The Long Wait

Derek could hear them out there, their quick footsteps crunching in the frozen sand. They would find him. There was no question now that they would find him. Their senses were far superior to human senses; they extended far beyond the capabilities of eyes and ears and noses and skin. If by some miracle, he ran and managed to evade their eyes and ears, then they’d be able to sense the warm footprints his boots left in the desert’s frosty crust, or the sour scent-trail of sweat and adrenaline he left behind. And even if he stayed where he was, they would find him by his heat or by the sound of his breathing.

So, he stayed where he was. Derek had never thought of himself as a hero, and to be caught while making a valiant last stand was a hero’s death. A hopeless, crazed run for freedom was a hero’s death. Being found hiding under the rusted hulk of a car, that was a coward’s death. That would be Derek’s death.

Out in the valley, the moon had risen over the icy dunes to the East, and flooded the whole desert floor with wan, milky light. Every now and then, one of them would take off across the valley at lunatic speed, and the light would catch the thing’s mirror-bright metal carapace, glinting for a moment like an electric arc and then vanishing. And every time this happened, the flashes were a little closer, and he could make out a little more detail, and their rapid footfalls were a little louder.

He was not safe under the car. He was not safe, and he never would be again. There was no such thing as safety any longer. There was no hiding from them; there was only running and dying. He’d done his running, and now, he was just waiting for the dying. And no doubt, it would come. It would come before morning.

But even if it didn’t, there was still no safety. The Harvesters were not the demons of all the horror films he’d watched in his old life, his former life; they did not vanish when the sun came up. If they didn’t find him by moonlight, then they’d find him by sunlight, and even if he somehow managed to escape their nearly omnipotent gazes for another whole day, and the heat didn’t get him, then they’d find him tomorrow night. Or the day or the night after. Or, if he was lucky, and they gave up for the time being, then he would keep running, and they would catch up with him a week or a month or a year hence. That was the fate of a human being these days. The world had become a game of cosmic Russian roulette, except now, instead of there being only a single bullet, there was only a single empty chamber. His survival thus far was much more surprising and unlikely than his inevitable death.

Something moved close by, and Derek stopped breathing. He didn’t move. He didn’t open his eyes. He’d been told once that they could detect even the blink of an eye, by sound if not by sight. The noise moved closer, and then was punctuated by the hungry grunt of an itinerant coyote. It snuffled around the front of the car, then padded lightly across the frost, giving him one careful look before wandering off into the dunes.

The Harvesters didn’t harvest animals. Derek had always wondered why. He’d also wondered why they never took children. It couldn’t be because children were helpless. The Harvesters seemened to have no compunction about taking the elderly and the infirm. They showed no mercy to the sick and the wounded and the downtrodden. They took pity on no one. Except for children. It couldn’t have been out of fairness or generosity. Derek had seen too much to believe that. More likely, he’d always thought, children simply didn’t have enough meat on them yet. And after all, if they took children, then who would go on to propagate the species and make sure that the Harvesters’ foodstock remained plentiful?

There was that glint of moonlight out in the valley again, but it wasn’t as close as he’d been expecting. Perhaps, if he made his move now, he could escape down the highway and hide in an abandoned gas station, or, if he made it that far, the ruins of Las Vegas. Perhaps he could hide long enough that they would abandon their hunt. But there was really no point in that, was there? After all, the Harvesters never really abandoned their hunt, they just deferred it for a while. He’d seen nomads live to be eighty or ninety years old, only to be harvested from their deathbeds after spending a decade trying to escape. That was how the Harvesters operated: pure and unsympathetic malevolence.

Maybe they wouldn’t kill him. Maybe they wouldn’t even harvest hi. They might do something worse. They might make him a Euphoric: give him a horrible shot of potent drugs that turned him into a gibbering, hopelessly addicted lunatic, willing to do absolutely anything for another shot. He’d seen Euphorics, and he knew that any fate would be better than becoming one of them.

