Read The Harvest for Free Online Page B

an animal gone feral—you stick a hand through the metal and you’ll pull back four fingers instead of five. And yet, she’s a rock in his shoe; he can’t quit thinking about her.
    He watches her scamper up a building, her short-cropped black hair like a bundle of unkempt grackle feathers. She uses a rust-eaten drainpipe to clamber up, then disappears. Two minutes later, she comes back down again.
    Eating a strawberry.
    A fat, plump, red-as-arterial-blood strawberry.
    She eats it quickly, palming it and biting it in one go, then spitting the green top into her hand. A hand that goes into her pocket before wiping a red smear on the patchwork, moth-eaten denim that covers her legs.
    The girl pauses for just a moment.
    She turns. And matches eyes with him.
    She sees him seeing her.
    Panic seizes him in a closing fist. Air out of his lungs. Eyes bulging. He knows he should duck, move, look away, something, anything , but he can’t. His feet—the good one and the other one—stand fixed to the ground. He knows his mouth is open, catching flies, but he can’t quite manage to close it.
    She winks at him.
    And then she turns and hurries off.
    The Fringe, they call it.
    The edge of the Heartland. Ringed by the Boundary. The fence posts are gleaming steel spires, each topped with a shining sphere. It looks like you could just walk between them, leaving the corn and entering the thick jungle beyond. But if you did, the wall would activate. A sonic barrier would screech like a hundred thousand crows, shrieking into existence in the same time it takes for lightning to strike—and you would be sheared in half.
    Most folks know what will happen. And yet, sometimes, people still walk through that fence anyway. Suicide with a dash of lottery-like uncertainty. Maybe this time I’ll walk in and the fence won’t get me. And then I’ll be free .
    That’s what they think.
    That’s what they hope .
    Then—the sonic screams. The invisible fence, a fence of sound, rises.
    Slice.
    The town that sits only a half mile from the Boundary, here in the Fringe, has taken on a senseless, hopeless atmosphere—a feeling that death hangs in the air, an invisible cloud, an unshakable fear. It’s a rat’s nest of a town, the buildings all leaning up against one another like sluggish Pheen addicts. Tin roofs dented, corroded. Stone walls cracked and crumbling. The plasto-sheen has long been perforated by Hiram’s Golden Prolific, and for a while, apparently, folks with sickle knives and Queeny’s Quietdown kept the corn culled. They’ve long given up that fight. The corn intrudes. Pokes up through the street. Through floorboards. Lone stalks serving as advance scouts, bending toward those who walk past, twitching, swiping, thirsty for blood.
    The town is Cloverdale, but nobody actually calls it that.
    They call it Curtains.
    And in the town of Curtains, the people are as ragtag and rotten as the buildings. A sad, rough group of Blighted, hobos, and the infirm. Hollow eyes and black tumors. Missing teeth and missing fingers.
    Curtains is the Heartland’s gutter. It’s where all the slurry runs. Where all the pollen blows, the trash drops, the piss trickles.
    The hobo boy saw his first suicide yesterday.
    He’d heard that you could go near the fence and find things. Things that people had left behind before they decided to walk through the tall posts. Sometimes, they said, if you were really brave, you could find the halves of the bodies that fell on the Heartland side of the sonic barrier, and sometimes those halves had trinkets or treasures in the pockets that you could trade back at the town Mercado for a bit of food, water, or treats.
    The hobo boy is hungry. He misses food.
    So he goes into the corn and hobbles the half mile out of town toward the wall. The corn is tall, but soon he sees that the metal posts are taller—they rise high in the sky, tall as ten of him stacked, feet on shoulders.
    The corn cuts him in the few places his skin