Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (28 page)

“It’s here,” she whispered into his
ear as he fought not to gag on the horrific odor of ammonia and
something burning. “Oh, God.”

Alexander chose that moment to
attack. A hissing, shrieking battle raged for a few seconds that
felt like a lifetime to Jack, as he imagined his cat again facing
off against the horrible thing that had come for them. His blood
turned to ice as Alexander’s furious assault ended in a brief
feline cry of agony.

Shaking with rage, Jack wanted
nothing more than to open the goddamn door and face the thing, to
stick the snub-nose magnum in its squashed-bug innards and blow it
to hell. If he had been alone, he very well might have, but he
couldn’t abandon Naomi. Cats were hardly known for their loyalty to
the humans who cared for them, but Alexander had been an exception.
In his own feline way, he had always been there for Jack when he’d
needed comfort or a laugh. He fought the tears that came to his
eyes, but gave up when he realized that it wouldn’t matter: his
vision was useless in this total dark, anyway. He let the tears
flow.

“Come on,” he
hissed as he heard the thing move one if its appendages across the
door, like someone scraping the tines of a fork across a dinner
plate. “
Come on, you
fucker!
” he screamed.

The thing suddenly hammered on the
door, a rapid tattoo of powerful blows that set Jack’s ears
ringing. The hammering became even more frantic, and he heard the
shriek of shearing metal as the door frame began to give
way.

“Oh, God, Jack, don’t let it get in
here!” Naomi cried.

Jack had a sudden flashback to his
last patrol in Afghanistan. The world was tinted an eerie green
from the night vision goggles he wore, and a series of images and
sensations cascaded through his mind in slow motion. The wraiths of
Taliban fighters that seemed to appear right out of the rocks
around him and his men. The sharp reports of automatic gunfire and
machine guns, the explosion of grenades, the desperate shouts and
agony-filled screams. The biting smell of the gun smoke, the
nauseating stench of voided bowels, the coppery tang of blood. Then
the hammer blows that sent him flying backward to the ground. The
bullets that penetrated his body armor at point blank range, the
night vision goggles torn from his face by an exploding
grenade.

Until now, he had never remembered
seeing the blanket of stars above him with his naked eyes as he lay
there, thinking that the world was dying around him, and that the
stars were so beautiful. So beautiful...

In the pitch dark, snapping back to
the present, he had a moment of perfect clarity. He pulled Naomi’s
hands away from him and stepped forward. Something slapped against
his free arm and he grabbed hold of it, knowing instinctively that
it was the whip-like appendage holding the stinger. He curled his
left arm around it as if it were a rope and heaved with all his
strength. The door finally gave way completely, and the harvester
slammed into him, its horrible stench overwhelming.

Instead of resisting the force of
the impact, he pivoted, pulling himself against the creature,
ignoring the sensations of gelatinous flesh and chitinous
exoskeleton against his skin. The whip-stinger writhed and twitched
in his left hand and he felt one of the thing’s “arms” groping for
his neck. He jammed the muzzle of the magnum deep into the mass of
malleable tissue covering the bulging nerve ganglion behind the
creature’s utility pod and pulled the trigger.

The blast was deafening as the flash
illuminated the thing in a grotesque shadow theater. Its screech
tore at his eardrums and he felt himself being lifted off the
ground as he fired again. And again. The .44 magnum revolver held
five rounds, and every single bullet struck home, blasting through
the Sansone-thing’s naturally armored body to tear out its
guts.

After the last shot, the creature
suddenly collapsed on top of Jack, and he felt the malleable flesh
begin to ooze over him as whatever neural control the creature
exacted over it failed. Gasping, he shrugged it off, still holding
onto the whip of the stinger until he was out from under the
creature’s body. Then he shoved the pointed tip into the gaping
wound blasted by the magnum, embedding it deep in the creature’s
thorax.

He managed to crawl the few feet to
the back wall before he vomited.

