The Harvest Cycle (8 page)

    For a moment, Rafe nearly conceded. He nearly went back to his corner to get drunk and wait for the end. But he didn’t.

    “We have to
run
,” he said, his voice well above a whisper. All eyes in the room fell upon him.

    Abe sighed. “I can’t stop you.”

    “We’re guaranteed to die if we just stay here.” Rafe gestured toward Peter. “It’s giving up, is what it is. I know you’re not willing to give up, Abe.”

    Peter finished off the tequila and snorted. “Abe isn’t willing to do shit. He didn’t earn his gold, he took it from me-”

    “Fuck you,” Abe snapped. He immediately regretted it and, returning to a furtive whisper, said, “We probably wouldn’t even make it off this floor. They might be right outside the door.”

    “Help is coming eventually,” Erika offered. She was ignored.

    Peter stumble-walked over to the bar and opened a pint of rum. “We don’t stand a chance anyway, not with the baby.”

    Gayle clutched Emma to her chest, fixing a hateful glare on Peter. “My baby isn’t your problem, O’Connor.”

    “It’s a liability for all of us,” Peter said with a shrug and a swig. “If that baby starts crying, we’re done. And you know she’ll cry if we make a run for it.”

    “So leave us here, asshole!” Gayle retorted. Abe pressed a trembling finger to his lips.

    “God,” Rafe said. “Look at this.”

    He was peeking through the curtain again. Abe joined him, then Erika; they looked out across the rooftops and saw, perched on every corner like a gargoyle, one of the creatures. Heads bowed, claws dangling at their sides, they appeared to be asleep.

    “Do you think they’re really sleeping?” Rafe asked. “Maybe they’re hibernating or something. Maybe they won’t-”

    “They’d hear us,” Abe muttered. “Look, they’re not comatose. Their fingers are moving.”

    Indeed, the translucent claws were gently swaying, clinking against one another; a faint sound like wind chimes reached Rafe’s ears. The others heard it too. Abe knitted his brow. “What...”

    “They’re talking,” Erika gasped.

    “How do you know that?” Scoffed Abe. “They are,” Erika insisted. “Look how their heads move when the music changes...ever so slightly.”

    Music? Rafe hadn’t thought of it like that. But, as he listened more intently, it did seem like a gentle, lilting tune.

    And just a little off-key...

    “We have to run,” he said again. “I’m gonna go.”

    “It’s getting dark,” Abe warned. Then he let out another, long sigh. “If we’re going to try this, we should wait until just before dawn. Assuming those things are still at rest, that is. If they’re not, I say we wait.”

    “Fair enough.” Rafe patted Abe’s shoulder.

    “And where are we running to?” Asked Erika. “The marina,” Rafe answered quickly.

    “But they came from the ocean.”

    “We’ll never make it on land. There’s no escape on this island.”

    “What about the goddamn baby?” queried Peter.

    “You don’t have to worry about us,” Gayle said quietly. “We’ll take care of ourselves.”

    “Gayle-” Abe began. She silenced him with a shake of her head.

    “Then we wait,” Erika said. She returned to her spot on the floor.

    “You should stop drinking if you want half a chance,” Abe said to Peter. In response, Peter raised the bottle in his hand, as if in a toast, and tilted it over his lips.

    Despite himself, Rafe was sizing up the others, guessing who’d make it and who wouldn’t. Peter was shaping up to be more of a liability than Gayle; but Rafe was convinced that neither would make it.

    He studied Emma’s sleeping face. The corners of her tiny mouth were upturned in the slightest smile. Rafe wished for her blissful ignorance, for the comfort of dreams.

***

    That night, he did dream.

    He was surrounded by darkness, by a pressure that filled his head and weighed down his limbs. Then a soft blue light began to filter down from somewhere above.

    He was underwater. Standing at the bottom of the ocean.

    And something was coming out of the darkness.

    He tried to run. His legs kicked in place, muscles burning, his arms churning as water swept into his lungs. But he didn’t drown; no, he just kept struggling and suffering and trying to force a scream from his flooded throat.

    A coldness came over him, and his limbs froze. It was the same icy cold from the corpse-house. It was Nightmare.

    The current stirred at his back as the entity spoke.

    
I will savor you most of all. Your dream-meat will melt on my tongue, seep into my blood...I’ve not been able to reach any of the others the way I’ve reached you. You’re a special one
.

    Rafe asked a question in his mind, knowing the thing could hear him. “Are you one of them?”

    
Oh, no. You really don’t understand, do you?

    Shadows passed over Rafe’s face. He glanced up and saw, floating beneath the ocean’s surface, great pink clusters - the creatures, clinging to one another, tentacle-like things threading through their arms and legs and claws and tethering them to each other. Even from his distance he could see their closed eyes, their slack jaws with rows of razor-sharp teeth.

    
We made them, Rafe
.

    
If only we could descend upon you ourselves and harvest your dream-meat...we would have done it ages ago. But we’re not of flesh, you see, for flesh cannot endure at the edge of space...we had to seed the ocean floor with harvesters and wait for them to grow ripe. We’ve waited countless aeons, waited to devour your dreams
.

    “Are you...are you God?”

    The thing laughed. It was the most awful noise Rafe had ever heard, and it rang through every bone in his body. He prayed for the water to drown him, but he knew it was in vain.

    
You might call us gods. How I adore the human imagination! Your dreams!

    “What do gods need with dreams?”

    
Our sleep is a sleep of millennia, a sleep of madness. We have nothing to soothe our minds, you see - it’s all darkness and silence. And gods deserve no such thing, not when puny animals like you have the power to dream!

    Rafe looked again at the clusters floating overhead. So the creatures were just vessels for the stealing of dreams? But how...

