HSA-17: Harvest

By Quixerotic

HSA-17: Harvest

In the early days of the HSA, Harry is tasked with acquiring the story of Ulster Rock from the sole known survivor. Ben Holcomb tells the story of his days in the small, isolated town working alongside a team of men to bring in the fall harvest. Ben and the others find themselves caught in a surreal world as the town starts to affect them as well. Everything is perfect until jealousy and madness start to take over as an unseen force works its ill intent on the young lovers.

The HSA program is tasked with identifying and isolating events and artifacts associated with the Human Sexual Anomalies. First chartered as a classified organization in 1953, the HSA program has worked diligently for many years to preserve the sanctity of human life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quixerotic
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005363253

Quixerotic

I have always enjoyed a particular type of erotica, stories where lust and carnal desire overwhelm reason, driving away the trappings of the real world as ecstatic fantasy takes over. My writing strives to tell such stories in rich worlds of dark fantasy, far flung science fiction, or apocalyptic inevitability, finding the kinky fun under every rock or at the end of every winding corridor.

Book preview

HSA-17: Harvest

Quixerotic

Copyright 2020 by Quixerotic Publishing

Smashwords Edition

HSA-17: Harvest

by Quixerotic

Declassified:

She bent down to kiss him, her breasts pressing against his chest as his hands moved up to grope her ass. Don’t be silly, Ben. This is what you want. You want to stay for the harvest festival. You want to see me put on the crown. And you want to fuck me at every chance you get until then. Until the big moment! Isn’t that right? She ground her hips down hard, pushing him fully inside of her. Her lower lips squelched with a mingling of his cum and her own arousal. She pressed her mouth against his, hard. Ben felt a twinge of pain and met her kiss with equal enthusiasm. He tasted his own blood in his mouth, a small cut from his lower lip. The moon will rise tomorrow night. Mira said it’s come sooner this year. I can’t wait. I love you so much, Ben. Promise me you’ll stay.

In the fall of 1953, the Human Sexual Anomaly division had been officially in operation for six months. No longer did the interviews take place in a dank harbor warehouse or a grimy roadside bar, but in a clean interrogation room two stories below an average office building. A lamp hung over the wooden table causing a gleaming reflection in the new varnish. On one side sat Harry Dean. He would last three more years before meeting an ill fate. He was a squat man with a serious, gaunt face. He wore a thin, tailored, black suit with a white shirt and a narrow tie. His hat and overcoat hung on a hook near the door, still damp from the rain. Arrayed before him on the table were black and white photos, several manila file folders, and a clean white notepad, made specially by the division for this purpose. At the end of his interview for the job, the division told Harry he would encounter things that made him questions his sanity, his morals, and his god. He did not believe it until he learned about the Harvest of Ulster Rock.

Across the table sat another man. Never trust a frayed rope, Harry’s father told him as a boy. Ben Holcomb looked like a frayed rope. For the past two years, Ben lived in the care of his blind aunt in Knoxville. How he made it to Knoxville after Ulster Rock remained a mystery of relatively little importance, but Harry intended to suss it out along with the rest of the tale. At twenty-two, Ben looked handsome despite his fraying. The shock of white hair running down the center of his head, hedged on either side by waxy black curls, warned of something uneven inside the young man. Thin, but wiry, made of the thread-thin steel from which country boys seemed to be spun. Periodically, spasms seized his muscles causing his arms and neck to go rigid. He winced at the slightest knock or thump. Harry knew shell shock well enough to recognize it before him.  He hates seeing the signs in a man who had been free from the horrors of war.  This boy would trade places with any of them, Harry thought, maybe even the dead.  Maybe only them.  

"Let me see your hands, son," Harry asked in the stern tone that he once addressed troops.

Ben did not turn his head, but tentatively offered his bare palms to the man across the table. Harry frowned, and his lips curled. Across the palms and up the wrist to the elbow were three branching patterns which Harry recognized. During the war, a corporal walked out to the latrine during a storm, carrying his rifle. Lightning did what the Germans couldn’t and struck the boy dead. Harry helped carry the body back. A medic looked the boy over before sending him on to the white trucks. The same pattern on Ben hands and wrists had been on the back of that soldier. Lichtenberg pattern, the medic called it. Burst all the blood vessels down a line in the shoulder and back. Not what killed him though, the medic had said. The kid’s heart stopped, and that killed most everyone. The pattern on the dead boy’s back had started to turn black when Harry saw it, like still blood, but the ones on Ben’s hands remained bright red, as if the blood vessels broke anew every few minutes. And perhaps, Harry thought, the fingertips are why.

On each hand, on each finger and thumb down to the first knuckle, a thick, tarry substance coated Ben Holcomb’s fingers. It writhed like pitch on the boil. Harry nodded, and Ben pulled his hands back. Harry picked up his pencil and made several notes, most centered on the fact that despite looking like pitch, the substance has not worn off on any object or so much as changed position on the skin. Satisfied with that for the moment, he looked up at Ben with the best smile he could muster. We’ll begin now, if that’s all right?

Ben went to a spot in his mind that has been dark and closed off for two years. He saw it as a door once sealed with great difficulty — a red door, covered in pitch stains and nail scratches. Nothing scared Ben more than opening it, but he knew he couldn’t keep it closed forever. Because what happened to him could happen again. Men in suits, men like Harry, found him and offered help. They showed him things other men would never believe, some horrible and some beautiful and all treacherous. He sat up straight in his chair, folding the scarred and tarred hands in his lap. He still felt the wriggle and burn of the sticky substance. In his mind or his heart or his soul, wherever one keeps the darkest of secrets, he reached for the handle of the door and found it turned easily.

"It was October 14th, 1951. I just turned twenty, and I took a job in Ulster Rock. They were bringing in the harvest and needed extra labor. Extra men, you see, for the harvest."

Harry nodded, and his hand went to work at the notepad.

***

Ben arrived on a Greyhound line thirty miles south of Ulster Rock. At the depot, he met up with his new foreman, a dusty old man called Willard. Six other young men got off at the same stop. They’d been riding together for miles and none of them knew they were headed to the exact same place. An eighth man came a different route, bringing an old beat up Ford on its last leg. The young man behind it looked two sizes too small for the rig, and Ben half expected to see him sitting on a pile of books with cinder blocks taped to his feet to reach the pedals. Willard gathered the lot of them on the rear side of the bus depot.

Glad to see you all made it. We’ve got a good drive left ahead of us, but figure we should shake things out here. Ulster Rock is out in the fuckin nowhere. Don’t get no passers through, and no man with a truck is heading out of town till after harvest. So if you get fuckin sick of me, you got a long walk before finding any way back to your momma’s leakin tit. He spat to emphasize his point. Willard wore muddy and tattered overalls covering a shirt that might