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Matthew McCrae Martin

The February Editor's Pick Writer is Matthew McCrae Martin

You can email Matthew at: mmmccraemartin@gmail.com

Matthew McCrae Martin

HARVEST ROAD
by Matthew McCrae Martin

The mayor lay, shot and bleeding, while the compound burned. The raiders in their black, beetle helmets and road leathers flowed around him, not casting a reflective facemask his way. He was only one more dead man, after all. Or soon to be, he thought and grabbed his stomach. His shirt was slick and warm against his belly. A fresh gout of blood spurted from between his fingers.

The Beetlemen moved through the compound with guns and flamethrowers and clubs. They revved the engines of their motorcycles and circled. The mayor wrenched his head back in the dust and saw a breach at the main wall. His father had built that wall, alongside the fathers of the good men now dead in the dirt around him. Folks thought the wall would last a hundred years. Now it was rubble after less than a generation.

The mayor looked over his stomach, past bloody fingers, past smoke and flame and all that death. He saw the Beetlemen herding women and children, wailing and keening, out through another breach at the rear. The raiders pushed his people through the freshly-made tear in the wall of his world; waved them on out into the wastelands, leveling shotguns and knives at those that tried to climb back through.

The Beetlemen weren’t in the business of taking captives; they simply let them loose into the wastelands. That was a blessing. If his Elmira was among the castaways, he knew she’d take control, and lead the group east to the sea. No sense heading south anymore. The Harvest Road was closed.

It was almost a hundred miles to the ocean. They’d be crossing the wastes with no weapons for bandits, no food, no water. Not all would make it, but he had no doubt that some would, Elmira chief among them. He spared a smile at the thought of her leading the people. He had faith that she’d remain to tell the story of her town—their town—the Dalton Compound, Jewel of the Harvest Road.

The Beetlemen formed a phalanx and were approaching the first shipping container. These containers, salvaged from a yard out near the coast and hauled back west when the Harvest Road wasn’t even open yet, were where the harvest was stored. That first generation of Dalton Compound men had been mindful enough to know that their harvest would attract raiders and other dwellers from the wastes. They’d made sure that the containers were distributed throughout the compound, rather than piling them all together. Better to lose some of the harvest than all of it at once.

The Beetlemen were to the door now, and the one in the lead pulled a pair of bolt cutters from a pack on his back. He cut the chain and lock laced around the handles. A pair of Beetlemen came forward now, flung the doors wide.

There was flash followed by a concussive boom. The container exploded. Beetlemen screamed. The original Dalton men had also been wary enough to booby trap the containers. The mayor watched Beetlemen burn as other black-suited raiders tried to beat back the flames.

Some of the Beetlemen would die.

He watched the sky. It was a parched blue, with pebbly clouds stretching off into forever. A small piece of an old song came to him then. He sang it loud and true:

Harvest Road, where the blood do flow,
Hear them trucks,
Best shut the door.
Harvest Road, the trucks come and go,
But I won’t be goin’ home no more.

A Beetleman kicked him in the ribs and he felt something snap…come loose within. Still, he smiled up at the kicker, daring him to bring the boot down on his face, and stomp and stomp until there was nothing left save a bloody smear in the dirt. He’d count it as a mercy now. Being gutshot meant a long death full of thirst and cold. A quick end would be a relief, but these black-suited men weren’t done with him yet and he knew it.

He turned his head and watched a group of raiders advancing on another container. They’d wised up, brought in a pair of sappers who were going over the containers looking for trip wires and dead-man switches. They’d find them, he was sure. They’d cut the wires, open wide the doors, and take the harvest. He found a certain calm in recognizing the inevitably of the coming defeat. He looked to the sky once more.

The Beetleman who’d kicked him turned away, but the mayor grabbed a cuff of his road leathers. “Say, Hoss, you got any spare water?” the mayor asked. He still had some dash.

The Beetleman looked down at him for a time, then pulled an aluminum flask from his belt, and dropped it on the mayor’s chest. Surprised, the mayor wiped bloody foam from his lips before drinking. The water was stale and warm, but he gulped it down. It was so, so good. He stopped drinking and took a breath.

The Beetleman reached for his flask. The mayor jerked it away. “My father never agreed with the harvest,” he said.

The Beetleman drew his hand back, sat on his haunches head cocked to the side like a spaniel, listening.

“He wanted Dalton to be a community of farmers. We tried, but the weather had changed since the bombs, and the ground was too acidic to grow anything but the mealiest crops. We’d never be anything but subsistence farmers—and pretty sorry ones at that.”

He took another swig.

“Dalton needed to live,” he said to the Beetleman, a bit of steel creeping into his voice. “You understand?”

The Beetleman said nothing.

