Looking down at the heads that were nearest to me, I saw that those which faced in my direction had fixed their eyes on me. Down here amongst them, their lamentations seemed even more stunningly loud. But I could still hear the individual cries from these heads at my feet.
"Help me!" one screamed.
"Dig me out! Please!"
And one of them, a black man with his branded forehead glistening with sweat and pasted with ash, said, "Watch out for the Harvesters."
I took a step closer to him, and crouched down a bit, but kept back a little as if I feared he might be luring me in to drag me down with him. I saw a tiny orange crab crawl up from the back of his head to perch atop it. It had kinky hairs stuck in its pincers that it had obviously plucked from his head. I reached out and flicked the thing off him.
"Watch out for the what?" I said.
"Listen," the man went on, rolling his bulging eyes frantically, "you have to get out of here. The ones who put us here have been gone a long time…I don’t know how long…but now the Harvesters are beginning to collect us. More of them will be coming…"
"Please, mister, please!" a woman shrieked at me. I looked at her. Half of her skull was crushed, horribly indented like a deflated basketball. But despite the thick, drying blood I could see she was already mending. I realized that she, like many, had been struck with rocks hurled like missiles from the eruptions.
"There’s nothing he can do for us!" another man bellowed at her. "He’s just like us! He’ll get his another way!"
"Listen," the black man hissed, and I returned my attention to him. "There’s a town in the foothills, to the right of the volcano. Can you see them?" He tried to jerk his head over his shoulder. I glanced in that direction. I could see the foothills he spoke of, entirely black. "There’s a town there—Caldera. We all lived there…we built it. For years it wasn’t too bad. Demons would come into town, and Angels, but it was bearable. The volcano never made a peep. And then one day the volcano woke up and took Caldera. And the Demons gathered up the survivors and planted us here."
"But the town is buried?"
"Mostly. But go there. It’s as safe as you’re going to get. And beyond it, if you can make it, beyond it is a city. If you can get there, you’ll be a little better off. Towns and cities are less open, there are more places to hide. They’re usually safer—when you can find them. But for all I know, that city might be gone now, too. Just be sure you don’t go into a Demon city. Make damn sure of that…"
In the distance, through the screams and the wind and the mounting sounds of the fire, which cast a glow on the cracked ground around me, I heard a new sound. Like a truck rumbling slowly across unpaved ground. And mechanical whines and rasps and gratings.
"The Harvesters!" shrieked the woman with the crushed head. In glancing at her again, I saw another orange crab plucking at her healing wound. I swatted it off her. She didn’t seem to notice, so terrified was she of this Harvester we were hearing.
"We’ll be freed, at least," the black man told her. "Finally freed from this lava…"
"I don’t want to go through it!" she sobbed.
"You’d better go, mister," warned the black man. "You’d better go."
"He’s stupid," sneered another man. "He’s new. Look at his clothes. He still wears the uniform. He still carries the book bag like a good little school boy. Stick around, school boy! Learn something!"
"Fuck you," I told him. "Thanks," I said to the black man. "Sorry," I said to the woman. Then I was bolting to my feet and running through the field of heads…weaving between them and leaping over them so as not to injure anyone. Though my concern was comical, really.
The haze of the forest fire began to spread across the caldera now, helping to mask me from whatever this Harvester was. Unfortunately, it might also be masking the Harvester from me.
I stumbled on the rocks scattered by the volcano. I skirted around scraggly bushes set aflame by lava bombs. Here and there human heads were alight, flickering orange through the smoky mists. My lungs burned as I gulped at air full of stinging smoke and poisonous sulphurous gases.
Ahead of me the curtains of fog thinned…for the moment I had outrun the worst of the smoke…and I could see across the caldera again. I didn’t seem to be much closer to the volcano’s foothills. And to make matters worse, there was a wave of lava flowing across the plain in my direction, a bright orange. Oddly, though, I saw no streams of lava on the flanks of the volcano itself.
Well, I would veer to the right a bit, away from the coming wave, and hopefully still reach the outermost of the foothills before the molten rock spread in that direction as well. I launched myself forward again, trying to ignore the chorus of pleas that swarmed around my every footfall.
I ran. I ran. I ran. My legs ached, my seared eyes streamed, I thought my heart would explode (if it did suffer cardiac arrest, it would probably heal pretty quickly, but I didn’t want the inconvenience). The volcano did, at last, seem taller to me. That meant it was closer. Pausing to look back the way I had come, I saw the reverse view was lost in low-lying smoke, but I judged myself to be about halfway across the circular plain. And while looking back, I heard the crack of a gunshot in that smoke. Another. A third. An Angel, I decided, not sure whether any Demons themselves used guns. I could picture a robed Angel wandering amongst the rows of heads, untroubled by the choking air, idly shooting down into them.
Encouraged by my progress, I continued on. The Harvester’s sound dwindled and was lost behind me. There were more gunshots but at least none in front of me. But after I had covered a lot more ground, my fears about the spreading lava came back to me. It looked like my path to even the outermost of the foothills was going to be blocked, soon, after all. I wondered how thick the lava was and how far I could run through it before my melting shoes and then melting feet brought me down. I couldn’t afford to let that happen. I didn’t want to be entombed on this plain myself. I pitied the heads that were being covered in that advancing orange surf.
I tried to pick up my pace. I must beat the lava to the foothills. I must…
With an explosion of porous pumice and glittering obsidian, pulverized into glittering sand, the floor of the caldera burst open a short ways ahead and to the right of me. I thought it was an eruption of some lesser vein of the volcano. But then I saw a great hulking form lurch up over the lip of the hole, streaming that gray-black grit down its sides.
