The Harvest

Tyler led them across the Great Basin into Utah, joined what had once been a populous stretch of 1-15 north of Brigham City, then veered east on 1-80 where the towns grew sparse again.

Tyler read the road maps with great care. He was worried about crossing the Rockies. 1-80 skirted much of the mountains, followed the Union Pacific route through the Red Desert in Wyoming, but late or early storms had been known to strand unwary travellers.

He called a halt at a town named Emory and pressed on in the morning. The sky when he started his engine was bright with herringbone clouds.

The road climbed and subsided and began to climb again.

He felt better when the road wound away from civilization. Those empty towns were oppressive. Mountain and desert were simply eternal. Granite and sagebrush and cheat grass: invulnerable to all the discord that had dropped like bad magic out of a starry sky.

He was alone in the cab of the pickup truck, although Sissy kept him company.

Sissy had been keeping him sporadic company since that town in Georgia—Loftus.

She spoke to him, a voice out of the wind, but he didn’t actually see her until one afternoon in rural Texas while he was driving the Hummer west. It seemed appropriate that Sissy should appear in the desert. The desert was a place of mirages, dust-devils, chromium-blue lakes shimmering where the highway touched the horizon. Sissy had seemed exactly that tenuous, sitting next to him where A.W. Murdoch used to be. She was a translucent, desert-dry Sissy—dressed as inappropriately as ever in cotton and nylon and polyester of all colors, clothes so brittle with old dirt that any motion emitted a greasy rustle and exuded an odor too stale to be offensive. It was the smell, Tyler thought, of something dead that had dried a long time in the sunlight.

The radio was good, Sissy told him, good to be talking to those people, smart, but be careful, she said: stay away from the crowds, all those East Coast city survivors, clever and dangerous in some way she never explained. Talk to that Joseph, Sissy said. He admires you.

Sissy was an illusion. Tyler knew that. Of course he did. You’d have to be crazy to believe she was really sitting there, some kind of ghost.

She was, as the psychologists would no doubt say, a private revenant, a fragment of himself. She was Tyler giving Tyler Tyler’s advice.

But in another way she really was Sissy: Sissy cut loose from memory. His memory had lost its grip on Sissy the way a child might lose its grip on a balloon; and like a balloon she had risen up, had floated out of his head and come to rest in the passenger seat beside him.

Sissy advised him to drive to Oregon, hike down from the coastal mountains to Buchanan, assume a leadership position among these ragged refugees.

Lead them east, Sissy said.

To the gathering place of the survivors, a new home in the valley of the Ohio River, a sheltered place—or so Tyler told them, and it had even seemed true for a while.

But Sissy—always a repository of unpleasant surprises—had been coy about their destination.

Tyler led his caravan up a road walled with granite, threading a path around fallen rock. Whenever he turned his head to the right he found Sissy gazing at him. Today she was bright as the sun, her plump cheeks a blazing white, difficult to look at.

Those people back east, Sissy said. They surrounded themselves with Helpers. They talk to Helpers.

“True,” Tyler said.

Helpers are the voice of that thing in the sky… “I know,” Tyler said, weary of these cryptic pronouncements. Sissy’s eyes, volatile and relentless, demanded answers he was helpless to produce… and of the dead. “Dead what?” The skinless living.

The Contactees, Tyler interpreted. Contactees who had died might be able to speak through the Helpers. The dead might talk to the living. Tyler said, “The danger…”

They’ll talk about you, John. That girl you killed in Loftus. Maybe it will be Murdoch talking. Maybe Murdoch crossed over, too. And who else might talk? They might talk about Stuttgart. They might remember every sin you ever committed.

This was a new and unwelcome idea.

People will know what you are.

Peevishly: “I’m no worse than the rest.”

They’ll know about Loftus. They’ll call you killer.

Would they? Extraordinary circumstances, Tyler thought. Alien possession. The girl had been… not human.

Anyway, he told himself, I’m a man of some stature. A man who served his country, a man who made a place for himself in the business world. A man who had once been a familiar presence in the Capitol Building, a man accustomed to lunching with Defense Department functionaries or the members of oversight committees. Above certain kinds of i

That’s a joke, Sissy said. Another Washington crook. What’s the difference?

Tyler worked at remembering that period of his life. It had been structured, formal, complex. In those days he had known how to seal off this Sissy part of himself. Compartment A: The presentable Colonel Tyler. Compartment B: Certain phantoms. Certain urges.

But with Contact, the borders had grown tenuous. Like a naval vessel, he thought. Bulkheads breached. Flooding in the engine room. Fire in the hold.

The sad fact was, he talked to this ghost because he had no choice. Pay attention, Sissy scolded him. To…?

The danger! You can’t risk being exposed.

But even Colonel Tyler had dreamed of that green valley in Ohio. A gathering place, a new life—safety. A trap, Sissy said.

“But if not there,” Tyler said aloud, “if that’s not where we’re going…”

But when he turned to pose the question, Sissy had vanished.

They came across a fallen telephone pole blocking the highway. Tyler called a halt, then enlisted Joey Commoner and Chuck Makepeace to work a chain around the pole and hook it to the rear of the pickup.

Tyler revved the Ford’s heavy-duty engine, inching forward against the drag. The pole gave a moan of stressed timber and then began to shift.

Tyler took careful note of the people who had climbed out of their campers and RVs to drink bottled soda and watch the show.

Kindle and Wheeler stood together, both poker-faced. Wheeler in particular seemed to be working to disguise some emotion. His resentment, Tyler supposed, at being elbowed out of the leadership position.

Among the rest Tyler identified idle curiosity, some cautious frowns from the likes of Abby Cushman and Miriam Flett, frank idolatry from Joey Commoner.

He turned away to measure his progress, and when he looked again he was surprised to see Sissy among the crowd—a more ethereal presence.

A dry wind came rivering down this pass, but Sissy’s long, tangled hair hung limply over her shoulders; her layered clothes stirred not at all.

She extended her hand over the head of the new boy, William.

This one, Sissy said. Her lips moved soundlessly, but Tyler heard the words as if they were his own. Watch out for this one.

He drove until sunset.

“A lot of settlers came through here,” Kindle said. “Mormons, especially, but also people on the Oregon Trail, the California Trail. You can still find their wagon tracks on the scrub prairie about forty miles north.”

Matt walked with his friend along the highway away from camp.

They had stopped for the night along a stretch of high Wyoming rock desert that seemed to Matt infinitely dry, silent, and immense. Di