Harvest Moon

It was a black night due to the new moon. In cities you could just make out the edge of the moon, due to the Earthshine. Only people watching closely noticed it dimmed just as a large spaceship landed on its face, due to its dark color and slow speed. And those that saw it, saw a 10% shift in all light due to its cloaking capabilities and shook it off as tiredness. Nobody really knew that the harvest had begun until it was too late to stop it, but everywhere a low piercing sound was heard.

Diana awoke to pain in her abdomen, she had started her menstrual cycle the night before and had trouble sleeping. When she woke up, by instinct she grabbed her towel and a tampon from her lock box and headed straight for the showers.

This was the hottest shower she'd had since she entered the Air Force and wondered why she hadn't been reprimanded for oversleeping. “No "Reveille"?”, she thought, as she finished a quick shower. She dried off, applying her tampon and getting her uniform on, before finding the rest of her recruit platoon, who's hampers were bare as though no one had showered. It had already started off as a bad day and she knew it would only get worse since she'd be in trouble and earn a reprimand. She reentered the dormitory and then she noticed that some of the sheets and blankets had been drug off the beds and onto the floor. It looked like two of her bunkmates had been drug away with their blankets. She noticed the time. It was just before 10 am. Why had no one woken her? It was hard to think at all, with all of that buzzing.

“What....? No, that can't be?”, she thought to herself after noticing the time.

She looked in on her military training instructor. Her bed looked disheveled, and a gun was on the ground. She began to realize something was really wrong.

She put on her flight suit, and went back to her training instructor's room, and armed herself before leaving the barracks. There were no people around. Birds and insects seemed to be swarming and scared of her as she moved through the airfield. They stayed close to the ground as though they were hiding from something else. She checked the mess hall, the obstacle course and even the officer's quarters. She looked everywhere on the base that there should be people. She found no one, and barely a few signs of struggle. “How does a boot camp base get taken down without any survivors?”, she thought. It was the crashed cars at the gates that told her this was more than just the barracks and decided to fly herself home to make sure her family was safe. Luckily her father was a pilot and had taught her how to fly in her teens, even though these planes were much more sophisticated she remembered her few training sessions on the flight simulators.

Diana fueled up a small plane. And took off for Philadelphia, to check on her family and hopefully find out what is going on around here and everywhere.

The first thing she did was check the radio. All she got was static on every channel. She called out, but there were no responses on any of them. It was as if every human had vanished overnight.

She called out on the airfield channel, just in case someone was listening to record her destination. She took to the sky heading for home. As she got above the city, the only difference she noticed were large strange thorny celery like plants the size of trees everywhere, along the river valleys across the country. She had never seen anything like them. But it wasn't until she was closer to home, that she realized that they didn't belong anywhere. She had spent most of her life riding trains and buses throughout the tristate area and had never seen anything like them in her life. But now they had arisen near every waterway. She had also not seen a single plane, any traffic, or people on the ground during her flight either. She began to be scared for her family as well as all of humanity.

She landed her plane at the Northeast Airfield since it was close to where she grew up as a kid. When she landed, she saw that some of the plane's doors were left open as if the pilots had run from their vehicles. Some wheel chocks were drug across the field, and some of the planes had piled up while taxiing. One even knocked down some of the fencing. She called out over the radio on several channels and got nothing but static in return.

She opened her cockpit and was greeted with the same piercing sound she had heard back at her base. She climbed out of her plane and began looking for a way out of the airport. The terminal doors were locked to the airfield, so she looked around and found some bolt cutters. She found a locked gate and used the bolt cutters on the lock. She then unwrapped the chain wrapped around the gate. It hit the ground with a thud, and she unbolted the rest of the gate. It was going to take a while to get home without public transportation, but the Air Force had prepared her for a run. She searched some of the planes and found some water and trail mix for her trouble. She then began to run home to see her family.

After she ran a mile or two down Roosevelt Boulevard, she took a rest. As she stretched out in the street, she heard a shopping cart being pushed down one of the side streets. She decided to follow the sound even though it was off the main route. Any chance to see another human being at this point was worth it. As she came to a three way crossing, she looked both ways and saw nothing.

She then heard the shopping cart come down off of a curb. As she turned around, she saw a tall stocky man pushing a shopping cart full of water and nonperishables come out from behind a truck. He was looking at her taking in her lovely curvy body.

“Hey you! What happened here?”, Diana yelled down the block.

The man was stunned that she was real, dropped his cart and started running away.

“Oh, no you don't!”, Diana yelled as she started running after him.

She caught up to him quickly due to his weight.

“Why are you running?”, she demanded as she got close to him.

