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HARVESTER OF MEN

by Tony Daniel

The tank. Mobile artillery. Maneuverable. Deadly. Highly effective in problematic situations. Such as, for example, an alien invasion of Earth, where the aliens are strange almost beyond recognition. Perhaps such a situation will require rethinking exactly what a tank is. Or maybe not. Maybe those who love trucks—big, tricked-out trucks with eight-inch lift packages and tires as big as Jovian moons—those who are always being accused of driving a tank, whether the accusations are playful or hostile, actually are . . . driving a tank, that is. Maybe those owners are just waiting for a nasty alien invasion to show everyone that driving such a tank might be a very good thing!

“Everything was going okay until the Ranya rolled that giant horn over to Round Rock from Victoria, and it started calling all them people inside, never to be seen again,” the young man said. He settled in the office chair and it squeaked, startling him with the metallic noise. It was an all-too-familiar sound, a sound that he intensely disliked. It brought a cold shiver to the pit of his stomach like a knife wound might. He sat back straight.

The young man’s name was Montgomery Monroe. People knew him as Monk.

Across from Monk was a woman of rail-thin proportions—not that everybody wasn’t getting pretty rail-thin these days, but she looked like she’d always been skinny, someone who lived on coffee, cigarettes, and sheer nervousness. Only she wasn’t smoking a cigarette, but vaping from a boxy device.

It was a type of vape Monk had never seen before, at least in East Texas, and was made of a blue-white glassy substance. She clicked it on anxiously every few minutes and took a toke, like she was asthmatic or something. She was all-around a nervous person. Monk had at first wondered if she were on some kind of drug. The blue-white vape could’ve been some version of a California crack pipe for all he knew. But she was too coherent and focused in with her questions for that to be true.

Maybe because of the constant vaping, she had a very pronounced wheeze when she talked. This was his second half-hour interview with the woman, and she still hadn’t given him her name. He’d started thinking of her as “Darth Vaper.”

“What do you mean ‘okay’?” said Darth Vaper. Wheeze. Another pull on the vape. She continued, “The Aranya had already invaded and killed half the population of Austin, DFW, Houston here. California is dead. Everyone. The East Coast is lost.”

“Yeah and Tyler, Longview, Waco, Nacogdoches. Hell, Shreveport,” Monk replied. “I mean okay for me. You’re asking about me. Me and Grandaddy had things under control. We was out in the country, holding our own. And it wasn’t ’cause the Ranya didn’t want to bother with us country folks, either. We got the killer rays or whatever they are, too. And there was plenty of moss-men around.”

“Moss-men?”

“Yeah, that’s what we call them.” Monk shuddered. This was by far the creepiest weapon of the alien invaders. “They look like men, or a person, from a distance, I mean. They dress in regular clothes, but it’s all camo. And not just regular camo, but ghillie suit style, with the moss and stuff hanging off to break up your profile to the deer or whatever.”

“Like they’re made of moss.”

“But what they’re made of is bugs. Well, you know, of Ranya, whatever they are. Whatever it is. Thousands of ’em to a man. It’s like those moss-men are a walking swarm, only they ain’t a swarm. They’re not like bees. There ain’t no queen.”

“We could have a long discussion as to what the Aranya actually are, whether individual motile units, a substance, an algorithm—”

“And still be here tomorrow, I know,” Monk said. “Anyway, the moss-men. They usually come two together, and they find whoever or whatever they’re looking for, and they break apart, spread out. Looks like smoke flowing out, only it’s clouds of Ranya. You know, some pieces are smooth like coins, only coins with them kind of flowy legs—”

“Cilia.”

“Yeah, I guess. Like centipedes. And some look like bundles of tacks or jacks—”

“Jacks?”

“Them things the kids used to pick up? You bounce a ball and pick up however many jacks.”

Darth Vaper shook her head. “I’m not familiar.”

“Where you from, anyway?” Her accent was definitely not East Texas.

“A lot of places,” the woman wheezed. She took another pull on the vape. “I was an Army brat.” Wheeze. “I finished high school in Fayetteville, North Carolina, if that’s any help. Fayetteville’s gone now, I understand.”

Monk nodded. “Well, whatever they’re made of, moss-men, they’re deadly as hell. Sometimes they just kill. Break, stab, what-have-you. Sometimes they swarm over a person, a car, a house, and just un-make the thing. Leave a pile of that goo they leave behind which, I guess, is the person or car or house. The elements.”

“That’s what we think.”

Monk squinted his eyebrows. “Who is ‘we’? You with the government?”

Darth Vaper smiled. Her teeth had a bluish-white tint, like the color of her vape, and combined with her skin-and-bones facial features—as sharpened as the rest of her—the smile made her look even more skeletal.

“There is no government, Mr. Monroe. Everybody is dead. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘everybody.’ The effectual are dead. The people who used to get things done. The Aranya and their killer algorithms found them all. Wiped them out with death rays or ground-based devices like your moss-men. They didn’t bother with the useless bureaucrats and time servers. Why waste any energy on them? We call it the Maven Algorithm. The government’s collapsed. The army. The military. Gone.”

Monk nodded. “I figured. We all figured. But pardon me, ma’am, you keep saying ‘we.’”

“First responders,” replied the woman. “A small army of first responders. That’s how I think of them. Of you. People on the front lines. It’s not a government. It’s not even a real organization. I’m not its boss. It’s just sort of a network that we—I and my transport crew, and others—have drawn together after the Aranya onslaught took out—well, everything else. The only competent people who survived are first responders. Somehow. We’ve been trying to understand how you did it. And use that against the Aranya.”

She clicked on her vape, pulled long and hard on it, then let out a wheezing breath of air and a cloud of white vapor.

“How’s that going?” Monk said.

“Not very well,” Darth Vaper replied. “Until recently. We think we have something now, an idea. Maybe even a weapon. That’s why I’m here. But I need you to tell me more. How are you still alive?”

“That’s easy. Because of Grandaddy.”

“Tell me.”

Monk relaxed a bit more. His chair back moved and squeaked again as it adjusted. Damned if he didn’t jump at this. The sound was too close to that made by the moss-men when they disassociated and attacked. Like ten thousand annoying squeaky office chairs going off at once. Then they slaughter you.

Calm down, he thought. It’s just a chair. And this is not some idiot G-man. At least he didn’t think so. It was somebody who might actually be able to help.


Call me Cuckoo, since that name implies my purpose in being. I was created by the 2X2L canopy as an experiment generated by a seldom used subroutine triggered when a colonization delimited to the incursion and subjugation stage meets a differential value calculated by length of infiltration time integrated with degree of struggle.

My original purpose was to serve as a subterfuge operant. The native biological species on 2X2L C had proven 52.7 percent resistant to initial subjugation, and there were outlier spiking scenarios that predicted the continued resistance by the vertebrate biologicals might even lead to colonial expulsion—something that has not happened to our super-cluster in over fifty thousand years.

I was to serve as an activator that was not only a physical copy of the local dominant fauna—in this case, beings called “humans”—but a mental analog, as well. My function: to infiltrate and destroy. If I were successful, there would be more cuckoos.

To achieve this, the 2X2L canopy had to undertake an operation completely foreign to its nature.

“You are repulsive to the value stacks this unit accesses.” That’s what an activator told me once. “Only one subroutine stands between you and elimination. You should not be.”

But I was. The canopy calculated that it needed to generate an individual, and so it did.

Me.


“I have to go back a ways to talk about Grandaddy right,” Monk said. “I mean, you have no idea what that man meant to me.” He looked down, saw a piece of cigarette rolling paper in his hand. He’d unconsciously taken it out along with his tobacco pouch, which was a battered sandwich-sized baggie. “Do you mind if I—”

Darth Vaper was staring at his makings of a cigarette almost hungrily. “Where did you get tobacco? And paper?”