The first Euphoric he’d seen had been his barber back in San Diego. Just after the Harvest began – back when nobody knew what was going on, when nobody knew that the Harvesters existed, when all anybody knew was that people were starting to disappear without a trace – Derek had gone downtown for a haircut. The city was starting to get quiet, and he’d badly needed something to do, something to get him out of the apartment for an hour or two, so he’d gone to get a haircut.

But Dan Barber – that was the man’s real name; he was something of a stock character brought to life, the stereotypical friendly, overweight barber, cherubic and old as dust, always chattering happily as he worked his scissors – Dan Barber was gone. Derek figured that he’d fled the city like so many others, all hoping not to become the next unexplained disappearance.

But a week later, he went back anyway, and found Dan Barber curled up in one of his chairs, razor cuts up and down his arms, swollen bite marks on his wrist. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten in days. Even though he’d been quite obese before, now, he was nearly emaciated. And his eyes, they were terrifying, both glazed and alert, both vacant and, somehow, too sharp. They were a madman’s eyes, sunken and ringed with dark, sickly circles. His whole face was contorted into a mask of angry terror. The spittle dribbling from the corner of his mouth, and the fresh blood running from his arms, and the much-chewed needle puncture in his wrist (Derek found out later that the wrist was where the Harvesters preferred to inject their euphoria drugs) all told Derek that Dan Barber the man, Dan Barber the human being no longer existed.

In the weeks and months and years that followed, Derek had seen more and more Euphorics wandering through the city, doing horrible errands for the Harvesters, sent as agents of espionage and destruction, reduced to pale ghosts of the people they had once been. Tobias had met such a fate, and in a rare moment of lucidity between spasms of desperate self-mutilation and catatonic depression, he’d asked Derek to shoot him in the head, which he’d done without hesitation, and which he planned to do to himself – or is equivalent, since he didn’t have a gun any longer – to himself, rather than suffer the same fate.

But he was not given the chance. The sun came up, and contrary to expectation, the Harvesters disappeared. The valley grew silent, save the whispering of the breeze through the frayed telephone wires, and the creaking of the weathered wooden crosses from which they hung.

And as the heat started to soak into the sand, Derek knew that he had to make his choice. He could get moving and give himself another shot of illusory hope – how much like the Harveters’ drugs it was, how cruel and addictive – or he could bake to death beneath the car, or wait until nightfall to be killed or harvested or euphoricated.

He ran. Against all his existential hopelessness, he ran. The hope may have been illusory, but he knew that the human spirit – or was it merely the survival instinct? – was indomitable. He jogged across the burning sand and onto the burning blacktop, strangely soft in the heat, and started running towards Las Vegas.

He stopped running within a quarter mile and clutched his shuddering heart. It was far too hot to run. So he walked, reddening by the minute with sunburn, parched with thirst, staring half-blind into the white-hot horizon.

There were not many things he could be sure of anymore. There weren’t many certainties. But there was one certainty on which he was willing to stake his life: that he was going in the right direction. He knew very well that he was indeed on the road to Las Vegas, and that was about the only thing he knew anymore.

Of course, in his old life, he’d thought he’d known many things. He’d thought he’d known that humanity was a powerful and permanent presence on Earth. He thought he’d known that humanity was the most intelligent race of creatures ever to grace the universe. He’d thought he’d known that, if aliens did come knocking, they’d be from Guadalajara, not Andromeda.

But he’d been wrong on all counts. Humanity was no more permanent than an anthill, and no more powerful, and in the face of the harvesters, probably didn’t even deserve to be called intelligent life. And the Mexicans that he’d been afraid of, and the Canadians that he’d thought were so snooty, and the Afghanis he’d been told were heartless, murdering terrorists, and the Congolese and the Senegalese and the Chinese and the Germans and the French and the Brazilians, none of them were alien. Not in the way he’d always been told. After all, all of them knew something of compassion, of empathy, of respect for human dignity. The Harvesters knew nothing of these, or, more likely, they just didn’t care. To them, atrocity was a sport, a game, a means to get their next horrific meal. They had no problems with doing the most horrible things they could think of to the fragile human body, and even more fragile human mind. They seemed to have no capacity for mercy, which served them very well.

