Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Heavy Green Machine Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

HEAVY GREEN MACHINE

The crowd was large, a vast mixture of buyers of various depths of pocket. The sun rode high, mercury rising without concern for the reddening necks below. The right kind of red neck could be a badge of honor, and these folks wore their burns proudly.

Hot and busy, here was a good day for an auction. Marvin Wade walked amid the gawking crowd. He’d gotten a call that a pretty fancy machine was on the block and the lack of serious faces meant it might go at a steal.

Marvin looked over the different tones of green. “They had to repaint the header and some bits of the undercarriage, girl’s blood baked in the sun like a bird plop on a sidewalk,” a raspy voice said into Marvin’s ear. “The pressure washer took off the layers of paint, but it’s a combine, not a Cadillac, am I right? Sad about the girl though. Josie Boone was her name, tragic.”

Tragic indeed. The man was correct all the way around despite his ill-colored comparison.

Marvin pouted out his bottom lip, pondering. The fact that this particular machine chewed through a twelve-year-old might lower the price even further. He fought a smile while he half-heard more about the little girl; knowing her name was bad enough. The thought of losing a child shivered fresh goosebumps upon his flesh.

The auctioneer gave the specs. A 1 self-driving system meant the operator could sit on the sideline and let the machine move itself. A high efficiency fuel system meant it could run for double the usual hours. A tri-folding header meant the new owner would not need to hire a truck to drag the header around. On the auctioneer went—top of the line. The thing was like-new.

“This is a bit of a rarity, they’ve changed the design because of what happened to that poor girl and her baby sheep; new ones have additional sensors, so be careful and pay attention. Can we start at three-fifty?” The auctioneer’s tongue rolled, but no arms rose. He mopped sweat on his brow. “How’s about we start at two-fifty, can I see two-fifty?” The crowd had gone still but for the chewing and spitting of Skoal. “Okay, fifty. Can I see fifty-grand?”

Marvin lifted his card.

Four minutes after the first bid, Marvin owned the combine; a John Deere SDS880, one of only five ever produced, buying it outright for a few bucks under one hundred nine thousand—a steal of a deal.

Marvin wandered around the auction a little while longer, spent a few thousand on prices he couldn’t deny, items he might need someday. He was already working out that he could manage the Self-Drive System 880 while he sat on the edge of the field, monitoring with his iPad as the machine harvested his crops. He could perhaps get some paperwork done while he combined, and the time savings had him salivating.

He’d name the machine Josie; it was only right.

—

The SDS880, Josie, arrived three weeks after purchase and Marvin was giddy with the potential. He used an iPad to set a path and the header detached at a tap so that one of Marvin’s men could inspect and grease. The combine rode up and back on the two-kilometer laneway.

“Look at that, look at that.” Marvin slapped his hat on his leg, a Stetson, the same model he replaced year after year. The combine returned to where it would sit for two months until the grain screamed for removal—late August in Saskatchewan.

—

The sun had been up for an hour already at five o’clock. Marvin strutted out feeling like a cool kid on the first day of third grade with a new pair of cowboy boots. Hands on Josie’s wheel, he drove manually out to the first field, one that stretched on a perfectly flat swatch almost nine kilometers in every direction. He set the route on his iPad, adjusted the radio, and let the machine do its thing. It was slower than most of the newer combines but doubling up on the fuel saved him more than enough to pay for the pace.

He’d given up watching the edges, it was a perfect line, and hummed along with Conway Twitty on the radio. “Left those crystal, hmm, hmm, dream, hmm, hmm, tight fittin’ jeans.” At the far end of the field, Marvin stepped out of the combine and planted himself under the shade of a tree.

“Combine that drives itself, amazing,” he said as he awoke the iPad.

The combine rode along the back line and out of clarity. Marvin watched, poured a cup of coffee from his thermos, and pulled a wad of reports from his briefcase. Doing a couple things while Josie did her thing had to be the Mount Rushmore of perks.

