Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (23 page)

It was then that Jack’s thin hold on
sanity fell away as he saw what was happening to Sansone. He stood
there, rooted to the floor, as she began to change, to transform,
into something that clearly wasn’t human. Her features began to
lose their detail, as if the flesh were changing into dough that
merely resembled the human form. The color of her skin changed, as
well, a sickly-looking swirl of yellow and purple covering her
entire body like an enormous bruise. The cuts and bruises that had
evoked such an emotional response in him faded, disappearing into
the pulsating mass of tissue.

Then, like some
hideous Phoenix rising from its protoplasmic ashes, multi-jointed
appendages emerged from the devolving flesh, unfolding from what
had once been Sansone’s arms and legs. Her face disappeared,
the
faux
visage
oozing downward to join the bulk of tissue that had been her torso.
A glistening green chitinous construct remained behind, a
biological sensor array, an analog of the equipment mounted in the
cell’s dome. From the torso sprouted what Jack, had he been capable
of speech at that moment, would have thought of as a biological
Swiss Army knife. A big one.

Viewed as a whole, the thing
reminded Jack of nothing so much as a giant cockroach that had been
stepped on.

As the thing stood up on four
spindly stalks that had unfolded from Sansone’s legs, one of the
“tools” from the pod shot forward against the side of the cell,
hard enough that the reverberation from the strike shocked Jack
into stepping backward.

As he looked at the indentation the
thing had made in the wall of the cell, he felt a scream start to
build in his throat. He suddenly saw an image in his mind of the
cutting board in Sheldon’s apartment after it had been ransacked,
and the wavy groove that someone had cut into the hard wood. The
pattern this thing had left in the wall was, if not identical,
close enough that Jack knew that one of these things had been in
Sheldon’s apartment. And Jack had only missed encountering it by a
couple hours, at most.

He dropped the rifle and backpedaled
toward the door, a mindless scream on his lips.

Naomi was there to catch him.
“Jack,” she shouted as she tried to calm him, “this isn’t a dream.
It’s real. But you’re safe.”

“No!” he cried,
his heart thundering in his chest as he fought to get out, to get
away from the horror behind him. “It’s not possible!
This can’t happen!
” He
began to hammer at the door controls so hard that his hands began
to bleed, cut by the unyielding plastic and
metal.

“Listen to me,” she told him,
wrapping her arms around his chest, not in an effort to restrain
him, but to reassure him. “Do you trust me?”

With one final slam of his fists
against the controls, Jack shuddered. He had never been so
terrified in his life, even after the horrors of Afghanistan, as he
was now. His legs gave out, and he collapsed to the floor on his
knees, Naomi still holding him tightly from behind. “Yes,” he
finally gasped as he fought desperately to keep from
vomiting.

“Then listen to
me,” she said in his ear. “What you just saw, that
thing
in there, is
what’s real. It wasn’t Sansone. Lynnette Sansone was a real person,
but that thing killed her at some point and took her place. We just
don’t know exactly when. It showed you a tortured woman because it
knew that would upset you, would get you to doubt what you knew,
what we’d told you. They’re incredibly good at deceiving us, Jack.
I’m sure it knew about your wife Emily from its time mimicking
Sansone at the Bureau. It found out what happened to her and tried
to use that against you.”

“And it almost worked,” he rasped,
horrified. “My God, I almost...I almost let it out. I
almost...”

“No,” she reassured him, “you
couldn’t have. There are safety interlocks that prevent the silo
entry doors from opening after a cell door has been opened, unless
it’s been authorized from the command center. It might have escaped
the cell, but it would have never left this room.”

“It would’ve killed you and the
others,” he said. Shivering, he took hold of her hands in his. That
was a burden of guilt, Naomi’s death most of all, that he could
never have lived with, even if the thing had somehow left him
alive.

“Hush,” she said, turning him around
to face her. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Jesus, Naomi,” he said, shaking his
head, still trying to come to grips with the living nightmare he’d
just seen. “Just what the hell are these things?”

With a grim smile, she said,
“They’re your little green men, I’m afraid. Come on, soldier,” she
told him, helping him to his feet, “it’s time you got to know your
enemy.”

CHAPTER
TWELVE

As Naomi pulled Jack to his feet, he
turned to the three guards and said, “Sorry, guys.”

They just nodded, but he could see
forgiveness in their expressions. Jack figured that just about
everyone who came here to be “briefed” probably wigged out at
first.

Then he turned to
face
it
. The
thing stood there, unmoving, with its eye stalks –
If that’s what they are
,
he wondered – fixed on him. Holding tightly to Naomi’s hand, still
unwilling to believe what his eyes were telling him, but unable to
deny the truth of it, he followed her as she took him closer to the
wall of the enclosure.

“We call them harvesters,” she
began. “We don’t know what they’re really called, or if they even
have a name for themselves that we could comprehend, so we had to
come up with something. Gregg coined the term, and it
stuck.”

“Haven’t they...” Jack began,
suppressing his revulsion at the thing’s natural appearance,
“...haven’t they ever said anything about who they are or where
they come from?”

“Nothing we were willing to
believe,” she said. “They’re nearly perfect mimics, Jack, and they
understand us better than we understand ourselves. We know they
feel pain and discomfort, but beyond that we know almost nothing
that we can really trust. We’ve tried every interrogation technique
ever invented, using the carrot and the stick, but all we get is
more of what they think we want to hear, or they just make that
god-awful screeching sound.”

“How do you know they haven’t said
something that was true?”

