Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (59 page)

Shrieking in agony, the thing dodged
to one side to avoid the last bullet, and its stinger shot out,
aimed at Jack’s face. He ducked, and heard Renee scream as the
deadly lance spanged into the metal door less than an inch from her
face, venom spattering from its tip.

The creature withdrew its lance and
turned to flee, taking great leaps toward the steps leading up to
the mezzanine.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Jack shouted,
bolting after it.

“Jack!” Renee called after him.
“Jack, don’t!”

He heard her, but didn’t listen. He
wasn’t about to let this thing get away.

Even injured as it was, it flew up
the steps, faster than any man could run. Jack paused to take aim,
firing at the thing as it reached the mezzanine. The harvester
twirled in mid-leap, the bullet just nicking its misshapen head.
Screeching again, it dodged around the biohazard room before
disappearing down the intake tunnel.

Jack followed right behind. Two
shots left, he warned himself as he moved past the metal plating
that had been ripped off by the nuclear blast, then entered the
tunnel that led to the air intake complex. He could barely see
anything in the thick smoke, and he covered his nose and mouth with
the sleeve of his left arm to help him breathe. Ignoring the
stinging of his eyes, he crouched low to get below as much of the
smoke as he could.

He reached the end of the tunnel,
which opened into the rear section of the intake complex, where he
found a gigantic squirrel cage fan that was at least twelve feet
across and so high that it disappeared into the smoke. Jack had
never seen anything like it, and was thankful it wasn’t turned
on.

He moved through an access door,
then up a ladder, heading closer to where the blast valves were.
The smoke was thicker here, and it was getting much more difficult
to breathe. He passed more giant-sized equipment as he went deeper
into the complex, which was like a large cylinder placed on its
side.

Hathcock was
wrong
, he thought,
when he said you could hide a Volkswagen in here. You could
hide a goddamn Cadillac.

The smoke was so
thick on the platform that he nearly fell off the edge when he
reached the end. He could barely make out the round shapes of the
five blast valves, each of which was four feet across. They were
closed, except for one where he could see a tiny glow of heat where
the metal was white-hot. He couldn’t see the bottom of the complex,
but figured it must be a good ten or fifteen feet below the
platform he was on.
That would’ve been a
bad fall, Jack
, he thought
grimly.

As he turned, intending to go back,
he caught sight of something on the platform behind him. He dropped
flat onto the metal flooring, where the air was slightly
clearer.

It was the harvester, moving
stealthily toward him. He couldn’t see its body through the smoke,
only its insectile feet, stepping closer.

“We think they can see and smell
about as well as we can,” Naomi had told him, what seemed like ages
before. The harvester knew he was here, but the smoke was blinding
it and it didn’t know enough to get down low.

With only two shots left, Jack
couldn’t risk firing blindly into the smoke. He had to be able to
see his target. Which meant bringing it down to the floor.
Close.

He waited until the thing was
practically on top of him before he kicked its feet out from under
it with one of his legs. Screeching and flailing its limbs, it fell
to the floor right beside him. Before he could shoot, it had him,
its arms around his chest, pulling him to its thorax and the deadly
mix of organic weapons there.

“No!” Jack shouted, bringing his
knee up to block the chopping blade that suddenly extended from the
creature’s chest. The harvester’s claws dug into his flesh where
they gripped his waist below the body armor, and Jack gasped with
pain.

The harvester suddenly rolled on top
of him, its face right above his, and its mandibles parted to
reveal rows of serrated teeth. It lunged at his neck, but Jack was
ready: instead of tearing out his throat, its mouth closed over the
muzzle of the Desert Eagle.

“Fuck you, you bastard!” Jack
shouted as he pulled the trigger. The big bullet blasted out the
back of the harvester’s skull, and the creature rolled away from
him, limbs flailing as a wet rasp issued from its
throat.

Jack pinned the thing against the
wall of the chamber with his foot and stuck the pistol against the
harvester’s chest before pulling the trigger on his last bullet. It
blasted through the creature’s exoskeleton and tore into its vital
organs.

After a final shudder, the harvester
lay still. Dead.

“Jack?” he heard a strangely muffled
voice calling a few moments later. “Jack, where are
you!”

“Here,” he managed, trying to hold
back the coughing that threatened to take hold of him.

A moment later, he saw lights moving
in the smoke, and then hands were pulling him to his feet. Naomi
and Richards.

“Renee?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” Naomi reassured
him.

“She needs to go on a diet,”
Richards complained as he pulled a smoke hood over Jack’s head so
he could breathe easier. “It took both of us to pull her big ass
out of that door.”

Jack took one last look through the
smoke at the harvester’s oozing mass before he followed Naomi and
Richards back into the tunnel to the lab dome.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR

“Christ Jesus,” President Curtis
whispered, his face ashen as he stared at the Predator drone’s
video footage of the enormous mushroom cloud that rose over Sutter
Buttes in central California. The yield of the bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive yield of about fifteen
kilotons. The one that Curtis had ordered dropped on his own
country had been twenty times more powerful.

“It had to be done,” the creature
masquerading as Ray Clement soothed. “There was no
choice.”

Curtis turned from the horror on the
screen in the situation room to stare at the thing. General
Coleridge, who had no idea what Clement really was, glared at him.
The Secretary of Defense, Wilburne, looked ill.

“Don’t patronize me,” Curtis
growled. Then, turning to Coleridge, he said in a calm voice,
“General, it would probably be a good idea to let the military know
that we weren’t just nuked by the Russians or Chinese.”

