Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3)

by Michael R. Hicks

  It looked at the cheap digital watch on its wrist. Turning to one of its kin, it nodded.

  While the humans around them were preoccupied with watching an air battle rage overhead, the thing raised a portable radio handset to its ear and spoke into the microphone. It had made this check every half hour since Kiran had left their company. The thing was not sure if Naomi Perrault would take their offer, but knew that in the end, if the humans wanted to survive without leaving their world a nuclear wasteland, she and those with authority over her would have no choice.

  The great question, of course, was whether the radio had the power to reach Naomi so far away, should she ever appear.

  All they could do, the thing knew, was to continue trying. There was no other choice.

  ***

  “Naomi…ault. Calling Nao…”

  The voice was heavily accented and weak, barely audible through intermittent static on the channel.

  “That’s them!” Naomi exclaimed. “The signal’s weak, but it’s them. It has to be. Who else out here would know my name?”

  “That’s great, kid, but we don’t have direction finding gear. How the hell are we supposed to find them?”

  Naomi listened again as the voice repeated the message before fading away. “They said something that sounded like raz, or razi. Does that make any sense?”

  “The map I’ve got shows a border crossing about forty kilometers south of here,” Kiran said from the passenger cabin, where he and two other men, Naomi’s security team, sat. “Khoy-Qator-Razi, it’s called. That might fit.”

  Naomi looked at Ferris, who shrugged. “We sure don’t have anything going on up here but fireworks.”

  “Okay,” she told him. “Head south and let’s see if we can find this place.”

  “With pleasure,” Ferris said, relieved. “Those idiots firing the artillery are starting to drop shells all over the place. I’d rather not have one fall through the rotors.”

  Ferris wheeled the helicopter to the southwest, flying as low as he dared over the unfamiliar terrain. They passed several more villages and small towns located near the border. All of them were getting pounded by Iranian artillery.

  “Christ,” he grumbled, “as if we don’t have enough trouble with the harvesters without everybody trying to kill off their neighbors.”

  “People are terrified,” Naomi said as they flew by another town, Beyarslan, which was wreathed in smoke. “And for all we know, the harvesters could have orchestrated this.”

  “Then why the hell are we trying to help them?”

  She turned to him. “We’re not. They’re here to help us, I hope. Because if they don’t or can’t…” She fell silent and looked away.

  A few minutes later they reached the D300 road. “Turn east,” Kiran said. “This road should take you right to the checkpoint.”

  “Yah,” Ferris said. “The five bazillion cars and ten times as many people down there were a clue.”

  Naomi craned her head, looking down. “Look at them all!”

  The road and every square inch of traversable ground alongside was packed with people streaming west.

  “How the hell are we supposed to find them?” Ferris wanted to know.

  “Why don’t we just ask?” Naomi keyed the microphone, transmitting on the special frequency. “This is Naomi Perrault. Come in, over.”

  “This is Vijay.” The signal was strong now, but she could barely hear Vijay’s voice over the tumult in the background. “Where are you?”

  “We’re in a helicopter just west of the border checkpoint at Khoy-Qator-Razi. Can you see us?”

  After a moment, the thing replied, “Yes, we see you. We are still on the Iranian side. Can you retrieve us here?”

  Naomi looked at Ferris, who had tuned into the conversation. He shook his head emphatically and mouthed no fucking way. “Negative. In case you hadn’t noticed, Iran and Turkey aren’t getting along too well right now, and we’d prefer not to get shot down. You’re lucky the Turks are still letting people through.”

  “They’re not,” Al said, pointing. “Look.”

  The flow of people and vehicles through the Turkish side had stopped, and soldiers had taken up positions to make sure no more came through. Some turned to look at the helicopter, and a few brandished their guns.

  “It looks like you’re cut off,” Naomi told the harvester. “You’re going to have to figure out another way across.”

