Dark Harvest

PART FOUR Blood

The bell tolls midnight.

Ricks says: “Give me the pistol.”

“I think I hit him,” Riley says, handing over the.38. “I’m pretty sure that last shot — ”

“Uh-uh. You didn’t hit shit, kid. Unless you want to count that church door. You hit that thing five fucking times. But don’t worry about it. At least you did one thing right.”

“What do you mean?”

“You pulled the trigger five times. That means you left one bullet in the gun. And being as it’s past midnight, there’s one place I’d really like to put it.”

“Huh?”

Ricks smiles. Jesus. This kid really is a spud with a pretty thick jacket.

He jams the.38 under Riley Blake’s chin.

He pulls the trigger.

Two hundred and thirty pounds of useless hits the ground.

Kelly grips Pete’s hand in the darkness. “Thank God you’re okay. Those last two shots when you were coming through the door — I thought you might have been hit.”

“No,” Pete says. “I’m still on my feet. Looks like he is, too.”

Ahead of them, the October Boy walks slowly down the aisle. He’s unsteady but holding on, his left hand catching the endcaps of oak pews as he advances from one row to the next. Ribbons of moonlight spill through narrow stained-glass windows, falling like bars across his path. They’re the color of blood and bruises, and the Boy wades through them, his battered head dipping on that braided-vine neck, light from the lightning-bolt crack flashing through the stained murk like a yellow knife.

Pete watches, not quite trusting his own eyes.

It’s past midnight, and the October Boy is still on his feet.

It’s past midnight, and the October Boy is inside the church.

He’s won.

Six hours ago, Pete never could have imagined that he’d be standing in this place, silently celebrating the Boy’s victory. It’s a strange moment, because Pete knows he made that victory possible. Just a few hours ago he was intent on killing the thing that’s walking down the aisle on scarecrow legs, and now he’d run to help the Boy if he stumbled.

But the October Boy doesn’t stumble. He moves forward with head bowed, approaching an icon this town abandoned long ago. Pete stares at the big cross nailed up there on the wall. That thing has never meant much to him. He sat beneath it on a thousand Sunday mornings he can’t recall. He sat beneath it on one day — the day of his mother’s funeral — that he’ll never forget. He knows what the cross is supposed to mean, and there’s a part of him that would like to think that maybe it could mean those things — in another place, to other people. But not here, not to him, and not to a boy who ended up on his knees in a cornfield with a gun pressed against his head while an entire town turned its back.

So the sight of the October Boy moving toward the cross — slowly, almost reverently — surprises Pete McCormick. But Jim Shepard’s head is bowed no longer. As he nears the altar, he stares up at the cross. His carved features are projected on the wall ahead, and the crack slicing from stem to chin covers the cross like a jagged hunk of molten steel just pulled from a forge.

And then the Boy looks away, and the wall goes black. The light from his head spotlights the floor below the altar. There’s something there, something Pete didn’t notice until now, something that lies hidden in the darkness.

Pete starts up the aisle, straining to see the thing that separates the Boy from the cross.

The thing the Boy was focused on all along as he walked the aisle with head bowed.

A few steps, and Pete sees that thing clearly.

It’s a dead man with a shotgun clutched tightly in his hands.

The gun is aimed at the place where his head used to be.

Ricks doesn’t waste time looking at the dead boy lying face down on the blacktop. The fat punk doesn’t matter now. The way the lawman sees it, nothing much matters, because it’s five minutes past midnight, and the pumpkin-headed freak is inside the church, and that means an entire way of life just went to hell in a handbasket.

Uh-huh. The October Boy ran the fucking gauntlet. He made it down the black road… made it all the way through town. Got two tons of Detroit steel wrapped around him and managed to crawl away. Five lead slugs drilled holes in a door as he ducked through it, and not one of them splattered his Jack o’ Lantern skull. And once he made it inside the church… well, things must have been just fine and dandy in there as the bell tolled twelve, because Ricks sure as hell didn’t hear any riot gun booming in the night.

The cop doesn’t waste time wondering what happened to Dan Shepard. He doesn’t care if the weepy bastard turned rabbit and hippity-hopped down the road; he doesn’t care if Shepard’s down on his knees kissing his misfit kid’s feet. The only thing that matters to Ricks is that the end credits are rolling on the world as he knows it. All you have to do is take a quick glance to the north and you’ll see the curtain coming down on this show.

Hell, forget coming down. The damn curtain’s burning up. Those three fires kindled by the October Boy have joined together into one king-size conflagration that’s cremating the poor side of town. It’s like someone dumped a bucket of coals on the curtains in the movie theater across the street, and the flames are burning that dark velvet to cinders, scorching the night clean off the raw white screen underneath.