“Sir,” Coleridge said, then quietly
left the room.

As the door
whispered shut, Curtis went on to The Other, “I made the decision
and I’ll take the responsibility, but don’t tell me there was no
other choice. If there was a mistake, it was that I trusted in you
to be omnipotent and omniscient, that you and your kind could keep
us away from disasters like this. And make no mistake: this is a
disaster. We believed in you too much, and this is the price we
have to pay.”
And it’s just too goddamned
high
, he cursed himself,
even for my daughter’s sake
.

Just then the door burst open. It
was his chief of staff, Paul Rochelle, followed by half a dozen
Secret Service agents with guns drawn.

“Mr. President!” Rochelle exclaimed
as the agents gathered around Curtis, intending to manhandle him to
safety, if necessary. “NORAD reported that we’ve been attacked with
a nuclear weapon! There was an explosion just moments ago in
Calif–”

“I tried to stop them, Mr.
President,” Coleridge said, storming into the room behind the
agents, “But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Listen to what?” Rochelle shouted.
“We’ve been attacked!”

“No, Paul,” Curtis told him quietly,
motioning for the Secret Service agents that he didn’t need their
assistance. “It was...I ordered it. It was the Earth Defense
Society base. There wasn’t any time and we had to be sure we took
them out. They...”

He stopped, shaking his head. As if
he were a balloon that had suddenly deflated, Curtis slumped down
into his chair at the head of the table. “Casualties,” he muttered
miserably. “Do we have any estimates yet?”

“No...no, sir,” Rochelle replied,
stunned. “How could we? We just found out. I...Mr. President, I
don’t understand. How...?”

“Tell the governor of California
that we’ll provide any and all assistance they require,” Curtis
told him, holding up his hand to forestall any more questions. “Get
the staff going on that right away, and get FEMA moving. Then get
the press secretary in here so we can get an explanation of this
out to the public.” He glanced at the Clement-thing. “But right
now, I need a few minutes alone.

Everyone made to move toward the
door except Clement.

“I said
alone
,” Curtis
snapped.

Nodding respectfully, or at least
making a good show of it, “Clement” followed the others
out.

In the sudden silence after the door
closed, the President stared at the roiling, glowing mushroom cloud
that now towered over Sutter Buttes and the devastated wasteland
around it.

Then Norman Curtis, the most
powerful man in the world, put his face in his hands and
wept.

***

“Sir!”

Paul Rochelle had just closed the
door to the President’s conference room when a Secret Service agent
called from the door to the next conference room down the
hall.

“What is it?” Rochelle asked dully.
His voice was still weak as he fought to grapple with the nightmare
reality into which he and the rest of the country had just been
plunged. He still couldn’t believe that what had happened had
really happened.

“FBI Director Ridley, sir,” the
agent said, gesturing into the other room. “I was supposed to make
sure she wasn’t disturbed. She needed some rest, the President said
after they spoke earlier. But after what happened, I checked on
her, and...” He looked into the room, then back at Rochelle,
shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m sorry, sir, but you need to see
this.”

Rochelle cursed under his breath and
walked quickly to the door, looking where the agent
pointed.

Ray Clement watched the exchange
impassively, then turned and quickly walked out of the situation
room complex.

“Oh, my God,” Rochelle said as he
rushed into the room to kneel next to the twisted, motionless woman
who lay on the floor. “Call the medical unit and get somebody down
here right now!”

“Already done, sir,” the agent
replied, his eyes riveted on Ridley, who lay curled in a fetal
position where she had fallen from a chair along the wall. A secure
phone was still in her hand, but her fingers no longer had the
strength to hold it. There was a trace of blood on her blouse, just
above her waist.

“Director Ridley,” Rochelle said
quietly, lowering himself so he could see her face, afraid to roll
her over in case she’d injured her back or spine. “Director, what
happened? How badly are you hurt? Talk to me!”

Her eyes were open and fixed on him,
and she tried to move her lips, but no words came out.

“What is it?” Rochelle asked,
bending closer, her lips now right to his ear.

“Clement...imposter,” she breathed.
“Stop...him...”

“Who’s Clement?” Rochelle asked, not
recognizing the name. He looked up at the Secret Service agent. “Do
you know who she’s talking about?”

“He was a senior FBI agent
accompanying Director Ridley,” the agent said. “A big guy,
African-American, with–”

“Find him!” Rochelle barked. “And
for God’s sake, don’t let him get near the President!”

As the agent ran from the room, gun
drawn and microphone to his lips to alert the rest of the White
House protective detail, Rochelle turned to Ridley and said
soothingly, “Don’t worry, help is on the way. You’ll be
okay.”

The only answer she could give him
were the wordless tears that crept down her cheeks.

***

Clement walked briskly toward the
entrance used by tourists, rather than the one for official
visitors, planning to lose itself in the crowd. Had it truly been
human, it might have smiled at the convenient timing of an incoming
group of people streaming through from the visitor
center.

But it wasn’t human. Its outward
expression was impassive as it strode past the goggling tourists.
It contemplated thoughts in the way of its species, altogether
indecipherable to humankind.

“Everyone on the
floor,
now!
”

The sudden order was followed by the
sound of running feet and the metallic clicks of weapons being
taken off safe.

“Down! Down! Down!” the same voice
boomed. Around Clement, the humans noisily fell to the floor,
crying and cursing in fear.

“Freeze, Clement!”

The creature stopped, then slowly
turned to face the human who had spoken to it. It was a Secret
Service agent who stood with a dozen more, all of them with guns
leveled at Clement’s chest.