“Jack,” he heard Naomi say through
the ringing left in his ears from the gunshots. “Oh, my God, Jack.”
Then her arms were around him, holding him tight.

He wasn’t sure how long they had
been holding one another before he saw light flicker on in the
tunnel outside. A few minutes later, the complex alarm suddenly
blared, and soon they heard the sound of shouting voices and
running feet coming down the tunnel.

They were suddenly confronted by two
dozen men and women with assault rifles and shotguns raised and
ready to fire.

“What’s going on?” Tan asked
sharply, his gun aimed right at Jack.

“The harvester escaped,” Naomi told
him as she and Jack got to their feet and moved out of the service
room and into the tunnel with the others. “Jack killed it. Lower
your weapons.”

With looks of shocked disbelief at
the gruesome body of the creature lying only a few feet away, they
did as Naomi asked, although most of them kept their fingers on the
trigger. They wouldn’t trust that the harvester was truly dead, or
at least fully immobilized, until its body was frozen
solid.

“Ray,” she said to one of the men,
“get to the command dome and make sure Renee’s all right. But don’t
go down the tunnel to the antenna silo.” Ray looked at her
strangely. “I’ll explain later, but for now just secure the complex
down to the junction.”

Tan began to follow Ray and the
others, but Naomi stopped him. “Tan, wait,” she said, taking hold
of his arm. “I want you to stay with me.”

He simply nodded and stood close to
her like the bodyguard he had been since Naomi had come to
them.

Jack’s heart went out to him, even
though he knew Tan would never accept his sympathy. And then he saw
a small, dark form lying very still on the concrete floor against
the far wall of the tunnel, with a white cat, Koshka, curled up
against it.

“Alexander,” Jack whispered as he
shoved the magnum in the back of his jeans and crossed the tunnel,
kneeling next to his four-legged friend. The top half of
Alexander’s left ear had been torn off, and the white fur of his
belly was matted with dark crimson blood that had run into a pool
on the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Jack,” Naomi
whispered from behind him. “But we’ve got to–”

“Go on,” Jack told her, his voice
cracking. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

With a squeeze of her hand on his
shoulder, she and Tan left to join the others.

“You stupid little shit,” Jack
whispered. “Why didn’t you run?” Lifting the limp body from the
floor, he was startled to hear a weak cry of pain. Holding
Alexander gently, Jack could see that he was breathing.
Barely.

“Naomi!” he called
as he turned to run after them, Koshka loping along behind him.
“
Naomi!
”

Naomi and Jack, with Tan following
behind, ran to the junction, and Naomi called to one of the women
there. “Theresa,” she said. “See what you can do for Alexander.”
Turning to Jack, she said, “Theresa’s our vet who looks after the
cats. She saved Koshka.”

Theresa carefully took Alexander
from Jack’s arms and told him, “I’ll do what I can,” before rushing
into the lab dome, Jack staring helplessly after her.

“Renee,” Naomi called to one of the
ceiling-mounted microphones in the junction. She wanted to go see
her in the command center, but she had to tell, and show, Tan what
had happened to Ellen first. “What happened? Did you bring the
systems back up?”

“No,” Renee’s voice answered. “It
was all programmed. She had one machine set up to reboot the
others, then it reset the power control systems. The power came
back on before the security systems, so the portal doors would’ve
had power, but everything else went into lockdown until the
security systems were released. I have to hand it to her: she did a
hell of a job. Especially the little video bit she put in at the
end of the command center recording where she makes it look like
she blew me away just after the systems came back up, making it
look like I was up to no good. You’ll love it. She really expected
to get away with this whole thing by making me the
scapegoat.”

“What about the cell
block?”

“Scranton, Hatch, and Pearlman are
dead,” Renee said grimly. “There’s...there’s not much left of
them.”

“What is she talking about?” Tan
asked, bewildered.

