Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3)

by Michael R. Hicks

  At last, it fell silent. The only thing she could hear now was the whump of the rotor blades of the helicopter outside and screams. There were lots of screams.

  Alexander tore out of her grip and hid under the mound of stuffing that was all that remained of her bed.

  “Hathcock?”

  He groaned.

  “Craig? Are you okay?” She rolled over to look at Hathcock. “Craig!”

  “Fuck,” he gasped. “Help me up.”

  She grabbed one of his arms and pulled, lifting him to a kneeling position. The floor beneath him was covered in blood. “Oh, God,” she said, “you’re hurt!”

  Right below them, where the entry doors were, they heard a crash, shouts, then gunfire.

  “Here, take this,” Hathcock gasped, pulling a small pistol from a pouch on the side of his combat harness and handing it to her.

  She held it as if it were a steaming turd. “I’ve…I’ve never fired a gun!”

  “It’s easy, kid. Just point and shoot.”

  “Okay, but this thing’s a toy. It might stop a squirrel.”

  He managed a grin. “It has magic bullets. If one hits their skin, you’ll get a nice fireworks show. Piece of advice: keep shooting until you’re sure the target’s dead.” He took a deep breath, wincing at the pain. “Now get your ass in the bathroom. Shoot anything that comes through there.”

  Using his shotgun, muzzle down, as a crutch, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered to the doorway.

  “Hathcock,” she pleaded, “stay here! Don’t go!”

  “Sorry, kid, but I need a better line of sight…to the stairs. Otherwise they’ll just gang up on us here and we won’t stand a chance.” He looked at her, and it was hard for her to hold back the tears. “You’ll be fine.”

  Then he was gone.

  She knelt in the bathroom, her eyes fixed on the empty doorway that led to the hall, the gun locked tight in her trembling hands.

  From somewhere under the bed, she could hear Alexander growl before another massive explosion outside drove her to the floor.

  ***

  “God, I could use a stiff drink.”

  Renee yawned as she watched Carl stand up from behind his desk and stretch. “I could use a dozen.”

  “Count me in,” Howard added as he rubbed his eyes.

  Carl tossed the electronic tablet he’d been clutching onto his desk. More reports, more bad news, he thought. This little meeting had been about trying to keep the other SEAL labs supplied as the road and rail networks continued to fray. They were having to shift nearly everything to airlifts, but that was putting even more strain on the looming fuel shortage. Oil refineries had been given a higher priority for security than even nuclear plants, because once the fuel flow, especially diesel and jet fuel, stopped, they’d be done. Finished. And it wasn’t just for running vehicles and airplanes, it was for throwing up fiery walls to stop the harvesters. That simple expedient, above all others, seemed to work. It had worked in Chicago when the safe zone had been overrun, and had been used in several other places, as well.

  The only downside was that it only worked as long as you had fuel to keep the fire burning. Once it went out…

  All of the SEAL facilities were at one hundred percent for their fuel reserves and were being continually topped off, but it was getting harder to get the tanker trucks through from the distribution centers and rail lines. As for the rest of the country, that was someone else’s problem.

  “I think I’ll go down and see how Naomi is making out with her pets,” Carl said.

  Renee saw something moving through the window behind him, and the sound of the helicopter that had been coming in to land got louder. A lot louder. The Black Hawk looked like it was about to fly right through the window.

  “Carl, look out!”

  Carl turned to look out the window, then dove across the desk and rolled to the floor. Grabbing her in his arms, he yanked her down beside him as Howard pitched forward out of his chair.

  The window shattered, blasting fragments across the room from an explosion outside. Then a 7.62mm minigun opened fire.

  The base alarm began to blare.

  Renee raised her head up and he shoved it back down to the floor. “Are you nuts?”

  She struggled to get out from under him, to no avail. “Dammit, what’s happening?”

  “What do you think? We’re under attack!”

  The building shuddered as the bullets from the minigun hammered into the concrete, but the lab was made of stern stuff and none penetrated inside other than the ones that blasted through the window.

