Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  He snapped his mouth shut as he heard it, a muffled cry from somewhere behind him. Forgetting about the gun Naomi still had trained on him, he quickly moved toward the sound, which was coming from the utility room.

  Without stopping to think, he kicked the door next to the lock, slamming his heel against the metal surface. Fortunately, neither the door nor the door frame were terribly sturdy, and on the third kick the frame gave way with a loud crack and the door slammed inward.

  Jack plunged into the small room to find Renee on the floor, her arms curled over her chest as she cried in pain.

  “Renee,” he breathed. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

  “Ell...en,” she rasped. “Bitch...shot me.”

  “Oh, my god,” Naomi whispered as she knelt down next to the older woman. Gently but firmly moving Renee’s arms aside, Naomi pulled up her sweater to examine the wounds, shocked to see that there wasn’t any blood.

  Instead, she saw the dark lining of a bulletproof vest. She found where the slugs had hit, penetrating about halfway through the armor. With Jack’s help, she quickly got the armor off.

  “Ahhh,” Renee cried.

  “You probably have a couple of bruised or broken ribs,” Naomi told her as she and Jack helped Renee up and back out into the command center, carefully settling her into her chair.

  “I think I figured that part out, girlfriend,” Renee rasped. “Jesus, that hurts.”

  “What happened?” Jack asked urgently.

  Renee shook her head. “I was just standing my watch when Ellen showed up and shot me point blank with a silenced pistol. She didn’t say a damn thing before she pulled the trigger.” She looked at Jack. “I got the creeps about her after that little revelation you led us to, and decided it was time to try out that fancy body armor that Gregg bought for all of us that I used to turn my nose up at. Just in case.” She grimaced as another wave of pain shot through her chest, and she gritted her teeth.

  “Do you believe now?” Jack asked Naomi.

  She nodded. “Yes, but what is she doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Renee growled, “but you’d better sound the alarm.”

  “Right,” Naomi said. Moving to the security station, she lifted the plastic cover from the big red alarm button and slammed her hand down on it.

  Nothing happened.

  “Shit,” Naomi cursed. She hit the button again. Still nothing.

  “Move aside,” Renee told her. Jack pushed her forward to the console, and Renee began to type at the keyboard, trying to unravel what Ellen had done. “God,” she whispered, “she must have been planning this for months.”

  “Why do you say that?” Naomi asked, glancing worriedly at Jack.

  “Because what she did here you don’t just sit down and do...” Renee paused as she continued to backtrack through the changes Ellen had made to the security systems. “Oh, no,” she muttered. “Goddamn it.”

  “What?” Jack asked.

  “She password coded all the security access routines,” Renee said, her voice edged with frustration and a rising sense of anger at Ellen’s betrayal. “She even locked out the communications system. Dammit!”

  “But you have the master passwords to the system!” Naomi said.

  “So does she,” Renee told her grimly as her fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. “Whatever she plans to do, there’s nothing we can do here without rebooting all the servers...Oh, shit.” Turning up to face the others, she said, “She also deleted the file we’ve been trying to break into. She wiped all the copies. I can’t retrieve them.”

  She looked at Jack, and he was shocked to see her angry expression transform into a satisfied smirk. “But I’ll bet she didn’t get the original.”

  “What,” Jack said, astonished, “did you put the smart card back in that goofy photo frame that’s in my room? Without deleting all the files?”

  With a wink, she nodded at him. “Why should I delete the files? There wasn’t any reason to.”

  “Let’s go,” Naomi said, putting a hand on his shoulder. As he turned to face her, she added, “And I’m sorry, Jack. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he told her, gently brushing his hand against her face. “Come on.”

  “Where to?”

  “We’ve got to bang on some doors and wake people up,” he said, turning and heading for the stairs.

  Naomi put a hand on his arm and stopped him. “Jack, it’s the mid-shift, and there’s no one downstairs. I’m the only one who lives in the command dome, except Gregg and a few of the other topsiders when they need to sleep over. Everybody else is in the apartments near the missile silos.”

