“Yes, and two magazines. That, my knife, and my wits are my only remaining weapons.”
“Two out of three isn’t bad.” Jack grinned as Mikhailov snorted.
“Here, take these.” Mikhailov handed him the gun and spare magazines. “You can hold it and shoot. I cannot. Not now.”
Jack took the weapon and shoved it in his empty holster, then put the magazines in a pouch. “So what’s the plan?”
Mikhailov pondered for a moment as they watched the “people” near the cars. Apparently content that there were no survivors, and clearly not wanting to venture closer to the flaming wreckage, they returned to their cars and drove off, heading back toward Elista.
“The world has just become an extremely dangerous place, my friend,” Mikhailov whispered.
“Yeah,” Jack said, shaking off the chill that went deeper than the cold muck as he watched the cars leave. “That was pretty damn creepy. It’s strange, though: I would have thought they would have acted more normal.”
“Perhaps they have not yet learned?” Mikhailov mused. “Or perhaps they did not feel the need to, if all four of them were harvesters.”
“Something else for Naomi to figure out, I guess.”
Mikhailov shook his head. “What you observe and tell her will be just as important as anything she learns in the lab, and perhaps more. It is like with weapons: seeing how they perform at a test facility is one thing. How effective they are on the battlefield in the hands of a soldier is something else.”
They were silent for a time, the only sound the crackling of the burning helicopter.
Then Jack asked, “How many harvesters do you think there were back at Ulan-Erg?”
“There must have been a few hundred, maybe more. Not including the ghastly little ones.”
“That’s about what I figured. And how many more do you think must be loose in Elista to cause that kind of panic?” He nodded toward the flames rising from the town.
“I cannot even guess. Where is this leading?”
“Naomi said that she believed they could reproduce, that they weren’t limited to a host ingesting the engineered corn and transforming into a harvester. But if what she said is true, how fast do they reproduce? How long was it since that facility hereabouts was overrun?”
“Perhaps a week,” Mikhailov said, uncertain, “maybe a few days more.”
“And in that short time there are hundreds of the damn things.”
“There is worse.” Mikhailov turned to look at him. “There is still at least one in Stavropol, the one masquerading as Putin.”
“Who’s now probably spawned a lot more, plus any that might have come from here. Shit.” Jack blew out his breath, forming a fog in the air that drifted upward until it vanished. “You still haven’t answered my question about what we’re going to do.”
“When we came out on our mission to the facility where the harvesters here originated, I had some time to study maps of this area. Elista has a small airport that should be roughly five kilometers northwest of us. There should be little between here and there, a few scattered farm houses, perhaps, and several bridges that cross a small river, the same that ran north of Ulan-Erg.”
“Do you know how to fly?”
Mikhailov winced. “I make no claim to being a pilot, but I spent several summers with one of my uncles, who owned a plane he used for spraying crops. It had two sets of controls. He let me fly with him many times, and let me take the controls when he thought it was safe to do so.” He grinned. “That was not so often as I would have liked.”
“Okay, let’s assume you can get us off the ground without flying into the control tower. But why the airport? Why not try one of the other towns, or even here in Elista, and steal a car?”
“Because I want to be away from the ground, and leave here as fast as we can.” Mikhailov’s voice was shaking now. “I can cope with the adult harvesters. They are terrifying, but they are an enemy I can understand, after a fashion. It is the small ones, the amoebas. I do not want to die that way. I do not want to be eaten alive.”
“But they can’t get you in a car.”
Mikhailov stared at him. “They are drawn to rubber and plastics, Jack. Cars attract them like honey. That is what we saw at the facility. And if you ran over one in the road, it would stick to the tires or the undercarriage, then eat its way in.”
“Planes have lots of rubber and plastic parts, too, you know.”
“Of course they do. But if we can escape in a plane, we are free for a while. And we may go as far as the plane can take us without fear of encountering other harvesters.” He paused. “An aircraft radio would also allow us to contact any nearby military units, and hopefully get in touch with the regiment at Stavropol. My hope is that most of the larvae are in the town where there is an ample supply of food.”
Jack took a deep breath. “Okay, fine, you convinced me. I don’t have any better ideas.” He looked at his watch. It wouldn’t be long before it was daylight. They needed to get to the airport before dawn. “We’d better get a move on.” He got to his feet, then helped up Mikhailov, who grunted in pain. “You should’ve stayed in the hospital, you know.”
“No,” Mikhailov gasped as they began to walk toward the road and the airport that lay somewhere beyond, “I should have been born a millionaire so I never would have had to do any of this in the first place.”
* * *
Their trek to the airport was uneventful except for crossing the road and then, later, one of the bridges that spanned the small, meandering river halfway to their destination.
The A154 road was a challenge because of the cars that seemed to be perfectly spaced in distance and time to see anyone trying to cross. A road block had been set up outside of what looked like a truck stop just on the eastern side of town, and all the cars and the handful of trucks that had been heading west had been pulled off. A little less than a kilometer away, Jack and Mikhailov watched as policemen shepherded the unwitting passengers into the building. None of them came out again in the time the two men spent watching.
