“Look for one about this size, then give it a little squeeze to check the fruit for ripeness.” I took it from him gingerly and squeezed it as delicately as I could. “I suppose it don’t matter that much. At worst you could pick a few that aren’t quite ripe enough. They’ll get used anyhow. They have to. They can always go to the pigs.” He grinned at me, a big man who grinned at everything. I smiled back uncertainly. “Take this,” he handed me one of the rough sacks. “You walk down this row.” He pointed the direction we’d been headed into a green labyrinth of corn that swallowed everything but the blue sky overhead. “Check every plant and put the ears in the sack. Once you’ve got a full one brings it back to the road and get another sack from the pile. We’ll come along later with a wagon and pick them up.” He stopped and I nodded. “Easy enough. All right, I’ll leave you to it then.” He walked off through the stalks back towards the road accompanied by the whisk of corn leaves settling back into place behind him.
I hesitantly approached the next plant, leaning around it is checking for the ears. A couple clung tightly to the stalk. As far as I could tell they felt the same as the one he’d shown me. They were thick enough. Ryan had failed to show me how to detach the ear from the stalk. They weren’t like a fruit which you just pluck from the branch. They were fused to the stalk. I grabbed one and pulled on it is shaking the entire plant and those that it rubbed against. The ear remained stubbornly in place. Finally, I pulled it downward, ripping it off the stalk with a damaging sound. I did the same for the second ear on the stalk and then moved on to the next plant. I could hear other ripping sounds emanating from further into the field and I felt somewhat reassured, although I had visions of the entire row that I harvested withering and browning in my trail. Dottie would shake her head and my brother would have no choice but to send me back to mucking, which in the quiet surroundings of the field seemed a most unpleasant job. It didn’t take long for me to begin moving automatically, pulling ears, shoving them into the bag with a squeak as their leaves rubbed against one another. The world consisted of green, shadows, the crumbly soil beneath my feet, the calls of birds as the arose startled from the crop, the blue sky, and the sun overhead. Soon I grew warm and sweat rolled down my temples and through the small of my back. My sack grew heavy and I dragged it along behind me, then it filled, and I took it back to the road. Nothing moved on the road but there were several other sacks lying on its side. I went back to where I’d left off fresh sack in hand. The row stretched on forever, nothing but stalk after stalk of corn rustling whenever the air moved. I went back to work. What was my brother doing? I hadn’t seen him doing anything. I should have been working with him, helping him. I wondered if he was lonely surrounded by all those vampires.
The morning rolled by delineated only by the sun’s progression and the growing ache in my arm from carrying sacks full of corn. My thoughts wandered in and out of a daze, so that I didn’t notice the voices right away. They were punctuated by the ripping of ears from the stalks.
“I heard that there’s a bunch of people headed here from the east. They should be here any day now.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“The reverend.”
“The reverend told you that.”
“Well not exactly. It was Todd, who heard the reverend discussing it.”
“Shit, no men have shown up in almost a year now. You think they’re going to show up now, with winter bearing down on us. No men make it here anymore except for his brother and I’ll tell you why. He won’t let them. Either he feeds them to his vampire buddies, they get scared off or he kills them.”
“But we need more recruits. And we need more women.”
“You’re too dimwitted and ugly to get with a woman even if we had more around. Answer me this: how many vampires have shown up since the last man showed up.”
There was a pause. They pulled a couple of ears off and I pulled off one, my ears strained to catch them when they spoke again.
“About fifty I’d say.”
“Fifty vampires and no men and that doesn’t strike you as strange. No men are showing up, we’ve got too many of those damn vamps around now no human outside the inner circle can ever go hunting our scouting. Half of those bastards want to be vampires anyways and the other half are already worse than vampires. We’ve been stocking up to clear the land for a while now, but I haven’t seen any clearing out, all I’ve seen is more and more vampires coming in.” He let
