“Jesus Christ, kid,” Renee croaked. “You can have as much dessert as you want tonight.”
“Hold your fire!”
The two turned back to the tunnel, where a familiar bald head was peeking out. “It’s okay, hon,” Renee said to Melissa. “Put that thing down. Carl gets very upset when people shoot at him.”
Nodding, Melissa did as Renee asked. Then the girl doubled over and vomited on the floor.
“My God,” Howard said as he and Carl entered the room. “Are you all right?”
“A little shaken up, but past that, yeah, we’re fine,” Renee answered.
Tossing all decorum aside, Carl pulled her into a tight embrace and held her. He didn’t say anything, just held her.
At their feet, Alexander meowed and strutted over to the third person to enter the room.
“Jack!” Melissa shouted. Then she saw the white fluffy shape Jack held to his chest. “Koshka!” Running to Jack, she threw his arms around him while burying her face in Koshka’s fur.
“Annie Oakley here blasted your hitchhiker to pieces,” Renee said, finally pulling away from Carl, who looked at Melissa, then at the burning body of the harvester. “We’re going to send her out to do your dirty work next time, boys.”
“I’m not going to complain,” Howard said as he took a fire extinguisher off the wall and put out the flames. “But look at this place. What a mess.”
The power lights on most of the server towers were dark. Half of the server boxes had holes in them as big as Renee’s index finger, or had their cases blasted to bits. A few threw sparks and smoke into the air.
She caught Melissa’s look of horror and guilt. “It wasn’t you, hon,” she told the girl. “The damage isn’t from your shotgun. Most of it was fire from the harvester’s gun, and the rest from one of the Marines who went down. You did good, understand?”
“Here,” Jack said, “why don’t you look after her.”
Nodding vigorously, Melissa took Koshka from Jack and held her close before kneeling down to show her to Alexander, who sniffed at his companion.
Looking around at the devastated electronics, Jack leaned against one of the server racks and asked, “Any chance this can be fixed?”
Renee and Howard exchanged a look before the billionaire said, “It would take us days to fix this, even assuming we could get spares for everything.”
“Then I guess we’d better pray that Naomi got what she needed from the network,” Carl said grimly, tossing aside the blackened remains of a hard drive he’d picked up from the floor, “because we don’t have days. We’ll be lucky if we have hours before we’re overwhelmed here or the harvesters find Ferris at the airport.”
Jack winced and blew out a breath. “Great. Just great.”
BETRAYAL
Naomi looked up from monitoring one of the dozens of items of lab equipment as the door opened and Carl stepped into the room. Two Marines came in with him, weapons at the ready.
“Naomi, a word please,” Carl said.
She could tell he was tense, and his eyes flitted over the harvesters. They were, for the moment, easy to spot: Naomi had given them all blue lab coats. The humans wore white.
“Did you find Jack?” She got up and hurried over, and Carl ushered her out the door onto the landing that overlooked the now-darkened foyer. It was a disorienting experience, looking out from this high up into the darkness below. “Is he all right? And when is the network coming back up?”
“Come with me.” He took her by the arm and led her to the stair well. The two Marines he’d brought with him stayed inside the lab.
“Carl, what is it?” His behavior was more than odd. He was spooking her.
He remained silent until they reached the lunch room on the ground floor. Opening the door, he quickly ushered her in before closing it behind them to minimize the light spillage.
“Jack!” Naomi exclaimed.
“Hey.” He gave her a quick hug, then hissed as the Marine corpsman put some antiseptic on one of the shrapnel wounds in his legs before dressing it with gauze.
As a doctor herself, Naomi surveyed the man’s work with a critical eye, nodding to herself in approval. Then, to Jack, she said, “God, what happened to you?”
“I had an argument with a grenade and lost, as usual.”
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Carl said, interrupting. “I’m going to give you the good news first. Melissa?”
Naomi turned around to find Melissa coming over with a furry friend in her arms. “Koshka!” Naomi picked the cat up gently and held her.
Koshka meowed at the indignity of it all.
“Now I’ve got some bad news,” Carl went on grimly. “Vijay turned on us and escaped.”
“What?”
“We were ambushed by the hitchhiker,” Jack told her, “and just as the bastard took down Lowmack, Vijay attacked the other two Marines. I’m not sure, but I think the only reason he didn’t kill me is that he might have been more afraid of the other harvester. He turned and ran.”
“My God. Where did he go?”
“We don’t know,” Carl said. “And that’s what bothers me the most. He knows everything, Naomi. Where we are, what we’re doing, our strengths and weaknesses. If he hooks up with another group like the one that wiped out SEAL-2 and brings them here, we’re finished. The other bad news,” he went on, “you already know about. The computer network is screwed. Half the servers were blasted to bits in the firefight with the hitchhiker. Renee and Howard say it would be days before they could get it back up again, and we don’t have that kind of time.” He stared at her with a questioning look in his eyes. “The question is, where does that leave us?”
“We don’t really need it now,” she said. “It would make certain things easier, but we’re past the analytic and development stage. We had already programmed the equipment before the network died, and the machines can run in local mode.”