More time passed, and Jack knew that they were just going to have to take their chances. If they didn’t move soon, they’d be caught in daylight when they reached the airport.
The two had crept up as close as they dared to the road. Waiting until the latest car sped past, Jack whispered, “Now!”
Grabbing Mikhailov by his harness, Jack hauled him to his feet and helped propel the gasping Russian across the road. He felt completely naked as they ran, their boots pounding across the fifteen meters of asphalt. The only blessing was that there weren’t any streetlights this far away from town.
They had made it halfway across when a car pulled out of the truck stop and headed toward them.
“Hurry!”
Mikhailov ran, grunting with pain, and the two of them tumbled into a culvert on the north side of the road. Jack drew his Desert Eagle and crawled on his elbows, raising himself up just high enough that he could see the car.
It didn’t slow, just kept on moving.
“Well, that was fun.” He holstered the pistol and slid back down beside Mikhailov, who was still groaning. “Sergei, are you all right?”
“I have been better.” He wiped his mouth with his left hand, while pinning his right arm against his. “Chyort vozmi’. I’m bleeding inside. I think one of my ribs has punctured a lung.”
That certainly wasn’t good news, but Jack wasn’t surprised after the beatings Mikhailov had taken, first at the facility, and then earlier tonight. “Come on, then. All the more reason to get the hell out of this place so we can get you to a hospital.”
From there, they made their way northwest past the rear of the truck stop and across open fields until they found a way over the river, which, after he saw it, Jack considered more of a creek. But with all the rain the creek was swollen and running fast. There was no way Mikhailov would be able to make it across through the water. The bridge they found was little more than earth
packed over a big culvert pipe, with the water only a few feet below the road.
Standing in the middle of the earthen bridge was a dark figure in the shape of a man. He would have been invisible, except that Mikhailov had noticed his silhouette against the handful of lights that shone from around the buildings at the airport. Jack hoped that he and Mikhailov hadn’t been silhouetted themselves against the burning town behind them, but there was nothing he could do about that.
“Stay here.” Jack drew his pistol and stood up. If there was more than one of the things, he figured it would be better to draw them out with an obvious approach than to blunder into them while trying to sneak up on the thing guarding the bridge. He had to assume it was a harvester. Why else would anyone be standing out here on such an awful night?
Jack’s eyes were constantly in motion, scanning around him using his peripheral vision, which was better suited to seeing at night. Everything was indistinct, shadows upon shadows, but he saw nothing that hinted at movement, which he took as a good sign. He was worried that the sound of the big gun firing would draw unwanted attention, but there was no way around it. There was no quiet way to kill a harvester.
The man-shaped silhouette remained still until he got within a few meters of it.
“Hey!” Jack called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. “How’s it going?”
The shadow didn’t respond, but he noticed movement. The torso rippled, changed.
Jack brought up the Desert Eagle, aimed at the center of the dark, shifting mass, and fired. In the glare of the enormous muzzle flash that for an instant seemed to join him with his target, he could see what looked like an elderly man, except for the stinger-tipped tentacle uncoiling from his chest.
The half-inch diameter bullet smashed into the thing’s thorax, knocking the creature backward, and Jack knew that he’d scored a direct hit. When bullets hit only the malleable flesh, they tended to pass right through. They did damage and hurt the harvester, but wouldn’t kill it. Hitting their appendages and less well-protected parts of their skeleton could do severe damage, but again, the bullets tended to pass through and rarely would provide a first-round kill.
But the toughest parts of their skeleton could stop even a .50 caliber round from a Desert Eagle at close range. The downside for the harvester was that all the energy from the bullet was transferred directly to its body. So while the core skeletal structure remained more or less intact, the impact ripped the carbon fiber bones from the internal connective tissues and organs, causing massive internal damage.
Making a gurgling wail, the harvester tumbled off the bridge to land with a splash in the water and was rapidly carried downstream.
Blinking his eyes, trying to clear the afterimage of the muzzle flash, he ran back to Mikhailov, who was already moving toward him.
“Next time I will give you my knife,” Mikhailov told him. “You were almost that close.”
“I didn’t want to miss.” Jack wrapped his arm around his Russian friend’s waist. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
Two and a half kilometers later, they were crouched behind what Jack took to be the only real hangar at the Elista airport. Across the street to the west was what he guessed might be a maintenance building, and beyond that, past some sort of park with trees, was the main administration building and the control tower. There were two tall masts with stadium-style lights in front of the tower building that illuminated the tarmac in that area, and poles bearing flood lamps about sixty-five meters apart illuminated the rest of the tarmac area.
Aside from that and a dozen or so other nondescript buildings, none of them very large, there wasn’t much there.
“When you said the airport was small, you weren’t kidding.”
“Not everything in Russia is big, Jack.” In the reflected light of one of the nearby lights, Mikhailov tried to grin, but it looked more to Jack like a grimace.
“How are you holding up?”
“Give me some vodka and I’ll be fine.”
