Robert Wilson - The Harvest

Beth! he thought. Her head lolled to one side.

He needed to keep her blood volume up, and he needed to get her to a hospital. Even then, with modern equipment at hand, he wasn’t sure of his ability to treat the wound singlehandedly. He might have to explore for the bullet.

He looked at Tyler.

Tyler’s eyelids were drooping. His mouth moved, but soundlessly. Who was he talking to?

Matt watched the Colonel’s hand sag until the pistol was aimed, not at Beth, but at the floor. Tyler’s mouth hung open now; his eyes were nearly closed. Matt turned his attention back to Beth.

She’ll need an improvised stretcher, he thought, and which would be the fastest vehicle? And where was the nearest hospital? Laramie? Cheyenne?

He stood up and turned to the door…

But here was an unhappy miracle: Tyler stood up, too.

He came out of Vince Connor’s old recliner like Neptune from the briny deep. His eyes were wide, his pupils small, and the blue light from the window made an eerie halo around him. “It wasn’t an antibiotic,” Tyler said.

It had been morphine, perhaps enough to kill him, certainly enough to sedate him, and what miracle of will or sheer evil had allowed him to resist it even this long?

Tyler’s good right hand came cranking up, the pistol in it.

I’m going to die here, Matt realized. In this stupid room. For this stupid reason.

Then Tyler looked puzzled, turned his head aside, and vomited massively across Vince Connor’s desk.

Matt dropped to the floor. He wanted just a little time, time enough for the morphine to do its work, as it inevitably must. He rolled into the corner of the room, knocking over a table lamp.

At the sound, Colonel Tyler jerked his head.

The pistol swiveled with his look.

Simultaneously the door crashed open.

Tom Kindle stood in the dark hallway with the barrel of his hunting rifle sweeping the room.

Tyler pivoted to face the motion.

Kindle fired.

Tyler fired his pistol.

The two sounds, in this confined space, battered the ears. Even Beth, deeply unconscious, gave an involuntary twitch.

Kindle cried out and fell back in the hallway.

Colonel Tyler fell, but soundlessly, with Tom Kindle’s bullet lodged in his heart.

John! Sissy said as he fell.

It was the first time she had said his name, the first time since he was a child.

Tyler looked at her as the life went out of him in a powerful sigh. It was as if he had been holding his breath for fifty-two years, and his breath was his life, and now he just opened his mouth and let it go.

John, she said, her voice grown faint. Now you can come to live with me again.

It’s over, Matt thought. The words seemed to circle in his head. It had been vile and ugly and there was still Beth’s terrible wound demanding his attention, and Kindle in the hallway, but Tyler was dead: that impediment was gone.

It’s over.

He must have said the words aloud as he bent over Tom Kindle, who had been shot in his bad leg and was bleeding from the calf. “Matthew, it’s not,” Kindle said through gritted teeth.

Matt wrapped the injury. “What do you mean?”

“Are you blind? It’s bright as day out there! Two a.m. and bright as day! And the sound! Jesus, Matthew, are you deaf?”

Not deaf, merely distracted.

He heard it now, a faraway rumble.

It came through the air. It came up through the bedrock.

It began to shake the house.

The Artifact was leaving the Earth.

From the doorway of Bob Ganish’s motor home, Abby was able to see the Connor house—the dark window where Colonel Tyler was holding Matt hostage—and beyond it, on the horizon, the disc of the new Artifact, glowing like a floodlight or a bright new moon.

Paul Jacopetti had taken a propranolol and was resting in the camper’s narrow bed. Ganish and Chuck Makepeace sat stiffly at the table in the kitchenette. They had grumbled at this confinement, but not too loudly; it was Tyler’s idea, and they were Tyler’s constituents; they seemed to think their docility would win them some brownie points when this was all over. “We don’t know for certain what’s going on,” Makepeace said. “It would be premature to pass judgment.”

idiot, Abby thought.

She worried about Matt, and about Miriam, grown so strangely thin, and about Tom Kindle, hiding in the shadows with that hunting rifle of his. But her eyes kept straying to the Artifact. She had grown so accustomed to that presence on the far prairie that she had forgotten what an astonishing thing it really was. It was a spaceship, she thought, as round as a marble and as big as a mountain. It was affixed to the Earth like a tick on the skin of a dog… it had fed on the Earth, filled itself with humanity, and now, sated, it was apparently ready to leave.

It was almost too bright to look at.

Abby shaded her eyes and stood at the door of the Glendale waiting for a resolution. For more gunfire, or for Matt to emerge from the house. Or Colonel Tyler. Or for the world to end: with this peculiar blue light radiating across the prairie, she guessed that was a possibility, too.

“You hear something?” Bob Ganish said.

The car salesman had cocked his head to listen.

Chuck Makepeace looked up sullenly from a game of solitaire. “No.”

“Like a rumble,” Ganish said. “Like a truck going by. You really don’t hear it?”

Abby pressed her face against the cold window glass and felt another caress of the fear that had not left her for a day and a night. “I do,” she said. “I hear it.”

The noise was faint but distinct, like thunder, like the artillery of a faraway war.

Then it was as if the cannons had come suddenly much closer, as if the caissons had rolled up behind the Connor house where the grazing land began. The Glendale motor home began to yaw and pitch.

Abby braced herself against the frame of the door. Jacopetti began shouting from the bed, shouting a single word over and over. The sense of it was lost in the roar; she looked at him and tried to read his lips. But he wasn’t speaking to her, he wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular; he was speaking to God, Abby thought. His eyes were wild with panic. The word was, “ Earthquake!”

Chuck Makepeace fell to the floor and pulled the table down after him. Playing cards fluttered through the air like wounded birds. Bob Ganish gazed around himself in mute startlement, then slumped into a crude duck-and-cover with his hands clasped behind his neck. He had stocked this camper with every conceivable necessity, and the floor was suddenly awash with canned goods, bottled water, spare propane tanks, and plastic jugs of gasoline.

Somehow, Abby managed to stay upright.

She saw the Artifact begin to rise. The horizon had obscured its lower circumference, but now a gap began to widen there.

The spaceship rose with a gentle, impossible buoyancy.

At its base, a dome of hot volcanic gases exploded after it.

And the cannonfire became a deeper, more frightening growl; and the floor dropped under Abby, and rose and dropped again, until she lost her footing and fell.

Home had driven its roots deep into the lithosphere. Its central artery, its umbilical connection to the Earth, was a vent that reached below the basaltic crust to the fluid magma.

Home’s departure fractured the substrate beneath it into floating chonoliths like so many loose teeth and exposed a reservoir of liquid rock to the cold night air.

The mantle shook with protest. A tectonic shockwave radiated outward from its epicenter in northern Colorado and was followed immediately by a second shock and a third.