Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3)

by Michael R. Hicks

  The Seven, as the harvesters were being called in the rumor mill, awaited them. They were all in human form, but a chill fluttered down Naomi’s spine and gooseflesh broke out on her arms as she entered the cool air of the lab. Their leader had adopted the guise of Vijay Chidambaram, which deeply unsettled her.

  She glanced up at the ceiling as the doors slid shut, leaving Jack and the others on the protective detail outside. The lab was equipped with remotely controlled pods in the ceiling that held steerable Tasers and darts filled with formaldehyde, and the fire suppression system had been replaced with one that would instead turn the lab into an instant inferno.

  Turning around, she waved at Jack and the others through the thick armor glass window. A dozen cats, Koshka among them, crouched on the shelf that had been installed especially for them. She could see their mouths move as they voiced their fear and loathing of the harvesters in hisses and growls.

  “Naomi,” the Vijay-thing said in the voice of the gentle Indian she had known, taking her attention away from the cats. Like its six companions, the thing wore surgical scrubs the humans had provided. Behind it, a door stood open to one of the larger containment cells on this level, where the harvesters could retire to rest, should they so require, and feed on the raw beef they were given. “We are ready.”

  “Good,” she said with a faltering smile. “Let’s get to work.”

  ***

  After a round of awkward introductions, the human researchers paired up with their harvester companions and began to instruct them in how to use the systems and access the data, for until they understood that much, they would be of little help.

  While the others were doing that, Naomi took Vijay aside and sat down in a corner of the lab. “I want you to give me more details about the three keys that you mentioned,” she told him. It, she had to remind herself. It’s not human. “We were able to figure out the first one that you sent with Kiran, which has to do with the outer protein receptors.”

  The Vijay-thing smiled at her. “Yes, that is correct. I know you would have figured those out without terrible difficulty, but it seemed to be a good opener for our dialogue.” It cocked its head. “You still do not believe in our sincerity, do you?”

  She leaned back, folding her arms. “Let’s just say that I have a hard time accepting it without concrete proof. Trust is something that’s going to be in rather short supply for a while, I’m afraid.”

  “That is true for both sides, I fear.” It gestured toward Jack, Kiran, and the Marines who waited outside. “I know that Kiran, for example, would like nothing more than to set us all alight and watch us burn, and should things not go as well as you would like, he might take it upon himself to…”

  “Stop it,” Naomi snapped. The Vijay-thing closed its mouth, giving her a quizzical look. “Manipulation is another one of your specialties. Planting ideas in our heads, sowing the seeds of doubt or fear. Every man and woman standing out there would love to put you and your friends to the torch.” She leaned toward it. “So would I. So stop with the games and let’s focus on finding a solution that will keep both our species alive.”

  It shrugged. “So be it. I was merely trying to be honest. As for the remaining two keys, one that I’m sure you must be aware of by now are the coded receptors within the cell that control genetic replication.”

  “Yes. That was certainly high on our list, since we can’t do anything else until we get past that.”

  “We shall help you…open the door, shall we say.”

  It smiled again, and Naomi got a queasy sensation in her stomach. “And the third key?”

  “The third is the master key,” the thing told her with a flourish of its hands. “It is the key to our genetic code.” It leaned closer. “First, we would greatly reduce the reproductive rate, and limit reproduction only to those of our kind who had achieved sentience. Second, we would eliminate swarming by degrading the ability of the non-sentients to communicate with one another in their rudimentary fashion. Instead, we can turn them against themselves. With those two changes alone, we would be able to gain control of the planet.”

  We would be able to gain control of the planet. The thing’s choice of words were not lost on her.

  ***

  With Hathcock in tow, Melissa wandered through the complex. She had been surprised when she hadn’t been sent straight to some lab for a bazillion tests like she had at the hospital in Chicago. Instead, a lady doctor had asked her a lot of questions about her symptoms. The questions had all been asked before by other doctors, but this one had an endless supply of jokes that kept Melissa laughing the whole time.

