Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (60 page)

“On the floor. Now!” the agent
growled. “I won’t ask you a second time.”

The creature stared at him. It felt
no fear, for emotions were simply another facet of the mimicry that
allowed it to blend in with its prey, or avoid the rare true
predators that walked among this species. It understood fear, for
it had seen it on the face of Ray Clement as he died: the creature
had replaced him the night Sheldon Crane had infiltrated the
Lincoln facility, hoping that in the guise of Clement it could help
regain control of what Crane had taken.

“Clement” – it had taken the name as
well as the DNA of its victim, for it did not have a name as a
human might understand it – knew that it had failed, as had the
others. Of all those on The List, only one would soon remain.
Clement could still sense it, knew that it was alive. The others
had all perished at the New Horizons facility.

It expressed no sadness, no
frustration or regret at their deaths, its worldview one of
ultimate nihilism. Yet it knew that the trucks carrying the
precious seeds were on their way into the world. Its species would
yet survive.

Returning its attention to the
Secret Service agent, it said cryptically, “There will be
others.”

Then it launched itself at the
humans.

***

“Mr. President,” Rochelle said
urgently as he struggled to keep up with Curtis’s angry stride,
“you don’t have time for this!”

“Yes,” Curtis snapped, “I do. This
is the one thing in the world right now that I must have time
for.”

Striding into the visitor center, he
was confronted with a bloody scene. Four Secret Service agents lay
dead, two of them looking like they’d run into a chainsaw, while
the other two had died in contortions of unimaginable agony. Three
more writhed on the floor, screaming in pain, with doctors and
nurses from the White House Medical Unit doing what little they
could to ease their suffering.

Miraculously, none of the civilians
had been hurt, despite the dozens of rounds the agents had fired,
shots that had snapped Curtis out of his melancholy reverie in the
Situation Room. The far wall of this room, where he now stood, was
peppered with bullet holes. He wrinkled his nose at an incredibly
foul odor beyond the sharp stink of the gun powder that permeated
the room.

One agent stood alone over a
sheet-shrouded mass about the size of a man that was soaked with an
ichor fluid. He was still holding his weapon trained on whatever
was under the sheet, his expression a mixture of rage and
fear.

“Show me,” Curtis said
quietly.

Looking at him with haunted eyes,
the agent nodded. But instead of turning back the sheet, he pulled
his Uzi tight into his shoulder, aiming it at the object of
Curtis’s interest as another agent stepped closer and gingerly
pulled back the soaked covering.

“What the devil,” Curtis whispered
as he beheld the misshapen creature, or what was left of it, that
was revealed when the sheet was pulled back. It looked nothing at
all like the beautiful alien that Kempf had revealed herself to be,
and for a moment he wondered if they were two totally different
species.

“How can this possibly be...” he
murmured before admitting the truth to himself: The Others had lied
about everything, and had preyed upon the emotional weakness of
Curtis and people like him to advance their own agenda. Part of him
still recoiled from the possibility that his daughter would have
the gift The Others had given her taken away. But the rest of him
seethed at having been taken for a fool and turning down a path
that would leave his name in the halls of infamy, as the President
who had dropped a nuclear weapon on his own country, who had killed
thousands of those he had sworn to protect.

In that moment of clarity another
truth struck him: all this time, the Earth Defense Society had
indeed been working to defend their world and humankind. The
terrorist attacks, the strange goings-on that had been reported in
the genetic engineering industry, all of it had been the work of
The Others. Only the so-called lunatics of the EDS had seen the
truth and had tried to fight back. And he had done everything
possible to exterminate them.

After a long moment of staring at
the mottled mass of oozing flesh and exoskeleton, dark and
glistening where it had not been smashed by bullets fired by the
Secret Service agents, he nodded to the agent holding the sheet,
who gratefully put it back over the body.

“Burn it,” he ordered grimly. “And
sterilize this room. I don’t want a single damned molecule of that
thing left when you’re done.”

Then, kneeling down next to one of
the doctors struggling to control the agony of one of the wounded
agents, he asked, “How is he?”

