Black and Orange

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October 31
^st
of Last Year

Where was Tony Nguyen? Where was the Heart of the Harvest?

Martin couldn’t answer that. He’d lost his gun, his mind could not conjure another mantle—he was powerless. The answers he desperately needed escaped him. He just ran. Teresa wove through a field of tall grass and he followed. The brittle blades swept across his face, snapping and hissing as they went. The children flooded into the field, their dark orange jaws snapping in concert with the disruption in the grass. Martin could hear Teresa wheezing. Her pace slowed. He had to match it; she wouldn’t be left behind, not like—

Where was Tony?

Thousands of little fiends chomped hollowly, hungry to fill that hollowness—instinctively Martin attempted to throw a mantle and dissect the crowd, but his brain had gone completely dry; he’d overdone it. There was no mental power left. He’d failed Tony. They both had. Now the Church of Midnight would have their sacrifice. The same realization flooded into Teresa’s cold face as she sprinted through the darkness ahead. He’d wasted his power, she was ill and the Church was too damned powerful now.

Chaplain Cloth was too damned powerful. And he took Tony. Somewhere along the line Martin and Teresa had lost the Heart of the Harvest, Tony Nguyen, that single soul that was theirs to protect from sacrifice.

The nightscape sloped. One of the children clamped onto Teresa’s leg with its serrated teeth and twisted its head to rip at the tendons there. Martin brought down a boot on its pumpkin shaped skull. The head trauma forced the jaws open. Martin jumped forward to crush it. The thing growled and jumped to meet him. Teresa swung around and stopped the creature mid-flight with the butt of her handgun. Her frayed jeans grew dark with blood but she ran on. The other children gained. Colorless trees flooded past, the open field turning into dense forest.

Maybe Tony had gotten away somehow. They couldn’t lose another Heart of the Harvest. The gateway grew too wide already—another sacrifice would bring the other world too close to theirs.
Goddamnit
, where was Tony Nguyen? Did he trip and fall somewhere? Martin’s foot hit a root. He tumbled sideways, landed on his elbow in a wet bed of leaves. Teresa took his hand and ripped him to his feet. But it wasn’t Teresa. This person wore a new face and new eyes.

Martin twisted away from the old monster. The shark-belly skin, the night black suit and orange tie. Trees exploded behind Martin in a rush of splintery debris. He found his strength, forced on a path of adrenaline, and brought up a mantle that moment. The invisible shield wrapped around his body and deflected the attack. Martin’s heel caught mud and he slid fast into a black ravine. He lost hold of the mantle when he splashed down. His protection vanished.
Where was Teresa? Where was Tony?
Martin was alone.

His legs slopped through a waist-high stream. Chaplain Cloth hadn’t come down after him and as much as that might have been a relief, it meant his direction had turned elsewhere. Martin couldn’t let that happen, not to Tony, not to Teresa. He charged hard through the cold stream and broke out of the arresting water onto a steep embankment. The memory of Cloth’s face burned in his mind: needles of pitchy hair swinging over one black eye, and the orange eye engulfed in hate. His teeth were raw pink like flayed muscle, colored from past harvests, colored with those Hearts that never saw another November.

Screams echoed from a bubble of light somewhere north. Martin’s legs burned red-hot.
Can’t stop
. He focused to build another mantle. The cold spot in his brain, where mantles were drawn, bloomed with power. The light in the forest intensified. Shadows became more distinct. A voice yelled for him.

“Martin! Here!” Teresa peered out between some stunted trees. Her face was streaked in dirt and dried blood. “Get over here.”

He dove into the hiding place and sidled up next to her. Her words came out between gulps of air. Her wheeze sounded dry, but he knew it’d get worse soon in this dampness. “We have to get back to the van. We’ve lost him Martin. They have Tony. Tony’s gone! Let’s go.”

“How do you know? Did—?”

She guided his face over, leaving dank mud on his chin. In his confusion he’d overlooked a nearby ledge over a washout. Pine trees wreathed the area in a nighttime vertigo. At the other side of the washout stood an old brick structure, a primary school left to ruin. A gaping mouth opened through the bricks. The gateway leading to the Old Domain stretched forth impatiently, power-starved. At the other side of the bilious corridor, human arms pushed and pulled and wrenched to open a fist-sized hole separating the worlds. The arms withdrew a moment and a woman’s face filled the hole. Smiling. It was a lovely face with corpse cold eyes.