  Jack’s hopes sank. “We can’t run all the way there to get help and still hope to catch Ellen.”

  “You think she’s gone to get the harvester, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Nothing else makes sense. What else is here that would be worth killing Renee?” And probably others, he didn’t add.

  As they turned to go, Renee said, “Hey, kid, you might need this.”

  Jack took the .44 magnum pistol she held out to him.

  Then he followed Naomi out of the command dome and they cautiously headed down the tunnel that led to where the harvester was held.

  ***

  At that moment, Ellen was standing before the prison that contained the creature they had known as Sansone. It had assumed that shape again, and stood, nude, facing Ellen behind the cell wall.

  Behind Ellen, the three guards were sprawled on the floor, unconscious. She had lured one of them outside on the pretext of helping her with the malfunctioning retinal scanner, then stunned him with a shock baton.

  The other two she had stunned with a shot from the Tasers she’d brought, then kicked each of them in the head to make sure they stayed down. After that, she went out and dragged in the first guard. The plan was to make it look like the harvester had escaped, killing all three. She only had to make the guards helpless. The harvester would take care of the rest.

  It’s worth it, she kept telling herself, trying hard to believe the words.

  “Your people made a bargain,” she told the thing in the cell. “Will you keep their word? That your people will make a cure for Tan?”

  “Of course,” the woman-thing in the cell said, staring into Ellen’s eyes as its face altered into a chilling smile. “Free me. Now.”

  Taking a deep breath, Ellen nodded, then hit the necessary command overrides on the security console. With a hiss, the door to the containment cell sprung open, and the Sansone creature quickly stepped through it.

  “Remember,” Ellen said as she turned around, “you’ll need to kill these three after I’ve gone back to–”

  The rest of her words were lost to a scream of searing agony. With horrified eyes, she looked down to see the Sansone-thing’s stinger in her belly, the poison sack near the end contracting and expanding as it pumped its lethal ejaculate into her body.

  Ellen stumbled backward toward the door to the tunnel, pulling the hard tip out of her flesh. “No,” she moaned as the stinger disappeared back into Sansone’s chest, the flesh of the faux breasts swallowing it up. “You...you promised!”

  With an angry snarl, Ellen brought up her Taser and shot Sansone, who went rigid and collapsed to the floor.

  Ellen turned and fled through the open door into the tunnel. Her gut was burning as the creature’s venom quickly spread through her body, bringing paralysis along with it. Groaning in agony, she stumbled as fast as she could back toward the command center, hoping that the Sansone-thing would remain stunned long enough for her to make it. And that the poison wouldn’t kill her first.

  ***

  “Did you hear that?” Jack asked as he and Naomi moved quickly down the tunnel toward the harvester’s prison. He cursed the designers of this Cold War relic for every one of the nearly six hundred feet they had to run from the command center to the antenna silo complex.

  “Yes,” Naomi said, raisi
ng her magnum. “It sounded like screaming.”

  “Yeah,” breathed Jack as he picked up the pace. “Somebody’s coming.”

  Ahead, they could see the tiny shape of a human figure moving toward them at a shambling, staggering run.

  “Damn,” Jack said. “It’s Ellen!”

  Suddenly the woman collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.

  Naomi sprinted toward her, with Jack cursing her stupidity as he tried to keep up with her.

  “Ellen!” Naomi cried as she knelt next to the stricken woman. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen cried, taking Naomi’s hand. “I...I didn’t have any choice.”

  “Talk some sense, girl,” Naomi said softly as Jack knelt down, aiming his magnum down the tunnel toward the antenna silo. It was still so far away he couldn’t make out the door in the strange optical illusion the long tunnel created.

  “They promised me...they’d help him,” Ellen panted, her face contorted from the burning pain that was spreading through her body.

  “Help whom?” Naomi asked urgently.

