Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3)

by Michael R. Hicks

  Carl and Howard must have reached the same conclusion. Their shotguns roared, filling the corridor with flame.

  The two soldiers were knocked backward. One of them stumbled and fell, firing off a spray of bullets that blasted through the wall a few inches above Renee’s head. She squeezed off a shot in return, and the .50 caliber slug found the gap in the soldier’s body armor just under the left arm. He twitched and lay still.

  “Holy crap,” she rasped.

  The other soldier was backing down the hall into the mist as Carl and Howard fired away. It had to be a harvester, because no human soldier could take that sort of punishment and stay on his feet, but she didn’t understand why the Dragon’s Breath didn’t just turn the thing into a roman candle.

  There was more firing at the other end of the hall. Then silence.

  “Get back in the office,” Carl hissed. “We’re too exposed out here. Howard, move back.”

  Renee was crawling on her hands and knees toward Carl’s office when a machine gun opened fire from beyond the veil of the tear gas, blasting holes in the floor and walls.

  She was almost through the doorway when one of the bullets found her.

  ***

  Melissa was shivering, but it wasn’t from the cold air seeping through the torn up wall. She flinched as another door was kicked open down the hall. This time someone was inside. Whoever it was screamed just before a gun went off and the screaming stopped.

  That had been the fourth one. And every door was closer.

  Without Hathcock, she felt totally, utterly alone, more than she had ever felt in her life. Damn you, Craig.

  Even Alexander had deserted her. The big cat, still wrapped in pink bandages, was cowering under the ripped up bed. He’d been growling before, but had fallen silent as the killer out in the hall came closer. She’d caught glimpses of the cat’s eyes reflecting the overhead lights, his green retinas glowing in the dark recess of his makeshift lair. But he’d withdrawn farther under the bed now, and had completely disappeared. For all she knew, the furry coward had fled the room.

  Damn you, too, cat.

  Clutching the pistol Hathcock had given her, she crouched on the floor of the bathroom, her back to the wall beside the door that led to the bedroom. Whoever was out there kicked down the door to the apartment next door. Finding nothing, the killer went to Jack and Naomi’s room, right across the hall. She peeked around the corner of the bathroom door and caught a glimpse of a camouflage uniform.

  A few moments later, she heard his footsteps coming back across the hall.

  Closing her eyes, she prayed that the killer would just take a look around the devastated bedroom and call it a day.

  The footsteps moved into the room.

  Melissa bit back a scream as the soldier kicked in her closet door. Then he moved toward the bathroom.

  She glanced up…and saw his masked face in the bathroom mirror, which somehow had remained intact. He was staring right back at her.

  Without a word, he raised his weapon and stepped around the remains of the bed toward the bathroom door.

  Just as he leaned into the doorway, the muzzle of his rifle mere inches from her temple and looking about as big around as a battleship gun, she heard a deep growl in the bedroom.

  The soldier tried to whirl around, but the muzzle of his rifle caught on the door jamb as Alexander, pink bandages and all, made a limping charge from under the bed and sank his fangs into the soldier’s leg. The soldier stumbled on one of the chunks of the shattered sink that was lying on the floor and went down right at Melissa’s feet.

  He twisted around into a sitting position and was raising the rifle to smash Alexander with the butt end when Melissa brought up her gun and pointed it at the man’s masked face. She pulled the trigger over and over as Hathcock’s words echoed in her mind: keep shooting until you’re sure the target’s dead.

  The soldier dropped the rifle and began to screech. The harvester clawed at the mask, which now had several holes in it, and through the eye pieces she could see that its fake human face inside the mask was on fire. Then flames burst from around the mask and under the helmet.

  Throwing the empty pistol aside, she got up, stepped over the thrashing body as flames began to pour from the head and neck, and grabbed Alexander. It took all her strength to pull the cat off the thing. His claws and teeth were shredding the uniform fabric and he simply wouldn’t let go.

  Slinging him over her shoulder, she ran out into the hallway, where more bodies were burning near the stairwell.