“And living meant doing what we had to do.” The mayor swept his arm out in a wide arc, as if to take in the whole of the Earth. “We went out, found the long haul rigs, repaired them, opened the front gates that had held back the world and set out to discover what those folks needed most. The ports were still open in Miami and Miami had contact with ports in New Orleans, and Galveston. Oil was still coming up in the Gulf of Mexico. We found that for some, the end of the world had been a boon. Some towns had doubled, tripled in size in the months following the flashes and poisonous clouds, as they absorbed great tracts of land and all the topsoil that came with it. On these places they grew soybeans, tobacco, sugar cane, sorghum, wheat, and all the other crops that'd never grow again in Dalton.”

The mayor paused, rested his head against the ground. The oration had exhausted him, but he’d needed to say it; needed to make at least this one person understand. “Those places needed bodies to work the refineries, to bring up the oil, to work the land. Our neighbors of this new world needed stock.”

The Beetleman finally spoke from behind his visor. “That’s what you people called them?” He flexed his hands as he spoke. The mayor heard the tight creak of leather each time the Beetleman made a fist. “You called them stock.” It wasn’t a question this time.

“We couldn’t personalize it,” the mayor said, and took another sip of water. “We had to have workers. Tell me you understand.”

To recognize themselves in those they took—harvested—from other, smaller settlements, from home and bed, and herded into containers at the end of gun, club, and knife, might prevent them from doing what was necessary to keep their town going, to keep their town from dying out.

The Beetleman stood, turned from the mayor. They mayor heard the Beetleman flip up his visor, saw him bring hands toward his hidden face. The Beetleman’s shoulders shook. Even over the din, the mayor heard the man’s sobs.

His father had hated it, and, in the end, had hated him. He was like that man in the story, the one his father had read to him as a boy. The one about the man who takes a journey on a dark and stony path and sees his neighbors—hypocrites all—walking arm in arm with the devil.

The man in that story died in bitterness and gloom, he remembered, so too did his father. He remembered how his father, from his deathbed, had told him that it would have been better for everyone to have died from the radiation.

The future mayor of Dalton had walked from his home that night, his face burning, sat at his own kitchen table. He dried his tears, looked to the living room where his young wife, Elmira, sat nodding in her favorite chair, the crochet hook and ball of worsted he’d brought back from Miami in her lap.

At last, he had decided that his father, for all the good that he done for his town, lacked vision. The man did not see how the network of roads on which the big rigs rolled had given his son this house, had made it possible to marry a good woman, had provided them comfort and taken away the fear they’d felt in those first months after the bombs. And if the old man couldn’t see that, then to hell with him.

The mayor watched the remaining survivors of Dalton, men—his men—who drove the rigs and manned the guns, now kneeling in a line in the dirt, hands resting atop their heads. Beetlemen trained their rifles on them. He hoped that their deaths would be clean and quick.

“We went too far north,” the mayor said to the Beetleman’s back, “that was our trouble.”

The Beetleman returned, knelt. “Jesus, you really think that was your trouble? You think that was what you did wrong?”

The mayor did think that. They’d harvested too much stock from the surrounding counties. What stock did remain had wised up and either gotten very good at hiding once they heard the big rigs rolling, or else had joined up with some of the emancipators—those agitators who were always bedeviling the convoys on the Harvest Road with ambushes and roadside bombs. Stock was thin.

“I sent a convoy, finally. Had to gather more slaves. Tell me you understand,” he smiled, looked up at the Beetleman.

The Beetleman kicked him on the thigh, kept on kicking him. It didn’t hurt.

The mayor was beyond pain now. He heard cheering, looked toward the sound of it. The container was open, and the stock came out, blinking and unsure. Hoards of slaves kept coming out of the containers.

The people from the containers saw the Beetlemen with their guns and shrank away. But the Beetlemen raised their hands and gave signs that they meant no harm. They embraced then and the stock wrapped arms around these black-clad men in return. He heard their laughter and weeping. Saw their exultation.

The mayor closed his eyes. The harvest was lost. Dalton was lost. Elmira was lost.

The Beetleman was now threading a cord around his ankles.

“What are you doing?” the mayor asked.

The Beetleman didn’t answer, just kept at his work.

The mayor didn’t need an answer, he knew. The Beetleman would tie the other end of the cord to one of their motorcycles and drag him around his own compound. Drag him until he resembled nothing human and was dead. Whatever remained they’d string up from a tree along the Harvest Road, with a white sign driven into his chest with a nail that read: SLAVER.

Just a slaver, caught out by emancipators.

No one would know his side of the story. They wouldn’t know that he had been a rig driver, had been mayor, had sent out more harvest convoys that any other compound and made his town into the Jewel of the Harvest Road. They wouldn’t understand, just as his father hadn’t, that he and everyone else who rolled on the Harvest Road had heeded the old man’s words whether they knew it or not: they had been given a chance to live again, and they had taken it.

He hoped that someone would understand.

Matthew McCrae Martin’s writings have appeared in The Honolulu Weekly, Construction, and Sanitarium. He teaches English Composition at the City College of New York. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, fellow teacher and writer, Sharae Allen. He tweets (infrequently) as @eldritchadjunct.