Monk smiled mysteriously. He’d traded his last two cans of cream corn to a man and his kids who lived out toward Jewett for it. “Us country folk’s got our ways,” he replied. “Want one?”

“God, I wish,” Darth Vaper replied. “But please, go ahead.”

He rolled a cigarette with practiced ease and lit it with his grandfather’s old Zippo.

“I was born in Tyler, Texas, but after I went to live with Grandaddy, we was closer to Houston and Waco. Nearest town was Marquez, but we was east of there, a place called Buzzard Branch, and Granddaddy ran a little farm-to-market type store at the crossroads of State 7 and County Road 400. People call it Monroe Crossroads, or used to.

“Mama is, well, last I heard, she was in Mobile, ’cause she had a connection there. And my dad and brother went out to California, allegedly, to sell a satchel full of meth, and never came back. Mean son-of-a-bitch. He chained me to a radiator once for two days for getting into his edibles.” Monk shrugged and took a long drag on his cigarette, breathed out. “I was five.”

His cigarette smoke wafted toward the woman’s vape cloud, but was seemingly repelled. The two types of smoke did not mix. At all. Weird.

“He lit out, and Mama’d gone from oxy to the H. She was useless. And that’s when Grandaddy showed up and took me home with him. He tried to take her, too, but she wouldn’t have none of it.

“He blamed himself for her problems. After Memaw died, he says he wasn’t much of a man for a couple of years.

“‘Those were the years Becky most needed me,’ he told me once. ‘She was thirteen, turning into a woman.’ Poor man blaming himself for that piece of work calling herself my mama.

“Anyway, that was the last I saw of her for a while. A couple of times she’d sober up and come back and take me off for a few months or a year. We’d try living in places. Dallas. South Dallas. Bonton. Now that was a rough neighborhood. Them gangsters didn’t care for my little redneck ass. Once, she had a job at the Round Rock Golden Corral and we moved there. I liked it there. Everything was new and clean and the school was pretty good. Same thing, though, and I was back at Buzzard Branch, in Grandaddy’s trailer. After a while, I wouldn’t go with her no more, and I never seen her again. We’d get calls when she needed something. Money. She sent me a picture once.”

He still carried it in his wallet, tucked behind a photo of his favorite dog, Terry-boy, long dead, but never forgotten.


The iterative process was straightforward. A command passed through approximately 10.3 million activator units until a group with sufficient proximity was encountered. These immediately congealed into a procreative knot, initiated a hard restart with a voltage surge, which engendered a material-code nugget.

Me.

My chirality was determined by the presence of the right-chirality unit in the procreative knot—an activator that might be designated as my “father.”

My own iterative chirality is carbon-left. Therefore I am a female.

The remaining members of the knot dissolved to form nutritive substrate and I was wiped onto 68C9I corridor of Harvester T-5 to harden.

Harden I did.

At this point, Harvester T-5 was operating in the vertebrate biological cluster designated as Austin.

I am a Texas native.


“So your Granddad was like a father to you?”

“He’s the only one who ever gave a good goddamn about me, that’s for sure.” Monk took a final tug on the hand-rolled cigarette, finishing it down to a nub.

Some say there are only two seasons in Texas: green and brown. It was late “green,” in east Texas, two years since the Ranya’s arrival. The interview—or whatever this was—was taking place in the transport cabin of a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter. The ’copter was sitting in the post office parking lot of Marquez, Texas. There were two chairs. He sat in the squeaky office chair. Why not a folding chair? He didn’t know. He supposed they must secure it somehow when flying. The vaping woman sat in her metal fold-out. She had a notebook and a pencil, obviously sharpened with a pocketknife. What kind of low-rent operation was this?

He looked around for an ash tray, but there was none. He shrugged, crushed out the cherry with two fingers, then put the remaining bit of paper and tobacco back into his tobacco bag to mix and smoke later.

“Grandaddy sent me to school here in Marquez, and after that I had to figure out something to do. I didn’t much like working in the store, and we had a couple of acres, so I started growing hemp down at Buzzard Branch. Learned to make CBD oil. We sold it in the store. I was pretty good at it. That was my brand, Buzzard Branch. Oil. Lotion. You get a bee sting, put on some of my moisturizer, that sting is gone.”

“You were a marijuana grower?”

“Hemp farmer.”

“You don’t sell pot?”

Monk shrugged noncommittally. Time to change the subject. “So when the Ranya first come,” he said, “you heard a lot about the cities, but we got invaded out in the country just as much. There was all kind of weird stuff going on out in the fields and woods. We got lots of ‘shakers,’ where all the glass and mirrors starts to, you know, vibrate, and then the thing or the place or the truck blows up. Or, most cases, the person. We got the death rays, or whatever they are. Took out Centerville. The courthouse. Everything entire, even Woody’s Barbecue. Left it a empty ghost town. All the Leon County government and what have you—”

“The infrastructure.”

“Right. But they wasn’t done. Come after folks in the country. That’s when all them moss-men started showing up like a plague. Somebody’d be out in the woods hunting, running a fence line, whatever, and there they’d be. And they’d kill you.”

“But you fought back.”

“Me and some others. I kind of got a crew.”


After the nutritive pap dissolved, I was flaked off the wall by a janitorial activator.

This unit brought me to refuse clearance, where I was placed in an isolation chamber. Nevertheless, I was paying attention, garnering information about my surroundings even while I was being moved. I was a very curious child.

In the isolation chamber, I “grew up,” in human terms. Most activator units are integrated into the local cluster of the canopy upon parturition. Not me. I was seasoned in the chamber.

Occasionally, a portal would iris out and a human child was injected into the chamber to spend time with me. These were my playmates. Only later did I understand they were terrified. I attempted to interact, but the very atmosphere of the chamber, with its high nitric content, was ultimately deadly to the them.

Each lasted for a few activity rotations, and then expired. After several repetitions, a new tack was taken. Instead of awkward physical interaction, I was subdued by isolation chamber wall extensions—interface outgrowths that I could not avoid—then imprinted with harvested q-pot from the minds of human children. I was fed their souls.

This seemed to work better.

For example, I began to cry incessantly, and call out for a mother I didn’t have.


“So the shaker attacks made you come up with the idea of the mirrors?”

“Mirrors attract and confuse the Ranya. So, yeah, it was worth a try, and it worked. Grandaddy and me got sort of a reputation for being able to clean out the moss-men when they showed up. People would contact him, he’d tell me, and I’d get the hunters going. We taught a bunch of people how to do it, too. But we was always careful about letting anybody know too much.”

“And so you avoided the Maven Algorithms,” said Darth Vaper.

“Grandaddy was the contact man at the Monroe Crossroads store. I did the organizing. We knew the Ranya have some way of figuring out who’s good at something and to come after them directly. It ain’t intelligence, necessarily. They ain’t smart, not like we think of smarts.”

“We believe we’re dealing with a control-dispersed colonial being that operates with no associated consciousness,” said the thin woman. “Like you say, you can’t kill the queen. You can’t take out command and control. The Aranya doesn’t think. It’s sheer action.”

Monk rubbed his shoulder, which still ached from a recent close call with a Ranya invader. His left arm had almost been ripped off. “To kill one of the things, the moss-men, you have to break it apart far enough so the parts can’t get back together right away. Maybe an hour of separation. Then they just kind of lose the connection or lose interest in reforming or something. If you just attack, the moss-man’ll separate like they was made of fog, and you’ll miss. They’ll get you then.”

Darth Vaper leaned forward, gazed at Monk intently. “But you lured them. How?”

Monk shrugged. “So if you make kind of a tunnel or trail of mirrors, the moss-man swarm will go down it. And you’d have a split. Two paths, both lined with mirrors. And we would channel each path into two of them 275-gallon IBC totes. You ever seen ’em? Plastic agri-containers with these metal box-frames around ’em?”