  Then came the part she really didn’t like: getting her blood drawn. But this time she didn’t mind at all. The young Navy corpsman who handled the needles and little vials was totally, awesomely hot, and she had to restrain a nervous giggle at practically every word he said. She felt like a complete moron, but there it was. And he looked at her without a trace of pity, fear, or loathing. That made her like him all the more.

  The doctor came back in and took samples, a lot of samples, of the fibers, along with a few small bits of skin. Picking the fibers out had been more uncomfortable than painful. Every time the doctor plucked one out, or a bunch that were in one of their nasty little knots, Melissa felt like cockroaches were sent scurrying under her skin.

  After double-checking that she had everything she needed, the doctor told one last joke, which left Melissa laughing so hard tears were running down her cheeks, before releasing her to Hatchcock’s care.

  As Melissa was leaving the lab, she caught sight of the corpsman one last time. He smiled and waved at her, and she thought she would die right then and there.

  You’re just being a stupid little girl, she told herself. But she left the lab smiling, just the same.

  “Let’s go see Alexander now,” she said to Hathcock. “Can we?”

  “Sure,” he said. “The vet clinic is downstairs.”

  “Isn’t that where the harvesters are?”

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  “Why do they keep the animals close to where those awful things are?”

  Hathcock looked uncomfortable. “Well…”

  “They use them for experiments, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” the soldier — the sniper, she corrected herself — said. “I don’t know what all they do with them, though.”

  “They wouldn’t use Alexander, would they?”

  Hathcock laughed. “No, kid, we don’t use cats for any of that kind of stuff. They don’t carry any weapons, but they’re our guardians all the same. And Alexander, he’s a bit of a furry hero.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he saved Jack’s life a couple times back when there were just a few harvesters for us to fight. Then he saved us again from a harvester when we got to the cemetery where we got you. The damn cat ought to get a medal.”

  They went down the stairwell and through the sub-basement security checkpoint, which had a stainless steel mantrap and was guarded by four Marines and a pair of leashed cats.

  “This way.” Hathcock led her down the main corridor to a door labeled Veterinary Clinic. He ran his badge through the reader and punched in a four digit code. The door clicked open and he pushed inside, Melissa trailing behind him.

  The first thing she noticed was the smell. It was almost exactly like the lab where the doctor had taken samples of Melissa’s skin, but had an underlying musky odor that reminded her of the dirty vacuum cleaner bags her mother made her change when they cleaned the house.

  She felt hot tears welling up in her eyes at the memory, and she angrily brushed them away.

  “May I help you?” The veterinarian got up from one of two workstations in the room and came over to greet them. The entire back wall, from floor to ceiling, was made up of stainless steel animal pens of various sizes. Most had thin bars across the front, while some had clear plastic. Off to Melissa’s right were two doors, labeled Surgery 1 and Surgery 2. />
  “We’re looking for Alexander the cat,” Melissa said. “We’re, uh, friends of his.”

  The vet smiled. “He’s right over here. Come on.”

  She led them into a small room that had Recovery on the door. “Here he is. Just be real gentle with him, okay? He’s full of painkillers, so he’s a little groggy.”

  The big cat, wrapped in pink bandages, was curled up in a padded pet bed in the corner, looking at them with half-open eyes. He mewled when Melissa dropped down on her knees next to him. “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”

  “He’s going to be fine. He’s got some minor burns on the more exposed parts of his skin and some of the pads on his feet were roughed up, but he looks a lot worse than he is.”

  “I wish I could take him back to my room. I could keep him company.”

  “Why don’t you, kid?”

  Melissa looked up to see Renee standing in the doorway.

  “I figured you’d probably be here after you escaped from that chamber of horrors upstairs,” Renee said, kneeling down to rub Alexander very gently under his chin, where the hair had been singed down to stubble. “If it’s okay with the doc, I’m sure Jack would be happy to have you watch over him.”

