Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (61 page)

That
, thought Jack,
was the real reason no one wanted to go out
through the auxiliary entrance
. The
harvester’s prison was in the silo to the left, and they hadn’t
heard from the guards there. Worse, all the cats had disappeared.
Even Alexander and Koshka had run off, and Jack couldn’t help but
be worried for them. On the other hand, he knew they had better
sense than to stand around in a growing lake of diesel fuel like
Jack and the others were doing.

“All right,” Naomi finished, “let’s
go.” She turned and headed down the tunnel that, almost six hundred
feet away, would hopefully lead them to the dubious safety of
ground zero on the surface above.

Jack and the others followed behind
her, leaving the dim light of the junction for the enveloping
darkness of the tunnel.

***

The line of a hundred and
twenty-three people moved quickly through the smoke-filled
darkness, trying to cover the distance of nearly two football
fields before they were overcome by smoke inhalation.

In the lead now, Jack crouched down
as he walked to get under as much of the smoke as he could, holding
one of the few precious flashlights on the floor ahead to look for
debris or obstructions. He had passed the respirator to Naomi, who
followed right behind him.

“This is as far as we got,” coughed
one of the men who’d accompanied Livingston earlier, walking close
behind Naomi. “This part of the tunnel still has power. Some of the
lights are still working, but most were broken by the shock of the
blast.”

As if on cue, Jack passed under a
surviving ceiling light that cast its rays into the swirling
murk.

“What’s that?” he asked as he heard
what sounded like the rush of air passing through a vent, somewhere
still far ahead.

“It must be the antenna terminal
ventilator,” Naomi explained, excited. “It was designed to keep
humidity from building up in the terminal. Just like the other
ventilation systems, it had a blast valve to protect it against the
detonation of a nuclear weapon. It must have come back on
automatically after the blast pressure wave passed.”

“If it’s still working,” Renee
wheezed excitedly, “that means the terminal still has
power!”

“And the smoke is starting to clear
off a bit,” Jack said.

He heard Naomi behind him taking a
few quick breaths on the respirator as it was handed back up
through their team. Jack turned to take it from her when she held
it out for him, tapping it against his right arm.

His foot caught on something just as
he took hold of the respirator. Off-balance and carried by the
momentum of the fast pace he’d been setting, he fell flat on the
floor.

“Shit!” he cursed as he slammed into
the concrete, dropping the respirator.

“Stop!” Naomi shouted. “Stop for
just a minute!” She didn’t want Jack to be trampled. With only a
few bumps and shoves, everyone behind them stopped in place. “Come
on, Jack,” she said. “Now’s not a good time for a nap.”

“Naomi, look at this,” he said, his
voice thick with dread.

She got down on her hands and knees
to get under the smoke, and gasped at what Jack had stumbled
over.

It was the body of one of the
cats.

“It must have died from the smoke,”
she said quietly.

“Look a little closer,” Jack
whispered. “This cat wasn’t killed by smoke.”

She did, and her skin crawled. The
cat’s body, contorted in feline agony with its eyes still open wide
and staring, lay in a small pool of blood. There was a perfectly
round hole about the same diameter as her thumb in its chest. “Oh,
God,” she whispered, pointing a bit further along the tunnel with
her flashlight, “there’s another one!”

In all, Jack could see five cats.
Two of them had puncture wounds, while the other three had been
brutally mutilated. He silently thanked God that Alexander and
Koshka weren’t among them, although he had no idea where they might
be.

“It got out,” he told her. “The
harvester we captured at Spitsbergen got free somehow.”

“What happ...ened,” Renee asked as
she duck-walked forward, coming to a sudden stop when she saw the
remains of the cats. “Oh, Jesus.”

Then she saw
something else in the gloom further down the tunnel just as the
smoke lifted slightly. “
Wade!
” she gasped.

Turning to look, Jack and Naomi
could just barely see the outline of the barrel-chested engineer’s
naked body where it lay against the far wall of the tunnel. He’d
been eviscerated.

Standing up and
turning toward the others behind them, Naomi screamed,
“
Wade Livingston is a
harvest–
”

A needle-like stinger lanced out of
the smoke just as Jack shoved Naomi aside. The stinger struck him
in the right shoulder, sinking deep into the muscle. Gasping in
agony, he gripped it with both hands and, with a scream of pain,
yanked it free before collapsing to the floor.

People screamed in confusion and
fear, and suddenly there was a stampede as they ran past him toward
the antenna terminal. Only Naomi kept him from being trampled by
brutally shoving away anyone who came too close.

As the tendril slithered back into
the gloom, Richards was suddenly there, firing at it with his
magnum.

The thing screeched at him before
turning and fleeing down the tunnel toward the junction,
disappearing into the smoke.

“Jack!” Naomi cried as she knelt to
cradle him in her arms.

“Oh...God...that hurts,” he gasped
as the harvester’s venom went to work. His shoulder was on fire,
and already paralyzed: he couldn’t lift his arm.

“The antivenin,” Renee said as she
knelt next to Jack. “It’s back in the lab, in the refrigerator by
the animal storage area!”

“I know,” Naomi interjected. “I’m
going back for it,” Naomi said. “Jack, I’ll be right–”

“No,” he told her as he sat up,
cradling his right arm. “You’ve got to make sure everyone gets
out.”

“Jack, you’ll die!” she said. “I’ll
just be a minute!”

“No!” he told her fiercely, turning
to look at her. “The antivenin isn’t important. It may not even
work.” He hissed as a fresh wave of pain washed over him, and he
could feel the progression of the fire in his shoulder, spreading
down his arm and into his chest. “We’ve got to make sure the
harvester doesn’t get to the silos. It can still open the blast
locks and find a way to destroy the seed vaults.”