  But nothing in the compound short of the M1 tanks could stand up under a concentrated burst from the weapon, and Carl heard the main entry doors on the ground floor let go. Then the weapon moved on as the sound of the helicopter changed, moving away to strafe the rest of the compound.

  “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here! Crawl to the doorway and get down the hall!”

  Renee did as he said, and Carl ushered Howard out before he followed himself, stopping only long enough to grab one of the AA-12 shotguns from the rack just inside the office door.

  “Give me one of those.”

  Carl turned to look at Howard, a frown on his face.

  “Come on! Just because I’m rich doesn’t mean I’m helpless. I’ve shot skeet every other weekend for the last thirty years. Give me the damn thing!”

  With a shrug, Carl grabbed a second weapon and handed it to him, then the three of them moved out into the hallway.

  ***

  FBI Special Agent Angie Boisson’s eyes flew wide when she saw the flash and smoke of an explosion near the entrance to the lab building of SEAL-2. Her hands instinctively reached for her assault rifle.

  She was in the copilot’s seat of the last Black Hawk out of Grand Island. The town and the airport had been overrun by a wave of harvesters that had come surging across the Platte River from the south. Ferris had just brought the helicopter in for a landing after a long recon mission when the monsters attacked the airport. While it had been far smaller in scope than the devastation she’d seen in Los Angeles, so many harvesters had come sweeping across the tarmac that it had looked like a black tide. The people who’d come running toward her Black Hawk weren’t brought down by individual harvesters. They simply disappeared below the surface of the ocean of creatures. Some had come close enough that Boisson could still remember their terrified faces. Faces that she’d never forget.

  Worse, the helicopter had been struck by some stray gunfire. Half the indicator lights on the control panel, including the master alarm, were red, and Ferris had been fighting with the controls since then, struggling to keep the helicopter in the air.

  “What the fuck?” Ferris exclaimed as another Black Hawk, hovering low over the facility, opened fire with its minigun, tearing the compound to pieces.

  Boisson glanced over at the pilot. Ferris was losing it. The harvesters had nearly killed them at the airport. Some had leaped up to grab onto the landing gear as the helicopter had lifted off, and one had actually poked its hideous head into the crew compartment before one of Boisson’s agents had blown it away. More had vaulted high enough to slam into the helicopter’s windscreen, but couldn’t hold on and fell away.

  That hadn’t kept Ferris from screaming.

  And as if the Grand Island massacre hadn’t been enough, now SEAL-2 was being hammered by what looked like one of their own helicopters.

  “Baker!” She called to the helicopter’s crew chief, who manned the minigun. “Can you get a bead on that bastard?”

  “We need to get closer! I can probably hit him from here, but I’ll hit anything behind him, too.”

  “Step on it, Ferris,” she said.

  “Right.” Ferris dropped the Black Hawk’s nose and pushed the engine to its limit, sending the helicopter shooting toward SEAL-2.

  As they approached, the other helicopter ceased firing and came to hover near the lab entrance. Boisson watche
d as a dozen or so men slithered down ropes, then ran into the buildings. “Dammit,” she hissed. “Baker, take out that chopper!”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Ferris angled the nose to the right so the gunner had a clear line of fire. A second-long burst sent a stream of metal that nearly cut the other Black Hawk in two before it exploded, sending bits of whirling rotor blades and hunks of metal flying as the helicopter’s carcass crashed to the ground.

  “Oh, my God,” Ferris moaned as they flew in over the outer wall. The gunner in the other helicopter had known his business. The four M1 tanks still squatted in their dug-outs, the standby crews having been slaughtered as they ran to their tracks. The two tanks on watch duty were smoking, with crimson spattered over the turret tops where their commanders had been. The other defensive positions had been obliterated.

  The worst was the tent city where most of the personnel had been living while waiting for the new barracks buildings to be completed. Boisson had worked in a slaughterhouse in her late teen years. This was worse.

  “Get us on the ground as close to the lab as you can,” she told Ferris.

