Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Kempf?” Jack asked. “LRU’s dean?”

  “Yes,” Naomi said. “She was the university dean more in name than fact; the assistant dean took care of all the day to day business, while she spent most of her time in the lab working on the Revolutions project. I hadn’t heard about the deaths of the others when I went to the university lab the next morning. I was still feeling terrible from the flu, but I was so excited that I went in, anyway.” She wrapped her arms around herself, and Jack could see goose bumps on her flesh. “I joined her in the lab and she...propositioned me.” She stopped and looked up at Jack, and he could see the terror in her eyes, lingering from that day over a year ago. “She told me that the project was about to be taken into its final phase, and the others hadn’t been able to accept it. She stood there and told me that she’d killed them, Jack!”

  Before he could think, Jack had wrapped his arms around her, drawing her shivering body close. “You don’t have to say any more,” he whispered into her hair as she wrapped her own arms around his waist, holding him tightly.

  Naomi shook her head. “No,” she rasped. “You have to know this. You have to understand.” Taking a breath, she went on, “She said that I had the talent that she needed, that the others had been useful tools, but nothing more. She said she would make me rich, far richer than I could imagine, working on the final phase of the project. I could have whatever I wanted, Jack. Anything. All I had to do was to keep on being brilliant, working with her, the two of us alone, in secret, developing targeted strains of the retrovirus. She didn’t say exactly what they would be for, but I knew it couldn’t be good.” She shuddered. “I had no idea what to do, Jack. I was trapped in the lab with her. I thought she was insane.”

  “So what happened?” Jack asked softly.

  “I agreed,” she whispered. “I told her that it sounded like a wonderful idea and rolled out every avaricious desire I could think of.”

  “And she believed you?” Jack asked, shocked.

  After a brief pause, she said, “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Naomi pushed herself away and looked up at him. “She believed me because I’d been spoiled and greedy, Jack. By that time I was easily worth twenty million dollars. I knew I was a hot commodity and never made any bones about making the company bleed green for my services, especially after working like a slave to position myself to be on the staff at LRU. Yes, I had dreams about doing some good things. I think we all do. But I expected to be well paid for making those dreams come true, and Kempf was appealing to that part of me, the part she thought was strongest.” Naomi shook her head as he opened his mouth to protest. “I’m not saying I was a devil, Jack; maybe more like a spoiled brat. I’d never really had to grow up, even after my parents died. I’d always been self-centered in a lot of ways, even more after they died. But I grew up that morning. Fast.

  “I was actually lucky,” she continued, “that I’d had the flu. I could feel the blood draining from my face as she spoke, but I was so pale and washed-out that my reaction didn’t register with her. Kempf told me that I’d be watched closely to make sure I didn’t go back on my word, then she let me go.”

  “What happened after that?” Jack asked. “I know from what Special Agent Richards, the agent in charge of the LRU investigation, told me, that your house was abandoned: you just disappeared.”

  She took his arm and guided him along the seemingly endless tunnel, toward what looked like another blast door up ahead. “I never made it home,” she told him. “Gregg’s people had been watching the lab. They knew what Kempf really was, and knew about the deaths of the other researchers on my team. Gregg knew they had to move quickly if they wanted to get me, to get what I knew, before I could do anything that would get me killed.” She gave him a wan smile. “After the other night at your house, you can probably appreciate what they did. I drove home, scared to death and feeling terribly ill. I noticed a car that followed me out of the university parking lot. Kempf’s watchdogs. They didn’t even make a pretense about it, just got up right behind me and stayed there. Along a stretch of isolated farmland that I drove through to get home, a big SUV suddenly pulled alongside the car trailing me and blasted the car off the road with shotguns and assault rifles. I floored it and just took off.” She chuckled. “I own...owned a Tesla, an electric sports car that makes a Porsche look like a covered wagon. I left the SUV in the dust. Then my phone rang. It was Gregg, telling me that he knew about the lab and Kempf, and offered to get me out of the fix I was in.”