Jesus. That’s a hell of a thing to think.

The lawman plucks six cartridges from his gunbelt. This time they don’t look anything like a fistful of fresh-spawned trout. He feeds the bullets into the.38’s cylinder and starts across Main Street.

He checks his step as a rattletrap Chevy makes the corner of Oak and blows by him, and by the time his foot hits the curb on the other side of the street an old Ford’s doing the same. Ricks turns to the west, watching that Chevy blow across the Line, watching the Ford do the same. Both cars cross the city limits just like that… like there’s no Line at all anymore, and no Jerry Ricks to stop them, and no Harvester’s Guild to watch for in the rearview mirror.

Taillights swim in the distance as the two cars disappear into the night. Ricks wipes a trickle of blood from the gash in his forehead. Wow. He steps off the curb on one side of the street, and the world works one way. By the time he makes it to the opposite curb, things don’t work that way anymore. That’s how fast people change when the status quo goes up in flames. The hell with this, they figure, and they get their scorched asses out of Dodge PDQ.

Some people might call that courage. Ricks won’t go that far. The way he sees it, the people in those cars are just about as brave as a pack of rats skittering off a sinking ship before it heads for Davey Jones’s locker. You want to call that courage — go ahead, that’s fine with Jerry. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that it does the same job — those cars are gone, and the black road waits for more, and Jerry Ricks doesn’t figure it will be waiting for long.

Well, he figures, that’s the way the mop flops. Maybe in a little while, Jerry will get his ass out of Dodge, too. Maybe… but first he’s got some unfinished business to attend to. He’s got six bullets in his gun, and he figures that’ll be just enough to batten down the hatches on the way things used to be.

The dead man’s face is gone, pale skin butchered to blood and bone by the shotgun still gripped in his hands. Even so, the October Boy recognizes the corpse. He knows this man’s hands, and he recognizes the simple gold wedding ring on his finger.

Jim Shepard is the product of that ring. Seeing it now there is only one word in his head, and it’s the same word that crossed his bristling smile when his father finished carving his face just a few hours ago.

Why?

Jim’s father didn’t give his son an answer when Jim spoke that word in the cornfield, but he has given him one now. It’s plain enough, lying there on the floor. Mute, voiceless. Skinned of the components that allowed it to see and the part of it that could smile. Stripped down to red meat and the ruined mechanics of bone and muscle.

That’s the way you look once you’re broken for good. If you’re a man, not a machine, and your gears are stripped smooth and you just can’t run anymore. And that’s what the men in the Guild didn’t understand when they placed Dan Shepard between the finish line and his eldest son. They put Dan there to stop his boy, when they should have realized that his gearbox had been ground down to filings a year ago, out in that cornfield. He could never haul that load again. Pop the hood, check the engine, you’ll see that clearly. Take the machine down to muscle and bone, test the wear and tear on the life contained in that wedding ring and the easy trigger action on that shotgun, you’ll wonder how anyone could have figured Dan was capable of stopping anyone besides himself.

Hell, a kid who just spent a year buried in the ground can see that plain enough, and he just has a couple of holes hacked in his hollow head — he doesn’t even have any eyes.

“You figuring it out yet, you fucking freak?” Jerry Ricks screams from the street. “You king of the hill now? You cock of the walk? Uh-uh. You know better than that, don’t you? You’re just a goddamn weed with a heartbeat. That’s all you were when you came out of the ground, and it’s all you’ll be from here on out. ’Cause you’ve got nowhere else to go!

“Yeah!” Ricks yells. “Twelve dings of a bell didn’t really change much, did it, Jimmy? You should have let one of those wet-nosed morons take you down when you had a chance! They would have done it quick! Not me, boy… I’m gonna make sure you suffer! I’m gonna prune you back an inch at a time!”

Staring down at the broken remains of his father, those words gust through Jim’s head like a winter wind. But words can’t extinguish the fire that burns there. Jim’s sawtoothed smile closes in a tight grimace as he takes his father’s hand in his own. Gently, he slides the wedding ring from Dan Shepard’s finger. He holds it there in his wounded hand — the hand with three fingers — for a long moment.

“I’ll take care of the rest of you, too!” Ricks screams. “Don’t think I won’t! Every one of you in there is as good as dead! McCormick… Kelly Haines. And if you’re in there, Dan, I’m coming for you, too, you sniveling piece of shit!”

Oh, yes. Dan is here, along with all those other fathers who ended up in that cornfield, and all those other sons who died while their fathers watched. Jim feels his father in the ring he holds in his hand. He feels the others in the places where rusty nails punctured his knotted body and held him to a crosspiece.