  “Tan,” Ellen sobbed. “He’s got...pancreatic cancer. Metastasized before they found it. Inoperable. He’s...he’s dying.”

  “And they told you they could engineer a cure,” Naomi said, the words like ashes on her tongue.

  Ellen jerked a nod. “Sansone...betrayed me,” she whimpered. “I was...a fool. Thought I could trust it. Stunned it.” She looked at Naomi with an expression that was as much emotional as physical agony. “I let the other one loose…never would have done that...if I had known it was going to try and kill you. God...I’m sorry!”

  “Didn’t you say there was a cure for the poison?” Jack asked. He couldn’t muster any sympathy for someone who had conspired to kill her friends, even for the man she loved, but she must know critical information about the harvesters, and the only way they could get it was to keep her alive.

  “There’s an experimental batch of the antidote in the lab, but it’s never been tested on–”

  “No,” Ellen breathed, shaking her head. “Not on me. I...don’t deserve it. Tell Tan...tell him I love him.”

  She suddenly began to flail her arms and legs in a violent seizure, nearly knocking Naomi to the ground.

  But as suddenly as it had come, the seizure passed. When Naomi turned Ellen’s head to see her face again, Ellen’s eyes stared up at her. Sightless. Dead.

  “She’s gone,” Naomi whispered. “We need to get to the antenna silo and find out what happened to the guards and the harvester.”

  “I think you’d better rethink that idea,” Jack said as an unholy racket erupted from the direction of the antenna silo. His guts turned to ice as he heard the hisses and growls of at least a dozen cats mixing with the shriek of the harvester. It was loose. He got to his feet and backed up, his gun pointed down the tunnel toward the sound of the enraged felines, pausing only to grab Naomi’s hand and haul her up from where she still knelt on the floor beside Ellen’s body. The last thing he wanted to do was face the harvester in the tunnel with only the two weapons they had. On top of that, no one else in the complex besides Renee knew anything about what had happened. “Come on,” Jack told her. “Run!”

  They had almost made it back to the command center when the lights went out.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “What the hell happened?” Jack whispered as he and Naomi blindly stumbled forward in the pitch-black tunnel, trying to reach the main junction.

  “She must’ve rigged the power systems to fail to help that thing get out,” Naomi told him. “Dammit!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she hissed. “I just banged my leg against the cable tray.” The electrical cables serving the antenna complex were carried in a metal tray that jutted out from the side of the tunnel wall.

  “Shouldn’t there be emergency lights in here?” Jack asked. The tunnel was utterly dark, without a single ray or glow of light along its length. Jack shivered when the cacophony of the battle between the cats and the harvester abruptly ended in silence after several terrified squeals of pain.

  “There are,” she said, her hand tightening on his, “but everything’s tied into the computer systems and the battery grid. There are redundant backups, but Ellen must have shut them all down.”

  “Great,” he muttered as he forced himself forward through the darkness, dragging the muzzle of the magnum along the cable tray to help keep him from running into it. He held tight to Naomi with his other hand. “How fast can those things run?”

  “Fast,” she said shakily. “Faster than us.”

  “And I’ll bet they can see in the dark, too,” he said grimly.

  “No, they can’t,” she told him. “We think they can see and smell about as well as we can. They also have a very distinctive and unpleasant odor when they’re in their natural state. You’ll know it if you smell it, trust me.”

  Jack yelped as something suddenly brushed by one of his legs. He almost fired at it before he realized what it was: one of the cats. An urgent mewling cry sounded in the darkness, and Jack felt a wave of concern as he recognized that feline voice. “Alexander, you idiot, what are you doing here?”

  Just then his right shoulder slammed into something solid and unyielding, and he sprawled backward onto the floor, losing his magnum in the darkness. “Shit!” he cried, and heard Alexander’s limping gait patter away into the void that surrounded them.

  “The junction!” Naomi told him as she groped for him in the dark, helping him to his feet and dragging him into the connector to the left that led to the command dome. “We made it!”