  “I’ll bet he didn’t zap you with a cattle prod and drug you to sleep,” Jack grumbled.

  “Actually,” Naomi told him, “he did, if it makes you feel any better.” She sighed. “I miss my stupid car. I hate driving rental minivans when I get to go topside.”

  Unable to help himself, Jack started laughing, and a moment later, Naomi did, too. It didn’t last long, but it felt good.

  “It’s just lucky for Gregg that he saved Koshka, too,” she said, “or I would have zapped him with an electric prod.”

  “Koshka?” Jack asked as they came to another huge door marked Blast Lock #2.

  She smiled. “She’s my cat.”

  He suddenly remembered the white long-haired cat in the photograph he’d seen of her.

  “She and Alexander have been getting along quite well,” Naomi said with a grin.

  “Oh, jeez,” Jack muttered. “He hasn’t been any trouble, has he?”

  “No, Jack,” she told him with a quick smile. “He’s sweet. And as you’ll see, cats are more than welcome here.”

  “So, where are we now?” he asked her. The blast lock formed a wall in the tunnel and had two entrances. One was a massive blast door not unlike the one to the lab and control center domes, although not as big. Next to it was part of a cylinder made of steel that was nearly six inches thick and perhaps three feet across, clearly designed to roll back into the concrete wall of the small junction they’d reached.

  “This is Blast Lock Two,” she told him as she quickly ran through the same entry routine with her badge, a six-digit combination, and a retinal scanner that were in the wall next to the cylindrical door. “When the site was built, this and another lock like it were designed to partition off the missiles from the rest of the complex. In case of an accident, or if a nuclear blast destroyed one or more of them, the rest of the complex would be safe. Now it’s one of our main physical security points, modified a bit. We normally just use this smaller entrance to go to this part of the complex, and only open the main door if we need to move something larger.”

  The cylinder hummed open, rotating into the wall. But unlike the other doors he’d seen so far, this one opened into a man trap: whoever entered couldn’t get to the other side without standing inside it while the door rotated and closed off the main tunnel again.

  “Come on,” she told him. “It’ll be a little tight, but shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Shrugging, Jack entered the cylinder behind her.

  Holding up her badge to a camera mounted in the ceiling, she said, “It’s Naomi and Jack Dawson. Open up, please.”

  “Roger, Naomi,” a man’s gruff voice came from the speaker next to the camera. “Rotating now.”

  Jack looked over his shoulder as the man trap’s door began to rotate closed.

  Naomi turned around and pulled him away from the closing door. “The first rule of doors in this place, Jack,” she said as she pulled him up against her, “is to never get caught in one.”

  His breath caught in his throat as he looked at her, so close now that their lips were almost touching. His chest tingled where her breasts pressed against him, and he felt a flush of heat and desire as his body immediately began to react. He halfheartedly tried to back away to keep from embarrassing himself, but her hands, still on his waist, pulled him even closer. For a long moment, he was lost in her blue and brown eyes as she looked at him with a mixture of appraisal and invitation.

  Then the door hissed
to a stop, the other side standing open now, and the moment was over. Slowly, Naomi let go his waist and turned to step out of the man trap into the tunnel.

  Jack, at a loss, stood there for a moment, trying to sort out his feelings and failing miserably.

  “Come on, Jack,” she said softly. “We’ve got one more stop for now.”

  With a shake of his head as he gradually regained control of his rebellious body, he moved to walk beside her as she took him down a tunnel that branched off the main one.

  “Naomi...” he began, not quite sure what to say.

  She held up a hand, stopping him from saying anything else. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be a tease. Like I told you, I’m still a spoiled brat at heart.” She grinned, but it was tinged with sadness. “Living here, and knowing what I know, knowing what’s out there in the world, has given me a different perspective. It’s like living under the sword of Damocles, living in fear. Wondering if we can stop what’s happening, and hoping we don’t get killed in the process. I haven’t really had anyone to share anything with for a long time.” She chuckled. “I’m also dead tired. You’ve been knocked out the last twenty-four hours, while I’ve been awake the whole time, working my ass off in the lab. I guess I’m getting a bit punchy.”

