The Harvest by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online

is exposed. The rest of him is bound up with rags. He limps out of the corn—it dies quickly toward the Boundary—and staggers close to the fence. He listens, expecting it to hum or buzz or make some kind of noise, but it’s dead silent. Only thing he hears is the wind through the corn. Hissing, as if to hush him.
    Then he sees. There, on the ground. Stuck in the leaf-curl of a stunted stalk: a single ace note. Corner bent. A streak of mud across it—
    No. Not mud. Blood.
    Jeezum Crow in King Hell.
    But it’ll do. It’ll buy him something at the Mercado.
    Something he can give to the hobo girl.
    He stoops, winces through the pain, and reaches down for the ace note—
    Then he stops.
    A man stands no more than twenty feet away. Bushy, bird’s nest beard. Hollow, haunted eyes set over a nose that looks broken and rebroken.
    He’s less than a foot from the fence.
    He turns to the hobo boy and offers a small wave.
    The bottom of his palm—down to the wrist—is fringed with little squirming pea-shoots. Green as wet moss. He realizes what he’s done and quickly hides the hand behind his back.
    He sniffs.
    The hobo boy says: “Wait.”
    But the man steps through the fence and the sonic wall screams.
    Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
    But how can he not? He’s back in town, and he keeps feeling his face for more flecks of blood. Not his. The man’s. He felt the faint mist as the invisible barrier split the Blighted hobo. He’s been wiping at his face ever since.
    He hides in a small alley, holds up the ace note again to look at it. He wants to think about this , not that . Think about what he’ll buy for the girl. At first he thought food of some kind: somebody’s rations. But rations have been cut down or cut off for people. Food isn’t easy to come by anymore, though some supplies have trickled out of and away from the wreckage of the Saranyu flotilla. Pegasus City. Besides, the girl has access to strawberries or something, right?
    So, maybe something else then. A trinket. A piece of jewelry. That might be nice. Isn’t that what boys do for girls? Give them jewelry?
    A scuff of a heel behind him.
    He turns, expecting to see the girl standing there. Because how perfect would that be? She’d appear. See him with the ace note. Probably steal it.
    But it’s not her.
    It’s another boy. Knotty like rope. Freckled face. Upper lip with a soft, deep cleft that shows yellow teeth.
    “Hey, fatfuck,” Cleft Lip says. “I see you found my ace note.”
    “What?” the hobo boy says. “No, no, this is mine—” He moves to try to tuck it back under his shirt, but Cleft Lip catches his wrist.
    “Yeah, yeah, I lost it. I can tell you it’s mine because I can describe it. It’s an ace of hearts. Bent corner.”
    Of course he can say that because he just saw the damn thing.
    “No, I found it—”
    “It’s mine, ain’t that right, Cashew?”
    “Right as rain,” says a sloppy, lisping voice. The hobo boy turns, sees a girl enter the alley on the other side. She’s got broad shoulders. Thick. Fat, even. Built like a dang motorvator. Hands as big as a hog’s head. Half her face is a sludgy avalanche of loose skin. It covers one eye, a nostril, part of her mouth. A line of drool slicks her chin before she licks it away.
    The hobo boy feels for her—the way she looks, what she must go through. Whatever it was, it lent her a kind of meanness , a dark spark ready to catch fire. He stands, tries to step away from the two of them, but the alley is narrow and he doesn’t have anywhere to go.
    The big girl steps in and—
    He staggers against the wall as she clubs him in the face with a fist. He tastes blood and hears a ringing deep in his ear.
    “What’s that there?” Cleft Lip says. “Lookie at that. Got something more valuable than an ace note, Cash. Got hisself a fakey foot.”
    “I need it,” the boy says. “Please.”
    The girl—Cashew—steps in close.
    Cleft Lip hems him in on the other