Norman Partridge - Dark Harvest

So the sight of the October Boy moving toward the cross — slowly, almost reverently — surprises Pete McCormick. But Jim Shepard’s head is bowed no longer. As he nears the altar, he stares up at the cross. His carved features are projected on the wall ahead, and the crack slicing from stem to chin covers the cross like a jagged hunk of molten steel just pulled from a forge.

And then the Boy looks away, and the wall goes black. The light from his head spotlights the floor below the altar. There’s something there, something Pete didn’t notice until now, something that lies hidden in the darkness.

Pete starts up the aisle, straining to see the thing that separates the Boy from the cross.

The thing the Boy was focused on all along as he walked the aisle with head bowed.

A few steps, and Pete sees that thing clearly.

It’s a dead man with a shotgun clutched tightly in his hands.

The gun is aimed at the place where his head used to be.

Ricks doesn’t waste time looking at the dead boy lying face down on the blacktop. The fat punk doesn’t matter now. The way the lawman sees it, nothing much matters, because it’s five minutes past midnight, and the pumpkin-headed freak is inside the church, and that means an entire way of life just went to hell in a handbasket.

Uh-huh. The October Boy ran the fucking gauntlet. He made it down the black road… made it all the way through town. Got two tons of Detroit steel wrapped around him and managed to crawl away. Five lead slugs drilled holes in a door as he ducked through it, and not one of them splattered his Jack o’ Lantern skull. And once he made it inside the church… well, things must have been just fine and dandy in there as the bell tolled twelve, because Ricks sure as hell didn’t hear any riot gun booming in the night.

The cop doesn’t waste time wondering what happened to Dan Shepard. He doesn’t care if the weepy bastard turned rabbit and hippity-hopped down the road; he doesn’t care if Shepard’s down on his knees kissing his misfit kid’s feet. The only thing that matters to Ricks is that the end credits are rolling on the world as he knows it. All you have to do is take a quick glance to the north and you’ll see the curtain coming down on this show.

Hell, forget coming down . The damn curtain’s burning up. Those three fires kindled by the October Boy have joined together into one king-size conflagration that’s cremating the poor side of town. It’s like someone dumped a bucket of coals on the curtains in the movie theater across the street, and the flames are burning that dark velvet to cinders, scorching the night clean off the raw white screen underneath.

Jesus. That’s a hell of a thing to think.

The lawman plucks six cartridges from his gunbelt. This time they don’t look anything like a fistful of fresh-spawned trout. He feeds the bullets into the.38’s cylinder and starts across Main Street.

He checks his step as a rattletrap Chevy makes the corner of Oak and blows by him, and by the time his foot hits the curb on the other side of the street an old Ford’s doing the same. Ricks turns to the west, watching that Chevy blow across the Line, watching the Ford do the same. Both cars cross the city limits just like that… like there’s no Line at all anymore, and no Jerry Ricks to stop them, and no Harvester’s Guild to watch for in the rearview mirror.

Taillights swim in the distance as the two cars disappear into the night. Ricks wipes a trickle of blood from the gash in his forehead. Wow. He steps off the curb on one side of the street, and the world works one way. By the time he makes it to the opposite curb, things don’t work that way anymore. That’s how fast people change when the status quo goes up in flames. The hell with this , they figure, and they get their scorched asses out of Dodge PDQ.

Some people might call that courage. Ricks won’t go that far. The way he sees it, the people in those cars are just about as brave as a pack of rats skittering off a sinking ship before it heads for Davey Jones’s locker. You want to call that courage — go ahead, that’s fine with Jerry. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that it does the same job — those cars are gone, and the black road waits for more, and Jerry Ricks doesn’t figure it will be waiting for long.

Well, he figures, that’s the way the mop flops. Maybe in a little while, Jerry will get his ass out of Dodge, too. Maybe… but first he’s got some unfinished business to attend to. He’s got six bullets in his gun, and he figures that’ll be just enough to batten down the hatches on the way things used to be.

The dead man’s face is gone, pale skin butchered to blood and bone by the shotgun still gripped in his hands. Even so, the October Boy recognizes the corpse. He knows this man’s hands, and he recognizes the simple gold wedding ring on his finger.

Jim Shepard is the product of that ring. Seeing it now there is only one word in his head, and it’s the same word that crossed his bristling smile when his father finished carving his face just a few hours ago.

Why?

Jim’s father didn’t give his son an answer when Jim spoke that word in the cornfield, but he has given him one now. It’s plain enough, lying there on the floor. Mute, voiceless. Skinned of the components that allowed it to see and the part of it that could smile. Stripped down to red meat and the ruined mechanics of bone and muscle.

That’s the way you look once you’re broken for good. If you’re a man, not a machine, and your gears are stripped smooth and you just can’t run anymore. And that’s what the men in the Guild didn’t understand when they placed Dan Shepard between the finish line and his eldest son. They put Dan there to stop his boy, when they should have realized that his gearbox had been ground down to filings a year ago, out in that cornfield. He could never haul that load again. Pop the hood, check the engine, you’ll see that clearly. Take the machine down to muscle and bone, test the wear and tear on the life contained in that wedding ring and the easy trigger action on that shotgun, you’ll wonder how anyone could have figured Dan was capable of stopping anyone besides himself.

Hell, a kid who just spent a year buried in the ground can see that plain enough, and he just has a couple of holes hacked in his hollow head — he doesn’t even have any eyes.

“You figuring it out yet, you fucking freak?” Jerry Ricks screams from the street. “You king of the hill now? You cock of the walk? Uh-uh. You know better than that, don’t you? You’re just a goddamn weed with a heartbeat. That’s all you were when you came out of the ground, and it’s all you’ll be from here on out. ’Cause you’ve got nowhere else to go!

“Yeah!” Ricks yells. “Twelve dings of a bell didn’t really change much, did it, Jimmy? You should have let one of those wet-nosed morons take you down when you had a chance! They would have done it quick! Not me, boy… I’m gonna make sure you suffer! I’m gonna prune you back an inch at a time!”

Staring down at the broken remains of his father, those words gust through Jim’s head like a winter wind. But words can’t extinguish the fire that burns there. Jim’s sawtoothed smile closes in a tight grimace as he takes his father’s hand in his own. Gently, he slides the wedding ring from Dan Shepard’s finger. He holds it there in his wounded hand — the hand with three fingers — for a long moment.

“I’ll take care of the rest of you, too!” Ricks screams. “Don’t think I won’t! Every one of you in there is as good as dead! McCormick… Kelly Haines. And if you’re in there, Dan, I’m coming for you, too, you sniveling piece of shit!”