The Harvest by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online Page B

that bark and hiss as Rigo passes.
    The girl, Beryl, doesn’t stop there. She keeps going. Not running, but keeping enough of a pep in her step that Rigo has to limp along double-time, sending jolts of pain up into his hips.
    Ahead, she turns the corner, ducks into an old theater. Not a holo-theater, like the one they found in Martha’s Bend, but a proper one—used for plays and the like. THE WHEELHORSE , it says out front on a sign tilted so far it looks like the letters could just spill out like sand.
    Rigo looks around to make sure Cleft Lip and Cashew aren’t following along and then ducks through the front door.
    The smell climbs up his nose and stays there: rot, ruin, mold, pollen. Pollen . His head starts to feel pressure behind the eyes. The sensation of a pair of fingers pinching his nose closed. He tries not to sneeze but can’t help it—
    Sneezing sends a little hurricane of dust up. It blows across shafts of light—columns of sun shining from holes in the roof far above.
    Beryl is nowhere to be seen.
    “Hello?” he calls out.
    Ello, ello.
    Echo, echo.
    Birds stir in the eaves.
    He winds his way through the center aisle—dark seats on each side, long fallen to disuse and disrepair, half collapsed, fabric torn. There’s a slight decline here, and Rigo grunts as he navigates even this slight shift—
    “Hey, Rigo.”
    Beryl. Up on the stage. By a red curtain so dark it might as well be black.
    “Why did you help me?” he asks.
    But she ducks behind the curtain. Curtains in Curtains, he thinks. He’s about to haul himself up on the stage—no easy task given that he can’t see a set of dang steps around here—when he pauses. Last time he was alone in a creepy, half-abandoned building, he ended up finding a fake baby and getting a jaw trap around his leg. An act that lost him his leg once infection set in.
    This could be another trap. Maybe all of it is. Maybe Cleft Lip and Cashew are just waiting for him behind that curtain, ready to snatch up his limb and beat him half to death with it. Or all the way to death.
    Behind the curtain, he hears Beryl whistling. He recognizes the song, but at first he can’t put a name to it. . . .
    “The Ballad of Calla and Kade.” A love song.
    A love song that doesn’t end very well, but sounds nice just the same.
    Oh, hell with it.
    Rigo reaches out and drags himself up onto the stage, bracing himself with the fake leg and throwing the good one up over the edge. It takes him longer than he likes and he feels like Wanda’s mutt, Hazelnut, rolling around on her back and showing her belly like a big ol’ doofus.
    But somehow, he manages. He stands up, takes a deep breath—
    And walks behind the curtain.
    For a moment, it’s all fabric and dust. And again he starts to sneeze, but this time he tamps it down, chokes it back. The curtain seems to go on forever, endless folds that have no end, and a weird thought strikes him: I wonder if this is what having sex for the first time is like , lots of pawing and not sure where everything begins or ends, and now he’s blushing thinking about how he’s never done it and probably never will do it, but if he did manage to find someone gracious enough to be his first it sure could be Beryl, but boy howdy, does he think about sex too much these days, he should really quit—
    He steps out from behind the curtain, starts to fall as the fabric catches on the heel of his fake foot—
    A hand catches him, helps him up.
    It’s not Beryl.
    Rigo gasps.
    “Pop,” he says.
    “It’s nice to see you, Rodrigo,” Pop says.
    Then Cael’s father hugs him.

“THE BALLAD OF CAEL AND WANDA”
    HEARTLANDERS TELL all kinds of stories about the cycle of day and night. One says that the Lord and Lady take the sun in every night to cook their food and warm their baths. Another says that night is a punishment for Old Scratch—or, in a variant tale, a punishment for the oldest gods of the earth—blinding him so that he cannot find his way