Jack and Naomi exchanged a glance. My God, she thought. That could help solve one of their biggest problems, dispersal of the virus. One plane couldn’t cleanse the world, but it could spread the virus far faster and farther than host to host transfer. If more of this particular aircraft type had survived, the possibilities were staggering. A plane like this could dispense thousands of gallons in a single flight.
“You could cover the globe in a matter of months,” Vijay went on, “rather than decades.”
“All right, so you’ve told us something that we probably could have figured out on our own.” She wasn’t going to give the harvester an inch, other than to pay out the figurative rope she hoped to strangle the thing with. “What else do you have to offer?”
“You know the challenges you will face from the legacy of my creators will be far from over, even after the virus sweeps across the globe to make my kind more…manageable. There will be mutations, possibly even hybridization. Things you cannot now foresee. Even with your genius, Naomi, you will not be able to conquer all these things alone, especially with so few scientists of your caliber left in the world. You will need my help.”
“Naomi…” Jack said uneasily as she stood there in silence.
But he, like the harvester, misunderstood the reason she was silent. She was not considering its proposal. She was thinking furiously about how to free Melissa.
Then she had it. The idea wasn’t foolproof by any means, but might work if Melissa and Renee could read her mind. Cocking her head to the side, she said, “You were never infected with the virus, were you?”
The Vijay-thing shook its head. “No. That, perhaps, is my one regret. I would have liked to pass on the gift to others of my kind.”
“Maybe we can accommodate that wish,” Naomi said.
“Here you go, you sorry bastard!”
The thing whipped its head around just as Renee lunged forward, raising the wand of the sprayer and squeezing the handle. While there had still been plenty of the virus-containing liquid in the tank, she’d used up all the pressure and hadn’t had time or the need to pump it back up. But the cabin pressurization was far lower than at ground level, and served the same purpose. A cone of mist hit the harvester right in the face.
The harvester began to laugh.
***
Melissa recognized the spray for what it was: a diversion. As the harvester began to laugh in the weird man’s voice, she grabbed the wavering stinger with her free hand. It was warm and slimy, and she wanted to puke as she touched it. Wrapping her fingers around the base of the pulsating venom sac, she shoved it upward, past her right ear, as hard as she could, right up into the harvester’s fake human-looking lower jaw.
The laugh turned to a strangled screech as the thing let her go to clutch at its own throat.
Terje grabbed her and pulled her away as Jack charged forward past her, his body slamming into the thing and driving it backward into the cockpit.
***
Richards had kept quiet after the thing had sent him sprawling into the cockpit, staying out of sight behind what looked like a huge box of circuit breakers that went from floor to ceiling in the rear of the cockpit near the door to the cargo area. Being out of sight and out of mind of the harvester might yield an opportunity.
That opportunity came when Jack sent the thing flying into the cockpit, the grenade still clutched in one of its hands.
Come to daddy, Richards thought as Jack and the harvester slammed to the deck at his feet. The harvester was already transforming into its natural state, the clawed appendages emerging from the malleable tissue while the stinger whipped back and forth.
Ferris screamed.
Richards fell on the creature, ramming his knee into its head as he wrestled it for the grenade. Jack grunted with pain as the thing clawed him, and the wavy-bladed cutting appendage sliced through Kurnow’s flight uniform, nearly cutting Richards’ leg off.
The harvester twisted and bucked, slashed and jabbed. The stinger caught Richards in the chest, but was deflected by his body armor. He couldn’t grab it, because it took all the strength he had in both hands to hang onto the grenade. The harvester’s grip was too tight for him to pry it away, but he dared not let go.
Jack cried out as the harvester slashed his face just below his eyes. He lost his grip and rolled away from the fight.
While still clinging to the beast’s hand that held the grenade, Richards twisted his body and caught the harvester’s head between his thighs in a move he’d learned while wrestling in high school. Locking his lower legs together, he squeezed as hard as he could and twisted.
That’s when the stinger found him. It stabbed him in the thigh, the tip driving deep into his femur.
The creature tried to whipsaw its body back and forth, trying to break away. Richards rolled with the motion and twisted, bringing the thing next to the opening to the hatch trunk. “Dawson! Push! Push, damn you!”
Bracing himself against the navigator’s position, Jack kicked at the thing with his legs, driving it across the deck.
Richards rolled into the opening, dragging the creature with him.
The two of them slammed against the hatch at the bottom, and the harvester finally threw him off.
As the thing stood up, reaching for Jack and the flight deck with the grenade still clutched in its hand, Richards grabbed it in a half nelson hold and dragged it back down.
“Jack!” he cried. “Close the grate! Close the goddamn grate!”
***
Jack looked at the two heavy, bright yellow safety grates that covered the hatch trunk during flight to keep the crew from accidentally falling in. They were still flipped up, out of the way.
Richards screamed again. “Close it! I can’t hold on much longer!”
The harvester reached up toward Jack with the hand that held the grenade.
It let the handle fly.
Jack’s heart felt like a huge, cold stone in his chest as he reached up and flipped the forward grate down.
