StarHarvest

  Audrey pulled out of our parking spot, and we slowly got onto the road heading away from the forest. I saw the townspeople waving us goodbye, and Sarah was waving back, sometimes smiling and sometimes not. I had a thousand things on my mind, but one came to the forefront as soon as I turned my head back towards Audrey.

  “Do you think they know about the house?”

  “Yes. There’s no other way for them to get food.”

  “What about all the dead bodies?”

  “Those are just the undesirables, the people who they thought couldn’t be up to their standards.”

  “So, what, they snuffed them out?”

  “Yeah.”

  I turned away and looked out of the side window. The trees were sparse in this area, and occasionally a farmhouse could be seen in the distance. I wondered if the same situation was happening there as well, maybe the best of the weak being treated like cattle, walked around and shown off, maybe being penetrated by horses whenever their desires got too noticeable to be ignored. Without turning my attention away from the window, I asked Will, “Were any of the people who chased you in chastity?”

  “Yeah, all of them were.”

  “Do you think it was forced upon them to be permanent?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  I saw a rge specter rise over the nearest farmhouse. It looked over the world and culled the herd, just like the man from the house had done. I opened the window to get a breath of fresh air, and was instead hit with the feeling of death. It was inescapable, and I quickly shut the window so the specter would not infect me with its rotten scent. I coughed, and I imagined that tall and terrible figure as the abusing man’s ego. I saw it rise and fly over the clouds, following the car close enough that I thought we would be next. I saw half-angels flying behind it, twisted and ghastly in form. They seemed to have been devils at first, and then transformed into nephilim once they had gone up to this pce along with the specter. I opened the window once again, and I was only greeted with a feeling. The only way to save yourself, the only way to actually redeem yourself from the horror that your whole body is stricken, and has been since conception, is to kill yourself. Once we make all people realize this fact, this inescapable facet of modern life, there will be nothing more to say. All the bad people will be punished by the specter, and all the good people who have given their lives over to me, and all the people who were intrinsically good from the start, will stay here on Earth in a form of salvation never attainable by anyone else.

  I shut the window, unable to speak because of the abusers hubris. I knew now what was going on. The changes in the city, the scenes and that explosion, were all meant to weed out the “bad people.” Sometimes I thought I was one of the bad people, but the specter had reassured me that no matter what I did outside of his purview, if I groomed and raped children, if I abused my wife and gambled all of her money away, if I broke into old women’s houses and murdered their cats and dogs, it would all be fine if I just stayed on his path. If I kept doing what he wanted, all would be forgiven, and it was even conceivable that I could convert some of the old women just before they died.

  I stared at Audrey for a few minutes. I believe she noticed, but she didn’t care. She was paying attention to the road, trying to dodge the potholes and the tumbleweeds that crossed behind and around the car. The grass was a dirty brown, probably from a ck of water. Out by the farms, it was bright and blinding green, but there was no care given to the surrounding area. I was about to wonder why that was when a massive spout of water, probably a mile wide and at least 75 miles tall, came shooting out of the ground and into space.

  “Audrey, you see that, right?”

  I think she could tell that it was not the time to lie to protect my feelings, because she said, “No, what’s the matter?”

  “You don’t see the water?”

  “No. What does it look like?”

  “It’s like a stream of water from a faucet, but miles wide and probably at least 60 miles tall. It’s going right into space. Someone is stealing our water.”

  Audrey pulled over onto the side of the road and talked to me very clearly.

  “No one is stealing our water. No one wants to steal our water. There- Listen. Do you wanna go and see?”

  “No, no, please. I don’t want to go and see.”

  “Okay, so I’m just going to keep driving. Okay?”

  I could not respond. I just colpsed into myself and refused to look out of the window until I was confident we had driven at least a hundred miles away from the pnet draining device. Of course, it was more a matter of twenty miles, and the water spout was no longer there. It was just clear skies all the way, and I saw Audrey smile at me. I asked, as if to lighten the mood, “What color are my eyes?”

  “They’re hazel.”

  “Oh, okay. They’ve always been different to me. Red, green, blue, bck some days. But never hazel. I remember one day I was looking in the mirror and my eyes were gone, completely gone. Not even just removed either, there were holes going all the way through to the back of my head. I put one of my fingers there and gave myself pink eye. My eyes came back to normal the next day so I could see exactly how much pain I was feeling.”

  Audrey had stopped smiling before I finished my story. I suddenly looked down at myself, because I was afraid that I had made her sad, and as such we would never be friends again. I pulled my attention towards the window, and there was a man right outside of the car. That was the reason Audrey had stopped smiling. He looked either 19 or 56, based on which parts of his body you paid the most attention to. It was like he had come from another time, a time where different parts of people's bodies grew at different rates and different speeds depending on arbitrary factors. I saw him try and get Audrey’s attention, and she stopped the car and rolled down my window to see what the man had to say. He was out of breath and shaking, and his voice did not rise above a whisper. He said, in an embattled tone, “I’m stranded. Could you help me out?”

  Audrey did not respond, and instead pointed towards the trunk of the car and opened it as the man slowly shambled over and got into his pce. As Audrey rolled up the window, she pointed at me, then towards the man, in an indication that I should close him into his prison.

  I did, and I saw that he was in a bad state. He was clothed, but his clothes were ratty and unwashed, and he smelled like a corpse broiled in acid. He was shivering, and he had pulled a bnket over himself to keep himself warm. I smmed the trunk shut and swiftly moved back to the car. I got in and we kept driving. None of us wanted to speak, but the need to know about myself was too strong, and so I meekly said, “Audrey, are you mad at me?”

  “No. Not in the slightest. I’m just stressed. That’s all.”

  I did not respond. I looked out of the window again, and I saw a city in the distance. I pointed this out to Audrey, and she said that she saw it as well. That was where we were going.

  “How long?”

  “Give it twenty minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  The twenty minutes passed in silence. I imagined people running through the pin after us, and sometimes they gained sentience and ran towards us, trying to get in. They called out to me, begging for me to open the door. It was so cold, they said again and again. I never once opened the door. I stayed away from the window, because it was starting to crack and split under the pressure of all those hands needing to get in. You let one of them in, why not us? We’re so kind and friendly. You must understand our troubles.

  I saw their faces twist and turn into monstrous beings as we drove on further. They tried tricking me by pulling the trunk of the car open and throwing the man out. I covered my face with my hands and groaned out something horrible. They had started talking to me at a certain point. They said all the things they were supposed to say. I had nothing more to give them, and so I bit down hard onto my hand and the world stopped moving.

  I looked up and saw that I had bitten my finger off, but I felt no pain whatsoever. I just held the emotion of mild bemusement while the monsters outside looked on in horror at what they had caused. I was privy to their tricks by this point, and so I let the finger drop from my mouth and looked at Audrey, who was in a state of panic. I looked back at Will and Sarah, and they were asleep. Apparently it was night, but to me it seemed like there was no such thing as day or night. I seemed to live in a state of terror, and nothing more. The Earth outside was only lit by distant stars, and I imagined that they had all gone out millions of years before. Once I lived to see it, there would be no more light. Just me and the monsters. I supposed that was okay.