He feels all of them. Here. Now.

Those feelings linger, but Jim Shepard does not. He slides that band of gold onto the ring finger of his left hand. In another moment he’s on his feet. He turns his back to the altar, his carved eyes trained on the young man standing near the church door.

The October Boy starts toward him.

The fury in his eyes lights up the shadows.

His sandpaper voice scrapes over the pews.

“Give me your gun,” he says.

Spoken in the October Boy’s voice, those words can only sound like a threat. They strip a layer off Pete’s bravery. His fear is a product of the town, the same way the Run is. It’s the kind of reaction designed to shatter the bond shared by a couple of boys named McCormick and Shepard. And you understand that better than anyone, because you’ve walked in Pete McCormick’s shoes, and you’ve walked on the October Boy’s severed-root feet. You know them both, and a hundred others like them buried out in that black field where your bones were sown.

So you know what happens in the moment when these two forces converge. That moment has always been the same, as inevitable as it is explosive. But that’s not the way it turned out tonight. Tonight the template changed. One half of that equation reached out to the other, and together they stepped past midnight into a moment where everything was different.

That moment passes between them now, in a single glance. The scorching glare from a pair of carved sockets reveals the icy gleam in a pair of blue eyes. Different forms of the same fire, and both are burning bright.

But only one of them can deliver that fire into tomorrow.

For that to happen, the other must burn it down to cinders tonight.

“You can’t do it alone,” Pete says, because he doesn’t want to believe the inevitable. But Jim Shepard knows better. The thoughts contained behind his battered Halloween mask of a face are clear in a way Pete’s thoughts can’t be.

“I know what’s left for me,” Jim says.

He looks at Pete, and at the girl, and at the open door behind them.

“The rest is left for you.”

Even before the words are spoken, Pete understands what the Boy is saying. A dozen arguments fill his thoughts. But they’re his thoughts, not the thoughts he shares with the Boy, not products of the final night that joins them. And as soon as Pete realizes that, the fire from the Boy’s eyes burns every one of Pete’s arguments to ashes.

Pete swallows hard and hands over the gun.

There are no other good-byes.

There don’t need to be.

Three fingers and a thumb tighten around the butt of the pistol, and the October Boy’s index finger creeps through the trigger guard. The boy and the girl hurry down the aisle, heading for the back exit of the church. The Boy’s gaze follows them — all hard strobes and flickers, that busted gash spotlighting their path as they make their way through the shadows.

Jim Shepard doesn’t want to miss this moment.

It’s the one moment tonight that matters most.

Pete McCormick and Kelly Haines pass the altar without a second glance.

The back door stands open, and they step through it together.

The door swings closed.

And the fire inside the October Boy is fed. It’s doubly strong now, and it glows brighter than before. Because the boy destined to follow Jim into a cornfield grave is gone. He’s headed for the black road, heading toward tomorrow without a detour in sight. And so that fire’s eating at that battered rind, warping that lead-lined door that held back an Atomic Fireball fury. It seeps through that jagged crack of a wound, bubbling over those jagged teeth like lava escaping a volcano. It spills down the Boy’s neck, following the veins that root inside him, and it drips onto his coat, splashing against frayed blue denim and traveling on, splattering the church floor, scorching black circles on the carpet as the October Boy stalks toward the heavy oaken doors.

“C’mon out of there, chickenshit! Come on out before I come in and — ”

Jerry Ricks stands at the bottom of the brick staircase. Gun out, mouth open. Neither does him any good. Because the church doors fly open as that last word crosses his lips, and the October Boy is through the gap before those doors even have a chance to bang against scar-colored bricks.

His head spits fire.

A stolen.45 rises in his hand.

The hammer crashes against hard steel. Muzzle-flash lightning escapes the barrel. A bullet tears through Ricks’s shoulder, but he doesn’t even feel it. He’s too busy pulling the.38’s trigger. The slug rips through denim and vine, and the October Boy staggers against the railing as a second and third slug chew holes through his chest.

But he doesn’t fall back. Hell, no. He comes forward, fingers closing over the railing as he rides it… spilling down those stairs like a two-legged nightmare… raising the.45 while he makes the trip….

And another bullet hits Ricks where the first one did, carving the meat off his shoulder. Ricks tries to raise his gun, but the muscles meant to do that job don’t work anymore. The pain comes hard and fast, and so does the Boy. He’s still charging forward… and Ricks stumbles back a half dozen steps… and a third bullet chews through his shoulder, chopping his deltoid to hamburger, shearing rotator cuff, shattering his humerus bone in its socket.

