The Harvest Cycle (21 page)

    Cutter felt blood filling his mouth, his throat. He felt his jaw strain, his cheeks stretch. He felt blinding pain course through his skull.

    Then:

    
CRACK
.

***

    In the basement of the food bank, all was quiet. Knowing that the Harvesters were roaming the streets up above, the survivors were forced to bear their grief in silence.

    “We should have been watching her,” Amanda whispered through tears.

    “Cutter was,” West said. “Cutter was watching her, and he’s dead.”

    “Macendale took him,” Bruce said. “The Harvesters were in a frenzy...Macendale was armed to the teeth...”

    “You’re saying you couldn’t have done anything?” West snapped bitterly. Amanda placed her hand on his. “Whisper!”

    Hitch sat under a torch at the opposite end of the basement. He stared blankly into a can of greasy wheat product, one of the few foodstuffs left in the bank. He felt like coughing it up and letting it warm on his belly.

    Cinnamon was pacing back and forth in front of him. Hitch looked up and asked, “What?”

    “We should have done something,” she said.

    “I know you and Cutter had....” Hitch began. He wasn’t sure what to say. A bond? A relationship? Would she consider it that, or was Cutter just another man? The bot’s pacing said the latter.

    She looked at Hitch, waiting for him to finish. He didn’t.

    Instead, he said dully, “Macendale. Macendale. Why is his name Macendale?”

    “Thomas Macendale,” Cinnamon answered. “He was an engineer of early robotics. Many of the second-gens are named after human developers, as are older first-gens like Delmar. Jason Delmar invented our lifetime battery. As for Bruce...I think he was named by the UFC when they requisitioned him to work in Alaska. Others, like myself, have more specific consideration put into our names.”

    Hitch smiled slightly at that. She saw him in the firelight and raised an eyebrow. “Nothing,” he said.

    Then he remembered the Harvesters, remembered the little girl, and Cutter, and the smile was gone.

22.

Flesh and Mind

    Cutter’s face was a swollen, pulpy ruin. His cheeks and jaw had been torn asunder by the pear, and the skin lay open in bloody flaps, shattered bone hanging from threads of muscle with his tongue draped limply over them. His eyes were blackened, but open - open to watch, in shocked silence, as Macendale affixed two planks of wood around his right leg.

    Wrapping iron bands around the planks and screwing them down, holding the contraption in place, Macendale finally spoke. “Apparently they call this one the Spanish boot. I think you can see how it works.”

    And he tightened the screws more. Cutter moaned in agony.

    “Righty tighty, lefty Lucy,” the bot said. “Wasn’t that her name, Lucy? Isn’t that what you were screaming? Or do you even remember screaming? Oh, God, the look on your face when they took her out - so worth it.

    “Now, let’s get some of this mess off your face,” Macendale sang, tugging at an errant scrap of flesh that was once Cutter’s bottom lip. “I want to see you grinning from ear-to-ear, just like me.

    “These,” he said, producing a huge pair of scissoring blades, “they call mutilation shears.”

    Cutter moaned again, trying to shake his head, trying to make a coherent sound. Macendale laid the cool blades on his prisoner’s face. “There’s a side-screw here to help close the blades, just in case that pesky jawbone proves to be a problem.

    “Now, say
ahhhh
...”

***

    “I need to speak with you,” Bruce whispered to Jack DaVinci. “In one of the back rooms.”

    There, Bruce held out a closed fist. “I was able to get this before we returned to the shelter...able to get it before the Harvesters did.”

    “You mean...” DaVinci’s eyes lit up.

    Bruce opened his hand, exposing the nanoplasmic cortex. Lucy’s.

    Bruce didn’t tell DaVinci how he’d chased down the Harvesters, fought them off, how he’d plunged his hands into Lucy’s fractured skull. He simply presented his gift and spoke.

    “I need your help to find Macendale before he finds us,” Bruce said. “I need you at your sharpest. And I know you need this.”

    “Yes...yes I do.” DaVinci cupped his hands to receive the nodule, tiny and warm and moist. “Should I take it now? Do you want to get into this now?”

    “How do you mean?”

    “We’re going to sit down, all of us - or those who are willing - and try to reason where Macendale might be. Now I know that you don’t think you can make heads or tails or how that bastard’s thinking, but we’re going to try. Starting now.”

    And DaVinci swallowed the nodule, closing his eyes, shuddering as he anticipated the rush.

    “We know very little about Ogden’s layout,” Bruce muttered. “From the cemetery to the temple, that’s about all we’ve seen.”

    “The school bus,” DaVinci said. “You told us about a school bus. Where’d he get it? And it couldn’t have been driven, so he had to move it out into the street himself. Couldn’t have been very far away.”

    “You’re already feeling the effects,” Bruce said, studying DaVinci.

    The detective nodded. “We need to look at everything that’s changed about Macendale, everything he’s acquired.”

    “He’s crudely painted himself, maimed his face. Resembles a dead clown. He has the Mormons’ rifles. Is unwary of the Harvesters or anything else. Now, where would he take Mister Cutter?”

    “Somewhere,” DaVinci replied, “where he could torture him. Perhaps for information - whatever the reason, I think torture is his aim in keeping Cutter alive.”

    “I don’t know of any place in this area that’s more suited to torture than anywhere else,” Bruce said. “Don’t know anything about this area, in fact, not even the ground we’ve covered. We need to get back out and perform a search - but how?”

    “The roof,” DaVinci answered. “We can do recon from there, and if we see any sign of Macendale, or any place that might be suited to his madness, we’ll work from there and try to formulate a plan. We might not be able to save Cutter, but we can at least destroy Macendale. Then it’s just a matter of waiting out the Harvest.”