“Smart ass.” Jack saw that Mikhailov’s chin was covered in blood. Mikhailov had been wiping his mouth with his sleeve, but it was easy enough to see that the bleeding was getting worse.
On his knees, Mikhailov leaned around the corner of the hangar. They were at the rear corner, farthest from the tower building, which was almost two hundred meters away.
“That will work.”
Jack, standing in a crouch so he could see over Mikhailov’s head, followed his gaze. He saw a trio of single-seat crop dusters lined up along the edge of the tarmac in front of the hangar. “Sorry, Sergei, I consider you a friend, but I’m not sitting in your lap.”
“No, no! Not those little ones.” He pointed past them at half a dozen large shapes that squatted on the tarmac beyond the single-seaters, about seventy meters away, right under one of the light poles. “Those!”
Jack looked closer. “Holy shit. Sergei, those are biplanes!”
“Is that what you call them? Biplanes. Yes, they are An-2 aircraft. My uncle had such a plane. He called it Annushka.”
“Those have got to be older than my dead grandfather, Sergei. Are you seriously thinking of flying one of those crates out of here?”
Mikhailov glanced at him. “There might be other planes here that would hold both of us, but that is the only one I might stand any chance of flying. If I can remember how to start it. If any of them are fueled. And if I don’t bleed to death before convincing you we have no other options.” He nodded to the east. While it was still dark on the ground, the sky was beginning to lighten. Morning twilight was coming, and quickly.
“Right,” Jack told him, accepting his fate. Wonderful, he thought. I’m going to die in a bloody Russian biplane! “Which one were you thinking of taking?”
“The third from the left. The entrance door is on the left side. The line of trees there will cover us from anyone who might be in the tower until we step out onto the tarmac.”
Jack nodded agreement. “Let’s do it, then.”
With Mikhailov leading, they moved under the trees that led from the eastern side of the hangar toward the tarmac where the An-2s were lined up, tails facing them.
They were halfway to the planes when they heard a crash and a scream from the hangar.
Both men knelt down and froze, their attention riveted on the hangar behind them.
The scream came again, and Jack’s insides turned to ice. It was a woman’s voice, and she was clearly fighting for her life. A shot rang out, then another, and the hideous cry of a harvester tore through the darkness.
“Shit!” Jack turned to Mikhailov. “Get to the plane. I’m going to see if I can help her.”
Mikhailov grabbed his arm. “Don’t be a fool! Their struggle will probably draw more! We must go!”
Shaking the Russian’s hand loose, Jack snarled, “I know, but I can’t just walk away. Now, get to the fucking plane! I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Leaving Mikhailov cursing behind him, Jack dashed along the trees, back toward the hangar.
He had almost reached the side of the big building when the personnel door there flew open. Reflexively raising his pistol, Jack tensed his finger on the trigger as a dark shape emerged.
It was a woman. With a gasp, she stopped short and raised a double-barrel shotgun, pointing it at his face.
Then there was something else coming through the door, something that was almost a man but wasn’t.
“Down!” Jack hadn’t even thought whether the woman might understand English. Even if she didn’t, she got the message. She dove to the ground and flattened herself out.
Jack fired at the harvester coming out the door after her. It shrieked as a fist-sized chunk of flesh and skeleton exploded from its back as the bullet passed through, but the hit barely slowed it down.
The second shot, however, severed the thing’s head from its thorax. The body fell into a twitching heap just behind the woman, who was scrambling to her feet to get away from it.
“You understand English, I take it?”
“Da, some.”
“Good.” Jack took her arm and pulled her toward the plane. “Come on, follow me!”
There was no point in trying to hide behind the trees now: any other harvesters here would know there were humans loose. And it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where to look.
Ahead, the engine of one of the ancient An-2’s coughed into life, exhaust belching from under the cowling as the big four-bladed prop began to turn.
“That’s our ride!” Jack shouted, pointing. The woman nodded as she ran, easily keeping pace with him.
Jack turned to look behind them, and his spirits fell as he saw a group of inhuman shadows bounding after them.
As he and the woman reached the plane, Jack gestured for her to get aboard. After she disappeared into the aircraft, he aimed at the nearest harvester and fired. The slug took off the appendage that would normally pass for a right arm, and the creature tumbled to the pavement. Jack fired at another and missed. He kept on firing until the magazine went dry, then he dropped the empty magazine and slammed in the last one he had. The creatures scattered, but clearly had no intention of giving up.
“Jack!” He heard Mikhailov screaming in his ear and felt an urgent tug on his shoulder. “Come on!”
With one last look at the harvesters, who were again charging after the plane, Jack turned and shoved Mikhailov back through the passenger door, then climbed up himself as the engine rose to a roar and the plane surged forward.
It suddenly struck Jack that Mikhailov wasn’t at the controls. “Who’s flying the goddamn plane?”
“That crazy woman you rescued. She is a real pilot!”
Something lunged at them through the door, even as the plane was gathering speed.
Jack fired. He missed, but the muzzle blast was enough of a distraction that the harvester lost its grip on the door frame and fell to the tarmac.
Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) Page 27