Dark Harvest, page 12
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…
About the Author
NORMAN PARTRIDGE’S fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story” says his friend Joe Lansdale. Partridge’s novels include the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. His latest novel, Dark Harvest, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. Partridge’s compact, thrill-a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his collections and stories have received both the Bram Stoker and IHG awards. A complete bibliography, free fiction and commentary, and news about upcoming projects can be found at
www.normanpartridge.com.
Norman Partridge, Dark Harvest