“He won’t make it,” the doctor told
him, his features drawn downward by the weight of resignation that
he would lose these patients. “Whatever...it was, it hit him and
the others with some sort of stinger and injected them with a toxin
of some sort. None of us have seen anything remotely like this, and
none of the drugs we’ve given them is even touching it. There’s
nothing I can do to save them. I can’t even ease their pain,” he
finished bitterly.

“Just do what you can,” Curtis said
woodenly, grasping the doctor briefly on the shoulder.

Turning to Rochelle, he said, “I
want to see the staff and General Coleridge in the Oval Office in
five minutes.” He glanced out a window as a white-topped Marine
Corps Sea King helicopter settled onto the White House lawn,
summoned by Rochelle as soon as he’d learned of the nuclear strike.
It was known as Marine One when the President was aboard, which he
would be soon. “And alert Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base
to be ready to take off as soon as I get there. I’m heading to
California.”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE

“We don’t have a choice,” Naomi said
grimly. “We’ve got to get out of here. And there’s only one way we
can go: through the antenna complex.”

The inhabitants of the old Titan
base were gathered in the smoke-shrouded junction between the
command and lab domes. Renee and some of the others had restored
additional power by making a dangerous trek back into the lab dome,
but their fix wouldn’t last long: the flood of diesel fuel from the
enormous storage tanks in the exhaust complex had continued
unabated, and it was now spilling out onto the floor of the
junction, covering it in a slick of the stinking liquid and filling
the air with fumes. The partially restored power had allowed
Livingston, the engineer, to close the blast locks that led to the
missile silos that contained the seed vaults. Even if the rest of
the complex was consumed by fire, the vaults would be
safe.

Unfortunately,
restoring partial power hadn’t gained them the one thing they
needed more than anything else: the ability to open the portal’s
surface doors. The inner door connecting the portal to the junction
had opened after power had been restored. When Renee had tried to
open the surface doors from the command center, however, it became
clear that no one was going to be leaving that way: the mounting of
one of the hydraulic rams used to push the leaves of the door
upward gave way with an ear-splitting
crack
. The sudden increase in load
on the other rams resulted in a complete failure, and the doors,
which had risen a total of two inches, slammed back down with a
thunderous boom.

After that, Naomi had sent
Livingston to check on the power leads to the antenna complex, to
see if they could use the auxiliary elevator to escape.

“There was no way we could get
there,” Livingston explained after he and the two men who went with
him returned early. “The smoke was so thick that we couldn’t see at
all, and I got separated from the others. I found them, finally,
but it’s just not safe down there, Naomi. We shouldn’t go that
way.”

“So, you don’t know if the antenna
complex has power?” she asked him pointedly.

Livingston shook his head
stubbornly. “It doesn’t matter. We should open the blast locks and
stay safe in the silo complexes. We’d at least have power from the
batteries, with fresh air and food until–”

“Until what?” Naomi interrupted him,
tired of the man’s refusal to give in to the obvious. Pointing to
the door to the lab dome, she said, “We’re going to lose power.
Soon. And when that happens, anybody on the far side of the blast
locks will be trapped. The batteries in the silo arks are there to
manage the liquid nitrogen cooling system for short periods if main
power goes out. Those circuits don’t activate the hydraulics in any
of the doors. Only the power from the lab dome does, and we’re
going to lose that soon when the diesel fuel ignites. And if the
heat from the resulting fire is intense enough, the junction and
the tunnels might collapse. You’d be buried alive.”

“Fuck that,” someone muttered
quietly.

“But they just lit off an atomic
bomb out there!” someone else cried. “We’ll die of radiation
poisoning!”

