Read Online The Harvest by Chuck Wendig - Free Book Online

tangled vines. Wet kisses and trailed saliva. Sticky, tacky sap. Dead earth churned fresh, tilled back to life by the movement of the boy and the girl above it and roots crawling through the earth like worms below them. Tongues tasting nectar. The softness of skin together, and the whisper-rasp of green against green. Vines twining, unspooling, twisting, teasing. Pinning wrists. Small grunts. The snap of branches. And then release—like trees losing leaves in a hard wind, shuddering and howling.
    Cael feels lost to it all. A part of his mind still wants to do the human thing and think about what is happening. Him and Wanda? What about Gwennie? But it feels good, it feels right , and he can’t help his attraction to Wanda now. At first he thinks it must be due to the Blight, but then he remembers seeing her back in the corn outside the Empyrean depot—her with the rifle, her seeing his Blight and still having love in her eyes—and she seemed strong and confident in a way she hadn’t before. . . .
    But then all those thoughts get buried underneath a more primal urge. A tide of feeling that isn’t human and maybe not even animal. It’s all colors and textures. Memory stirred by smells and tastes. The heady floral scent; the spoor of sweat; the taste of that sweat mixed with the sweetness of something else; the feeling of skin too smooth to be skin—
    He gives in to that. Reeling. Reveling. Wanda moans against him. She moves to get comfortable, nuzzles into the curve of his outstretched neck, hand draped on his thigh like a resting butterfly.
    The ground is soft. Welcoming.
    Sleep takes him swiftly.
    He dreams of being swallowed up into the earth. Roots pulling him down. Black, churned earth opening up. Teeth of rock and broken stalk. A hellsmouth of the mad, hungry world.
    Then: a vibration through it.
    A thrumming. He draws a sharp breath through his nose.
    A ship.
    His eyes snap open.
    A shadow moves in front of the light above. Streaks of white go to wincing black. Cael thinks: Is it morning? Past morning? Already? How did that happen? How did time slip away so dang quick?
    Someone stands over him.
    A tall shape. Broad. Blotting out the sky.
    He reaches up, starts to protest—
    “Hey, who in King Hell—”
    Something cracks him hard in the face.
    Wanda screams as consciousness threatens to slip away. Blackness bleeds in at the edges of his vision, and he sees his attacker—just some Heartlander, he thinks at first, but then he sees. The skin isn’t skin—it’s some kind of rubber casing, flesh-colored but not actually flesh. The material bunches up around the joints, and when the thing moves, he hears the servos whine and metal grind on metal. He sees not human eyes but blue glass disks bulging from a peach-pink face.
    It raises an arm, and a sonic cannon roars to life.

THE BRUTAL GIRL
    SPARKS RAIN DOWN off the mountain like a waterfall made of fire, bright embers leaving streaks through mist.
    Enyastasia Ormond, seventeen years old, stares down off a steel grate platform at the sight. From time to time a small black shape emerges from behind the cascade of sparks, coming through it and catching fire—fluttering and jerking about, clearly in pain, trying to rise higher before falling. A burning star.
    They’re bats. Here the Empyrean is constructing the new flotilla in the mountains of the Workman’s Spine, the various peaks serving as assembly sites for the new flying city. And here, where they’re constructing the control tower, sits a cave for juniper bats. Little black mousy things. Creatures who love the little pale berries on the everblue trees that grow in the gorges below. If the bats were smart, they’d stay in their bat cave. But they don’t. The construction disturbs them. And so about every half hour, one decides to be brave—or perhaps it just can’t deal anymore with the anxiety of all this light and sound, all this clamor and brightness—and it flits out into the mountain air, flying