pulled up his shirt to reveal a wide, jagged pale scar running down his left side and into his belly. “I’ll tell you something. If I’m down in the shit with those bastards all around me, I ain’t lettin’ them touch me or anyone around me. You can count on me, sir, mapmaker, pussy. By the Lord.”

    In the back, Amanda had been able to get herself down on the floor with Lucy and put an arm around her. Lucy was almost asleep, her puppy too, and West watched them with a smile in his eyes.

    “Maybe you should sleep too,” he said.

    “Do you want me to dream?”

    “If it happens, it happens. And I’m right here.”

    “What if Nightmare is able to find out what we’re doing?” Amanda whispered. “What if it gets in my head and sees the Plan?”

    “You can block that from it. I know you have that strength.”

    “I don’t know that I do.”

    “We’ve come so far these past several weeks, you’ve realized so much power...that’s why I need you here. You know I love you and I wouldn’t have put you in harm’s way unless I needed you for that reason.”

    “You have more faith in me than I do,” Amanda said with a smile. “God, Mike, all this has happened so fast.”

    “You mean the Plan, or us?”

    “Both. And it’s good, I’m not afraid, I’m just overwhelmed.”

    Ira let out a snore from the cot at West’s right. Moving onto the floor with Amanda and Lucy, West massaged Amanda’s folded legs and tried his best to sound reassuring. “I know that here, on the precipice of all this, it looks like madness. But all you have to do now is fall.”

    He scooted over beside her and stroked her hair. “Just fall asleep. Feel the road moving beneath you, that rhythm, and let it lull you into unconsciousness.”