He’d gotten the entire story about the poor girl, poor Josie Boone. He hadn’t wanted it, but farmers gossip like a knitting circle if you put a pot of coffee and a plate of eggs in front of them. Initially, Deere commissioned an outside test, the man testing watched closely, but his fields ran a good distance, and up near Melfort the landscape had hills and dips, obscuring views. Story went, Josie Boone was a bit off, no friends, didn’t know how to act in public, apt to freak out at the grocery store. A plain old strange girl. Her parents bought her a lamb, willing to try anything, and to a point, the runty beast helped her. She treated the lamb like a dog, took it for walks, pet its coat, rubbed its belly. On that unfortunate August morning, Josie Boone was out and about with her lamb and something spooked the animal and it took off—leash dangling behind. The young girl chased and the pair met the hungry header of the machine running on auto-pilot, and the rest was a messy history. The machine drove on a little ways after the farmer heard the lamb screaming; Josie Boone hadn’t made a peep when the machine chewed her up. But that sheep scream was warning enough and the man stopped the motion with the iPad and chased down the field.

The combine had showered a backwash of tiny bits of Josie over the neatly harvested rows.

Marvin hated the idea, it stank of exaggeration, but it was there, in his head, swimming around. He’d heard other things about the combine after the accident, like it would start up on its own in the middle of the night, that the lights burned red under a full moon, the shipping guys heard screams coming from the back of the truck, things like that. Marvin chalked it up to bored bumpkins creating excitement from banality.

Looking out onto the field, it seemed the combine moved where it shouldn’t have and he stood. The iPad had gone into sleep mode. He waited for the screen to light and once it did, looked at an aerial projection of his field. “What in the sweet heck is that?”

The lines rode in rounded edges, swinging back and forth over one another.

“Dang it all to Dinah.” He slapped his Stetson and killed the header, called the combine back. It poked along toward the tree and Marvin. Engine still roaring, Marvin climbed into the cab and looked out of the wide glass window. “Damn.”

He’d have to spend the rest of the day driving one of the other machines; the SDS880, was supposed to be a piece of equipment reaching for showcase status, but it was just another flawed chunk of technology. He bumped along, slower than the already slowed top speed and wondered how much it would cost him to get a John Deere computer technician out.

“Probably a bundle and then some, jeepers cripes,” he whispered under the twanging voices of Dolly and Kenny coming from the radio. The stereo flickered and sputtered, sounding akin to an ancient drive-thru box before it died fully. “Hmm.” Marvin switched the station, nothing. The engine slowed further. “Oh, what now?”

A loud cough barked from behind him. The slick black steering wheel spun and the engine snarled back to life.

“What the heck? What the heck?”

Frantic, Marvin tugged against the wheel, but it wouldn’t budge. Josie found a new gear and zoomed more than triple speed back down the field, away from the home, away from the workers.

“Hey, hey!”

The combine ate through a thick-trunked oak as if it were a woodchipper tackling a sapling. The radio flared back on. “Have you seen a lamb, mister? I can’t remember where I left it,” a young feminine voice said—definitely not the country station anymore.

“No… Hello?” Marvin said as the machine rolled on. He waited and called out again, growing evermore panicked. Slamming the breaks didn’t help and the heavy machine continued increasing its speed. “Stop, dang you!”

Marvin reached into his pocket for his cellphone. There, as if afraid of the competition, the machine stopped dead, jutting tire ruts into the field, sending double waves of dirt arcing in its wake. The momentum had Marvin on the move; he crashed through the curved glass windshield. Flying and landing before he knew what had happened, he looked back at Josie. It snarled at him and revved the header, the small blades within the teeth famished for blood. Marvin got to his feet. Nelcarres, the closest village, was barely within sight at only a five or ten-minute sprint away.

“Dang you!” he screamed as he put weight on his legs. The pain tore into his soul. The machine laughed at him. He dragged the bum kicker, moving at a pace just above walking an anxious puppy. Josie jerked forward and Marvin looked back, blood dripped down his face from the collision with the windshield, and stalks and grains had attached themselves to sticky liquids trailing all over his body. He noticed nothing but the pain radiating from his leg. If he’d made it to the hospital, they would’ve diagnosed a shattered fibula.