Ricks spits his cigarette into the flowerbed lining the brick walkway. His shoulder is jelly hanging off the bone. Convulsively, his finger jerks the.38’s trigger one last time, but he’s not aiming at anything anymore. The bullet sparks off the brick walkway. The October Boy’s whiskbroom foot covers the spot as he advances, firing again. The bullet cores Ricks’s guts, exploding a pair of vertebrae on its way out, and Ricks drops his pistol and sinks to his knees.

And there he is. Right there. The Boy is on him now. A cloud of gunpowder… the stink of scorched cinnamon. Ricks tastes it in the air, tastes it along with his own blood.

Brown eyes gleam in his skinned face as he stares up at Dan Shepard’s kid. The thing from the cornfield doesn’t have any eyes. Just a headful of fire. The creature reaches out, fingers twining through Ricks’s hair like a trio of rattlesnakes. It raises the lawman’s head; it stares down. Drops of blazing pulp pour over its barbed teeth, splattering Ricks’s face like battery acid.

That’s bad, but what’s coming is worse.

The Boy jams the.45’s barrel against Jerry Ricks’s temple.

The hot metal scores the lawman’s flesh like a branding iron.

A sawtoothed smile lights up the cop’s bloody face.

“You remember this part, don’t you?”

Those words hit Ricks like another bullet. He glares up at the pumpkin-headed freak. He remembers, all right. Goddamn right he does. Out there in the cornfield. A dozen trips… maybe more. A dozen bullets. Maybe more. His gun pressed against all those heads… his callused finger pulling the trigger time and time again.

Someone else pulls the trigger now.

Muzzle flash scorches the side of the lawman’s head.

Brain and bone and blood splatter the flowerbed.

By the time he hits the ground, Jerry Ricks can’t remember anything anymore.

But some things can’t be forgotten. Neither can they be contained… not within the head of the October Boy, and not within the borders of the dark little town.

Gouts of fire spill through the October Boy’s eyes and blacken the wound slashing across his face. He steps over Jerry Ricks’s corpse, knowing he has done the last thing this night demands of him, but the fury required to do that thing can’t be tamped down now that it has been unleashed.

And so it burns. The October Boy’s body is tinder ready for the spark, but his head is a furnace. And the fire in his brain takes things from him — his anger, his pain — but these are not the things he wanted to keep. Those things have passed to another now, and Pete McCormick will carry them with him as he follows a path traveling out of the darkness.

That path, too, is carved by fire. An inferno has ravaged the neighborhoods. Jerry Ricks’s house is gone — his gun cabinet is less than a cinder. The heavy bag that hung in his backyard has shed its canvas skin, spilling sand over the black concrete below. The front lawn where Kelly and Pete had their dustup with Riley Blake and Marty Weston is an ashy blanket woven with dying sparks. The market on Oak is a charred carcass, home to flame, swirling soot, and the stink of burning meat.

The air is heavy with smoke. Slivers of black ash skitter across the full moon like bats on the wing, and sparks rain down from the night sky in firefly swarms. They make cradles of dying leaves, catching fire in the oak tree above the October Boy’s head, peppering his shoulders with cinder and ash as he follows the brick walkway.

He makes his way to the street. A hot red wave rises above the rooftops across Main. Flames gutter through the alley that parallels the railroad tracks, firing masoned bricks as if they were the walls of a gigantic oven. Blistering heat cracks the weakest bricks like old bones, scorching the inside walls of those buildings, tindering new blazes that burst alive in dark corners. And soon mushrooms of black smoke billow against a dozen ceilings, and hungry flames search for air and fuel — riding lacquered wood, torching cloth and paper, boiling water trapped in pipes, scalding gas lines that rupture and ignite.

Across the street, the movie theater’s windows explode. Broken glass rains down, splattering the windshields of two cars racing down Main toward the black road, and a gigantic fireball rolls over the blacktop, singeing their rear bumpers as they pass.

Snakes of fire crawl up the front of the theater, slithering across the marquee, melting the red letters that cling there. The October Boy watches as red plastic drizzles to the cement below. The words slip away; a curtain of sparks rains down. And it’s the same inside the Boy. The Red Vines braided within his body melt like the letters on the marquee; pockets of memory burn to black in his head; molten fire peels away wax paper and scorches his beating candy heart.

That’s all that is left. Fire in the building, fire in the Boy. Those marquee letters are gone now, and so are his memories. And so are the words and the world they made. Inside the theater, reels of film burn like rolls of midnight crepe. The projectors are melted wrecks. All that remains is a building shorn of purpose, an inferno blazing inside its open brick jaws. And so the October Boy moves toward it with a black skull tottering on his shoulders that looks almost human now, and a jacket that’s more ash than denim, and a gun still gripped in his hand.