“I think I know what you’re talking about.”

“I remember trapping my first moss-man. I was scared as shit. It was trying to kill this woman, a widow with five little ’uns over toward Oletha. She’s a nurse or something like that, but rents out her place for hay. There was round bales everywhere, and the moss-man was supposed to be out in the field. So I went out there, dodging this way and that, and I got to the moss-man and tried to get it to chase me, but it didn’t pay the slightest attention. That’s the way the Ranya can be. One minute it’s like you’re not there, the next it wants to murder you. Anyway, I was dancing around, trying to get it to notice, and I started flashing this at it.”

Monk held up his grandfather’s silver Zippo lighter.

“It was about sunset, and I got the light to glint off of it real strong, right at the moss-man. Well, that got its attention. It started to swarm out, the way they do, reaching for me. So I lit out, and it come running after me.”

“Partial disassociation?”

“It stayed mostly a man-shape, but kind of smoky around the edges, and I got it all the way back to a hay barn where they kept the horse bales. And inside there me and some fellows had set up a couple of the widow’s totes. We had a little hall of mirrors that led down to the openings. The two bottle mouths was side-by-side.”

“That’s some pretty advanced thinking on your part, too.”

Monk stiffened. Was Darth Vaper mocking him? “Look, I don’t know where I got the notion, but I did. And it worked. That moss-man was swarming after me. Got a hold of my boot and melted it on my foot, as a matter of fact, so I was screaming like nobody’s business from the chemical burn while I was running. I ran like hell was on my trail, ’cause it was. Took off down that hall of mirrors we’d made.”

“What sort of mirrors?”

“Rear view mirrors of junkers, house mirrors, bathroom mirrors. You name it.”

“Okay, and then what?”

“We’d set up a ‘Y’ leading to the two big totes. The moss-man kind of stuttered there at the branch. There was mirrors all around and a couple of the men with me held up a mirror over the top of it, too. It wasn’t no airtight corridor or anything, but it seems like the moss-man was stuck there. And then it looked like it come to a decision, and it broke in two. Two clouds that both kind of looked like smoke-children or something.”

Monk reached again for his Zippo and tobacco, hesitated.

Save it for later, when you really need it, he thought.

“One swarm went into one IBT bottle, the other one went into the other. Couple of my crew screwed on the tops—they was brave as hell—and there it was, the moss-man, broke in two swarms. And, like I said, it took about an hour, but it died in them totes. Fell to the bottom like dust. Which was good, because we killed so many of ’em we would’ve run out of totes otherwise.”

“So you figured out how to hold your own against the Aranya ground soldiers. Mr. Monroe, that’s pretty impressive.”

“Other folks could figure out, given time.”

“Really? Well, they didn’t figure it out in San Francisco. The Aranya units wore hoodies there, not ghillie suits,” the thin woman said. “Ninety-nine percent of the population killed. Gone.”

Monk shook his head. “Poor bastards,” he said. “But at least the dead were spared what came next. The thing we don’t have any kind of answer for yet.”

“The Austin-area vortex?”

“Yeah, the horn, we call it.”


I remained in Harvester T-5 for a season of the planet. Then one night I was ejected with no warning from my chamber into the waiting hands of a ground penetration activation synod.

This subcluster of activators took me into the Texas night.

I got my first look at the starry skies above, the ground below. I began to cry. I cried a lot in those days.

The activator shook me until I stopped.

I was transported to what I learned was the city of Temple, Texas. There I was substituted in the cradle for the infant of a woman designated Theresa Easterling. The infant was subsequently destroyed.

I called Theresa Easterling “Mama.” It was my first word.

Over the course of the next four months, I matured into full human adult form.

This startled, then dismayed, then frightened Mama, as well it should. Yet she did not report me to any human security activators, or take security action herself.

She raised me, fed me, rocked me.

Mama still believed somehow that I was her natural child. She believed it up until the day I ripped off her face and drank her blood.


“Right. So I come in from hunting moss-men one day when that first horn-call starts up.”

“The horn’s mental lure?”

“Yep. I saw all sorts of cars and trucks lighting off down 79 West—like a train of ’em coming out of a high school football game on Friday night or something—and I knew something bad was up. So I get off-road with my Sierra and go around them, then go to find Grandaddy at the store, and he’s not there. I go to his trailer. He’s got a real pretty place there sits on a high bank over the creek in a live oak grove. He’s not there.

“That’s when I hear some sounds coming from the tool shed out back of the trailer in a little stand of yaupon. Moans and groans. I go over there, and, lo and behold, there’s Grandaddy. He’s taken a length of quarter-inch come-along cable with eyes in both ends and chained himself to this big ol’ lawn tractor. Two locks, one locking the cable to the lawnmower, and the other around his belly real tight, locking him to that end. And there he is, straining against the cable, clawing at his own stomach. He’s made a bloody mess of himself, but he can’t get away. He did too good of a job locking himself up.”

“That must have been upsetting.”

“He pleaded and begged with me to let him go.

“‘I’ve got to get there. She’s there,’ he tells me.

“‘Who?’ I asked.

“‘Caroline,’ he said.

“That was Memaw’s name.

“‘But get where?’ I ask.

“‘I can see it. In my mind. Big. Shaped like one of them Thanksgiving horn things. Size of ten, twelve football fields.’

“He threw himself against the cable. ‘Now get them keys and turn me loose, boy!’

“‘I ain’t a boy no more, and I ain’t turning you loose,’ I says. ‘Besides, you threw away the keys.’

“‘They’re out yonder in the yard.’

“‘I won’t get ’em.’

“‘Then cut me loose. Use them bolt cutters over yonder.’ He pointed to them. He’d put them mercifully out of reach.

“‘No.’

“‘If you don’t, then by hell I’m going to tear myself apart,’ he says. He runs up against that cable length as hard as he could then, digging it in. He’s clawing at his skin, tearing big gouges. I go over to him to pull his hands away and he’s hitting me, going for my eyes. I push him down, hard, and he’s laying there gasping and he starts whispering to me, ‘You don’t understand, I got to get there. Caroline is there.’”

“He thought he would be reunited with his dead wife?”

“I don’t know what he thought,” said Monk. “Or if he was really thinking. He doesn’t remember it.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I zip-tied his arms so he wouldn’t tear out his own goddamn internal organs, and his ankles so he couldn’t take a run to the end of that cable no more.”

Monk did allow himself to take out his tobacco again. He rolled another cigarette. The thin woman waited patiently. He took out the Zippo to light the cigarette, gazed at it for a moment, then pocketed it. He held the cigarette, unlit, in his right hand.

“That first horn-call lasted about a day, about twenty-four hours,” Monk finally said. “Then it let up. It was over. We heard reports of what had happened, how all them thousands and thousands of people—men, women, children—had lined up and done it, walked straight into that horn where it had moved to now, at the round rock in Brushy Creek. They came from hundreds of miles. All them vehicles parked in that giant cluster on the roads around that park where the Ranya set that horn down, or grew it, or whatever they did.” Monk gazed at his cigarette, turned it over his hand. “And none of ’em come back out.”

“The lure didn’t affect you?”

“It never has yet. What about you?”

“It does. Powerfully. But I have—” She held up her vape. “I have protection.”

“That thing?”

She nodded.

“How?”

“In time. But for now, tell me more about your grandfather, please.”

Monk took the Zippo back out, lit his cigarette. “We prepared. I got a buddy to weld us something like a jail cell in that shed at the trailer site, and another one at the store. We put a bottom on ’em, too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this East Texas soil is sandy as all get out. You could dig right out of a dirt floor.

“Anyway, we both knew I, or somebody, had to be there when the horn-call came again. So we hired that widow to help tend store. The Widow Brown. That way she could also keep a watch on her kids. Two of ’em were susceptible, and she’d had to practically knock ’em out to keep them from wandering off toward Round Rock. Missed their daddy. Ranya blowed him away.”