“That’s definitely going to happen
if we stay in here,” Renee said tiredly as she stood up from some
equipment she’d been working on with the help of a few others
holding flashlights for her. “But it won’t happen any time soon if
we’re smart. See that lovely smoke we’ve been breathing in? I
thought at first it was just something inside that was burning. But
it’s from outside, folks. Those FBI cuckoos – no offense,” she
added sarcastically to Special Agent Franzman, whose expression
hardened slightly, “– with the explosives damaged the blast valves
in the intake complex. The NBC filters aren’t working very well,
and all the smoke that came in through the intake is contaminated.”
She nodded to the small pile of gear on the floor at her feet. “I
finally got one of the goddamn Geiger counters working, and we’ve
gotten the radiation equivalent to a few dental X-rays so far. Jack
got more when he went after the harvester in the intake complex,
but it still shouldn’t be too bad.” She looked around at the
others, then at Livingston. “Staying in here isn’t much better than
being topside. At least out there the wind is working to disperse
the fallout. Down here it’s just going to keep concentrating and
getting worse.” As Livingston opened his mouth to argue, she added,
“And the air in the complex behind the blast locks isn’t clean,
Wade. It’s just as contaminated as it is in here. So shut up and
give it a rest.”

“What about the heat on the
surface?” Jack asked. “If we were at ground zero, things topside
are likely to be a bit toasty.”

“No doubt about it,” Renee said.
“There’ll probably be some local fires still burning, and the
ground’s going to be hot as hell. Maybe we can rig something up to
pump out some fresh water to cool the ground off a bit around the
antenna complex. But out there we might have a chance. Once the
inferno in the lab dome kicks off when the fuel leaks into an
active electrical circuit, if we’re not burned to death or die of
smoke inhalation, we’ll definitely be asphyxiated as the fire eats
up all the oxygen. Or we can choose the Wade Option and die of
asphyxiation and radiation poisoning behind the blast locks. I
don’t know about you, Romeo, but none of those are on my Top Ten
List of Ways To Die.”

“I say we vote,” Livingston
protested, refusing to give up.

“I say,” Richards growled, drawing
his pistol and pointing it at Livingston’s forehead, “that if
another word comes out of your pie hole, I’m going to blow your
head off. As I understand it, this lady,” he gave a quick nod in
Naomi’s direction, “is in charge here. You said your piece and you
were overruled. So just...shut...up.”

Livingston glared at Richards.
“There aren’t enough respirators for everyone to make it through
the tunnel,” he persisted, ignoring the pistol aimed between his
eyes.

“Yes, there are,” Naomi grated. “If
you remember our discussion from before you went to check the lines
to the antenna complex, there are plenty of respirators and even
environmental hazard suits in the hazardous storage silo where the
elevator is. There’s plenty for everybody, along with survival
gear.”

“We just have to do a little buddy
breathing with the ones we have here so we can make it down the
tunnel,” Jack added.

Grudgingly, Livingston nodded, but
there was something in his eyes that told Jack he hadn’t conceded
the point.

Richards lowered the pistol and put
it back in his holster. “Idiot,” he said.

With everyone’s attention focused on
the drama between Richards and Livingston, no one saw Renee’s
frown. Stepping close to Jack, she stood up on her toes and
whispered in his ear, “He must really be wigged out. It’s not like
Wade to argue with Naomi. He worships her.”

“Christ, Renee,” Jack whispered
back, “can you blame him? No matter what Naomi says, locking
ourselves back with the silos sounds a heck of a lot better than
heading up into a nuclear wasteland.”

“Maybe,” Renee said, but the frown
refused to leave her face.

“So that’s it,” Naomi said. “We’re
getting out of here. Right now. Everyone break into your apartment
teams. We’ve got eighteen respirators, so you’ve got to take a
couple of quick, deep breaths as we move along, then hand it on to
the next person on your team, and keep doing it until we get to the
antenna complex. We’ll all be coughing up a storm by the time we
get there, but we’ll make it. Keep one hand on the conduit line
along the tunnel wall at all times when the smoke gets thick to
help keep you from becoming disoriented.” She paused, her gaze
quickly passing over every frightened face turned toward her. “This
is going to be tough, but we’ll do okay. And when we get to the
antenna complex, remember to go right at the junction there and
into the storage silo. You don’t want to go to the
left.”