Mikhailov did a quick translation for Jack.
“Dammit!” Jack cursed.
“He is repeating,” Mikhailov said in a tight voice. “I do not think he will ask again.”
* * *
Polkovnik Dmitri Andropov, the Mainstay’s mission commander, looked at the track of their quarry on Ignatiev’s scope.
“Give them a warning shot and order them to Kilpyavr Air Base,” the polkovnik said. “If they do not comply, shoot them down.”
“Yes, sir.” Ignatiev switched from the intercom to the control frequency for the aircraft assigned to him, two MiG-29s. “Tigr flight, you are cleared to fire a warning shot past the target’s nose.”
“Tigr lead, understood.”
* * *
Jack cringed as a stream of cannon shells blazed past the canopy, followed by a pair of fighters that thundered by, insanely close. They quickly disappeared into the slate gray clouds like great white sharks sinking into dark water.
“Jack!” Mikhailov had to shout over the An-2’s straining engine. Khatuna had pushed the throttle forward to keep the old biplane from falling out of the sky as it flew through the slipstreams of the two fighters. “They say they will shoot us down if we do not land at a nearby air base.”
Mikhailov’s face bore an agonized look, but it was not of physical pain. It was the anguish of failure.
They had reached the end of the line, only spitting distance from their objective. But there wasn’t any point in fighting the inevitable. Jack had thought earlier that it would be worth any sacrifice to get out of Russia, but now that the time had come, he couldn’t bear to sacrifice his friends. Had it only been himself, it might have been different. He knew that, if he asked, Sergei would gladly go on and perish in the fireball of the missile that one of the fighters must even now have locked on this antiquated plane. Perhaps even Khatuna would.
But he wouldn’t ask them to. “Do as they say,” he said. “Getting ourselves killed isn’t going to help anyone.”
Mikhailov nodded wearily, then spoke to the Air Force controller, informing him that they were turning toward Kilpyavr. “Khatuna,” he said, “bring us around to the east. Khatuna?”
She was staring straight ahead, a slack expression on her face. “I will not go back.”
The voice was hers, but something in how she said the words sent a chill down Jack’s spine.
“We must turn about, or they will fire!” Mikhailov tried to turn the copilot’s wheel, but Khatuna’s grip was like iron and the controls didn’t budge.
Twisting in her seat, she turned toward Mikhailov. Jack let out a shout of horrified surprise when a stinger burst from her chest and shot across the cockpit to stab Mikhailov in the stomach.
The Russian screamed, but it was as much in pain as it was in rage. His combat knife was suddenly in his hand, and with a savage slash he severed the stinger from the undulating tentacle connecting it to the Khatuna-thing. She/It, in turn, screamed, the shrill call of a wounded harvester.
Jack drew his own knife and drove it up to the hilt into the thing’s neck.
With an ear-shattering shriek, it elongated one of its arms, then slammed a fist against his head, then again. Reeling from the blows, Jack lost his grip on the knife and fell against the bulkhead at the rear of the cockpit.
Mikhailov, the stinger still embedded in his gut, managed to release his harness and hurled himself at the creature, driving his knife into its head again and again.
With a hiss, the harvester slammed Mikhailov backward against the instrument panel, one of its clawed appendages latched around his throat. In his struggles, he shoved the throttle to the idle position, and the plane shuddered as it lost airspeed.
Getting back to his feet, Jack yanked his knife from the thing’s neck and jammed it in again, twisting it savagely.
It released its grip on Mikhailov, then slammed him back against the bulkhead with an elbow that hit him like inch-thick steel rebar.
Jack sank to his knees, stunned.
“Get out, Jack!”
He looked up at Mikhailov, who was still wrestling with the creature. The Russian was bleeding in a dozen places from where the harvester’s claws had savaged him, but he refused to give in. It tried to drive a claw into his chest, but he managed to deflect it with one hand while pinning the thing’s other claw against its chest with his knife.
Beyond the two struggling figures, Jack could see snow-covered trees through the windscreen.
Mikhailov screamed as the thing wrestled its claws free, then shoved one of them into his chest, deep into his rib cage.
There was nothing else Jack could do. He ran back toward the rear of the plane. As the thing in the pilot’s seat flung Mikhailov’s body aside and regained control, Jack swung the door open to the bitterly cold air outside.
“Jesus,” he whispered as he watched the ground flash by, maybe fifty feet below. Even shuddering in the air on the verge of a stall, moving just fast enough to stay airborne above the trees, the An-2 seemed to be moving as fast as a rocket sled.
He caught a glare out of the corner of his eye, and saw something streaking out of the darkness toward him.
A moment later, the warhead of the R-73 air-to-air missile launched by one of the MiG-29s detonated, blotting the old biplane from the sky in a fiery cloud of smoke and debris.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Naomi stared at the monitors, watching the crippled harvester drag itself around the containment cell. It was obviously keeping its distance from the larva that mindlessly pursued its parent, which the larva viewed as nothing more than food.