My life after Mama is a blur. I can isolate exact moments and catalog events, but there is no overall perspective view, no manner in which to achieve mental distance and consider my actions as a whole. I was dissociating. My vertebrate elimination algorithm was more in control than I was.

I became a thing of the night. This suited me fine, for I had loved the night since my deployment from the T-5 Harvester.

I understood how the vertebrate biological sapients nested, and I sought those places out. I was lithe and bred to be 2.78 times as strong as a normal human, and so gaining ingress was normally not difficult.

Neither was ripping people limb from limb.

Except the little ones. Their cries sounded like mine.

My creation printing must have foreseen this possibility, for within my body was a contingency override. I was forced to kill the little ones by the governor implant within me. Just as I was forced to kill Mama.

Weeping while I did it.

Mama.

So terrified when I attacked. So sad.

She loved even me. Even then.


Monk winched the thing, the woman, tight against the front bumper of his truck. Her back was tight against the engine grill, but her head protruded just over the hood. She was positioned like one of the teddy bears the garbage trucks liked to put on the front of their vehicles, tightly bound.

His GMC Sierra 1500 was big, even by truck standards. His crew called it “Monk’s Tank.” Whatever it was he had captured was shaking the hell out of the thing, even the frame.

“What in the world are you?” he asked. The question was more for himself than the woman. Or whatever she was. Her skin gleamed preternaturally white in the moonlight as if impregnated with mica chips. It was the same sheen as the moss-men dust in the bottom of the totes. This thing was Ranya.

Yet she had the form of a woman. An almost perfect form.

The woman strained against the webbing. Monk saw several edges of the fabric, originally designed to hold two tons of bricks aloft, fray. But the webbing held.

“I know you ain’t no vampire or nothing. There ain’t no such thing.”

“Are you sure?” the woman asked. “I feel like one all the time these days.” Her voice startled him. The moss-men were always deadly silent. He hadn’t expected her to speak. It was a normally pitched alto. She spoke in English, and her accent sounded very East Texas.


He’d caught her because he’d been staking out the Widow Brown’s place during his “off hours.” He’d taken a personal stake in the Brown family’s continued existence. Every day the children lived, Monk considered it a personal victory.

Then there was Molly Brown. Monk tried not to let his mind go there. He was not meant for anyone as pure as that. But he could love her from afar.

And keep a watch for moss-men.

In pacing the grounds of the Brown place, particularly the barn where the horse hay was stored (it was just regular hay that wasn’t supposed to get wet and moldy), he’d come upon signs of . . . something else.

A bedding area, tamped down in the collapsed back of a round bale of hay. A nest about the shape of a small man. Or a medium-sized woman.

Other things. A pink pacifier. There was no child young enough for a pacifier in the Widow Brown’s brood, and her youngest was a boy. A scarf with the odor of cheap perfume still clinging to it. A recipe, handwritten, on a three by five index card, on how to make chicken and dumplings.

They were gathered in a little pile near what he thought of as the “nest,” and looked very much like some sort of . . . keepsakes. Mementos.

Then he found the partially devoured severed human arm, also hidden in the straw.

Monk laid his trap in the form of a black cargo net made of half-inch webbing. He’d buried it in the straw just under the nest.

He ran a cable from his truck’s winch through the four steel rings that were attached to the cargo net’s corners.

Then he waited in the shadows.

Until, lo and behold, whatever it was—whoever it was—returned and bedded down.

Monk tiptoed out to his truck. He verified that his power systems were on-line.

Then he switched the lever on the winch to “rapid retrieval,” and reeled in his catch.


The thing, the woman, was silent. Monk took out his Zippo. He also removed his thousand candle flashlight from the holster at his side, and flicked it on the brightest setting.

He held the flashlight on the Zippo, then he moved both over and held the Zippo to the woman’s face.

“Shit!”

The woman snapped at his fingers so quickly that he was almost not able to get them away before she bit one of them off.

He was more careful to keep his distance on the second attempt. And he had an idea. This time, instead of shining the light on the metallic lighter, he shone it on the woman’s face. This would cause her to see her own reflection in the chrome.

And there it was. The woman stared at the lighter, at herself, like a cat fixed on the red dot of a laser pointer. With a grunt of frustration, she tried to move toward it, but the cable held her stationary.

“Why do you like it so much?” he found himself asking. “Mirrors and such?”

“Sweet,” she murmured, her attention still on her bright reflection in the lighter. “Tastes sweet.”

She turned her eyes toward him. Bluish-purple irises. Weirdly pretty.

“Kill me,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

“The only way to do what?”

“The children in the house. I want them. I can’t hold back much longer. It won’t let me.”

What won’t let you?”

“Inside this activator unit I inhabit, it is—” She shook her head violently, as if any more explanation was beyond her at the moment.

“Kill me,” she whispered.

“Okay,” said Monk. He put the lighter and flashlight away and picked up his shotgun. He put the muzzle of the twelve gauge against the woman’s right temple. “No problem.”

He pulled the trigger and blew out her brains in a spray of purple-red goo across the passenger side of the truck’s hood. It was more like grease than blood.

“Goddamn it,” said Monk. That was going to take a power washer to get it off.


What am I?

The end of the shotgun barrel touched her head.

How can I even ask the question?

She was going to cease to be. Like Mama. Gone. No me. No me anymore.

What am I?

She would give everything she had to live.

Everything. Anything. To stay a person.

A hand came free. Not by much.

Her lower arm.

But try as she might, she could get no more of herself loose from the net.

She snaked her hand between two fins and through the front grill of the truck. A man’s hand would not have fit. She strained farther, a bit farther. Her fingers reached inside for something, anything.

They closed around a cable.

Analysis.

A data cable that led to the GMC’s electronics. Its brain.

BCM 2554A91 installed in vehicle GMC Sierra 1500 Heavy Duty Pick-up Truck VIN 3GTP9EED7LG417999.

Not a very big brain. Maybe big enough.

Like the rest of her ilk, she interacted well with data systems.

Go. Flow.

She heard the bang of the man’s gun as if from a distance.


Darth Vaper was silent for a long moment.

Click, click, click went her vape device. She sucked in and let out an enormous cloud of vapor. It filled the passenger cabin like fog.

“The reason I’ve come to Marquez, Mr. Monroe, the reason I’m talking to you today and taking time from your valuable activities, is not merely to gather information.”

Monk was startled. And intrigued. From the moment he’d seen the old Sikorsky setting down in the parking, he’d assumed this was exactly what she was here for. To find out what he and his crew knew, to maybe tell others how to use it somewhere else. After all, that was what the invitation to come had said.

She seemed to be very carefully filling the room with vape fumes before speaking. Finally, she did. “We have—” Wheeze. “—been working on—” Wheeze. “—an idea,” she got out. “A weapon.”

She held her vaping device before Monk. Turned it in the passenger cabin’s wan, dusty-speckled light. It was probably only reflecting sunlight, but the device’s blue-and-white sparkle seem to originate from somewhere within.

“My late husband called it a ‘collapsivator,’ bless him. He developed it before he died. Before they got him. With a shaker attack.”

“I’m real sorry.”

“Thank you,” said the thin woman. “Anyway, I call it a vaporizer. I don’t really understand how it works, but Harvey left notes. The principle is that it resets the quantum states of particles within a certain field of effect. Basically returns them to a blank state.”

“That sounds . . . weird.”

“Yes. Harvey outlined the process before he died. You see, a normal Higgs boson’s life is ephemeral. 15.6 thousand-billion-billions of a second.”

“That’s pretty damn fleeting, all right.”