They shrunk back as Chaplain Cloth strode from the gathering of trees adjoining the school. Tony Nguyen’s furrowed body hung limp in Cloth’s arms. He was alive, but Martin knew that wouldn’t last long.

“We have to do something,” he whispered.

“You know there’s nothing we can do now,” said Teresa. “We can only hope the gateway will shut again. This was bound to happen again.”

“We can try—”

“No,” she said, firmly, “I’m calling this one.”

Tony wasn’t scared, although the abrasions from Cloth’s children had almost bled him out. So very brave—thought Martin. How had they let this happen? They were too slow.

Without warning, the boy’s torso twisted back; the spine snapped in three places. The Chaplain rested his hand on the damp white shirt and it jumped apart at the poisonous touch. Through Tony’s abdomen, the ribcage surfaced through the skin like the hull of a sunken ship. Once each bone was exposed, they shattered in succession. Cloth blinked back at the chalky discharges. Strands of muscle and skin ignited and burst into tiny organic filaments. Cloth worked a pale finger around the dense muscle in the cavity. Pulled the heart free from Tony’s chest.

The Heart of the Harvest didn’t glow, or shimmer, or change colors. It looked like a human heart, like any mammal heart, a tough piece of bloody flesh. But then Martin saw—everything for miles around had been deprived of color. Teresa’s face looked gray beside him. Even Cloth’s black and orange eyes were two smoky discs. Yet the heart had a burgundy hue so ferocious it looked like something from a surreal dream, an apple galvanized with cinnamon steel.

Tony’s jaw clicked as his body met the forest’s carpet of twigs and leaves. He was carrion now because of them. This kid, this great kid that once explained in detail how he planned to code videogames after college, and once he mastered that, wanted a large family—he wasn’t one of those guys who hated the idea. Becoming a good father someday was his ultimate goal, because his own father left so much to be desired. Tony had wanted to have a life after this Halloween. And now he would be fertilizer for the forest. Dust.

The heart was placed outside the gateway. The arms inside thrashed frantically as the brilliant red lump boiled. A swarm of children attacked the organ, taking measured bites of the fruit. Their bulbous bodies fled inside, charged with radiant power. Hundreds detonated. Through the eclipses of darkness and light, layers of the hole collapsed into soot. The opening widened and a slender arm, the woman’s arm, came through with her head. She moved quickly through, for the gateway would repair and soon.

“They’re coming through.” Teresa swallowed the words.

“I don’t think it will stay open forever,” Martin told her. They’d lost Hearts before, but he still wasn’t sure.

Laughter scaled the peaks of the hovering pines. More Church members clamored through the forest toward the new arrivals.

Teresa tugged at him, but Martin couldn’t move. All he could do was think about the end. His body came off the ground with a surge of strength. “This is done, Martin. We have to go!”

Thousands of demented orange faces exploded around them. Teresa flung a mantle and it powered through the children like a cannon ball. Martin followed her through the maze of twisting trees, trusting her to lead them to the van.

Chaplain Cloth’s laughter followed them all the way back.

Martin spent the last of their cash on a package of cookies and drinks. The Messenger usually left them enough money for the year, but in the past few months they’d resorted to selling off some equipment and arms to
Ebay
thugs and pawn shops. That had only lasted so long; the road was expensive, and their cash flow thinned to a trickle. Maybe this was a punishment for losing Tony last year.

Martin could only afford a cheap diet raspberry ice tea. He ran the gamut of other drink options: beverages in Styrofoam cups (so,
benzene
poisoning), aluminum cans (so,
aluminum salts
and Alzheimer’s to follow) and plastic bottles (so,
bisphenol
-A
to disrupt your hormones). Some drinks were sugared or
chemicaled
. Too many were caramel colored, caffeinated, and energized with herbal supplements the FDA still hadn’t bothered investigating. But raspberry tea always gave him butterflies. He never remembered if he liked it or hated it. It sounded good; so he let go his inhibitions.
Enjoyed the lingering question
. It thrilled him like the early-morning charge of heading out on an unknown road in their ‘79 Ford
Quadravan
, windows down, cold air deep in his lungs and the whole day before him.

Teresa slept with her cheek
smooshed
against her shoulder. Only a nomad could sleep so comfortably in that position. The sun winked over the distant hills behind her, the day still buried in piles of shadow beyond another prehistoric gas station tipping over the edge of American stupor.

He gagged suddenly on the drink. “
Ick
—too sweet.”

Teresa stirred.

He dropped the bottle in the cup holder. “I thought you were the one that didn’t like raspberry.”

“Peach,” she answered.