Roaring and rolling, the engine revving higher than any RPM gauge ever crafted, but moving in a creep, closer and closer, the header’s hinges bent and folded upwards, swatting out, at first swishing the air over Marvin’s head; “Oh mister, I sure do miss her,” the girlish voice said, and the header swiped over a second time, slicing Marvin’s Stetson to pieces, Marvin turned to see the steel face of death, but what he didn’t see, was the grinding and the great shower of blood that followed.

Bits of Marvin Wade covered a five-hundred-foot radius, a young girl’s laughter accompanying it with a fading echo as it settled into the field.

—

The telephone rang at the front desk and quickly went back to the on-duty officer, Luke Morning. “Yeah, Officer Morning here,” he said, too early to accommodate the routine of feigned interest. Morning had moved from Vancouver to Melfort—a change in speed. It was almost always a smucked deer, or moose, or elk, or pig, or buffalo, animals searching the road, free from the wilds and free from pens alike.

“Hello, my dad’s missing and his new combine’s all smashed, has some blood, but I can’t find anything of him. I’ve seen farm accidents before, usually something sitting around. I think he must’ve walked off, dazed or something, if it’s his blood. I mean the machine’s right up by the house, can’t drive itself…well, it can but…” The missing man’s son was an adult according to the timbre and pitch of his voice.

“Whoa now, slow down. I need a name to start…and what do you mean the thing can drive itself?”

“Marvin Wade, my name is Marvin Wade Junior. Dad’s Marvin and I’m Marv.” Marv went on to explain the combine.

“Right, I see. You’d best give me your info and I’ll pop out there.”

Marv did and then watched the laneway. The farm around the house was brimming with activity. Farmhands didn’t get the day off just because the boss was missing.

—

Morning rolled up the long laneway in his cruiser. The young man was there, waiting. They shook hands and Morning looked at the combine that hadn’t moved since the day before. In the cab was a steel thermos, a briefcase, an iPad, but no glass.

“The windshield broke outwards, see that?”

“What you mean, Dad went through the glass?”

“Could be, could’ve hit his head and went on a walk like you say, explain some of that blood; looks like an awful sum, doesn’t it?” Morning calculated the reaction, the young man seemed cold about his father, plus Morning never trusted anyone in a cowboy hat, wished he could’ve found a job somewhere else. Sometimes a screw up took a real toll and a body had to spend time around cowboy hats and the folks who wore them before they got back to city life.

Two years earlier Morning made a bad assumption, said some wrong things, and found himself without a job. When Vancouver PD fired him, he had few options. One option had been Melfort, Saskatchewan—a permanent revolving door for job opportunities. The other places, well, he couldn’t even imagine those. Somehow, this was the best he could get.

The kid registered the question and swallowed emotion. “Sure, it does, but way I see it, without anything left of the body, means that he’s not a body yet and he’s still my dad and he needs help.”

A reasonable answer, no sense crying over milk that might not be spilled. “Can you figure this thing? Tell us where the machine went?”

Marv booted the iPad and it quickly died. “Needs a charge, but he was out in that field, the rows show that, but it’s all wacky, see?”

Morning’s gaze followed the direction and the rows were indeed strange. “A real fuckeroo, isn’t it?”

The young man nodded. “You want me to charge this? Josie’s GPS don’t work without it, but it’ll show us where he was.”

“Josie?”

“Dad named her Josie. That machine ate up a small girl last year when the operator wasn’t looking.”

“Sweet shit sandwiches,” Morning mumbled. “Better charge it.”

Marv ran into the house. Morning continued his investigation of the machine; the interior told nothing and the exterior told something needing more proof.

Marv returned.

“We’re going to do a quick check, your father hasn’t been gone near long enough for a traditional file, but this blood is scary, so we’re going to head out to where he’d been with the machine, uh Josie, and look. Maybe it was already following a program when it came back. It could do that, right?”

Marv lowered his eyes and then nodded.

