Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (27 page)

The other two she had stunned with a
shot from the Tasers she’d brought, then kicked each of them in the
head to make sure they stayed down. After that, she went out and
dragged in the first guard. The plan was to make it look like the
harvester had escaped, killing all three. She only had to make the
guards helpless. The harvester would take care of the
rest.

It’s worth
it
, she kept telling herself, trying hard
to believe the words.

“Your people made a bargain,” she
told the thing in the cell. “Will you keep their word? That your
people will make a cure for Tan?”

“Of course,” the woman-thing in the
cell said, staring into Ellen’s eyes as its face altered into a
chilling smile. “Free me. Now.”

Taking a deep breath, Ellen nodded,
then hit the necessary command overrides on the security console.
With a hiss, the door to the containment cell sprung open, and the
Sansone creature quickly stepped through it.

“Remember,” Ellen said as she turned
around, “you’ll need to kill these three after I’ve gone back
to–”

The rest of her words were lost to a
scream of searing agony. With horrified eyes, she looked down to
see the Sansone-thing’s stinger in her belly, the poison sack near
the end contracting and expanding as it pumped its lethal ejaculate
into her body.

Ellen stumbled
backward toward the door to the tunnel, pulling the hard tip out of
her flesh. “No,” she moaned as the stinger disappeared back into
Sansone’s chest, the flesh of the
faux
breasts swallowing it up.
“You...you promised!”

With an angry snarl, Ellen brought
up her Taser and shot Sansone, who went rigid and collapsed to the
floor.

Ellen turned and fled through the
open door into the tunnel. Her gut was burning as the creature’s
venom quickly spread through her body, bringing paralysis along
with it. Groaning in agony, she stumbled as fast as she could back
toward the command center, hoping that the Sansone-thing would
remain stunned long enough for her to make it. And that the poison
wouldn’t kill her first.

***

“Did you hear that?” Jack asked as
he and Naomi moved quickly down the tunnel toward the harvester’s
prison. He cursed the designers of this Cold War relic for every
one of the nearly six hundred feet they had to run from the command
center to the antenna silo complex.

“Yes,” Naomi said, raising her
magnum. “It sounded like screaming.”

“Yeah,” breathed Jack as he picked
up the pace. “Somebody’s coming.”

Ahead, they could see the tiny shape
of a human figure moving toward them at a shambling, staggering
run.

“Damn,” Jack said. “It’s
Ellen!”

Suddenly the woman collapsed to the
floor, writhing in pain.

Naomi sprinted toward her, with Jack
cursing her stupidity as he tried to keep up with her.

“Ellen!” Naomi cried as she knelt
next to the stricken woman. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry,” Ellen cried, taking
Naomi’s hand. “I...I didn’t have any choice.”

“Talk some sense, girl,” Naomi said
softly as Jack knelt down, aiming his magnum down the tunnel toward
the antenna silo. It was still so far away he couldn’t make out the
door in the strange optical illusion the long tunnel
created.

“They promised me...they’d help
him,” Ellen panted, her face contorted from the burning pain that
was spreading through her body.

“Help whom?” Naomi asked
urgently.

“Tan,” Ellen sobbed. “He’s
got...pancreatic cancer. Metastasized before they found it.
Inoperable. He’s...he’s dying.”

“And they told you they could
engineer a cure,” Naomi said, the words like ashes on her
tongue.

Ellen jerked a nod.
“Sansone...betrayed me,” she whimpered. “I was...a fool. Thought I
could trust it. Stunned it.” She looked at Naomi with an expression
that was as much emotional as physical agony. “I let the other one
loose…never would have done that...if I had known it was going to
try and kill you. God...I’m sorry!”

“Didn’t you say there was a cure for
the poison?” Jack asked. He couldn’t muster any sympathy for
someone who had conspired to kill her friends, even for the man she
loved, but she must know critical information about the harvesters,
and the only way they could get it was to keep her
alive.

“There’s an experimental batch of
the antidote in the lab, but it’s never been tested on–”

“No,” Ellen breathed, shaking her
head. “Not on me. I...don’t deserve it. Tell Tan...tell him I love
him.”

She suddenly began to flail her arms
and legs in a violent seizure, nearly knocking Naomi to the
ground.

But as suddenly as it had come, the
seizure passed. When Naomi turned Ellen’s head to see her face
again, Ellen’s eyes stared up at her. Sightless. Dead.

“She’s gone,” Naomi whispered. “We
need to get to the antenna silo and find out what happened to the
guards and the harvester.”

“I think you’d better rethink that
idea,” Jack said as an unholy racket erupted from the direction of
the antenna silo. His guts turned to ice as he heard the hisses and
growls of at least a dozen cats mixing with the shriek of the
harvester. It was loose. He got to his feet and backed up, his gun
pointed down the tunnel toward the sound of the enraged felines,
pausing only to grab Naomi’s hand and haul her up from where she
still knelt on the floor beside Ellen’s body. The last thing he
wanted to do was face the harvester in the tunnel with only the two
weapons they had. On top of that, no one else in the complex
besides Renee knew anything about what had happened. “Come on,”
Jack told her. “Run!”

They had almost made it back to the
command center when the lights went out.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

“What the hell happened?” Jack
whispered as he and Naomi blindly stumbled forward in the
pitch-black tunnel, trying to reach the main junction.

“She must’ve rigged the power
systems to fail to help that thing get out,” Naomi told him.
“Dammit!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she hissed. “I just
banged my leg against the cable tray.” The electrical cables
serving the antenna complex were carried in a metal tray that
jutted out from the side of the tunnel wall.

