“Shit!” Jack cried as Alexander’s claws suddenly poked into his skin, and he set the cat down to join the others.
“Even before we brought Sansone in,” Naomi told him as they stopped to watch the cats’ strange behavior, “when we only had the corpses of the other two, frozen in there, the cats would still do this.” She gave Jack a frightened look. “We’re not really sure the things are dead,” she admitted. Turning back to the cats, she said, “They’ll come down here, all the way down the tunnel, and do this until they get so hungry they feel compelled to leave. And then they run back to the junction as if they’re being hunted, just like the three cats we passed on the way here. They’ll stay away for a while, as if they have to build up their courage to come back. But they always do.”
“And that’s why you had them at the portal when Ellen came in?” Jack asked. “To see if she was one of them?”
“Yes. Even the trucks that we use to move people and equipment have cats riding shotgun, you might say. Cats and thermal imagers.”
His eyebrows went up at that, but all Naomi would say was, “You’ll see.” Then she stepped very close to him and said, “Jack, you’re simply not going to believe what you see in there. Not at first, even after all that you’ve gone through.” Taking him by the arms, she went on, “And from now on, we’re not going to pretend that it’s human. That was more for your benefit, Jack, because inside your head, you’re still thinking of the woman from the FBI who came to your home. Even after shooting her point blank with a shotgun and seeing her get up again, your brain is still clinging to the fiction that she’s human, because anything else is...madness. An impossibility. Right?”
Jack nodded. She’d hit the nail on the head with that one. He knew that Sansone couldn’t have been normal, but there had to be some rational explanation for what had happened. Or did there?
“Just don’t believe anything it says or does,” she warned. “It will try to deceive you, Jack, in any way it can. I can’t tell you how, but just be prepared for the unexpected.”
He tried to swallow, but found that his mouth had suddenly gone bone dry. He really, really didn’t want to see what lay beyond the blast door in front of them, guarded by the growling, hissing cats. “Let’s do this,” he rasped.
Giving his arms a last reassuring squeeze, she nodded and let him go, then stepped carefully through the cats to the door. Jack followed right behind her, surprised that the cats didn’t crowd around the door to try and get in.
“They don’t want to come in,” she said. “It’s like they know that they’re here just to make sure it doesn’t get out. They never come through the door.”
She pressed an intercom button next to the door. “It’s Naomi,” she said, looking into a security camera located above the doorway. “I’ve brought Jack to brief him.”
“Roger,” a woman’s curt voice answered. “Scan in, please.”
Naomi stepped to the retinal scanner, holding her eye open for the blue laser.
“Confirmed,” the woman, who Jack assumed was inside the antenna silo, said. The blast door began to cycle open toward them.
As soon as it was open enough for them to pass by, Naomi led him inside into what could most closely be described as an airlock.
“It’s another man trap,” she explained. “Although it’s not designed to trap humans.” Turning to another camera above them, she said, “We’re secure. Cycle the doors.”
“Roger. Doors cycling.”
Behind them, the blast door, driven by another set of massive hydraulic rams, closed with a heavy thunk that Jack could feel through the steel floor plates, followed by the sound of the locking bolts sliding into place. Then the inside door, made of solid steel three inches thick, opened.
Naomi led him inside, and Jack stopped dead in his tracks at what he saw. As she had told him, the silo was a massive reinforced concrete cylinder almost thirty feet in diameter. The room they were now standing in was clearly a prison, but unlike any he had ever seen. There were three transparent cylinders, about eight feet in diameter, with walls and domed ceilings that were at least eight inches thick. Offset to the side in each one was a metal access hatch, easily six inches thick, that looked like the door to a bank vault. Jack could tell from the dull sheen of the metal that it was probably made of titanium. At the apex of the dome, which stood roughly ten feet above the floor, was an equipment cluster that included a variety of optical sensors, a pair of powerful remotely controlled gripping “waldos” that could reach anywhere in the enclosure, and something that looked like an oversized Taser in a small spherical turret.
