Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (44 page)

“Is it working?”

“Yeah, until the fire catches up to her and blows her sky-high. Where the hell do you find these people?”

That’s a good question
, Richards thought.
But thank God for them
. “How about fuel for the plane?”

“We’re working on it. I’ll let you know when we’re ready. What about Dawson?”
 

“Last I heard, he should be right behind us. Just get the bird ready and let me worry about that.”

“Roger. Ferris, out.” To the Marine driving the Humvee, he said, “Hang a right up here at Adams. That should take us to the airport.”

“Yes, sir,” the Marine said.
 

Richards reflected on their exodus from SEAL-2. The convoy had only encountered a few small groups of harvesters here and there, and the larvae were much easier to avoid in the daylight. The worst part of the trip had been finding a way across the rail line just south of I-80. An abandoned train had blocked their way for at least three quarters of a mile. Getting around it had diverted them even farther west, and they hadn’t been able to turn north again until they reached Northwest 84
^th
Street, which had taken them over the slaughterhouse of the interstate.

“Mr. Richards, this is LAV-1.”

“Richards here. Go ahead.”
 

“Sir, we’ve got movement in the tree line at your ten o’clock.”

Richards looked left, past the driver. Some tree tops poked up over the slope at his ten o’clock, but that was all he could see.
 

“What kind of movement?”

“Lots of it! Contact, ten o’clock! Harvesters in the open, moving out of the tree line. Thousands of the bastards!”

Richards saw them as the Humvee came over a small rise and the trees were fully exposed. A horde of the creatures was streaming toward them across the furrowed ground, and would cut off the convoy before the next turn. “All units, all units! Get off the road and head northeast across the fields! Follow our lead, and fire at will!” To the driver, he ordered, “Get us the hell off this road and away from those things.”

The kid looked at him with eyes as big as dinner plates. “Yes, sir!”
 

With a spin of the steering wheel, he sent the Humvee barreling into the field off to the right. Richards clamped his mouth shut so he wouldn’t bite his tongue off as the vehicle bounced and jolted across the furrows.
 

The other vehicles turned and left the road, the plumes of dust from their tires mixing with the smoke from the cannons and machine guns as they blasted the harvesters.

The front right tire of the last Humvee in line blew out. The driver managed to keep it under control, but the vehicle quickly fell behind the others.
 

One of the LAVs pulled alongside, then both vehicles slammed to a stop. The occupants of the Humvee piled out and clambered onto the LAV, which then took off at full acceleration, the tires throwing rooster tails of dirt out behind it.

“Swing north to the road!” Richards told his driver. “We’ve got to get out of these damn fields!” West Adams Street would take them to within a block of the airport, and from there he planned to take the route Boisson had told him she’d used to get onto the field.

The Humvee veered to the left into a drainage swale. Swerving around the solitary tree that was planted right in the middle, the Humvee reached Adams Street and headed east.
 

He looked at the GPS. The airport was now just three miles away.
 

The swarm of harvesters chasing after the convoy had spread out on either side of the road like a black tide. The convoy was gradually pulling away, but would reach the airport mere minutes before the swarm caught up to them.

Richards turned to Renee, who was sitting in the back seat, clutching the sprayer to her chest. “If you’re going to use that thing, now’s probably a good time,” he said.

“What?” She looked sick, and he caught sight of blood soaking the seat cushion beneath her. Glancing down at the sprayer, she blurted. “Oh, Jesus. I’m such a dumb-ass.”

Sticking the wand out the window, she squeezed the handle. A wide cone of fine mist jetted from the wand’s tip. “Breath deep, assholes!” She shouted.

She kept squeezing the handle until the tank ran out of pressure and the flow dribbled to a stop.
 

***

Even with the helmet on, Jack’s ears were ringing from the hammering of the LAV’s guns. He’d wanted to veer more to the west and follow the path Richards and the convoy had taken to the airport, but after Richards had called and warned him about the swarm approaching from the east, he’d changed his mind. After speeding west about a mile from US-77, Jack had the driver turn north on Coddington Avenue.