Within two hours of starting, long before the iPad took a full charge, they’d found the tattered Stetson, a belt buckle, a severed hand, and the back half of Marvin Wade’s skull. A raven had picked it mostly clean, flying away as the two-man search party approached. Morning called it in and by evening, with all the farmhands’ help, they’d gathered and bagged most of Marvin Wade, minus about seventy pounds of gooey bits and blood lost to the dry earth.

“I’ll come back first thing tomorrow and we can figure out that iPad, got it? Don’t so much as boot it up between now and then,” Morning said.

Marv fought the tears like a trooper, but the exhaustion and horror of the situation wore his will. A few errant drops slipped down his dusty cheeks as he nodded.

—

That night, Morning wondered about the distance and the trajectory, the machine had pointed the wrong way—according to what Marv thought—several kilometers from the house. It seemed almost impossible that someone hadn’t guided its path.

—

Marv awoke alone in the empty bungalow down a secondary lane from the farmhouse. Bright lights blared through his curtains. He heard the high-pitched cry of anguish and shot from his bed. It was hot and he’d slept in his Fruit of the Looms—tighty-whities. He drew back the curtain and stared at the teeth of the combine’s header; red freckles dull on the green paint and the yellow accents. “How the…? Josie.”

The headlights shifted shade and glowed a ravenous red. Revving a hideous metallic din, the header folded three rows of steel on steel and crashed through the cheap siding and the recycled two by fours of the home. Marv jumped back and ran through the hallway toward the kitchen, the machine eating the place like a polyphagic kid with a bowl of Chunky Monkey.

Echoing the calls of his father, Marv pleaded with the screaming machine. He reached the door that opened into the backyard just in time to see the roof cave from the outside. Behind the engine’s scream, a laugh called out playfully, stalling Marv.

“Have you seen a lamb ‘round here? I asked your daddy, but he didn’t see one. I bet you did!”

“No, no!” Marv shook his head as he ran, glad the specs on the SDS880 stated it could move at a maximum speed of twenty KPH, giving him sufficient seconds to run to the hand me down Dodge. He broke and listened to the gravel crunch and the tumbling bric-a-brac of his home. The door swung and he glanced sideways. Doing okay.

The truck’s engine sounded just barely over the encroaching terror behind him. He floored the accelerator; gravel sprayed and clinked off the wall of steel coming to chase him but didn’t slow it. Marv pulled away, the speedometer reaching fifty, sixty, eighty, one hundred, one-thirty. The lights of the possessed machine shrank, until they didn’t and then surged forward, tinting the black landscape a silky scarlet.

“Impossible!”

The lights grew larger and larger. The truck found one-fifty, the little RPM line dancing in the red-zone. Josie gathered more and more speed, almost biting onto his tailgate with horrid metallic chomps.

Once possible, Marv swung out onto the road, two wheels rising from the gravel, but the wide truck held grip long enough to leave the combine pointed in the wrong direction. Behind the truck, enormous wheels attempted the turn, although wider and heavier, it skipped and tipped, rolling over six times into the field on the far side of the road. Marv slammed his breaks and exhaled. The lights died and Marv turned back and pointed a spotlight on the roof of his truck at the wreckage. It was impossible. He felt for a cellphone in a pocket and recalled his near nakedness.

He drove back up the lane, mindlessly humming along with the radio—Dwight Yoakam, made him think of his father. He switched it off and carried on at an even forty kilometers an hour.

A rumble followed him and he worried that he’d pushed the truck too hard during the chase. The rumble grew louder. Marv looked to the blackness in his rearview mirror, shook his head and mentally added Jim’s Automotive in Nelcarres to his list of calls. The first, of course, would be to the police, then everything surrounding his father’s funeral, and, if he had the energy left, Jim’s Automotive. The roar had suddenly become deafening and Marv looked back over his shoulder, it was nothing but a dark night’s blackness until, once again, it wasn’t. Lights blinked and filled the truck’s cab. Marv punched the pedal with his toes.

“You made me crash, bad boy!” the girlish voice pouted in a boom.

He whispered, “Josie.”

The truck’s speed rose, too late. Mechanical laughter filled the night, screaming and cheering in a horrid chorus while the rows of teeth ate the truck, showering steel up the laneway as it drove.