  “Craig!” She shouted.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Craig, where are you?” Leaning to one side, she could see uniformed bodies sprawled in one of the rooms on the far side of the stairwell. Huge chunks of the wall had been blown out, and the room was blazing. She tried to get in there, to see if Craig was injured and needed her help, but it was too hot. Alexander struggled against her, raking her back with his claws. He had experienced enough of fire.

  With tears in her eyes, she forced her way past the sizzling, flaming remains of the harvesters into the stairwell, hoping that no more awaited her down below.

  RESCUE

  After the panicked call from SEAL-2 that they were under attack, Jack had ordered the remaining five LAVs back to the base, the drivers pushing the big vehicles as fast as they would go along County Road 45. He and Terje were standing up in the personnel hatches behind the turret of the lead LAV, Jack’s heart in his throat as a plume of black smoke rose from the facility twelve miles away.

  They had just crossed US 281, the American Legion Memorial Highway, nearly halfway to SEAL-2 when they spotted dark shapes loping through the fields just to the south. A wave of adult harvesters was fleeing northward from more of the dreadful giant larvae.

  Lowmack asked, “Should we light them up?”

  “Yeah, shoot the adults,” Jack told him, “but whatever you do, keep moving! And don’t use up much ammo. We don’t know what’s waiting for us back at the base.”

  “Roger. Keep your heads down.”

  The last words had barely left his mouth when the turret of the LAV turned and the 25mm Bushmaster cannon and coaxial 7.62mm machine gun opened fire, scything through the lead ranks of the harvesters.

  The other LAVs followed suit, and in a few moments the fields to the south of County Road 45 were filled with blazing corpses.

  “Shit!” Jack was startled by the face of a harvester that appeared over the side of the LAV. He drew his Desert Eagle and jammed the muzzle into the thing’s open jaws. The back of its head exploded as he pulled the trigger, the .50 caliber slug blasting through the natural carbon fiber of its skull.

  With muffled thumps, two more harvesters latched onto the LAV and began clambering toward the exposed humans.

  “Button up!” Jack shouted.

  He and Terje dropped back into the cramped troop compartment, slamming the hatches shut above them. Lowmack dropped down into the turret and closed his hatch as he warned the other LAVs.

  In the blink of an eye the LAV was swarming with the creatures, which blocked the viewports, blinding the crew as the things pounded on the hatches, trying to get in.

  The vehicle swerved off the road, tilting crazily before the driver regained control.

  “We’ve got to keep moving!” Jack told Lowmack. “Have the LAVs use their machine guns to swat these things off!”

  Lowmack bent down to stare at him. “And have us covered in burning harvesters? You sure you want to do that, sir?”

  “Don’t you have ammo other than incendiary and tracer?”

  “Some, yeah.” He said to the gunner, “Switch out the machine gun ammo to standard rounds.”

  “We’ve only got a couple hundred of those aboard,” the gunner warned him. “Some jackass said we had to load up with all the fiery shit.”

  Terje looked at Jack and shrugged.

  While the Marines were sorting that out, Jack and Terje poked their rifles out the gun po
rts in the rear of the LAV and began to shoot at the harvesters that were trying to get at the other vehicles, careful not to hit the ones actually on the LAVs.

  “Okay,” the gunner said through the comm circuit. “Let’s rock and roll.”

  The coaxial machine gun in the turret fired, and the gunner swept the harvesters from the top deck before picking the monsters off one of the other vehicles, while they returned the favor. Jack winced as the hull rang from bullets striking the armor, some of them having missed their intended targets, others having passed through the harvesters’ bodies. The drivers began to move again, picking up speed as more of the harvesters were cleared away. When they weren’t picking off unwanted passengers, the gunners blasted groups of harvesters along the road with their Bushmaster cannons.

  They had nearly made it clear of the bulk of the monsters when the LAV was shaken by a loud boom, after which it swerved and shimmied.