“Oh, God,” Renee whispered. “He’s
right. It can open the blast locks to the rest of the complex while
the power’s still on back there, then light off the diesel as it
closes itself off. We’d all be dead before we could get out, and it
could do whatever it wanted to the seed vaults.

“But Jack,” she went on, “you can’t
go shooting off your gun back there or this place’ll go up in
flames like the Hindenburg.”

“That’s why you have to get everyone
out right now,” he said as he got to his feet. “Because that’s
exactly what I plan to do.”

“Jack…” Naomi began, but he hushed
her protest with a kiss, drawing her close with his good
arm.

Richards opened his mouth to say
something, but Renee elbowed him into silence.

“Get everyone out,” Jack told Naomi
softly after their lips parted. There was a moment, just a breath
of time, when he almost said something more.

Then the moment was gone. Donning
one of the respirators, Jack turned and ran down the tunnel toward
the junction.

Naomi watched until he had
completely disappeared into the swirling smoke. Then, with Richards
and Renee, she turned and followed the others toward the antenna
complex.

***

Jack knew he might be running right
into an ambush in the tunnel, but there was no time for caution,
and he moved as fast as he could. It was a grueling effort, panting
through the respirator as the agonizing pain from his shoulder
continued to spread through his body. His right arm hung limply
now, and he clutched his Desert Eagle in his left hand.

He expected with every step that the
thing he was hunting would lash out at him, but at last his feet
splashed into the sea of diesel fuel that was spreading away from
the junction. Jack was amazed that it still hadn’t found an open
electric circuit somewhere in the power room that would ignite it,
but he gave fervent thanks that it hadn’t.

The door to the lab dome was still
open, swung wide after Renee had made her second fix of the
electrical system. The lights inside still glowed dimly, the upper
level of the dome still shrouded in smoke.

Moving forward with more caution
now, fighting to keep from groaning with every step from the pain,
he waded through the wreckage of the lab area. It would have been
easy to simply fire his pistol and light off the thousands of
gallons of diesel that had poured out, but he had to make sure the
harvester was here. He wanted to watch it die. He had to make
sure.

In the back, near the animal storage
area, he saw the refrigerator that Renee had mentioned, the one
that contained the antivenin. It was on its side, open, the
contents spilled over the fuel-covered floor.

I won’t be needing
any miracle cures
, he thought
grimly.

He was just turning around to scan
the mezzanine level when a searing pain shot through his left hand.
He screamed and dropped the gun. Looking down, he saw that the
harvester’s lance had passed right through the middle of his palm,
and venom oozed out the tip to fall to the floor as a new burning
sensation shot up his left forearm.

The lance suddenly whipped away from
him, and Jack spun around to face the harvester.

“I knew you’d come.”

There, her nude body glistening in
the flickering light, stood Naomi. Or a biological image of
Naomi.

“Jesus,” Jack whispered as he fell
to his knees, his right leg finally giving out on him completely.
He was helpless without the gun: he had nothing else he could use
to ignite the fuel around him. His only hope was to keep the thing
talking until the diesel came in contact with one of the electrical
circuits. It couldn’t take too much longer.

“It’s over,” Jack told it, trying
not to look at it, unable not to. “You and your other cockroach
friends, however many might be left, are finished. You
lost.”

“So you think, Jack,” it/she said.
“Soon, in days, weeks, at the most, there will be thousands of us.
Then millions. We’ll sweep your kind from this world and make it
our own. If your species survives at all, it will be as
food.”

Jack forced a
laugh through the increasing waves of pain sweeping over him.
Between the agony and the overpowering diesel fumes, he wanted to
vomit.
Just keep talking,
Jack
, he ordered himself. “What, are you
talking about all those trucks filled with seed and your little
retrovirus?” he rasped. “We got them. We got them
all.”

“Lies,” the Naomi-thing hissed at
him.

“Believe what you want. But there’s
no way you’re getting out of here.”

“Getting free isn’t my intention,
Jack,” she reassured him, stepping closer. “You know of our
vulnerability to open flame. Our kind also suffers greatly from
ionizing radiation. What would make you sick would kill me.” It
came closer yet, only a few paces away now. “I know you must be in
incredible pain,” the creature said. “I could help you, Jack. I
could cure you.”

Something about
what the harvester was doing didn’t make any sense to Jack.
Why was it hanging around?
he wondered. It could just as easily have killed him, then
gone through the first blast lock to hide in the missile silo part
of the complex and figure out how to destroy the
seeds.

Because it
couldn’t
, his mind sang
out.

“You don’t know the security codes
to the blast locks, do you?” he asked. The door to the lab dome had
been left open, but Wade Livingston had closed and sealed the blast
doors to the rest of the complex after he had brought everyone out,
before his fateful journey to the antenna complex.

“No, I don’t,” it said. “Give them
to me, Jack, and I’ll let you go. And I’ll also let you have this.”
It held forth a yellow case. “The antivenin.”

“Bullshit,” Jack wheezed, suddenly
doubling over as the flames raging through his body entered his
abdomen. “It’s just a box you grabbed. Oh, God…”

“It’s the antivenin, Jack,” it said,
stepping beside him as he writhed on the floor. “The guards talked
about it while I was your captive. I knew what to look for. It
didn’t take me long to find it.” After a pause, it added, “I must
live, Jack. I’m the last of my kind now. We can sense others of our
species, and there are no more. You’ll have me trapped in the
missile complex. I won’t be able to cause anyone any
harm.”