Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3)

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Naomi would know.”

  Carl looked away, a hard expression on his face. “Naomi’s the smartest person I’ve ever known, Dawson, and I don’t claim to be a hundredth as bright as she is. But can a single human, even one as smart as her, really know everything that’s going on with this stuff? She said it herself: the harvesters are naturals at all this genetic jazz, like some sort of monstrous idiot savants, except without the idiot part. There’s something deeper going on here. I can feel it twisting in my gut.”

  “Even if that’s true,” Jack said, “what can we do about it? Naomi said she needs the harvesters. We don’t have a choice.”

  “I know, and I hate it. I’m tired of feeling helpless. We’ve been reeling backward since day one. Just once, just once, I’d like to have the initiative. Shit.” Carl blew out a breath and stared off into the darkness.

  Changing the subject, Jack said, “Any word yet from Boisson and Ferris?”

  Carl shook his head. “Not a peep. I didn’t really expect them to have found Air Force One waiting for us up there, but I told Boisson I wanted hourly sit reps. It’s not like her to not call in, and she hasn’t answered my radio calls.”

  Jack looked to the north. The airport was about ten miles in that direction. Ten miles of exactly what, only Boisson, Ferris, and the agents with them could know.

  “I should have sent them in one of the LAVs,” Jack said quietly.

  “Don’t second guess yourself. We need the LAVs here. As much as it would hurt us, in the great scheme of things we can afford to lose Boisson and Ferris. We can afford to lose nearly anyone and anything except this.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the building behind them.

  Melissa tugged on Jack’s sleeve. “Can we get Koshka now?”

  “Sure, hon,” he said, happy for the distraction.

  Granting Alexander a moment of privacy on a patch of grass along the way to do his business, they headed for Lowmack’s LAV, which was parked in front of the building, facing toward the student union and the main parking lot.

  The rear doors were open, and Melissa hopped in, then stopped, dead still, staring at the seat where she’d left Naomi’s cat.

  Jack leaned in and looked. “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

  Koshka was gone.

  WE NEED THIS PLANE

  The ten miles from the LRU campus reminded Ferris of all the other war zones he’d seen in his life. The bodies, burned out cars and houses, the cries and pleas for help from terrified civilians were all too familiar. It was all the same, except that it was in his own country rather than somewhere else.

  Hundreds of civilians flocked toward the Humvee as Ferris wove through the wrecks on the roads, which this close to Lincoln included the back country roads they’d been on since splitting from the convoy before it crossed I-80. The agent manning the vehicle’s heavy machine gun had to shoot over the heads of the refugees now and again to keep them at a distance.

  Then came the curses and ugly gestures, the screams of impotent rage that faded into the silence of the damned.

  He felt like the world’s biggest pile of dog shit.

  “Fuck,” he cursed, pouring every ounce of venom he could into the word, wishing he could turn it on the harvesters and fry the bastards with it.

  “I hear you,” Boisson said softly. She tore her eyes away from the scene outside to check the map display. “Take a right when we get to West Mathis Street. That should take us right to the western apron, about a klick and a half ahead.”

  “Got it.”

  As they neared the airport, the refugees thinned out and disappeared.

  “You’d think people would be going to the airport,” Ferris mused.

  Boisson shrugged. “Maybe they know something we don’t.”

  “Shit!” He spun the wheel to the left to steer the Humvee clear of a suspicious looking patch on the road. He’d seen enough of the damn larvae to be able to spot them on a smooth road surface once they were close enough. Otherwise, they would have run out of tires about a mile after they’d split off from the convoy.

  A few moments later, they found themselves in a parking lot, facing the fence that bounded the old apron for what had once been Lincoln Air Force Base. One of the agents hopped out with a pair of bolt cutters and made short work of the lock on gate 44.

  Once the agent was back in the Humvee, Ferris headed out onto the ramp that joined the apron with Runway 36. Once he reached the runway, he turned right and sped south. Nearly a thousand meters later, he turned again, taking them east on another ramp. “We’ll see if the Army National Guard guys are home first.”

