The Fate of Nations Book II The Harvest (19 page)

Terry didn't know what this guy was getting at, but he didn't like the way he asked that last question.

His tone was a little too superior. Terry Richards wasn't used to people talking to him with that tone. He had the respect of every single person in Elizabettown. This guy Horace, snooty name, if you asked him, was talking to him like he was stupid or something.
Well
, he thought,
this fella here just don't know any better, now does he,
than to talk to the Sheriff like that.

He'd let it pass, for now, since he wasn't from around these parts. Horace and the other two scientists asked Terry to relay the story again and they scribbled notes furiously down on their yellow legal pads as he spoke. An hour passed before any more questions cropped up.

“Will you wake her up now?” Bruce, another of the scientists, who sat next to Horace, asked. “Yeah,”

Terry replied, “Hey Jess, wake that kid up!” he yelled into the other room. “No problem, Sheriff,” Jess called back and went into the room where Sarah still lay sleeping soundly.

The three Scientists filed into the small office where Sarah now sat upright, rubbing her red, bloodshot eyes. Jess brought in some chairs and left, closing the door behind him. Terry came in and sat down at the desk, not wanting to leave that little kid alone with these guys. There was something sneaky about them, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. He didn't trust them in there with her, no, not for a minute.

The scientists sat down in a line in front of Sarah.

They questioned Sarah for hours about the Grays, what they were, where they came from, about Mikel, about the instructions he had given her to survive The Harvest, each Scientist carefully noting her answers on the large yellow legal pads they had brought along with them. They took samples of the gray stinking dirt from her hair with white cotton swabs that they placed hurriedly into small plastic bags.

They eyed the samples warily, as if expecting something to leap at them from off of them. They acted skeptical of her story and made her repeat it a dozen or more times before they left.

Sarah laid back down on the comfortable old couch, her eyes swollen and sore from crying, her whole body exhausted from the last round of questioning. She fell fast asleep, the wool blanket pulled snugly to her chin.

“Well,” Terry asked, as they filed back out of the office, “what do you make of that?” “Can't really say yet” Horace replied guardedly. “She's probably just making it up, but if she is, she's a helluva smart kid, that was some story.” “That's sorta what I thought too,”

Terry admitted, he had a grudging admiration for Horace, even if his name sounded sorta snooty.

“Well, thank you guys for coming over, I

appreciate you takin time out to check this out.” Terry shook their hands and walked them to the building's exit. “Let us know if she sprouts horns or wings or extra eyes, will you?” Bruce said jokingly as they walked towards the dark blue sedan waiting in the parking lot.

“Yeah, no problem,” Terry shouted back.

Fucking assholes
, he thought, as he walked back into his office.
They're probably laughing their asses off at
us.
Terry sat at his desk feeling like the biggest country dumb ass of all time. J
ust wait until the papers get a
hold of this
, he thought. He'd been Sheriff of Elizabettown for twenty fucking years, and he was pretty sure he wouldn't be for much longer.

“What do you think Horace?” Bruce asked, once the sedan was gilding smoothly down the freeway. “I think we might have a problem” Horace replied, a worried frown creasing his freckled forehead. “That little girl wasn't lieing, she went somewhere, and if what she's saying is right, we had better go to work on finding a way to talk to these Grays.” “I'm dieing to get at those samples” Darren, the third scientist, said excitedly, “Who knows what we'll find!” “Yeah, who knows?” Horace replied, frowning. The group grew quiet then, reflecting on the strange little girl's far out story as the dark blue Buick sedan glided smoothly down the freeway, eating up the miles as it traveled west to Raleigh.

The press soon got word of Sarah's disappearance and they paraded her picture on the front page of every tabloid they could sell the story to. Sheriff Richardson refused to comment, and kept his job, but John confided everything he knew to the local reporters, only after insisting that his name could never be used and that he remained anonymous.

Sarah spent the next several months being

buffeted by questions, stares, insults and accusations.