He walks toward that fiery mouth, smiling his last smile.

This is the place he’s meant to go.

This is the place where stories find their endings.

But they don’t always die. No. Like fire, like fury, stories can’t always be contained.

A car races toward the Boy as he steps into the street. Its windows are glowing orange, as if the car is stoked with coals. There’s a face behind that reflected fire, a face that grows smaller as the car whips by. It’s a boy’s face… a little kid staring through the rear window at the burning thing walking in the streets… and the boy sheds his blazing mask as the car speeds down Main and the reflection streams off the glass, but he doesn’t shed the look of wonder kindled in his eyes.

“The October Boy,” he whispers.

The October Boy….

That car speeds away, disappearing into the night. Other cars do the same as the town empties out. Some take the black road, some take roads that head in other directions. But it’s not destination that governs the routes they follow. It’s raw chance, and rawer emotion — fear and excitement, joy and rage — a thousand different shades smeared across the burning palate of the night.

And that’s a different state of affairs around here. In this town the human animal’s most unpredictable quality has always been contained, buttoned down, nailed up. Until tonight. Tonight all bets are off. The Harvester’s Guild and the men who ran it have scattered in the darkness. The walls are falling in those cramped little houses. The invisible Line that penned up this world is gone.

Pete McCormick understands that as he and Kelly stand at the side of the year-old Cadillac he boosted behind the brick church. Not that it was hard to snatch those wheels — the keys were in the ignition and the gleaming machine’s doors were unlocked, just as Pete knew they’d be. Because the man who drove that car was finished with it before he slammed its door for the last time. Pete sees that now, even though he didn’t know the man who drove this car. He sees it, because there’s a part of him that’s looking at things through a pair of carved eyes that belonged to somebody else.

Seen that way, the world looks a little different. So does this moment. It’s not the way Pete expected it to look a couple of hours ago, not at all the way he imagined it in his mind’s eye. He looks across the gravel parking lot in front of the grain elevator, and there’s ample evidence of that. Because, hey, Pete’s human, the same way Jim Shepard was. He’s got his own emotional palate, and even now the big brush of the night’s working the colors inside him.

Pete feels that happening as his little sister rushes toward him, tears in her eyes.

He feels it, too, as he stares at his father standing there next to his old beater of a Dodge, his lined face headstone gray as he watches his daughter go.

Smoke and ash paint the distance between father and son, but that doesn’t hide anything from Pete. His eyes are icy blue, fashioned from flesh and blood that burn and sting in the hot winds whipped by the inferno a couple miles distant, but those aren’t the eyes he’s looking through now. No. His eyes are a pair of fiery triangles that cut through the smoke and cut through the night. They slice it up the same way they cleaved the darkness that blanketed the brick church, only this time they don’t find a dead man on the floor.

No. Not this time.

Kim’s feet crunch over gravel as she runs toward her brother. There’s a grocery bag clutched in her hands. In a town where no one owns a suitcase, that paper bag’s the best she could do. It can’t hold much — a few clothes, and a stuffed animal her mother gave her. Not everything Kim wanted to take with her. Not everything she can’t do without, or won’t miss.

But that’s the way it is.

A time like this… things the way they are… you can’t take everything with you.

So you take the things that are most important.

You take the things that can’t be left behind.

And that’s what Pete McCormick does. His foot’s heavy on the gas. The Cadillac burrows through the flames as it speeds down backstreets, catching Main at the edge of town. A quick turn and there’s the black road — fire threshing through the corn as the rolling inferno busts the city limits, the Cadillac pressing on through the night as it does the same.

That road does not meander. Like a planned path of escape, it cleaves a sea of blazing quarter sections, and so does the Caddy. The black car races through fields where scores of dead boys lie buried under cornstalk pyres, its big engine fighting for ground as fire climbs a rough-hewn crossbar heavy with rusty nails and tumbles on in the night.

Spark and ash spatter the windshield, but ahead there’s hard clean darkness.

Pete charges toward it. Racing the fire, racing the night.

A quick glance in the rearview, and he says, “Look behind you, Dad.”

“No,” his father says. “Not anymore. Not ever.”

Jeff McCormick’s eyes are trained on that hard yellow line ahead. He won’t look back. But Pete looks, and longer this time. Kim’s in the backseat — his little sister is burrowed in Kelly’s arms. And behind them the sky is as red as the devil’s own furnace, banked tight against a scorched penny of a moon.

The Caddy travels on as that penny melts in the night.

The flames travel, too.

But they can’t catch Pete McCormick.

He’s much too fast.

He’s already gone….