Robert Wilson - The Harvest

She was surprised by a sudden thought that both of these men had touched her: Tyler with his large hand, Matt more intimately. Somehow, she was a party to this.

She walked down the corridor to Colonel Tyler.

He registered her presence, though his eyes were distant.

Beth said, “What happened?” Peering past him into a room where the window was open, broken, and there was an acrid smell—“Is that blood in there?”

The Colonel put his hand on her shoulder, another touch, and steered her away.

“I’ll explain,” he said.

It was William who had been the spy. The boy was dead.

The Colonel explained, and Beth retired to her camper.

They had acquired all these vehicles at a dealership in the Willamette Valley, on the eastern side of the Coast Range where the storm hadn’t done as much damage. It was strange, Beth thought, everybody driving these $40,000 Travelaire and Citations with connections for running water and TV sets, these fancy boxes on wheels.

Everything we ever made, Beth thought—we human beings—most of it was boxes. A house is a box, she thought; an office building is a box. A TV is a box, and a microwave oven is a box of radiation. All these boxes. Nobody made boxes anymore. All the boxes we’ll ever need, Beth thought idly, people left them lying around for free.

Alone, she listened to the morning’s violence echo and rebound through the camp. Footsteps, doors slammed, angry voices now and then.

She wasn’t accustomed to violence. Her family had never been violent, unless you counted her father’s occasional deer hunts. Her mother was a careful, prim woman who left home and moved to Terre Haute with a new husband when Beth was fifteen years old. Her father was often angry, but he never actually hit her. Since that trouble when she was fourteen, her quick D C at a Seattle hospital, he had seldom even looked at her. Nobody had looked at her, except to laugh or make fun—except Joey.

She dozed through the afternoon, afraid of what might be happening outside. At dinnertime, she left the camper and found Tyler and Joey and Paul Jacopetti building a fire in a barbecue pit behind the farmhouse: people didn’t want to eat a meal inside the house where William had died. The Colonel ignored her; Jacopetti ignored her.

Joey watched her the way he always watched her—following her with i his eyes, not making a big deal of it, but relentlessly. She felt his attention like a toothache. He had been watching her like this every day since they had left Buchanan, a casual proprietary surveillance that made her itch with indignation.

She decided she wasn’t hungry. She turned her back on the men and walked to the front of the farmhouse and inside, although the hot-metal odor of this morning’s bloodshed was still hanging in the air. Miriam Flett was inside, sitting in a chair doing nothing. Watching the dust float. Beth approached her with caution. She imagined the old woman must be horribly sad. It was obvious she’d liked that boy; even if he was a spy, not human.

Miriam looked up at Beth’s approach, her face crowded with wrinkles.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s all right.” Miriam’s voice was a dry whisper.

“You must—” Was this the right thing to say? “You must feel terrible. I’m sorry about what happened.”

“They told you about it?”

“The Colonel did. He said William was—uh—”

“Not entirely human,” Miriam supplied. “But I knew that about him.”

“Did you? Still… he died. It’s sad.”

“If he wasn’t human,” Miriam said primly, “he didn’t die.”

It took Beth a moment to interpret this. “I guess not. It’s hard to get used to the idea, though.”

Then Miriam did something Beth had not seen her do before: She smiled.

“It was hard for me, too,” she said.

There was some talk of moving on, or back to the truckstop, some place away from this unhappy house, but Colonel Tyler vetoed the idea, at least until morning. They could sleep in their vehicles; there was no real urgency. Beth supposed he was right. But the encampment that evening was steeped in an ugly silence.

Just before dark, while there was still a rosy light around the high slope of the human Artifact, Tim Belanger unhooked the camper-trailer from the rear of his pickup truck and went roaring away east. He escaped, Beth thought, just like Tom Kindle—another refugee.

Another one gone, Beth thought sadly.

Nine of us left altogether.

She wished it had been Joey who left.

She found him damping the fire in back of the farmhouse. The fire had been the only significant light on this prairie, and she was sorry to see it flicker out.

Joey wore his ancient skull-and-roses T-shirt and a leather jacket to keep away the night chill. His pistol was tucked under his belt. It was a small-caliber pistol, but Beth thought it was reckless of Colonel Tyler to have given Joey any kind of gun. It was a miracle Joey hadn’t blown his own balls off with it.

She hadn’t come looking for him. She wanted to walk a distance into the Connors’ grazing land and be by herself… watch the stars come out and try to make some sense of everything that had happened. But Joey waved her over.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I was going somewhere,” Beth said, aware of how pathetic it sounded.

“Taking in a movie? Goin’ down to the mall, Beth?” He laughed. “It’s a fuckin’ desert out here. Everywhere we go is some kind of desert or other. Doesn’t it rain anywhere but Buchanan?”

“It rains in Ohio.”

“Ohio,” Joey said scornfully.

He poured another bucket of sand over the embers until even that faint light was lost. “Some wild events this morning.” She nodded.

“I saw the whole thing. Two shots.” He cocked his index finger. “Bam, the chest. Bam, the head. You don’t want to know what it looked like. It was obvious the kid wasn’t human. Inside, he was like—shit, I don’t know. Like a watermelon full of motor oil.”

“Christ, Joey!”

He smiled at her. “Facts of life.”

“Is Abby Cushman still under guard?”

“Jacopetti’s outside her door. Not that he could stop her from coming out. I take over from him when I’m done here. It doesn’t really matter—where’s she gonna go?”

“Like Tom Kindle or Tim Belanger, maybe. Just leave.”

“Nope. I pulled the distributor cable out of her engine.”

“Does Colonel Tyler know that?”

“He said it showed initiative.” Big grin.

Beth resented Joey’s access to the Colonel. It was Joey’s influence that had caused most of their problems, she was sure of it. She remembered Tyler’s hand on her shoulder this morning. Familiar hand. She had memorized the sensation.

His touch was like a token of everything she’d gained since Contact, and Joey was everything she wanted to forget. The two of them together… it was an unbearable combination.

“Bam” Joey said, reminiscing. “I’ll tell you one thing there’s less of now. There’s less bullshit.”

It was a callous, stupid thing to say, and it made her angry. “The end of the world is a good thing because you get to carry a gun for the first time in your life? Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“If the world hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be carrying a pistol. True. If the world hadn’t ended, you wouldn’t be fucking a doctor.”

She flushed with anger. “You don’t know who I sleep with. You don’t have a clue.”

“All I’m saying is don’t act superior when you’re out there with a Tor Sale’ sign between your legs.”