  ***

  The Vijay-thing lowered the radio to its side. The others of its kind, all eight of them, were clustered together. “We must get across,” it said in Azerbaijani, a language the others understood through the humans they had taken. While some of the humans around them might be able to hear their words, speaking in a local tongue would arouse less suspicion than the English or Hindi they had acquired from the passengers of the Indian plane that had carried Vijay and Kiran Chidambaram.

  The others, instinctively reacting in character with their human mimicry, nodded. While a human might consider the Vijay-thing the leader of the group, its own kind had no such notion. They did not vie for dominance through physical combat or ritual posturing. Leadership ebbed and flowed from one individual to another, depending on the decision matrix of the others in its company. Its kind could work well in groups, even in the masses of tens of thousands that were sweeping through humanity’s cities, but they were just as comfortable in complete solitude. The latter had become more pronounced for the Vijay-thing as it had achieved sentience. After leaving behind its reproductive phase, its taste for being in groups, especially large ones, had lost its luster once it had discovered that it was prey to its immature kin just as much as the humans or any other form of organic matter.

  “One must be sacrificed that the others may live,” it said.

  No discussion, no arguing, no voting, no group selection or consensus was required. It was up to each individual to decide, and if none chose the path of sacrifice, then so be it. But the thing knew that one would choose, for it was logical to do so and fulfilled what had become a desperate survival imperative for the group as a whole to survive. That, above all, was paramount.

  A young woman, whose face gave the appearance of being in her mid-twenties, nodded. Like a shadow, she drifted away from them through the crowd, which had begun shouting a chant demanding the Turks open the gates.

  A few moments later, the chants turned into screams.

  DUNKIRK

  “You’ve got lousy timing, Dawson,” Major Baird told him as she quickly shook his hand. She was short, barely coming up to his shoulder, with strands of copper hair struggling to free themselves from beneath her helmet.

  As she read Jack’s orders, he took in their surroundings. The 68th Street Pumping Station was a cavernous building two hundred feet long and a hundred and thirty feet wide, two stories tall. The ground level held enormous pumping machinery that reached as high as the second floor mezzanine. But the pumps were silent now, the electric grid having long since failed. Baird’s makeshift headquarters was on the mezzanine’s west side, which looked out over South Oglesby Avenue. Soldiers were positioned at each of the big windows, waiting for the onslaught they knew was coming.

  “Okay,” she said, handing back the rumpled, dirty paper. “You’ve got my attention, but I’m not sure how I can help you other than sending you to the beach like everyone else. I just hope you get picked up before we all get fried to a crisp.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack said.

  “The president’s authorized a nuclear strike on the greater Chicago area. They’re going to hold off nuking the safe zone until the ships have pulled off, but as you can hear, that’s not going to be long.”

  Outside, the din of screaming civilians had reached a crescendo. Then someone screamed, “Open fire!” Every soldier in the pumping station began blasting away at the harvesters that were flooding down 68th Street, savaging the rear of the crowd trapped beyond the fence line.

  “Don�
��t tell me you plan to make this your last stand?”

  “No, I’m not the suicidal type,” she told him. “You saw the fuel tanker, right?”

  “Yeah. You’re going to light off a burning moat, I take it.”

  “Precisely. And we’ve run the pipes across the entire block along Oglesby between 68th and 69th Streets, then all the way back to the beach east of us. That should keep the bastards out for a little while until we can get to the ships and get the hell out of here. Once the civilians have passed us by, I’m lighting it off.”

  “Lieutenant,” she shouted over the sound of the machine guns firing into the mass of dark forms that began to spill down Oglesby Avenue, heading for the fence, “light up the moat.”

  “But there are people still out there!” Terje said, aghast.

  Baird gave him a brief, hard look. “I know that, captain.”

  The lieutenant, a sick look on his face, repeated her orders into his field radio.

  Melissa, hands over her ears to muffle the weapons fire, was staring out the window. Then she turned and shouted, “Jack! Look!”

