Jack had lost count of how many rounds he’d fired from Mikhailov’s gun. The magazine held only seven rounds. He hung out the door, looking to the east as the sun burst over the horizon, putting the abomination hanging onto the tail of the aircraft into sharp silhouette. He took aim and fired.
The bullet missed the harvester and passed harmlessly through the rudder behind it.
Come on, Jack! He tried to calm himself. Come on!
He took aim and held his breath as the harvester again sent the plane nosing toward the ground, which was perilously close. He squeezed the trigger. The big gun fired, and the slide locked back: the magazine was empty.
The bullet grazed the back of one of the thing’s claws. Had they been on the ground, the hit would have hardly injured the creature. Here, the pain was enough for it to reflexively loosen its grip, and even a harvester couldn’t hang on with just one of its clawed appendages.
As the woman pulled the plane up into a steep climb with the earth mere meters below the main wheels, the harvester was wrenched free. Jack watched it tumble through the air until it splattered on the wet ground.
Holding onto his web belt, Mikhailov hauled Jack in. After tossing the Desert Eagle to the floor, Jack got to his knees and managed to close the door and dog it shut. Then he collapsed beside Mikhailov, leaning against the inside of the fuselage, which reeked of fertilizer, oil, and gasoline.
“I am thinking,” Mikhailov shouted as a thin trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth, which was parted in a pain-tinged smile, “that you need additional target practice.”
Unable to help himself, Jack laughed. “Next time I’ll let you do the honors, Sergei.”
His smile evaporated when he stood up and looked out one of the round windows in the cabin.
Behind them, another plane was lifting off from the airport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“God, what a nightmare.”
Garcia’s murmured words effectively captured the unreal scenes that greeted the passengers of the three SUVs as they made their way toward Santa Anita. The I-210 freeway had been reduced to a standstill, and after forcing their way along the shoulder, in one case having to shove a car blocking their path out of the way, the small convoy managed to get off on the exit for Corson Street. From there, they began weaving their way through residential streets toward the mall.
Around them, people were in a panic. They were fleeing south out of Altadena, even as more outbreaks were reported in other parts of the metropolitan area from Burbank to La Habra. The roads were choked with cars, and the situation was made worse by thousands who were fleeing on foot, many of them having abandoned their cars on the jammed freeways.
Naomi cursed as Garcia took them over a curb and onto a sidewalk, then cut through someone’s yard. He and Boisson were in the front seat of the lead vehicle. Naomi sat in the middle of the seat behind them, with a pet crate on either side, and two more agents sat behind her. Alexander was meowing constantly, while Koshka lay in a tense crouch, panting. Naomi hated to take them along, but they wouldn’t be returning to the safe house, and where the team was headed, the cats just might be invaluable.
She was dressed in black tactical gear now, as were the FBI agents, and all of them were well-armed with a mix of shotguns and assault rifles. Boisson had been extremely reluctant to do so, but under orders from Carl Richards and her boss in Los Angeles, she’d offered Naomi her choice of weapons. Naomi had chosen a shotgun.
Like Naomi, each agent also had a can of hairspray and bottle of lighter fluid stuffed into pouches on their combat harness, and several of the agents had Tasers. All of them had exchanged looks as Boisson had handed out these new “weapons,” but none of them had made any wisecracks. The fear that gripped the city had leached any trace of humor from all of them.
“Take a right up here, Garcia,” Boisson said, her voice tense. They were on Hugo Reid Drive, coming up on Baldwin Avenue, which ran right past the mall.
“Shit!” Garcia slammed on the brakes as a car shot over the curb from Baldwin and careened in front of him, clipping the front left fender of the SUV.
Naomi held onto the crates, the cats crying out in fear at the impact. As the car flashed by, she caught sight of the driver. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, because most of the poor soul’s head was covered by a larval harvester.
There was a crash behind them as the car took down a telephone pole and then slammed through the white wrought iron fence of the house on the corner before disappearing into the back yard.
Ahead, Baldwin Avenue was a bumper to bumper traffic jam in both directions, with those fleeing north trapped by the parking lot that I-210 had become, and those heading south pinned by the traffic on Huntington Drive that bounded the southern end of the mall. Many of the cars were empty, the occupants having fled on foot.
“Park alongside the road here,” Boisson told Garcia. “We’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”
The SUV bounced as Garcia took it over the curb and parked in the lush ivy ground cover that ran next to the sidewalk. The other SUVs followed suit.
Naomi had wondered why other cars hadn’t been trying to head away from the mall on the street they were on. Then she saw that the street was marked one-way, and that the flow of traffic was enforced by a barrier that would puncture the tires of a vehicle going the wrong direction.
As the other agents got out, she opened the crates and released the cats. Both wore one-piece harnesses around their chests that had a clip for a leash between the shoulder blades. Jack had long been in the habit of taking Alexander for walks outside, and once they were together in San Antonio, Naomi had gradually gotten Koshka used to the idea. The memory of their “family walks” around the neighborhood brought a brief smile to her face that faded as Alexander looked up at her with big, frightened eyes.