  “Well, I’m not necessarily complaining,” Jack said with a smile. He couldn’t help but be attracted to her, but part of him knew it was nothing more than stress and the lack of close female companionship since he ended his relationship with Jerri years before. Still, he thought to himself, you could do a lot worse, brother. “I just...need to get my head around all this,” he told her finally. “I still feel like I’m in some sort of bizarre dream, waiting to wake up.”

  “The dream’s going to get worse before it gets better, Jack,” she cautioned him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s something else I have to show you that you’re not going to like,” she said. “That’s the ‘everything’ that Gregg meant when we left the command center. But we’re going to do that after I get some sleep. I just can’t face it now.”

  “Sansone,” Jack said, and Naomi nodded.

  They came to a small junction, and Naomi turned right. “To the left is the old propellant terminal,” she said, “where they used to store the fuel for one of the missiles.” They walked past another tunnel that branched off to the left. “That’s the silo, one of our deep freezers. I’ll show you what’s in there a bit later.”

  Straight ahead of them was a sign that read “Apartment One,” but Jack didn’t notice. He had been turning over in his mind the things she’d told him, and realized he was still missing a vital piece of the puzzle. “Naomi, if you helped develop this retrovirus delivery system, you must have known all about it. So why did you send Sheldon in there? What was he really after?”

  “The prototype retrovirus that Kempf created after I left,” she said grimly. “We learned from one of our insiders that she had finished her work on the prototype seeds that were infused with the first functional retrovirus. Sheldon went in to try and get samples so we could see exactly what the retrovirus was intended to do.”

  “So you never knew what the retrovirus might really be?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Just playing devil’s advocate for a minute, what if it’s benign? And what about all the stuff on the EDS web site about the Earth being terraformed by some evil extraterrestrials?”

  She frowned. “You don’t believe it now, Jack – there’s no way that you could, not yet – but we believe it’s true. But our only proof up to now has been anecdotal information that we’ve never been able to back up with anything that would stand up to scrutiny in the scientific community or wouldn’t come across as a hoax. What we find in that corn, the retrovirus itself, will be indisputable scientific proof of what New Horizons and its allies have in store for us.”

  “When will you know?” he asked as they came to the normal-looking metal door for Apartment One, which opened quietly on well-oiled hinges.

  “It’ll probably take two or three days, working around the clock,” she told him as they stepped into a hallway that was about twenty feet long, with an elevator in a vestibule area on the right side. There were three doors along the length of the hallway. “This is one of the three ‘apartment buildings’ we’ve got in the complex,” she told him. “They used to be the equipment terminals for the three missile silos. Each one is a huge four-story reinforced concrete cylinder, forty feet across. We put in three apartments on each floor. Most aren’t occupied right now, but probably will be soon.” She headed to the first door on the left and opened it. “This one’s yours.”

  As Jack stepped inside, the lights automatically came on. He saw that the apartment was furnished much like Naomi’s room in the command center, but was somewhat larger. It had a nice, if compact, bathroom with a shower, and there was a microwave and small refrigerator in one corner. A large flat-screen television was mounted along the curving outside wall, facing a queen bed and a comfortable-looking arm chair.

  “God, I’m tired,” Naomi said quietly as she leaned against the door frame, eying the bed as Jack explored the room. “Having my room in the command center usually saves a lot of walking, but these rooms sure are a lot nicer.”

  In the more even light here in his new home, as opposed to the stark overhead illumination in the tunnels, Jack could clearly see the rings under her eyes. She looked as if she was ready to fall over from exhaustion. “Come here,” he told her, reaching for her hand.

  “Jack...” she said, uncertain.