  “Good,” he said, angry that he’d lost his weapon. His right arm was numb from the force of the impact with the steel support wall that stuck out slightly into the tunnel beyond the cable tray, defining the entry to the main junction. “Now let’s get in the command dome and lock the fucking door behind us.”

  Naomi suddenly stopped. “We can’t,” she said bleakly.

  “Why?”

  “There’s no way to open the blast doors without power,” she told him. “They’re far too heavy to open without hydraulics. Oh, God, we’re trapped in here,” she whispered, drawing close to him.

  “Come on,” he whispered urgently. “You know this place like the back of your hand. There has to be somewhere in a facility this big where we can hide!”

  “Not here, there’s nowhere in the junction! We can’t open the blast doors to either of the domes without power, and we can’t get through the blast locks to reach the apartments or the missile silos, either!”

  “Wait,” Jack said, already groping his way forward in what he hoped was a straight line across the junction to the tunnel that would take them toward the part of the complex where the apartments and old missile silos were. “Wait a second. There was something else in the main tunnel here, maybe a hundred feet from the junction and before the first blast lock. You showed it to me on the map, but I can’t remember what it was called.”

  It took Naomi a second to realize what he meant. “The liquid nitrogen terminal,” she said.

  “Does it have a blast door?”

  “No...no! Just a heavy metal door with a deadbolt, but I have a master key that’ll open it.”

  “Come on, then,” he said as a bone-chilling shriek filled the tunnel behind them as the cats and the harvester again clashed. Close, he thought, his skin breaking out in gooseflesh. Too goddamn close! He just prayed that Alexander and Koshka had the good sense to stay away from the thing.

  Jack managed to head into the tunnel without knocking himself senseless on anything. He kept to the left side, which he remembered was where he’d seen the alcove to the old missile fuel storage area that was now used for liquid nitrogen. Trailing the fingers of his left hand as a guide along the conduits that lined the tunnel, he pushed himself and Naomi as fast as he could in the pitch darkness.

  About a hundred feet past the junction, his hand swept into an emp
ty space along the wall.

  “Here!” he whispered, guiding Naomi into the alcove. After frantically groping for the lock, she inserted the key with shaking hands and turned it. Jack grabbed the handle and pulled it open, gasping in fear as the hinges made a horrific squeal in the utter silence around them.

  Shoving Naomi in first, Jack followed right behind her before slamming the door closed and locking it. He felt her hands grab his shoulders and pull him back into the darkness until they came up against the rear wall of the small room that provided access to the forty-thousand gallon liquid nitrogen tank that resided here. Jack faced the door, trying to focus all of his concentration on what might be happening beyond it as she wrapped her arms around his waist and held onto him tightly, her body shivering in fear.

  “God, Jack,” she whispered hoarsely. “I hate those things. The last one came so close to–”

  “Give me your gun,” he said, and she handed him the magnum. He held it pointed in the direction of the door. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he promised, knowing full well that if the harvester somehow managed to get through the door, it would probably get both of them. Even with .44 magnum bullets, he doubted he’d be able to kill the thing before it stung them both with a lethal dose of venom.

  Everything was unnaturally quiet, the only sounds that Jack could hear being their shallow breathing and his own heartbeat. They can be killed, he told himself in a mantra, over and over. And this gun can kill it. Aim for the thorax. They can be killed...

  He suddenly heard a deep growl just beyond the door, and his heart sank as he realized that it was Alexander. No, you stupid cat! he thought, afraid to speak the words aloud for fear the harvester might hear. He knew the thing must have heard the squeaking hinges, but Jack hoped it might not be sure this was where they’d hidden. Alexander was already slowed down by the injury he received during the fight at the house, and in the alcove beyond the door he’d probably be trapped. Run, Alexander!

  The big cat hissed a feral challenge to the approaching monster just as a horrible stench assaulted Jack’s nose. Naomi’s grip around his waist suddenly tightened.