Marv didn’t beg, didn’t move, accepted the impossible, accepted his demise. Farm accidents happened all the time.

—

Morning noticed the rubber streaks where the gravel met aged and paled asphalt when he turned into the Wades’ laneway. He’d called Marv, but Marv hadn’t answered, went straight to voicemail. He came upon a mess of steel, rubber, and skin, and went no further. An eyeball perched on a leaf at the edge of the lane, next to it were three fingers attached to a nub, and a pair of white underwear stained yellow and speckled with red dots.

His radio buzzed and Clara at dispatch relayed a call. “Uh, Morning, got a call. A Deere running wild. Chewed up a barn south of town.”

Morning shook his head and hit the button. “How’d a deer—?”

“A John Deere, a combine. Mike White says it’s like it’s got a mind of its own. Says he hid in the storm cellar; thing took out everything. Like a wild party all the noise it made, so he said. Sounds drunk—What in the sweet applesauce?” Clara’s voice rose as she concluded.

“What now?”

“Seabiscuits! Get back here, there’s some wise guy rolling right at us in his combine, probably the same—How in the heck? No, no!”

The line died and Morning tried two times before buzzing back out the lane. Certain some lunatic was out running folks down with Marvin Wade’s combine.

“Josie,” he said, breathless.

It took fifteen minutes to get back to Melfort. The place was a smoky wasteland, flames licked from building to rubble and back again, both sides of the street. The combine crawled around a corner, the cries and laughter rattled about Morning’s head like a colicky baby on an airplane.

He rolled nearer, seeing people hiding down alleyways, seeing people that had attempted and failed to hide, mounds and puddles of death all over. Morning parked and opened the door, lifted the dash microphone to his lips, hit the megaphone button. “You, come down out of there.”

A green mass wheeled toward him, the cab was empty, the steering wheel was turning on its own. It wasn’t a surprise, the thing worked on GPS signal. Some lunatic controlled it from afar. Morning scanned the bulky green combine and settled that the black box on the roof was the GPS locater. He aimed and fired. Missed. Shot again and again until the little box shattered and the pieces fell to the ground. The engine sputtered and the motions ceased.

People jumped out from hiding, patting Morning on the back, hailing him a hero, and only seconds after the action calmed. Right then, he thought maybe Saskatchewan wasn’t so bad after all. Lost in the loving bask of cowboy hats and checkered shirts, but only momentarily, Morning called out to a group of men and women inspecting the combine. “Don’t go over there, stay away. We still have to find the culprit.” The man fought a smile.

“Tank’s blown right off, boy howdy,” a man in overalls said.

“Not a drop in’er, amazing,” a woman added, also in overalls.

“What do you mean?” Morning drew closer.

“Tank, no diesel, no nothing, bore right through, dry as the gull dorn Sahara,” the man said.

The group all turned their attentions to Morning, as if he might have a clue. He didn’t and returned a confused gaze.

A loud voice emanated from the machine. The windows not already shattered fell to pieces. A chorus of laughter like that of a TV sitcom studio audience filled the air. Josie roared back to life, the folding header shot out and gathered bodies within reach, chewing through flesh, bone, coverall, flannel, felt, denim, fingernails, and boot leather without trouble. Gore sprayed from the spout into the bin. The guard edge of the header arm struck Morning, knocking him aside and unconscious.

—

Smoke rose into the sky, black and dirty: the first thing Morning saw when he awoke. The second thing: the mess that used to be Melfort. The entire town had been eaten alive by Josie.

He was sore but got to his feet. Head throbbing, legs weak, he staggered to his cruiser, one of only a handful of vehicles still on its wheels. He tried the radio, got nothing. He climbed inside, started the engine, and followed the damage.

Josie had cleared a path south out of Melfort. Morning chased after the destruction. It swooped east for a bit and then west for a piece, but there was no sign of Josie. He wondered what he’d do when he finally caught up to the machine, decided he’d worry about that when the time came. Worry about that when the girlish laughter in the air died and he could think things through without seeing flashes of green, yellow, and red from the corners of his eyes every time he blinked.

XX