The Harvest

Di

“Jesus,” Chuck Makepeace said. “We must have lost part of the building.”

Kindle, who was collecting empty trays, said, “Maybe. More likely something hit us. One of those big trees at the west end of the parking lot, maybe.”

Jacopetti, pain-free but still pale, was impressed by the idea. “What would it take to pick up one of those trees and fling it that distance? What’s a tree like that weigh? Eight, nine hundred pounds?”

“I never weighed one,” Kindle said.

“Pick it up like a stick,” Jacopetti marvelled. “Pick it up and throw it!”

Matt checked his watch. Ten forty-five.

Eleven fifteen: Beth Porter said she thought she smelled smoke… maybe coming down through the ventilators? Kindle said he didn’t think it was likely, but for safety’s sake he was going to shut off the generator. “Get those battery lamps going. Eye of the storm should be overhead soon.”

The hallway seemed colder without the overhead light. Maybe it was colder. Hadn’t been that warm to begin with, Matt thought. He helped Abby distribute blankets.

Another huge crash shook the hallway, and another directly after it. Christ, Matt thought, what must it be like out there? He tried to picture an exterior world so transformed that Douglas firs flew through the air like javelins.

At half past eleven there was a new and even louder crash, a rending roar that shook the foundation—the vibration seeming to come from beneath, up through the concrete, through the bedrock.

“Lost part of the building for sure,” Jacopetti said. “Maybe a whole floor.”

“You may be right,” Kindle said. He added into Mart’s ear, as nearly a whisper as conditions permitted, “I hope you didn’t go to too much trouble to cure this man.”

Abby said, “I think I might scream.” She sat down, pale in the lantern light. “Fair warning, people.”

We must be near the eye wall, Matt thought. A wall of wind harder than brick, wind become a substance: solid, deadly.

He thought of that wind sheering at the broken stump of the hospital and prying at what was beneath—rooting for these few human lives like a terrier digging up a nest of field mice.

The foundation shook again. Matt looked at his watch. Perversely, the battery had chosen this moment to die. The display was blank; when he rapped it, the watch said 13:91. “Abby? Do you have the time?”

It was twelve twenty-five when the wind suddenly paused.

The freight-train roar faded gradually.

The air stirred. Dust rose from the floor of the hallway and danced in the lantern light.

“Eye of the storm,” Kindle said. “The building is exhaling”

“My ears popped,” Abby said.

Matt thought of gradients of air pressure steep as a mountain, the engine of the storm.

“Worse,” Bob Ganish said. “My nose is bleeding.”

There was a dreamlike quality to the stillness. Matt had heard that in the eye of a hurricane you could look up and see stars—it was that clear. He tried to imagine Buchanan, or the ruins of Buchanan, enclosed in a perfect rotating column of cloud… the moon shining on a landscape of wet rubble.

Warmth, what remained of it, seemed to drain from the basement. Matt wrapped his blanket around himself and saw others doing likewise.

Abby appeared hypnotized by the calm. “It’ll come again, won’t it? Just as hard. Maybe harder. And all at once. Like a fist. Isn’t that true?”

Kindle moved onto Abby’s mattress and put an arm around her. “True, but then we’re through the worst of it. After that, Abby, it’s only a question of waiting.”

Bob Ganish said, “I need some cotton for this nosebleed. I’m a bloody mess here.”

Matt attended to it. In the dim light, the blood on Ganish s shirt looked dark. Shiny rust. He worked mechanically, still thinking about moonlight.

“Oh,” Abby said sadly. “I can hear it… it’s coming back.”

Matt breathed shallowly, listening. She was right. Here it came. That freight-train roar. It was advancing across the water, onto the land, marching uphill to Buchanan General. Impossible not to think of it as a living thing. Vast and ponderous and stupid and malicious. Leviathan.

“Best sit down, Matthew,” Kindle said.

My God, he marvelled. Listen to it come.

The Helper—anchored to the high ground where City Hall recently stood—had witnessed the destruction of the town.

It assembled vision from disparate wavelengths, peering deeply into the storm. It saw what no mortal human could have seen.

It saw the storm advance. It saw the ocean flood the lower reaches of the town; it saw tornadoes dipping from the dark shelf of the clouds.

It stood in the calm center of the eye, seeing what Matt Wheeler had only imagined: moonlight shimmering on splintered tree stumps, loose bricks, battered truck bodies, fractured bridge abutments, fragments of drywall, road tar, torn shingles, torrents of rainwater, while the microscopic shells of Traveller phytoplankton hovered in the still air, a silver mist.

Then the eye wall approached once more from the west, eclipsing the moon—a black horn of wind.

The Helper saw Buchanan General Hospital as the eye wall devoured it.

The storm had already sheered away the hospital’s roof and much of its third floor. This new impact was more than the weakened structure could withstand.

Chunks of concrete whirled upward, trailing rust-red structural rods like severed arteries. Pieces of the hospital joined fragments of other buildings in a stew of airborne debris. Lab coats tangled with tree limbs, bedsheets embraced splintered glass.

There were human beings in the hollow under the ruins of the building. But not even the Helper’s powerful eyes could see into the earth.

The building came down in a noise of wind and destruction so intense that Matt didn’t register it as a sound. He was simply battered by it. It knocked him down.

He saw Abby screaming but he couldn’t hear her.

The others shrank into their mattresses, making themselves small.

The cafeteria ceiling collapsed. Fractured concrete poured through, the remains of the west wall of the building. Matt saw this clearly from the hallway through the open cafeteria doors. The doors were open because the storm wind, rushing through the lapsed ceiling, forced them open.

If we had been in there, Matt thought, if we had stayed in the cafeteria—

A gap had been opened to the tortured sky. The wind penetrated the hallway in a single terrible thrust. Tim Belanger took the brunt of the assault. He had laid out his mattress by the entrance to the cafeteria, a mistake. The wind—heavy with dust, wet, almost tarry—cracked his head against the wall and tossed him aside.

The wind picked up the battery lanterns and threw them down the corridor. Tom Kindle managed to snag one, but the rest winked out as they struck the stairwell door. Kindle waved the single lantern, beckoning with it, shouting something inaudible.

Matt fought his way upwind to Tim Belanger. The City Hall clerk was unconscious. Matt took a breath full of grit and dirty rain and began dragging Belanger away from the cafeteria, toward the faint beacon of Kindle’s lamp.

Breathing was the hard part. Everything would be okay, Matt thought, if only he could extract enough oxygen from the moist sludge that had replaced the air. Every breath filled his mouth with grit and drove a dagger into his lungs. He fell into a rhythm of inhaling, hawking, spitting, exhaling. The dead weight of Belanger became an intolerable burden, and several times Matt considered leaving him behind. It would be the wise thing to do, he decided. Save yourself. Maybe Belanger was already dead. But his hands wouldn’t let go of the injured man’s arm. Traitorous hands.