The Harvest (6 page)

The town is Cloverdale, but nobody actually calls it that.

They call it Curtains.

And in the town of Curtains, the people are as ragtag and rotten as the buildings. A sad, rough group of Blighted, hobos, and the infirm. Hollow eyes and black tumors. Missing teeth and missing fingers.

Curtains is the Heartland’s gutter. It’s where all the slurry runs. Where all the pollen blows, the trash drops, the piss trickles.

The hobo boy saw his first suicide yesterday.

He’d heard that you could go near the fence and find things. Things that people had left behind before they decided to walk through the tall posts. Sometimes, they said, if you were really brave, you could find the halves of the bodies that fell on the Heartland side of the sonic barrier, and sometimes those halves had trinkets or treasures in the pockets that you could trade back at the town Mercado for a bit of food, water, or treats.

The hobo boy is hungry. He misses food.

So he goes into the corn and hobbles the half mile out of town toward the wall. The corn is tall, but soon he sees that the metal posts are taller—they rise high in the sky, tall as ten of him stacked, feet on shoulders.

The corn cuts him in the few places his skin is exposed. The rest of him is bound up with rags. He limps out of the corn—it dies quickly toward the Boundary—and staggers close to the fence. He listens, expecting it to hum or buzz or make some kind of noise, but it’s dead silent. Only thing he hears is the wind through the corn. Hissing, as if to hush him.

Then he sees. There, on the ground. Stuck in the leaf-curl of a stunted stalk: a single ace note. Corner bent. A streak of mud across it—

No. Not mud. Blood.

Jeezum Crow in King Hell.

But it’ll do. It’ll buy him something at the Mercado.

Something he can give to the hobo girl.

He stoops, winces through the pain, and reaches down for the ace note—

Then he stops.

A man stands no more than twenty feet away. Bushy, bird’s nest beard. Hollow, haunted eyes set over a nose that looks broken and rebroken.

He’s less than a foot from the fence.

He turns to the hobo boy and offers a small wave.

The bottom of his palm—down to the wrist—is fringed with little squirming pea-shoots. Green as wet moss. He realizes what he’s done and quickly hides the hand behind his back.

He sniffs.

The hobo boy says: “Wait.”

But the man steps through the fence and the sonic wall screams.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

But how can he not? He’s back in town, and he keeps feeling his face for more flecks of blood. Not his. The man’s. He felt the faint mist as the invisible barrier split the Blighted hobo. He’s been wiping at his face ever since.

He hides in a small alley, holds up the ace note again to look at it. He wants to think about
this
, not
that
. Think about what he’ll buy for the girl. At first he thought food of some kind: somebody’s rations. But rations have been cut down or cut off for people. Food isn’t easy to come by anymore, though some supplies have trickled out of and away from the wreckage of the Saranyu flotilla. Pegasus City. Besides, the girl has access to strawberries or something, right?

So, maybe something else then. A trinket. A piece of jewelry. That might be nice. Isn’t that what boys do for girls? Give them jewelry?

A scuff of a heel behind him.

He turns, expecting to see the girl standing there. Because how perfect would that be? She’d appear. See him with the ace note. Probably steal it.

But it’s not her.

It’s another boy. Knotty like rope. Freckled face. Upper lip with a soft, deep cleft that shows yellow teeth.

“Hey, fatfuck,” Cleft Lip says. “I see you found my ace note.”

“What?” the hobo boy says. “No, no, this is mine—” He moves to try to tuck it back under his shirt, but Cleft Lip catches his wrist.

“Yeah, yeah, I lost it. I can tell you it’s mine because I can describe it. It’s an ace of hearts. Bent corner.”

Of course he can say that because he just saw the damn thing.

“No, I found it—”

“It’s mine, ain’t that right, Cashew?”

“Right as rain,” says a sloppy, lisping voice. The hobo boy turns, sees a girl enter the alley on the other side. She’s got broad shoulders. Thick. Fat, even. Built like a dang motorvator. Hands as big as a hog’s head. Half her face is a sludgy avalanche of loose skin. It covers one eye, a nostril, part of her mouth. A line of drool slicks her chin before she licks it away.