    DaVinci scrutinized Bruce’s face and continued. “Don’t fool yourself. You do know Macendale. He’s your ‘child’. You know where his psychosis, or whatever it is, is coming from.”

    “He’s simply broken.”

    “He’s more than broken. The accident opened the floodgates for him, unleashed his potential for insanity. It was always there, buried inside of him. He’s achieved it by studying
human
madness, isn’t that right?”

    Bruce thought back to Macendale’s comments about his personal archives, the files he had stored in his memory about killers and tyrants. He’d stored those files under the pretense of understanding Man’s extremes, his limits, his madness - and now Macendale was playing them out himself. In some way, this was indeed a corruption of his programming, and he was carrying out a new mission based on it.

    The mission?

    “Chaos,” DaVinci said.

***

    Macendale shook Cutter to consciousness.

    He’d cut away most of Cutter’s face. The ruined cheeks and jaw and tongue were all gone, along with the nose. Macendale had considered moving on to the ears, but no, he wanted those in perfect condition.

    A set of rusted steel claws, like those of a panther, slipped over Macendale’s hand with the help of a brace. “Cat’s paw,” he told Cutter, whose eyes were barely open. “The card over there said ‘Spanish Tickler’ but that’s stupid. Let me explain, now, how you’re going to die.

    “I’m going to gut you with these claws and spill your entrails onto the floor. I’m going to dance in your steaming guts while the last of your life slips away; then, I’m going to work on your brain. For what purpose? Well, that’s for me to know. You’re out of the loop once I’ve eviscerated you.

    “Oh, what the hell. I’m gonna pull out your brain and use it as bait for the Harvesters. They’ve been quiet out there, haven’t they? They’ve got nothing to hunt, nothing to munch on. I’ll give them something, and then they’ll do something for me.

    “Seeing that precious little child on the Harvester’s skewers...oh, I wish all of your cohorts could’ve been there. Because see, that moment, that one rotten moment, it transformed you, friend. It sent you on a suicide run, and now you’re being flayed alive. All because you went crazy.”

    Macendale adjusted the cat’s paw and stepped back, standing over Cutter. “Now, I think, you really get it.”

    Then he slammed the claws into Cutter’s belly.

    “
NOW YOU GET IT!
”

    Ripped out coils of viscera, let them fall on his shoes.

    Cutter’s eyes closed. Macendale swept the rest of his entrails from their cavity, splashing in them with his feet, letting out a long, resigned sigh.

    It just wasn’t enough for one guy to get it.

    He had to show them all. And he would.

    The first step was getting at Cutter’s brain.

***

    “The Harvesters will lose it if they see anyone up on the roof,” West said.

    “Not if they’re bots,” Bruce said. “They’ve never associated our presence with living dreamers. And they generally don’t attack us unless we’ve attacked them.”

    “It looks like you were attacked,” Amanda said, pointing to a laceration running the length of Bruce’s arm. “What’s that about?”

    “It was nothing...I just got in the way of the swarm.”

    “We’ll just have to be careful,” DaVinci said, “and avoid being spotted by that lunatic Macendale.”

    “’We’?” Bruce asked.

    “I’m an undreamer. I can go up there with you.”

    “That remains to be seen.”

***

    DaVinci and Bruce watched the sunrise from their perch on the roof - covered in tarpaulins, lying at the edge and surveying a city crawling with Harvesters.

    The Harvesters walked the streets, looked through windows, studied trees. They seemed confused. There was nothing here for them.

    “I have to tell you something,” Bruce whispered to DaVinci. “This is just between us. Now, unless you want the Harvesters to focus in on this building, you cannot have any sort of reaction.”

    “That’s asking a lot of a human being.”

    “It’s important that you know this. It affects you in the aftermath of Doctor West’s plan, should it succeed.”

    DaVinci sighed. “All right. Go.”

    “There is no Gotham. Not anymore. Same with the dreamers below.”

    DaVinci sat in silence. His high was waning. Hell of a time to learn that yet another community had been wasted. He’d been through this more times than he could count but it was somehow different with Gotham, with those dreamers below and their tense co-existence. Some bot army had just wiped it all away.

    It was different, all right. And it’d be real different when the dreamers found out.

    “I’m sorry for what I did,” Bruce said.

    “Really? Wanna prove it?”

    As the last remnants of imagination and creativity were fading from DaVinci’s mind, he said, “Can’t you still contact the rest of your team by radio? Can’t you spread the good word?”

    “I can.”

    “Get their heads straight and get them to Ogden.”

23.

Jesus Christ

    “You know who else got all broken and bent out of shape and then came back as...?” Macendale looked over to Cutter’s corpse. The skull, most of its meat and hair peeled away, could only offer a grim smile. Glassy eyes swam in infected sockets. Macendale poked one of them, absently, and went on.

    “Christ, the Son of Man. What does that mean? His book says He’ll come back at the end...but, oh no! Certainly
not
. It couldn’t be me...No. Yes? Why not? Well, I look like shit, for one.”

    Macendale rose from his seat and slapped Cutter’s severed skull from sight. It made a commotion falling to the floor.

    The shadows outside halted in their prowl. The Harvesters.

    Macendale had covered the windows with boards, but little else was done to fortify his curiosity shop. He perched himself on a counter and waited to see what they’d do.

    Claws broke through the board just above the door’s handle, glass coming down with the splinters. Macendale let out a HOOT! and the Harvesters began to attack with vigor.

    “Come meet your new god,” the clown whispered.

***