“It’s here,” she whispered into his ear as he fought not to gag on the horrific odor of ammonia and something burning. “Oh, God.”
Alexander chose that moment to attack. A hissing, shrieking battle raged for a few seconds that felt like a lifetime to Jack, as he imagined his cat again facing off against the horrible thing that had come for them. His blood turned to ice as Alexander’s furious assault ended in a brief feline cry of agony.
Shaking with rage, Jack wanted nothing more than to open the goddamn door and face the thing, to stick the snub-nose magnum in its squashed-bug innards and blow it to hell. If he had been alone, he very well might have, but he couldn’t abandon Naomi. Cats were hardly known for their loyalty to the humans who cared for them, but Alexander had been an exception. In his own feline way, he had always been there for Jack when he’d needed comfort or a laugh. He fought the tears that came to his eyes, but gave up when he realized that it wouldn’t matter: his vision was useless in this total dark, anyway. He let the tears flow.
“Come on,” he hissed as he heard the thing move one if its appendages across the door, like someone scraping the tines of a fork across a dinner plate. “Come on, you fucker!” he screamed.
The thing suddenly hammered on the door, a rapid tattoo of powerful blows that set Jack’s ears ringing. The hammering became even more frantic, and he heard the shriek of shearing metal as the door frame began to give way.
“Oh, God, Jack, don’t let it get in here!” Naomi cried.
Jack had a sudden flashback to his last patrol in Afghanistan. The world was tinted an eerie green from the night vision goggles he wore, and a series of images and sensations cascaded through his mind in slow motion. The wraiths of Taliban fighters that seemed to appear right out of the rocks around him and his men. The sharp reports of automatic gunfire and machine guns, the explosion of grenades, the desperate shouts and agony-filled screams. The biting smell of the gun smoke, the nauseating stench of voided bowels, the coppery tang of blood. Then the hammer blows that sent him flying backward to the ground. The bullets that penetrated his body armor at point blank range, the night vision goggles torn from his face by an exploding grenade.
Until now, he had never remembered seeing the blanket of stars above him with his naked eyes as he lay there, thinking that the world was dying around him, and that the stars were so beautiful. So beautiful...
In the pitch dark, snapping back to the present, he had a moment of perfect clarity. He pulled Naomi’s hands away from him and stepped forward. Something slapped against his free arm and he grabbed hold of it, knowing instinctively that it was the whip-like appendage holding the stinger. He curled his left arm around it as if it were a rope and heaved with all his strength. The door finally gave way completely, and the harvester slammed into him, its horrible stench overwhelming.
Instead of resisting the force of the impact, he pivoted, pulling himself against the creature, ignoring the sensations of gelatinous flesh and chitinous exoskeleton against his skin. The whip-stinger writhed and twitched in his left hand and he felt one of the thing’s “arms” groping for his neck. He jammed the muzzle of the magnum deep into the mass of malleable tissue covering the bulging nerve ganglion behind the creature’s utility pod and pulled the trigger.
The blast was deafening as the flash illuminated the thing in a grotesque shadow theater. Its screech tore at his eardrums and he felt himself being lifted off the ground as he fired again. And again. The .44 magnum revolver held five rounds, and every single bullet struck home, blasting through the Sansone-thing’s naturally armored body to tear out its guts.
After the last shot, the creature suddenly collapsed on top of Jack, and he felt the malleable flesh begin to ooze over him as whatever neural control the creature exacted over it failed. Gasping, he shrugged it off, still holding onto the whip of the stinger until he was out from under the creature’s body. Then he shoved the pointed tip into the gaping wound blasted by the magnum, embedding it deep in the creature’s thorax.
He managed to crawl the few feet to the back wall before he vomited.
“Jack,” he heard Naomi say through the ringing left in his ears from the gunshots. “Oh, my God, Jack.” Then her arms were around him, holding him tight.
