Author's Note: As my stories go, this one is 90% story and 10% sex. It's relatively long, so if you're here for straight up naughty stuff, you may find it lacking.
***
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 have once been white. His face and arms were sun worn leather. Wisps of white hair jutted out from beneath a denim cabbie hat. His left eye had turned to milk, but the right still sparkled a lively green. He spoke with his arms wrapped around his chest, showing pocked skin and knotted knuckles. "Two weeks of hard work. Pays twice, once at the end of the first week. Again at the end of the second. One hundred dollars a week with a fifty dollar bonus if'n you don't cut up none. I don't begrudge a man his drink, but can't have you whooping around town and causing trouble. That settled?"
The troop of young men nodded. For a brief moment, Ben wondered how and why each of them had come to be standing in front of Willard's one good eye. Ben guessed by the look of the lot that they all couldn't be more than a few years apart. It was the first time Ben felt his hair stand on end, an instinct his daddy had taught him to always heed. He believed if any danger was to come out of the group, he suspected it to be the fellow standing in the middle. Nathan Puckett, a bull of a man with cold, heavy lidded eyes and a nasty scar running down the left side of his face, nodded along with Willard's instructions like a greedy hog watching his keeper bleed out in the pen. Slow and cold, he'd eat the world so long as it laid still in front of him. Ben's active imagination had no trouble spinning a tale of the butcher Nathan Puckett, who took farm jobs with other men, working side by side with them until the pay was doled out in full. Then with that dumb smile on his wet lips, he would follow each of them down an alley and introduce a knife to their guts for the money in their pockets.
"Chuck here has volunteered to drive up behind me. I'll take half of you in the truck. The one who stinks the least can ride in the cab with me. The other half pile in with Chuck. If'n you got to piss, do it now. I ain't intending on stopping on the way back. Gotta get ya settled."
Fifteen minutes later, they had loaded their meager belongings in the car or truck and divided themselves up. To Ben's relief, Nathan went off to the truck with Willard. "Like goes with like," Chuck offered as a greeting as they situated themselves for the drive. Ben introduced himself in return by asking what Chuck had meant. "That dullard. The big one. I can see him gettin on fine with old Willard. Willard and the Dullard, a fine pair to make us break our backs haulin corn or just apt to split an axe in your back from the look of them."
"Yeah, sure," agreed one of the two in the rear seats. "Norman Black, pleased to meet you fellas."
"Gregory Anders, people who bother to call me, call me Anders," said the fourth.
"Charles Thornton is my full name," Chuck continued after Ben gave his name. "Been called Chuck since as long as I remember, though. Like a woodchuck my ol' ma would say. Small, but industrious." He flashed them a grin and cranked the car. It rattled. Ben immediately thought they'd be left behind, but the engine rolled over and Chuck's feet went to work on the clutch. "Hi-ho silver!" The engine roared defiantly, and a swirl of dust rose up behind them as they followed Willard's truck out onto the road. From the bed, leaning back against the cab, Nathan alternated between glaring at them menacingly or looking dumbly at nothing at all. At first, Ben found it unnerving, but as the corn fields started to roll by and the conversation started up in the car, he forgot the eerie feeling he'd had. "I come from Kansas, myself," Chuck prattled on, bouncing in his seat along the rough road. "Pa went off in the war when I was still in shorts. Left him over in North Africa, we think. Thought. Ma moved on last year. Kicked around the old place for a while till my brother came back for it. He ran me off, telling me to go find my own. Gimme the car though, so he ain't all that bad. What about you fellas?"
