Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (47 page)

Curtis sighed, interrupting her
reverie. “I think everyone who knows has doubts,” he told her
quietly. “But I can’t deny what they’ve done, what they can do. And
I can’t deny the joy every parent with a dying child would know if
their child could be saved.” He was silent for a moment, before he
went on, “When we found out that Kathleen had cancer and the
doctors couldn’t do anything, that she didn’t even have a
chance...” He shook his head, and she could see tears brimming in
his eyes at the memory. “Just the knowledge of it nearly destroyed
me. We couldn’t have another child. She was all we had, all we
would ever have.” He fixed Ridley with a pitiless gaze that chilled
her. “I would have done anything to save my daughter. Anything. And
so far, nothing that Kempf and her kind have asked of us has been
outrageous.”

“That’s what bothers me,” Ridley
said. “They haven’t asked for anything but our silence and to help
them make our world a better place. Maybe I’ve just gotten cynical,
but can they really be that philanthropic? They’re going to make
all our ills go away just because they’re nice, without asking
anything in return?”

“Wouldn’t we, if we could?” Curtis
asked. Ridley only offered him a doubtful expression. “It’s true,
Monica,” he told her emphatically. “Listen, the United States
spends almost thirty billion dollars a year on foreign aid. Sure, a
huge chunk of that’s for weapons, but a lot isn’t. A lot of it’s
medical aid. Every time there’s a disaster somewhere in the world,
even in countries that hate our guts, we send them tons of money
and aid supplies. And now, with the subsidies Congress is going to
approve, we can help poor countries afford the New Horizons seed.
And we’ve already paid for development of the seed itself. If what
Kempf and her kind are offering was something that we could send
out overtly without people going berserk over some sort of idiotic
alien conspiracy theory, I’d gladly put my signature on a bill that
would send it to the entire world and happily pay every penny of
the cost. And nobody’s ever accused me of being a liberal-hearted
sap.”

Ridley had to smile at Curtis’s last
remark. While it was a Republican administration, the former
President had been able to work well across the aisle with the
Democrats in Congress, and Curtis had been able to cater equally
well to the more conservative members of the party. It had been a
winning combination at the polls, and the unlikely team had been
very effective in office. But Curtis was universally known as a
hard-ass, and beyond a very small circle of close friends, no one
would ever have expected to see tears in his eyes over
anything.

“So, no, I don’t think their
philanthropic claims are ridiculous,” he told her. “But Kempf and
the others are right,” he conceded. “People wouldn’t understand if
they knew what was happening, just like these fools in the EDS
don’t. Unless you’ve experienced the miracle, you can’t believe in
it. We’d be burned at the stake as heretics, even though we’re
offering people salvation. That’s why we have to help the world
without people knowing it.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Jack, Naomi, three other heavily
armed men and one woman stood tensely in front of the blast door to
the lab dome, weapons at the ready. It had been a long, tiring
flight back to California after their meeting with Richards in
Maryland, capped by the dangerous procedure of getting the captive
harvester from the airport to the base, and then into one of the
cells in the antenna silo complex.

While everyone would have liked to
take a rest, Jack and Naomi insisted on finding out what had
happened in the lab dome, and to Vlad.

“We don’t need any mysteries like
that,” Jack had told Renee after she finished relating the story of
what had happened when she had gone into the dome those long hours
before.

“Open it,” Naomi ordered.

“I’ll go first, if you don’t mind,”
Hathcock said easily. Jack nodded: even though the man was only
carrying a G36C assault rifle instead of the massive Barrett sniper
rifle, he was by far the best shot and had more combat experience
than anyone else in the base, including himself.

As the massive door thrummed open,
Hathcock quickly scanned the expanse of the room over his gun
sights before stepping inside. Jack and Naomi followed right behind
him, covering to the left and right, scanning high and low between
the mezzanine level and the ground floor.

“No contacts,” Hathcock called
clearly as he moved deeper into the maze of lab equipment and work
benches. “I’ll take the upper level.”

“Roger,” Jack said from behind him,
motioning for two men to follow Hathcock up the steps to the
mezzanine. He, Naomi, and the last of the search party, Carla
Torres, a woman who’d also served in Afghanistan as an intelligence
specialist, moved carefully along the ground floor.

Jack had them sweep wide to the
right, checking the far side of the dome from where the animal
storage cage was, to make sure nothing had crept over there. It was
clear.

Spreading out, they then moved back
to the other side of the dome, finally coming to stand in front of
the animal area where Alexander had been trapped.

“It’s clear down
here,” he called up to Hathcock.
Yeah,
it’s clear all right
, he thought.
Too damn clear
. “Jesus,”
he said aloud. “What the hell happened here?”

Naomi moved forward far enough to
reach out and open the latch on the doorway to the
enclosure.

“Keep your eyes on the mezzanine,”
Jack told Torres, who nodded uneasily. “Renee said that she thought
she saw something moving up there.”

Torres stepped back a few paces so
she could get a better view of the support structure for the upper
level and scanned the length above where Jack and Naomi were
standing. Then Jack stepped into the animal enclosure to look
around, but there wasn’t much to look at.

“Nothing,” he said into the quiet
that surrounded them.

“That’s what’s so odd,” Naomi
muttered as she joined him, leaning over to inspect the monkey cage
more closely. She ran her hands across the metal inside the cage,
the bottom and the mesh sides. “We keep the animal cages clean,
Jack, but there’s not a trace of anything but metal here, not even
a tiny scrap of food caught in the mesh. And the metal’s shiny,
like it’s been polished.” She looked around at the other
enclosures. “It’s like the entire room’s been given an acid bath
that scoured everything away.”

“What could have done that?” he
asked, a shiver running up his spine as he looked at the floor for
any trace of liquid. “Wait a minute. What’s that?”

