Chris Holm - The Big Reap

It happened like this. I leapt onto Topher’s back, and tried to ride him to the ground. He would not relinquish his grip on Zadie, who was already off-balance from his attack. My weight plus the camera made him top-heavy. He tumbled forward onto her, me still on his back and then rolled into an awkward somersault, taking me along. His hands released her neck, too late to prevent her from tumbling after us. So the three of us rolled down the steep decline, maybe twenty feet all told, but the pitch was such it was more falling than rolling.

We hit bottom and scattered like jacks. I landed flat on my back with a hollow whumph and a plume of breath like a pair of bellows being squeezed. For an agonizing second, new breath just wouldn’t come, and then finally my diaphragm listened to what my lungs were telling it and got back to work.

I found my feet and looked around, disoriented. Heard a shuffle of nylon ripstop, caught a glimpse of matching winter jackets through the trees, one following the other in hot pursuit. I had no idea what the hell had come over these two today, but I figured I ought to join in the parade. And so I did, the camera dangling behind me from its strap, its choking weight slowing me down enough I thought I might never catch up. But they weren’t running for long.

Up ahead, I heard a scuffle, and then a sickening crack. Like a gunshot. Like broken bones. I worried it was Zadie’s neck and put on whatever little speed I could with the camera pulling back on me like a yoke. In seconds, I spotted them, and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Zadie’s neck that snapped. It was her walking pole, which had apparently just broken in half. Unfortunately for Topher, said walking pole broke in half because she brought it down atop his head.

Topher, who’d been grappling — buck knife drawn — with Zadie when she cold-cocked him, wobbled a moment on his feet. His eyes rolled back, his face went slack, and his buck knife tipped slowly in his loosened grip, eventually falling to the forest floor point-down. Its handle wobbled back and forth as it stuck, in imitation of its owner, perhaps. Then Topher’s knees buckled, and he went down.

I looked at Zadie, who was still holding the handled end of the walking pole like a baseball bat, its lacquered surface now terminating in a jagged metal O, and then at Topher’s crumpled form. Zadie looked back at me, wild-eyed and panting. Then she threw the pole away from her in disgust, as if it had transformed into a writhing snake, and whatever malevolent urge had come over the two of them evaporated. She dropped to her knees beside her unconscious lover, and called to me, voice pleading: “Nicky! Nicky, get over here, and bring the camera. I can’t tell if Topher’s breathing!”

I did as she asked, struggling out of the camera strap as I approached. She snatched the camera from me like a desert wanderer might a canteen. Then she held the lens up to Topher’s nose and mouth, her face splitting into a manic grin of relief as it plumed with rhythmic condensation.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed him. Hell, for a minute there, I thought he was gonna kill me .” She chucked Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera aside without a thought. It bounced off a jutting shoulder of exposed mountain rock, and its oversized viewfinder swung open on its hinge. Somewhere deep inside his own psychic prison, Nicholas-not-Nicky let out a wail of sheer gearhead angst. But I wasn’t paying him any mind. Nor, if I’m being honest, did I care much that Topher had regained a sort of swirly-eyeballed consciousness, thanks possibly to Zadie’s gentle if insistent slapping of his cheeks.

But I did care about what he was pointing at with one unsteady hand as he blinked his eyes into focus, his face a mask of punch-drunk confusion. “Nicky!” he stage-whispered with awed incredulity. “Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”

And as I said some time ago, Nicky wasn’t. But I was, and once Zadie followed the trail of Nicky’s arm down past his pointing finger toward the camera, she was seeing it too.

The camera, propped crooked on the rock a few feet from us, aimed at a gentle, treeless patch of upslope, gray and barren as the moon, and as empty, too. The camera’s viewfinder was open. And in it was that same patch of barren, empty upslope, though in the viewfinder it was neither barren nor empty.

On it sat a small log cabin, rough-hewn and lichen-scabbed. It sat a quarter-turn away from facing us, its front windows staring blankly into the middle distance from beneath their brow of covered porch as if indifferent to our presence. A thin wisp of oily smoke twisted skyward from its chimney. A patch of tilled earth arranged in furrows — a garden not yet growing — rested on its southeastern edge, now deep in sunset’s shadow. The cabin was still and quiet beneath the waning light. No light shone from within. And though for our entire hike the forest had teemed with life, it had apparently abandoned us now, for all was silent and still as a crypt.

“The fuck is that?” Zadie muttered.

“That,” I told them, “is proof.”

“Of what ?”

“That the world’s a weirder place than even you two yahoos realize.”

And then, before they knew what hit them, I attacked.

“Ow! That pinches!”

“Does it?” I asked, giving the nylon line another tug. Topher wailed a little louder than was strictly necessary in response, if you ask me. But after the racket we made stumbling upon the cabin in the first place any attempt at a quiet approach was shot anyways, so I figured let him yell. “Good.”

We were huddled in a cave some three hundred yards from where the cabin stood. More a depression in the rock than anything. Not quite deep enough for a bear to settle down in, but not so exposed to the wind and elements that these two would freeze to death if I didn’t come back until morning. Probably. I mean, I’m not a nature guide or anything. But either way, I figured they stood a better chance of surviving hog-tied and tucked away somewhere than if I let them storm the cabin with me. I’d lost enough lives taking on the tunnel Brethren — three shit-bags and one innocent — to learn my lesson. The only hide I’d be risking today was Nicky’s — er, Nicholas’s — and even that was one more than I’d ideally prefer.

“What the fuck, Nicky!” This from Zadie, who, near as I could tell in the failing evening light, was giving me the scowling of a lifetime. “I thought you were our friend .”

“If we’re such good friends,” I said, figuring I’d throw the consciousness who, when I left, would once more be driving this meat-suit a bone, “then you’d know I hate being called Nicky. And besides, this is for your own good.”

“Yeah? How you figure?”

“Well, for one, believe me when I tell you, you want nothing to do with what’s in that cabin. And for two, let’s not forget whatever nasty juju they’ve enacted to keep folks from stumbling across it damn near made you two kill each other. But worry not, once I head in there and do my thing, you won’t have either to contend with.” I hope , I added mentally.

“Since when’d you go all Venkman on us?” asked Topher. “I thought you didn’t even believe in this shit.”

I rolled my eyes. “Venkman hunted ghosts,” I told him, “and was a huckster besides. If you’re gonna drop a reference, think I’d prefer Van Helsing.”

“You mean that shitty movie by The Mummy guy where Wolverine wears that dumbass hat?”

“You know what?” I said. “Never mind.”

“Nicky,” Zadie said, only to shake her head and close her eyes by way of self-chastisement. “Nicholas,” she corrected. “You don’t have to do this.”