Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (33 page)

Vijay ignored the cat and nodded at Jack. Then his gaze rested for a moment on Melissa. The other harvesters stared at her, too, before they were ushered into the lab. Four Marines stood guard inside the room, with four more outside.

“They scare me,” Melissa whispered as the door hissed shut.

“They’re the ones who should be scared,” Jack told her.
 

“Scared of what?”

“Of you, kid.”
 

She wasn’t convinced. “If you say so.”

Jack could hear Naomi’s voice through the door.While she was speaking in English, he barely had a clue what she was talking about. Centrifuges, electrophoresis and FISH machines, homogenizators, incubators. The words reached his ears and bounced right off his tired brain.
 

“When was the last time you slept, Jack?”

He rubbed his eyes and looked at Terje. “Damned if I know. Probably about the last time you did. Last year, maybe?”

“Can we get Koshka?”

They both looked down at Melissa, who was a bit deflated now that she didn’t have Alexander to care for.

“She’s been out in the LAV alone since we got here.”

As if reading her thoughts, Alexander whined, and after a last long growl at the harvesters in the room with Naomi, tugged on his leash, pointing toward the stairs.
 

“Okay, Romeo,” Jack said with a last look at the lab door, “let’s go get your girlfriend.”

“He probably just has to pee,” Melissa said.

“Or eat, more likely. He hasn’t had anything in a while. Terje, would you mind keeping an eye on things here until we get back?”

“Sure.” He winked at Melissa as she and Jack, led by the limping Alexander, headed toward the stairs.

“Why can’t we use the elevator?” She asked.

“Their motors use a lot of power,” Jack answered as he scooped up Alexander to carry him. “The main thing is that you don’t want to get stuck in an elevator if something happens to the generator and we lose power.”

She took hold of his wrist, and he could see the spark of fear in her eyes. “That won’t happen, will it?”
 

“I don’t think so. But we don’t want to take any chances, right?”

“I guess so.”

Jack smiled. “It’s a shame, though. Those elevators are really cool.”

 
The elevators, one on either side of the open atrium, were built like glass cylinders. But the designers of this building had gone one step further: the floors of the elevators were clear, too.
 

Jack opened the front door and they stepped out into the night. Unlike when they arrived and the night was preternaturally quiet, now they could hear the muted sounds of human activity all around them against the background hum of the generator. The entry steps to the lab building were bathed in light, which both soothed and worried Jack.
 

Carl stood outside the main entry with Lowmack, who had the rest of his Marines hard at work setting up the defenses.
 

“Where are Renee and Howard?” Jack asked as Alexander rubbed up against Carl’s leg.
 

Carl squatted down to scratch the cat under the chin. “They’re down in the basement, trying to get the computers back online.” As he stood back up, Alexander head-butted Carl’s leg. Looking down at him, Carl shook his head. “Sorry, buddy. I’m all out of sardines.”

They’re down in the basement
. Those words sent a sliver of ice sliding down Jack’s spine. The crime scene photographs of Sheldon Crane’s murder flashed through his mind. Sheldon had been Jack’s best friend and a fellow FBI agent, and a harvester had vivisected him in one of the basement service tunnels beneath this very building, looking for the corn samples Sheldon had stolen from the lab.
 

Melissa took Jack’s hand in hers. “Are you okay?”

“Shake it off, Dawson,” Carl said. “We’ve got enough trouble without you worrying about ghosts.”

“I’m fine.” Jack said the words, but they didn’t echo his feelings. “Are they safe down there?”

“My men are blocking off the access tunnels,” Lowmack told him. “The adult harvesters won’t be able to wander in without battering through steel and setting off some fireworks, but any larvae could still be a problem.”

“What about the ground-level perimeter?”

“We’re stringing up a fence of triple concertina and claymores around this building and the physical plant, and we’re setting some Claymore mines along choke points the things would have to take to reach us. I’ve also got observer teams up on the roofs who can warn us if anyone…or anything…is heading our way.”

“What about the ones that look like us?” Melissa asked.