He wasn’t sure how long they had been holding one another before he saw light flicker on in the tunnel outside. A few minutes later, the complex alarm suddenly blared, and soon they heard the sound of shouting voices and running feet coming down the tunnel.
They were suddenly confronted by two dozen men and women with assault rifles and shotguns raised and ready to fire.
“What’s going on?” Tan asked sharply, his gun aimed right at Jack.
“The harvester escaped,” Naomi told him as she and Jack got to their feet and moved out of the service room and into the tunnel with the others. “Jack killed it. Lower your weapons.”
With looks of shocked disbelief at the gruesome body of the creature lying only a few feet away, they did as Naomi asked, although most of them kept their fingers on the trigger. They wouldn’t trust that the harvester was truly dead, or at least fully immobilized, until its body was frozen solid.
“Ray,” she said to one of the men, “get to the command dome and make sure Renee’s all right. But don’t go down the tunnel to the antenna silo.” Ray looked at her strangely. “I’ll explain later, but for now just secure the complex down to the junction.”
Tan began to follow Ray and the others, but Naomi stopped him. “Tan, wait,” she said, taking hold of his arm. “I want you to stay with me.”
He simply nodded and stood close to her like the bodyguard he had been since Naomi had come to them.
Jack’s heart went out to him, even though he knew Tan would never accept his sympathy. And then he saw a small, dark form lying very still on the concrete floor against the far wall of the tunnel, with a white cat, Koshka, curled up against it.
“Alexander,” Jack whispered as he shoved the magnum in the back of his jeans and crossed the tunnel, kneeling next to his four-legged friend. The top half of Alexander’s left ear had been torn off, and the white fur of his belly was matted with dark crimson blood that had run into a pool on the floor.
“I’m so sorry, Jack,” Naomi whispered from behind him. “But we’ve got to–”
“Go on,” Jack told her, his voice cracking. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
With a squeeze of her hand on his shoulder, she and Tan left to join the others.
“You stupid little shit,” Jack whispered. “Why didn’t you run?” Lifting the limp body from the floor, he was startled to hear a weak cry of pain. Holding Alexander gently, Jack could see that he was breathing. Barely.
“Naomi!” he called as he turned to run after them, Koshka loping along behind him. “Naomi!”
Naomi and Jack, with Tan following behind, ran to the junction, and Naomi called to one of the women there. “Theresa,” she said. “See what you can do for Alexander.” Turning to Jack, she said, “Theresa’s our vet who looks after the cats. She saved Koshka.”
Theresa carefully took Alexander from Jack’s arms and told him, “I’ll do what I can,” before rushing into the lab dome, Jack staring helplessly after her.
“Renee,” Naomi called to one of the ceiling-mounted microphones in the junction. She wanted to go see her in the command center, but she had to tell, and show, Tan what had happened to Ellen first. “What happened? Did you bring the systems back up?”
“No,” Renee’s voice answered. “It was all programmed. She had one machine set up to reboot the others, then it reset the power control systems. The power came back on before the security systems, so the portal doors would’ve had power, but everything else went into lockdown until the security systems were released. I have to hand it to her: she did a hell of a job. Especially the little video bit she put in at the end of the command center recording where she makes it look like she blew me away just after the systems came back up, making it lo
ok like I was up to no good. You’ll love it. She really expected to get away with this whole thing by making me the scapegoat.”
“What about the cell block?”
“Scranton, Hatch, and Pearlman are dead,” Renee said grimly. “There’s...there’s not much left of them.”
“What is she talking about?” Tan asked, bewildered.
Naomi looked at him, her face a mask of sadness. “Something…” she began. “Something’s happened to Ellen.” Turning to Jack, she said, “I need your help with this.” She nodded down the tunnel toward the antenna silo.
“Right,” he answered, his elation that Alexander was alive tempered by the agony of the revelation they now had to make about Ellen.
“Tan, come with us,” Naomi said. “The rest of you, double check the power and other critical systems to make sure everything’s working.” Then she turned and, Jack walking next to her, headed down the tunnel toward the antenna silo.
