Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (44 page)

“Dawson, you still there?” Richards
snapped irritably.

“Yes,” Jack told him, gently
removing Naomi’s hand from the mic. “So what do you
say?”

“If I can get you cleared through
Canadian and U.S. airspace,” Richards asked, “how long will it take
you to get to Baltimore-Washington International?”

Jack glanced at Ferris, who held up
his hand, thumb and fingers spread. “Five hours,” Jack told him,
nodding for Ferris to make it happen.

Ferris shrugged and punched some
navigation data into the Falcon’s console, then nudged the
throttles forward to its maximum cruising speed

“I’ll be waiting, Dawson,” Richards
told him. After a brief pause he said, “If you’re lying to me,
you’d better make sure I’m dead before you walk away, or I’ll spend
the rest of my life hunting you down. You’ll never have a chance to
rest again for whatever miserable life might be left to
you.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack told him. “We’ll
be there. Just keep an open mind about what you’re going to
see.”

“Five hours,” Richards said, then
the line went dead.

Blowing out a deep breath, Jack tore
the headset off, feeling as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Just
like that, exhaustion left behind by the stress of combat hit him
like a hammer.

“Come on,” Naomi told him, helping
him to his feet and leading him back to the seats in the passenger
cabin. “I’ll call Renee and let her know what we’re doing. Then
let’s get some rest while we can.”

***

There was standing room only in the
EDS base’s command center. All eyes were fixed on the horror
transpiring on the screen, where Vice President Norman Curtis was
being sworn in as President of the United States. No one in the
underground base had any doubt that the deputy Secretary of
Defense, a known puppet of the harvesters, would be moved up to
take the now-dead secretary’s job.

The world had watched through the
lens of a video camera as a single bloodied Secret Service agent
had somberly carried a body bag from near where the podium had
been. His burden was light, for there had not been much of the
President’s body left after the blast.

Now, Norman Curtis, a known agent of
the harvesters, was holding up his right hand as a local judge in
Alabama, where Curtis had been campaigning, read him the oath of
office.

After talking to Naomi and hearing
Jack’s plan to show their captive harvester to Special Agent
Richards, she had double-checked the files Sheldon had stolen:
Richards wasn’t on either of the lists. The FBI Director was on the
list of human conspirators, but Renee hadn’t had time to verify the
rest of the collaborators; she had focused on the harvesters first.
They turned out to have taken the guise of sufficiently public
personalities that much of their activity could be monitored
through the Internet. Not surprisingly, almost all of them had very
recently gone “on vacation.”

As she stared at the news display,
Curtis finished the oath of office: “...and will to the best of my
ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the
United States.”

Muttering in disgust, she stood up
and gently shouldered her way through the silent crowd around her.
She’d seen enough, and felt like vomiting. “I’m going for a walk,”
she said to no one in particular as she went down the stairs, then
out through the dome’s blast door and into the main
junction.

Once alone, she began to cry.
“Please, God,” she sobbed. It was the first time since she’d
learned the truth of what was happening that her faith and resolve
had faltered. As she watched Curtis being sworn in, she felt
completely crushed and dispirited, as if she and the others no
longer stood the slightest chance of succeeding. She would be so
glad when Naomi and Jack returned. She hated being in charge,
especially now, because she knew she couldn’t let the others see
her this way. “Please, God, give us just a little help. Just a
little.”

After a few moments she recovered
her composure, wiping her tears away on her lab coat and
accidentally smearing mascara across the pristine white
fabric.

“Goddammit,” she cursed. Then she
laughed at herself. “The world’s falling apart and you’re worried
about your damned mascara. Idiot.”

She decided it was time to get some
sleep, if she could. But first she wanted to check on the lab and
see if anything interesting was going on.

***

The thing that had once been a
rhesus monkey moved silently along the mezzanine level of the lab
dome. It had left the confines of the biohazard room by consuming
the rubber gaskets lining the door and squeezing its gelatinous
body onto the metal decking beyond. It was growing rapidly as it
broke down and reformed the material it had consumed, yet it
remained hungry. It needed more.

As it grew, triggers in its DNA
commanded the formation of an ever larger array of specialized
cells. The thing had no awareness, but its ability to focus on the
food it required was sharpening. It was no longer a random act, but
a search directed by highly sensitive receptors that formed along
the outer layers of soft, flowing tissue. The receptors guided it
in the direction of the storage area, and it silently feasted on
the cardboard and plastic boxes and their contents.

But all too soon the feast was over,
and it ran up against a metal wall that had no easily consumed
gaskets through which the beast could force itself. Moreover, its
feasting had triggered more changes from its complex DNA: it was
nearing saturation, almost ready for the next step in its life
cycle.

Almost.

That was when its receptors focused
on chemical signals from directly below, through the grates in the
metal floor: complex organic matter. It quickly withdrew from
probing the infernal metal wall and silently oozed through the
holes in the decking to fall into the lab animal storage
area.

***

Alexander was jarred from a
drug-induced sleep by a riot of screeching and howling that
suddenly erupted from the other animals nearby. He had been
sleeping in a large crate, padded with a soft blanket, as he
recovered from the wounds he had received while fighting the
creature to which his kind were especially attuned.

Mewling in pain, he got to his feet
and turned to look in the direction of the other animals. They were
in cages inside a much larger cage-like enclosure, and something
was after them. Alexander didn’t know what it was, in the fashion
that his kind recognized other creatures, but he instantly knew it
was a threat. Backing against the opposite wall of his crate, he
arched his back and his fur stood on end, and he bared his teeth in
fear.