Carl leaned forward slightly. “So you did it? You created the weapon?”
“We’ve prototyped it and are replicating it now.”
“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Jack said. “I thought you’d be jumping for joy.”
“We won’t know for sure that it will work until we can test it.”
Carl cocked his head. “And when will that be?”
“The first cultures should be done soon, assuming nothing goes wrong upstairs.”
Jack frowned. “And how are you planning to test it?”
“On the harvesters in the lab.”
“What if you need them again?” Everyone turned as Terje stepped into the room, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. Like the rest of them, he looked as if he’d aged a decade in the last twenty-four hours, and a hundred years in the last week. He collapsed into a chair and set his helmet on the table. He gave Melissa a wan smile as she handed him a cold drink from one of the vending machines.
“I don’t think we will,” Naomi said. “The culture that’s incubating in the lab will either work or it won’t. I don’t think we’re going to have time for another run at this.”
“If their part in this is over,” Carl said, “then it’s time we got rid of them.”
Naomi shook her head. “Carl, we should let them go after they’re infected. They can help spread the virus, and it would be a perfect field test to make sure it works.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m letting those things walk out of the lab alive. We’ve already got Vijay on the loose, and I’m not going to let any more out. I’m sure we can figure out a way to spread the virus ourselves once we get out of here.” He looked at Jack. “Let’s go put an end to this.”
***
Zohreh smiled at the lab technician, then shyly averted her eyes. He was a middle aged man, as skilled at his craft as he was naive about women. The memories the harvester had taken from Zohreh were filled with such men. In their eyes, she was extremely attractive and highly desirable. Even in the oppressive culture of mod
ern-day Iran, men remained men. A flutter of the eye lids, an inviting smile, a tilt of the hips or a turn of her chest to accentuate her ample breasts never failed to affect them. Men like him tended to be single, because their outward appearance and mannerisms were not highly desirable by women. To be favored with so much as a smile from a beauty such as she made such men stammer and act the fool. She saw the paradox, of course: such men knew they would never possess a beautiful woman, yet they would trip over themselves to please her just the same.
This one was no different from the others the ghost of the human woman’s memories had known. He had watched her since she had arrived at SEAL-2, and she had stoked the fire of attraction while barely speaking a word to him, for she had been assigned to a different section of the human-harvester team. She had done the same with the other men. Not all were quite so foolish as this one, but it was easy for her to gain their attention. That was all that mattered.
With another smile at the man, she glanced around the room, as if wistfully looking for someone to talk to, to ease her boredom. With the computer network down and the synthesis work on the prototype virus completed, there was little for any of them to do now other than wait for the incubators to do their work, replicating the virus into a quantity that they could use.
That time had come.
Pushing back from her workstation, Zohreh stood up with a tired sigh. Looking at the two Marines, who were only a few feet away, she let the hint of a smile grace her lips as she put her hands on her hips and leaned back into a languid stretch, her breasts straining against the blouse beneath her unbuttoned blue lab coat.
With their attention firmly riveted to her chest, she pitched herself forward as the stinger exploded from her blouse, propelled by the tightly coiled umbilical in her thorax. It speared the throat of the Marine on the left side of the door, while the stinger from the harvester working beside her sank into the other Marine’s left eye.
The human scientists in the room were momentarily paralyzed with shock as the Marines’ twitching bodies slid to the floor.
The harvesters wasted no time. In a frenzy of thrusting stingers, the humans died.
Zohreh watched the demise of the lab technician who’d been so enamored with her. His mouth opened and closed like that of a fish, his body unable to do anything more after a stinger had severed the spine in his neck. The look in his eyes was one of hurt, of surprise. Then he lost all expression as death took him and his muscles relaxed, his gaze still fixed on her.
Turning away, Zohreh moved to one of the two Marines and began stripping him of his uniform and equipment. One of her companions did the same to the second Marine. The other three harvesters took the clothes from the bodies of the lab technicians while commanding the malleable flesh of their bodies to transform, to take on the appearance of their victims.
Quickly donning the Marine uniform over her newly transfigured body, Zohreh became Private First Class Gabriel Woodson, a young African-American male.
When finished with their transformation, they dragged away the bodies and stacked them behind some lab equipment in a corner of the room, away from direct view from the doorway.
An electronic chime sounded from the biological safety cabinet that housed the incubator that had been nurturing the first batch of the cultured virus. The thing that was now Woodson carefully removed one of the trays of culture flasks and extracted some of the liquid with a dropper.
Turning around, Woodson found his five companions standing in a row.
Without a word, Woodson went to his companions and put a drop of the clear liquid on their faux tongues, then gave himself a dose. “This will have little effect on us,” he/it said, “as we have already reached maturity. But we will be able to spread the change to others of our kind.”
They quickly transferred some of the virus culture from the flask to smaller vials they could carry with them. Woodson had briefly considered destroying the rest of the batch and the equipment, but in the end decided not to. More of the virus here simply meant a greater likelihood of more of her kind being reborn.
“Someone is coming,” said the harvester mimicking the other Marine, who had gone to stand watch at the door.