Her life became a hellish place to live. She had only tried to do what Mikel had instructed her to do, “someone will listen to you Sarah,” he said, when Sarah told him that nobody would believe her. She had tried to tell her family about Mikel before and they looked at her like she was crazy.

No one believed that she had a friend named Mikel. Her parents refused to listen to her if she talked about him.“Someone will believe you Sarah,” Mikel had said
, but who?
she thought miserably.

It was a lot worse for Sarah this time, when she relayed her bizarre story. Not only did her family think she was crazy, there were complete strangers walking up to her and her family asking why she would tell such a crazy tale and scare people. They told her she should be ashamed of herself. Sarah finally stopped talking about it at all, but she didn't, she couldn't stop thinking about those poor people who all thought that they were in hell.

Sarah thought about Mikel as she sat on the floor and played with her doll. She missed Mikel. He was her friend. He had been her friend for as long as she could remember. He came to see her at night and he took her places.

Mikel always turned red when he was happy. His whole body turned red. Sarah liked that. Mikel was kind to her and he was just her size. He always had the greatest things to tell her, as if he saved them all up just for her and he always made her laugh when he tried to mimic her gestures. He told her things too. He was very, very old. Mikel knew a lot of things and Sarah loved him. She didn't care if anyone else believed her or not, she believed, and that was enough.

She closed her eyes and blocked out the sound of the horror happening outside. She thought back about the last time she had seen Mikel. He woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to come outside, he wanted to see her. She got out of bed and slipped on some jean shorts and a t-shirt and slipped quietly out of the house, barefoot. She walked beside of him and listened as he told her about where he had been and of the fantastic things he had seen.

They walked along for some time down the

winding dirt road that led to the fields behind her family's house, before Sarah asked him where they were going. “I have to show you something”, he said, not elaborating even when she asked him a thousand questions about what, where, why, why, why. He just kept his silence. “You'll see,” he finally said.

At the last field, under the light of the full moon, Sarah saw Mikel's small ship. The ramp was down and the lights were dimmed, giving it the slightly spooky silhouette of an open waiting mouth.

Mikel and Sarah walked up the corrugated metal ramp to Mikel's ship and seated themselves on the small chairs located in front of of the now familiar rows of lights and symbols that Mikel deftly touched in a quick sequence to start their trip.

Sarah's stomach lurched as the small ship shot up into the air. She always hated that part. She always thought she would puke, but soon, as they glided into the darkness of night and space, her stomach settled and the queasy feeling left.

“Where's the Brancher at Mikel?” Sarah asked, looking around the control room warily, She didn't want to accidentally brush up against that thing. “He stayed behind on the patrol ship, Sarah,” Mikel replied, a hint of laughter in his voice when he noticed Sarah looking around her frantically. “He is here though,” Mikel added. “I thought you said he was on the patrol ship,”

Sarah asked, confused. “He does not have to be here, to be here, Sarah.” Mikel replied cryptically. “Do you understand?” he asked, glancing at her quickly. Sarah shrugged her shoulders and looked at Mikel questioningly. “He is in the patrol ship,” Mikel began, “His physical form is there, but his essence, or at least one small part of it, is here with us.” Sarah nodded her small head quickly, recalling how Serel had once projected his formidable essence for her to see. “It isn't exactly the same,” Mikel said slowly, as he saw the image form in Sarah's mind. “It is similar, but not the same thing.”
The Brancher's intelligence is a thousand
times more vast than Serel's,
Mikel thought, as he painstakingly cautioned Sarah not to compare The Brancher with a lesser being.
The Brancher could reach
out with the slenderest tendril of thought and
completely darken Sarah's mind if he chose to.
“You will be wise not to even think about the Brancher Sarah,” Mikel warned her. “That way, no harm will come to you.” He abruptly changed the subject and Sarah forgot completely about The Brancher and Serel as Mikel told her about a musical planet near the Abell Galaxy where the ground hums and the flowers begin to sing as their new leaves unfurl. “The singing starts out low and subdued and then becomes louder,” Mikel continued. Sarah's face was rapt with attention. “They then burst out in a harmonious song of thanks, to their Highest, as their small silvery flowers burst forth.”