Naomi turned around to look where
Jack was pointing. Under the table that had once been home to a
dozen lab rats was a large pool of...something. “Don’t touch it,”
she warned.

“No worries,” Jack told her, edging
back to give her more room as she knelt next to the
puddle.

“Torres,” she said, “grab a handful
of specimen vials and some swabs from that table there,
please.”

Torres grabbed several vials and
some swabs, quickly handing them to Naomi. Then she backed up to
where she could watch the mezzanine.

Naomi carefully dipped a swab in the
liquid and dropped it into the vial before sealing the lid. Then
she slipped the vial into an empty pocket. Standing up, she called
out, “Hathcock!”

“Here!” he answered
instantly.

“Watch for any puddles of liquid up
there,” she told him, “and keep well clear of them. The cages down
here look like they’ve been bathed with some sort of acid, and I
don’t want you stepping in any of it.” Naomi didn’t think the
liquid here was acid, as it hadn’t reacted to the materials in the
swab, but there was no sense in taking any chances.

“Understood,” he called back. “We’re
moving into the biohazard room now...”

“There’s nothing else I can see
here,” Naomi conceded.

Nodding, Jack turned away and led
her and Torres back toward the steps leading up to the
mezzanine.

They found Hathcock emerging from
the biohazard room, a perplexed look on his face.

“Bugger if I know what happened in
there,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder, “and there’s no
sign of our Russian friend. But look at this.” He pointed to the
edge of the door to the room. “There should be a heavy rubber seal
here, and a matching gasket on the wall. They’re gone. And all the
rest of the seals are the same way. And look at this.” He pointed
to what had once been a computer, but was now an eerie-looking pile
of shiny metal and silicon bits. “Every bit of rubber and plastic
in the room is gone. Just disappeared.”

“What about the monkey?” Naomi
asked, moving past Hathcock to look inside the room.

“What monkey?” Hathcock said,
following her to the first biohazard containment chamber. “There’s
nothing in any of these. They’re all empty. And the lower parts of
them have just fallen apart.”

Naomi peered into the first chamber
where the rhesus monkey had been. Just like the animal housing
area, it had been scoured clean. The metal door to the lower part
of the chamber that contained all the mechanisms was on the
floor.

“Shit,” Hathcock swore. “Plastic
hinges. They’re gone.”

“Along with everything else in the
unit that wasn’t metal,” Naomi said, peering into the guts of the
cabinet with the aid of the flashlight on the end of Jack’s rifle.
“And guess what? There’s another puddle in here.” Using a vial and
swab, she took a sample, marking the top with her pen so she’d know
where the sample had been taken from.

“So what happened?” Jack asked. If
anything, he was more spooked now than he had been down
below.

“Whatever happened,” Hathcock told
him, “it was behind a locked door.” He poked the door to the room
with the muzzle of his weapon. “This was secured when we got here.
I had to pry it open.” Nodding to the keypad inside the door, or
what was left of it, all the plastic and rubber components having
mysteriously vanished, he said, “Now I know why.”

“Naomi,” Torres called from around
the corner in a tense voice. “You should see this.”

Followed closely by Jack and
Hathcock, Naomi joined Torres and the others on the walkway that
led past the biohazard room to the storage area.

“What is it?” she asked as she
scanned the next segment of the mezzanine that led from the air
intakes for the diesel generators around to the exhaust tunnel on
the opposite side.

“The supplies,” Torres said. “The
stacks of boxes. Half of them are gone.”

“Bloody Christ,” Hathcock muttered
as he moved forward into what had been the storage area, “she’s
right. But look at this.” He probed the toe of his boot through a
scattering of detritus, all of it metal, foil, or ceramic, on the
metal grating. “This is stuff from some of the spare parts boxes,”
he said. “But some of it,” he reached down and picked up a ceramic
cylinder, “isn’t something you could even take apart: this is part
of a water filter with a cast plastic housing. You couldn’t even
cut it off without damaging the ceramic filter. Yet here it
is.”

“And where’s the rest of the stuff
that should be here?” Jack mused. “There must have been at least a
dozen good-sized boxes.”

“Look at this one,” Naomi pointed to
a box that was stacked atop several others along the dome wall.
“It’s been half...melted.”

As they stood there uncertainly,
Jack’s mind began to weave together the bits of the puzzle that he
and the others had seen. The conclusion he was coming to was too
terrible and bizarre to contemplate, but it seemed to fit all the
facts they had at this point.

“I don’t think it was melted,” he
said quietly, “at least as we’re thinking of it. I think everything
that’s missing was eaten.” The others looked at him in shock.
“Don’t ask me by what, but look where we’re standing.” He gestured
to the grated metal flooring on which they stood. “Right above the
animal area.” He turned toward the biohazard room. “I think this
started with the monkey. Remember the weird lesion or whatever it
was that we saw on it before we left for Spitsbergen? I think that
was the first visible sign that the retrovirus was transforming it
into...something. And that something started eating all the plastic
and other stuff, even the animals that are missing.”

“Carbon and other organic
compounds,” Naomi murmured, her terrified mind flying along the
trajectory of Jack’s reasoning. She suddenly gasped. “Oh, my God!
Vlad!”

Nodding grimly, Jack said, “He
must’ve come up here to check on the monkey, and it was already out
of the chamber.”

“Then the fucker got him,” Hathcock
continued. “But how did it get out of the biohazard
chamber?”

“The harvesters are shape-changers,”
Naomi said. “Maybe...maybe this is some sort of a larval form
that’s made up mostly or entirely of the malleable tissue. Perhaps
it didn’t have any skeleton developed yet.”

“What,” Hathcock said, “so it just
oozed its way out through the gaps that were left after it ate the
rubber seals?”