  “That’s not a problem,” Ferris told her as he angled the Black Hawk toward the building. They both flinched as a loud bang came from one of the engines and more indicators flashed red. “Jesus!” The Black Hawk began to vibrate and shudder. “Hang on!”

  Boisson pressed herself back in her seat as the ground came up fast. Ferris managed to squeeze a little more lift out of the rotors at the last second before the helicopter smacked into the ground. It bounced once, twice, then settled onto the landing gear.

  “Fuck this shit,” Ferris whispered as he quickly shut everything down. He was pale as a ghost and his hands were shaking.

  “You did good,” she told him. “Now let’s go kill those sons of bitches.”

  IN FLAMES

  A flash-bang grenade sailed into the corridor from the stairwell, and Kiran snapped his eyes shut just before it went off. Even with his eyes closed, the grenade left bright afterimages on his retinas and the shock wave bounced his head off the wall behind him. Blinking his eyes clear, he took aim at the stairwell door with his AA-12 shotgun.

  A dark figure, then two, charged out into the hallway, and Kiran hesitated. They were dressed in U.S. military uniforms. He was about to hail them as saviors, thinking they had cleared out the attackers in the stairwell, when they opened fire on the scientists who still hadn’t fled to the labs.

  Kiran pulled the trigger and held it down. The shotgun, which was fully automatic, belched Dragon’s Breath shells at the rate of three hundred rounds per minute, filling the corridor with fire. These newer rounds also had a heavy lead slug in the center, and he saw the lead attacker double over as he was hit in the abdomen.

  The enemy reeled back under the barrage, beating a hasty retreat back into the stairwell. Kiran let up on the trigger, then quickly swapped out the magazine. It held thirty-two rounds, and the first magazine was nearly empty. He was sure he had hit both men multiple times and covered them in fire, which left him puzzled. If they were human, they should have been injured or killed, and if they were harvesters, they should have burst into flame, but they had done neither.

  Three more grenades sailed into the corridor.

  “Gas!” The Marine who’d been with him, but who was now on the far side of the corridor, shouted as a heavy, smoky mist began to spew from the grenades.

  One whiff told Kiran that it was tear gas. While harmless, it could be debilitating and, worse, had completely blocked his view of the stairwell.

  The Marine began to cough uncontrollably, then screamed in agony for a terrifyingly brief moment before he was silenced.

  Kiran fired a few rounds toward where the Marine had been, and was rewarded with a high pitched screech just before a hail of bullets tore up the wall around him. One hit his leg, the bullet passing clean through the calf muscle. He gritted his teeth against the pain as he retreated through the nearest doorway into one of the main labs before the enemy could overwhelm him.

  ***

  Hathcock knew he didn’t have much time. The slug from the minigun had taken him below the right kidney and he was bleeding out fast. He only hoped he could hold out long enough for help to arrive.

  He had staggered partway down the hallway toward where the stairs emerged onto the second floor. The contractors hadn’t installed the door to the stairwell in the partially completed building, which was good news and bad. He’d be able to see the enemy as they came up the stairs, but they’d be able to see him, too.

  Moving past the stairwell, keeping the muzzle of the shotgun trained on it as he went, he kicked in the door to one of the apartments farther down the hall.

  With hands and arms that felt like lead weights, he took two grenades from his combat vest and set them on the floor before sinking down to a prone position, facing the stairwell. He eased the door closed until it was just wide enough for the muzzle of the gun to poke through.

  There were still sounds of savage fighting below, and he could hear more coming from the lab building.

  A burst of rifle fire, followed by a brief gurgling scream, sounded from the stairwell.

  Focus, he told himself as a figure in combat fatigues stepped onto the landing, his gun sweeping the empty hallway. It was a US Army uniform, and the man was wearing a protective mask.

  Someone down the hall in Melissa’s direction whimpered, and the soldier swiveled that way and moved out of the stairwell, two more right behind him.

  Hathcock held them in his sights, waiting a few precious seconds to see if anyone else was going to appear.