Morgan had made his call to Richards, who had been stunned into momentary silence by the numbers Renee had come up with. Her projections had been checked by an analyst at FBI Headquarters and a team at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. All of them had come up with similar numbers. All of them had been scared out of their wits.
Richards had bumped the information up the line, and now they were waiting for a secure video teleconference call with the President. Morgan had wanted Naomi to come up and wait in the conference room, but she had preferred to stay in the monitoring room, focusing her thoughts and her hate on the harvester. Alexander and Koshka were with her. Koshka was in her lap, purring, while Alexander lay in a Sphinx position, his attention riveted on the thing in the monitor. She knew that normally he didn’t watch television, even when she turned on a nature program with birds or small rodents that fascinated Koshka. But here, the big cat somehow sensed that the thing on the screen, while not right there with them, was real. Every now and then a low growl escaped from his throat.
She knew that, as a scientist, it was wrong to hate the harvester and the others of its kind. Scientists were supposed to be objective, to make dispassionate observations of their subjects. These creatures weren’t inherently evil, nor did they bear any particular ill will toward humankind for what it was, any more than the average person despised a steer. The steer, however, did not realize its lot in life. Naomi and the others who now understood the full scope of the harvester threat, however, did. And she hated them for what they were, what they were now doing to her world.
Renee hadn’t helped lift her mood with what she’d told Naomi about what was happening in Russia. There had still been no word from Jack, and intelligence information that Naomi normally wouldn’t have been privy to indicated that the Russians were trying to find him because they believed he was the source of the harvester outbreak there. Naomi only hoped that Mikhailov and Rudenko could keep him safe.
The rest of the world where the other harvester outbreaks had occurred were mirror images of what was happening in Russia and, in a smaller microcosm, Los Angeles. Very little news was coming out of China after the government had severed most of the connections to the internet and telephone communications, but it was clear from what the Intelligence Community was reporting that southern China was a massive battleground, far worse than in Russia because China’s outbrea
k had occurred earlier. Martial law had been declared in several states in India, where a massive military mobilization was taking place. In South America, Brazil was quickly falling into anarchy, and French Army troops were fighting for their lives in southwestern France from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean.
In the United States, unconfirmed reports of harvesters had already come in from Seattle, Dallas, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and New York City, and people across the country were starting to panic.
Giving in to a sudden impulse, she reached out and activated the Taser in the instrument cluster at the top of the containment cell. It automatically tracked the adult harvester, and with a single press of her finger on the control it fired.
The weapon coughed as it spat its electrodes into the harvester’s flesh before hitting the creature with thousands of volts.
The harvester spasmed and went rigid. The features of the woman that it mimicked melted away to reveal its natural form.
The larva reached its prize, and Naomi leaned forward, aroused by morbid curiosity as the amoebic creature flowed onto one of the adult harvester’s shattered legs.
Sooner than should have been possible, the adult harvester began to gain control of its body. It twitched, then began to thrash, and a high keening issued from its throat as the larva moved farther up its leg.
Naomi watched as the limb began to disappear, dissolved and consumed by the larva. “The consumption rate is so fast,” she whispered, double checking that the system recorder was capturing the scene.
The harvester was in a frenzy now. Unable to shake the larva from its leg, it swung out its cutting appendage and began to hack away at the damaged limb. But the wave-edged blade must have touched the larva, for a tiny part of it stretched away from the oozing mass and clung to the blade.
Pitching and twisting, the harvester did everything it could to dislodge its cannibal offspring, all to no avail. Its legs, then the rest of its body, disappeared under the cover of the mottled blue and yellow of its child.
In just under five minutes, the adult was gone. The larva, much larger now, paused a moment to excrete a small pool of dark liquid, then moved around the chamber, searching for more prey.
Out of curiosity, she hit it with the Taser. The weapon had no effect. The electrodes disappeared into the mottled flesh and arced, but that was all. The thing continued to move about the enclosure, mindlessly searching for more food.
“Where’s the harvester?”
She looked up to see Renee staring, horror-struck, at the screen.
“Right where it belongs,” Naomi told her softly. “In Hell.”
“Come on kid.” Renee put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder. “It’s time.”
* * *
“I’ve been told the numbers, doctor, but frankly I’d rather hear them from you. Maybe your words will make more sense to me.”
President Miller looked as if he had aged a decade in the days since she had last seen him on television. In the high definition video teleconferencing display, he looked haggard. She couldn’t imagine the stress he was under, and little of what she had to tell him would bring any relief.
At the table beside him in the White House Situation Room were the vice president and several cabinet members, along with Carl Richards, who sat at the president’s right hand. All of them wore uniformly grim expressions.
“I’ll do my best, Mr. President.”
Miller nodded. “Then let’s get started, doctor, if you please.”
“Sir,” she began, “based on what is, as yet, a very small amount of directly-observed data, we’ve put together a rough projection of harvester population growth. While we need to refine our model with more detailed information, I think it’s close enough to give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem we face.”