  Jack’s heart caught in his throat as his gaze followed Melissa’s pointing finger. A familiar black and white shape dashed across Oglesby Avenue toward the pumping station, no doubt drawn by the other cats. Following right behind was a mass of harvesters, which began turning into fireballs under the impact of incendiary and tracer rounds. But more kept coming.

  Whirling to Baird, Jack shouted, “Stop! Don’t light off the gas!”

  But it was too late. Sprinklers rigged to dispense the gasoline outward toward the street began spewing amber liquid, which ignited into sheets of flame.

  ***

  Alexander was beyond fear, beyond terror. His muscles trembled with exhaustion, his breathing was an endless series of rapid heaves through his burning lungs, and the pads of his feet were raw and bloody. Still, he ran. He would run until his heart gave out and he died, for his instincts would let him do nothing less.

  Close behind him, he could hear the clicking and scrabbling of claws on concrete and asphalt, the wailing screeches of the things that pursued him. Their stench had overpowered the sweet smell of the water and the scent of his own kind, many of them, just ahead. He was so close now, he could see them, but the things were catching up to him.

  The building ahead, where his kin and many humans were gathered, erupted in flashes and bangs. He flinched at the sounds, but did not change course.

  The things pursuing him began to burst into flame, and he fought to dodge the bits and pieces that flew from their corpses as they stumbled and fell to the ground. More and more died, so close that the heat singed his tail.

  Humans were trying to close the gate even though more humans were trying to press through. The soldiers fired their weapons, and the humans closest to the gate began to die.

  The gate slid closed. The humans trapped outside tried to flee,but there was nowhere for them to go. Harvesters pounced and brought them down.

  While the gate was now closed, Alexander could see that it was made of vertical bars and designed to keep out larger creatures such as humans, not smaller predators like himself. He would be able to slip in between the bars.

  He was so close now. Lowering his head slightly, he put all he had left into a final sprint to the black bars.

  A foul smelling liquid fountained upward from just in front of the fence. Had there been any other choice, he would have turned away. Instead, he dashed forward, right into the spray, his panting turning into a cry of surprise and pain as the liquid burst into flame.

  ***

  Jack never remembered running down the stairs as he ran for the gate. One of the soldiers there aimed his rifle at the small, four-legged torch that staggered through the bars.

  Jack slammed into him, sending the man flying, before he threw himself on top of the screaming cat, driving Alexander to the ground in an attempt to smother the flames. Alexander writhed and fought, biting and clawing.

  He felt himself being hauled over, exposing Alexander to the air. Jack was opening his mouth to scream in rage when he saw Terje standing over him, a fire extinguisher in his hands. He squeezed the handle, and a frigid blast of carbon dioxide washed over man and beast, quickly extinguishing the flames.

  The cat struggled for a few more seconds, growling and snapping, then went limp in Jack’s arms.

  “No, no,” Jack whispered as he got to his knees, cradling Alexander to his chest. “You stupid, stupid cat.”

  Melissa was standing beside Terje, tears streaming from her eyes.

  Alexander twitched, and Jack wanted to shout with joy as he felt the cat’s rib cage move. He was still breathing, still alive.

  “Come on, Jack,” Terje said, hauling him to his feet. He was carrying Jack’s weapon. Jack didn’t remember dropping it. “We’ve got to get to the beach!”

  With Alexander’s limp body in his arms, Jack let Terje lead him. Melissa ran alongside, her fingers holding Jack’s combat harness and her eyes darting up to look at Alexander, while Hathcock covered them from behind.

  They could see nothing beyond the wall of flames that Baird had engineered. The flames shot up fifteen to twenty feet high, arcing out into the streets near the pumping station, and onto the trees and manicured lawns of the South Shore Golf Course that led to the rocky shoreline. A quarter mile long from Oglesby Avenue to the beach, and a tenth of a mile across, this new safe zone now protected thousands of civilians who were crowding along the shore.

