Story code: ST-001405
Part 4: Rotten Harvest
Mateo stared at the glowing screen under Dale’s thumb. The numbers-1-866-347-2423-burned into his fevered brain, brighter than the harsh overhead fluorescents. In the shadowed supply corridor, the mechanical churning of the conveyor belts suddenly felt miles away. All Mateo could hear was his own ragged breathing and the frantic clicking of Dale’s teeth as the farm owner ground his jaw together in sheer panic.
Mateo searched Dale’s bloodshot eyes for a bluff, a sliver of hesitation, a sign that the man who had hired him wouldn’t actually condemn him to a federal holding cell. But there was no bluff. There was nothing in Dale’s pale, sweat-drenched face except the feral terror of a drowning man pulling someone else under to stay afloat. Dale would hit send. He would trade Mateo’s life for the corporate harvest contract without a second thought.
Slowly, the last vestiges of resistance evaporated from Mateo’s chest. His rigid fingers uncurled from his torn flannel collar. His right arm dropped heavily, uselessly to his side.
A deep, suffocating hollow opened in his stomach. The crimson streaks of the chemical infection pulsed violently against his collarbone, a venomous drumbeat tracking straight toward his heart. He wasn’t going to get an ambulance. He wasn’t going to get a doctor to neutralize the spreading sulfur-copper burn. And he certainly wasn’t going to get his harvest pay. He was just going to die, either bleeding out in the farm dirt or sweating to death on a deportation bus.
Dale let out a ragged exhale. The farm owner’s massive shoulders slumped, but his thumb remained rigidly locked barely a millimeter above the screen. “Just go out the back,” Dale whispered, his voice a broken rasp barely audible over the distant, polite laughter of the corporate auditors inspecting the sorting belts. “Don’t come back tomorrow. I’ll mail your pay to the community center. Just go.”
Mateo knew it was a lie. The words were an empty attempt to put a human mask back over an inhuman choice. There was no pay coming. There was no paper trail for his undocumented labor, no proof he had ever stood in that sweltering shed or touched a single crate of those cursed peaches. He had traded the flesh of his arm for absolutely nothing.
He didn’t waste his breath on a man who had already buried him. Mateo turned his back on the bright lights of the main packing floor, away from the pristine corporate auditors and the stacked pallets of fruit, and shuffled toward the heavy fire door at the rear of the corridor.
He hit the crash bar with his good shoulder. The metal door groaned open, admitting a blinding shaft of white summer sunlight and the suffocating, dry heat of the open fields.
Mateo stumbled out onto the gravel lot. The air was utterly still, thick with suffocating dust and the inescapable scent of rotting orchard fruit dumped in the irrigation ditches. He clutched his left arm tightly against his stomach. The cheap white cotton gauze was entirely saturated, the pale yellow fluid dripping slowly from his elbow, leaving a dark, wet trail in the parched dirt.
Behind him, the metal door clattered loudly as it swung open again, bouncing against its hinges.
Mateo stopped, his boots grinding in the gravel. Swaying on his feet, he looked back over his shoulder.
Dale had followed him out into the brutal sunlight. The farm owner stood alone on the edge of the concrete pad, permanently separated from his precious corporate buyers by the thick corrugated steel of the warehouse walls. The smartphone slipped from Dale’s trembling fingers, hitting the gravel with a dull crack. He didn’t reach down to pick it up.
Mateo watched as the crushing reality of the transaction finally slammed into the man. Dale stared down at his own empty hands, the hands that had just sealed a death sentence to protect a bank loan. A violent shudder ripped through Dale’s heavy frame. He staggered toward the rusted metal railing of the loading dock, his knees completely buckling. He grabbed the iron pipe to keep from collapsing into the dirt, bending double as a loud gag tore out of his throat. Dale wretched violently into the dry weeds, his broad back heaving, physically sickened by the monster he had just become. He had secured the contract and saved his land, but the rot had permanently taken root inside his own chest.
Mateo felt no vindication watching the farm owner break down. The sight of Dale weeping and vomiting into the dirt didn’t cool the fire burning in his veins, and it wouldn’t stop the eviction notice from being taped to his family’s apartment door on Monday morning.
Mateo turned away and faced the long, empty stretch of county highway. It was twelve miles of shimmering, heat-baked asphalt to the nearest town. He had no wallet, no truck, and no hope of making it halfway before the fever finally pulled him under.
He took a single, agonizing step toward the road, his boot dragging a deep trench in the gravel. A massive wave of dizziness tilted the horizon, blurring the distant treeline. Mateo locked his jaw, forcing himself upright, and marched into the suffocating heat as the dark red lines of the infection crawled silently up his throat.