  They drove across to the Army facilities, which included a landing area that could take nearly three dozen helicopters. Behind that was a large hangar and various other buildings housing the Nebraska Army National Guard aviation battalion garrisoned there.

  “This doesn’t look so good,” Boisson said.

  “That’s the understatement of the year,” Ferris whispered as he brought the Humvee to a stop.

  A pitched battle had been fought here, and lost by the human defenders. The metal carcasses of three helicopters lay on the apron, their fuselages now little more than ash silhouettes on the concrete, with the more resilient bits of machinery laying in a heap on top. The fence line that surrounded the buildings had been reinforced with concertina wire, but it was crushed and torn in half a dozen places. Overturned and burned out Humvees, some with their dead gunners still clinging to the weapons mounted on top, encircled the buildings.

  Harvester corpses were stacked in enormous piles on either side of the breaches in the fence line, with hundreds, maybe thousands, in the open kill zones around the compound, and more inside. Many had been burned to ash, but just as many more weren’t. Hundreds of dead soldiers also lay inside the fence line, many of them entwined with dead harvesters. Ferris could smell the scent of war in the smoke that wafted from the vehicles and buildings and the scorched marks on the ground where harvesters had been incinerated.

  “Custer’s last stand,” he whispered. As he watched, the nearest pile of harvester bodies shifted. Larvae, large and small, were at their devil’s work, eating their dead parents. “God, those things make me sick.”

  Boisson turned to him. “Should we check out the buildings here?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no point. We’re looking for something that flies, and their choppers are all toast.” He looked at the wrecks. “We really could’ve used one of those.”

  He heard the other agents breathe a quiet sigh of relief as Boisson said, “I’m not going to complain. We’d need steel galoshes to get through all those damned larvae.”

  “Yeah. Well, let’s see if the Air Force can do us any better.” Ferris swung the Humvee around and turned north on the ramp that led to the Nebraska Air National Guard’s 155th Air Refueling Wing’s facility.

  The 155th’s apron had room for half a dozen KC-135 tanker aircraft. The facility boasted a huge hangar that could hold one of the four-engine jets, plus a smaller one that could partially accommodate one of the planes.

  Both hangars were charred wrecks. The smoking remains of a KC-135 lay in the large hangar.

  “Scratch that one,” Ferris said as he headed toward another of the big planes parked on the apron. While the apron could hold six planes wingtip to wingtip, only one was still here, parked right in the middle.

  “It looks intact,” Boisson said, a note of hope creeping into her voice.

  “Look again.” Ferris didn’t mean to snap the words, but he couldn’t help it. “The fucking tires are gone.” He hammered a fist against the steering wheel in frustration.

  Every one of the plane’s tires was gone, and it now sat on the runway on the metal rims. Huge pools of hydraulic fluid and fuel had spilled under the plane, and around the edges of the pools were larvae as small as Ferris’s fist up to the size of a horse.

  “Christ,” he said, “they’re drinking the fuel!”

  Boisson tur
ned to him. “It’s carbon based, right?”

  “Yeah. God.”

  As he left the marooned KC-135 behind, he said, “I guess we’ll have to try the commercial terminal. If we don’t find something there, maybe a smaller airliner, I think we’re going to be screwed. The best we’ll find otherwise is a corporate jet. We won’t be able to take many people anywhere in one of those.”

  He headed back out onto the taxiway that led north across the front of the 155th Refueling Wing’s operations area, planning to follow it up and around to where the passenger terminal was. He kept his eyes on where he was going to keep from running over any larvae.

  Boisson reached over and touched his arm. “Wait!” She pointed off to the right. “Look!”

  He stopped the Humvee and looked where she was pointing. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

  A KC-135 was sitting off by itself on a much smaller auxiliary apron north of the main facility. The plane was facing toward the main runway, its tail not much more than a stone’s throw from the road that ran along the passenger terminal on the far side.

  “I’m not sure, but it looks like the tires are intact,” Boisson said carefully.

  “Don’t jinx us, woman.” Ferris spun the wheel and took the Humvee onto the asphalt access between the taxiway they’d been on and the apron where the KC-135 was parked.

