The Harvest

“Uh-huh. Big mess, frankly. Took out the window at the five-and-dime and the rain came in and mint the magazine rack. You guys do that a lot?”

He wasn’t sure whether he ought to boast or confess. “Maybe twenty times, twenty different towns since October.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“The Helpers don’t fight back.” They don’t have to, Murdoch thought. “I mean, dangerous for regular people. Like civilians.”

“We haven’t killed anybody so far.”

She nibbled her thumb. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, A.W., but it seems kind of pointless. Like, the Helpers almost back together again.”

“We only just found out they can do that. But is it sensible, you mean? Soo, I don’t know. Colonel Tyler thinks so.”

The taste of her skin, her lips, was still in his mouth. Murdoch thought: We smell like each other.

“Going to do it some more?”

“The TOW shoots?” He shrugged. “Maybe I won’t. Colonel Tyler… I can’t speak for him. Sometimes I think…”

“What?”

“He’s maybe not the world’s most stable individual.”

“You didn’t look that stable yourself, this morning.” Her smile was mischievous.

He shook his head at the memory. “Well, Christ… skins!”

“Come on… it’s not so terrible.”

He looked at her sidelong. “You said those people, what, faded away?”

“Kind of. You know, A.W., it was something they decided to do. It’s how they wanted it. Maybe in some other town more people stayed in their flesh. Around here—I guess it sounds stupid, but there isn’t that much to do. You remember Contact? Travellers said in time people might not want the flesh? Well, that’s all this is. Mrs. Corvallis, she used to run the hair salon, she rented me a basement room—I watched her go. We were friends. I sat with her a lot. Toward the end she was just—I don’t know how to describe it—very pale. You could tell she was going. She was like china. Like porcelain. Almost shiny, light as a bag of feathers. The Travellers were holding her together until the end. A.W., you know what they call neocytes?”

He nodded. He’d heard the word from a medic at Quantico, shortly after Contact.

“Well, the neocytes kept her together. Until she was living mainly on the other side, hardly here at all. Then one morning I knocked on her door and nobody answered and when I went in her skin was there, all empty. It wasn’t so bad. She was happy about it.”

But Murdoch couldn’t suppress a shudder. “It was her choice—you honestly think so?”

“I know it.”

“Horrible,” Murdoch said.

“A.W., what’s the alternative? When you die, you know, you leave your skin behind, too… and considerably more than that. It gets buried in the ground and rots. This was cleaner—and it wasn’t death.” She was still smiling, but gently, almost absently. “What was Contact like for you?”

“Same as for everybody,” he murmured—softly, because a terrible suspicion had touched him and lingered a moment before he could dismiss it.

“No,” she said, “for you. I really want to know.”

“The Travellers came that night in August and they made an offer. What else is there to say?”

“You turned them down.”

“Obviously.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I think—no, it’s stupid.”

She focused her large eyes on him. “Tell me, A.W.”

“When we moved from L. A. up to Mendocino County, I used to follow my father around those woods. Big Pacific woods. I was nine or ten years old and it scared the shit out of me—redwoods, helicopters, but not just that: it was the bigness of everything. I got lost once. Only for maybe half an hour. I sat under a tree until my old man found me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the woods rolling on for miles all the way to the sea, the sea big enough to cover up every place I’d ever lived and everyone I knew, and a sky big enough to drown the sea—shit. Does this make any sense?”

Soo nodded gravely.

Murdoch was embarrassed, but he went on talking almost in spite of himself. “I don’t think I trusted anything after that unless I could hold it in my hand or take it apart. Contact sounded real good, you know, in its own way. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But it was like being out in those woods again. Everything was so—” There wasn’t a word for this feeling. “Big.”

“So you said no.”

Murdoch nodded.

“A.W.—did you ever regret it?”

“You mean, would I do it the same way over again? I don’t know.” He thought of the skins. “It still scares the shit out of me, frankly.”

“Maybe if there was somebody with you.”

He looked at Soo a long time in the dim light. “But that’s not possible.”

“I think it might be.”

“They said—the Travellers said—Soo, the neocytes aren’t inside me anymore.”

“A.W., if you want a second chance, I think it could be arranged.”

He backed away across the sheets. “How would you know that? I mean, how would you know?”

She looked deeply worried. “Is it possible to fall in love with someone in less than a day? It wouldn’t surprise me. Because I think I did. Stupid me.” She sighed. “No, they aren’t inside you. But they can be if you want them. It would be as easy as a touch, A.W. A kiss. If you want them. It’s not too late.”

Murdoch couldn’t think clearly. He grabbed his pants and pulled them on, backed against a wall and stared at her. He summoned words and the words spilled out: “I thought you were human!”

“Oh, God. I am! I just wanted to stay this way a while longer. It’s a choice, A.W., it really is. I like my skin. There’s skin in the new life, too, I mean it’s not just angels floatin’ around heaven, but… I wanted to have my Earth skin and be in Loftus a while longer.” She hung her head. She looked weirdly penitent, like a little girl caught stealing cookies. “I should have told you!”

He thought of what he’d seen this morning, dry parchment in the shape of an arm, a hand, fingertips. He looked at Soo. This skin he’d just touched. He imagined it empty and dropping like isinglass, perhaps blowing down the street in a strong wind.

God help me, Murdoch thought, I held her in my arms! And all along…

… all along, she had been one of them…

… one of them, under her skin…

“A.W.,” she said, “please don’t leave. Please! I’ll explain.”

The monster wanted to explain.

Murdoch shook his head and ran for the door. He left most of his uniform behind. He didn’t want his uniform. There were other clothes. He wanted this cold rain to wash him. He wanted it to wash him clean.

John Tyler placed his service revolver on the desk opposite the bed where he could see it. He was reassured by the sight of the weapon. It was substantial and weighty. It was like an investment, Tyler thought, something withheld until its value increased.

He was thinking about loyalty.

Loyalty was the fundamental thing, Tyler thought. Loyalty was normalcy reduced to its essentials. Loyalty allowed no room to maneuver. Loyalty was precise.

He had begun to entertain doubts about Murdoch’s loyalty.

Tyler was sitting at the rainswept window watching the dark main street of Loftus when Murdoch came stumbling back to the hotel.

Murdoch was a ludicrous sight, naked above the waist and barefoot, mincing over patches of broken glass in the midnight rain.

It might have been fu

He listened through the wall as Murdoch let himself into the adjoining room. There wasn’t much to hear. The shower ran for a long time before the room grew quiet again.

Tyler eased back into his chair.

He had been without sleep for two days, and he hadn’t left this room since Murdoch took him down to see the Helper rebuilding itself. This was his madness come back again, Tyler recognized, but he had forgotten that madness was also clarity; madness was the ability to see things as they really were, to make decisions he might not otherwise be capable of making.