Tan went with them, slowing only momentarily when he caught sight of the limp body that lay sprawled in the middle of the tunnel.
“What happened?” Tan asked woodenly as he knelt next to Ellen’s body. The venom the Sansone-thing had pumped into her had reduced Ellen’s once-beautiful body to a mass of necrotic tissue that made her look as if she’d spent hours in the makeup chair for a zombie movie. Tan bunched his hands into fists, his forearms bulging with strain as he fought to control his emotions.
“She...” Naomi began, then stopped to wipe away a tear from her cheek. “She told us about your cancer, Tan. Somehow...somehow Kempf, when Ellen was at the lab in Lincoln, must have found out and convinced Ellen it could cure you if Ellen would help them. Ellen let the other harvester out a few months ago. She...set up Sheldon. And she helped Sansone escape.” Glancing at Jack, who could only stare grim-faced at Ellen’s ghastly corpse, she said, “I can’t forgive her for what she did, Tan, but she had a noble reason.” She reached out a hand to touch his arm, but it was like brushing her fingers against cold granite.
“She betrayed everything, all of us, for me?” he rasped, shaking his head slowly. “I never knew. Ellen...”
Before either Naomi or Jack could intervene, Tan calmly drew the pistol from its holster on his thigh, stuck the muzzle under his chin and pulled the trigger.
“No!” Naomi screamed as she was spattered with blood and gore. Tan’s body slowly slumped forward over Ellen, his head coming to rest on her breast, blood spilling from the grisly wounds in his skull. “Tan! No, no, no!”
Jack pulled her to her feet and drew her into his arms as four men came charging down the tunnel from the junction, weapons at the ready. They skidded to a stop as they saw the two dead lovers and the pistol still firmly clenched in Tan’s fingers.
Naomi was quivering against Jack, desperately trying to hold in the sobs of anguish that sought release. Her fingernails dug into the skin of his back through his shirt, so hard that they drew blood. He ignored that and everything else, focusing his attention on her, holding her tightly against him. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m so sorry, Naomi. If I’d had any idea what he was going to do...”
“You couldn’t have stopped him,” she whispered. “And he was already...dying. I think he would have preferred it this way, except for what happened with Ellen. My God.”
There was nothing Jack could say, so he simply held her as she quietly wept for her dead friends.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Unlike an hour before, the command center was bustling with activity. Jack stood at the center of a small whirlwind of people who were talking, heading up and down the stairs, making calls, and typing frantically on their computers. They were trying to find Gregg Thornton and letting the other members of the Earth Defense Society know what had happened.
Jack wasn’t yet trained on their systems, so he contented himself with watching over Renee’s shoulder as she continued to work on breaking into the secret file that Ellen had tried to destroy. Renee had recopied the original from the smart card in Jack’s photo frame to the base’s internal servers. She also put it on an external secure server that she had hacked into, disguising it as an innocuous-looking system file, but making sure that Jack and Naomi knew where it was and how to get to it. Just in case.
“You’ll figure it out,” Jack told her.
“Yeah, right,” Renee sighed, leaning back and rubbing her eyes. “I just hope Sheldon didn’t think I’m smarter than I really am.”
“You’re brilliant,” he said with a smile, patting her on the shoulder before moving over to where Naomi was staring fixedly at her computer screen.
“Still nothing from Gregg?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, clearly worried. She had sent an emergency alert to a smart phone that Gregg carried specifically for secure communications with the base. “He’s never taken longer than ten minutes to answer, for real emergencies or the weekly tests we do.”
“What’s that?” Jack pointed to a timer in the window showing Gregg’s contact information on her screen. It read 00:02:13 and was counting down toward zero with every passing second.
“It’s his dead man switch limit,” she said. “Everyone who goes topside has to make contact with the base once every twenty-four hours using preset codes. One code is an all-clear, the other is a duress code, used when they’re in trouble and being forced to use normal communications procedures.”