Sarah smiled at Mikel and his heart leapt. He knew he would never let her be harmed. Not ever. He liked this little bean.

Mikel's small ship glided past galaxies that were beautiful to behold, great spiral galaxies, small, densely packed galaxies, oblong galaxies, and millions of stars and planets. Time had no meaning out there in Mikel's ship. Eternities came and went, lifetimes and minutes, they were all the same out there.

Mikel talked happily, going on about a fantastic little moon orbiting around the planet Jupiter, and the fantastic way that the gravity from the large planet kept the ocean on it in liquid form, underneath a massive sheet of ice. He loved the idea of that little moon with its' half frozen ocean and talked about it until they approached a large, dark planet.

Mikel checked his instrument panel, making several adjustments to the brightly lit controls and suddenly became unusually quiet and guarded. Sarah looked to see what it was that made Mikel so quiet, expecting a comet or some other fantastic sight to come whizzing by them at dizzying speeds but saw only the, now massive, dark planet, lit only dimly by a tiny, distant sun.

It wasn't anything extraordinary, as planets went.

She had see many spectacular planets with Mikel, some vividly colored, some almost translucent with light, and this one was dull and dark and ugly in comparison.

Mikel ordered her to get into one of the bio suits, the metallic colored suits with the helmet attached, that protected them from different atmospheres and toxic air.

They were light weight and very flexible. She could see out of the eye sections, but nothing could see in, past the dark lenses there to protect the eyes.

She had the suit on and it had self adjusted to her frame, when she looked around to see if Mikel was in his suit yet. He wasn't putting one on. “Why do I have to wear this and you don't?” she asked a little peevishly.

Sarah didn't like wearing the suit. They weren't the most comfortable of things to have on even though they were flexible and light. The metal scratched against her skin and her feet were already getting scratched up. She wished she had worn some shoes.

“I don't need the suit” he responded, and DON'T

say anything else about wearing that suit.” His tone held a warning that Sarah rarely heard Mikel issue “Or else”

it implied. Mikel only used that grave tone when he was serious.

They descended to the surface of the dark planet.

The air held suspended dust particles and they swirled around Mikel's ship as he landed softly on the dark gray dirt. Mikel powered the ship's engine off and they walked down the small ramp from the ship to the ground. Sarah watched in fascination as the dust particles resumed their former positions, suspended in mid air. The air there was thick with the dust, gray soot like dust that stank. The bio suit's filter did not filter out smells.

They walked towards a distant building. Sarah had never seen anything like it before. Nothing compared to the size and shape of that building, if it could be called a building.

It towered for miles above the surface and stretched out as far as she could see. It was ornately designed with weird alien script and symbols that she couldn't read. Mikel knew what it said but he wouldn't tell her when she asked him. “What is it Mikel... what is this place?”

Sarah began to feel afraid. Mikel wasn't

answering. Something about the smell of the dust and the strange alien symbols seemed familiar to her and she tried to recall where she had smelled that rotten meat, sour milk smell before, where she had seen those lines and dots.

Alarms were going off in her mind. “I am not going in there” she said defiantly, “if you don't tell me what it is and what's in there.” Mikel just kept walking, not replying to Sarah, looking straight ahead of him at that massive structure looming closer and closer.

Sarah stayed in step with Mikel, that uneasy feeling nagging at her mind, churning in her stomach.

After they had covered a distance of two miles, Sarah again asked Mikel where it was they were going, and what that place was. Mikel still would not reply.

“Why won't you tell me?” she asked, growing more fearful with each step they took towards the building. Mikel waited until they were directly in front of the massive structure before finally answering.

“It is a meat plant,” he said quietly. “do not scream,” again with that warning tone. “A meat plant?”

she asked, almost laughing with relief, “why would I scream about that?”

In her mind, Sarah saw a houseplant, made from meat, and thought that it would be the weirdest thing ever to see. Again, Mikel said “Do not scream. Stay by my side at all times, Sarah, do not wander off by yourself, stay with me.” Mikel's voice was strangely ominous.