Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (16 page)

The truck bounced across another road before sailing into the next section of burial plots. Holding the accelerator to the floor, Jack drove through row after row of low-set headstones that ripped and tore at the truck’s suspension.
 

Their luck ran out as the truck’s rear axle caught on a headstone and tore the entire rear end out. The impact deployed the airbags. In the footwell on the passenger side, Alexander cried out, more in fear than pain.
 

“Dammit!” Jack tried to shake his head clear as the air bag deflated. “Are you two okay?”

“
Ja
,” Terje said.

“I think so,” Melissa answered.

Alexander whimpered.

“Terje, take her. I’ll get Alexander.” The Black Hawk was on the ground, only a hundred and fifty feet away.
 

Taking Melissa’s hand, Terje helped her out of the truck as Jack picked up Alexander, holding him close against his combat vest. He saw that Hathcock had positioned the Humvee just northwest of where the Black Hawk had set down, putting the vehicle between the helicopter and the mass of civilians running down the road toward them. The sniper was still on the vehicle’s machine gun, while the other three men were spread out, weapons leveled in the direction of the civilians.

“Oh, no,” Jack moaned. “Hurry!”

As they ran across the cleared landing zone, the Apaches fired rockets that exploded on the far side of the lake they had just passed. The 30mm guns chattered, blasting dark shadows that moved beneath the trees behind them.

He tried to key his radio, but it was impossible while holding the squirming cat. Alexander settled the matter by biting Jack’s hand. “You little shit!” Jack dumped the cat to the ground and held onto his leash. He keyed the radio again, hating himself for the words he had to say. “Hathcock! Do not let those civilians get past you! Scare them off if you can, shoot them if you have to. Understood?”

“Roger.” A heartbeat later, Hathcock raised the muzzle of the machine gun slightly and fired off a few warning shots. The stampede faltered for a moment, until some among the crowd saw the harvesters dashing through the cemetery from the west. Hundreds, then thousands, of mouths gave voice to screams of terror, and the crowd lunged toward the only way out: the Black Hawk.

“God, no,” Jack whispered as the panic-stricken people charged Hathcock and his men while he and Terje ran toward the helicopter, Melissa between them. Alexander, who Jack expected to have to haul along by his leash and harness, was in the lead, straining so hard that the leash was digging into Jack’s wrist. “Please, no!”

He cringed as the big machine gun opened fire, the index finger-sized bullets blasting through the helpless people at the front of the crowd. The M4 rifles of the other three soldiers also opened up.

It made no difference. When confronted with death by gunfire or death by harvester, the crowd instinctively headed toward the guns. In a heartbeat they’d swept past the Humvee, and Hathcock ceased fire. The three men he’d positioned in a defensive arc to protect the helicopter went down, trampled to death by the crowd.
 

The Black Hawk pilot gave Jack a frightened look before he hauled up on the collective, trying to get the helicopter into the air.
 

It was too late. The leading wave of the crowd reached the helicopter before the wheels left the ground, and people punched, kicked, and tore at one another to get aboard. The crew chief thrown to the ground, where he disappeared under the onslaught.

The helicopter’s engine screamed as the pilot fed full power to the collective, and the Black Hawk staggered into the air. The cabin was packed with people, with some hanging out the doors and more clinging to the landing gear. A few were even holding on to the rear stabilizer.
 

Using the distraction, Hathcock, who had somehow survived the mob, was bulling his way through the crowd in the Humvee, making his way toward them as the Black Hawk see-sawed in the air. Some civilians tried to jump into the vehicle, and Jack winced as Hathcock shot them with his pistol. The limp bodies fell back into the crowd, which pulled away from him.

“Don’t look,” Terje told Melissa, holding her to him and covering her eyes as the Black Hawk’s tail sank back toward the ground. A cloud of red spray went up as the tail rotor swept through half a dozen people just before it came apart, killing even more. Without the tail rotor to keep the helicopter’s torque under control, the Black Hawk began to spin, tilting to one side as it went down right into the middle of the crowd.