But as wrong as he’d been about all those things he’d thought, all those assumptions he’d made, he still knew one thing for certain, and with more certainty than he’d ever known anything else: he was going to Las Vegas. He had a map that told him so. He had a compass that told him so. He had no map, no timeline to show him that humanity would survive. He had no timetable that told him when his last train was departing. But he was going to Las Vegas, and he was getting close, and that was a fact he could rely on.

Of course, Vegas was not as he remembered. It was no longer a great Mecca of careless freedom and debauchery. It was a sad and lonely wasteland, ravaged and picked clean by the Harvesters’ final push, leveled by nuclear fire, and now reclaimed by the creeping dunes. All those casinos were now little more than eroded relics, most of them blown down or melted into unrecognizable shapes, covered with scrub brush and infested with sand, sand that seeped uncannily into the smallest crack and filled and clung to everything. It was a wasteland, and much more so than the desert was a wasteland. After all, the desert had always been the way it was, and it was in its natural state. There was life in the desert in far greater measure than there was decay. But in Las Vegas – as in all cities, he’d been told – there was more decay than life. Far more.

He spent the night in the remnant of that great pyramidal gambling hall whose name he could never remember. Where once there had been gluttony, lust, and greed, now there was only sand and rats and little black beetles. The sun beat down through the pyramid’s sheared-off roof, casting a merciless square of light that meandered as the sun passed the zenith and began to sink towards the West.

Still, in spite of everything, it was a comfortable place. It served his instincts to be inside, to be in an enclosed space. These instincts had nothing to do with survival. They were relics of a life that no longer existed, of a time when he’d had a comfortable urban disdain for the outdoors, and a great love of air conditioning. Not even ten years of nomadic wandering had managed to expunge these deep-rooted instincts. No matter how much time went by, it still felt right to be inside. Safe or not, it felt right.

That night, there were no sounds as the nocturnal chill fell over everything and the sand froze over again. He laid out the tarp to collect morning condensation, and slept uneasily. In the night, he was woken more than once by the awful moaning of a coyote, or the hoot of an owl hunting mice. He was used to this, though, and tiredness didn’t bother him anymore. He was beset with a kind of weariness that no amount of sleep could ever get rid of. It was like the tiredness that had accompanied his mother’s leukemia: it was visceral, far deeper than any amount of rest could ever reach. Fatal and final. It was a symptom, as it had been for his mother, of a long, slow death.

But he never actually seemed to die. When typhus had broken out in the pestilent relocation center in San Diego, he’d survived the raging fever and the vile delirium. When the city had been abandoned, he’d survived the evacuation riots and the sudden, violent attack of the Harveters who, someone had reckoned, had carried of nineteen out of every twenty evacuees. And when what was left of the government had decided that only the hydrogen bomb could wipe out the city’s Harvester infestation, he’d escaped the blast and the firestorm and the fallout that had killed so many of the survivors. And now, he’d survived again, even though the Harvesters were now looking for him, him in particular. He was still alive, against all the odds. It was a cruel, cruel miracle.

And that annoyed him. More than making him happy, making him feel grateful, it annoyed him. As long as he was alive, he knew that he’d never be able to escape, to end himself. Suicide was only a viable option for the strong-willed, for those who weren’t afraid of death, and who had convinced themselves that death was nobler than being harvested or euphoricated. As long as he was alive, he knew that all he could do was wait for the Harvesters to find him, to end his life for him. That kind of futility sandbagged him, and made him ever wearier, but there was something within him that was either too fierce or too cowardly for him to die at his own hand.

Perhaps, it really was nobler to live. Perhaps, suffering Shakespeare’s slings and arrows was better than to oppose and end them. But it didn’t feel noble. There was no room left for nobility.

