Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (25 page)

“It is all right, Naomi,” the Vijay-thing said. “Go. We will…”

It broke off at the sound of gunfire coming from one of the levels above, followed by screams.
 

“Come on!” Kiran shouted.

With a look of helpless frustration at Vijay, Naomi stood up and ushered the others toward the door.
 

The Vijay-thing began to lead the other harvesters to the rear of the lab where their cells were.

“We’ll be back as soon as we can!” Naomi said.

It smiled. “We are not going anywhere.”

When the humans were clustered near the door, Kiran hit the button to cycle it open, keeping an eye on the harvesters to make sure they didn’t try to escape. Naomi brought up the rear. Once she was through, Kiran hit the button to close it.

“Come,” he said, leading them out of the room and into the main corridor, which was now swarming with panicked scientists and technicians from the other labs on this level. “Clear the way!”

The two Marines bulled their way through the men and women who were waiting for the elevator.

“The elevator locks on the ground floor in case of any alarm! Head for the stairwell!”
 

She heard Kiran curse as everyone ran to join the crush of people already trying to get through the door to the stairs. Ignoring their angry shouts, he and the Marines pushed and shoved people out of the way, shepherding her to the stairs.

They were halfway up to the first basement level when a loud boom echoed from somewhere above. Then someone cut loose with an automatic weapon inside the stairwell, and everyone began to stampede back down toward the second basement level.
 

Kiran threw Naomi into the corner of the mid-level landing and shielded her with his body as the mob of panicked people stampeded past them.

A grenade exploded two landings up. She had been looking up through the narrow gap in the switchback of the stairs when it went off. Blood and small gobbets of flesh spattered across her face and upper body. She screamed as another grenade went off, closer this time, sending more bits of gore raining down on her and the others. Her ears felt as if someone had stuck an ice pick through them as the shockwave smashed into her.

Then she was moving again, back down the stairs, Kiran’s hand holding her upper arm in a steel grip. She was blinking her eyes, trying to clear them of the blinding after-image from the flash of the first grenade, and was just getting her vision back when they burst through the door to the basement level from which they’d come. The corridor was filled with screaming, blood-soaked refugees.
 

“Hide!” Naomi was still partially deaf from the grenades, and Kiran’s bellow sounded as if he were underwater at the far end of an olympic swimming pool. “Get away! They’re coming!”

He dragged her back toward the fortified lab. Only one of the Marines was still with them, blood dripping from a long, ugly gash in the triceps muscle of his left arm. Kiran, too, was wounded, a piece of shrapnel having sliced through the back of his scalp, leaving a trail of blood running down his neck, and his back was covered in crimson.

None of the other members of her team were in sight.
 

“Where are the others?” She shouted.

Kiran didn’t answer.
 

“Kiran, where are they?”

He fixed her for just a moment with his dark eyes. “Keep moving!”
 

“Hold here,” Kiran told the Marine as they entered the vestibule area off the main corridor.
 

Following Kiran to the armor glass door, she saw that the seven harvesters hadn’t returned to their cells.
 

He turned to Naomi. “If I open this door, there’s a good chance these things will kill you.”

“But if you don’t,” she said, “I’ll probably die anyway. But they could also protect me.”

He nodded, and she knew it was a choice she had to make. “Open it.”

Pushing the intercom button, Kiran said to the harvesters, “Stand back away from the door.”

They did, quickly moving toward the back of the lab.

Kiran opened the door and waited for Naomi to go through.

“You two should come with me,” she said.

He looked over his shoulder at the sound of gunfire and screams from down the corridor. “I can’t.” He drew his pistol, a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, and handed it to her. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

Then he pushed her inside and closed the door.
 

“Good luck,” she whispered as Kiran led the remaining Marine back out into the corridor.

The thing that looked like Vijay Chidambaram came to stand beside her, an inscrutable expression on its face.