    
Dream-meat

    Rafe began to choke. The pressure in his lungs and behind his eyes built until his vision went dark. And the hideous laughter of the nightmare-god filled his senses.

***

    Abe shook Rafe awake. “You’re screaming!”

    Rafe pushed the other man away and scrambled to his feet, gasping for breath. “We have to go NOW.”

    Abe shook his head. “There’s...something happened.”

    Rafe looked over Abe’s shoulder. He saw Erika by the barricaded door, Peter slouched behind the bar. Gayle was kneeling with her back to the others, whispering softly to Emma.

    She turned and stood, the baby in her arms, and even in the dim pre-dawn light Rafe could see her puffy blue skin, her limp little arms and the innocent smile erased from her face.

    “Jesus.”

    He stared at Gayle in horror. How could do it, to her own daughter?

    Then he noticed that the others weren’t looking at Gayle. They were looking at Peter.

    He sipped a glass of wine and cleared his throat. “Is it time to go, Rafe?”

    The world had finished coming apart in the time Rafe had slept. Peter looked shamelessly at the smothered infant, and even though Erika and Abe were staring him down, they didn’t look outraged, or even mortified. They had accepted what he’d done. He’d taken care of a liability.

    Rafe grabbed Abe’s shoulder. “What are you thinking? Are you just going to let this go? Jesus, Abe!”

    “Keep your damn voice down,” Abe shot back. “The things are still resting. Now’s the time.”

    Erika and Peter began dissembling the barricade.

    Rafe fell to his knees beside Gayle. Her face was expressionless, her lips whispering sweet nothings over the cold body of her child. He touched her arm. “Gayle...”

    “We’re not going,” she said calmly. “We’re staying with Neil.”

    “Neil?” Rafe shook his head furiously. “Gayle, you need to come with us!”

    “My baby is here,” she replied. “She can’t leave. She lives here now.”

    Rafe spun to face Peter, his hands clenched in white-knuckle fists.

    Peter looked him right in the eye and said, “She needs to stay with her family.”

    “The elevator might be safer, but I really think we have a better chance on the stairs,” Abe said. “That way they won’t know we’re coming.”

    Erika nodded and pulled the last table away from the door. “There are two sets of stairs. Let’s split up. We’ll get down quicker.”

    “All right. Who’s coming with me?” Abe placed his hand on the doorknob and looked back.

    Rafe still couldn’t believe things were unfolding like this. He was the only one still acknowledging Gayle’s existence. Erika approached Abe and said, “I’m with you.”

    “That makes us buddies,” Peter said to Rafe. “Think you can keep up?”

    “I hope they eat you alive,” Rafe growled.

    Peter was unfazed. “What makes you think they eat people?”

    “Oh, they do,” Rafe whispered, closing the distance between himself and the other until they were nose-to-nose. “What do you dream, Peter?”

    Abe put his hand between them. “Let’s go. Me and Erika first. We’ll take the stairs off to the right, you guys go left.”

    Together, he and Erika unlocked the door and pulled it open a fraction of an inch. They stared and listened for several moments, then pulled the door open enough for Abe to stick his head out and get a look at the entire hallway.

    “Let’s go,” he whispered. Then he was gone.

    Erika ducked out after him. Peter stretched his arms and rolled his head. “I’m not gonna wait up for you, Castillo.”

    Rafe looked back at Gayle. She had settled in one of the chair, still cradling Emma, and offered him a vacant smile. “You’d better run.”

    He turned back. Peter was gone.

    Rafe tensed his legs, lowered his head and broke into a sprint.

***

    The stair access door was wide open. Rafe ignored the blood on the walls and floor, all of it a crimson blur as he leapt into the stairwell and took the concrete steps three at a time.

    There was a faint echo below him, Peter in the lead. It occurred to him that if there were creatures in the lobby or on the stairs, Peter would reach them first. Maybe it would give Rafe a fighting chance.

    Or maybe he’d stop to watch Peter die.

    He had all but given up on thoughts of survival, even as he raced down the stairs. He knew that this was bigger than Fevgos. He knew that there were greater monstrosities behind the razor-fingered harvesters. Regardless of where he fled, Rafe was unlikely to “make it” in any sense of the word - but at least he’d get away from here, away from the others with their liquor-stained breath and Gayle with her dead baby and the creatures perched on the rooftops just outside the windows.

    He grabbed the railing and swung himself over a landing without touching the floor, avoiding a puddle of blood. He began skimming every landing this way, taking the steps four at a time now, seeing Peter just a couple of floors below him. He could hear the other man’s ragged panting. Too bad Peter didn’t have his steroids. They were probably back in his room.

    Rafe overtook Peter at the bottom of the stairwell. He grabbed the door leading to the lobby and glanced through it, then took off.

    The lobby was every bit the charnel house that Erika had described. Unrecognizable body parts littered the floor, counters and some were even plastered to the walls. The entrance had been blown in, as if by a hurricane, and debris swam in a slick of gore. The street outside appeared deserted. Dawn was almost here.

    Abe threw open the other stair door and raced across the lobby. Without a word, he passed Rafe and Peter and shot down the street.

    Rafe and Peter crossed the threshold and emerged in the chill morning air, glancing in both directions. There wasn’t a soul to be found. A few cars were in the middle of the road, windshields awash with blood.

    Rafe realized that, among the carnage, he hadn’t yet seen a single human head.

    They were eating them-

    
Dream-meat

    And as Rafe stood in the street, trembling with horror, he was startled by a high-pitched scream from somewhere up above.

    It was Gayle. Leaning out a tenth-floor window, she shrieked, “THEY’RE DOWN THERE!”

    “Bitch,” Peter gasped. Then he took off.