Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Because they’re vulnerable, Jack,” Naomi said. “Remember: they don’t know about the threat we face. Most of them have little or no real physical security, and some are victims to lack of funding or subversion, which we know the harvesters have capitalized on. That’s basically what happened to Bari, the largest genebank in Italy,” she explained. “Back in 2002 the Italian government decided to merge it with research centers that were focused on genetically engineered plants, and created the Plant Genetic Institute. The new management, which was run mainly by the GMO researchers, largely ignored the genebank’s original mission of germplasm conservation – the preservation of native seeds – and focused the institute’s resources on genetic research.”

  “They even let the cooling systems for the seeds in the cold storage vaults fail and didn’t repair them for months,” Chidambaram added. “It’s difficult to estimate what damage may have been done.”

  Naomi nodded. “The harvesters and their human collaborators took Bari out of the game through political maneuvering and calculated neglect. The same has happened to many of the other smaller genebanks.”

  “Most of the genebanks contain a wide range of species,” Chidambaram said, getting back on the subject of Jack’s question. “Ours focuses on core food crops for humans and livestock, plus supporting species that help protect against pests and weeds. This makes our job somewhat easier, as fewer than one-hundred and fifty species, albeit of many varieties, are used these days in modern agriculture. Those and some plants critical for livestock make up most of what is preserved in the silo vaults.”

  “So this place is the secret backup for the backups,” Jack said, and Chidambaram nodded. “But how long would that take? I mean, if the harvesters got their mutated strains out there and everything went to hell in the food chain, how fast could you sort things out again?”

  “Even with the combined resources of all the genebanks, it would take years, possibly decades, especially if the crops of commercial seed producers were contaminated.” At Jack’s puzzled look, Chidambaram explained, “Most farmers don’t plant from their own seed, but buy it from commercial seed producers. If their seed is contaminated, many farmers will have nothing to plant.” He looked at Jack with dark, sad eyes. “Beyond whatever the retrovirus itself may do, it is nearly certain that millions, many millions, would die of starvation before the balance could be restored.”

  “And it might take centuries to root out and destroy any remaining vestiges of the retrovirus in the biosphere,” Naomi added bleakly, “especially if those strains cross-pollinate with any plants outside of the agricultural chain.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack murmured. Now he had a grasp of the magnitude of what was happening, but suddenly wished he had remained blissfully ignorant. “Okay, so I guess we just hunker down here and hope for the best.”

  Naomi stood up, stretched, and hooked her arm in his. “Come on,” she told him. “I need to go check on some things in the lab, and you can check on Alexander.”

  As they made their way across the junction linking the two subterranean domes, he asked, “Would it really be that bad? If something happens to the…native seeds?”

  She nodded. “Yes. The harvesters have a good strategy for whittling us down, and it’s going to be hard to beat. And if something’s happened to Gregg...” She shook her head. “I can’t fill his shoes, Jack. I’m not going to say we can’t go on without him, because we will, but if he’s...gone, it will be a catastrophic loss to our cause.”

  That made Jack feel guilty about the less-than-kind thoughts he’d had about Gregg Thornton during their brief acquaintance, and he had to admit to himself that he’d never in a million years have been able to conjure up all the things Gregg had. The front companies, this huge facility, and whatever else was out there that was part of the Earth Defense Society that Jack didn’t even know about yet.

  “I’ve got faith in you, Naomi,” he told her, and she slipped her hand into his and squeezed it.

  After they passed through the blast door into the lab dome, Naomi guided him toward the back where there was what looked like a small operating theater with movable panels forming temporary walls around it. Theresa, the vet, was there with another woman, talking quietly. Both wore surgical scrubs, but had their masks pulled down around their necks. Jack tensed up at the sight of Alexander, stretched out on the table, until Theresa turned toward them and smiled.

  Jack blew his breath out, unaware that he’d been holding it.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Theresa told him. “It looked worse than it was. He had a bad cut along his chest and probably a concussion. He lost a fair bit of blood, but he’ll be okay. His scars won’t be quite as impressive as Koshka’s, except for the ear, I suppose.”

  “Hey, you big dummy,” Jack whispered, leaning down to gently stroke the fur on Alexander’s forehead.

  The big cat’s eyes were still unfocused from the waning effects of the anesthesia, but he slowly reached out with his tongue to touch Jack’s hand.

  “No more heroics, okay?”

  Alexander answered by closing his eyes.

  “He’s going to need some rest for a while,” Theresa told him. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when he’s up and around.”

  “Okay,” Jack said uncertainly. He had always hated leaving Alexander at the vet’s office. The big cat always cried in the crate when Jack took him, and then cried all the way home, making Jack feel like he was guilty of animal abuse.

  With a final look, Jack turned away and followed Naomi upstairs to the mezzanine level. Taking a few turns around stacks of crates and boxes, they came to a small walled-in section that wasn’t easily seen from below.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s our biohazard room,” she told him. “It’s not anything at all like what Fort Dietrich has in its labs for biological warfare research. Instead of trying to seal off the room completely, we use small self-contained biosafety containment chambers where we keep our specimens.”

