The Harvest by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online Page A

side, clucking his tongue.
    “That’ll go big at the Mercado. Always some poor dirt-farmer needs a new leg.” Cleft Lip leers. “You either take it off and give it here, or we’re gonna have to knock you sideways and take it ourselves. It’s your bag, dumpling.”
    “You can have the ace note—”
    “I know we can have it,” Cashew says with her mush-mouth. “We’ll have that and the leg and anything else we want to take from you.”
    Cleft Lip grabs his crotch. “Maybe I’ll use your mouth as a toilet.”
    “Please, no, don’t.”
    “Maybe I won’t have to use you as a piss-hole if you gimme that leg.”
    The boy closes his eyes, knows how this is going to go, but he’s not like that man at the fence. He won’t just step through into oblivion.
    He runs.
    Or tries to.
    Truth is, he can’t run for squat. The fake leg strapped to his knee makes him slow like a shovel-struck dog. By the time he’s lurching forward, desperately trying not to fall, his two attackers already have their hands on his shoulders and they slam him up against the wall.
    Cleft Lip hits him in the cheek. He sees stars. Tries to fall down to the ground, cover himself up, but the big girl won’t let him. She props him up as Cleft Lip beats him and kicks at him. The hits land with dull thuds, and each meaty slap sends his brain rattling ’round his skull. Before long his head hangs forward, twin streams of blood pouring from his nose.
    The punches have stopped, and the boy’s leg jiggle-juggles as Cleft Lip works at the leather straps holding the fake leg to the thigh.
    He tries to plead but finds his words caught behind his blood-slick lips. He throws a fist of his own, but Cleft Lip just leans back and avoids it same way you might avoid a tree branch or a buzzing horsefly.
    Cashew laughs. This hee-haw jackass laugh. Haw haw haw—
    Then the laugh cuts short.
    Grrrrrk!
    The hobo boy looks up. Blinks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Cashew’s face has gone red as beet juice. Her one visible eye strains at its sockets, ready to pop as a wormy, sluglike tongue licks at the air.
    She’s choking. Reaching up at the folds of her neck, trying desperately to—to what? The hobo boy stares, sees a long thin wire wrapped around Cashew’s neck, and he follows that wire to the roof—
    Cleft Lip looks up, too, and yells, “What the—? Beryl, you little bitch!”
    It’s her .
    The hobo girl sneers from above, wire held in gloved hands.
    The girl—Beryl—lets the wire go. Cashew gasps, then falls.
    Then the hobo girl jumps. Both feet collide with Cleft Lip’s body—his head smacks back into the crumbling wall and he howls in pain. He scampers away, trying to stand, but she brings a knee against the side of his head.
    “Told you to skip town, Eddie,” the girl—Beryl?—says. “And Cashew, you human lump of melted candle wax. You ought to go, too.”
    Cashew writhes on the ground, clawing at her bleeding neck. She chokes out the words: “Old . . . Scratch . . . take you . . .”
    Beryl gives her a middle finger. “Far as you’re concerned, Old Scratch is my daddy, my boyfriend, and my guardian Saintangel. Now suck piss.”
    Then she turns and walks to the end of the alley.
    She looks over her shoulder before she turns the corner.
    “You coming, Rigo?”
    And then she’s gone.
    Rigo thinks: How in King Hell did she know my name?
    Of course he follows after.
    And of course he gives Cleft Lip a kick—with his fake foot, because why not?—right to the crotch before hobbling out of the alley.
    Rigo enters the streets of Curtains. It’s a town bigger than Boxelder by two, maybe three times the size, and since the Saranyu fell, it’s been collecting misfits and castoffs with a far greater frequency. Any walk down the streets of Boxelder, you’d see a dozen people, and that was it. Here, particularly around the mouth of the Mercado warehouse, they gather in crowds. Some have rough dogs or feral tabbies on chains