  “I’m sure it has tires,” she said.

  Ferris had to work hard to keep his eyes on the asphalt ahead of him to watch for harvesters and not pin his gaze on the plane. “Come on, gorgeous,” he said. “Stay beautiful for old Al.”

  Boisson glanced at him. “Ferris, you have some serious female issues.”

  “Why the hell do you think I’m single?”

  Ferris brought the Humvee to a halt just short of the aircraft’s nose. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Let’s check her out.”

  He, Boisson, and three of the agents got out, while the fourth remained on the .50 caliber machine gun. Once on the ground, Ferris led the others, ever watchful for larvae, on a clockwise circuit around the plane. “Landing gear looks good, all the tires and hydraulic lines seem to be intact.” He scanned every inch of the plane that he could see from the ground, looking for any telltale signs of problems. As he rounded the port side main gear and headed back toward the nose, he said, “I don’t see any damage on her belly, and nothing’s leaking that I can see.” Next to the plane was a big box on wheels with an electrical cable snaking across the asphalt to where it plugged into the plane. “We’ve even got an APU, assuming it still works.”

  “Ferris,” Boisson said, “I hate to ask this, but let’s assume this plane is operable. Can you even fly it?”

  He turned and gaped at her. “Lady, I can fly just about any goddamn thing with wings, with or without engines.” He stomped over to the crew hatch, which was on the lower side of the nose on the port side. “Can I fly it? Jesus.”

  The hatch was closed, which didn’t surprise him. What did come as a surprise was that the ladder that provided access to the main deck was on the ground.

  “I take it the ladder shouldn’t be there,” Boisson said.

  “No.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s see what we’ve got.” He opened the hatch slowly, peering into the darkness beyond. “Don’t see anything.”

  Grabbing the ladder off the ground, he stuck the hooked end up into the plane and secured it. As he began to climp up, he felt Boisson’s hand on his shoulder.

  “No you don’t, flyboy,” she said. “I’ll go first, then Willis. We’ll make sure the coast is clear first.”

  “Right,” Ferris said, disappointed. “Sure.”

  He stepped away from the ladder to make way for Boisson and Willis, who went up fast, pistols in hand.

  A few moments later he heard Boisson’s voice calling from above. “It’s clear. Come on up.”

  Relieved, he climbed up the ladder. Shaking off the helping hands offered by Boisson and Willis, he got to his feet. He was standing in the cockpit, just behind the seats for the pilot and copilot and across from the navigator’s station. After quickly scanning the instrument panels, which were festooned with dials, gauges, buttons, and switches, he said, “Nothing looks like anybody’s taken a hammer to it or blasted it with a gun. Past that we’ll have to see what happens when we start throwing switches.” To Boisson, he said, “Did you see anything wrong in back?”

  “No, but we were only looking for things that might eat you. You’re the one who knows planes.”

  “Yeah, I vaguely recall saying something to that effect.” Ferris reached over and flipped some switches that brought up the overhead lights. Then he headed aft through the door in the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the cargo area. All but four of the dozen or so passenger seats, which were nothing more than red nylon webbing over a light metal frame, on each side of the compartment were folded up and stowed against the fuselage. Several pallets, mostly laden with cardboard boxes, were secured with heavy duty nylon tie-downs in the center.

  Ferris made his way through the cavernous hold past the pallets and the two auxiliary power units before he came to the boom operator’s station near the rear of the plane.

  “Hold up,” Boisson said, her voice sharp.

  Ferris turned around. “What is it?”

  Boisson held up a dark brown wrapper of an MRE meal packet. It was open, with the end of the spoon sticking out. “Mediterranean Chicken,” she read from the side of the packet. “And it’s warm.” She smelled it, then stuck her finger in it and gave it a taste. “Still good and fresh.” Setting the packet back down where she’d found it near the forward APU, she brought up her rifle. “We’re not alone in here.”

  Ferris drew his Desert Eagle and turned back toward the boom operator’s station, which was a recessed cubby below the main deck, partly hidden by two stacked rows of large orange oxygen tanks. “Look,” he called out, “we know you’re in here. We’re friendlies. Just come on out so we can talk. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  All he got in return was silence. But it wasn’t the silence of a completely empty plane. Someone was here. He could feel it.