“Shouldn’t there be emergency lights
in here?” Jack asked. The tunnel was utterly dark, without a single
ray or glow of light along its length. Jack shivered when the
cacophony of the battle between the cats and the harvester abruptly
ended in silence after several terrified squeals of
pain.

“There are,” she said, her hand
tightening on his, “but everything’s tied into the computer systems
and the battery grid. There are redundant backups, but Ellen must
have shut them all down.”

“Great,” he muttered as he forced
himself forward through the darkness, dragging the muzzle of the
magnum along the cable tray to help keep him from running into it.
He held tight to Naomi with his other hand. “How fast can those
things run?”

“Fast,” she said shakily. “Faster
than us.”

“And I’ll bet they can see in the
dark, too,” he said grimly.

“No, they can’t,” she told him. “We
think they can see and smell about as well as we can. They also
have a very distinctive and unpleasant odor when they’re in their
natural state. You’ll know it if you smell it, trust
me.”

Jack yelped as something suddenly
brushed by one of his legs. He almost fired at it before he
realized what it was: one of the cats. An urgent mewling cry
sounded in the darkness, and Jack felt a wave of concern as he
recognized that feline voice. “Alexander, you idiot, what are you
doing here?”

Just then his right shoulder slammed
into something solid and unyielding, and he sprawled backward onto
the floor, losing his magnum in the darkness. “Shit!” he cried, and
heard Alexander’s limping gait patter away into the void that
surrounded them.

“The junction!” Naomi told him as
she groped for him in the dark, helping him to his feet and
dragging him into the connector to the left that led to the command
dome. “We made it!”

“Good,” he said, angry that he’d
lost his weapon. His right arm was numb from the force of the
impact with the steel support wall that stuck out slightly into the
tunnel beyond the cable tray, defining the entry to the main
junction. “Now let’s get in the command dome and lock the fucking
door behind us.”

Naomi suddenly stopped. “We can’t,”
she said bleakly.

“Why?”

“There’s no way to open the blast
doors without power,” she told him. “They’re far too heavy to open
without hydraulics. Oh, God, we’re trapped in here,” she whispered,
drawing close to him.

“Come on,” he whispered urgently.
“You know this place like the back of your hand. There has to be
somewhere in a facility this big where we can hide!”

“Not here, there’s nowhere in the
junction! We can’t open the blast doors to either of the domes
without power, and we can’t get through the blast locks to reach
the apartments or the missile silos, either!”

“Wait,” Jack said, already groping
his way forward in what he hoped was a straight line across the
junction to the tunnel that would take them toward the part of the
complex where the apartments and old missile silos were. “Wait a
second. There was something else in the main tunnel here, maybe a
hundred feet from the junction and before the first blast lock. You
showed it to me on the map, but I can’t remember what it was
called.”

It took Naomi a second to realize
what he meant. “The liquid nitrogen terminal,” she said.

“Does it have a blast
door?”

“No...no! Just a heavy metal door
with a deadbolt, but I have a master key that’ll open
it.”

“Come on, then,”
he said as a bone-chilling shriek filled the tunnel behind them as
the cats and the harvester again clashed.
Close
, he thought, his skin breaking
out in gooseflesh.
Too goddamn
close!
He just prayed that Alexander and
Koshka had the good sense to stay away from the
thing.

Jack managed to head into the tunnel
without knocking himself senseless on anything. He kept to the left
side, which he remembered was where he’d seen the alcove to the old
missile fuel storage area that was now used for liquid nitrogen.
Trailing the fingers of his left hand as a guide along the conduits
that lined the tunnel, he pushed himself and Naomi as fast as he
could in the pitch darkness.

About a hundred feet past the
junction, his hand swept into an empty space along the
wall.

“Here!” he whispered, guiding Naomi
into the alcove. After frantically groping for the lock, she
inserted the key with shaking hands and turned it. Jack grabbed the
handle and pulled it open, gasping in fear as the hinges made a
horrific squeal in the utter silence around them.

Shoving Naomi in first, Jack
followed right behind her before slamming the door closed and
locking it. He felt her hands grab his shoulders and pull him back
into the darkness until they came up against the rear wall of the
small room that provided access to the forty-thousand gallon liquid
nitrogen tank that resided here. Jack faced the door, trying to
focus all of his concentration on what might be happening beyond it
as she wrapped her arms around his waist and held onto him tightly,
her body shivering in fear.

“God, Jack,” she whispered hoarsely.
“I hate those things. The last one came so close to–”

“Give me your gun,” he said, and she
handed him the magnum. He held it pointed in the direction of the
door. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he promised, knowing
full well that if the harvester somehow managed to get through the
door, it would probably get both of them. Even with .44 magnum
bullets, he doubted he’d be able to kill the thing before it stung
them both with a lethal dose of venom.

Everything was
unnaturally quiet, the only sounds that Jack could hear being their
shallow breathing and his own heartbeat.
They can be killed
, he told himself
in a mantra, over and over.
And this gun
can kill it. Aim for the thorax. They can be
killed...

He suddenly heard
a deep growl just beyond the door, and his heart sank as he
realized that it was Alexander.
No, you
stupid cat!
he thought, afraid to speak
the words aloud for fear the harvester might hear. He knew the
thing must have heard the squeaking hinges, but Jack hoped it might
not be sure this was where they’d hidden. Alexander was already
slowed down by the injury he received during the fight at the
house, and in the alcove beyond the door he’d probably be
trapped.
Run, Alexander!

The big cat hissed a feral challenge
to the approaching monster just as a horrible stench assaulted
Jack’s nose. Naomi’s grip around his waist suddenly
tightened.