  “Can we?” Melissa looked up with hopeful eyes at the vet.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said. “He’s not in any danger, and I can come up and check on him periodically. You just need to keep him calm and quiet, okay?”

  “That means no obnoxious cartoons blaring on your TV or raucous parties, kiddo,” Renee said with a wink. “Hathcock, you want to carry this big lug so we can watch your biceps bulge?”

  The sniper frowned. “Let’s get a cart and put him on that. I’d carry him, but I need to keep my hands free.” He gestured with his right hand, which was closed round the grip of the AA-12 automatic shotgun that hung from his shoulder on a tactical sling. It went along with the big pistol that was strapped to his right thigh, a long knife that rode handle-down on the left side of his chest, and a combat vest stuffed full of grenades and extra magazines for the shotgun.

  “Fine, go ahead and ruin my day,” Renee teased the Canadian, who grinned. “Come on, kid. Let’s get this big fried fur ball out of here.”

  Ever so gently, the two of them lifted Alexander, still on his bed, onto the rolling table that the vet brought up from the back. Once he was in place, they slowly pushed him out into the corridor and headed toward Melissa’s room, Hathcock following along behind.

  ***

  Jack stared through the thick armor glass that stood between him, Terje, and the Marines and the lab where Naomi and the other members of her team were getting to know the harvesters. Microphones inside the room broadcast their voices into his ear through his radio. It was hard to make much out through the subdued babble, but it added another set of indicators to what he could see in case there was trouble. For now, the researchers sounded a little tense, as might be expected, but nothing more than that. Nor were there visible signs of trouble.

  He was concerned when Naomi took the Vijay-thing over to one corner to speak to it alone, but after a few moments the two of them concluded their conversation and she led him to a workstation. Naomi smiled and gave Jack a quick wave before sitting down. Vijay looked at him, nodded his head, then sat down beside her, both of them disappearing behind the computer monitors that were set up on the desk. All Jack could see now were the tops of their heads.

  As the first seconds stretched into minutes, and the minutes began to stretch into the first hour, the tension began to drain out of him.

  After two hours, Jack rotated the reaction detail, bringing in a fresh team. The uncertainty he had heard in some of the voices at the beginning was gone, replaced by excitement as the joint species research team got down to business. Some of them oohed and aaahed like kids in a toy shop, while others chuckled or laughed. Even Naomi laughed, a sound that cut through the half dozen other conversations going on in the lab.

  “If they were going to do something,” Terje said, “they would have done it by now.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. I still don’t like it.”

  The Norwegian snorted. “Who does? This is the worst of all possible worlds, but it’s the only thing we can do.” He grinned. “It’s sort of like drinking during the long winter in Norway.”

  Jack turned to the Marines. “We’re going to Condition Two,” he told them. Condition Two had two Marines at the door and four more within a minute’s call.

  “Yes, sir,” the Marine staff sergeant said. He turned and dismissed all but one of the Marines. “We’ll keep this watch, sir.”

  “Thanks, staff sergeant,” Jack said. “Okay, I guess we’ll…”

  “Jack.” It was Carl’s voice, breaking into the feed carrying the babble from the lab. “Where are you?"

  Jack stopped in his tracks at the tone of Carl’s voice. “I’m down at the lab. What’s up?”

  “Get up here right now,” Carl told him. “We’ve got a problem. A big one.”

  ZEALOTS

  “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it.” Terje handed the binoculars to Jack.

  “Yeah,” Jack breathed, taking another look. “Me, too. Christ, what a monster.”

  They stood on the rear deck of one of the eight-wheeled Marine LAV armored reconnaissance vehicles. Carl had assigned all six LAVs from the lab complex to deal with this particular problem.

  “I wish we had a battalion of tanks,” Jack muttered.

