Robert Wilson - The Harvest

Was it dead? Deaf? Or simply not listening? “Answer me,” Matt said. “Talk to me now.”

The cold seemed to claw inside his body. He knew he couldn’t stand out in this night rain much longer. He put his hands on the body of the Helper. The Helper was as cold as the air. He left bloody prints on the alien matter.

It didn’t speak.

He carried Beth from the camper.

He knew this bordered on the insane, taking a dying woman into the cold night. But he seemed to be out of options. There was no reasoning, only a slow panic.

Beth was heavy. He held her with one hand supporting her shoulder and the other under her knees. She was a small woman, but he was terribly tired. He staggered under her weight. Her head lolled back and her breathing stopped. He waited for it to resume. Breathe, he thought. She gasped. A bubble of blood formed on her lips.

He told her how sorry he was that all this had happened. She didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t bad. It was one of those unforeseeable tragedies, like an earthquake, like a fire.

He put her down in front of the alien sentinel. She was pale and limp in the wet gray ash. Rain fell on her. Matt put his jacket over her. He pulled away one limp strand of hair that had fallen across her face.

Then he addressed the Helper.

“Here she is,” he said. “Fix her.”

Was this too peremptory? But he didn’t know another way to say it.

From that black obelisk: nothing.

“I know you can fix her. You have no excuse.”

An infinitely long time seemed to pass. A gusty wind turned the rain to needles on his skin. The wind made a sound in the ruins of the capitol building. It sounded like whispering.

The Helper was connected to the Artifact, he supposed, and the Artifact was full of humanity—or something that had once been humanity. “Are you all in there?” Several billion human souls. “Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

He was light-headed. He leaned against the Helper to steady himself. The Helper was cold, substantial, inanimate.

“Everybody in there?” He was hoarse with all this talking. “Jim Bix in there? Lillian? Annie, are you in there? Rachel?”

Silence and the sound of the spattering rain.

“You have no excuse. You can help this girl. Rachel, listen to me! This isn’t good at all. Just standing there letting this girl die. We didn’t raise you to do that.”

He closed his eyes.

Nothing had changed.

He felt himself sliding down, felt himself sitting in the wet ash beside Beth. He couldn’t hear Beth anymore. He wondered if she had stopped breathing. There was a buzzing in his ears that drowned all other sound.

“If you were human,” he said, “you would help.”

He fought to cling to his awareness, but the sense was eroding from his words. There was nothing left inside him but a weary frustration.

“If you were human. But you aren’t. I suppose we don’t matter anymore. This girl doesn’t matter. This dying girl. That offends me. Fuck you. Fuck all of you.”

He wanted to open his eyes but couldn’t. Time passed.

He roused for a moment.

“Rachel! Come out of there!”

He felt the stony body of it cradling his head.

“Rachel!”

Asleep, he dreamed that she did come out.

He dreamed that the Helper changed, that its contours melted, that it became the shape of his daughter, Rachel, as if carved from black ice, black against a gray sky, rain on the polished skin of her like dew.

He dreamed that she touched Beth, touched Matt himself, and the touch was warm.

He dreamed that she said a word to him: some wonderful, comforting word he could not understand, because the language she spoke was not a human language.

As soon as he thought it would be safe to leave Matt for a few hours, Tom Kindle located a functioning automobile—a Honda that had been buried under ash but washed more-or :less clean by the rain—and drove north to Casper.

His leg nagged him relentlessly. The bullet wound was a knob of fire in the meat of his calf. But it had been a clean wound, and Matt had bandaged it well, and Kindle found he was able to move around all right if he favored the leg. He wondered how he looked with a limp.

Like a lopsided old son of a bitch, he supposed. Which was approximately true.

A wave of cool, dry Canadian air had chased the rain away. He drove an empty road north beyond the limits of the ashfall. He marveled at how good it was to see some green grass again. Wildflowers were blooming in the gullies.

He saw a number of dead animals along the way. The departure of the human Artifact had killed a lot of livestock. Did they know? Did they care, the so-called heirs of mankind? But Kindle guessed it was no worse than a natural disaster—a unique event, unlike the perpetual hardships human beings had imposed on the animal kingdom since the year zip. The herd animals would come back quickly now that so many of the range fences were down.

In Casper he picked up a ham radio he believed would operate from a twelve-volt car battery. He wasn’t sure how to hook it up, but it came with instructions—he could probably figure it out. He could have used Joey’s help, however.

As daylight faded, Kindle hunted for water. Water was a scarce commodity since the taps had ceased to work. A supermarket, its big windows shattered in the quake, yielded a dozen plastic gallon jugs of distilled H 20.

He loaded them into a new car for the trip back: a Buick wagon with a nearly full tank of gas. Gas pumps didn’t work any better than the plumbing, but there was plenty of this old Detroit rolling stock free for the taking.

Night fell. He drove with the Buick’s heater running, with the smell of hot metal and a pine-scent air freshener, south toward that glow on the horizon, the smoldering volcanic crater, as if 1-25 crossed a border into the western precincts of Hell.

In Cheyenne the next morning Kindle assembled two wooden crosses from lumber stock and loose nails.

When the crosses were solid, Kindle used a nail to scratch a letter deep into the horizontal board of the first of the two markers. It was awkward, clumsy work. But he persisted.

He wrote the letters A, B, B.

Then he paused to think. Would she prefer Abigail or Abby? Or Abbey, or Abbie, come to that?

He had only ever known her as Abby, and in the end he inscribed the simplest version of her name:

And on the second cross:

And he took the two crosses out and hammered them into the ash-gray lawn in front of the ruins of the Wyoming state capitol building, next to the statue of Esther Hobart Morris. Of course Joey and Abby weren’t buried here; their bodies were lost. But they deserved some memorial more dignified than the burned-out hulk of a Glendale motor home.

As for Jacopetti, Ganish, Makepeace, Colonel Tyler— Let ’em rot.

He went back to the camper and stood vigil over the inert forms of Matthew Wheeler and Beth Porter.

Matthew seemed to be asleep. His hands appeared to be gloved: they were encased in a glossy substance the color of bituminous coal.

“Matthew?” Kindle said. “Matthew, can you hear me?”

But the doctor didn’t answer—as he had not answered yesterday or the day before.

Beth was covered from the waist up in the same inert black material. Kindle didn’t speak to her. Why bother? Her head was all enclosed. Her nose, her mouth.

He built a fire and watched the smoke rise up into the blue twilight.