Naomi looked at him, her face a mask
of sadness. “Something…” she began. “Something’s happened to
Ellen.” Turning to Jack, she said, “I need your help with this.”
She nodded down the tunnel toward the antenna silo.

“Right,” he answered, his elation
that Alexander was alive tempered by the agony of the revelation
they now had to make about Ellen.

“Tan, come with us,” Naomi said.
“The rest of you, double check the power and other critical systems
to make sure everything’s working.” Then she turned and, Jack
walking next to her, headed down the tunnel toward the antenna
silo.

Tan went with them, slowing only
momentarily when he caught sight of the limp body that lay sprawled
in the middle of the tunnel.

“What happened?” Tan asked woodenly
as he knelt next to Ellen’s body. The venom the Sansone-thing had
pumped into her had reduced Ellen’s once-beautiful body to a mass
of necrotic tissue that made her look as if she’d spent hours in
the makeup chair for a zombie movie. Tan bunched his hands into
fists, his forearms bulging with strain as he fought to control his
emotions.

“She...” Naomi began, then stopped
to wipe away a tear from her cheek. “She told us about your cancer,
Tan. Somehow...somehow Kempf, when Ellen was at the lab in Lincoln,
must have found out and convinced Ellen it could cure you if Ellen
would help them. Ellen let the other harvester out a few months
ago. She...set up Sheldon. And she helped Sansone escape.” Glancing
at Jack, who could only stare grim-faced at Ellen’s ghastly corpse,
she said, “I can’t forgive her for what she did, Tan, but she had a
noble reason.” She reached out a hand to touch his arm, but it was
like brushing her fingers against cold granite.

“She betrayed everything, all of us,
for me?” he rasped, shaking his head slowly. “I never knew.
Ellen...”

Before either Naomi or Jack could
intervene, Tan calmly drew the pistol from its holster on his
thigh, stuck the muzzle under his chin and pulled the
trigger.

“
No!
” Naomi
screamed as she was spattered with blood and gore. Tan’s body
slowly slumped forward over Ellen, his head coming to rest on her
breast, blood spilling from the grisly wounds in his skull. “Tan!
No, no,
no!
”

Jack pulled her to her feet and drew
her into his arms as four men came charging down the tunnel from
the junction, weapons at the ready. They skidded to a stop as they
saw the two dead lovers and the pistol still firmly clenched in
Tan’s fingers.

Naomi was quivering against Jack,
desperately trying to hold in the sobs of anguish that sought
release. Her fingernails dug into the skin of his back through his
shirt, so hard that they drew blood. He ignored that and everything
else, focusing his attention on her, holding her tightly against
him. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m so sorry, Naomi. If I’d had any
idea what he was going to do...”

“You couldn’t have stopped him,” she
whispered. “And he was already...dying. I think he would have
preferred it this way, except for what happened with Ellen. My
God.”

There was nothing Jack could say, so
he simply held her as she quietly wept for her dead
friends.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

Unlike an hour before, the command
center was bustling with activity. Jack stood at the center of a
small whirlwind of people who were talking, heading up and down the
stairs, making calls, and typing frantically on their computers.
They were trying to find Gregg Thornton and letting the other
members of the Earth Defense Society know what had
happened.

Jack wasn’t yet trained on their
systems, so he contented himself with watching over Renee’s
shoulder as she continued to work on breaking into the secret file
that Ellen had tried to destroy. Renee had recopied the original
from the smart card in Jack’s photo frame to the base’s internal
servers. She also put it on an external secure server that she had
hacked into, disguising it as an innocuous-looking system file, but
making sure that Jack and Naomi knew where it was and how to get to
it. Just in case.

“You’ll figure it out,” Jack told
her.

“Yeah, right,” Renee sighed, leaning
back and rubbing her eyes. “I just hope Sheldon didn’t think I’m
smarter than I really am.”

“You’re brilliant,” he said with a
smile, patting her on the shoulder before moving over to where
Naomi was staring fixedly at her computer screen.