“After that the Higgs particle goes about doing its job—which is spreading mass and inertia around like so much manna from heaven, I suppose.” She took a long drag on the vape, then continued. “My husband invented a device called a muon inhibitor. I’m an administrator, not a scientist, and I can’t truly explain how it works, but I understand that the inhibitor prevents the decay of any Higgs particle trapped within it. When you can control and direct the release of large numbers of Higgs bosons, well, you can make the matter in the vicinity extremely confused as to its properties, even as to whether it is matter at all, or what kind of matter it is. It is rather difficult to generate Higgs particles to begin with. One needs a particle accelerator, a cyclotron. Only a small one, but still. We captured one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, several months ago. Since then, we’ve been manufacturing Higgs bosons, and using Harvey’s collection method.”

“I thought you said there was no ‘we.’”

“No government. No military. But there are bright and resourceful people left. You’ve proven that. I’ve found others. A cop in Seattle, who holds half the community together. An EMS helicopter pilot down in Florida. People who have had front line experience. People who have adapted and survived, at least so far. Well, some of those front line warriors—some ex-military, some not—have been working on an offensive weapon. A disruptive weapon. Big enough to produce quantum reset effects on a macro level. Small enough to fit.”

“Fit where?”

She lowered her vape, placed it in the cupped palm of her bony hands. “In, say, the bed of a pickup truck, rather like a fifty caliber mount,” she replied. “We want to use it to attack the vortex, the horn. We want to take that abomination down.”

Monk sat back in the squeaky office chair. “You want to put a giant vape on my truck?”

“Yes. Yours for a start. A pilot project, so to speak.”

She held up the device in her hand before her eyes. “This isn’t really a vape, you know. It’s a Higgs boson emitter. It’s what has kept me alive. But it has also wreaked havoc on my respiratory system, I’m afraid. Having a constantly changing mass and inertia imparted to the air one breathes will do that.” She palmed the vape again. “The emitter we wish to equip you with will be larger. It is a weapon for quantum reset within a sizable area of effect. That area includes all entangled particles, as well, so the strike zone is not necessarily a contiguous expanse.”

“Equip me? How?”

“Affixed somehow to the bed of your truck, I was thinking,” said the thin woman without cracking a smile.


The horn-calls continued for several months after the interview with Darth Vaper concluded. Monk’s welded “jail cell” allowed his grandfather to make it through—so long as he was pent up inside for the fourteen to twenty-four hours the horn-calls lasted.

Monk knew he never would have been able to accomplish this feat without Molly Brown’s help.

Then the moment came. The single mistake that was so minor as to be unnoticed. It may seem inevitable to some, but Monk did not believe in the inevitable. His mother made a choice. So had his grandfather. So did he, every day, to stay alive and fight.

That was why he felt his grandfather’s escape was on him. He should have thought the problem through more.

When the horn-call came that Sunday, Molly Brown was helping tend store. As always, she was there with her children so as to be near the cell. She locked his grandfather, Emmett Monroe, in the cell while Emmett was still rational enough to walk himself in, then she went looking for her susceptible children, Hector and Jamison. She found Heck, a boy of eight, playing in a pile of brick bits and construction dirt behind the store. Molly quickly pushed him in and shut the cell door.

But she couldn’t find Jamison, her five-year-old daughter. Molly frantically searched around the store, and was about to dive into the woods next to the parking lot looking for the girl, when she glanced up the state road.

There was Jamison, walking along the left shoulder. Walking west toward slaughter.

“What are you doing baby?” Molly asked when she caught up with Jamison.

“Gonna find Yago, Mama,” Jamison answered. Yago was her favorite stuffed animal, it was a Texas longhorn. The night her father died, exploded, Yago had disappeared along with him.

Molly came back with Jamison to find the cell contained only Heck, her son. No Emmett Monroe.

Had she locked the door?

It was locked now.

She quickly opened the cell, thrust Jamison in, then slammed the door shut with a bang, carefully locking it this time with her key.

What was she to do? Although cell phones did not work, there was an extended citizen’s band radio network in the area. After a couple of relays, Molly raised Monk on the walkie talkie he carried in the truck.

“I made a mistake and your grandaddy’s gone,” she told him. “He took that old brown Crown Vic of his.” She quickly gave Monk the rest of the details.

It seemed that even in the madness of his escape, Monk’s grandfather had the sense to prevent Heck from getting out of the cell. The boy must have begged. According to Molly, he missed his father something terrible.


Monk immediately dropped what he was doing and took off after his grandfather.

And almost as quickly got stuck in the traffic headed toward Round Rock.

It was nothing the tattered remnants of county law enforcement could prevent anymore. Besides, if you set up a roadblock and stayed still, you made yourself a target for a death ray or a shaker.

Monk took the truck off-road. He was confident in himself. He knew the lay of this land. He was confident in the GMC.

With his “not drug” profits, he’d installed the full package on the Sierra. Rancho shocks, locking rear differential, underbody skidplates, heavy-duty air filter, dual exhaust system and a custom two-speed transfer case with a granny gear. He’d put in an eight-inch aftermarket lift package. And for tires? Thirty-eight inch Baja Claws.

Okay, she was a drug runner’s delight, he had to admit, perfect for taking off-road in tricky situations.


He took the northern route through Cameron, then jagged north to Buckholts and took a scarcely used rancher’s road he knew of from a “delivery” overland. He went off-road again at Granger to avoid the jam of the blithely suicidal on County 95, until he had to hit city roads to make his way into Round Rock, the northern suburb of Austin.

He arrived at Memorial Park only three hours after starting, thinking surely he’d beaten his grandfather to the place. He frantically searched among the parked cars that gathered like dead moths around the park edges. He was beginning to feel the edge of relief suffuse over him when he saw it.

The Crown Vic.

There was no mistaking. Right there on the rear was a bumper sticker advertising Monk’s CBD oil, Buzzard Branch.

Grandaddy must’ve taken some back roads, too, Monk thought.

It took Monk a seemingly infinite minute, but he finally managed to get off the road, through a drainage ditch, and into Memorial Park proper with the GMC’s wheels churning. There was a moment when his two driver-side tires came off the ground and he thought he was going to roll her, but she almost miraculously settled back down with a hard slam that temporarily knocked the breath out of him. He jammed the accelerator and kept going.

Picked his way through a stand of mesquite.

Through a penny-a-wish pool.

Over a pile of rocks that seem made to be a barrier. But not for the Sierra’s enormous clearance.

Then he was beside the creek. Ahead was the round rock, the mark for navigation, that had given the town its name.

He turned into Brushy Creek and roared across, throwing up a spume of muddy Texas water in his wake.

That was when he got to the line. The queue of the brain-addled lining up, shuffling forward, waiting their turn to disappear into the horn.

The horn? Where was it?

Then he realized he’s been looking straight at it. He’d thought it was a stormy sky.

“Holy shit,” Monk murmured.

It went up and up in front of him.

The yawning opening. The maw.

It had to be a quarter mile high. And inside: colors. Whirls and curls of light, like the stormy surface of some gas giant planet. Bright and dark patches. Flashing of some sort of light-producing energy that went on and off.

It was as bright, random, and alarming as a sheriff’s car when you come up on it in the dark of night.

But no sheriff’s lit up vehicle had what Monk saw next. There were fleshy . . . things hanging from the sides of the structure, about fifty yards back from the maw’s entrance. Tendrils. Pinkish-gray, and wet with pus and gore.

Whale baleen, Monk thought. Like in a nature documentary he’d once watched. For the whale, these were biological structures to sort out the krill. Only here, the structures were some kind of alien madness, and the krill were human beings.

It was a harvester of men.

Much larger, too. At the bottom were specks, dark lines, wriggling, wavering. Monk realized these were the silhouettes of people. People just walking into the monster. So many. Too many. He couldn’t make out his grandaddy in the crowd.

He had no choice. He drove toward the crowd, the queue that was least fifty people wide and a thousand people deep. Patiently moving forward into the maw.

They’re dead already, Monk thought. Nobody was turning back. He honked the horn. Nobody got out of the way.