“They'll get us and take us away too!”, the man cried.

“Who are they and where are they taking people?”, she said, as she caught him and spun him around.

“I don't know. Some white bugs or something. Please, they'll take us both”, he dropped to his knees breathing heavily.

“Look, I haven't seen anyone or anything. They took everyone from my Air Force boot camp. I need to know what's going on and why I got left behind. Can you help me?”, Diana asked.

“I guess.... I could try but we have to get indoors before they find us. They're out more at night than during the day. I think that they're making that squealing sound. I can show you what they are when we get home”, he said.

Diana nodded in agreement.

“OK, but we have to hurry. They disembowel people as they take you away,” he said as he points to a trail of blood close to them. As Diana looked around, she noticed that there were many around seemingly at random.

“So, what's your name?”, Diana asked.

“David. What's yours?”, he asked.

“It's Diana. You're the first person I've seen in two cities,” she said with a fearful voice.

“You mean this was nationwide?”, David asked.

“Sure seems it”, she responded.

“I was hoping it was some invasive species, or government accident gone haywire locally. Do you think it could be worldwide?”, David asked after a big gulp.

“Possibly, but there is no telling without more data. But if the United States Air Force was thrown down, it just may be,” she continued.

“Just do me a favor. Keep that to yourself. I don't want my family to freak more than they have”, he said.

She nodded and the rest of their walk was silent except for the sound of the wheels on the cart.

They turned down a street with row homes and stopped in the middle of the block. He walked up two flights of stairs to a brick house and opened the heavily locked door. There were several cameras looking out toward the streets. After he got the door open, they both emptied the cart into a small hall. After they both got their last packs of water in the door, David locked several freshly installed locks, and Diana felt safe for the first time since all of this started.

A door opened from upstairs.

“David is that you?”, an elderly woman's voice asked.

“Yeah, mom it's me,” he responded as he started hauling the food and water towards the kitchen with Diana following his lead.

“Did you remember your father's medications?”, she asked as she came down the stairs.

“Yes, I did,” he said as he started unloading his jacket pockets of medicine bottles.

“Oh, who's this?”, she asked as Diana startled her as she came out of the kitchen.

“This is Diana, I found her in the streets. She says she's from the Air Force”, David said as he found each bottle his father needed.

“What's all of this?”, his mother asked seeing all of the bottles.

“We don't know how long this will last so, I got anything we might need in an emergency”, he said.

“That was good thinking Dave”, Diana said, “Who knows when things will get better?”

“Don't you?”, his mother asked, “After all you are with the military right?”

“I'm sorry ma'am, I was in boot camp and wasn't given much instruction. I'm hoping the higher ups have a plan, but I haven't been able to reach anyone to get orders today”, she said trying to keep her calm.

“Oh well, I'll have to take care of my husband. Make yourself at home, its nice to see you. Especially during these trying times”, she had a scared look on her face and shook her head as she left them.

David's mother took the medication and two bottles of water back upstairs. They heard the door close and both Diana and David sighed with relief.

“Sorry, I tried not to startle her too much.,” Diana apologized.

“It didn't help that she worries about having some of these in the house, because of my brother and his girlfriend,” he said as he started bagging the medications into a paper bag. “I'll have to keep them hidden or they may take what we'll need to survive.”

“So, you know what's going on then?”, she questioned.

“Well, kind of. Come on I'll show you.” David opened the basement door and Diana followed him down. As they came down the stairs, soft moans could be heard coming from the darkness.

“Damn you Richard, get out of my room!”, a half-naked woman ran up the stairs past them.

Richard was still trying to shutdown the porn site they had been viewing together.

“Sorry bro, I thought you'd be gone longer. She just got off the rag and you get better speeds down here,” Richard said as he pulled up his pants.

“Damn bro looks like you found a partner for the end of the world. You're rather fetching. You into swinging?”, he asked Diana bluntly.

David threw a book on quantum mechanics at him and yelled, “Get out of here asshole.”

With that Richard followed the girl upstairs.

“Sorry about that. They're like rabbits.”, David said as he covered his chairs with a blanket and towel.

“That's OK, I have a brother that's just like him”, she consoled him.

“Well pull up a chair and I'll show you what I've seen”, David said as he started opening a file on his computer.

David and Diana pulled his two chairs up to the three screens of his enormous computer setup. Wires were leading upstairs and all over the place.

Did you notice the cameras out front?”, he asked.

“Yeah, there were a few of them”, she responded.

“Three are normal cameras and the other three below them are high speed cameras. Watching accidents, or people falling in slow motion can be fun to watch. But here watch this now”, he offered.