She shrugged. “I’m sure some of it
probably is. The problem is sifting the truth from the lies. We
have everything recorded, and there’s a team at another site that
has been trying to dig through all the crap to find the truth, but
what we have is thin.” Folding her arms, staring at the thing with
undisguised loathing, she went on, “We’re not sure how long they’ve
been here. The UFO guys,” she gave him a wry grin, “think they must
have picked up our early radio signals and come running to find us.
But then you have the issue of how many years it would take a radio
signal to reach the nearest stars, the odds that these things live
in any of those systems, and then the arguments start. They must
have been here for decades, at least, to do the things we know
they’ve done. But they could easily have been here for centuries,
maybe longer. The honest answer is that we just don’t
know.”

“There’s no chance they could be,
you know, from here?”

She shook her head. “Their cellular
structure, especially of the malleable tissue, is so completely
different from Earth-based life that there’s not a chance they
evolved here. I think they’re genetically engineered themselves,
tailored from their native form to be able to function on Earth.”
She turned to him. “All we know for certain is their mission here,
which is to prepare our world for their kind, to transform our
biosphere into something they can live in.”

Jack, frowning, asked, “But if they
were some sort of advanced extra-terrestrial race, wouldn’t it be
easier to just come in and blast us down to bedrock and rebuild
things the way they want?”

“Would it?” she said. “Imagine how
much went into reconstruction after the major wars we’ve had, the
devastation to the planet if we tried to nuke an invasion force and
they nuked us back, or worse. They think on a scale far larger than
we do, Jack. We’re lucky if we can plan something out a few years.
We believe their time scale is measured in centuries for a project
like this: they’re willing to trade time for economy. Conquest is
expensive; extermination isn’t.” She shook her head. “The irony is
that we made it easy for them just by being who we are: they’ve
been using our technology against us, injecting critical
information at key junctures in our development to unwittingly aid
in destroying ourselves. And here we sit, ignorant of what’s
happening in the shadows, thinking that we’re smart and doing smart
things, or perhaps stupid things but reaping enormous profits from
it.”

“And the corn Sheldon found, and the
other plants like it, are the key,” Jack said.

Naomi nodded.
“Think of it as a type of pesticide, Jack. Once the engineered
strains of the primary food crops like corn, wheat, and rice, and
feed crops like alfalfa, are released into the market, there won’t
be any stopping it. It will cross-pollinate with native strains,
carrying the retrovirus with it. We don’t know what the retrovirus
does yet, but whatever it is, it isn’t going to be good for
anything that currently lives on this planet. Except for
them
. Every person or
animal that eats it, or consumes animals that have eaten it, will
be contaminated. Once that happens on a mass scale, there probably
won’t be enough of us left to matter, and they can just march in
and wipe us out with a flyswatter. And that’s the least unpleasant
scenario that we’ve come up with.”

“I hate to ask, but what’s the
worst?”

She looked at him,
her brown and blue eyes blazing. “The worst, Jack, is the sort of
horror movie stuff you saw on the EDS web site: that we could be
transformed into biologically compatible life forms. And you can
bet that
homo sapiens
wouldn’t be at the top of the food chain in a world ruled by
them.”

“How can they be killed?” Jack
asked, forcing himself to look at the creature not through the eyes
of a shocked and frightened human, but as a veteran soldier
striving to learn his enemy’s weaknesses.

“Their skeletal structure is tougher
than Kevlar,” she replied. “Assault rifles will kill them at close
range, but you’ll probably use up most of a magazine. That’s why
most of us carry them in here. Shotguns are dicey, depending on the
ammunition: slugs are best. Any handgun short of a .44 magnum is
useless unless you just get lucky. Aim for the center of mass,
because you’re almost guaranteed to hit something. If you aim
anywhere else, you don’t know if you’ll hit the exoskeleton or
their malleable tissue; if you hit the tissue, bullets just pass
right through. And you have to be quick, Jack. When they move, they
move fast.” She turned to the thing in the cell and leaned closer.
“Fire also works nicely.”

Hissing, the harvester stepped back
away from the cell wall. There were obviously speakers inside the
cell, carrying their conversation to the thing.

“They’re very afraid of fire,” she
explained, “and with good reason: they burn like wood doused in
gasoline. We found that out with the first one we captured: we took
samples of the malleable tissue and subjected it to a variety of
tests, and it nearly blew up in our faces when it was exposed to an
open flame. That’s why Gary Woolsey burned down the lab where one
of these things was, because if it even got close to the fire, it
would be dead. It’s one of the very few weaknesses they
have.”

“Yeah, but you can’t exactly go
wandering around in here or topside with a flamethrower,” Jack
said.

“Exactly,” she said. “We have a
well-designed fire suppression system down here, but fire’s never
something you want to turn loose in a sealed underground facility.
It’s hard to use as a weapon, but we know for certain that it’ll
kill them. Quickly.”

“So what’s the deal with the Taser?”
he asked, pointing to the turret in the chamber that had swiveled
slightly when the thing moved away from the wall, tracking its
movements. “You used a stun baton on Sansone...it...at my house,
too, didn’t you?”

“The shock disrupts their ability to
control the malleable tissue,” she explained, “causing them to
revert to their natural state. Shocking them also has a similar
stun effect on them as it does on us, rendering them helpless for a
few moments.” She looked at Jack. “That’s when they’re most
vulnerable and is the best time to kill them if you can’t use
fire.”

“When you were at the house, one of
the people with you – Tan? – had a syringe of something that he
stuck in its chest after it got zapped.”

“Formaldehyde,” she told him. “Plain
old formaldehyde injected into their central neural ganglion acts
like an anesthetic. That was an accidental discovery with the
second prisoner. It has to be done right after they’ve been
shocked, but enough formaldehyde will keep them completely knocked
out for hours. Eventually their system breaks it down and they
revive.”