“I know, boy,” she whispered, clipping on his leash. She tried not to think of Jack, wondering where he was and what had happened to him. She now had her own set of worries to focus on. “I’m scared, too.”
After leashing Alexander, Naomi repeated the process with Koshka. “It’s going to be okay, baby. But I think we’re going to need your help. Otherwise, I never would have brought you.”
She stepped out of the SUV, and the two cats jumped after her. They circled around her feet, and Naomi had to sling her shotgun over her shoulder so she could keep the cats from tripping her with their leashes.
The agents, none of whom had ever seen a cat on a leash before, gawked and shook their heads.
“You’re nuts, Perrault.” Boisson was staring at her, a deep frown etched onto her face. “And if your stupid cats get any of my people killed, I’m going to kick your ass.”
Naomi turned a cold gaze on the special agent. “These ‘stupid cats’ have saved a lot of lives, including mine. And by the end of the day, they might save yours, too. Let’s get going.”
“Whatever. Garcia, you’ve got point.”
With Garcia in the lead, the group of sixteen FBI agents, Naomi, and the two cats set off toward the mall. Naomi, Boisson, and the two men carrying the big glass containers were in the center while the other men and women formed a protective ring around them. The cats slunk low to the ground, their tails down, beside Naomi, their eyes wide and their ears alternately pricking up, then laying back against their skulls. Neither of them were making a sound now.
“So let me get this straight,” Boisson asked. “You don’t want any of the big ones, just those nasty slimy things?”
Naomi nodded. “If we can capture one of the adults, that’s a plus. But our priority has to be capturing at least one of the larval forms. We know a lot about the adults, but nothing about the larvae. And we’ll learn about the adults as the captured larvae mature.”
Boisson didn’t bother to mask her distaste. “Well, that makes things simpler, at least. God, what’s that noise?”
Off to their left came a horrible sound, screams, but not fro
m any human throat.
“I think it’s the horses,” Garcia called over his shoulder.
“Horses?” Naomi was confused.
“Yeah. There’s a horse track right over there,” Boisson nodded in the direction of the cries of equine terror and the hammering of the horses trying to batter their way out of their stalls. “Santa Anita Park, just north of the mall here. Thank God there isn’t a race today, or there’d be thousands more people here. God, those poor animals.”
Garcia turned to look at Boisson. “Which way?”
“Straight across the parking lot to the nearest set of doors.”
The parking lot was roughly half full. Most of the cars had been abandoned, and the rest were desperately trying to get out the mall exits, but had nowhere to go because the adjoining streets were already blocked. People fled past them, nearly all heading south along Baldwin Avenue. None of the people were fleeing north, for no one wanted to come any closer to the unholy cries coming from the stables.
“Look at that!” One of the FBI men was pointing at a dark form loping across the parking lot, chasing after some of the refugees from the mall. He and several others raised their rifles.
“Hold your fire!” Boisson’s command cut through the air like steel.
“But…” The agent stared at her, mouth agape.
“Hold your fire, Perkins.” She spoke directly to him, but her words were meant for the others, too. “We’ve got a job to do, first. We can’t afford to get tied up out here.” To Naomi, her eyes following the thing as it leaped upon a running woman and shoved its stinger in her back, she whispered, “They’re real. Sweet Jesus, they’re real!”
Beside Naomi, the cats had come alive. Alexander, his ears laid back flat against his big head, stared at the harvester and hissed, exposing his half-inch long fangs. Koshka, who hardly ever vocalized, growled deep, sounding like a large dog, as she, too, watched the creature.
Triggered by some unknown imperative, they both lunged in the harvester’s direction.
“Shit,” Boisson breathed, unable to credit what her eyes were telling her. “I’ve never seen cats act like that!”
“You won’t, except around harvesters,” Naomi said tightly as she pulled the cats along, their claws scratching on the pavement.
They continued across the lot toward one of the big box department stores on the corner. Naomi hoped and prayed that they’d be able to find what they were looking for without going too deep into the mall. There were plenty of victims near the theater, but that was on the other side, and she suspected that by now most of them would be too big to get into one of the glass carboys.
The glass doors at the entrance were shattered, and four bodies, including a young boy, lay in bloody heaps after being trampled to death.
Garcia glanced over his shoulder at Boisson, and she gave him the hand signal to proceed.
Assault rifle tucked tight into his shoulder, his boots crunched on the glass as he led the other agents inside.
The interior of the store was a shambles. Worse, parts of it had been cast into darkness.
“What happened to the lights?” One of the female agents asked.
“The larval forms love rubber and plastic,” Naomi answered. “One of them might have gotten into the power cables or breaker boxes and shorted something out.”
“Christ.”
As they passed by the jewelry display, Naomi caught sight of something. “Wait a minute.”
“Halt,” Boisson called to the others. The agents stood or knelt, facing outward, weapons at the ready.
Naomi went to a display that had necklaces for girls made of bright plastic beads. She grabbed all of them. “Bring me the carboys.”
The two agents carrying the big glass jugs set them down. Naomi unscrewed the caps, then dropped the necklaces through the narrow mouths of the carboys before screwing the lids back on.