“And if they don’t call in before the twenty-four hours is up?”
“We assume the worst.” She looked up at him. “Gregg’s never been this far into the twenty-four hours before. My God, if something’s happened to him...”
Jack was worried, too, but not just about Gregg. “Naomi,” he said, “you’ve got to start thinking about evacuating the base.”
She turned from the workstation and stared up at him. “Why?”
“Because Ellen probably compromised us,” he told her bluntly. “She’s been a willing accomplice of the harvesters for months, at least since she let the last one out of its cage. I find it hard to believe that she never revealed anything that might lead them to us.”
“Ellen would have told us if she’d said anything,” Naomi said. “She had no reason to conceal anything from us...at the end.”
Jack shook his head. “Naomi, even if that’s true, don’t you think the harvesters might have been able to learn enough from her over the last several months to figure out where this operation is? I know it’s not an easy thing to consider with everything that’s been invested here, but it’s a damn big assumption that she never even slipped up and dropped a clue.”
“If they’d known before, they would have come already,” Naomi countered. “And if they had found out after what happened in Nebraska, they would have come right away, even before she got here.”
“Besides,” Renee said into the sudden silence that had fallen over the command center as everyone picked up on their conversation, “it’s not a simple matter for us to evacuate from here, Jack.”
“Listen, I know you don’t just pick up an operation like this and all the research you’re doing and move it at the drop of a hat,” he replied. “I get that. But if the harvesters have the sort of influence in the government that you seem to think they do, once they find out what’s going on here, they’ll come. And even this fortress won’t hold them off forever. You’ve got to have a plan B for when that happens.”
“You don’t understand, Jack,” Naomi told him. “If it were only a question of saving ourselves or the research here, the equipment, it wouldn’t be a problem. If it was just that, Gregg would probably have set up shop in a warehouse or office complex somewhere. And we do have backup locations for the research aspect of what we do here.”
“But the reason we can’t just pick up and leave is because of what’s in the missile silos,” Renee told him.
“The freezers,” Naomi clarified. “We have the world’s largest collection of genetically pure seed here, especially varieties of the primary a
gricultural food crops.”
“And don’t forget the bees,” said a middle-aged man with a dark complexion and jet black hair. “Even worms.”
Naomi smiled. “And bees and worms,” she said with a respectful nod. “This is Dr. Vijay Chidambaram. He pioneered a method of sustaining honeybee and other critical insect larvae and certain types of earthworms in cold storage for what we hope will be a long, long time.”
Jack stared at her, uncomprehending. “Seeds, honeybees, and worms,” he muttered. “Oh, my.” Looking between her and the smiling Chidambaram, he said, “I’m missing something. I thought the main thing you were doing here is research to figure out what this retrovirus that Kempf engineered into the crops will do.”
“We are, Jack,” Naomi explained. “And if we’re successful, hopefully we’ll be able to halt or even reverse the effects of the retrovirus on the human and animal populations.
“But even if we can defeat the retrovirus in humans and animals, if the New Horizons seed is released, we’ll still have to deal with infected crops in the biosphere,” she went on. “Every successive generation of infected strain and anything it cross-pollinates with will still have the retrovirus. The only way we can defeat the harvesters’ plan in the long term is to destroy the strains they’re putting into our food supply, and any wild cross-strains, and replace them with genetically pure species.”
“And to do that,” Chidambaram told him quietly, “we have to have large quantities of pure seed stocks to work from, and the critical facilitators from the plant and animal kingdoms to enable pollination and breeding. There are over fourteen hundred germplasm genebanks in the world. Seed repositories,” he went on. “But most of them are small, and even the large ones do not have nearly enough seed stock to quickly regenerate the major food crops. And we must assume that whatever effect the retrovirus has on the biosphere will adversely affect the insects critical to pollination, thus our focus on preserving them, as well.”
“But if there are already a bunch of these genebanks out there, why make another one?”
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