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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