“Our night sights can tell the difference,” Lowmack told her with a smile. Turning back to Jack, he said, “The LAVs and armed Humvees are our main defense. If we get mobbed by so many that the vehicles are overrun…” He shrugged.

Frowning, Carl said, “I can’t escape the feeling that the bigger threat is from those seven things up there working with Naomi.”

Jack glanced through the glass front of the building to the fourth floor mezzanine. “What do you mean?”

Carl squinted at Jack. “Who’s to say those things aren’t cooking up something to help finish what their dead creators started? What if they’re sticking a little extra something into that virus to help kill us off?”

“Naomi would know.”

Carl looked away, a hard expression on his face. “Naomi’s the smartest person I’ve ever known, Dawson, and I don’t claim to be a hundredth as bright as she is. But can a single human, even one as smart as her, really know everything that’s going on with this stuff? She said it herself: the harvesters are naturals at all this genetic jazz, like some sort of monstrous idiot savants, except without the idiot part. There’s something deeper going on here. I can feel it twisting in my gut.”

“Even if that’s true,” Jack said, “what can we do about it? Naomi said she needs the harvesters. We don’t have a choice.”

“I know, and I hate it. I’m tired of feeling helpless. We’ve been reeling backward since day one. Just once,
just once
, I’d like to have the initiative. Shit.” Carl blew out a breath and stared off into the darkness.

Changing the subject, Jack said, “Any word yet from Boisson and Ferris?”

Carl shook his head. “Not a peep. I didn’t really expect them to have found Air Force One waiting for us up there, but I told Boisson I wanted hourly sit reps. It’s not like her to not call in, and she hasn’t answered my radio calls.”

Jack looked to the north. The airport was about ten miles in that direction. Ten miles of exactly what, only Boisson, Ferris, and the agents with them could know.
 

“I should have sent them in one of the LAVs,” Jack said quietly.

“Don’t second guess yourself. We need the LAVs here. As much as it would hurt us, in the great scheme of things we can afford to lose Boisson and Ferris. We can afford to lose nearly anyone and anything except this.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the building behind them.

Melissa tugged on Jack’s sleeve. “Can we get Koshka now?”

“Sure, hon,” he said, happy for the distraction.

Granting Alexander a moment of privacy on a patch of grass along the way to do his business, they headed for Lowmack’s LAV, which was parked in front of the building, facing toward the student union and the main parking lot.
 

The rear doors were open, and Melissa hopped in, then stopped, dead still, staring at the seat where she’d left Naomi’s cat.

Jack leaned in and looked. “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

Koshka was gone.

WE NEED THIS PLANE

The ten miles from the LRU campus reminded Ferris of all the other war zones he’d seen in his life. The bodies, burned out cars and houses, the cries and pleas for help from terrified civilians were all too familiar. It was all the same, except that it was in his own country rather than somewhere else.
 

Hundreds of civilians flocked toward the Humvee as Ferris wove through the wrecks on the roads, which this close to Lincoln included the back country roads they’d been on since splitting from the convoy before it crossed I-80. The agent manning the vehicle’s heavy machine gun had to shoot over the heads of the refugees now and again to keep them at a distance.

Then came the curses and ugly gestures, the screams of impotent rage that faded into the silence of the damned.
 

He felt like the world’s biggest pile of dog shit.

“Fuck,” he cursed, pouring every ounce of venom he could into the word, wishing he could turn it on the harvesters and fry the bastards with it.

“I hear you,” Boisson said softly. She tore her eyes away from the scene outside to check the map display. “Take a right when we get to West Mathis Street. That should take us right to the western apron, about a klick and a half ahead.”
 

“Got it.”
 

As they neared the airport, the refugees thinned out and disappeared.
 

“You’d think people would be going to the airport,” Ferris mused.

Boisson shrugged. “Maybe they know something we don’t.”

“Shit!” He spun the wheel to the left to steer the Humvee clear of a suspicious looking patch on the road. He’d seen enough of the damn larvae to be able to spot them on a smooth road surface once they were close enough. Otherwise, they would have run out of tires about a mile after they’d split off from the convoy.