“Contact!” The gunner reported. “Harvesters! Uh, more than I can count, coming from the southeast.”

Jack didn’t hesitate. “Open fire!”

The 25mm Bushmaster cannon roared, and Jack fired with his machine gun. The harvesters streaming into the open ground southeast of the overpass were packed so close together that they could barely move an inch in any direction other than forward. Harvesters burst into flame from the explosions of the cannon shells and the machine gun’s tracer rounds, setting fire to more harvesters around them.
 

They had to cease fire as the driver took the ramp down to US-77, temporarily blocking the harvesters from view. But a moment later they reappeared, running at breakneck speed under the overpass and down the ramp after the LAV.

Jack let the gunner keep the pursuers occupied while he kept watch ahead of them.

The driver shouldered his way through more abandoned and burned out cars, and their pace was slowed to a crawl as they made their way across the overpass that took them over the rail yards.
 

But the overpass gave them a temporary advantage. The harvesters behind them had to bunch up to get across, and the burning corpses as the gunner blasted them created an impassable wall of flame that reached up well over a hundred feet in the air.

That was the good news. The bad news was that more harvesters were charging through the rail yards below the overpass. Some were far enough out that Jack could depress the muzzle of the machine gun enough to shoot them, but the bulk of the creatures were directly below, out of sight.

“We’ve got to get to the other side!” He told the driver. “Gun it!”

The driver jammed down on the accelerator. If he hadn’t been wearing body armor, Jack would have broken half a dozen ribs on the hatch coaming when the LAV slammed into the next car. He heard cries of pain and surprise from below as Naomi, Terje, and Melissa were thrown about, and he clenched his hands on the machine gun controls, cursing their luck.

At last, they were across, and the driver had a little more room to maneuver as he wove through cars and tried to avoid larvae.

“Sir,” the driver called as they crossed over US-6, heading straight for the westbound ramp for I-80, “which way?”

“Straight ahead! Don’t take the right turn onto the I-80 ramp, just go straight. The airport’s dead ahead!”

“Roger that.”

Jack swiveled the machine gun to the right and blasted a group of harvesters pounding toward them from a residential complex just southeast of the junction with the interstate.
 

The gunner had been keeping up a steady stream of fire from the Bushmaster, which fell silent with appalling suddenness. “Main gun ammo is out!” He began firing the 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. It wrought its own form of devastation on the pursuing mass, but Jack could immediately tell the difference in how many harvesters fell or began to burn.
 

“Dawson, this is Richards.”

Jack keyed the mic while blasting another group of harvesters that appeared over a huge pile of concrete debris off to their left as the LAV zoomed down the I-80 ramp, then shot off onto the open ground to the north. “Dawson here. We’re a little busy.”

“What’s your ETA?”

The LAV crashed through a chain link fence and darted through a thin line of trees. The airport lay just ahead, along with a bridge that would take them over the Platte river.
 

“We’re almost there. Can’t you hear us shooting?”

“We’re doing a little shooting of our own, wise ass. Boisson’s going to try and give you some cover. Ferris is waiting at the north end of the runway.”

The LAV tore across the bridge and smashed through the boundary fence of the airport. Off to his left, a tanker truck was racing toward them from the southern end of the runway. Something about it was strange, and it took him a moment to realize that fuel was spraying out to either side, and three trails of flame were following along about a hundred yards behind it. Boisson, he saw, was at the wheel.

“What the hell is Boisson doing? She’s insane!”
 

“No argument from me,” Richards replied.

Boisson waved at him as she passed behind them. She took the truck along the fence line near the southeastern corner of the airport before wheeling it around. Following the fence line, she left a trail of gasoline along the perimeter, the flames racing along behind.

The harvesters that hadn’t been gunned down by the LAV blundered right into the fiery barrier. A few had the prescience to leap over it, but most of them, pouring over the bridge and climbing the fence, didn’t. In seconds, a wall of fire enveloped the southern end of the field.