  The strained voice of the driver came over the intercom. “We’ve lost a tire!”

  “Keep moving,” Lowmack ordered. “You’ve got seven more.”

  Thirty seconds later, that number was reduced to six.

  “Small larvae,” Terje said. “It must be. They’re sticking to the tires when we run over them in the road, then they eat through the rubber and blow out the tires.”

  “Goddamn fucking things,” Lowmack growled. “The other LAVs are losing tires, too.”

  “Just keep moving,” Jack told him. “Run on the rims if you have to.”

  As they neared the complex, Jack popped open the rear deck hatch and stood up so he could see. Flames rose to lick the base of the churning cloud of oily black smoke that billowed into the sky. Most of the fire was concentrated near the helipad and maintenance area, but smoke was also rising from the lab, and the personnel buildings were both ablaze.

  “The gate’s not opening,” Lowmack said as they approached the outer fence line. Bodies in blood-soaked camouflage uniforms hung from the sandbagged positions guarding the entrance.

  “Blast it open,” Jack ordered.

  “Roger that.”

  A moment later the LAV’s Bushmaster opened up, blowing the heavy gate from its hinges. The driver sped up, and the big vehicle crashed through, the other LAVs following close behind.

  Looking at the lab building, he saw a Black Hawk, its rotors still spinning down, sitting just outside the entry to the lab building. The flaming wreckage of a second helicopter covered the ground not far from what was left of the main guard shack along the inner fence line.

  “Detach one of your squads to search Tent City for survivors,” Jack told Lowmack, his gut churning at the devastation across the compound. “Then let’s split up the other four into two teams. I’ll take the lab. You take the personnel quarters.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I think we might want to leave the crew in one of the LAVs, just in case something ugly pops up out here.”

  Jack nodded. “Good call. If you don’t mind, I’m going to task you with that. Would your men have any problem following Captain Halvorsen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good,” Jack said. “Terje, you lead the squad to search the personnel building.”

  “Understood.”

  With Lowmack and his crew providing cover from their LAV, the others dismounted and split up to follow Jack and Terje.

  “In we go,” Jack said to the Marines with him. “Check your targets. We’re hoping for friendlies, but if adult harvesters are here…”

  “Shit,” one of the Marines breathed. “Wish we had one of them cats so we’d know who’s for real.”

  “You and me, both, Marine,” Jack told him.

  They stepped through the lab building’s front entrance, their boots crunching on metal and glass as they stepped around the bodies of the Marines who had died there.

  The point man stopped as the sound of automatic weapons fire echoed from somewhere deeper in the building, answered by blasts from a shotgun.

  Two more Marines moved past Jack to push through the remains of the inner door to enter the main corridor.

  Bodies were everywhere. A few were in uniform, but most wore civilian clothes or the surgical scrubs preferred by the scientists. The bodies were riddled with bullets.

  As they moved down the hall toward the sound of the gunfire, which was coming from both the level above and somewhere down below, they came across several bodies whose heads were missing. Blood still seeped from the flesh of the neck, which looked as if it had been cauterized.

  “Hold up,” he ordered. Kneeling next to one of them, he read the name on the security badge. Dr. Theresa Katsulas. She was — had been — the director of one of the lab divisions. He couldn’t remember exactly what she did, but she was high up on the pecking order here.

  Moving to another body, he checked the badge, but didn’t recognize the name. Checking a third, he found another name he recognized, one of the team leads from the weaponization division. The fourth and last body he checked was another senior scientist.

  “Shit,” he breathed. The harvesters were doing more than just massacring the staff. “Keep moving.”

  The staff sergeant who was the senior Marine in his group turned to him when they reached the main stairwell. “Up or down, sir?”

  Jack didn’t hesitate. “We’ll clear the basement levels first.”

  “Down we go, then,” the staff sergeant said.

  The Marine on point nodded, then stepped through the open door to the stairwell, doing his best not to step on the any of the bodies stacked inside.