  One of the three turned to sweep down the hall in Hathcock’s direction, and the soldier’s gaze came to rest on the stainless steel muzzle of Hathcock’s shotgun.

  Hathcock fired, the heavy slug punching through the gas mask right between the eye pieces as the soldier’s body was wreathed in fiery Dragon’s Breath.

  The head lit up like a torch, burning inside the mask before the rubber itself ignited, sending up a cloud of black, noxious smoke while the harvester danced a death jig. The helmet fell away as the head lost its shape, taking burning gobs of malleable tissue with it.

  The other two harvesters leaped away to get clear of their flaming sibling, then turned and loosed a volley of gunfire down the hallway, peppering the walls with bullets.

  Hathcock fired again, but the harvesters were moving too fast for a head shot, and his vision was dimming quickly. Gritting his teeth, he held down the trigger, turning the hallway into a maelstrom of blinding fire.

  The last expended shotgun shell flew from the ejection port on the gun. Hathcock dropped the weapon and rolled away from the door just as it was blasted into splinters by more gunfire. He took two rounds to the chest, the bullets slamming into the body armor and driving the wind out of him.

  Panting from the pain of cracked or broken ribs, he grabbed one of the grenades he’d set aside, pulled the pin, and let the handle fly before rolling it to one side of the door. He pulled the pin on the second and tossed it onto the bed beside him. Then he drew his Desert Eagle. He was so weak now that he could barely hold it, but he didn’t really have to aim. It was only a distraction.

  One of the harvesters kicked in the door and Hathcock fired, hitting the thing in the side of the neck. It screeched as ichor fluid spattered on the door, but the slug didn’t stop it. Tossing aside its rifle, it bent down and reached for him.

  The grenade by the door went off. It was a regular fragmentation grenade, rather than the more lethal white phosphorous grenades, and at close range it could take down a harvester. But he hadn’t planned on fighting harvesters wearing body armor.

  The thing was knocked off balance by the blast, sent stumbling deeper into the room. White hot pain from the shrapnel lanced through Hathcock’s feet and legs as the harvester took hold of his head.

  Then the grenade on the bed exploded, and the world went dark.

  ***r />
  “Down!”

  Carl shoved Renee to the floor as a pair of grenades bounced off the wall opposite the stairwell. One of them ricocheted toward the far end of the corridor, while the second landed a dozen feet from where Carl, Renee, and Howard had been crouching, guns trained on the elevator and stairwell doors.

  Instead of exploding, the grenade spewed a misty smoke. One whiff told Carl what it was. “Tear gas,” he announced.

  Renee immediately began to gag. She buried her mouth and nose in the fabric of the sleeve of her left arm, but it was no use. In only a few seconds she was rendered helpless. Her eyes felt like someone was rubbing them with sandpaper, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. Her salivary glands went into gooey overdrive, and more spit and snot were coming out of her than tears. She began to cough uncontrollably. “Holy shit,” she choked. “What moron called this tear gas?”

  On the other side of the hallway, Howard was coughing, although not as bad as she was. Beside her, Carl hawked and spat, but that was the extent of his reaction. “Showoff,” she croaked. She tried to steady the Desert Eagle, but it was hopeless. Between the coughing and her screwed up vision, the only way she’d be able to hit anything was if it came and pressed itself up against the weapon’s muzzle.

  Shadows moved through the smoke. “Hold your fire,” Carl whispered. “Might be civilians.”

  There was a voice, someone calling out from one of the rooms farther down the hallway. “Thank God! Did you catch the bastards who…”

  Whoever it was never got a chance to finish the sentence. A three-round burst from an assault rifle cut them off.

  The shadows moved closer.

  “Over here!”

  It was Howard. Fighting to see through the tears, Renee looked over to where he was crouched low against the wall. She could barely see him.

  The billionaire cried out again. “Help me! Help!”

  Two shadows materialized out of the smoke, moving right toward him. They were soldiers wearing gas masks. But that didn’t make sense, because masks weren’t standard issue here on the base, and most of the military personnel were Marines, not soldiers.