Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Who’s ‘them?’” Richards asked. “Little green men from Mars? I don’t believe in little green men.”

  “Neither do I,” Jack told him. Richards would have laughed were it not for how dead serious Jack’s voice was. “They’re not little or green, but they’re deadly as hell. We’ve got one with us that we captured during the fight at Spitsbergen.” He paused. “You need us, Carl, you just don’t know it yet. And we sure as hell need you.”

  “God help me,” Richards muttered to himself, “I can’t believe I’m even listening to this!”

  “Richards, I swear on my murdered wife’s name that I’m telling the truth.”

  Those words took Richards by surprise. Like most of the agents who’d worked with Jack, he’d heard the story of his wife’s murder, and knew that Dawson would never have said such a thing unless he was deadly serious.

  Shaking his head in disbelief that he was even thinking of anything other than collaring Dawson and dragging him off to trial, Richards said, “Okay, Dawson, what do you want?”

  ***

  “The first thing we’ll need,” Jack said, “is clearance back into U.S. airspace.”

  “Where are you now?” Richards asked.

  Naomi shook her head, and Ferris grimaced, but Jack went ahead and told him. “We’re over Greenland, heading toward the east coast. If you check the international news, you’ll probably see a story pretty soon about a battle involving Russian and Norwegian troops on the island of Spitsbergen. That’s where we’re coming from. We didn’t have a flight plan back, and with the murder of the President the FAA has closed our airspace, and the Canadians didn’t want to let us through, either.”

  “All right, Dawson, I can swing that,” Richards told him, picturing in his mind a pair of F-16 fighters escorting Dawson’s plane in. “What else?”

  “I want to meet up with you and show you who the real enemy is.” Naomi’s eyes flew wide. “Wait one,” he told Richards as Naomi covered his microphone with one hand.

  “Jack,” she told him urgently, “we can’t risk showing that thing to anyone outside of the confinement chambers at the base.”

  “It’s knocked out with formaldehyde, right?” Jack asked pointedly. “As long as you can keep it unconscious, we’ll have to risk it. Listen, this guy’s a hard-ass and he’s not going to be easily convinced. He’s going to want real proof, and we’ve got it right here with us. If we can get him to believe what’s going on, he’ll be a huge help to us. But he’s not going to just take my word. I’m shocked he even agreed to talk to me at all.”

  “Dawson, you still there?” Richards snapped irritably.

  “Yes,” Jack told him, gently removing Naomi’s hand from the mic. “So what do you say?”

  “If I can get you cleared through Canadian and U.S. airspace,” Richards asked, “how long will it take you to get to Baltimore-Washington International?”

  Jack glanced at Ferris, who held up his hand, thumb and fingers spread. “Five hours,” Jack told him, nodding for Ferris to make it happen.

  Ferris shrugged and punched some navigation data into the Falcon’s console, then nudged the throttles forward to its maximum cruising speed

  “I’ll be waiting, Dawson,” Richards told him. After a brief pause he said, “If you’re lying to me, you’d better make sure I’m dead before you walk away, or I’ll spend the rest of my life hunting you down. You’ll never have a chance to rest again for whatever miserable life might be left to you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jack told him. “We’ll be there. Just keep an open mind about what you’re going to see.”

  “Five hours,” Richards said, then the line went dead.

  Blowing out a deep breath, Jack tore the headset off, feeling as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Just like that, exhaustion left behind by the stress of combat hit him like a hammer.

  “Come on,” Naomi told him, helping him to his feet and leading him back to the seats in the passenger cabin. “I’ll call Renee and let her know what we’re doing. Then let’s get some rest while we can.”

  ***

  There was standing room only in the EDS base’s command center. All eyes were fixed on the horror transpiring on the screen, where Vice President Norman Curtis was being sworn in as President of the United States. No one in the underground base had any doubt that the deputy Secretary of Defense, a known puppet of the harvesters, would be moved up to take the now-dead secretary’s job.

  The world had watched through the lens of a video camera as a single bloodied Secret Service agent had somberly carried a body bag from near where the podium had been. His burden was light, for there had not been much of the President’s body left after the blast.