The hobo boy feels for her—the way she looks, what she must go through. Whatever it was, it lent her a kind of
meanness
, a dark spark ready to catch fire. He stands, tries to step away from the two of them, but the alley is narrow and he doesn’t have anywhere to go.

The big girl steps in and—

He staggers against the wall as she clubs him in the face with a fist. He tastes blood and hears a ringing deep in his ear.

“What’s that there?” Cleft Lip says. “Lookie at that. Got something more valuable than an ace note, Cash. Got hisself a fakey foot.”

“I need it,” the boy says. “Please.”

The girl—Cashew—steps in close.

Cleft Lip hems him in on the other side, clucking his tongue.

“That’ll go big at the Mercado. Always some poor dirt-farmer needs a new leg.” Cleft Lip leers. “You either take it off and give it here, or we’re gonna have to knock you sideways and take it ourselves. It’s your bag, dumpling.”

“You can have the ace note—”

“I know we can have it,” Cashew says with her mush-mouth. “We’ll have that
and
the leg and anything else we want to take from you.”

Cleft Lip grabs his crotch. “Maybe I’ll use your mouth as a toilet.”

“Please, no, don’t.”

“Maybe I won’t have to use you as a piss-hole if you gimme that leg.”

The boy closes his eyes, knows how this is going to go, but he’s not like that man at the fence. He won’t just step through into oblivion.

He runs.

Or tries to.

Truth is, he can’t run for squat. The fake leg strapped to his knee makes him slow like a shovel-struck dog. By the time he’s lurching forward, desperately trying not to fall, his two attackers already have their hands on his shoulders and they slam him up against the wall.

Cleft Lip hits him in the cheek. He sees stars. Tries to fall down to the ground, cover himself up, but the big girl won’t let him. She props him up as Cleft Lip beats him and kicks at him. The hits land with dull thuds, and each meaty slap sends his brain rattling ’round his skull. Before long his head hangs forward, twin streams of blood pouring from his nose.

The punches have stopped, and the boy’s leg jiggle-juggles as Cleft Lip works at the leather straps holding the fake leg to the thigh.

He tries to plead but finds his words caught behind his blood-slick lips. He throws a fist of his own, but Cleft Lip just leans back and avoids it same way you might avoid a tree branch or a buzzing horsefly.

Cashew laughs. This hee-haw jackass laugh.
Haw haw haw—

Then the laugh cuts short.

Grrrrrk!

The hobo boy looks up. Blinks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Cashew’s face has gone red as beet juice. Her one visible eye strains at its sockets, ready to pop as a wormy, sluglike tongue licks at the air.

She’s choking. Reaching up at the folds of her neck, trying desperately to—to what? The hobo boy stares, sees a long thin wire wrapped around Cashew’s neck, and he follows that wire to the roof—

Cleft Lip looks up, too, and yells, “What the—? Beryl, you little bitch!”

It’s
her
.

The hobo girl sneers from above, wire held in gloved hands.

The girl—Beryl—lets the wire go. Cashew gasps, then falls.

Then the hobo girl jumps. Both feet collide with Cleft Lip’s body—his head smacks back into the crumbling wall and he howls in pain. He scampers away, trying to stand, but she brings a knee against the side of his head.

“Told you to skip town, Eddie,” the girl—Beryl?—says. “And Cashew, you human lump of melted candle wax. You ought to go, too.”

Cashew writhes on the ground, clawing at her bleeding neck. She chokes out the words: “Old . . . Scratch . . . take you . . .”

Beryl gives her a middle finger. “Far as you’re concerned, Old Scratch is my daddy, my boyfriend, and my guardian Saintangel. Now suck piss.”

Then she turns and walks to the end of the alley.

She looks over her shoulder before she turns the corner.

“You coming, Rigo?”

And then she’s gone.

Rigo thinks:
How in King Hell did she know my name?

Of course he follows after.

And of course he gives Cleft Lip a kick—with his fake foot, because why not?—right to the crotch before hobbling out of the alley.