  “And what sort of ‘specimens’ do you have in here?” Jack asked, hesitating as Naomi keyed open the door and stepped inside. He noticed that the door was hermetically sealed, but there were no biohazard suits in evidence. The only thing that struck him as odd about the room were the closely spaced sprinkler units on the ceiling.

  “Anti-viral dispensers,” she told him. “If there’s any sign of a breach, everything in here will be flooded with a wash of a chlorine-based compound that will kill any viruses or bacteria if they’re exposed to it long enough.”

  “Then what?” Jack asked. “What about anybody who’s in here if that happens?”

  “They stay in here, Jack,” she told him grimly. “At least until we’re certain there’s no sign of infection. There’s an airlock system to pass food in, and there’s an independent water and waste system in here. Assuming you make it through the anti-viral wash and have a chance to worry about such things. Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen, okay? I don’t really fancy having my skin blistered, or worse. That stuff isn’t anything you want to mess around with.”

  Leading him up to one of four large cylinders lying on their sides, with integrated rectangular cabinets supporting them, she explained, “These are the biosafety containment chambers. They have externally controlled waldos and instruments that we can use to take many types of samples, and we can anesthetize the specimens, as well. And of course we can feed, water, and clean up after them, with the waste being collected in the unit’s support cabinet where it’s taken care of with a small incinerator.”

  “So who’s the lucky occupant?” he asked.

  “A rhesus monkey,” she told him, picking up the chart and looking at the notes neatly written there. “Vlad, one of my assistants, infected it with a sample of the corn Sheldon found.” She sighed in frustration. “We know a lot already about the retrovirus, but nothing that’s going to tell us exactly what it does. I was hoping to be able to run a lot more tests before we go
t to this stage, but I can’t help but feel like we’re running out of time.”

  Jack nodded. He was well-acquainted with the sensation of being in free-fall, plummeting down the rabbit hole.

  “This is interesting,” she murmured as she compared Vlad’s notes to the readouts on a computer screen built into a panel on the chamber.

  “What is it?” Jack asked, looking over her shoulder, peering through the clear Lexan panel. From the tone of her voice, “interesting” didn’t really mean interesting, it meant “bad.” The monkey, a young male, stared out at him with wide, sad eyes. Several sensors were taped to its skin, and a clear tube full of blood ran from a shunt in its arm. He was surprised the monkey didn’t just tear all of it away, but it seemed to have surrendered itself to its fate. After blinking twice at Jack, it turned its attention back to what Jack could swear looked like a banana sandwich that someone had made for him. He had eaten about half of it, but seemed to have lost his appetite. Poor little guy, Jack thought.

  “Vlad prepped this monkey only a few hours ago,” she told him, tapping away at the miniature keyboard embedded in the chamber’s panel, “but it’s already showing symptoms: its temperature is up three degrees and its heart rate is fifteen beats per minute above normal.” She was silent as she pushed a few more buttons, then turned and sat down at a workstation along the wall behind them. “The chamber’s equipped with a self-contained diagnostic unit that can perform quite a few different tests,” she explained as she opened up several windows on the workstation that displayed a lot of data that Jack didn’t understand. “Some tests we can’t do without anesthetizing the animal and doing a biopsy, but we can at least take a look at its blood serum. The system does that automatically. It usually doesn’t tell us much for viral infections until the initial infection has run its course and we can screen for antibodies, but it’s an...easy...”

  Her voice died away as the display on the screen showed a succession of computer-enhanced images of blood cells, each image bearing a time stamp. The first ones showed normal red blood cells, or erythrocytes, that were a roundish shape and crimson colored. To Jack’s untrained eye, they looked like tiny red cushions all bunched together.

  About halfway through the images, however, other cells began to appear. Or, rather, they were red blood cells that had mutated into something else. Where the normal erythrocytes looked like round cushions, these looked to Jack like yellow sea urchins with stubby spines. Some of them were about the same size as the erythrocytes, while others were much larger.

  “What are we looking at, Naomi?” Jack asked quietly as she intently studied the images on the screen.

  “I don’t know,” she answered worriedly. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The mutated cells are somehow attaching themselves to otherwise healthy-looking erythrocytes,” she glanced over at him, “then absorbing them to create more cell mass for themselves. And here,” she pointed to the final four images that had been made over the last hour, where a torrent of cells that were about the same size as the erythrocytes but had a lumpy surface had appeared, “neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, are swarming in, trying to fight the mutated cells.”

  “And getting their asses kicked,” Jack finished for her. The white cells were being skewered and absorbed just like the red cells: the neutrophils had absolutely no effect against the mutated predator cells.

  Naomi looked over more data and ran some numbers in a scientific calculator that popped up on the screen. “At this rate, the monkey’s entire blood supply will be converted to these new cellular forms in another hour, two at most.” She shook her head. “They must still be facilitating oxygen transport from the lungs, somehow, though: oxygen uptake has actually increased.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that these new cells are doing a better job than the monkey’s own red blood cells at getting oxygen from the lungs to the rest of its body.”