Pressing a button on the computer beside her, she brought up a slide that showed an image of a harvester, and that would be projected on the president’s display. “The harvesters appear to be asexual, meaning that any harvester is capable of producing offspring by itself, without the need to mate. From what we learned in the confrontation with the first of these new generation creatures at Sutter Buttes, they also mature extremely quickly, and can transition from larva to adult in roughly twenty-four hours, perhaps less.”
“Christ,” someone muttered off-screen in the Situation Room.
“We don’t know yet for sure, but we’re assuming the worst at this point, that they’re able to reproduce as soon as they achieve their adult form. From what is admittedly still very sketchy data, it looks like they may be able to reproduce as often as once every hour.”
The vice president leaned forward. “That’s from your analysis of the creature from Kansas City?”
“Yes, sir,” Naomi said. “That and some other circumstantial data that one of our people,” she glanced at Renee, “put together. Again, it needs to be refined, but we believe it’s close.”
“All right, doctor,” the president said quietly, “I accept your assumptions. Now tell me exactly what it all means.”
“What it means, Mr. President, is that in just twenty-four hours, a single harvester could lead to a population of more than three hundred.”
On the screen, the chilling image of the harvester was replaced by an even more frightening chart that showed time along the horizontal axis and the number of harvesters along the vertical axis. For one day, the number of harvesters leaped from one to just over three hundred.
“In a week, the population that began with that single harvester would be more than fourteen thousand,” Naomi continued. “And in a month, there would be nearly two hundred and sixty thousand.” She paused, letting the numbers sink in. “This fits with what we saw in Los Angeles. We don’t have any way of knowing exactly when the index case, the first harvester, was created there. But my theory is that it was roughly a month ago, and that the first host was probably a mouse or rat that made its way to the sewer system where there would be an ample supply of organic material for them to live on. But with that sort of population growth…”
“They’d eventually have to move above ground,” Miller finished for her.
“Yes, sir. And I believe that’s why we saw such a sudden, overwhelming invasion of the city.” Turning back to the chart, she hit the forward button again, and the population leaped upward, going nearly vertical up the chart. “In a year,” she went on grimly, “the population would be more than thirty-eight million harvesters.”
“And all of that stemming from a single individual?” Miller looked like he was about to be sick.
“Yes, Mr. President.” She took a breath and pushed on. He has to know the whole truth. “But we’re not dealing with a single founding individual. We have six known initial clusters: Brazil, China, France, India, Russia, and Los Angeles, here in the U.S. We know for certain that India and Russia didn’t stem from single individuals: Jack Dawson reported that an entire village in India was exposed to infected corn, and the members of a research facility in Russia were similarly exposed. Each of those individuals would be an index case for an entire harvester population as I just described. As for Brazil, China, and France, we don’t have enough data to determine whether their infestations stemmed from a single individual or mass exposure.”
At the mention of Jack’s name, Carl looked up. He said nothing, but his expression was a mixture of sadness and pain that spoke volumes, and Naomi felt a worm of fear burrow its way into her stomach.
“So what are we talking about for longer term numbers? Doctor?”
She took a breath, trying to compose herself and set aside her instinctive fear. “Sir, the thirty day global estimate starting with the six initial hot zones is one point five million individuals. Minimum. In roughly five and a half years, the harvester population will exceed the current human population of the planet.” She paused. “If they breed unchecked, we’re looking at an extinction level event, and not just for humanity. The harvester larvae could eventually scour the pla
net clean of every form of life larger than a microbe.”
Everyone sat back, stunned. Several of them, including Miller, had already heard the numbers, but it had been impossible for them to grasp their sheer enormity and the terrifying implications.
“I must point out, however, that these figures are extremely conservative, and assume only a single initial harvester in each of those six countries. We know there were more, so the pace of their population growth is likely to be much higher.”
One of the others at the table in the Situation Room asked, “What about environmental impact?”
“Who gives a crap about the environment when we have people being killed?” The vice president shook his head in angry bewilderment.
“It’s actually a good question, sir,” Naomi said. “The harvester larvae eat nearly everything that isn’t based on something from the mineral kingdom, and can consume huge quantities of food before they molt into the adult form.” She suppressed a shudder as she remembered the enormous monstrosities they had seen coming from the race track at Santa Anita. “And since the ground zero for each infestation, with the exception of Los Angeles, is in the middle of the world’s largest grain producing regions, harvester larvae could devastate critical segments of our food supply, in addition to attacking people in those areas directly.”
The president’s fists clenched on the table. “So on top of everything else, we could be looking at an imminent famine?”
“Between destruction of crops and attacks by harvesters on people working in agriculture, yes, sir, I’m afraid so.”
“What about water?” The same person, a gray-haired woman with sharp blue eyes, asked. “Can these things thrive in freshwater lakes and streams, or in the oceans?”
The vice president frowned. “Again, who cares?”
Naomi suppressed her irritation at him, and was heartened that the woman refused to be cowed. The President seemed content to let the conversation run its course.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 39