“Bait, right?” Boisson asked.
“Right. Plastic and rubber has a lot of carbon. We can’t handle the things or allow them to touch us. I’m hoping the plastic will entice them to just crawl right in.”
“Nice. A great new use for plastic baubles. Okay, let’s go.” Boisson motioned for Garcia to start forward again.
“Boisson,” Naomi said, looking up at the ceiling. A lot of tiles were missing, their remains scattered around the floor.
Boisson’s eyes followed where Naomi was looking. The other agents noticed, and looked up, too. “Do you think…?”
Naomi nodded. “Yes. Some crawled along the pipes and wiring up there, then dropped down through the ceiling.”
“Great.” Drawing a deep breath, she called to Garcia, “Move it. But make sure you guys watch the ceiling, too.”
There were muttered oaths from the men and women around her as they began moving forward again, each of them casting fearful glances at the ceiling with every step.
They passed seven more bodies before they reached the entrance to the mall itself. Four of them had been crushed in the panic, and a fifth was an elderly woman who had probably died of a heart attack, a rictus of terror still frozen on her face.
As for the remaining two, they had been decapitated.
Naomi knelt next to the first one to examine it. “Hold them, will you?” She handed the leashes for the cats to Boisson. Naomi knew it was safe at the moment, because the cats were back to merely being terrified.
The body was that of a man, Naomi guessed in his mid thirties. She examined the wound, which looked like something had taken a nearly perfectly semicircular bite out of the top of his torso. But it wasn’t a bite, nor was the wound made by any weapon: the edges were soft, as if the flesh had been dissolved. Of the head, there was no sign. There was a large pool of blood on the floor, although not nearly as much as she would have expected. The victim’s heart must have stopped beating before the wound had been completed.
The other body, of what looked like a teen girl, was the same.
“So they just eat heads?”
Naomi looked up at Boisson, who was studying the girl’s body with professional interest. “We don’t know anything about their feeding patterns. We captured some of the adults when I was in the Earth Defense Society, but they had refused to eat anything while in captivity. But this?” She shook her head. “Why would they bother to eat the heads over any other part of the body, unless…”
“Unless what?”
Naomi’s mind raced. That must be how they do it, she thought. They can mimic a body’s appearance perfectly, but what about the mind? How did they acquire the victim’s mannerisms, how they talked, the things the victim knew that made him or her unique, and in no time at all? There had been a great deal of speculation in the EDS about how the harvesters managed the behavioral side of their mimicry, but they’d never had any hard data from which they could form conclusions.
She feared that she was looking at the answer. Somehow, the things must be able to absorb at least part of the information stored in the victim’s brain. And as they learned more, they could adapt ever faster to new circumstances and environments.
“Naomi?”
“Nothing.” She took the leashes back from Boisson and stood up. “Let’s keep going.”
With a scowl, Boisson signaled Garcia, and the team moved into the mall.
* * *
Garcia had to work hard at controlling his breathing. He’d done a hitch with the Marines and had seen some action in Afghanistan before joining the Bureau, but this was something else entirely. He still couldn’t believe the things he’d seen, both on the television before coming here and then the thing out in the parking lot. He wanted to believe it was nothing more than a huge hoax, that they had been co-opted into some sort of new reality show, and that maybe Boisson was the only one in on the deal.
But he’d worked with her long enough to know that she was scared, too. Most people who didn’t know her wouldn’t be able to tell, but he could. And he’d never seen anything scare that woman.
&n
bsp; Keep it cool, he told himself. He scanned ahead of them, swiveling his torso as he aimed the shotgun. The mall here was empty, although he could still hear screams echoing through the corridors. The devastation wasn’t quite so evident as it had been in the store they’d come through, although there were still plenty of signs of panic. Several of the small kiosks in the center of the mall had been upended, their contents spilled over the shiny tile floor, and the displays in the storefronts were in disarray. In one of them, a large glass pane had shattered outward, with some of the shards coated in blood. Garcia imagined that someone must have leaped through it in an effort to escape them.
He gulped involuntarily as he thought again of what he’d seen in the parking lot. It was something out of a horror movie, but wasn’t nearly as terrible as the larval forms, as Dr. Perrault called them. The oozing things that he’d seen on the television, and the focus of their mission here, were an abomination.
As they passed a shoe store, the cats started hissing and growling again. That, too, was something Garcia found to be terribly unnatural, but at least the cats were on their side.
One of the displays in the store fell over, spilling colorful shoes to the floor, and everyone on the team pointed their weapon in that direction.
“Let’s take a look,” Perrault called softly as she reined in the cats. The big black and white one, bigger than any cat Garcia had ever seen, was straining at the leash like a dog, his razor sharp canines gleaming.
Boisson gave him the hand signal to move toward the store.
“Watch where you step,” Perrault called. “And watch the ceiling.”
Right, Garcia thought. He already felt as if he were turning into a chameleon, with eyes swiveling independently in their sockets to look up and down at the same time.
He stepped quickly around one of the black pillars that flanked the entrance to the store, his finger tensing on the trigger.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 28