But there was, it seemed, room left for hope. Foolish hope, but hope all the same.

And that was why, when the swift, hot dawn came, Derek went out and collected the water from the tarp. Food, though, was a more difficult matter. The sagebrush and tumbleweeds were far too woody to digest, and he only had two cans of ravioli left in his knapsack, which he was saving for a time when he had no other options, although he knew that time was not far off.

Eventually, his old mainstay the snare-trap saved him, netting him a scrawny hare that had apparently been living in the ruptured vault of some casino. He killed it without guilt – and to think that he’d been a vegetarian before the Harvest; it really was true what they said about the things that hunger could do to a man – and cooked it over a smoldering fire.

He always felt that he should save some of the meat, but there wasn’t much point. It was so deathly hot most of the time that any uncooked meat would spoil immediately, and even cooked meat wouldn’t keep for more than twenty-four hours. These days, hoarding was a pleasure reserved only for the rats.

That night, it was very quiet. The coyotes were nearly silent, and the breeze was gentle, whispering almost inaudibly through the skeletons of the buildings. In his former life, he might have considered such silence a bad omen, but he’d learned that the world was rarely so poetic as to actually foreshadow someone’s doom so dramatically.

And in the morning, he found himself still alive, unharvested and unmolested. He collected water from the tarp, killed three lizards with a rock, and had a nice lunch of lizard stew and dead beetles.

That night, the coyotes returned. He hated the coyotes. The weight of his existentialism had already saddened him enough, without their lonesome howls ringing from the dunes at all hours of the night. And the owls that constantly asked “Who? Who? Who?”, they reminded Derek that he had no answers. Who? Who? Who? Who was he, with his old life destroyed and with no kind of future ahead of him? Who? Who would he be in a day, a month, a year? Would he be at all? Who? Who would he meet, or would he never see another human being again? Could he be the last man on Earth? Who? Who would he come to save him? Who?

He knew the answer to that last question, and it was Nobody.

Such dark thoughts covered him like a woolen blanket, made it hard to get up in the morning, made it hard tow alk through the miserable heat, made it hard to do all the work that was necessary to keep himself alive, and made it hard not to simply let himself slip away when the heat got to him and he felt his heart going rubbery and his brain fogging up. But he knew that he would live until he died, and he knew that he would die at the hands of the Harvesters. That was his destiny now. In many ways, he’d already played that cosmic game of Russian roulette and lost, and was just waiting for the bullet to travel the distance from the barrel to his skull.

He knew such thoughts were useless, and that they would only exhaust him further, but he found himself unable to push them aside. He could not fight the hopelessness.

And yet, he had fought it. So far, he was still alive, still able to believe that, some day, he’d escape the horrible desert, maybe even see a tree again, or find a person to talk to. And he knew that he’d always have this hope to keep him alive. This gave him more comfort than all the religion in the world, than all the philosophy, than all the kind words or generous deeds. The last thing that came spilling out of Pandora’s box was Hope.

That day was especially hot, and he ran through his water quickly while tracking a slow, sickly coyote through the blistering dunes. He felt sick all day, and there were times when death seemed near, when it seemed that his heart would stop or his dessicated and overheated brain would convulse. But that evening, the weather changed.

He couldn’t believe it at first, but as the rainclouds continued to billow and march Southward, he began to smile again. He even laughed a little. The rolling clouds heaped up into a coal-black thunderhead that slid across the face of the merciless sun, blanketing him in a cool shade that was more wonderful than all the water or food or companionship that he could imagine.

As the light started to fail, he saw the lightning silhouetting the mesas and dunes to the West, and soon, the thunder was loping across the desert, carrying with incredible clarity in the still air.