***

Melissa had just returned to her room, lugging a litter box from downstairs for Alexander. Hathcock had refused to carry it, and she would have thought him a lazy jerk if she hadn’t taken such a liking to him. On the other hand, he was a sniper, after all. She wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, other than that he could put a bullet through a squirrel’s eyeball at a thousand yards (or something like that) while flying in a helicopter, but she knew that he was a very dangerous man. It wasn’t just that Naomi had told him he was one of their best, or that he was dressed up like some action movie commando. It was something about him that she couldn’t put her finger on. He just oozed dangerousness out of his pores. She wished she would have had him with her at school. None of the other kids would have made fun of her then, calling her freak or Typhoid Mary, or her personal favorite, The Thing. One glance from Hathcock, even without the two tons of weapons he carried around, would have sent them running.

Most of them were probably dead now. That made her sad, even though they had treated her like crap. Nobody deserved what the harvesters did to people.

Shoving that melancholy thought aside, she liked having Hathcock around as her own personal gangster muscle, even if he was Mr. I Have To Keep My Hands Free So You’ll Have To Carry That Yourself.

She was trying to figure out a way to make that into some sort of cool acronym when a huge boom sounded outside, so loud that it hurt her ears. The walls shook, and some of the pictures she’d cut out and taped up on the wall flew off. Alexander let out a startled cry from his bed, which was right next to hers.

Just as she was opening her mouth to ask Hathcock what happened, she was slammed to the floor, a huge weight on top of her.
 

It took her a moment to realize that it was Hathcock.

“Get off me, you perv!” She wrestled against his bulk, but it was like an ant trying to free itself from an elephant.

Then she heard a weird ripping sound, like someone took the sound of a zipper being opened really fast and dropped the pitch a couple octaves. Their music teacher had done that once with her voice using an electronic gadget, and had the class in stitches while she talked like Darth Vader.
 

The ripping came and went, like someone was flipping a switch, and she could hear the sound of a helicopter outside.
 

“Shit,” Hathcock cursed.
 

Melissa thought he was freeing her when he got to his knees, but she was wrong. He shoved her toward the end of the bed, grabbed Alexander by the bandages on the scruff of his neck, eliciting a ferocious hiss from the wounded beast, then dove to the floor beside her to spoon his body against her back while tucking the madly squirming cat into her arms.

She cursed as Alexander raked her arms with his claws and was about to shove him away when the ripping sound came again and the wall facing the helipad area disintegrated in a shower of splinters and drywall. Fiery red streaks passed over her head, inches away, and went right through the opposite wall, tearing the place apart. Her computer exploded into shards of plastic and the door to the hallway was blown away. Her nose was filled with the reek of smoldering metal, wood, and plastic, along with a chemical stink that she recognized as gunpowder.

Behind her, Hathcock grunted and his body was slammed against hers like someone had hit him in the back with a hammer.
 

The ripping sound went on, and she could hear bullets chewing through more of the building before the weapon moved on to destroy the personnel building next door that was still under construction.
 

At last, it fell silent. The only thing she could hear now was the
whump
of the rotor blades of the helicopter outside and screams. There were lots of screams.

Alexander tore out of her grip and hid under the mound of stuffing that was all that remained of her bed.

“Hathcock?”
 

He groaned.

“Craig? Are you okay?” She rolled over to look at Hathcock. “Craig!”

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Help me up.”

She grabbed one of his arms and pulled, lifting him to a kneeling position. The floor beneath him was covered in blood. “Oh, God,” she said, “you’re hurt!”

Right below them, where the entry doors were, they heard a crash, shouts, then gunfire.
 

“Here, take this,” Hathcock gasped, pulling a small pistol from a pouch on the side of his combat harness and handing it to her.

She held it as if it were a steaming turd. “I’ve…I’ve never fired a gun!”

“It’s easy, kid. Just point and shoot.”

“Okay, but this thing’s a toy. It might stop a squirrel.”