He clicks on a file, and she watched as a trail of blood appears out of nowhere.

“What was that?! Where did that come from?”, she wondered out loud.

He then clicked on the next file.

“This was taken with the high-speed camera at the same time.”

On the screen she could see a large translucent insect appear on the sidewalk and was joined by a second insect. One was carrying a stunned man, and the other a much older woman that seemed stunned too. As their back turned toward the camera the two insects glowed a bright white as they did something to the man and woman that made blood spurt onto the ground, and the two beasts carried off limp bodies hanging below them as they appeared to swim through our atmosphere with their feathery stalk-like wings.

“That was 100 frames per second,” David said as the screen went blank.

“What are these things?”, Diana asked.

“I've never seen anything like them. I even searched on-line and nothing. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen”, he declared.

There are ten more files in the folder. Each one he showed her shows the same thing. Two bugs, one human male and one human female and a bloody assault on the stunned humans. But there were no good shots of the event itself.

“Now do you see why I ran when I saw you?”, he asked.

“What are they doing?”, she asked with a stunned look on her face.

“You can't really tell from the angles, but whatever it is it can't be good,” David insisted.

“They look like large aphids or something like that, but giant sized”, she said.

“I don't know, but it doesn't look like something I want to deal with”, David said.

“Is it OK if I try to use this to try to contact my family?”, she asked hopelessly.

David downloaded the files to a jump drive. “Sure, go ahead. I wish you luck. I haven't been able to reach anyone on it all day. The TV's been out all day too. The only thing still on is the Internet, but if this thing is nationwide that won't last too much longer either. I'll be upstairs. I've got to get the food prepared in case the power goes out. Just yell if you need something”, he said as he climbed the stairs.

She opened the Zoom app and tried to contact her family, but no one answered. She logged into her Facebook account, and no one in her friends list had posted anything. Nothing was trending. As she logged out dread consumed her.

She climbed the stairs and when she saw David, her eyes burst into tears. He hugged her to try to calm her down.

“What if we're the only people left?”, she asked as she calmed down.

David was speechless. He wondered the same thing.

“I have to see if they're still out there. Maybe their phones weren't charged, or maybe they left the house without them?”, she begged.

David clung to her and said, “Not now. It's almost dark. We'll go tomorrow. I promise.”

That night she slept in his bed, while he slept on the couch in the living room. The next day he drove her to her home, or at least as close as they could get to it due to the cars in the streets. They walked the rest of the way and when they got there, the front door was wide open, and blood was on the lawn. There was no one there. She broke down, and all he could do was hug her to try to console her.

“Thank you for everything you've done”, she said as tears subsided to sniffles.

“I wish I could do more”, he said as they broke their embrace.

She gathered some personal things and left a note in case someone returned to her residence somehow. The ride home was very quiet. When they arrived back at David's house, they realized the power had gone out throughout the city. This was only going to get rougher.

When they got back, David went up to check on his parents. Diana stayed downstairs and she could hear his brother and his girlfriend upstairs making the bed squeak. David came downstairs shaking his head.

“Sorry about them”, he said embarrassingly.

“They're probably doing the right thing. If we're the only people on Earth it may be our duty too”, Diana said.

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”, David asked shocked.

“No time soon as I'm having my period. Maybe in a few days.”, she said shyly.

“Well, I'll leave that up to you. I don't want you doing something just because you think we have to,” David said as he went into the kitchen.

“How would you like a beer before they get warm?”, he asked as he appeared with an open twenty-four pack.

“Sounds good to me,” she said.

They drunk and talked until they both passed out from drinking.

Around 2am they were both startled awake. Something was scratching at the door. David looked out the window and saw nothing but the railing near the door was twisting as though something was using it as leverage.

“What the Hell is that?”, Richard came down the stairs in his tighty whities, carrying a baseball bat, his girlfriend came down in a nighty.

“I think one of those things is trying to get in the door?”, David explained.

He ran to the kitchen to get a knife. As he did, he heard Richard undo the latches. As he unlocked the last lock it burst through the door and grabbed him making him drop his bat. Diana ran over to close the metal door and caught a second one trying to follow the first inside the door. She slammed the door three times cutting off the bug's head which appeared out of nowhere, and its blood etched the metal on the door and brick around the door frame. She kicked the head away and started locking the door again as Richard struggled with the bug.

