Midnight Harvest Read online

  Midnight Harvest

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  About the Author

  SEASONS OF BLOOD

  BOOK ONE

  MIDNIGHT HARVEST

  by

  Elias Anderson

  Edited, Produced, and Published by Writer’s Edge Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  © 2014 by Elias Anderson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Other Books by Elias Anderson

  The Spider Inside

  Cookie Cutter Man

  Blood and Gasoline

  Of Daughter and Demon

  Animal Named Man

  Look Homeward, Clockwork Angel

  Bite the Hand

  SEASONS OF BLOOD SERIES

  Midnight Harvest

  She Devours

  Darkling Spawn

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the masters of the horror genre, as it has long been the meal I return to most. There are altogether too many to name but I cannot go without mentioning those that raised me: Poe and Lovecraft, Matheson and King. Through them, and all the rest, I have found worlds of darkness to dwell in, but more so, I have found joy in the dwelling and in knowing that in that darkness I am not alone.

  Also, huge thanks to Jeremy Laszlo for getting me started, Kendall Steinle for her amazing fixes and suggestions, and Alisha Helton, Beta Reader Extraordinaire, who had a passion for this project and a confidence in me that kept me going. You rock, Stockman.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SEPTEMBER

  “They haven’t found her body yet,” Alex said. He turned away from the wreckage and looked at Sera, who was still staring at what had once been their home. Her eyes were wide and dark. Streaks of ash and mascara made her pale skin seem all the paler.

  Alex turned back to watch the firemen and the cops picking through the blackened rubble. Smoke still rose in places, Alex’s nose burning from the stink of it. The cops would walk through the remains of the house for short periods, then move to the grass to let the soles of their shoes cool.

  “Why haven’t they found her?” Alex said. When he was ignored a second time he took Sera by the shoulder and turned her toward him. She offered no resistance; it was like posing a store mannequin. “Why haven’t they found her body?”

  Sera opened her mouth, then closed it, then turned back toward the house. She leaned her head against his shoulder when he put his arm around her and hugged. Her thin body shivered beneath the heavy blanket an EMT had wrapped around her.

  The fire had taken everything but the clothes they were wearing and what they had in their pockets. For Alex this meant his cell phone, his wallet, some spare change, and keys to a house that no longer existed. For Sera it meant she had nothing; her skirt didn’t have pockets.

  “They’ll find her,” Sera whispered after what seemed a long time. “They have to.”

  The EMTs leaned against the bumper of their ambulance, smoking cigarettes and looking bored. The sun in the west gave up the day and winked out beyond the horizon.

  Despite the darkness settling around them, the street was still full of light from the streetlamps and the neighboring houses and the revolving bulbs of the emergency vehicles.

  Alex stared at the one thing that had been left standing: their small fireplace and the chimney coming out of it. The chimney was black and looked like the charred finger of a burn victim. He wondered if that was what she looked like now, like how burnt-up bodies looked on television, just blackened skeletons in rags.

  They’ll find her, Alex told himself. They have to find her.

  He watched a fireman poke around in the smoking rubble and saw the explosion as it happened: a bright blast of light and sound and the fireman was a black silhouette against it, falling backwards. A fireball streaked up into the night sky, screaming like those Howler fireworks the Hannover kids up the block liked so much on the Fourth of July.

  Alex could hear the people in the sudden panic around them and knew someone, the fireman, was badly hurt. Alex dropped his arm from around Sera’s shoulders and walked as though in a dream toward the house. She reached for him, but it was a token gesture, and one he hardly noticed.

  They’ll find her body, Alex told himself again as he walked forward. They have to.

  A cop slammed into him as he ran by, taking no more notice of Alex than Alex had of Sera when she’d tried to grab him. Alex stumbled but kept going. His head seemed filled with voices now, and that buzzing. The EMTs and other firemen were screaming at each other, someone asking what had exploded. Alex reached the edge of the blackened patch where his home had once stood and the EMTs hurried past him with their stretcher, carrying the fireman back toward the ambulance.

  Alex looked down as they carried him by. The fireman had not been burned by the explosion, but instead was red and wet and spouting blood from his neck and face, his eyes wide and blank with…what? Shock?

  Alex wanted to believe that, so badly. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to un-see the tattered rag the fireman’s throat had become.

  He wasn’t surprised, wasn’t repulsed. What was one tattered neck compared to the things he’d seen? Alex didn’t react to this, only observed it. He didn’t feel it. He didn’t think about it. All he could think about was that they hadn’t found her body; he thought of that and the fireball that had gone screaming off into the blackness.