The LAV sped north on a service road that joined up with the main taxiway, while Boisson took the tanker along the western side of the fence line. Up ahead, far ahead, Jack could see a big Air Force jet at the far end of the runway.
 

Boisson was keeping up with him, following the long taxiway that ran parallel to the main runway on the western side, the flames still chasing her. He was wondering what she was doing when he saw the LAVs and Humvees from the main convoy near the plane. The muzzles of their weapons were flashing, and he saw flames rising from an enormous concrete apron on the western side of the base, opposite the Air National Guard facilities.

A solid mass of harvesters was moving forward across the apron. Even with so many burning and being blasted apart by the cannons and machine guns of the Marine vehicles, they kept coming.
 

Boisson’s truck arrowed straight for the heart of the advancing monsters.

“
Angie, no!
” Jack shouted.

***

Boisson had never really had an exit strategy for her chariot of fire idea. Driving north now along the western taxiway, she saw and heard the guns of the convoy open up, the tracers and cannon shells blasting at a swarm of harvesters that had appeared on her side of the field, having crossed the Platte River and jumped the fence. The gunfire from the vehicles was taking its toll, but also causing the swarm to spread out toward the buildings on the western edge of the apron. From there, they might run behind the buildings and flank the Marines, or just attack the plane as it made its takeoff run.

With a slight twist of the steering wheel, she aimed the truck at the swarm’s center of mass. With her free hand, she pulled the four grenades from her combat vest. Two were high explosive frag grenades. The other two were white phosphorus. She took one of the white phosphorus grenades and pulled the pin with her teeth.
That’s real John Wayne shit
, she thought with a grim smile as she spat out the ring.

Jamming down all the way on the accelerator, she slammed into the harvesters, sending them flying like bowling pins over the hood and cab of the truck. After the initial impact, she tossed out the first grenade, then grabbed one of the HE frags. Yanking the pin again with her teeth, she shoved it into the mouth of a harvester that tried to lunge through her window. Choking on the olive drab sphere, the thing fell way from the truck, which was quickly losing momentum against the horde that was surrounded her.
 

She pulled the pin of the second willie pete and tossed it out. As she let it fly, a harvester reached in and raked her arm into bloody ribbons.
 

The first white phosphorus grenade exploded somewhere behind her, sending up a plume of burning blobs that lit dozens of harvester on fire. Then the frag grenade went off with a
whump
.
 

She lost control of the truck as two harvesters forced their way through her window, using the steering wheel for leverage, while a dozen more hammered at the windshield, trying to get into the cab.
 

The tanker swerved, then rolled over onto the passenger side, crushing a bunch of harvesters and throwing the others from the cab.
 

The grenade bounced around, finally coming to rest on the passenger side.
 

With her good hand, Boisson released the seat belt and fell, smashing her face on the top of the passenger door. Dazed, she managed to take hold of the grenade as a dozen claws sank into the flesh of her legs and hauled her out of the truck.
 

Pulling the pin, she let the handle fly as a set of jaws opened impossibly wide and descended toward her face.
 

“Eat shit and die, you fuckers!”

The world ended in fire and darkness.

FIVE HUNDRED MILES

The western side of the airport was consumed in a titanic explosion that sent up a miniature mushroom cloud.

“My God,” Terje whispered over the intercom. “What was that?”

“Angie Boisson just bought us some time,” Jack told him. To the south, the direction from which they’d come, dark forms capered beyond the line of burning gas Angie had sprayed along the fence. “I just hope it’s enough.”

Up ahead, people moving around under the wings and belly of the KC-135, which was still almost three quarters of a mile away.
 

“Richards, this is Dawson,” he called over the radio.

“Richards. Go ahead.” There was no mistaking the sadness in his voice.

“I’m sorry about Angie. I wish there was something we could’ve done.” Carl didn’t answer. “It looks like she cleared out the threat on the western side. I don’t see any movement there. But we’ve still got hostiles approaching from the south. The defensive line Angie laid down won’t last long.” He looked back again. The flames were already guttering out.