David returned with the knife, but it was too late for Richard. It had injected him with a sedative using a set of needle-like mandibles making him stunned, and with another knife-like appendage in its maw it sliced open his abdomen and reached in removing all of his reproductive organs. A mouth like organ on the insect covered the wound in mucus. It slowed down so it could be seen as it ran over to Richard's girlfriend and grabbed her and tried to clamp its mandible on her. Diana picked up the baseball bat and started hitting it and David was able to slice off one of the needle-like mandibles, but it sliced open the organs and shoved them inside of the girl and put some more mucus over the area faster than David could stab it in the head. After several stabs and bludgeons with the bat the creature fell to the floor, its black blood burned into the wooden floor.

Richard was just lying there. The girl looked sickly and started vomiting on herself.

“What's going on down there?”, their mother demanded.

“Just stay up there. We have it handled”, David yelled.

She slammed the door closed.

“Here help me with them?”, David asked Diana.

“What are we going to do?”, Diana asked.

“There's not much we can do. We either leave them here, take them up to his room, or take them downstairs”, he said in a panic.

“Why not take them outside?”, she asked.

“And chance more of those things getting in? I don't think so, I don't want that happening to us,” he said in disgust.

“OK what should I do?”, she asked.

“Help with him first”, David commanded, but they weren't given a chance. The blood had burnt through enough floor that the bug and his brother fell through it down to the basement and cut them off from the girl. She vomited more mucus out of her mouth and reached out toward David and Diana with a look of panic in her eyes. As she became unbalanced, she fell into the basement too.

David looked down into the hole. They had all landed on his bed and the part the insect landed on was dissolving away from the blood.

“Well, that choice was made for us”, he said as he backed away from the hole, “I wish I could do more, but I think that they were both gone”, he said as he jumped to the stairs. “I'll be back.” He went to check on his parents. Diana could hear his mother burst into tears as he told her what had happened to her other son and his girlfriend. He didn't come back down until she had stopped crying.

Diana decided to go down to check on the girl. But all she kept doing was vomiting more mucus up as she reached out toward Diana with a sorrowful look on her face. She tried giving the girl some of the pills David had gotten but she just barfed them back out onto the bed. It was then that Diana realized that David had been right. They had both been lost already, only she had to feel what she was enduring due to David trying to save her. She went back to the living room to wait for David.

When he came back down, he made sure Diana was good.

“We need to find someplace safe”, she said shaking.

“We will, in the morning”, David comforted her, but neither could get much more sleep.

Around 8 am, they were all startled by a large crash.

David's mom yelled, “Now what are you doing down there?”

David sat up from the couch, there was now a fibrous plant emerging from the hole in the living room. It emerged from the basement and went straight up through the roof.

“What the Hell is this!”, David exclaimed.

Diana realized that this was one of the plants she had only seen from afar growing along the rivers.

“I don't know, but they're growing all over the place though”, Diana confirmed.

“David.... is that....ahhh!', his mother screamed but was muted quickly. He could hear the scratching noise of the bug's feet on the floor upstairs. David rushed up to try to save his mother and father, but Diana could tell it was too late for them, as they heard his father scream. Diana grabbed David, and said, “You're too late soldier, we have to save ourselves.”

He no longer heard either of them, and knew she was right. They grabbed their weapons and went down to the basement. David wanted to take his videos and they could go out the back. As he looked at his bed he thought he could make out the shape of his brother which was a black slime embedded in what was left of the bed and bug. It was reaching out and attached to the large plant which was using it to absorb nutrients from the ground. He was able to grab the jump drive he downloaded his videos to, loaded up a backpack of supplies including the medications and they bolted out of the back and jumped in his car. She directed him to go back to the airport. He drove through the gate she had opened to leave and while she found a plane she was more familiar with and filled the plane's fuel tank he looked for food and water to take with them.

As she was waiting for David, she was startled as one of the bugs appeared in front of her and sniffed the air in front of it. It snorted in derision and took to the sky becoming invisible as it moved off to look for another victim. And even though it was still causing her abdominal pain she was glad that she was having her period. She believed this is why they were still alive and why they hadn't ended up like everyone else.

David showed up and she told him what happened. Her hypothesis made sense to him as he was thinking they were acting like Earth insects only making men pollen and using women as a pistil. She taxied the plane and took off west. Both of them had tears in their eyes since they knew they would never see their families again. Then as she flew, she saw an enormous blue human-like being standing before them. It was nearly a mile high. As they ascended to the being's eyesight, it swatted at them as though they were a flying pest to it.

After Diana stabilized the craft, they saw about ten of the beings harvesting the plants that had opened up into red spike like fruits. Without saying anything they both realized that this is what had happened to all of the people including his brother and his girlfriend. She now knew her menstrual cycle had been their savior, and that there must be more women out there that saved others with this now seeming blessing.