Two of the enclosures were empty. The center one, however, was occupied, its prisoner watched over by three heavily-armed guards.
“Sansone,” Jack breathed.
“Remember what I told you,” Naomi whispered, touching his arm.
He batted her hand away. “Jesus, Naomi,” he said, horrified, “what have you done to her?”
On the floor in the center enclosure lay Sansone, completely naked. Her body was covered with bruises, welts, and contusions. Jack was no medical expert, but he could tell from the pattern of injuries on her lower body that she had been sexually molested, brutally raped.
Remember, he tried to tell himself, it’s not human. But in his mind he was no longer seeing Sansone, but Emily, his wife, just before she was murdered and tossed into a dumpster. The sight of Sansone tore his guts out.
“It’s a lie, Jack,” Naomi warned him, but he wasn’t listening. He went up to the transparent wall of the cell and knelt down next to where Sansone lay on the inside, curled in a fetal position.
“Sansone,” he called quietly, not sure if she would be able to hear him.
“Dawson?” she rasped, her voice coming from speakers somewhere above him. She lifted her head from the floor, painfully turning to face him. “Is that you?”
Jack fought back a wave of revulsion as he looked at her face, battered so badly that both eyes were swollen shut. “Yeah,” he grated. “It’s me.”
“I’m sorry,” she suddenly pleaded. “At the house. I’m sorry about what happened. We...we had orders to interrogate you. To bring you in.” She paused, gasping for breath. “Then they came.” She put a hand up against the inside of the clear wall, and he grimaced at the cuts he saw there, at the fingernails that had been ripped from her fingertips.
“Goddammit, Naomi,” he snarled, turning on her. “Nothing justifies this! Nothing!” Two of the guards blocked his advance, their weapons leveled at his chest.
“It’s a lie, Jack,” she repeated calmly. Then, to the woman at the security console, she said, “Zap it.”
“No!” Sansone screamed, clawing at the walls of her cell. “Jack, don’t let them do it to me again. Not again! Please!”
Her outbursts momentarily drew the guards’ attention. Before he realized what he was doing, Jack had darted forward to grab the barrels of both rifles the guards had trained on him, turning them up to point toward the ceiling. He savagely kicked one of the guards in the shin, knocking his leg out from under him and dropping him to the floor. He let the barrel of his rifle go, then turned and rammed his knee into the other guard’s hip, throwing him off balance. Jack shoved him backward, wrenching the rifle from his grip as he fell. He took aim at the third guard, the woman who sat at the control console. Her weapon was out of its holster, but she hadn’t had time to bring it up and aim it.
“Drop it!” Jack warned her. Glancing at Naomi, who hadn’t moved, he said, “Tell her to drop it, Naomi, or I’ll blow her fucking head off.”
“Do it, Tamara,” Naomi said.
“And tell these two clowns to move over there,” he gestured with the rifle’s muzzle to the small alcove on the right side of the sprawling room next to one of the empty cells. “You, too,” he told Tamara.
The three of them did as they were told, the two men limping in pain.
“Thank you, Jack,” Sansone whimpered. “Please, get me out of here.�
�
“Get her out,” he told Naomi. “Now.”
“Jack–”
“Open it!”
Naomi moved over to the command console and looked back at him. Without saying another word, she pressed a control on the panel.
There was a sharp pop inside Sansone’s cell, and then she began to screech just like she had at Jack’s house when Alexander attacked her. He had tried to forget that sound, tried to suppress the memory of something that couldn’t have happened in his reality. Yet here it was again.
Taking his eyes from Naomi, he turned toward Sansone and saw thin wire filaments trailing from the spherical turret in the top of the cell to a set of electrodes the weapon had fired into Sansone’s back. She stiffened and then fell flat on her back onto the concrete floor.
“You Tasered her!” Jack shouted.
“Yes, I did,” she replied calmly. The three guards made to move toward Jack, but she held up her arm, stopping them.