He managed a grin. “It has magic bullets. If one hits their skin, you’ll get a nice fireworks show. Piece of advice: keep shooting until you’re sure the target’s dead.” He took a deep breath, wincing at the pain. “Now get your ass in the bathroom. Shoot anything that comes through there.”

Using his shotgun, muzzle down, as a crutch, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered to the doorway.
 

“Hathcock,” she pleaded, “stay here! Don’t go!”

“Sorry, kid, but I need a better line of sight…to the stairs. Otherwise they’ll just gang up on us here and we won’t stand a chance.” He looked at her, and it was hard for her to hold back the tears. “You’ll be fine.”

Then he was gone.

She knelt in the bathroom, her eyes fixed on the empty doorway that led to the hall, the gun locked tight in her trembling hands.
 

From somewhere under the bed, she could hear Alexander growl before another massive explosion outside drove her to the floor.

***

“God, I could use a stiff drink.”

Renee yawned as she watched Carl stand up from behind his desk and stretch. “I could use a dozen.”

“Count me in,” Howard added as he rubbed his eyes.

Carl tossed the electronic tablet he’d been clutching onto his desk.
More reports, more bad news
, he thought. This little meeting had been about trying to keep the other SEAL labs supplied as the road and rail networks continued to fray. They were having to shift nearly everything to airlifts, but that was putting even more strain on the looming fuel shortage. Oil refineries had been given a higher priority for security than even nuclear plants, because once the fuel flow, especially diesel and jet fuel, stopped, they’d be done. Finished. And it wasn’t just for running vehicles and airplanes, it was for throwing up fiery walls to stop the harvesters. That simple expedient, above all others, seemed to work. It had worked in Chicago when the safe zone had been overrun, and had been used in several other places, as well.
 

The only downside was that it only worked as long as you had fuel to keep the fire burning. Once it went out…

All of the SEAL facilities were at one hundred percent for their fuel reserves and were being continually topped off, but it was getting harder to get the tanker trucks through from the distribution centers and rail lines. As for the rest of the country, that was someone else’s problem.

“I think I’ll go down and see how Naomi is making out with her pets,” Carl said.
 

Renee saw something moving through the window behind him, and the sound of the helicopter that had been coming in to land got louder. A lot louder. The Black Hawk looked like it was about to fly right through the window.

“Carl, look out!”

Carl turned to look out the window, then dove across the desk and rolled to the floor. Grabbing her in his arms, he yanked her down beside him as Howard pitched forward out of his chair.
 

The window shattered, blasting fragments across the room from an explosion outside. Then a 7.62mm minigun opened fire.

The base alarm began to blare.

Renee raised her head up and he shoved it back down to the floor. “Are you nuts?”

She struggled to get out from under him, to no avail. “Dammit, what’s happening?”

“What do you think? We’re under attack!”

The building shuddered as the bullets from the minigun hammered into the concrete, but the lab was made of stern stuff and none penetrated inside other than the ones that blasted through the window.
 

But nothing in the compound short of the M1 tanks could stand up under a concentrated burst from the weapon, and Carl heard the main entry doors on the ground floor let go. Then the weapon moved on as the sound of the helicopter changed, moving away to strafe the rest of the compound.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here! Crawl to the doorway and get down the hall!”

Renee did as he said, and Carl ushered Howard out before he followed himself, stopping only long enough to grab one of the AA-12 shotguns from the rack just inside the office door.
 

“Give me one of those.”

Carl turned to look at Howard, a frown on his face.

“Come on! Just because I’m rich doesn’t mean I’m helpless. I’ve shot skeet every other weekend for the last thirty years. Give me the damn thing!”

With a shrug, Carl grabbed a second weapon and handed it to him, then the three of them moved out into the hallway.

***

FBI Special Agent Angie Boisson’s eyes flew wide when she saw the flash and smoke of an explosion near the entrance to the lab building of SEAL-2. Her hands instinctively reached for her assault rifle.