  “Please,” he tried again. “Come out. We’re not harvesters, if that’s what you’re worried about. My name is Al Ferris, and I work for, ah, the government. I’m a contractor, sort of, and a pilot. The folks with me are FBI agents. They’ll come dig you out if they have to, but I’d like to avoid that, and I think you probably would, too. These people don’t screw around. What do you say?”

  For a moment, there was only more silence. Then a young woman’s voice said from the darkness of the boom operator’s pit, “What do you want?”

  “We need this plane,” Al said, “if it’ll fly.”

  “I think Colonel Cox will have something to say about that,” the voice said from the darkness, “when she and the others get back.”

  Ferris glanced at Boisson, who was slowly moving toward the dark recess in the deck where the woman was hiding. He shook his head, and Boisson stopped. “How long has your colonel been gone?”

  A long pause. “Two days. She and the others went out to get some spare parts. She told me to guard the plane. She’ll be back. I know she will.”

  Ferris shook his head. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “I’m Staff Sergeant Kurnow,” she shot back. “And I’m no kid.”

  He laughed. “When you get to be as old as me, Kurnow, everybody’s a damn kid.” Then, serious again, he said, “If your Colonel Cox has been gone two days, she’s not coming back. You know there was a hell of a battle here, right? You probably watched the fireworks through the windows.”

  “Yeah, I saw.”

  There was no easy way for Ferris to say what had to be said. “It was a slaughterhouse, Kurnow. There weren’t any survivors. And the hangars and other stuff for your squadron were pretty well toasted, too.”

  “The 155th isn’t…wasn’t my squadron,” Kurnow said, finally emerging onto the main deck. She was pe
tite, Ferris saw, maybe five foot four and probably weighed all of a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her short cut blond hair was a greasy mess, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. She was also holding a 9mm pistol pointed at his chest, and he noticed that her hand wasn’t shaking at all. “We’re from the 171st Air Refueling Squadron out of Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan. We were on a mission to refuel some B-52s and had to divert here after we had problems with the cabin pressurization. The ground crew had just finished testing the repairs when…when…” She bit her lip.

  “When your colonel saw that things were going to shit out there and wanted to try and salvage what she could before the base was lost,” Ferris finished for her.

  Kurnow nodded. “She left me here to watch the plane. They were only supposed to be gone thirty minutes, maybe an hour.”

  “Now it’s time to make sure she’s not one of them.” Boisson’s voice was quiet, but her tone made it clear that it wasn’t a negotiable issue. She withdrew a lighter from her pocket.

  “Uh, that’s not such a good idea,” Ferris told her. “Remember, this plane is a huge flying gas tank. If it’s fully loaded, we’re sitting on around a hundred tons of fuel.” He wished they had thermal imagers, but there hadn’t been enough to go around and they were stuck with the regular night vision goggles.

  “Then what do you suggest? We don’t have a cat, and we’re sure as hell not trusting her on word alone.”

  “Boisson!” The agent she’d left outside had climbed into the plane and was calling from the cockpit.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got movement out here. Looks like harvesters moving up from the main hangar area.”

  “It’s the lights,” Kurnow said. “They’re drawn to them at night.”

  “Shit,” Ferris breathed as he dashed toward the cockpit and hit the switches, throwing the plane into darkness.

  “You stay here,” Boisson told him as she slid past and took hold of the ladder, her night vision goggles once again in place. She pulled a Taser from the holster on her belt and handed it to him. “This is the only other way we have to test for harvesters if we can’t use a lighter.” If Kurnow was a harvester, she’d revert to her natural form after being shocked by the weapon. “The electrodes shouldn’t arc and light off any fuel fumes if they’re buried in her skin. If I’m wrong, I guess we won’t be around long enough to worry about it.” She stared at him, and he felt like he was looking into the face of an alien. “And don’t you dare be a sentimental sap and not do what needs to be done or I’ll fucking shoot you.”