Robert Wilson - The Harvest

Much of the city had burned.

He passed ash-shrouded rubble, strange columns of brick like broken teeth, the shells of empty buildings.

Two hospitals were marked on the map. De Paul Hospital: a smoking ruin.

And the V. A. Medical Center, not far away. It hadn’t burned—but the earthquake had shaken it to the ground.

He checked on Beth and Kindle once more.

Kindle drifted up from sleep and nodded at him. Kindle was okay.

Beth, on the other hand—

Was not dead. But he couldn’t say why. Her pulse was impossibly tenuous. She wasn’t getting much oxygen; her lips were faintly blue. Her pupils were slow to dilate when he lifted her eyelids.

Still, she continued to breathe.

There was something awe-inspiring about each breath. For Beth, each breath had become a challenge, a kind of Everest, and it seemed to Matt that she met the challenge bravely and with a fierce resolve. But no single breath would meet the needs of her oxygen-starved body, and each breath must be followed by the next, a new mountain to scale.

She wasn’t dead, but she was plainly dying.

What city might have an intact medical center? He looked at the map. His eyes seemed reluctant to focus. Somewhere beyond the range of the ashfall. But what was beyond the range of the ashfall? Denver? No: He would have to travel too close to the caldera itself; the journey might be impossible and would surely be too long. North to Casper? He wasn’t sure what he might find in Casper; it was still a long distance away.

Everything was too far away.

She might not last another hour. Two hours would surprise him. “Sleep,” Kindle said. “I know how it is, Matthew. But you won’t gain anything by killing yourself. Get some sleep.”

“There isn’t time.”

“You’ve been looking at that map for a quarter hour. Looking for what, someplace to go? Someplace with a hospital? Not finding it, I bet. And you can’t drive in this.” He had pulled himself to a sitting position. “Looks like Armageddon out there.”

Matt folded the map meticulously and put it aside. “Beth is badly hurt.”

“I can see that. I can hear how she breathes.”

“I don’t have what I need to help her.”

“Matthew, I know.” Gently: “I’m not telling you to give up. Just we can’t work a miracle. And it does no good to beat yourself for it. Look at you. You’re a mess. Lucky you can walk.”

It was true that they couldn’t reach a hospital. He might as well admit it.

But something pushed forward in his mind, an idea he had not wanted to entertain.

“There’s another possibility,” he said.

He explained to Kindle, and listened to Kindle’s objections for a while, but grew impatient and fearful for Beth and hurried back to the cab of the vehicle and turned it around.

He glimpsed the new Artifact as it finished a quick eastward transit of the sky. But the sky was closing in again; most of the stars had disappeared; and it was not ash that began to fall but a brutally cold rain.

The ash on the ground absorbed the water and became a slick, intransigent mud. He was forced to drive even more slowly, and even so, the rear end of the camper fishtailed now and then on what seemed like a river of liquid clay.

But he didn’t have far to go.

He found the state capital building, or what was left of it, at the end of a broad avenue lined with ash-coated trees and fallen limbs. Three-quarters of the dome had collapsed. One section of it, like an immense splinter, remained in place, lit from below by fires still burning in the shell beneath. The broad space in front of the building was a field of ash, and the rain had given it a wet sheen, and the firelight was reflected there.

Matt wasn’t certain he would find what he wanted. But the capital buildings were the centerpiece of the city, like Buchanan’s City Hall, the most logical place, therefore, to find a Helper.

He parked and climbed out of the cab. There was blood on the steering wheel, blood on his pants.

He struggled for footing on the slick, compressed ash beneath his feet. The rain on his skin was not only cold, it was dirty. It carried soot out of the air. It turned his skin black. Matt realized he had left his jacket in the coach, with Kindle. He went to fetch it.

Beth’s breathing was barely audible.

“Don’t do this,” Kindle said.

Matt shrugged into his jacket.

Kindle sat up and took his arm. “Matthew, most likely it won’t work. And that’s bad enough. But if it does—have you thought about that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a hospital out there. That’s not a doctor. It’s something from outer space. Something we never did understand. And that thing in orbit isn’t humanity. How could it be? And what you’re doing, it’s not asking for help. It’s praying.”

“She’ll die,” Matt said.

“Christ, don’t I know she’ll die? Haven’t I been listening to her die? But she’s dying like a human being. Isn’t that what we decided to do last August? When it comes down to it, what we said was no thanks, I’ll die like a human being. You, me—even Colonel Tyler. Even Beth.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“The hell it isn’t! Matthew, listen. The Travellers left. They went away. Best thing that could happen. And that new Artifact, probably it’ll go away too. Go star-chasing or whatever it is they do. And that’s fine. Because we’ll be left here with some human dignity. But if you go out and pray to that thing for help—my fear is that it will help, and it won’t stop helping, and we’ll have a new God in the sky, and that’ll be the end of us, one way or another.”

“I’m only one man,” Matt said.

“Maybe one is all it takes. Maybe they can look at a thousand things at once—maybe everything matters.”

“I have to help her.” It was the only answer he could formulate. “Why?”

“Because sometimes we help each other. It’s the only decent thing we do.” He turned to the door. “Matthew!” He looked back.

“Don’t let that thing come near me. I don’t care how badly off I am. I don’t want it near me. Promise me that.” He nodded.

The Helper was at the foot of the stairs of the Wyoming state capitol building.

Scabs of wet ash clung to it in the frigid rain. Matt reached up and brushed away these impediments.

He was a little feverish and immensely weary. It was strange to be standing here at the foot of this alien structure in the ash, in the rain, with the domeless capitol building burning fitfully in the dark.

He shivered. The shiver became a convulsion, and he bent at the waist until it passed and hoped he wouldn’t faint.

Rain settled on the Helper in thick, dark drops. This Helper seemed to Matt less tall, less perfectly formed than the one at the City Hall Turnaround. He wondered whether it might have begun to erode. Perhaps it would eventually sink into the earth, a shapeless mound, discarded.

It didn’t develop eyes. It didn’t look at him. It remained impassive.

He told it about Beth. He described her wounds. Some part of him listened to the sound of his own voice and marveled at the melancholy note it added to the rainfall and the wind. He felt like an intern on rounds, reciting a patient’s symptoms for a hostile resident. Was this necessary? It seemed to be.

He said, “I know what you can do. I saw that woman. That insect woman. If you can change a human being from the inside out, you must be able to heal a chest wound. And Cindy Rhee, the little girl with the brain tumor. She was cured.”

The Helper remained impassive.