  While Naomi dove into more data that scrolled up on the screen, Jack turned back to the chamber and its quiet occupant. Through the Lexan, which made up about a third of the cylinder’s surface to give a clear view of the chamber’s occupant, he took a closer look at the monkey, who studiously ignored him. Its hair was a mix of tan and light gray, with the tan covering the crown of its head and cheeks, and most of its back, while the gray was predominant over the rest of its body. Periodically, the skin of its back would twitch, as if it were shrugging away an imaginary bothersome insect. It had given up any remaining interest in the banana sandwich, and sat at one end of the chamber, staring listlessly at the shiny stainless steel wall at the other end of its prison, perhaps looking at its reflection in the metal.

  Jack was just turning away when he noticed something odd. Looking closer, he saw that a patch of the monkey’s hair was discolored.

  “Naomi,” he called, but she was so engrossed in the blood work that she didn’t hear him. “Naomi!” he called, louder.

  “What is it?” she said, startled.

  “Come here and look at this.”

  With one last glance at the data on the screen, she got up and came over to stand beside him to look in at the monkey.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked, pointing. “See, right there, on the left side of his chest? It looks sort of like a bruise. Is that from a biopsy or something?”

  Naomi shook her head slowly. “No, it’s not from a biopsy,” she said, looking at the dark blue and purple patch of skin. “We haven’t done any on this animal, and there’s no procedure that we might do that would leave a mark like that.”

  Jack peered closer, nearly touching his nose to the Lexan. “Jesus,” he whispered. “The hair looks almost like it’s melted into the skin. Do you see that?”

  Naomi leaned down for a closer look, concentrating intently on the nickel-sized area of skin. “Oh my God,” she breathed, “you’re right! What on earth is–”

  The monkey suddenly shrieked and hurled itself at the chamber’s observation window, its open mouth and exposed teeth smacking into the Lexan mere inches from their faces.

  Both of them leaped back, with Jack instinctively shoving Naomi behind him. The monkey, gone completely berserk, bounced around in the chamber with such violence that the heavy unit wobbled slightly. After about fifteen seconds, it stopped.

  “Christ,” Jack breathed. “The little fucker scared me to death.”

  “Yeah,” Naomi answered, her hands resting on Jack’s powerful back. She may have been the acting leader of the society in Gregg’s absence, and knew she was no coward, but Jack’s protectiveness toward her had become a sense of profound comfort. “Me, too.”

  What she didn’t tell him was what she had seen the instant before he pulled her away from the chamber and the monkey’s ferocious challenge: the inside of its mouth and tongue were covered with the same blue and purple mottling as the mysterious patch on its skin.

  She was about to say something to him about it when the base-wide loudspeakers came alive.

  “Naomi!” Renee’s voice boomed. “Naomi and all department heads, get your asses to the command center immediately. Something’s happened.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “You’ll never believe this,” Renee said, her face pale from shock as she pointed at the main view screen at the front of the command center, which showed the frozen image of the global network news channel and a blond anchorwoman whose first name, Jack vaguely remembered from watching the news in the past, was Connie. “Hold on to your hats,” Renee said grimly before hitting the control to resume the video playback.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Connie the anchorwoman said, her voice quivering, “we’ve just received breaking news of simultaneous terrorist attacks across the globe, with horrific explosions being reported within the last hour in the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, India, and Turkey. While we don’t have confirmation yet, the initial reports say that hundreds of people have been killed and many more injured. The attack here in the United Sta
tes took place on the campus of Colorado State University just a few minutes ago, and we have Tracy Bowman live at the scene. Tracy, are you with us? Can you tell us what’s happening?”

  The scene shifted to a young woman with dark hair and a face blackened with soot. She had a cut on her chin that was still bleeding, leaving a crimson trail all the way down to the top of her blouse, which had once been white but was now a dirty gray. She was standing in the parking lot of what looked like a small restaurant with a number of shocked onlookers visible at the edges of the picture. Behind her was a street, then what looked like a running track in a park, or what was left of it. Beyond that was a gigantic pyre with flames licking hundreds of feet into the sky. Heavy smoke billowed from the conflagration, and more smoke hung like a dark fog over the park.

  “Yes, Connie,” the young woman said, her voice trembling as she spoke into a microphone that she clutched in bloody hands. She winced as a convoy of emergency vehicles went screaming by. “What you see behind me is all that’s left of the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation that is...was a part of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. We were here covering this year’s Mountain West Conference men’s track and field championship at the Jack Christensen Memorial Track when...” She suddenly put her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, but managed to regain her composure after only a few seconds. Once again looking squarely into the camera, she went on in a shaky voice, “We were here covering the championship when the center, which is the largest seed storage facility in the United States, blew up in a...in a huge explosion. We were on this side of the track when it happened and only suffered minor injuries. But the bleachers for the spectators were right across the street from the blast...” She suddenly sobbed, unable to get out the rest of what she had to say.

  The cameraman took the opportunity to zoom in across the street and the scorched grass of the track facility to where the bleachers had once stood. Jack winced and a few of the others in the command center gasped in horror at the hundreds of bodies strewn across the ground, most of them charred or blown apart. Some were still burning.