The Harvest's Words

Downtowns smelled like a wet dog whenever it rained. And that made the bars smell like kill-shelters. They were the best shopping places for a while, if you could stand the scent. Saturday nights at Bad Dad’s, that was my spot. I’d seen enough TV before the plague to know that I couldn’t shop every week, or even every month. I spaced it out to twelve or thirteen times a year. I made my stores last.

200,000 dead after the first summer. We buried the dead for a time. Then we burned them, then they were just piled. The beach used to be a place to go for fun in the sun. That winter it was ringed by flesh-walls cemented in the ocean’s frozen spray. The cities were full again. That’s what tipped me off to their game. They were repopulating with replacement people; an illusion of a stabilized society.

When the spring thaw came again, toward the beginning of year two, it came as the first unwelcome spring in human history. The sickness killed another 200,000 before April. Instead of showers, April brought back an illness well rested from its winter hibernation. It woke hungry. Humans weren’t enough, it started to feed on the animals too.

The desperate healthy, moving again for the first time since the snows, lived on the weakened beasts just long enough to learn that full viral transference didn’t occur when the diseased were consumed. Instead, a biproduct of the Suicide Sickness affected those who ate afflicted creatures with a less self-destructive madness, but one that was more subtly delusional. I found I was immune. I was the first to find out about the Societal Stabilization Programs too, the SSPs.

When the immune were gathered and told to breed as a final measure, ensuring humanity lasted long enough to complete further research, some of us were all too happy to oblige. The government supplied airplane hangars and warehouses filled with rows of hospital beds with white iron headboards. We gathered and paired up quickly or were force-paired by the guards. We bred, but it wasn’t fast enough. It wasn’t clean enough. It was the second year of the plague. The guards called it the second Summer of Love while they observed us in our acts of hopeful breeding. We were all too weak by then anyway. Women that became pregnant lacked the bodyfat and muscle to carry to term, if they got pregnant at all.

A Mother who died while still carrying her young was discarded wholesale, no matter what trimester they were in. If the mother succumbed, it was thought that no matter the genetic recombination of her DNA in the offspring, it too would unavoidably succumb to the Sickness. People were so thin by then the damn incinerator fires that should have been crackling on human fat were silently billowing gray ash clouds that floated on the air and got into your clothes.

I had four of my children make it to conception and then wither and die and bring the mothers down with them. I was strong then, smuggling food, trapping vermin for what I referred to as my secret stews. I feared that I must have passed something on to my kin. Something bacterial maybe. A bug of a different kind.

A "folie a deux," as the docs say?

They should have lived.

No fever in me, normal muscle mass, considering. The docs told me I was too stubborn for illness. But they told me I wasn’t the cure either. Not immune, just lucky they said. Some luck. Four mothers and four kids wheelbarrowed off to the incinerators to burn up like old newspapers.

After a time, I abandoned the hangers. The guards let me go—I think. I didn’t hide my escape and they didn’t pursue. I made my way far from all the cities where people still stood in lines for bread and broth when they should have been breeding hard or dying out, pick a side already, right?

I made my camp in a cabin beside a burned down barn. It stood in a grove of trees. There was cool spring and a shady forest nearby. The barn contained the charred bones of beasts and men. Locked chains still linked the big metal barn handles, though the wooden doors and walls had burned to ash. There was a tractor, burned, melted from the heat. Saddles, only their metal ends and traces of scattered tack remained, all ruined. At least three adults, five if they were malnourished or very small. I spent days cleaning it up, pounding it all into a fertile mixture of dust, ash, and dirt. I had to move the tractor in pieces, broke it up with the pole end of an ax I took from beside the wood stove. I had to get to planting.

Corn wouldn’t take. Beans took a little. Squash grew the best. The squash drew rabbits. I started by killing them, then I trapped them, then I bred them. I ate rabbit and squash for a year before thinking I should visit the city and check on things there.

I went the next time it rained. Everybody leftover was too thin to stay warm, even in the summer rain. The Sickness didn’t make the nights any darker, how could it? The dark was just thicker somehow, like there was overall less light in the world. I strolled in, poncho dripping, a cowboy hat that I found hanging on a wall in the cabin, pulled low. Boots soaked. I thought it was impossible, but sure enough they had done it. One of the later SSPs must have worked. There were masses of people huddled around barbecue grills outside of makeshift shops. Neon lights flickered with electricity. Vehicles were now homes amidst the rubble. Kids chased rats and cats with slings and nets.

I laughed in the dark rain. I laughed so hard I started to cough before I was able to calm myself down. Those clever sonsofbitches, they figured out a way to grow people. It must have been a decision of last resort. If they couldn’t get us to breed our species through the Sickness, they could take the dice-roll of birth right off the table. I don’t know if they used synthetic placentas, shoved into beakers and test tubes. Maybe they planted ovaries in rows of dirt like potatoes and watered them daily with super sperm. They got the job done. I watched replacement people grill cat carcasses over barbecues and catch rainwater in dollar-store plastic bags to wash it all down.

I figured these were just big government rabbits waiting for me. I had observed that big rabbits made more rabbits, so I didn’t eat the big ones. I never took the weakest rabbits either. Now that I had come to the city, and had seen what had become of it, I had to be efficient. Too big a harvest and I couldn’t get it back to the cabin, too small and it wouldn’t be worth the trip.

This last harvest was a sticky situation. It still makes me laugh when I think about it. The Program had gotten so good that this young man actually had memories of a family, a mom and a dad. It showed me a heart-shaped locket and a book of nursery rhymes it carried around. This rabbit couldn’t fool me. I didn’t buy any of it. At first, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t successfully brained him when I got him outside. Then he woke up and made some sounds, I almost felt like leaving him there bound and bleeding. I felt the urge to run the other way. I started to laugh again.

He asked me my name. Nobody had asked me my name in two years.

I told him and then I wound up to knock him a good one this time with my club. A nice little going-to-the-city tool, a busted baseball bat I managed to wrap with some of the metal pieces from the tractor. He asked if I’d seen his sister. “Ha! Do potatoes have siblings now? Go to sleep bunny!” I bashed him one on each ear and dragged him on, keeping to the shadows, laughter at a minimum. He moved less as the rain fell heavier.

We got to the cabin. I unwrapped my harvest and hung up the tarp under the porch. While I prepared the block and tackle I had rigged to one of the larger Willows out front, the thing spoke up again. I wrote it down, it took me aback that much. I wrote it right there on the front door of the cabin. I wrote it over and over, laughing so much I cried while I did it. The harvest kept saying it was true and told me more about how his sister liked crayons and how hard it was to get them and how I was lucky I had paint and things for decorating my door.

It told me stories it must have been trained to tell, or programed to repeat, or whatever manner of artificial-news-dissemination this thing was created for. I put the finishing touches on my inscription and delt it the final blow, a good one, with a running start. I set the hooks and hoisted it up, tied off the line, and made my first cut. The locket fell in the dirt, and I left it there. I bled the harvest into buckets, it was good for the garden, and you know, waste not want not. These being trying times and all. I’d be lying if I didn’t use a little of the blood for shadowing around the words I had written on the door. I cut off a nice piece of its back and upper leg. I stopped to read the words out loud, just one more time before heading in for a hard-earned meal with squash and rabbit on the side.

“The Plague is over, the world is healing now,” said the door.