“Why...?” he asked.
It was then that Jack’s thin hold on sanity fell away as he saw what was happening to Sansone. He stood there, rooted to the floor, as she began to change, to transform, into something that clearly wasn’t human. Her features began to lose their detail, as if the flesh were changing into dough that merely resembled the human form. The color of her skin changed, as well, a sickly-looking swirl of yellow and purple covering her entire body like an enormous bruise. The cuts and bruises that had evoked such an emotional response in him faded, disappearing into the pulsating mass of tissue.
Then, like some hideous Phoenix rising from its protoplasmic ashes, multi-jointed appendages emerged from the devolving flesh, unfolding from what had once been Sansone’s arms and legs. Her face disappeared, the faux visage oozing downward to join the bulk of tissue that had been her torso. A glistening green chitinous construct remained behind, a biological sensor array, an analog of the equipment mounted in the cell’s dome. From the torso sprouted what Jack, had he been capable of speech at that moment, would have thought of as a biological Swiss Army knife. A big one.
Viewed as a whole, the thing reminded Jack of nothing so much as a giant cockroach that had been stepped on.
As the thing stood up on four spindly stalks that had unfolded from Sansone’s legs, one of the “tools” from the pod shot forward against the side of the cell, hard enough that the reverberation from the strike shocked Jack into stepping backward.
As he looked at the indentation the thing had made in the wall of the cell, he felt a scream start to build in his throat. He suddenly saw an image in his mind of the cutting board in Sheldon’s apartment after it had been ransacked, and the wavy groove that someone had cut into the hard wood. The pattern this thing had left in the wall was, if not identical, close enough that Jack knew that one of these things had been in Sheldon’s apartment. And Jack had only missed encountering it by a couple hours, at most.
He dropped the rifle and backpedaled toward the door, a mindless scream on his lips.
Naomi was there to catch him. “Jack,” she shouted as she tried to calm him, “this isn’t a dream. It’s real. But you’re safe.”
“No!” he cried, his heart thundering in his chest as he fought to get out, to get away from the horror behind him. “It’s not possible! This can’t happen!” He began to hammer at the door controls so hard that his hands began to bleed, cut by the unyielding plastic and metal.
“Listen to me,” she told him, wrapping her arms around his chest, not in an effort to restrain him, but to reassure him. “Do you trust me?”
With one final slam of his fists against the controls, Jack shuddered. He had never been so terrified in his life, even after the horrors of Afghanistan, as he was now. His legs gave out, and he collapsed to the floor on his knees, Naomi still holding him tightly from behind. “Yes,” he finally gasped as he fought desperately to keep from vomiting.
“Then listen to me,” she said in his ear. “What you just saw, that thing in there, is what’s real. It wasn’t Sansone. Lynnette Sansone was a real person, but that thing killed her at some point and took her place. We just don’t know exactly when. It showed you a tortured woman because it knew that would upset you, would get you to doubt what you knew, what we’d told you. They’re incredibly good at deceiving us, Jack. I’m sure it knew about your wife Emily from its time mimicking Sansone at the Bureau. It found out what happened to her and tried to use that against you.”
“And it almost worked,” he rasped, horrified. “My God, I almost...I almost let it out. I almost...”
“No,” she reassured him, “you couldn’t have. There are safety interlocks that prevent the silo entry doors from opening after a cell door has been opened, unless it’s been authorized from the command center. It might have escaped the cell, but it would have never left this room.”
“It would’ve killed you and the others,” he said. Shivering, he took hold of her hands in his. That was a burden of guilt, Naomi’s death most of all, that he could never have lived with, even if the thing had somehow left him alive.
“Hush,” she said, turning him around to face her. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Jesus, Naomi,” he said, shaking his head, still trying to come to grips with the living nightmare he’d just seen. “Just what the hell are these things?”
With a grim smile, she said, “They’re your little green men, I’m afraid. Come on, soldier,” she told him, helping him to his feet, “it’s time you got to know your enemy.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Naomi pulled Jack to his feet, he turned to the three guards and said, “Sorry, guys.”
