Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (22 page)

“Fine,” he said, holding up his
hands in supplication. “I won’t say any more.”

“Good,” she sighed, slowing down
slightly, more so Alexander didn’t have to work so hard to keep up
with them. “And don’t ever let Tan hear you say something like
that,” she told him quietly, “or he’ll kill you.”

“Right,” Jack said
quietly, thinking,
Well, there goes our
budding little relationship
.

They continued on down the tunnel in
silence. They paused about halfway through, when Jack looked down
to check on Alexander’s progress and noticed that he’d stopped a
few feet back, obviously in pain from his injured leg. Jack picked
him up and carried him over his shoulder. Normally the big cat
purred any time Jack put a finger on him, but not this time.
Alexander kept his head swiveled forward, his gaze riveted on the
distant end of the tunnel, his ears laid back. Koshka stayed close
by Naomi’s side.

Jack was surprised to see three cats
making their way back along the tunnel toward the junction. But
they weren’t moving with the devil-may-care attitude typical of
many cats: they were silently slinking along in the shadows under
the conduits running along one side of the tunnel. Their tails held
low, they frequently stopped to cast a look behind them as if they
were afraid of being pursued. They spared no more than a quick
glance at Jack and Naomi as they hurried toward the main
junction.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi said suddenly,
not long after passing by the trio of retreating cats.

“For what?”

“For being angry with you. I think
you’re wrong, Jack, totally wrong, about Ellen. But you’re new here
and don’t know the people, what they’ve done or been through.” She
offered him a tentative smile. “It just made me so angry that I
spoke without thinking. I don’t usually get upset so
easily.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said, shifting
Alexander’s weight to his other shoulder. “I have that effect on
people sometimes. I’m used to it.”

“Well, it’s also hard for me to stay
angry at a man who’s not too macho to carry his poor, wounded
cat.”

Jack snorted. “Two-legged servant,”
he muttered.

That was when Alexander began to
growl.

“Christ,” Jack said. “What is it
with him?”

“It’s the
prisoner,” Naomi said, and Jack saw that she had wrapped her arms
around herself. She was afraid to come down here, he realized. “We
don’t know exactly what causes it, but cats are unusually sensitive
to
them
. It’s not
smell, because the enclosure is hermetically sealed, and if it was
a scent-based reaction, certain dog breeds should be even more
sensitive to them than the cats, but they’re not. So we rely on
cats as part of our security system here, and in the homes of those
who live topside.” She looked at Alexander, seeing how his pupils
were dilated wide open in a fear/fight response. “You were lucky,
Jack,” she said. “If you hadn’t had Alexander to give you some
concrete proof that something was wrong with Sansone, you never
would have believed anything I said before it was too late, no
matter what I told you as a warning. They would’ve killed you
before we could’ve intervened.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, trying to force a
smile through the increasing apprehension that gripped him the
closer they came to the door that was now visible ahead of them.
“And I’m sure the little beast will never let me forget
it.”

He saw then that there were at least
a dozen cats clustered around the door in various aggressive poses.
All of them were growling or hissing.

“Shit!” Jack cried as Alexander’s
claws suddenly poked into his skin, and he set the cat down to join
the others.

“Even before we brought Sansone in,”
Naomi told him as they stopped to watch the cats’ strange behavior,
“when we only had the corpses of the other two, frozen in there,
the cats would still do this.” She gave Jack a frightened look.
“We’re not really sure the things are dead,” she admitted. Turning
back to the cats, she said, “They’ll come down here, all the way
down the tunnel, and do this until they get so hungry they feel
compelled to leave. And then they run back to the junction as if
they’re being hunted, just like the three cats we passed on the way
here. They’ll stay away for a while, as if they have to build up
their courage to come back. But they always do.”

“And that’s why
you had them at the portal when Ellen came in?” Jack asked. “To see
if she was one of
them
?”

“Yes. Even the trucks that we use to
move people and equipment have cats riding shotgun, you might say.
Cats and thermal imagers.”

His eyebrows went up at that, but
all Naomi would say was, “You’ll see.” Then she stepped very close
to him and said, “Jack, you’re simply not going to believe what you
see in there. Not at first, even after all that you’ve gone
through.” Taking him by the arms, she went on, “And from now on,
we’re not going to pretend that it’s human. That was more for your
benefit, Jack, because inside your head, you’re still thinking of
the woman from the FBI who came to your home. Even after shooting
her point blank with a shotgun and seeing her get up again, your
brain is still clinging to the fiction that she’s human, because
anything else is...madness. An impossibility. Right?”

Jack nodded. She’d hit the nail on
the head with that one. He knew that Sansone couldn’t have been
normal, but there had to be some rational explanation for what had
happened. Or did there?

“Just don’t believe anything it says
or does,” she warned. “It will try to deceive you, Jack, in any way
it can. I can’t tell you how, but just be prepared for the
unexpected.”

He tried to swallow, but found that
his mouth had suddenly gone bone dry. He really, really didn’t want
to see what lay beyond the blast door in front of them, guarded by
the growling, hissing cats. “Let’s do this,” he rasped.

Giving his arms a last reassuring
squeeze, she nodded and let him go, then stepped carefully through
the cats to the door. Jack followed right behind her, surprised
that the cats didn’t crowd around the door to try and get
in.

“They don’t want to come in,” she
said. “It’s like they know that they’re here just to make sure it
doesn’t get out. They never come through the door.”

She pressed an intercom button next
to the door. “It’s Naomi,” she said, looking into a security camera
located above the doorway. “I’ve brought Jack to brief
him.”

“Roger,” a woman’s curt voice
answered. “Scan in, please.”