  They were stopped on a small rise a quarter mile east of the intersection of East Prairie Road and the American Legion Memorial Highway. The LAVs had left a gaping hole in the barb wire fence around the pasture where a couple dozen cattle had been grazing. The cows stood in a group, staring at the vehicles and lowing at them now and again.

  While the terrain the vehicles occupied could hardly be called a hill, it gave their occupants enough of a height advantage that they could see a mile or more in just about every direction. Jack’s attention was focused on what was in the fields to the east of their position. Analysts of the NGA, or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, now dispersed to several emergency facilities throughout the country, had noticed something strange appearing among some of the farms in America’s heartland. For lack of anything better, the analysts had called them crop circles.

  Since protection of the SEAL facilities was critical, they were given a high priority for imagery coverage. When crop circles started to appear on both sides of the Platte River between Central City and Grand Island, which was only ten miles from SEAL-2, NGA flashed a warning to the facility that landed on Carl’s virtual desk. Since Jack was as confident he could be that no imminent harm would come to Naomi or the others working with the harvesters, he took on the duty to investigate.

  “Larvae,” Terje whispered as he compared one of the satellite images with their current position and the location of the crop circle they were now staring at. “Impossibly huge. Some of the ones on this image must be as big as a sports field, flattened like a pancake. How is this even possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, “but we’d better get them now before they divide.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a calf, its bovine ears twitching, moving toward one of the LAVs. “Captain,” he said to Captain Aaron Lowmack, the Marine company commander. “Shoot it.”

  “Sir?” Lowmack glanced at the young cow, a look of incomprehension on his face.

  Not waiting for the Marines to react, Terje raised his rifle and took aim at the calf, which was now perhaps fifteen feet away from the other LAV.

  The animal froze and jerked its head around to look at the Norwegian just before he fired. The tracer round caught the beast right between the eyes. The calf burst into flame. It was close enough to the other LAV that burning chunks of malleable flesh spattered onto the vehicle, setting the paint and two of the tires on fire. The quick reaction of the vehicle’s crew, which produced a pair of fire extinguishers and put out
the flames, saved the vehicle.

  The LAVs opened fire on the rest of the cattle with their 25mm Bushmaster cannon and 7.62mm machine guns, blasting the hapless beasts into bloody, smoking meat.

  “Cease fire, goddammit!” Jack shouted into his mic, but it was too late. “Cease fire!”

  The guns fell silent.

  “Sir,” Lowmack, who was obviously shaken, said, “we thought the rest were…”

  “They can only mimic things that are roughly the same size as they are,” Jack said through gritted teeth, “which means about the same mass as a human being.”

  “But what if some of them are bigger, sir?” Lowmack asked. “Those larval things are. Why can’t some of the adults be bigger, too?”

  Jack opened his mouth, ready to bite the man’s head off for being an idiot, then snapped it shut. Terje was looking at him with a speculative expression on his face.

  “It’s a possibility we can’t discount, Jack,” Terje said. “Just because we haven’t seen larger adult harvesters doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  “Point taken,” Jack said. “That would be some really bad news.” He looked again at where the cows had been slaughtered, then he offered the Marine captain a grim smile. “Maybe we’ll have filet mignon tonight.”

  “No complaints here, major,” the man said, “although the owner probably isn’t going to be too happy.”

  “He can bill Uncle Sam,” Jack told him. Then in a quieter voice, added, “If he’s still alive.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Terje asked.

  Jack took out his map, which was folded in a camouflaged canvas case. “What sort of ammo are you carrying, captain?”

  “The LAVs have a full load of M792 rounds, high explosive incendiary with tracer, and the machine guns are loaded with tracer, as well.”

  “Okay, so in theory, even a single shot from either should set one of those big bastards on fire. So how about this: let’s head east to 2nd Road and set up a mobile barrier along there from M Road north of us, all the way south to the river, giving each vehicle a section of road to cover. That should let us block the larvae from getting to the airport, the town, and SEAL-2.”