So he drove into the crowd. Slowly, but relentlessly. Remorselessly.

He was astounded when the crowd parted. There seemed to be at least some awareness, some desire to survive. Or at least to survive long enough to get into the maw to die.

He drove the Sierra forward, scanning the faces all around as he did, looking for one familiar one.

Nothing. No one he knew personally. Then he got to the horn’s opening, the maw. Its lower lip was almost flush with the ground. He could drive in if he chose. Instead, he stopped the truck. He reached behind the seat and took out his thirty-ought-six. It had been a gift from his grandfather on his sixteenth birthday, but since then he’d tricked it up a bit, particularly with a high powered scope. He climbed through the rear window of the truck, into the bed, pulling the rifle behind him.

In the truck bed was a recently installed weapon provided by Darth Vaper and her people. She’d called it a Higgs emitter. It was, she said, basically a very large version of her own vape. It even looked like a box vape, a really big one. It was a white box mounted on a stainless steel pole, an inch-and-a-half fence pole, as a matter of fact, acquired from the abandoned Tractor Supply in Rockdale. The welded pole had been cut off at about shoulder height. The emitter was mounted on it with a swivel bolt.

Monk ignored the device. Instead, he raised the rifle to his right eye and scanned the oncoming crowd of victims. He searched for his grandfather, sweeping, zeroing in on one or another person, working back from the front of the queue to the layers behind, one by one.

Emmett Monroe was not among them.

But the Crown Vic. He’d seen it. His grandfather had to be here.

Which could only mean one thing.

He turned around and directed his rifle over the cab of the truck.

Into the horn. Into the maw.

He began to scope people who were partway inside. Backs of heads, momentarily glimpses of the side of face.

And with the magnification, he could see what was happening to them.

The tendrils, the curtain tongues, took them. Licked them. Slapped them. Like the enormous fabric sheets in drive-through car washes.

Or like tongues, tasting. Moving back and forth.

And when the tongues got the taste they wanted, little pieces of—what? it was hard to say. Tendrils, capillaries?—would extend and wrap themselves around the person, like fast-growing roots. That was when the person, man woman, whoever, would start to scream. Scream because they were being pulled apart. Their whole body was ripped to shreds in a synchronized explosion of blood and gore.

What for, Monk wondered. What in God’s name for?

And then, scoping down the throat of the thing, Monk saw him. Almost to the harvesting tongues.

“Grandaddy!”

Monk climbed back through the window, got behind the wheel. He gunned his truck up and over the horn’s lip.

He drove into the mouth of hell.


Getting the Sierra over the lip wasn’t difficult. But the crowd pushing patiently to get in was. There were so many people in front of him. He didn’t want to run them over.

So he honked his horn. Honked and honked some more.

As before, the crowd parted for him. He did not have to run people over. Some glanced back, and he saw the occasional flash of apprehension on their faces. Then, almost instantly, placidity. Peace.

The peace of the grave, Monk thought.

The “floor” of the horn was squishy. It reminded Monk of going mudding.

Well, I got the tires and clearance for that, he thought.

He gunned the truck, and headed for the spot he’d scoped in on his grandfather. There was plenty of light, more light than outside. It was an eerie strobe that came from the inner lining of the horn, above and below. It had the quality of a fluorescent light with the ballast going out.

He was almost to the wall of tongues when he picked his grandfather out again.

Emmett Monroe was among the tendrils, the baleen-like curtains. Monk did not hesitate. He roared after, followed his grandfather in.

He was behind his grandfather, then beside him—

He roared past Emmett Monroe, and jerked the Sierra to a stop. Monk took a quick breath. Another. He opened his door and leaped out.

And landed in alien mud. Monk’s shoes and legs sank into the floor. It was gooey, but the liquid that made the gooeyness didn’t behave like water. When he was sure he would sink down and suffocate, the floor, the bottom of the horn, firmed up. It rebounded, and lifted Monk up so he was walking on it as if it were firm-pack.

Monk faced toward the exterior. His grandfather was walking toward him, not even noticing him, the placid look of a sheep going to unsuspecting slaughter on his face. Monk tensed to stop the man.

Whack!

The tendrils, the curtainlike tongues, slammed into Monk from behind. Monk sprawled forward. The tongue slapped down upon him several more times, knocking the breath from him. It was as big as a side of beef, and heavy. The floor goo got in his face, in his mouth. It tasted like batteries.

Monk pulled himself up.

It was just some random swipe, he thought. When the Ranya want to murder you, they come at you and do it. When they don’t, they ignore you like you’re a rock or tree or something.

The horn hadn’t called him. It had called his grandfather.

Monk got to his feet and looked frantically around. Less than ten feet away, one of the tongue harvesters had wrapped itself around his grandfather now.

Monk covered the distance in an instant. He clawed at the tendril. His fingers sank in, but, like the floor, the surface seemed to harden, rebound. He couldn’t get a grip.

He didn’t give up. He worked his arms into wrinkles of the material, using his body for leverage. He pushed into the folds. His breaths were filled with acidic fumes, but there was still some kind of breathable air. He pushed in farther.

And reached his grandfather. Grabbed him by the arm. Yanked him in the direction he thought was the truck. He could see smaller tendrils that had begun to dig like roots into his grandfather’s skin. He tore these away, and pulled harder.

His grandfather fought like a wildcat, but Monk worked him back, pulled him toward the truck. Finally they reached the open door, several inches above Monk’s waist. He picked his grandfather up by the waistband of his Dickies, and threw the man inside the cab. Monk scrambled in after, and slammed the door shut.

Inside, his grandfather eyed Monk like a cornered animal.

Monk looked into Emmett Monroe’s eyes and saw—

Nothing.

“Grandaddy,” he whispered in anguish. “You’re done gone, ain’t you?”

Monk reached to take the shell, what was left of the man, to hug it, cling to it one more time.

Perhaps there was something of his grandfather still left. Perhaps there was only sheer animal instinct and distant memory of how life was, how cars worked. His grandfather opened the passenger door and, before Monk could touch him, tumbled out.

“No!”

But his grandfather was already scrambling up, scurrying off into the maw. Monk watched, frozen by grief. Deeper, deeper into the shivering, shaking curtains of alien flesh.

The smaller tendrils catching, growing again into his grandfather’s body.

Monk couldn’t watch anymore. He reached over and pulled the passenger door closed.

But he thought he heard his grandfather’s final shout before the screams began.

“Caroline!”


Follow him, Monk thought. Follow him down the gullet.

Nobody cares about me in this life no more. The only man who ever did is gone.

What was there to keep fighting for?

But there was the Widow Brown. Her children.

He needed to protect them. Protect them all.

What the hell. Maybe he would try to get out.

But that was easier said than done. The Sierra was well into the undulating curtains. Monk put the GMC in reverse. Gunned it like crazy.

No good. He was digging himself in. He slammed it back into drive, locked the differential.

There was no choice. He had to drive forward, deeper, in the direction the tendrils were pulling it. A tendril slapped down on the cab, slithered across. With its weight, the truck caught traction. Moved.

Monk drove on. A hundred yards. Two hundred. Deeper.

Then he was through them. To the other side. He had not succeeded in turning the truck at all. He was still facing inward.

The goo’s firmness gave way. Now he was stuck.

“Goddamn it!” He slapped the wheel, rubbed his forehead.

He sat back and tried to think of something else to do.

That was when his truck started talking to him.


“What did it say?” Darth Vaper wheezed.

Monk started. He glanced around. He was back in the passenger box. The metallic Sikorsky interior. Was this a dream, a memory, or had he—

Gotten out?

Then he remembered. All of it. The metal-plated inside of the helicopter hadn’t changed, but outside the Texas season was now “brown.” Nine and a half months had passed since the last such interview. Everything was changed now.