As the darkness became complete, the wind came. He’d forgotten what real wind was like. Though he’d spent his childhood living next to the Pacific, and seen the kind of violence oceanic storms could inflict, that had all been forgotten when his past life had ended and his current life began. So the wind was surprising and terrifying. It reminded him of a pack of wolves leaping on a flock of sheep. It went howling across the city, tearing sheets of corroded metal and wind-worn fragments of glass from the buildings. It whistled in the bare girders and lanced through the burned-out shells of the casinos, sending moth-eaten currency and tufts of long-dead grass swirling down the street.

With the wind came a hurricane of sand, which blotted out even the light of the rising moon,. It was heard and felt rather than seen, a billion little razors slashing through the corpse of the city, stinging his eyes and biting into his skin. It felt very much like actual sandpaper was being rubbed all over his body, and when the rain finally came, it was a merciful relief. It came suddenly, pounding down out of the dusty air and roaring against the pyramid’s walls. It saturated the sand quickly and ran down the dunes, eroding little valleys and filling his tarp to the brim. He could hear it pounding out there, pouring down the steel skeletons, rattling on the roofs of the ruined cars, chattering in the stands of parched sagebrush and sawgrass. Then, the wind caught the rain and slung it with horrific force, slamming it so hard that, at times, it was as bad as the sand. But it was better to be wet than to be sandy. Water, like the sand, seeped into everything. But the water was better than the sand. After all, the water eventually dried up, but the sand clung for eternity. Standing in the casino, strobed by the blinding lightning, terrified by the growl of the thunder, soaked in mud and cold water, and nearly blown away by the window, he was happier than he’d been in ten years.

And then, it was over. His long wait was over. As the rain continued to come down in buckets, there was a little lull in the wind, and through the pounding and pouring of the water, he heard them on the road, hooting and squeaking and chittering mechanically to one another. It sounded like there were at least three of them, and at that moment, he knew it was the end. They would find him. There was no need to be troubled about whether to kill himself or try to escape, not this time. It was, more than ever before, an inevitability.

The Harvesters fell silent for am moment as the rain tapered and then roared again, and he heard their metallic footsteps hurrying across the pavement. Then, he saw one of them standing in the entrance to the casino, staring at him with those cold but penetrating electronic eyes, eyes that glowed with a predatory fierceness. The Harvester could probably read his expression, and from the look on its insectile face, it seemed to know as much as he did that resistance, as someone had once said, was futile.

He hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone – himself included – in nearly six months, but he felt as though he should say something now, some last words, a quick expression that would concisely summarize his feelings about his time on earth.

“You finally found me,” were the words he found, and they suited him well enough. The Harvester stared at him for a moment, unblinking, then gave a slow, eerily human nod. Then, it jumped at him, bowled him over, and pressed him into the wet sand. Two of its metal arms pinned his shoulders, another two seized his ankles, and a fifth gripped his neck while the sixth raised above him, extending some kind of horrific pointed implement. He knew that awful implement’s purpose from having seen it used countless times on his fellow humans. He knew that, in a moment, that evil buzzing thing would drill into his brain. An old man – a man who claimed to be a scientist, but there was no way of knowing if it was true – had once told him that, when the evil proboscis entered your brain, there was a moment when they could feel your thoughts, when they learned everything about you. The man had said that they consumed and digested your memories then, as they would soon thereafter digest your flesh. Derek almost smiled in the knowledge that he would, perhaps, finally be able to find out if that was true or not. Either way, in a few minutes, he would finally be dead. And he was night frightened of the approaching oblivion. Really, it was a relief. His refusal to kill himself, and his survival against all the odds was a victory, perhaps more of a victory even than surviving long enough to die a a natural death.

“It won’t be painful,” said the Harvester in perfectly-inflected English – in a creepily feminine voice, actually. For reasons he’d never understood, when the Harvesters needed to self-identify, they identified as female. Derek blinked and swallowed.

The metallic proboscis bored into his brain while he was speaking his very last words, and by chance, it happened to lance through his motor cortex, so every word but one came out as a strangled, paralytic gurgled. But still, he managed that one word.

“Over…”