He heard a deep growl nearby, and he
glanced over to see his companion cat, white to his black, on a
table across from his crate. She, too, was baring her fangs at
whatever writhed in the cage among the shrieking
animals.

He watched with eyes dilated wide
open as a shapeless form swept down from above onto the rabbits,
rats, mice, monkeys, and a pair of small pigs. They all shrieked in
terror, but their cries were short-lived: in only a few panting
breaths they were nothing more than quickly dissolving lumps in the
roiling mass of mottled flesh.

After the thing finished with them,
it slowly began to move out of the large cage. Toward
Alexander.

Ignoring the pain
from the wounds that the
other
thing had given him earlier, he turned and
desperately clawed at his own cage, crying in fear as this new
enemy oozed along the floor toward him.

His white companion hissed and drew
back on the nearby table, then suddenly fled to a safer spot
halfway to the door that led out of this place. She could not help
him.

He bloodied his paws as he scratched
against the slim bars of the cage, trying to get away, and blood
oozed from his reopened wounds as his terror drove him far beyond
the pain.

Then a shadow fell upon him as the
thing rose up, a pillar of pulsating and undulating matter that was
utterly alien to his instincts and feline understanding, now
standing high enough to block out the light from above.

Shivering, Alexander backed into the
corner of his cage, panting in fear as he waited for Death to take
him.

***

Renee went through the security
process to enter the lab dome, stepping wearily through the
entryway as the blast door swung aside. As she had both expected
and hoped, it was empty. Everyone was over in the command
center.

Except
Vlad
, she thought. She hadn’t seen the
young Russian over there. “Vlad?” she called.

No answer.

Then she heard a sound that turned
her blood to ice: the snarl of a terrified cat. Then two. But what
bothered her even more was that there wasn’t a single sound from
any of the other animals, especially the monkeys, which were
normally a very boisterous lot.

With the hair standing up on the
back of her neck, she drew her pistol and cautiously moved deeper
into the maze of work benches and equipment toward the animal
storage area.

Koshka, Naomi’s white cat, suddenly
ran past her and darted behind the lab bench on Renee’s right.
Renee could tell the cat was terrified. She could hear another cat
hissing and snarling, and the sound of what must have been its paws
desperately clawing at the crate: Alexander.

“Jesus,” she
whispered hoarsely. She knew that she should just turn and run to
get help, but she couldn’t bring herself to abandon Jack’s
cat.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
she cursed at herself, even as she continued to
move forward.

She couldn’t see Alexander’s crate
yet, as it was around a bulkhead that protruded from the left side
of the dome that made up the inside wall of the animal storage
area.

Alexander suddenly stopped hissing,
and all Renee could hear in the silence of the dome was the big
cat’s rapid panting.

Taking a deep
breath, Renee tightened her finger on the snub-nose .44 magnum’s
trigger and quickly stepped to the right between two lab benches so
she could see Alexander’s crate and whatever
else
was there.

***

The thing sensed yet another source
of nutrients just ahead, easily in reach, but it paused. It had
consumed a great deal, gorging itself on organic matter, and the
complex chemical and biological processes that dictated its life
cycle triggered yet another set of commands to its rapidly changing
body.

Expelling a large pool of unneeded
material, it began to seek a dark, silent place where it could
molt. Slithering up one of the mezzanine support pylons along the
inside of the dome, it made its way back to the upper deck and
silently began to probe around for a suitable place.

It quickly found the intake tunnel
that fed fresh air to the diesel backup generators. It flowed
through the grate in the locked safety bulkhead into the dark space
beyond, finally coming to rest under the air filtration system that
was mounted just before the outer concrete bulkhead and the blast
valves that led to the air intake vent.

There, in the warm dark, it lay
still and quiet. Changing. Becoming.

***

Renee’s finger was so tight on the
trigger that later she wondered why the pistol hadn’t just gone
off, but there was nothing to shoot at. Alexander was in his crate,
coiled in one corner and staring fixedly up toward the mezzanine
above him, but apparently unharmed.

She stepped closer, her gun still at
the ready, until she saw what was in the animal holding area. Or,
rather, what was missing.

“Shit,” she breathed as she looked
at all the empty cages. Every single animal was gone, disappeared.
All the snaps were still on the cage doors, and the bars and mesh
on the various cages weren’t bent or disturbed. Looking closer, she
noticed that there was no waste, blankets, or toys in any of the
enclosures, either: they were all nothing but bare metal. “Vlad?”
she called again, nearly choking on the young man’s name. “Vlad!”
she shouted, louder.

As before, there was no
answer.

She started to
move away, intending to check the biohazard room, when a deep and
desperate cry stopped her. Turning, she saw that Alexander had
shoved himself up against the door to the crate, one paw stretched
out to her as if begging for her not to go. She had never seen a
cat look so terrified before, even during the two battles they had
experienced with the harvesters here in the base.
But if there was a harvester
here
, she thought,
why weren’t the other cats gathering, drawn by whatever
unfathomable instinct that had made them such good organic alarm
systems? And how the hell could it have done...whatever happened
here?

Looking into the crate, she saw that
Alexander was again covered with blood, and noticed that a few of
his stitches had been ripped out, no doubt while he had thrashed
around, trying to escape.