Harvest

The earth has sixty harvests left. Once they have been gathered, there will be nothing left but the wastes and the wasted.

We, of course, will be old by then. The fat and hoary heralds of that passed age. They will hate us then, for our greed and the destruction we did not avoid, and they will envy us too. Some of them will round us up and spit and there will be incidents and we will pass. Then they will fight each other until so many fat and thin have fallen and died that the crops cannot help but grow again. And from the renewed soil will come death harvests of fattest grain and shiny tuber, the sleek fingers of roots will poke from the loam and the land will roll with the hissing undulations of stalks.

The corpse-grown food will be eaten as readily as it is now, normal, except unlike now not a single one of them will be able to say that they do not know where their food came from. And so it won't be as it is now. The growths themselves will be natural, if anything only fresher, but in the lack of unawareness our feeding on the crops will change. Fruit, identical to what we purchase and slice now, will roll down gullets quietly amazed at the death that has preceded this new life, and the unavoidable knowing of how necessary the death and unnecessary the specifics of those who died and those who came to live will, undigested, build and churn and fold in upon itself within the bellies of each and every person until, one day, a girl in Northern Europe stops moving.

She will be perched cautiously at the edge of a game chalked on tarmac and surrounded by the delving hum of the others playing she will fall still. She will not cry out. She will not pale. Her taut jaw will follow the arc of the sweet and succulent fruit that slips from her hand, and that is all.

The others will laugh and then drift away quiet, panic a soft blur in the periphery that they ignore. When the girl is found and taken to a hospital concerned parents will ask why they did nothing. They won’t have an answer. A boy from Israel who saw it happen will also go still, and he will be rushed to the same hospital. Still chalky from the playground, the others will munch mutely on bones while eying the crockery.

A father in Detroit halts traffic.

A huddle of lunching colleagues watch a fountain endlessly.

The new hysteria will paralyse an entire school, a city centre, several stadiums.

Quarantines will irresolutely circle innumerable points across the planet. They will spread, rise, fall low and – abandoned – overflow with statues that do not seem to age or eat or die.

After a period of chaos and collapse, a minority will emerge unfrozen. Lost and immune it will take many of them months, for some years, to utilise what remains of vehicles, radios and maps to congregate. Those that do not succumb late to the stillness or early to isolation will form nomadic tribes, drifting across a landscape more fecund than it had been for many centuries, scavenging what they can and foraging among the thick tendrils that have woven life over bone. In the time it will take these survivors to meet and become the new people, the preternaturally suspended will themselves change.

It will first be heard as rumour carried by strangers; told only at night and between the walls of shelter. The statues can be made to move. The haggard vagrants who bring these stories will tell of unwitting bands who have gone too boldly amongst the frozen crowds and awoken them to an unknowable panic. Returned to life hysterical, it is said that entire cities writhe and swarm as if the vitality they should rightly have expended over many years had been stored and suddenly sparked and set ablaze. They will say that those caught in these mass resurrections will be crushed by the maddened crowd into the macadam, though how these stories will propagate in the face of such ruin will never be made clear. Nonetheless, it will become common law to go quietly, and to wind gently, and slip swiftly.

A fog will descend over a city somewhere. On the top floor of one of the city’s towers there will be a man. His jeans will be caked in mud. Matted hair will crawl itself around his chin. He will clutch a backpack to his chest. He has had a reason to be there, but he won’t remember what it was. The remnants of what food he had with him will be strewn about his feet, and accordingly his backpack will sag with what it does not hold. He will not be able to remain there any longer.

He will edge his way across what today is an office, but then is nothing recognisable, and cower quietly before its door. A hand that trembles will open the door, and a cool wind will blow in from the stairwell before him. It will be thronged. Packed with them. Unbearably still, each a standing fetish bearing the spirit of a person who once tried to flee from this building. Some still hold an arm limply against the railing, their cool hands ringed faintly with rust upon the iron banister.

Alone and empty-stomached, the man will not understand how he got up there. There was a mechanism before, or perhaps simply a companion.

He will think he sees one of them twitch.

His breath will hiss jaggedly between his clenched teeth. His shoes will rasp hollowly over the concrete. Ducking, he will move, with as much care as he is able, around the first. Its dress will shift in the breeze of his passing. It won’t move. His empty backpack will hang loosely from his hand as he manoeuvres it around the body after he has already gone past. He will feel panic too strongly to remember to wear it.

There will be more. A trio locked in argument, conversation, maybe strangers frozen at a coincidence of eye-contact, occupy the first landing he will come to. He will crawl on his hands and knees between them. The quietly decaying silk of one of the statue’s trousers will whistle against his dirty jacket. He will hold his breath, but nothing will come of it.

The man will gag on the dust and the fear and in his lower abdomen his muscles will tear, ever so slightly, as he locks these sounds between his flexing ribs. The pain will be sharp and not dissimilar to his hunger and he will pass a moment wondering what the infinite hunger of those who are frozen must be like. After all these decades.

He will be only half-way down the building when he trips. An object, it’s function so alien to the world in which it now lies that it could not be recognised by any left moving, will lie blanketed in debris in the stairs. His foot will catch on it and with his arms dumbly grasping at the air before him he will fall. Not far or too painfully. He will manage to keep his bag that holds nothing. The sound of his body will echo proudly to the shaft’s fullest height.

He will lay at rest. After a time, he will raise his head and lock eyes with it. Closest to him, it wears rags matched with loosely ragged bands of leather around its feet. Though the man knows there are so many others, this one will command all of him. Its eyes will see him. It will open its jaw slowly – the newly open space will surprise him with its similarity to his own – and while they gape at one another it will bring its teeth together with an ivory ‘clack’.

The man will escape. Pushing himself up from the stone he will run headlong into the abdomen of the statue and he will hear its head hit the wall and he will run. Passing down one more flight he will manage a total of ten skittering steps before he runs into the others’ arms.

They will bludgeon him, not with fist or even open hand, but with the full length of their arms and with wild flailings of their torsos, until he his beneath their feet. There, they will trample him, wildly dancing to a percussion of snapping bones. Their own and his; their forearms and shins swinging in obscene arcs long after the man’s blood has soaked into the concrete and marked the place of his death a dull brown.

They will fall still again after an unknown time, and those that can still stand will, and those that now huddle and lie strewn will also, and they will return to their unmoving state with their necks bent back. Their still eyes caught on the ceiling above them, where a long-blown seed will have trapped itself in a crack and worked its way out; grown to hang a single, bulbous fruit above them like a sun.