They just nodded, but he could see forgiveness in their expressions. Jack figured that just about everyone who came here to be “briefed” probably wigged out at first.
Then he turned to face it. The thing stood there, unmoving, with its eye stalks – If that’s what they are, he wondered – fixed on him. Holding tightly to Naomi’s hand, still unwilling to believe what his eyes were telling him, but unable to deny the truth of it, he followed her as she took him closer to the wall of the enclosure.
“We call them harvesters,” she began. “We don’t know what they’re really called, or if they even have a name for themselves that we could comprehend, so we had to come up with something. Gregg coined the term, and it stuck.”
“Haven’t they...” Jack began, suppressing his revulsion at the thing’s natural appearance, “...haven’t they ever said anything about who they are or where they come from?”
“Nothing we were willing to believe,” she said. “They’re nearly perfect mimics, Jack, and they understand us better than we understand ourselves. We know they feel pain and discomfort, but beyond that we know almost nothing that we can really trust. We’ve tried every interrogation technique ever invented, using the carrot and the stick, but all we get is more of what they think we want to hear, or they just make that god-awful screeching sound.”
“How do you know they haven’t said something that was true?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure some of it probably is. The problem is sifting the truth from the lies. We have everything recorded, and there’s a team at another site that has been trying to dig through all the crap to find the truth, but what we have is thin.” Folding her arms, staring at the thing with undisguised loathing, she went on, “We’re not sure how long they’ve been here. The UFO guys,” she gave him a wry grin, “think they must have picked up our early radio signals and come running to find us. But then you have the issue of how many years it would take a radio signal to reach the nearest stars, the odds that these things live in any of those systems, and then the arguments start. They must have been here for decades, at least, to do the things we know they’ve done. But they could easily have been here for centuries, maybe longer. The honest answer is that we just don’t know.”
“There’s no chance they could be, you know, from here?”
She shook her head. “Their cellular struct
ure, especially of the malleable tissue, is so completely different from Earth-based life that there’s not a chance they evolved here. I think they’re genetically engineered themselves, tailored from their native form to be able to function on Earth.” She turned to him. “All we know for certain is their mission here, which is to prepare our world for their kind, to transform our biosphere into something they can live in.”
Jack, frowning, asked, “But if they were some sort of advanced extra-terrestrial race, wouldn’t it be easier to just come in and blast us down to bedrock and rebuild things the way they want?”
“Would it?” she said. “Imagine how much went into reconstruction after the major wars we’ve had, the devastation to the planet if we tried to nuke an invasion force and they nuked us back, or worse. They think on a scale far larger than we do, Jack. We’re lucky if we can plan something out a few years. We believe their time scale is measured in centuries for a project like this: they’re willing to trade time for economy. Conquest is expensive; extermination isn’t.” She shook her head. “The irony is that we made it easy for them just by being who we are: they’ve been using our technology against us, injecting critical information at key junctures in our development to unwittingly aid in destroying ourselves. And here we sit, ignorant of what’s happening in the shadows, thinking that we’re smart and doing smart things, or perhaps stupid things but reaping enormous profits from it.”
“And the corn Sheldon found, and the other plants like it, are the key,” Jack said.
Naomi nodded. “Think of it as a type of pesticide, Jack. Once the engineered strains of the primary food crops like corn, wheat, and rice, and feed crops like alfalfa, are released into the market, there won’t be any stopping it. It will cross-pollinate with native strains, carrying the retrovirus with it. We don’t know what the retrovirus does yet, but whatever it is, it isn’t going to be good for anything that currently lives on this planet. Except for them. Every person or animal that eats it, or consumes animals that have eaten it, will be contaminated. Once that happens on a mass scale, there probably won’t be enough of us left to matter, and they can just march in and wipe us out with a flyswatter. And that’s the least unpleasant scenario that we’ve come up with.”
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