  “The fire can’t last long before the tanker runs out of fuel,” Terje said.

  They came to an abrupt stop just short of the tree line that bounded the eastern edge of the second hole fairway, almost three hundred feet from the shore. Ahead of them, stretching to both sides of Baird’s fire wall, were thousands of people, packed in shoulder to shoulder. Jack couldn’t tell what was happening at the shoreline; all he could see was people and more people.

  “What do we do now?” Melissa looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes. She gently ran a finger over the singed fur of one of Alexander’s feet, careful to avoid the bleeding pads.

  “I don’t know, honey,” he told her.

  Alexander struggled for a moment, then gave up with a mournful mewling sound. Jack looked down at his feline friend, hoping that he wasn’t as badly hurt as he looked. One ear had a chunk missing from a harvester Alexander had fought over a year ago, but now both ears were charred and bleeding. The whiskers on his muzzle and over his eyes were burned off, his black nose was blistered, and every inch of his tuxedo coat was singed, in some places down to the skin. His tail, normally long and fluffy, looked more like a cooked rat tail. Despite all that, the cat’s thick coat had saved him from burning to death. Most of the gasoline that had sprayed over him had just run off.

  “Thanks, Terje,” Jack said, remembering that he’d never thanked his friend.

  “For what?”

  “For saving this big lug’s life. I should’ve thought of grabbing an extinguisher, but…”

  The rest of his apology was lost as he heard a familiar voice call his name. “Major Dawson!”

  They turned to find the lieutenant from the pumping station and four soldiers running toward them.

  “Come with me, sir. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  Standing shoulder to shoulder, the soldiers formed a wedge and began to push into the crowd, working their way toward the southeast end of the temporary safe zone. The closer they came to the front, to the shoreline, the angrier people became. They cursed at the soldiers, who had to resort to using the butts of their rifles to convince people to make way.

  They were about halfway to the shore when a roaring noise arose from the direction of the water and steadily grew in volume.

  The crowd began to surge backward as a cry went up from those nearest the water, and Jack grabbed Melissa’s hand as she stumbled and nearly fell. Terje picked her up and carried her while Jack adjusted his hold on Alexander, w
hose limp bulk was making his arms burn with exertion.

  “Keep going!” The lieutenant shouted at his men. “Push forward!”

  The four soldiers shoved and pushed, fighting to move ahead against the crush of the people in front of them, who were now trying to get away from the lake.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Jack had to shout above the noise around them.

  The lieutenant turned to him and managed a smile. “It’s the fucking Navy!”

  At last, with one last heaving push, the group burst through the leading edge of the crowd onto the grass at the edge of the shoreline.

  “Watch out!” One of the soldiers shouted a warning before firing his weapon at a dark shape undulating in the water around the edge of the flaming wall. The other soldiers joined in, chopping the harvester to pieces before it sank out of sight. The malleable flesh sparked and tried to ignite from the tracer rounds, but the water extinguished the flames.

  The noise was coming from an enormous hovercraft racing toward them across the water. Three others were circling farther out in the lake.

  “What is that thing?” Terje asked.

  “It’s an LCAC,” the lieutenant told him. “Landing Craft Air Cushion. The Navy uses them to get the Marines ashore for amphibious assaults.”

  “I hope they’re not bringing Marines here,” Jack said as the big craft, which was almost a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, slowed as it approached the shore. It had a control cabin on its right side in a blocky, rectangular superstructure that ran down the side of the craft, ending in a massive shrouded propeller at the stern. The left side was similar, except for the lack of the control cabin, and between the two superstructures was an enormous open cargo area with ramps at the bow and stern. A flexible black skirt bulged out around it, making it appear that the dark gray craft was sitting on top of a huge inner tube. Two large vent nozzles on the superstructures swiveled to and fro, keeping the craft on course as it slid over the rocks and onto the grass, where it quickly settled to the ground as the engines spun down.