The Harvest

The next morning, Beth Porter phoned and said she wanted to be a nurse and would Matt be willing to help her?

He asked her to repeat the question. He hadn’t slept much the night before… these days, his eating and sleeping habits didn’t encourage a lucid state of mind. He’d lost fifteen pounds since November. His reflection in mirrors took him by surprise: Who was this ski

“I think you should teach me how to be a nurse,” Beth said. “I’ve been thinking about this. You’re the only doctor in town, right? So maybe you need an assistant. At least somebody who knows what to do in an emergency. This storm that’s coming, for instance. Say a lot of people get hurt. Maybe I could at least put on a bandage or stop some bleeding.”

He closed his eyes. “Beth… I appreciate what you’re saying, but—”

“This is not a come-on. Jesus, I hope you don’t think that.” Pause. “I’m serious. Maybe I can save somebody’s life somewhere down the road.”

“Beth—”

“I mean, I feel so useless just sitting here in this room all by myself.”

He sighed. “Do you know CPR?”

“I’ve seen it on TV. But I don’t know how to do it, no.”

“You should.”

Joey Commoner used the handicam he’d stolen from the Newcomb house to videotape Buchanan.

Joey had heard all this talk about the weather. If half the talk was true, there might not be much left of Buchanan in a month or so. He didn’t love this ugly little bay town, but he liked the idea of saving it on videotape while it was still intact. Joey Commoner, the town’s last historian.

So he drove up and down the main streets and some distance into the suburbs, guiding his motorcycle with one hand and ru

The images he played back on his basement VCR were u

It made him feel peculiarly alone. It was the feeling you might get, Joey thought, if you were locked inside some big mall at night with the ma

It made him want to ride over to Tom Kindle’s place and work the radio. But that was probably a bad idea; since the big cities began their migration, Joey had been edged off the radio by Kindle and Bob Ganish and that asshole Chuck Makepeace. Gimme the microphone, this is important. Well, fuck it. He was tired of the radio. He had better things to do than DXing foreigners who couldn’t even speak English.

He videotaped some important personal places. His basement. His street. The street where Beth Porter used to live. The motel she’d moved into.

Hidden behind a highway abutment where she couldn’t see him, he videotaped Beth climbing into a white Volkswagen and driving north.

Beth didn’t have a driver’s license. She had only started driving since Contact, and it was fu

Where was there to go?

He watched the car bump out of sight.

She might be shopping. Idly curious, or so he told himself, Joey waited a prudent few minutes and then followed on his Yamaha. He checked the empty mall lots along the highway for her car, but it wasn’t there.

Visiting somebody?

So who was to visit?

Slow suspicions formed in Joey’s mind.

Not that he cared what she did. He hadn’t seen her much lately. He wasn’t sure what Beth meant to him or used to mean to him. A few good Friday nights.

But he remembered the way she used to undress for him, shy and bold at the same time. He remembered her shrugging out of an old sleeveless T-shirt in a dark room, unbuttoning her pants with one hand while she watched him watch. The memory provoked a knot of tension in his belly. Not desire. More like fear.

He rode past Kindle’s house, past Bob Ganish’s ugly little ranch house.

No Volkswagen.

Then he drove past the hillside house where Matt Wheeler lived. Her car was in the driveway.

Joey parked his motorcycle in a garage half a block away. He approached the house along a line of hedges and used the camcorder’s zoom to spy on the doctor’s house. But the blinds had all been pulled.

He waited about two hours until Beth came out again, looking somewhat pink in the cheeks.

He taped her climbing into the car and bump-jerking away from the curb.

Bitch, Joey thought.

Among the last things Tom Kindle moved down from his mountain cabin was his Remington hunting rifle, old but sturdy.

He hadn’t used it much in the last few years. Hunting in the coast forests wasn’t what it used to be; too many hobby shooters had moved into what had once been some pretty secluded territory. Every autumn, the woods grew a new crop of chubby CPAs in orange flak jackets. It made for a dangerous situation, in Kindle’s opinion. He didn’t relish getting shot by somebody who carried his ammunition in a nylon fa

But this talk of storms and travel made him nervous, too. So he brought down the Remington and picked up some shells and took some practice shots at the knotholes of a long-dead slippery elm back of his house.

The crack of the gunshots echoed a long time in the still air; the bullets struck the decayed tree with a different and softer sound, like a mallet head hitting a fence post.

Kindle found his aim was reasonably accurate even after too many lax years. But the rifle kicked harder than he remembered. Of course it wasn’t the rifle that had changed: He was getting old. There was no denying the fact. He bruised too easily, went to bed too early, and pissed too often. Old.

For shooting, he wore the corrective lenses he’d had made up a couple of years ago. Kindle was mildly myopic, which affected his aim, but the condition didn’t seem to have worsened—which was good, because where were the opticians since Contact? Gone to heaven, every one.

He sighted on a circle where the bark had dropped from the tree. Squeezed off a shot and missed by what appeared to be a good half foot.

“Damn,” he said, and massaged his shoulder.

He could have gone inside, where Chuck Makepeace was talking by radio to Avery Price, the Boston guy, but Kindle distrusted this business about Ohio. It was where everybody wanted to go, a new Promised Land, a Place Prepared; worse, it was where the Helpers wanted them all to go. Boston and Toronto were both travelling with Helper guides, and probably so were a bunch of small towns like Buchanan.

At least they called it guiding. Another word for it was herding. All the wild human beings were being assembled in one place—and Kindle guessed there were other such places on other continents, little reservations, little corrals. Barns. Pens.

He didn’t like that idea at all.

No doubt, he thought, the promises were true. Everybody would be defended against the weather; the land would be fertile and the skies would be blue. They would all be well cared for.

Like cattle.

Cattle were well cared for. Cattle were also slaughtered.

He put three more shots into the bole of the tree and then stopped because his right shoulder felt damn near dislocated.

The sky was a high, luminous blue brushed with cloud. The air smelled of brine. There had been ground fogs every morning for the last week. Sunsets had been wide and vivid.

If old bones tell the weather, Kindle thought, then something big was indeed about to break. The last few days he had been sleeping restlessly. This morning, he had woken up at dawn in a cold sweat. His body felt tight, as if it was braced for something.