A few moments later, they found themselves in a parking lot, facing the fence that bounded the old apron for what had once been Lincoln Air Force Base. One of the agents hopped out with a pair of bolt cutters and made short work of the lock on gate 44.
 

Once the agent was back in the Humvee, Ferris headed out onto the ramp that joined the apron with Runway 36. Once he reached the runway, he turned right and sped south. Nearly a thousand meters later, he turned again, taking them east on another ramp. “We’ll see if the Army National Guard guys are home first.”

They drove across to the Army facilities, which included a landing area that could take nearly three dozen helicopters. Behind that was a large hangar and various other buildings housing the Nebraska Army National Guard aviation battalion garrisoned there.
 

“This doesn’t look so good,” Boisson said.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Ferris whispered as he brought the Humvee to a stop.
 

A pitched battle had been fought here, and lost by the human defenders. The metal carcasses of three helicopters lay on the apron, their fuselages now little more than ash silhouettes on the concrete, with the more resilient bits of machinery laying in a heap on top. The fence line that surrounded the buildings had been reinforced with concertina wire, but it was crushed and torn in half a dozen places. Overturned and burned out Humvees, some with their dead gunners still clinging to the weapons mounted on top, encircled the buildings.
 

Harvester corpses were stacked in enormous piles on either side of the breaches in the fence line, with hundreds, maybe thousands, in the open kill zones around the compound, and more inside. Many had been burned to ash, but just as many more weren’t. Hundreds of dead soldiers also lay inside the fence line, many of them entwined with dead harvesters. Ferris could smell the scent of war in the smoke that wafted from the vehicles and buildings and the scorched marks on the ground where harvesters had been incinerated.
 

“Custer’s last stand,” he whispered. As he watched, the nearest pile of harvester bodies shifted. Larvae, large and small, were at their devil’s work, eating their dead parents. “God, those things make me sick.”
 

Boisson turned to him. “Should we check out the buildings here?”

He shook his head. “There’s no point. We’re looking for something that flies, and their choppers are all toast.” He looked at the wrecks. “We really could’ve used one of those.”

He heard the other agents breathe a quiet sigh of relief as Boisson said, “I’m not going to complain. We’d need steel galoshes to get through all those damned larvae.”
 

“Yeah. Well, let’s see if the Air Force can do us any better.” Ferris swung the Humvee around and turned north on the ramp that led to the Nebraska Air National Guard’s 155
^th
Air Refueling Wing’s facility.
 

The 155
^th
’s apron had room for half a dozen KC-135 tanker aircraft. The facility boasted a huge hangar that could hold one of the four-engine jets, plus a smaller one that could partially accommodate one of the planes.
 

Both hangars were charred wrecks. The smoking remains of a KC-135 lay in the large hangar.
 

“Scratch that one,” Ferris said as he headed toward another of the big planes parked on the apron. While the apron could hold six planes wingtip to wingtip, only one was still here, parked right in the middle.
 

“It looks intact,” Boisson said, a note of hope creeping into her voice.

“Look again.” Ferris didn’t mean to snap the words, but he couldn’t help it. “The fucking tires are gone.” He hammered a fist against the steering wheel in frustration.
 

Every one of the plane’s tires was gone, and it now sat on the runway on the metal rims. Huge pools of hydraulic fluid and fuel had spilled under the plane, and around the edges of the pools were larvae as small as Ferris’s fist up to the size of a horse.
 

“Christ,” he said, “they’re drinking the fuel!”

Boisson turned to him. “It’s carbon based, right?”

“Yeah. God.”
 

As he left the marooned KC-135 behind, he said, “I guess we’ll have to try the commercial terminal. If we don’t find something there, maybe a smaller airliner, I think we’re going to be screwed. The best we’ll find otherwise is a corporate jet. We won’t be able to take many people anywhere in one of those.”

He headed back out onto the taxiway that led north across the front of the 155
^th
Refueling Wing’s operations area, planning to follow it up and around to where the passenger terminal was. He kept his eyes on where he was going to keep from running over any larvae.