Jack closed his eyes, shutting away the horror as the rotor blades butchered dozens of people before the helicopter hit the ground. The blades splintered and went flying, killing and maiming as the Black Hawk flipped on its side and came to a shuddering stop. A chunk of the titanium spar from one of the rotor blades scythed through the engine compartment of the Humvee, and Hathcock’s hands flew up to protect his face as the hood and windshield were torn away. The vehicle rolled to a dead stop, and Hathcock, miraculously still alive and rifle in hand, staggered out, blood covering the left side of his face.

“Come on!” Jack grabbed him by the arm as they ran by. “Run like hell!” Keying his mic again, Jack called the lead Apache. “Foxtrot Romeo One Eight, this is Alpha Yankee Nine Seven. We’re on the ground just to the south of where the Black Hawk went down, heading east. Do you have us in sight?”

“Negative, Alpha Yankee Nine Seven. Too many people are down there. I can’t see you in that mob, over.”

“Understood. Just keep the harvesters off our backs as long as you can, and see if you can get us an evac!”

“Wilco, but be advised that your best egress may be to keep heading east toward Lake Michigan. It’s only a mile to the boats.”

“That’s a long goddamn mile when you’re trying to outrun harvesters,” Jack panted, elbowing someone out of the way before they could step on Alexander, who was still straining at his leash. “Alpha Yankee Nine Seven, out.” Taking up the slack in the leash, Jack said, “Come here, you stupid cat!”

As Jack leaned down to pick up Alexander, unsnapping the leash from his harness before it became tangled and could strangle him, someone from the crowd crashed into Jack from behind, sending him tumbling to the ground.
 

He was spitting out grass when Hathcock yanked him to his feet and got him moving before they were separated from Terje and Melissa.

Only then did Jack realize that the cat’s harness had slipped from his hands.
 

Alexander was gone.

ONE WAY FORWARD

Naomi stared at the paper Kiran had given her, on which the symbols for the receptors on harvester cells had been drawn. Trying to force down her disappointment that the information wasn’t revelatory, she looked beyond what was written on the page. It told her the harvesters were serious. They could have given her a great deal less.
 

Did that mean she trusted them? No, not at all. But she believed, now more than ever, that their request for an alliance was genuine. They might be harboring some deeper motive in the long run, for the harvesters — at least the original generation — crafted their strategy on a time scale that could span decades or even centuries, but their immediate intent of joining forces with their human foes seemed genuine.
 

She looked up as Renee came over to her desk. Setting the paper down, she said, “Please tell me you have some good news.”
 

Renee only frowned. “I think you should see this, hon.”

Getting up from her chair and stretching the cramps out of her back, Naomi followed Renee to the workstation she used down in the lab. She had a desk here and one in the operations center, and split her time between the two. “What do you have?”

“I’ve been banging my head against the wall over the reproduction estimates,” Renee said after taking a gulp of coffee. “The figures from CIA and Homeland Security are just way too high. I put some of that down to people just overestimating the number of harvesters, because it’s hard to count the ugly buggers when they’re running around eating people. But looking at what’s been happening in the major cities here and cross-referencing what other countries are seeing…their estimates are right. Actually, they’re probably a bit low.”

“So what you’re telling me is that the harvesters are reproducing even faster than we thought?” Naomi shook her head in disbelief. “How is that possible?”

“I’ll show you. I should’ve caught this earlier, but this is the first time I’ve seen this on video, and I just about peed my pants. I never would have believed it, otherwise.”
 

She pressed a key and a video began to play on her monitor, full-screen. The camera view was from above a major intersection. The street in the scene was littered with human bodies and adult harvesters feeding.
 

“God,” Naomi whispered, putting a hand over her mouth.

“This was in upper Manhattan two days ago,” Renee told her, “right after one of the defensive lines collapsed. Now watch what happens.”

The creatures continued to feast for a few moments. Then, in unison, they looked at something off-screen to the right and dashed away in the opposite direction.

“What…”

“Shh!” Renee pointed. “Watch!”

The view showed nothing but the corpses for a moment, then something heaved into the frame from the right.
 

An enormous larvae the size of a garbage truck oozed along the street, absorbing the corpses as it went.
 

“My God,” Naomi said, “that’s huge! It’s a dozen times larger than the ones I saw in Los Angeles.”

“Don’t blink,” Renee whispered. “This happens so damn fast…”

Just as it reached the center of the camera’s view, the giant larva disintegrated, shattered. In the blink of an eye it went from one gigantic blob of malleable tissue into thousands, each of which was no larger than Naomi’s fist, that cascaded to the street like raindrops.

