The Harvest

“Abby, he’s not human. Look!” Nudging the limp body with his foot. “This isn’t blood! Christ’s sake! It looks like thirty-weight motor oil! Jesus!”

Did any of that matter?

No, Abby thought.

In a gesture that surprised even herself, Abby collected all the saliva that remained in her dry mouth and spat into Colonel Tyler’s face. Her aim was precise.

Tyler froze.

Everyone in the room—a crowd, now, including Bob Ganish, Paul Jacopetti, and Joey Commoner, who was holding her from behind—froze and waited.

“Take her to her trailer,” the Colonel said. The spittle ran down his cheek, and his voice was a razory whine. “Take her there and keep her there. I’ll deal with this later.”

Rosa Perry Co

She moved in the sky with an easy familiarity. The sky was not an empty space, not a vacuum; it was an ocean, Rosa thought, rich with currents, inviting discovery, appreciation, acrobatics: glides and sweeping, sensuous curves. It was intoxicating.

She watched her shadow flow across dry rangeland, over scrub and cheat grass like ocean swells far below. The sun was warm on her wings.

She knew what had happened in the Co

It was the human tragedy that saddened him.

Tragedy is what they live in, Rosa thought. Tragedy is their ocean, William—their air.

He touched her with a sad rebuke that was not quite contradiction. You were human once.

Yes, Rosa acknowledged. She fixed her attention on the far peak of Home, china-blue in the morning light. Human once, she thought. But not anymore.

Abby Cushman was confined after some struggle in her camper with Joey standing guard at the door.

Dazed beyond thinking and weak with grief, she pressed her face against the window and watched Rosa’s orchid-colored wings grow small in the southern sky.

Chapter 33

Provocation

Beth came out of her camper at the sound of the gunshot and hurried into the farmhouse. She found Abby Cushman in tears, Joey and Bob Ganish leading her away.

Upstairs, Matt Wheeler was arguing with Colonel Tyler. Beth stood at the stairway end of the corridor, too far away to hear the argument clearly, but she was startled by the ferocity of it and by the way Colonel Tyler’s hand hovered near his pistol.

The unexplained violence in the air made her dizzy. These two admirable men, Matt in faded jeans and shirt, the Colonel in a threadbare officer’s jacket, looked used-up, worn out by their own anger.

She heard Matt say something about killing. And Colonel Tyler, fiercely: He was some kind of spy.

Not human, she heard Tyler say.

Who were they talking about?

Then Matt told Tyler he couldn’t make a prisoner of Abby Cushman, and Tyler said the doctor wasn’t in a position to give orders, and there were more of these bitter, clipped words, until Matt stalked away—Beth concealed herself in an empty bedroom as he passed—and the argument was finished.

She was surprised by a sudden thought that both of these men had touched her: Tyler with his large hand, Matt more intimately. Somehow, she was a party to this.

She walked down the corridor to Colonel Tyler.

He registered her presence, though his eyes were distant.

Beth said, “What happened?” Peering past him into a room where the window was open, broken, and there was an acrid smell—“Is that blood in there?”

The Colonel put his hand on her shoulder, another touch, and steered her away.

“I’ll explain,” he said.

It was William who had been the spy. The boy was dead.

The Colonel explained, and Beth retired to her camper.

They had acquired all these vehicles at a dealership in the Willamette Valley, on the eastern side of the Coast Range where the storm hadn’t done as much damage. It was strange, Beth thought, everybody driving these $40,000 Travelaire and Citations with co

Everything we ever made, Beth thought—we human beings—most of it was boxes. A house is a box, she thought; an office building is a box. A TV is a box, and a microwave oven is a box of radiation. All these boxes. Nobody made boxes anymore. All the boxes we’ll ever need, Beth thought idly, people left them lying around for free.

Alone, she listened to the morning’s violence echo and rebound through the camp. Footsteps, doors slammed, angry voices now and then.

She wasn’t accustomed to violence. Her family had never been violent, unless you counted her father’s occasional deer hunts. Her mother was a careful, prim woman who left home and moved to Terre Haute with a new husband when Beth was fifteen years old. Her father was often angry, but he never actually hit her. Since that trouble when she was fourteen, her quick D C at a Seattle hospital, he had seldom even looked at her. Nobody had looked at her, except to laugh or make fun—except Joey.

She dozed through the afternoon, afraid of what might be happening outside. At di

Joey watched her the way he always watched her—following her with i his eyes, not making a big deal of it, but relentlessly. She felt his attention like a toothache. He had been watching her like this every day since they had left Buchanan, a casual proprietary surveillance that made her itch with indignation.

She decided she wasn’t hungry. She turned her back on the men and walked to the front of the farmhouse and inside, although the hot-metal odor of this morning’s bloodshed was still hanging in the air. Miriam Flett was inside, sitting in a chair doing nothing. Watching the dust float. Beth approached her with caution. She imagined the old woman must be horribly sad. It was obvious she’d liked that boy; even if he was a spy, not human.

Miriam looked up at Beth’s approach, her face crowded with wrinkles.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s all right.” Miriam’s voice was a dry whisper.

“You must—” Was this the right thing to say? “You must feel terrible. I’m sorry about what happened.”

“They told you about it?”

“The Colonel did. He said William was—uh—”

“Not entirely human,” Miriam supplied. “But I knew that about him.”

“Did you? Still… he died. It’s sad.”

“If he wasn’t human,” Miriam said primly, “he didn’t die.”

It took Beth a moment to interpret this. “I guess not. It’s hard to get used to the idea, though.”

Then Miriam did something Beth had not seen her do before: She smiled.

“It was hard for me, too,” she said.

There was some talk of moving on, or back to the truckstop, some place away from this unhappy house, but Colonel Tyler vetoed the idea, at least until morning. They could sleep in their vehicles; there was no real urgency. Beth supposed he was right. But the encampment that evening was steeped in an ugly silence.