A Harvester.
It was facing away from me, and I was grateful for that as I skidded to a stop, wondering which direction I should flee in now. The thing pulled itself out of the pit on rows of wheels that rippled independently like the legs of a caterpillar. It was an armored black thing, seamed with rust, dented and scratched, and though I couldn’t see its front I heard the whine and swish of a blade or blades that swept across the ground.
I heard screams. Screams abruptly choked off with a gurgle. Replaced by another row of screams. Another row of gurgles.
It was harvesting the heads. When it had gone a little ways, I saw the gushing stems of the severed necks in its wake. Blood geysered and misted the air. There was a thunking rumbling inside the machine that I realized were the heads being gathered into some large receptacle.
There was no cab on the front of the huge machine, and unless the driver was hidden inside it as if it were a tank, I decided the Harvester was more robot than vehicle.
It didn’t seem daunted by the encroaching wave of lava, either, as it was headed right toward it. And when that thought hit me, that’s when I darted forward…chasing after the machine…and leapt up onto the back edge of it. I scrabbled for purchase and caught hold of some incomprehensible mechanical features on its scabrous iron skin.
I rode the Harvester toward the lava. I would ride it through the lava until we reached the foothills (at which point I assumed it would turn around and head neatly back the other way as if systematically plowing a field or mowing a lawn). At least I hoped it would follow this straight line all the way to the foothills. As I rode on it I tried to tune out the horrid clashing/cutting sounds it made, the cries of terror, the blood fuming in its wake. The gore wafted over me, speckled my face, reeked in my nostrils. The devouring beast churned and chugged under me and my shaken guts wanted to heave. But there was nothing I could do for these masses…I could only concentrate on my own safety. Relative, of course, to the fact that I could never be killed. For long.
The Harvester hit a large cooling rock that had been cast by the volcano, and as it rode over it I was nearly pitched off its back. I had to fight to keep from sliding off, clawing for new handholds. When finally I hoisted myself back up, I saw that the volcano’s bulk nearly blotted out the sky, and the foothills were very close. I also saw that we had reached the wave of lava and it was pouring around the automaton’s wheels. But now I realized that it wasn’t even lava after all.
They were crabs. Bright orange in color, and each one of them tiny like the ones I had shooed off several of the heads…but there had to be millions of the things, a writhing carpet of living entities, with sharp little pincers to pull out hair and snip at skin and nibble at eyes. Maybe lava would have been better; I pitied the rows of trapped victims anew. I saw evenly spaced, crab-covered lumps in the orange carpet that I knew were human heads enshrouded with the things. I hoped the blades of the Harvester would reach them soon.
Though the Harvester was crushing multitudes of the crabs, a number of them were finding their way onto the machine with me. Though I have always loved animals, I slammed them with the heel of my fist or stomped them with a foot, and enjoyed it.
We had nearly reached the edge of the plain, but the rows of heads had ended (or else been eaten away by the crabs) and the Harvester began to turn. I had to get off it now, and make a break for the foothills. There was still a swarming covering of crabs between me and the cliff-like edge of the caldera, but I would have to cross it on foot…and right now…
I leaped down from my unwitting transportation, luckily didn’t lose my footing and fall, then I was tearing across the crunching bodies. I almost slipped several times. I actually did hear their many little claws snapping and snicking at me like fingernail scissors. What was worse was the loud hissing, rustling sound their bodies made by their sheer numbers. Several latched onto my pant cuffs, or tangled in my laces, but I reached the cliff and pounced onto a rocky ledge, seized another, scrambled up the side like a spidery thing myself. And when I hurled myself onto the black sand above the rim, I brushed and tore away the hungry little parasites. Stomped every one of them. Though I didn’t study any of them closely, they each looked like they had a kind of stylized demonic face formed by the contours of their horny shells.
After one last look across the crater-like amphitheater…covered in mist in which fires flared, rumbling with several Harvesters, ululating with the moans of the undead, crackling with stray gunfire…I turned away and headed into foothills that seemed heaped from glittering black sand.
I climbed the side of one low hill, my feet sinking and sliding under the shifting ash. I figured it wasn’t ash so much as pyroclastic flow, that had run down the volcano’s slope like a mudslide or avalanche. Was the town of Caldera beneath my very feet even now?
When I crested the hill I found a hollow below, and there protruded the flat roofs of several small buildings. Some jutted up in their entirety, starkly white against this ash like pulverized obsidian, while other roofs were half exposed, or only showed one piercing corner like the prow of a sinking ship. Lumps in the black blanket suggested roofs that were fully submerged. I descended, half-sliding, the ash getting into my boots, into the hollow and found myself standing atop one of the taller roofs. So tall that its top level of glassless windows was just above the level of the ash.
Crouching, I eased myself through one of these windows into an unlit, sparsely furnished room. The wind had blown so much ash into it that its floor was covered, dunes blown halfway up its crude walls, which had the look of stucco or baked white clay. But there was a rough door made of purple-colored planks across the room, and when I pushed it open I found myself in a narrow hallway that had only the barest sifting of ash across it.
The hallway was lined with more doors made from that bruise-colored, decay-colored wood. And behind one of them, I heard a low moaning.
I knew a Demon would not be moaning, but a Demon might be in there causing the moaning, so I looked around me for a weapon of defense. There was nothing, really. So I crept to the door as stealthily as I could, and pressed my ear against it. The moaning was clearer, but I heard no other sounds. No sadistic chuckling, no growling, as from the pathetic baboon devils. No sounds of blows or chopping. I decided to risk it. Steeling myself for the possibility of my own pending moans, I cracked the door open as quietly as I could manage and peeked into the chamber beyond.