Naomi stepped to the retinal
scanner, holding her eye open for the blue laser.

“Confirmed,” the woman, who Jack
assumed was inside the antenna silo, said. The blast door began to
cycle open toward them.

As soon as it was open enough for
them to pass by, Naomi led him inside into what could most closely
be described as an airlock.

“It’s another man trap,” she
explained. “Although it’s not designed to trap humans.” Turning to
another camera above them, she said, “We’re secure. Cycle the
doors.”

“Roger. Doors cycling.”

Behind them, the
blast door, driven by another set of massive hydraulic rams, closed
with a heavy
thunk
that Jack could feel through the steel floor plates, followed
by the sound of the locking bolts sliding into place. Then the
inside door, made of solid steel three inches thick,
opened.

Naomi led him inside, and Jack
stopped dead in his tracks at what he saw. As she had told him, the
silo was a massive reinforced concrete cylinder almost thirty feet
in diameter. The room they were now standing in was clearly a
prison, but unlike any he had ever seen. There were three
transparent cylinders, about eight feet in diameter, with walls and
domed ceilings that were at least eight inches thick. Offset to the
side in each one was a metal access hatch, easily six inches thick,
that looked like the door to a bank vault. Jack could tell from the
dull sheen of the metal that it was probably made of titanium. At
the apex of the dome, which stood roughly ten feet above the floor,
was an equipment cluster that included a variety of optical
sensors, a pair of powerful remotely controlled gripping “waldos”
that could reach anywhere in the enclosure, and something that
looked like an oversized Taser in a small spherical
turret.

Two of the enclosures were empty.
The center one, however, was occupied, its prisoner watched over by
three heavily-armed guards.

“Sansone,” Jack breathed.

“Remember what I told you,” Naomi
whispered, touching his arm.

He batted her hand away. “Jesus,
Naomi,” he said, horrified, “what have you done to her?”

On the floor in the center enclosure
lay Sansone, completely naked. Her body was covered with bruises,
welts, and contusions. Jack was no medical expert, but he could
tell from the pattern of injuries on her lower body that she had
been sexually molested, brutally raped.

Remember
, he tried to tell
himself,
it’s not human
. But in his mind he was no longer seeing Sansone, but Emily,
his wife, just before she was murdered and tossed into a dumpster.
The sight of Sansone tore his guts out.

“It’s a lie, Jack,” Naomi warned
him, but he wasn’t listening. He went up to the transparent wall of
the cell and knelt down next to where Sansone lay on the inside,
curled in a fetal position.

“Sansone,” he called quietly, not
sure if she would be able to hear him.

“Dawson?” she rasped, her voice
coming from speakers somewhere above him. She lifted her head from
the floor, painfully turning to face him. “Is that you?”

Jack fought back a wave of revulsion
as he looked at her face, battered so badly that both eyes were
swollen shut. “Yeah,” he grated. “It’s me.”

“I’m sorry,” she suddenly pleaded.
“At the house. I’m sorry about what happened. We...we had orders to
interrogate you. To bring you in.” She paused, gasping for breath.
“Then they came.” She put a hand up against the inside of the clear
wall, and he grimaced at the cuts he saw there, at the fingernails
that had been ripped from her fingertips.

“Goddammit,
Naomi,” he snarled, turning on her. “Nothing justifies this!
Nothing!
” Two of the
guards blocked his advance, their weapons leveled at his
chest.

“It’s a lie, Jack,” she repeated
calmly. Then, to the woman at the security console, she said, “Zap
it.”

“No!” Sansone
screamed, clawing at the walls of her cell. “Jack, don’t let them
do it to me again. Not again!
Please!
”

Her outbursts momentarily drew the
guards’ attention. Before he realized what he was doing, Jack had
darted forward to grab the barrels of both rifles the guards had
trained on him, turning them up to point toward the ceiling. He
savagely kicked one of the guards in the shin, knocking his leg out
from under him and dropping him to the floor. He let the barrel of
his rifle go, then turned and rammed his knee into the other
guard’s hip, throwing him off balance. Jack shoved him backward,
wrenching the rifle from his grip as he fell. He took aim at the
third guard, the woman who sat at the control console. Her weapon
was out of its holster, but she hadn’t had time to bring it up and
aim it.

“Drop it!” Jack warned her. Glancing
at Naomi, who hadn’t moved, he said, “Tell her to drop it, Naomi,
or I’ll blow her fucking head off.”

“Do it, Tamara,” Naomi
said.

“And tell these two clowns to move
over there,” he gestured with the rifle’s muzzle to the small
alcove on the right side of the sprawling room next to one of the
empty cells. “You, too,” he told Tamara.

The three of them did as they were
told, the two men limping in pain.

“Thank you, Jack,” Sansone
whimpered. “Please, get me out of here.”

“Get her out,” he told Naomi.
“Now.”

“Jack–”

“
Open it!
”

Naomi moved over to the command
console and looked back at him. Without saying another word, she
pressed a control on the panel.

There was a sharp pop inside
Sansone’s cell, and then she began to screech just like she had at
Jack’s house when Alexander attacked her. He had tried to forget
that sound, tried to suppress the memory of something that couldn’t
have happened in his reality. Yet here it was again.

Taking his eyes from Naomi, he
turned toward Sansone and saw thin wire filaments trailing from the
spherical turret in the top of the cell to a set of electrodes the
weapon had fired into Sansone’s back. She stiffened and then fell
flat on her back onto the concrete floor.

“You Tasered her!” Jack
shouted.

“Yes, I did,” she replied calmly.
The three guards made to move toward Jack, but she held up her arm,
stopping them.

“Why...?” he asked.