He cursed as the thing tried to force the grate open again, and he had to put all his weight on it to hold it. The stinger lanced up at him through one of the gate’s openings, barely missing his neck.
He met Carl’s gaze for just an instant. “Carl, no!”
***
Richards’ body was on fire from the harvester venom, with more pain radiating from the bruises and broken bones the thing was dishing out as it writhed in a frenzy, trying to break his grip. But what he felt now didn’t seem that much worse than some of the torturous beatings his father had given him as boy. Very few people had seen the scars on his body, and the only person other than his dead mother who knew the truth of them was Renee.
Renee. The thought of her was what had kept him going. That and his own stubborn refusal to yield. While he didn’t always win, he’d never given in or given up on anything in his life, and he didn’t intend to go out as a whimpering loser. His only true regret was that he hadn’t had time to tell Renee goodbye.
He let go of the harvester with one hand long enough to find the hatch handle. For a brief moment, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to pull it open. Then he remembered who he was.
The FBI’s number one asshole.
His lips twisting into a bloody grin at his own joke, he yanked the lever and opened the hatch.
***
One second the harvester was there, inches away from Jack below the floor grate. The next it was gone, blasted through the hatch with Carl as the plane hemorrhaged its air in explosive decompression.
The grenade, too, was carried away to explode somewhere behind the plane.
Jack’s ears felt like someone had rammed ice picks through them as the pressure dropped. Automated alarms were going off in the cockpit, blaring over the tornado of air that rushed past him and pinned him against the grate. Ferris was shouting, and the plane’s nose pitched over into a dive. Jack was pelted by everything that had been floating around loose in the cockpit a
nd cargo area, blown toward the hatch by the escaping air.
Someone grabbed his combat harness and hauled him back. Terje. He, too, was prone on the deck, a pair of Marines holding his legs.
In a moment, it was over. The hatch was still open, but the pressure from the slipstream flowing past the plane’s nose kept it banging open and shut, but mostly shut.
They were alive. The harvester was gone.
And so was Carl Richards.
Jack stayed like that, sprawled on the deck, until Ferris leveled the plane at an altitude where they could breathe.
“You’ve got to get that hatch closed,” Ferris shouted. “We won’t make it halfway to grandma’s house with the fuel burn rate at this altitude.”
With a weary sigh, Jack nodded to Terje and the Marines. He pushed aside all the debris that had been trapped by the floor grate, then opened the grates themselves. With the Marines holding his legs, he dangled upside down just like the Kurnow-thing had done after they took off. After five tries, he managed to grab the handle and dog the hatch shut.
The Marines pulled him back up, and after flipping the grates back down, Terje helped him to his feet.
“Fly us the hell away from here, Mr. Wizard,” Jack told Ferris.
“Right,” the pilot said quietly. Tears glistened on the man’s cheeks.
There’s going to be plenty more of that soon, Jack thought grimly as he made his way back to the cargo hold. Naomi, who was so weak she could barely stand, hugged him, as did Melissa.
Then he turned to Renee.
She stood there, still clutching her garden sprayer, looking so alone and forlorn. She was trying so hard to be brave, to confront Fate with quiet dignity, but the facade crumbled as soon as he wrapped his arms around her.
“The goddamn moron,” she sobbed against his chest as he held her tight. “Why did he have to leave me?”
“It was the only way he could save us,” Jack whispered. “He knew it was the only way we had a chance to live.”
AFTERMATH
Aside from the droning of the four engines, it was a quiet three hour flight to Colorado Springs. Ferris managed to make contact with NORAD, and everyone aboard was relieved to find out that the president and most of the cabinet had survived, and the airport was still secure, if overcrowded.
They were joined an hour out by a pair of F-16s that escorted them to Peterson Field, where Ferris made a smooth landing. Following an armed Humvee, that met them at the far end of the runway, he taxied to an open spot on the apron, right next to another KC-135.
A welcoming party of heavily armed airmen, half a dozen armored Humvees, two ambulances, and an Air Force blue bus was waiting for them.
“That was good timing,” Ferris said as he shut down the engines. “We might’ve had enough fuel left to make it halfway to Denver before we crashed.”
“All I want is to get off this fucking plane,” Jack said. Kneeling down, he flipped up the yellow grates, trying his best to ignore the smears and spatters of blood, the blood of his dead friend, on the walls of the access trunk.
The hatch opened, and he was greeted by the muzzle of a shotgun held by a heavily armed airman.
Jack was not amused. “Put that thing away unless you want me to ram it up your ass.”
“Sorry, sir. It’s our procedure. If you’ll come down one at a time, unarmed, I’d appreciate it.”
“We’ve got wounded aboard. I’d like to get them out first.”
“We’ll get to them, major, but we have to clear the plane first.”
“How about a couple crates for our cats, unless you want me to just toss them down to you?”
The young man squinted at him, then he spoke over his radio. “Will do, sir. We’ll have some here in a minute.”
Under the watchful eye of the shotgun-toting airman, a ground crewman poked a ladder up through the trunk, and Jack locked it in place. He stood up and turned to face aft, where everyone was lined up. “One at a time, no weapons. Let’s go.”