Rigo enters the streets of Curtains. It’s a town bigger than Boxelder by two, maybe three times the size, and since the Saranyu fell, it’s been collecting misfits and castoffs with a far greater frequency. Any walk down the streets of Boxelder, you’d see a dozen people, and that was it. Here, particularly around the mouth of the Mercado warehouse, they gather in crowds. Some have rough dogs or feral tabbies on chains that bark and hiss as Rigo passes.

The girl, Beryl, doesn’t stop there. She keeps going. Not running, but keeping enough of a pep in her step that Rigo has to limp along double-time, sending jolts of pain up into his hips.

Ahead, she turns the corner, ducks into an old theater. Not a holo-theater, like the one they found in Martha’s Bend, but a proper one—used for plays and the like.
THE WHEELHORSE
, it says out front on a sign tilted so far it looks like the letters could just spill out like sand.

Rigo looks around to make sure Cleft Lip and Cashew aren’t following along and then ducks through the front door.

The smell climbs up his nose and stays there: rot, ruin, mold, pollen.
Pollen
. His head starts to feel pressure behind the eyes. The sensation of a pair of fingers pinching his nose closed. He tries not to sneeze but can’t help it—

Sneezing sends a little hurricane of dust up. It blows across shafts of light—columns of sun shining from holes in the roof far above.

Beryl is nowhere to be seen.

“Hello?” he calls out.

Ello, ello.

Echo, echo.

Birds stir in the eaves.

He winds his way through the center aisle—dark seats on each side, long fallen to disuse and disrepair, half collapsed, fabric torn. There’s a slight decline here, and Rigo grunts as he navigates even this slight shift—

“Hey, Rigo.”

Beryl. Up on the stage. By a red curtain so dark it might as well be black.

“Why did you help me?” he asks.

But she ducks behind the curtain.
Curtains in Curtains,
he thinks. He’s about to haul himself up on the stage—no easy task given that he can’t see a set of dang steps around here—when he pauses. Last time he was alone in a creepy, half-abandoned building, he ended up finding a fake baby and getting a jaw trap around his leg. An act that lost him his leg once infection set in.

This could be another trap. Maybe all of it is. Maybe Cleft Lip and Cashew are just waiting for him behind that curtain, ready to snatch up his limb and beat him half to death with it. Or all the way to death.

Behind the curtain, he hears Beryl whistling. He recognizes the song, but at first he can’t put a name to it. . . .

“The Ballad of Calla and Kade.” A love song.

A love song that doesn’t end very well, but sounds nice just the same.

Oh, hell with it.

Rigo reaches out and drags himself up onto the stage, bracing himself with the fake leg and throwing the good one up over the edge. It takes him longer than he likes and he feels like Wanda’s mutt, Hazelnut, rolling around on her back and showing her belly like a big ol’ doofus.

But somehow, he manages. He stands up, takes a deep breath—

And walks behind the curtain.

For a moment, it’s all fabric and dust. And again he starts to sneeze, but this time he tamps it down, chokes it back. The curtain seems to go on forever, endless folds that have no end, and a weird thought strikes him:
I wonder if this is what having sex for the first time is like
, lots of pawing and not sure where everything begins or ends, and now he’s blushing thinking about how he’s never done it and probably never will do it, but if he
did
manage to find someone gracious enough to be his first it sure could be Beryl, but boy howdy, does he think about sex too much these days, he should really quit—

He steps out from behind the curtain, starts to fall as the fabric catches on the heel of his fake foot—

A hand catches him, helps him up.

It’s not Beryl.

Rigo gasps.

“Pop,” he says.

“It’s nice to see you, Rodrigo,” Pop says.

Then Cael’s father hugs him.

“THE BALLAD OF CAEL AND WANDA”

HEARTLANDERS
TELL
all kinds of stories about the cycle of day and night. One says that the Lord and Lady take the sun in every night to cook their food and warm their baths. Another says that night is a punishment for Old Scratch—or, in a variant tale, a punishment for the oldest gods of the earth—blinding him so that he cannot find his way into the minds of men and women and children while they sleep. (This is why some speak the common refrain,
Nothing good happens after sundown
.) The most popular story, and the one Cael has heard the most often, says simply that the sun represents the story of Jeezum Crow, for the sun dies every night and is reborn every morning.