The Harvest

Must get this advice to the Boston and Toronto people, Matt thought. Should have done it sooner.

Christ, everything had gotten away from him these last few months. He had been blinkered by his fear for Rachel, transfixed by her slow evolution. But Rachel was gone. It was past time to pick up the fragments of his life, including his work.

“You’ll probably be on medication for some time,” Matt said, “but I can’t tell you for sure until we do a more thorough workup. Not until the storm passes, obviously.”

“If it ever does,” Jacopetti said. “In the meantime… it still hurts.”

“I’ll go up to the pharmacy and find you something. Lie still while you’re waiting, all right? Don’t exert yourself.”

“I’m not going fucking dancing,” Jacopetti said.

Matt checked in with Abby before venturing upstairs.

She might have fumbled the Jacopetti crisis, but she was doing a fine job as den mother. She had helped Miriam Flett into a dry outfit and settled her onto a mattress with coffee and Oreos. Now Abby was contemplating the possibility of a hot communal meal—“Maybe a little later, if Tom gets his generator working and we can run the microwave. I think that would cheer people up, don’t you? It’s hard enough just keeping track of everybody. Some of us want to move into the hallway—it’s quieter there and closer to the bathroom. Would that be all right?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“People are scattering all over. I don’t know where Beth got to. Or Joey, for that matter. Is the whole basement safe?”

“Oh, probably. But we should encourage people to stay together. And I don’t want anyone ru

“Upstairs is dangerous?”

“It could be. If not now, later.”

“But you’re going up there.”

“Only for a moment, Abby.”

“Matt, you look terribly tired. Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

“Soon. I just have to pick up some pills for Mr. Jacopetti.”

“Poor man. Sick on a night like this. Matt, I had the most terrible thought about him.” She lowered her voice. “I thought he was having a heart attack because it was the best possible way to a

“Abby, if I’d been here, I might have had the same suspicion.”

She looked pleased and grateful. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Check in when you come back downstairs?”

He promised he would.

At that moment, the thunder began.

The storm was complex, peculiar—a whole inventory of storms, Matt thought, one layer upon another.

The stairs ran upward through a cinderblock stairwell at the southwestern corner of the hospital. The ground-floor fire exit had been boarded over, but there hadn’t been time to seal the second- and third-story windows. One had broken. A trickle of rainwater ran down the stairs between Mart’s feet.

The thunder, a sudden new presence, was continuous. It had taken Matt a moment to identify it as thunder, not the approach of some mechanical leviathan from the west. With the thunder, lightning. The lightning lit the stairwell from above with a diffuse reddish-purple glow. It flickered but was never wholly absent.

Matt supposed Abby was right, he was tired, mortally tired—too tired, at any rate, to be frightened of this new evolution of the storm. It wasn’t even a hurricane, it was something larger, still nameless. Peak winds in a hurricane were what, 200 miles per hour? Maximum. And in this tsunami of wind currently breaking against the flank of the Coast Range? Three hundred miles per hour around the eye wall? More? And how powerful was that? Powerful enough to level Buchanan, Matt supposed. And drown half of it in the storm surge.

As he climbed from the hospital basement to the ground floor, he listened to the wind gusting through the upper reaches of the hospital, slamming doors and rattling gurney carts down vacant corridors. And he listened for the voice of the storm itself, a tympani growl, alive, organic, pervasive.

It was out there devouring his town. Uprooting it and devouring it.

He thought of Jim and Lillian Bix, wholly changed and wholly alien, inhabiting their paper-thin bodies only long enough to consummate some process he didn’t understand or wish to understand, the translation of Lillian’s unborn child and the delivery, incidental and trivial, of its derelict hulk. He supposed Jim and Lillian had abandoned their own skins by now. Their skins, like so many others, must have been carried up by the typhoon wind, perhaps to the high atmosphere, somewhere peaceful above the rain.

Matt shook away these troubling thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

Pharmaceuticals were stored at various key points around the hospital so that each floor had an accessible supply. These caches were locked—the drugs stored there included narcotics—but Matt had been carrying a key and a duplicate since September. He followed the corridor from the stairwell and cursed himself for not having had the wits to bring a flashlight. Kindle had hooked up a gasoline generator in the basement, but it was only feeding the emergency lights, incandescent bulbs at ten-yard intervals.

The drug cupboard, a room approximately large enough for one person to stand in without touching the shelves, was dark as night. Inside, Matt stood blinking, hoping his eyes would adjust, boxes and labels would reveal themselves in the faint glow leaking from the corridor. They didn’t.

He stepped back into the hallway, pondering the problem. He could go back for a flashlight, but there was an element of time here. He didn’t trust that elevating rumble of thunder, the new intensity of the storm.

He hurried to the nursing station down the corridor. For years, Hazel Kirkwood had been the clerical day nurse on this station. She had her own desk at the rear, away from the busy corridor. Nurse Kirkwood, Matt recalled, had been notorious for her ten-minute breaks every hour, when she would duck outside—or into the stairwell, furtively, in bad weather—to indulge a cigarette habit.

He rummaged in Nurse Kirkwood’s desk drawers. He found an abundant supply of Bic pens, paperclips, and knobby pink erasers; a stapler and a pocket calculator and a single, lonely, plastic-wrapped tampon… and lastly, at the back of the bottommost drawer, a package of filter Kents with a matchbook tucked into the cellophane.

He took the matchbook into the supply cupboard. One match to home in on the propranolol for Paul Jacopetti. Another match to empty a cardboard box of tongue depressors; a third match as he filled the box with anything nonperishable he hadn’t already crammed into his Gladstone bag: antibiotics, painkillers, a bag of sterile cotton. All the while berating himself for not having done this before the storm.

A last match to double-check his work… then he turned and found Joey Commoner blocking the doorway.

He was too weary to interpret this—Joey’s presence merely baffled him—until he saw the knife.

It wasn’t a big knife, but it caught the faint light from the hallway; the blade glittered as it trembled in Joey’s hand.

Joey said, “I want you to stay the hell away from her.”

His voice was shrill and barely controlled, and it occurred to Matt that, whatever else might be troubling him, Joey was also very frightened of the storm. “You shouldn’t be up here. It’s dangerous up here.”

“I don’t want you near her,” Joey said.

“Can’t we talk about this later?” There was a guncrack of thunder above the general dull roar. “We could end up with a wall on top of us.”