The others took their places at the workstations nearest the door, prepared to play their part in the final act of this farcical play. Heavy footsteps could be heard outside in the hall mezzanine. They stopped just outside.
“Let them come,” she said, tightening her grip on her assault rifle. “Let them come.”
ESCAPE
Naomi stood outside the lab, with Jack, Terje, and six Marines behind her.
“Remember, we’ve got friendlies in there,” Naomi warned. She reached for the door handle.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Jack whispered, gently moving her to the side. To the Marines, he said, “Go.”
The first two Marines opened the door and stepped through, followed by Jack, Terje, and then Naomi. The other four Marines waited outside.
They found the two Marine guards still inside the door, and four lab technicians were looking up from their work stations.
She saw white lab coats, but no blue ones. The harvesters were gone.
Before she could shout a warning, the two harvesters dressed as Marines opened fire, killing the pair of Marines who’d come in with her. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the other harvesters leaping over their desks toward the door before a hard shove from Jack sent her tumbling backward.
“Open fire!” Jack’s shout was lost in a cacophony of gunshots and screeching as the harvesters mobbed the door. Jack fired a burst from his weapon, then grabbed Terje by the rear of his belt and hauled him out onto the mezzanine.
Once they were clear, the Marines outside the lab opened fire, shooting through the doorway and the wall. They brought down one harvester, then another, which exploded into flame barely two feet from where Naomi was lying on the floor.
She got up on her hands and knees and tried to crawl away, hoping to find a small eddy in the chaos swirling about her, but was knocked flat by a Marine who tripped over her as he backpedaled away from the door. Still firing, he hit the wall overlooking the lobby below just as bullets struck his chest armor, blasting him backward over the railing. Naomi grabbed for his feet, but couldn’t hold him. With a terrified scream, he fell.
Drawing her Desert Eagle, she got to her knees and turned back toward the fight, but in the glare of the flames she wasn’t sure who was friend and who was foe.
Jack slammed to the floor beside her. His eyes were open, staring toward the ceiling, as he fought for breath.
As she reached for him, someone scooped her up from the floor. It was one of the Marines who’d been posted inside the lab. Woodson. A harvester.
“Fuck you!” She jammed the muzzle of the gun against the thing’s chest, but before she could squeeze the trigger, she was weightless, falling into space.
Still clutching her in its arms, the harvester had leaped over the wall overlooking the lobby three stories below.
***
With the computer center destroyed, there was nothing left for Howard Morgan to do in the basement. The only piece of equipment they bothered trying to salvage was the storage unit Renee had brought from SEAL-2, which, for what it might be worth, hadn’t been damaged in the firefight.
After escorting her and Melissa up to the lunch room, he decided to pay Naomi a visit. He’d never been a lab rat, of course, but having owned a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company had given him the opportunity to rattle a test tube or two. If nothing else, he could watch a display or mop up any coffee spills, or just sit there and keep an eye on the harvesters, shotgun in hand. And if Naomi shooed him out as a nuisance, he’d go stand watch with the Marines. He wasn’t a military man, but he could shoot as well as any of them.
The only thing he didn’t want was to do nothing. He was a man who’d always enjoyed his leisure time, but otherwise needed to feel, and be, productive, to make a contribution. That was one
of the traits that had helped him to become a wealthy man, and he wasn’t about to abandon that philosophy now.
He was halfway up the stairs to the second floor when he heard gunfire coming from above.
Taking the steps two at a time, he just made it to the third floor landing when the door to the mezzanine on that level burst open. A Marine with an unconscious woman slung over his shoulder charged onto the landing.
It took him a heartbeat to realize the woman was Naomi, and the Marine had to be a harvester. No one had been on this floor since the Marines had first cleared it.
As he tried to raise the shotgun, the Marine slammed into him, knocking him back against the far wall. Howard’s right elbow cracked against the concrete, and he lost his grip on his weapon as the thing turned for the stairs heading down.
Ignoring the pain in his arm, he rebounded from the wall like a boxer coming off the ropes. Wrapping his arms around Naomi, he tried to wrestle her off the thing’s shoulder.
It was a brief, savage tug of war before the harvester whirled around and used Howard’s momentum against him, pushing him up against the wall with Naomi’s body pinned between them.
Something slashed across Howard’s abdomen, just below the lower edge of the body armor. He lost control of his core muscles and felt a sharp tugging sensation in his belly. His legs collapsed under him, and he slumped to the floor as a warm, wet gush flooded over his lower body.
The thing said nothing as it again tossed Naomi over its shoulder and fled down the stairwell.
Howard touched his hand to his belly and recoiled at the feel of something not unlike a string of sausages, only warm and slick, smelling of blood.
“Oh, no,” he whispered as the pain finally hit.
***
Jack blinked his eyes, trying to clear them of the afterimages of one of the harvesters exploding into flame. He was on his back, gasping for air like a kid who’d fallen backwards off a swing to slam into the ground.
Terje’s face appeared above him. One side of his face had second degree burns and a deep gash that ran from the temple down to his jaw. Blood was running freely down his neck. “Jack! Are you hurt?”
Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Page 30