“I—”

“Mr. Monroe, we need this information for the first responders, the resistance, if we are to know what steps to take, what do with what you’ve given us.”

Monk shook his head. There was no figuring this out.

“Just say what happened. One step at a time, Mr. Monroe. The truck spoke to you? Please continue.”

“That was it,” Monk replied. “But the next thing she said was all I cared about at the time. She said she was going to show me how to take that alien slaughterhouse down.”


“I will help you. But first, we must get unstuck. You are about to be swept.”

It was the radio that was talking. The voice sounded so close, so complete.

Of course, he’d had an excellent after-market surround sound kit installed.

“There’s a cleaning function that removes organic debris after the q-pot harvesters are finished. You may have noticed the motility waves bringing detritus together?”

Monk smiled, thinking of his good ol’ truck. Despite her complicated diction, her East Texas accent came shining through, didn’t it?

Then he frowned, thinking how absolutely insane that sounded.

“The what doing what?” Monk replied.

“You have to get out of here. You are about to be showered with a nitric acid bath.”

Monk shook himself. Now was the time to act if he were ever going to.

“Deeper in,” he said. “We got to go deeper. There ain’t no choice at this point.”

“Agreed.”

“All right, but in case you didn’t notice, we’re kindly stuck in the goo.”

“I can help with that.”


“First we had to get moving, ’cause I was stuck,” Monk said.

Darth Vaper sat in her metal chair scratching notes with her home sharpened pencil. Occasionally, she would set down the pencil and take up her vaping device, take a puff, then resume writing.

“I shifted her down to low, and slowly inched her forward. My tires were spinning in the goo, not so much as before. I kindly rocked them from side to side—the way you do when you’re mudding—so the edges on them Nitto treads could hopefully get a grip.”

“‘I will tell you where the hard spots are,’ the truck said to me.”

Monk glanced over at the vaping woman, who had stopped writing and was staring at him. “Don’t say it, ma’am. I know it sounds crazy. The voice was coming out of my goddamn radio speakers. At least I think it was. Felt like it was in my head because I got such a good sound system in that cab.”

“Please go on,” said Darth Vaper.

“Okay, so I said, ‘That would sure help.’”


“If you could move to the left 3.72 yards, your left front and rear tires might find a grip.”

“3.72 yards, huh?” Monk laughed. “How about four? That too far?”

“That would be within parameters,” my damn truck answered. “I am working from memory. Although my recall is eidetic, I did not see everything during transport out of the horn.”

“Okay, left four feet,” he said.

He rocked it over. It seemed the goo would never release them, but suddenly he had grip on one side. Monk worked the truck carefully forward.

“Now cut it to a 37.4 degree angle,” the voice said.

“You mean turn further to the left?” Monk replied.

“Correct.”

So he did.

“Floor it, human!” said the truck. “Here comes the acid!”

Monk did that, too. Behind him came a rushing sound, and an awful bitter tinge filled his nostrils.

And he was on a patch of solid ground.

Solid whatever.

They were clear of the goo. Monk and the truck headed deeper into the beast.


He drove forward at what would be a walking pace. The surrounding light grew dim. Monk turned on his headlights, and then his cab roof fog lamps. The strobing effect was left behind them now as he slowly worked his way forward. The floor of the alien slaughterhouse was drier now. It was filled with ridges and bumps, but nothing the truck couldn’t handle at this point.

After the slopping, thrashing roar of the curtain tongues, there was an eerie quiet. His rear window was still open from where he’d slid through it.

“Where am I going? What am I looking for?” he asked the empty cab.

“There is an interface area,” said the truck. “I did not fully understand its function when I was ejected by the canopy activators, but I noted it as I passed. I do not forget.”

“Interface area? What does that mean?”

“The horn vortex is an ecosystem of competing algorithms. It does not have a command structure, as you would think of it. No central processing area. No hierarchical code core. The Aranya canopy is colonial, not a hive.”

“So no brain center or cockpit or whatever?”

“No.”

“So what are we looking for, then?”

“A reservoir.”

“Like for water?”

“Q-potential. A well of quantum capacitation filled with particles and their properties held in isolation from one another by virtual mirroring at micro-Planck distances. It is what we came for. It is what we harvest. Without it, star travel is impossible. Without it, the canopy’s existence would be impossible.”

“And, uh . . . what exactly would that reservoir look like?”

“It was roughly spherical and had a ghostly glow.”

Monk pointed ahead. “You mean, like that?”

He turned off his headlights. He didn’t need them anymore. The reservoir shone like an weird, lumpy moon before them. It was at least ten stories high. It fit between the horn’s roof, floor, and curved sides like a giant pearl. It seem to be made of swirling, rotating vapor, all aglow in silver, gold, and orange sparkles. They seemed to reach for him, but when he blinked, the tendrils were gone.

“What is it?” Monk whispered.

“Harvested human q-pot,” the truck replied. “It is a well of souls.”

Bam!

Something struck the side of the truck.

Bam! Bam!

Monk looked out. Familiar human forms.

Oh, no.

The green-and-black coloration. The stringy silhouette like they were wearing ghillie suits. But they were ghillie suits.

There were moss-men outside his truck, banging to get in.

A hand, an impossibly long hand with fingernails of steel, reached from behind him, grabbed him by the neck, and pulled him through the rear window. Monk fought it, choking, clawing at it, but it was too strong. He was thrown down in the truck bed. A moss-man stood over him. There were no eyes beyond the stringy moss descending from the forehead, no face at all.

One index fingernail extended, terribly long, like a machete. The moss-man bent down and casually slid the tip into Monk’s body. He rolled at the last second, and it pierced his side. He hoped it only caught some intestines or something nonlethal, something that would not set him to bleeding out instantly.

The moss-man withdrew the razor-nail and stabbed again, this time into the meat of his thigh.

It stopped.

The Zippo. It had hit the Zippo in his pocket.

The moss-man withdrew, considered its machetelike nail.

It plunged the bladed finger in again. This time it passed through his jeans and into his thigh muscle.

Monk cried out in pain. The creature pushed deeper. Through the leg. Into the metal of the bed.

It’s stabbing my baby! Monk thought. “Goddamn it, you leave my truck alone!”

As the machetelike nail passed into the truck, the entire vehicle seemed to shudder. The shuddering passed on to the moss-man. It began quivering itself, almost as if it had been hit by a Ranya shake weapon. And like a human hit by such an attack, it shook itself apart in a miniature explosion.

In the case of the moss-man, it exploded not in gore, but into droplets of a nasty, machine-oil like grease. The grease got all over everything. Some fell into Monk’s open mouth. It tasted like rancid butter mixed with WD-40.

Monk jerked himself up. A lightning-like pain shot through his side. His insides felt like they were quivering with the violation. His leg ached and bled. He put a hand on the oozing hole. It wasn’t an enormous wound, but it did go all the way through.

Nothing to do about it now. He reached over to the fence pole that held what the thin woman had called the vaporizer. He used it to pull himself up. With bloody hands, he stood and leaned over the device.

Bam!

Another moss-man was at the tailgate, with another two behind it.

Bam!

Another attempted to scramble over the side.

Monk turned his attention to the device. There wasn’t much to it. A switch.

Which was jammed by some residue from the harvester tongue. He quickly scraped it clear.

A glance up. The moss-man was half-over the tailgate. It may not have a face, but it did have a mouth, which it now opened. Huge, a dark hole where a face should be, a hole surrounded by needlelike teeth.

It screamed like a thousand squeaking office chairs, with the feel of a thousand mouths chewing aluminum foil.

Monk pressed the on-switch.

The vape did nothing. Or seemed to do nothing. But something was going on inside. Two substances were meeting, resolving, unresolving their own reality. Then the reality around them.

There was no human sense that could discern such a thing.