  He smiled at her sudden coyness after how she’d acted with him in the aptly-named man trap only a few minutes ago. “Lie down,” he told her, and she finally took his hand and let him lead her to the bed. “You’re whipped, and there’s no reason to walk all the way back to the command center. Besides, I got to sleep in your bed, so fair’s fair.” He pulled the covers back. “And I won’t attack you in your sleep. I promise.”

  “Damn. That’s no fun,” she muttered with a grin as she sat down on the bed, slipped her shoes off, and then lay back on the clean sheets and pillow. She was so tired that she didn’t bother trying to take her clothes off.

  Jack was partly relieved, and partly disappointed. “Maybe later,” he told her softly as he pulled the covers up around her.

  “Now go away so I can sleep,” she told him.

  “Well, I would if I could,” he said, “but I think I’m stuck in here with you. I can’t get through any of the doors.”

  “Uh-uh,” she murmured. “Just use the intercom. Ask Renee to let you back through to the command center. You should check on Alexander, too.”

  “Okay,” he said, gently pulling the blanket up around her shoulders and brushing a wisp of hair from her face. “I’ll do that.”

  Naomi didn’t say anything more. She was already fast asleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After calling Renee on the intercom, Jack wandered his way back through the tunnels to the command dome. He passed a handful of other people who nodded politely at him, but he also noticed that their eyes almost instinctively glanced at his chest, looking for a badge that he didn’t yet have. None of them made any comment, however, and he kept on going.

  He felt displaced, totally out of sync with reality, as if he were in a bipolar dream world that alternated between the horror of this secret war that he had fallen into and the totally unexpected pleasure of Naomi’s company.

  Naomi, he thought. Talk about an emotional roller-coaster. First he thought he should hate her for being involved somehow with Sheldon’s death. Then she saved his life. And now...Now, what? he wondered. Part of him felt like his emotions and pent-up desires were just carrying him along, while the logical part of his brain cried, Whoa! Slow down, boy! Maybe Naomi was interested in him, maybe she wasn’t.

  He couldn’t deny his own attraction to her. But he’d barely even met her, and he didn’t believe in love (or even infatuation) at f
irst sight. It was like time had been compressed, a relativistic effect of the madness he’d fallen into, making it seem like they’d known each other far longer than they really had.

  With a sigh of frustration, he looked up at the security camera outside the blast door to the command center and was rewarded with a loud beeping as it began to cycle open. He made his way upstairs to Renee’s station and gratefully sat down in a spare chair that she had wheeled over for him.

  “Welcome to Oz, kid,” she said, handing him a cup of coffee. “Hope you like it black.”

  “Thanks,” he said, taking a sip of the bitter but excellent tasting brew. He looked around, but Thornton was nowhere to be seen.

  Tan, however, was working at one of the other stations, and had positioned himself so he could both work and keep Jack in his peripheral vision at the same time.

  “Gregg’s off shift,” Renee told him, knowing exactly who he was looking for. “Don’t mind him, Jack. He really doesn’t mean it personally.”

  “He sure fooled me,” Jack told her bluntly.

  “He’s got the world on his shoulders,” she explained. “He and Naomi. Before she came along, Jack, this was all Gregg’s show.” She gestured at the command center around her. “All this, and a lot more, really, is because of Gregg, his determination and organizational genius. He had a lot of help, of course, but he was one of the first ones to learn the truth of what was happening, and took the lead in organizing a resistance. He lined up the funding, set up the front companies, got this place put together.” She shook her head in undisguised wonder. “He did all this in just five years.

  “The reason he was upset about you,” she went on, “was that he’s always handpicked the people who come into EDS, and he hates taking in ‘strays,’ as he calls them. I thought he and Naomi were going to slug it out over her going after you.” She took a swig of coffee from her mug. “Knowing we can trust everyone is vital for one simple and important reason: all of our lives, and humanity’s survival, depends on our operation remaining a secret. That’s a pretty hefty burden. Sometimes we get stuck with a charity case like you.” She smiled. “But I’d say we lucked out on that deal.”