One by one, they disappeared down the ladder. So few, Jack thought bitterly. So few of us are left.
“Come on, Al,” he said after the last of those who could move under their own power had left the plane. “Out you go.”
Ferris looked around the cockpit. “I feel like the captain abandoning his ship.”
“Don’t worry. I have a feeling you’ll be seeing this plane again.”
The older man looked at him, and Jack was surprised how much he seemed to have aged since they left Lincoln. Ferris had barely known Kurnow, but her death had hit him really hard. “That’s all I have left,” he said quietly before he climbed down the hatch.
“Sir?”
Jack glanced down to see the airman and his shotgun pointing up at him. “If you’ll come down, please.”
“No, I won’t come down, please.” He scooped up Alexander, who had come to the cockpit, sniffing after the mountain air coming in through the hatch. “Here, see this? This is a cat. He’s my cat, and the only thing he’s upset about right now is that there’s nothing in this plane for him to eat.” Alexander looked at the airman and meowed. Jack went on, “I’m not a harvester. Neither is anyone else on this plane. Now get the medics up here so they can help our injured, including the woman whose work is going to save our asses, or so help me God I’m going to blow your head off. That’s my procedure.”
***
“I assure you, Mr. President,” Naomi told President Lynch and the others gathered around the conference room table, “the virus will work.”
Despite the protestations of Jack and the medical personnel who’d taken a look at Naomi’s leg, Lynch had insisted that she be brought straight to one of the conference rooms of the underground NORAD complex after their plane landed. She hadn’t wanted to leave Renee alone, either, but at least Terje and Melissa, along with the two cats, were with her. What had happened to the others, she didn’t know.
But when she saw Lynch, she couldn’t help but be overwhelmed. The man’s hair had turned completely gray, he’d lost at least twenty pounds, and his eyes had deep circles under them that made him look like he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight prize fighter. His skin was paler than hers, and he had a persistent tic in his left eye. The stress of watching his country, his world, being torn apart was killing him.
“But how do you know? How do you really know without any kind of testing that the virus will kill the damn things, and that they didn’t do some sort of bait and switch, targeting us, instead?”
“First of all, sir, they didn’t need to target us with a virus. We’d already lost this war.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs opened his mouth to say something, an angry look on his face, but Lynch cut him off with a gesture of his hand so she could continue. “I know what you’re thinking: things would have been different if President Miller had bombed Los Angeles.” The general rewarded her with a curt nod. “That only would have delayed the inevitable, and not by very long, not with outbreaks in half a dozen other countries. No. We lost this war as soon as that one bag of seed was stolen from New Horizons. There was no other possible outcome once the first seeds were planted or eaten. The genie was already out of the bottle.”
She looked at the display that took up most of the wall at the end of the room. On it was a map of the world showing the estimated harvester infestations. Every country had widening swathes of red, and some had been entirely consumed by it. “Second, as I tried to explain to you earlier, the critical element, creating a strain of virus that would rapidly infect harvesters, was tested at SEAL-2 before the facility was destroyed. We know it worked, and worked very well, but it was effectively inert and unable to replicate a new set of genetic instructions. The harvester team gave us the keys we needed to fully enable the virus, and with the genetic information we derived from Melissa Wellington, I was also able to add in a kill gene to the viral Trojan Horse.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “Even as we speak, the first harvesters exposed to the virus, the ones wh
o escaped from the lab in Lincoln, will be experiencing what, for them, are the first very mild symptoms: a modest increase in body temperature coupled with glandular swelling and aching in the joints as the virus begins to take hold. I’ll be surprised if they really even notice it at first onset.” She looked back at Lynch. “Every one of them will be highly contagious, and we know they took samples of the virus with them to help spread it, thinking it was going to lift their species out of its lethal reproductive cycle and produce nothing but sentient harvesters that can replace us as the only sentient species on the planet.” She smiled. “The virus will, in fact, do just as they intended.” Her smile faded. “But about seventy-two hours after exposure, over ninety-nine percent of them will be dead.”
“And how are they going to die?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked.
She stared at him. “Slowly and horribly.”
“How,” the president snapped.
“The disease infecting Melissa helped me pinpoint the gene sequences in the harvester DNA that control their skeletal growth,” she explained, “and by comparing the genetic data from adult harvesters with immature creatures transitioning from the larval stage, I was able to identify the gene switch that shuts off their skeletal growth when they reach adulthood. The code I added to the virus both turns that switch back on and adds in a failsafe in the form of a sequence from a mutation in the human ACVR1 gene that causes a rare disease known as Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP. In humans, FOP causes fibrous tissue like muscles and tendons to spontaneously ossify, literally turning those tissues into bone and causing spontaneous bone growth at the site of any injuries.” She stared at the president. “The infected harvesters will be entombed in their own skeletons.”
***
The harvester that had masqueraded as Zohreh, that had kidnapped Naomi from the lab in Lincoln when the harvesters had escaped, could no longer move its limbs. It had known, of course, that the virus would produce uncomfortable symptoms for a time. That was to be expected as her body’s DNA was transformed.
Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Page 37