Renee played that part back again, then turned to Naomi. “We assumed that these big ones just crapped out all the stuff they didn’t need and made a single harvester, because we never had reason or evidence to assume they did otherwise. Some people have speculated that they might form huge adults, but that hasn’t panned out. But this,” she hooked a thumb at the screen, “is what’s really happening. How the hell can they do that? You’d think all the little ones would just stick together again.”

“I don’t know,” Naomi whispered as the larvae separated and began to make their own separate ways from the epicenter of the original mass. “Once the larva reaches that threshold, a gene sequence must kick in to make it fission into smaller ones. We’ve seen that separate larvae don’t tend to merge together, and also that a single larvae can be forced apart into multiple viable organisms, although I can’t understand why they don’t just reform. This is…incredible.”

“Well, now we know why we’re seeing so many more adults than we thought there should be. I don’t think I can even model their propagation now.”

Naomi swallowed. “I’d better go brief Carl and Howard.”

***

“Oh, my God.” Carl’s whisper fell into the silence of the conference room as he and Howard watched the video Renee had shown to Naomi. While he had always been fairly pale, having avoided the outdoors as much as possible beyond what was necessary to do his job, he now looked like he was chiseled from white marble.
 

“This is the first clear evidence we’ve seen,” Naomi told him, “but now that she knows what to look for, Renee’s found other videos and even some eyewitness accounts of this happening. No one believed them at first because we couldn’t corroborate the handful of statements we had and it was simply too fantastic. But we believe them now.”

“You know,” Howard added, tearing his eyes from the screen to look at Naomi, “I’m really starting to hate it when you call us in here.”

“What can we do about these things?” Carl asked.

“Nothing more than we’re doing already,” Naomi said. “They have the same strengths and vulnerabilities as any other larva, they’re just a lot bigger and fragment into hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.” She nodded to Renee, who hit a button to advance to a slide that showed the most recent graph of harvester reproduction versus human casualties. “The main thing is that it tosses these projections out the window.” Using a laser pointer to trace the line that represented harvester population, she said, “Making a very rough estimate of the casualties we’ve inflicted, this line should be tapering off, or even declining slightly. This is a global projection, and you can see here the huge hit the Russians inflicted with their nuclear strikes. But all the field reporting, even taken with a grain of salt, indicates that the harvesters are continuing to gain ground against us, especially in rural areas. Entire towns are just disappearing.”

“Why?” Carl rubbed his eyes. “Aren’t they still concentrating in the cities?”

“Oh, they’re still in the cities,” Howard interjected, “but think of how much food is in the countryside. And imagine these things loose in the Siberian forests. Or
our
forests, for that matter.”

“But wait a minute,” Carl said. “Why aren’t all the larvae getting huge? There’s no shortage of food for them out there. Hell, each of them could eat a house and there’d still be plenty more.”

“It could be another trait that does not appear in all of them, just like full sentience.”

Everyone turned to look at Kiran, who had up to now been sitting quietly along the wall behind Renee. Having had some food and rest, he looked more like the tough commando Jack had said he was. He was dressed in an American combat uniform and wore the rank of captain, and someone had sewn a cloth tape over his left breast pocket that said INDIAN ARMY, with CHIDAMBARAM in tightly squeezed letters over his right. “I’ve heard you talk of the first generation of harvesters almost as if they were gods. But they are not. As different as they are from us, they are creatures of flesh and blood; their only divinity is what we choose to see in them.” Gesturing to the screen, he went on, “I think the first generation harvesters, which you say could not reproduce and probably lived among us for centuries, could not possibly have intended what is happening now. You say that if we do not stop them, the only form of life on this planet beyond simple microbes will be harvesters, with the larvae feeding on the adults and the adults spawning more larvae, forever. Is this the work of highly intelligent, sentient beings that wanted to see their species thrive?” He shook his head. “I think not. You have put their genius in genetics upon a high pedestal, but they were fallible. Tell me they would have intentionally created such monstrosities as what we just saw. Tell me they intended to create a handful of sentient children whose fate was to be eaten by their non-sentient siblings or their mindless offspring. Tell me these things are what the first generation planned for this world, and I will not believe you.”