  ***

  Terje followed two Marines into the first personnel building, with five more Marines behind him. Threads of smoke filled the main corridor, and the men had to duck down to see and breathe.

  “Check the rooms,” he ordered, and the Marines methodically went into each apartment.

  About half of them had been occupied by bullet-riddled bodies, although a few were missing their heads.

  The smoke grew thicker, billowing from the stairwell, and the paint on the ceiling overhead had begun to blacken and blister from the fire that must be raging on the second level.

  “Sir, you want us to try for upstairs?”

  All of them were coughing now from the acrid smoke. None of them had so much as a gas mask, let alone fire fighting gear. The sprinklers in the ceiling hadn’t come on, and never would. Their installation hadn’t yet been completed.

  The smoke in the stairwell was thickening, with the flickering light of flames dancing off the walls.

  “No,” he said in between coughs, waving the Marine toward the exit. “Get back outside and cover the building in case any harvesters try to escape from the second floor. Go!”

  Terje waited until the Marines were past him and safely on their way to the front exit when he heard it. A soft cry from somewhere behind him.

  Turning around to face back toward the stairwell, he listened.

  Only the crackling sounds of the fire upstairs reached his ears.

  Then the sound came again. Someone was calling out. The voice was coming from the stairwell.

  The Marines had already cleared the exit. One of them, the sergeant who was the squad’s senior noncom, was shouting at him to join them.

  Terje waved at the man, then ran toward the stairwell.

  Slinging his rifle, he drew his Desert Eagle, which had more stopping power at such a short range than his rifle. Carrying the pistol also allowed him to bury his nose and mouth in the inside of the elbow of his free arm. Despite the nausea that gripped him, he kept going, moving up the stairs until he reached the landing midway between the first and second floors.

  Aside from three bodies, it was clear.

  An ear-splitting scream scythed through the sound of the fire from the corridor above.

  Melissa.

  He bounded up the steps. Leaning out of the doorway, he took a quick look down the hall. To the left, in the direction of the burning room, was nothing. To t
he right, two men in military garb had Melissa pinned to the floor. One still wore a helmet and gas mask. The other…

  The harvester’s black chitinous head, exposed over the neck of the uniform, opened its mandibles wide over the girl’s face. Wispy tendrils uncoiled like feathers from the creature’s maw and left smoking red weals where they brushed against her skin.

  Leaning past the door jamb, Terje brought up his pistol and took aim. He squeezed the trigger and the exposed harvester’s head disappeared in a spray of ichor and exploding exoskeleton.

  As the thing fell atop Melissa and writhed in a macabre parody of sexual union, the thing’s helmeted companion whipped around just in time to catch two .50 caliber slugs that speared through its body armor. It jerked like a marionette as the slugs, their energy largely spent after punching through the kevlar laminate of the armor, ricocheted off the back plate and back into the harvester’s body, tearing its insides to bits.

  The second harvester collapsed as the first stopped twitching and lay still atop the girl.

  “Terje!”

  Running to her side, he rolled the harvester off her. As he scooped her up into his arms, he saw that she still held a bundle of pink bandages to her chest. Alexander’s eyes, pupils dilated wide open, stared up at him, but his jaws eased closed. Terje glanced at the harvester that had been about to take her head. The front of the thing’s combat vest had been shredded by the cat’s claws and teeth.

  They both were coughing, the smoke filling their lungs as Terje turned and staggered toward the stairwell, then stopped.

  The hall by the entrance to the stairs was engulfed in flames. They were trapped.

  He was about to fling himself into the flames in a desperate bid to get down the stairs when the stairwell was filled with a whooshing sound. A white cloud boiled from the doorway, driving away the flames before it. A Marine appeared, then another, then a third, all of them blasting at the flames with fire extinguishers.

  A fourth Marine, the squad leader, emerged. “Captain!” He held a gas mask, which he slipped over Melissa’s face. Then he took off his own and managed to get it onto Terje. “Here, sir, take this. I can manage until we get outside.”