Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind the feed store where the dealers hang out. Time was my Aunt would come to me to have a word with anybody who messed with my family. Now she wants me to get on the phone and tell Paulie to back down. I mean, shit. What else am I good for, right?”
    “If he’ll listen to you, then you could end up saving his life.”
    “I’d rather have a talk with the guys that put him in here.”
    I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. “That’s what friends are for.”
    Thirty minutes later, Henry found us in the emergency room. He handed me the fresh t-shirt he thought to bring because he’s a genius. I shrugged it on, promptly ruining it. Still, it was better than walking around in bloody tatters. I filled him in while we waited for the others to be released.
    Henry listened patiently with that far-away look that I remembered from countless briefings back in the day. When I was done, he said, “Those creatures were definitely feeding on the dead in that graveyard, but they don’t sound like any ghoul that I’ve heard of. For one thing, ghouls are said to be human-like in appearance, and two, they’re solitary creatures. They don’t live in packs. But now that I have a description, I’ll go back through my books and see if anything catches my eye.”
    “Any idea why they stopped attacking?”
    Henry shrugged. “Well, if I don’t know what they are, I surely can’t tell you how they act. And before you ask, yes, I think this is why a foot from that cemetery ended up on my front porch. Someone clearly wanted us to find that nest.”
    “Which makes me wonder. Was it the nest or us that they wanted eliminated?”
    “That’s a good question.”
    Eventually Anne and Chuck came out to meet us. Anne lifted up the bottom of her shirt to show me her new stitches. “Can you believe this? I’m going to have a scar, right over my hip, for the rest of my life. I’m actually scarred for life.”
    I frowned. “You’d rather have had your guts yanked out? You were lucky to get off with just stitches.”
    “I’d be even luckier if I hadn’t gotten clawed at all. I’m never going to be able to wear a bikini again, Abe. Never.”
    “What? Great, now I’m angry, too! How about you, Chuck?”
    “Yeah, that sucks.”
    “No, I mean how are you? The nurse said you had some pretty bad bites.”
    “All the way to the bone. The doc kept asking me what did it. They said they’ve seen bites from pretty much everything that lives in this part of the country, and they’ve never seen this. I kept saying bear, and they kept giving me the hairy eyeball. In the end they gave up, but they shot me full of antibiotics and wrote me a prescription. Apparently animal bites are prone to infection. Other than that, just some stitches and pulled muscles.”
    “Close call,” I said. “When that thing got you on the ground, I figured you were a goner.”
    “Me, too. Oh, and Anne? If it makes you feel any better, I’m never wearing a bikini again, either.”
    Anne punched him in his good arm. “Shut up, Chuck.”

8

    W hen we got back to the house everyone gathered around Henry in his recliner. We told him about the attack in the graveyard while he scratched down notes and asked the occasional question. Afterwards, Leon handed over the pale leather tube. Henry examined it with hands sixty years younger than the rest of him, turning it this way and that with nimble fingers.
    The tube was the size of a rolled up sheet of paper and fastened shut with a twist of coarse vine. He gently untied it and saved the vine in his shirt pocket to examine later.
    He unrolled the leather sheet, revealing a single barbed thorn about two inches long. The base of it was a smoothly rounded ball that was very faintly transparent, like a drop of dark amber. The thorn that grew out of it was shiny and black and wickedly sharp.
    The inside of the sheet had words burned into it, as if marked with a thin, hot piece of metal. Henry read the words aloud in his deep