But the moss-men certainly could. The one on the tailgate stopped climbing, turned around, and scrambled to get down. It leaped to the floor of the horn, took a step away, another— The moss-man pulsed once, like an inner tube overinflated by a hand pump. Pulsed again. Then dissolved.

No, not dissolved, Monk thought. Ceased to be. Like a light blinking out.

“Shit,” Monk murmured. He looked at the vape. It began to, well, put out vapor. Or produce some sort of fog effect that looked like smoke but was obviously something else.

“You still there?” Monk called through the cab rear window.

“Yes,” the woman’s voice answered.

“I guess it was you somehow killed that moss-man that was stabbing me?”

“It did not expect an attack via the vehicle substrate. I was able to take it by surprise, otherwise I probably would have been destroyed.”

“Well, thanks,” said Monk. A flash of pain shot through his ravaged leg. He clung to the vape until it passed. “Hey, why isn’t this thing killing you like the moss-men? It just kind of wiped them out, I mean.”

The truck was silent for a moment. “I do not know,” she finally said. “Perhaps because I am a person. My quantum existence is self-contained.”

Monk nodded. “You want to try something interesting?”

“What we are doing is not interesting?”

Monk laughed. It hurt. Better not do that again, at least for a while.

“Let’s drive into that reservoir. That well. See what this thing does to it. What do you think?”

“That would be interesting,” said the truck. “It may affect the containment algorithms.”

“Can you drive yourself?” he asked.

“No. You have to do that.”

Monk groaned. “Shit, I was afraid that’s what you’d say. I have to climb back through the window.”

He pulled himself painfully through. After resting a moment, he opened the cab’s glove compartment. From it, he took a wad of paper that contained his vehicle registration and four or five expired insurance cards. He wadded them all together and pushed them into the wound in his leg. Once they were there, he applied pressure with his left hand. The exit wound on the back side of his thigh did not seem to be bleeding as much. Perhaps there were no big blood vessels nicked there. His side didn’t seem to be bleeding as much, either—which was either very good, or very bad news.

With his right hand, he reached for the keys. But the truck was already turned on. All he had to do was put it into gear.

He did so.

With his wounded right leg still reminding him he was abusing it with every movement, he flexed his foot and gently tapped the GMC’s accelerator. The truck rolled forward.

Toward the eerie light. Toward the well of souls.


Driving into the moonlike globular cluster of wispy light was like sliding sideways into a cloud. Then, as in an instant, the truck stopped in its tracks. Monk’s arms felt like lead. He looked at his hands, and they were made of gold, grasping a neon-yellow wheel. He breathed in and felt as if he were sucking in wet cotton. He gasped, and the colors strobed. Once, twice.

And everything was back to normal.

He stopped the truck and, without thinking, pressed down the emergency brake pedal with his left foot.

He rolled down the side windows and looked around.

Perhaps surprisingly, the inner walls of the horn chamber began to glow first, to pulsate. It was only then the globe, the reservoir, surrounding him and the truck seemed to respond. It spun faster and faster, tendrils of liquid light that Monk suspected were not light, but some other substance or state of matter, that merely emitted a glow as a byproduct, reached for the walls. Reached for the ceiling. The floor.

There was a sound like wind through brush.

Through mesquite, thought Monk. Like the air is rushing over thorns and leaves and branches.

The globular cluster tore itself apart and the tendrils disappeared into the inner walls of the horn.

And the horn began to blow. Low. Long. Changing pitch like a crazy tea kettle. It seemed not a call or cry, but a wail of dying agony.

“I believe the human q-pots are hunting down the Aranya algorithms and erasing them,” the truck said. “Although I’m not certain what is physically producing that sound.”

Suddenly there was a bright flash of light, blinding. Then total darkness.

After shaking his head for a moment, Monk turned on his headlights again.

Nothing moved in the vast chamber.

Then a twinkle along one wall. Another on the ceiling.

Twinkles became steady spots of light. More and more. As if the stars were lighting up one by one at night. But there were soon far more lights than stars in the night sky. A clear light suffused the vast chamber.

A light that did not outrage human eyes.

“What the hell did we just see?” Monk asked.

“They’re here. The harvested souls.”

A crazy hope shot through him.

Grandaddy!

“Can they . . . will they . . . come back?”

“I do not think so,” said the truck. “But in some way, they are alive again.” The motor purred for a moment before she spoke again. “I believe they seek vengeance.”


“What about the people outside? The still living, breathing people lined up?”

“Soon as the horn-call stopped, they got the hell out of there,” Monk said to the thin woman, Darth Vaper.

“And how did you get back here?”

“Sprinkled some anti-coag on my wounds, bound up my leg and side real tight, and walked out. I keep a good first aid kit behind the seat.”

“What was it like?”

“The horn was quiet. Big echoey thing. Still smelled bad, but I could breathe.”

“And from there?”

“Took the Crown Vic.” He rubbed his eyes, which had started to tear again. “Grandaddy left his keys in it. Took a bit of maneuvering and some smash-up derby, but I worked it out of the clump of cars he left it in.”

“And your truck? With the alleged female Aranya being in it? What happened to that?”

“Oh, she’s there. In the horn. She ain’t going nowhere. She hates them as much as we do for what they did to her.”

“And what was that?”

“Made her kill her own mama.”

“Ah,” said the thin woman. “I see. Well there are plans to be made—” The rest of her response was lost in a wheeze. But he did hear the final words Darth Vaper uttered. “—want you to head back inside.”


The Zippo clinked open, sparked. Monk lit a hand-rolled cigarette in the truck cab. He took a puff, sat back, and slowly let out the smoke. Strange how he felt comfortable here, right, in the middle of an alien monstrosity. But it was an alien monstrosity that was controlled by humans now, or at least some form of human nature. Human nature that was probably very pissed about being harvested by aliens, and looking for a way to fight back.

Grandaddy will be, Monk thought. That’s for damn sure.

There would need to be some kind of interface, some way to communicate with those inside the horn.

Monk figured he might be sitting in it.

The truck’s dash lights glowed. He hadn’t cranked her up, but had the truck interior electronics on.

“Before we get started figuring this thing out,” said Monk after moment. “Tell me. What are we to each other, you and me?”

The voice, the alto voice with the East Texas accent came over his speakers. “You are the driver. I am the truck.”

“But you ain’t no truck,” Monk said, arching up to pocket the Zippo in his right jean pocket. His leg was healing well, and the dull ache in his side had abated. The movement caused him only a short stab of pain. “You’re a person.”

“I am a truck. I inhabit several billion-billion collapsed quantum states of the material substrate. It is me and I am it. When you shot me, you took away my compulsion to kill. I was no longer a slave. The part of me that migrated into the truck is free. I am free.”

“And if we use this other thing we’ve taken over, this murder horn, to help get them invaders cleared out?”

“That is a big ‘if’—”

“Oh, I know that.”

“Well . . . after that, I suppose you can drive me out of here. Like any truck.”

“And do what?”

“I did enjoying going very fast off-road when you were meeting the others in your cluster, your group, to go after the activators. The moss-men.”

“You were there?”

“Also delivering the illegal substances.”

“Oh, now, that was just to selected clients. A few buddies. Help keep ’em from blowing their brains out.”

“I particularly enjoyed the day when we went through the bog by the river.”

“Bog?” ask Monk quizzically. Then it dawned on him. “Oh, you’re talking about the state lands, down by the Navasota where we cut across that time.”

“Yes,” said the truck, a hum of satisfaction translated via the radio speakers’ excellent dynamic range. “That was fun. I would like to go mudding again.”

Monk took a drag on his cigarette, breathed out. “I’d be pleased to arrange that,” he said with a grin. “After we get finished here.”

The truck answered in the incongruous East Texas drawl that Monk figured must once have belonged to someone else, someone who meant something to this strange being—something that was far more important than her own origin in murderous, unfeeling code.

“Yes, as you say,” replied the truck. “First, we must get her done.”


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Framed