  He turned his back on the charred husk and looked back at Sera. She seemed so small, standing on the curb, wrapped in her blanket, her eyes wide. The cops and the EMTs and the firemen were now busy with their fallen brother, and Alex decided it was time they leave.

  TWO DAYS LATER

  Detective William Coe took a last swallow of his coffee and drove his unmarked car up the long, curved drive in front of the hotel. It wasn’t a sleazy inn like he was normally called to on this kind of deal, but a middle-to-upper scale franchise hotel, the kind where no matter where in the world you are, if you wake up in one of their rooms, you could be in any of them, anywhere, because all of them looked exactly the same.

  Except this one. From what he’d already heard Coe hoped no other hotel room in the world looked like room 712 did tonight.

  He parked his car near the cluster of patrol cars and left the bulb spinning on the dash. He flashed his badge to the uniformed spastics that didn’t know him and hadn’t seen him pull up. They shut their mouths without saying anything and parted to let him walk by. Coe entered the lobby, which held several civilians, most with that rumpled look of having been rousted from bed in the middle of the night, all of them with a species of shock and fright on their faces.

  These would be the guests from the seventh floor; Coe knew these folks had been questioned already. They would have been allowed to stay in their rooms, but from what he’d heard, he didn’t blame a one of them for coming down here, and he was sure they’d soon be joined by others.

  It looked to be an all-hands-on-deck situation with the hotel staff, too, going from one cluster of people to the next, offering coffee or blankets, a room on a different floor. Coe overheard one concierge mention that a shuttle to another hotel was being arranged.

  “Detective?” a uniformed patrolman asked, falling into step beside Coe. “They sent me down here to wait for you, sir. It’s…it’s pretty bad up there.”

  The woman at the desk flinched at the remark and went a shade of ashen gray.

  Coe steered the uni to the side near the elevators and got in his face.

  “How that crime scene looks is not for you to speculate upon or discuss, officer, especially within earshot of the public. Keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  Before the uni could respond, Coe got on an open elevator and rode up to the seventh floor alone.

  When the doors opened he took an appraising gaze up and down the hall before stepping out. To the left was just the empty hallway of the hotel. To the right was another cluster of cops and an EMT. Coe took a deep breath and walked down the hall toward 712.

  He could smell the blood before he was halfway there. Coe slowed his walk a pace to look at his colleagues before he reached the room. There was a lot of quiet but nervous chatter and movement, people rubbing their necks and shifting from foot to foot, only looking through the open door for a split second at a time before averting their eyes, as they would look at the sun.

  This is gonna to be bad, Coe thought.

 
They too let him pass amongst them without a word. Most of them knew him, or at least knew of him, and how he worked.

  Coe stood in the door. All he could see was a pool of blood and the shattered mouth of glass that led to the balcony.

  “714 open?” Coe asked.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t look to see who answered him. Coe walked into 714 and opened the door that joined it with 712, and now he could see everything. He took it in all at once for a long moment then closed his eyes to process what he’d seen.

  The blood first.

  It had been everywhere. It had soaked into the sheets pooling around the bodies on the bed. Standing pools of blood. It was splashed on the wall and the headboard as though thrown there by the bucketful. It had been streaked across the ceiling and the wall next to the bed. Had there been any footprints? None that he’d seen on that first look.

  What next? The bodies. Two of them, a man and a woman, naked, on their backs, lying next to each other on the bed, the blood pooled between them. Woman on his right, closer to the balcony door, the man on his left, nearest the wall. He opened his eyes again and looked.

  The woman first.

  Her throat had been slashed all the way down to the spine if that really was a white knob of bone he was seeing, but this was the least gruesome of her wounds. She had been cut open from snatch to sternum, the ribcage cracked and opened like the lid of an unspeakable gift. Her lungs were missing. Her intestines were looped out of her body and were piled on the floor next to the bed. Coe looked into her eyes and stared for a moment before he realized he was looking into two empty sockets. The eyes had been plucked away as neat as by a surgeon.

  He closed his eyes and opened them like the shutter of a camera and everything was burned into the film of his mind.

  Now the man.

  His right arm had been pulled off and now lay on the floor next to the bed. His head was missing. His legs were splayed wide and Coe felt his stomach do a rare, queasy turn. It looked as though someone had set a shark to work between the man’s legs. It was not that his genitals were missing, it was that that entire piece of his body was gone, along with a large chunk of one of his thighs. Coe could see exposed femur and shattered pelvis.

  “Oh what the fuck,” Coe whispered to himself, unaware the thought had escaped his mouth.

  He closed his eyes again and cleared his thoughts, then opened them and looked from one side of the room to the other in one long, panning movement, left to right.

