The Harvest

“The roads aren’t getting any better, Beth.”

“You could walk me to the door, at least.”

He agreed… though it seemed somehow careless to leave the dry enclosure of the car.

Beth had appropriated a ground-floor room. The number on the door was 112. The door wasn’t locked. It opened into yellow light. “Just take a look,” Beth said. “Tell me it’s a nice place. God, it would be nice to have somebody tell me that.”

He stepped inside. The room was hot; the thermostat was turned up. She had decorated this ordinary suite with cheap art prints—pastel water-colors, kittens and farmhouses. A quilt, obviously homemade, had been thrown across the bed. She followed his look. “It’s the only thing I took with me when I left home. I slept under this quilt since I was little. My grandmother made it.” She sat on the bed and stroked the quilt with one hand. “Do I have to call you Dr. Wheeler? Everybody at the party called you Matt.”

“You can call me Matt.”

“Matt… you can stay here tonight if you want.”

Some part of him had expected the offer. Some part of him was surprised, even shocked.

“Because of the weather,” Beth said. “The weather being so shitty and all.” She began unbuttoning her shirt. “I hardly see Joey anymore. He just plays with that fucking radio over at Kindle’s. It wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, Joey’s hardly a prize—but he was the only person who ever… I mean, he used to say I was pretty.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “Nobody else ever said that.”

She slid out of the shirt. Her skin was perfect, blemishless, flushed pink. Her breasts were small, the nipples almost childlike. There was a line of freckles across her breastbone. Why couldn’t he say anything? He felt as if his mouth had been disco

WORTHLESS, said the small blue letters on her shoulder.

“I’m twenty years old,” Beth said. “I guess you’ve seen me naked since I was ten. You never said if you thought I was pretty. I guess doctors don’t say things like that. Matt. Matthew. Matt—do you think I’m pretty?”

“Beth, I can’t stay here.”

She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, then sat back on the bed. She frowned. Then she folded her hands in her lap in a gesture that was oddly shy. “I don’t know why I do this shit.” She looked imploringly at him. “It’s hard being alone all the time. The town is empty. It’s not just that no one comes out on the street—I think people are actually missing. And I don’t know what happened to them. And I lie here and I think about that and it’s just so fucking scary. Sad and scary. And I would like not to be alone. But you can’t stay?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is it as easy as that?”

“It’s not easy.”

It wasn’t. She was twenty years younger than Matt… but he wasn’t old, and she wasn’t a child, and the sight of her was deeply arousing. He hadn’t shared his bed with anyone since that August night with A

But she was vulnerable and too needy, and it was an act that might have unforeseen consequences.

She managed a small, embarrassed smile. “Telling the truth?” She looked him over, perhaps noticed the obvious bulge in his blue jeans. “I guess you’re telling the truth. You want to stay but you think if you stay it might be… dangerous? Can I use that word?”

He managed a nod.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m dangerous.” She stretched out across the bed in a motion that was both sensual and weary. “Maybe I had too much to drink.…”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Or maybe I’m a round-heeled little cunt. As my daddy used to say.”

He drove home on ice, through ice, a night all ice and darkness.

The house was dark when he arrived. The baseboard heaters stuttered and creaked. Rachel wasn’t home.

He hoped she was sleeping in a warm place this Christmas Eve.

But it wasn’t Christmas Eve anymore, Matt realized; it had been December 25 since midnight, since before he left the party. It was Christmas morning.

By Christmas noon, most of the ice had melted from the streets. Matt drove to the City Hall Turnaround and confronted the Helper a second time.

He wore his winter coat and a scarf Celeste had knitted for him in a time so remote it seemed like prehistory. Blades of grass, stiff with frost, crackled under his feet.

He stood close to the Helper—close enough to touch it. Rachel had said the thing could speak; but where was its mouth? Could it see him? Did it have eyes? Did it know he was here?

He supposed it did.

He began by cursing it. He called it a fucking intruder, a monster, a stony heartless motherfucking monument to all the needless cruelty that had been visited on the Earth.

He had to restrain himself from striking it, because he sensed its invulnerability, knew how easy it would be to beat his hands bloody on that unyielding surface.

He cursed it until there was nothing left in him but speechless hatred.

The silence, after that, was almost shocking.

He waited until his voice came back—he had worn it raw.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you know. Tell me what we have to do to survive.”

He took a quick step backward—surprised in spite of himself—when the Helper opened its eyes, or what seemed to be eyes, twin patches of sleeker blackness on the black orb of its head, weirdly mobile, like two slick dots of oil.

And it spoke—a voice deeply resonant, somehow artificial, completely terrifying.

“This is not a safe place any longer,” it said.

Chapter 21

Skin

It was good, at first, cruising through these southern towns, drowsy little November towns in Virginia, North Carolina, parts of Kentucky and Te

The towns were much alike. Each had its church, its central school, its highway mall—and each town had its Helper, nested at the center of it like a worm burrowed into an apple.

John Tyler personally destroyed several of these devices, and his friend A.W. Murdoch dispatched more. Murdoch was a surer hand at the TOW, much as Tyler disliked to admit it. We each have our talents, he told himself, and Murdoch was an excellent shooter.

At first they took elaborate precautions. Tyler thought the M998 was too obvious a vehicle; to conceal it, they navigated the highways in a stolen eighteen-wheel A P truck with the Hummer and its TOW platform parked in the rear.

Murdoch argued that this was a simpleminded piece of sleight-of-hand, not likely to fool anyone. The Artifact was probably as effective a surveillance tool as the average military satellite, and the Contactees were an unlimited source of information on the ground. “Sir,” Murdoch said, “if they want to get us, face it, they can get us—we’re mostly counting on their pacifism.”

Tyler yielded to the argument. After a week or so they abandoned the container truck and simply drove the Hummer from place to place, along highways and secondary roads that were generally empty, following a route Tyler hoped would seem random but that tended to the south. Tyler had not been warned about the weather, but he had already noticed an odd restlessness of wind and rain; he thought they’d be safer wintering below the snowbelt.

All this, plus his friendship with Murdoch, served to keep despair comfortably distant. At least for a time.

Tyler’s first warning that things had changed came in a little Georgia town called Loftus.