  On his far left was the door to 712, its chain busted from when hotel security had shouldered their way in. Then there was the bathroom, the light still on, gleaming whiteness and no blood that he could see from his present angle. The bed and the bodies. His mind had, as of yet, nothing more to add there. There was glass all over the floor, some of it mixed with the blood. Next to the bed on Coe’s right, on the floor, was a wooden chair, lying on its side. The chair, the wood of which was a rich brown color, had no legs. Coe stared at the four stumps where the chair legs used to be, the exposed whiteness of the busted wood somehow too bright. Next to the bed, on the woman’s side, was a table. On it sat what appeared to be the four chair legs, sharpened to crude points, and a large knife dusted with wood shavings. Next to the sharpened chair legs sat a thick, leather wallet and a watch with a big face and wide, steel band, flecked with blood. A man’s watch.

  What did that mean? It suggested to Coe that before the attack, perhaps the man had been on that side of the bed, closer to the balcony door. Or maybe it meant nothing. He went on.

  Another chair, a big, comfy-looking recliner, as well as the long, low piece of furniture that had served as a dresser and TV stand, were sitting at angles near the shattered glass door. It looked as though both had been shoved against it.

  A barricade? A barricade denoted some advance knowledge of the attack, or least a suspicion that the attack would take place. Still, no calls from this room had come down to the front desk, he’d been told this on his drive over. People in the rooms below, above, next door, and across the hall had called the front desk within about twenty seconds of one another, reporting screams and commotion. That had been about an hour ago.

  Coe ran his eyes again over the carpet, from one side of the room to the other. No footprints of any kind. This stuck with him, bothered him more than even the wounds that been inflicted upon the dead. This looked like close work, all of it. Had to have been.

  How is there this much blood, Coe asked himself, and not a single fucking footprint?

  There was a trail of blood splatter, leading from the bed to the balcony. Once the room was photographed, Coe followed the trail, walking through the room carefully, his movements like those of a cat, light on his feet in a way that fit his tall and slender frame.

  Coe flipped a wall switch and the balcony lit up. He smiled almost immediately.

  Gotcha.

  There was handprint on the fat, round bar of the railing atop the balcony wall, a hand printed in blood. It looked almost black underneath the fluorescent lighting. Coe moved closer and examined it, and only it. He put out of his mind where he was, what he was doing, what he had already seen. He looked only at the handprint, dried now, almost perfect as if it had been left on purpose. He could see the whorls and loops in some of the fingerprints, the lifelines across the palm. It was a small hand, almost delicate. It did not strike him as the hand of a man. The hand that made the print had been turned, so the fingers were pointing off to Coe’s right, toward the balcony next door, and the thumb was pointing almost straight forward at seven stories of empty space. Coe turned his own hand so that it matched the position of the print, raised it to the height of the railing. The position was awkward until he moved his arm in from his body at an angle. It was almost like...

  “You jumped, you motherfucker,” Coe said. “Vaulted right over the side.”

  Onto what?

  Coe stepped closer to the railing, mindful of the blood, and looked down at the sheer face of the hotel. None of the rooms below the seventh floor had balconies. There were no awnings, no ledges. There was nothing and he became aware of someone talking to him before he registered their words. Coe turned and looked at one of his colleagues.

  “What?” Coe asked.

  “They found the head.”

  Coe couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t leave, though it had been suggested twice and ordered another time by the Lieutenant. Coe watched the footage over and over.

  It had come to them from the rooftop security cameras of the Shafer Building. It was the tallest building in the city.

  Coe skipped the DVD backward again with the remote, alone in the dark room, the only light the flickering of the TV.

  He rewound it again. He saw the pale blur enter the screen from the top and fall straight down. It bounced twice and rolled closer to the camera, close enough that you could see it was the severed head of a thirty-something Caucasian male. It was security footage, so it was grainy, but there was no mistaking it. You could clearly make out the profile of the nose, you could see one eye and one ear and the mouth, even from the side, even at night and on grainy security camera footage from the top of the city’s tallest building, you could see the mouth was wide open. You could see the mouth was screaming.

  Coe rewound it, watched, rewound, studying the angle of the drop again and again. The head had dropped straight down onto the roof and rolled toward one of the security cameras. Word was that when the guard watching these monitors deep in the prestigious bowels of the Shafer Building saw what had landed on his roof, he’d vomited his late dinner of sesame chicken into his lap.

  Coe let the footage play all the way this time. A tech had burned views from all the cameras on the roof at that time onto this one DVD, but the first view was the best. Some of the other views simply showed the blur of something dropping onto the roof, others showed nothing.