  Now, Norman Curtis, a known agent of the harvesters, was holding up his right hand as a local judge in Alabama, where Curtis had been campaigning, read him the oath of office.

  After talking to Naomi and hearing Jack’s plan to show their captive harvester to Special Agent Richards, she had double-checked the files Sheldon had stolen: Richards wasn’t on either of the lists. The FBI Director was on the list of human conspirators, but Renee hadn’t had time to verify the rest of the collaborators; she had focused on the harvesters first. They turned out to have taken the guise of sufficiently public personalities that much of their activity could be monitored through the Internet. Not surprisingly, almost all of them had very recently gone “on vacation.”

  As she stared at the news display, Curtis finished the oath of office: “...and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  Muttering in disgust, she stood up and gently shouldered her way through the silent crowd around her. She’d seen enough, and felt like vomiting. “I’m going for a walk,” she said to no one in particular as she went down the stairs, then out through the dome’s blast door and into the main junction.

  Once alone, she began to cry. “Please, God,” she sobbed. It was the first time since she’d learned the truth of what was happening that her faith and resolve had faltered. As she watched Curtis being sworn in, she felt completely crushed and dispirited, as if she and the others no longer stood the slightest chance of succeeding. She would be so glad when Naomi and Jack returned. She hated being in charge, especially now, because she knew she couldn’t let the others see her this way. “Please, God, give us just a little help. Just a little.”

  After a few moments she recovered her composure, wiping her tears away on her lab coat and accidentally smearing mascara across the pristine white fabric.

  “Goddammit,” she cursed. Then she laughed at herself. “The world’s falling apart and you’re worried about your damned mascara. Idiot.”

  She decided it was time to get some sleep, if she could. But first she wanted to check on the lab and see if anything interesting was going on.

  ***

  The thing that had once been a rhesus monkey moved silently along the mezzanine level of the lab dome. It had left the confines of the biohazard room by consuming the rubber gaskets lining the door and squeezing its gelatinous body onto the metal decking beyond. It was growing rapidly as it broke down and reformed the material it had consumed, yet it remained hungry. It needed more.

  As it grew, triggers in its DNA commanded the formation of an ever larger array of specialized cells. The thing had no awareness, but its ability to focus on the food it required was sharpening. It was no longer a random act, but a search directed by highly sensitive receptors that formed along the outer layers of soft, flowing tissue. The receptors guided it in the direction of the storage area, and it silently feasted on the cardboard and plastic boxes and their contents.

  But all too soon the feast was over, and it ran up against a metal wall that had no easily consumed gaskets through which the beast could force itself. Moreover, its feasting had triggered more changes from its complex DNA: it was nearing saturation, almost ready for the next step in its life cycle.

  Almost.

 
; That was when its receptors focused on chemical signals from directly below, through the grates in the metal floor: complex organic matter. It quickly withdrew from probing the infernal metal wall and silently oozed through the holes in the decking to fall into the lab animal storage area.

  ***

  Alexander was jarred from a drug-induced sleep by a riot of screeching and howling that suddenly erupted from the other animals nearby. He had been sleeping in a large crate, padded with a soft blanket, as he recovered from the wounds he had received while fighting the creature to which his kind were especially attuned.

  Mewling in pain, he got to his feet and turned to look in the direction of the other animals. They were in cages inside a much larger cage-like enclosure, and something was after them. Alexander didn’t know what it was, in the fashion that his kind recognized other creatures, but he instantly knew it was a threat. Backing against the opposite wall of his crate, he arched his back and his fur stood on end, and he bared his teeth in fear.

  He heard a deep growl nearby, and he glanced over to see his companion cat, white to his black, on a table across from his crate. She, too, was baring her fangs at whatever writhed in the cage among the shrieking animals.

  He watched with eyes dilated wide open as a shapeless form swept down from above onto the rabbits, rats, mice, monkeys, and a pair of small pigs. They all shrieked in terror, but their cries were short-lived: in only a few panting breaths they were nothing more than quickly dissolving lumps in the roiling mass of mottled flesh.

  After the thing finished with them, it slowly began to move out of the large cage. Toward Alexander.

  Ignoring the pain from the wounds that the other thing had given him earlier, he turned and desperately clawed at his own cage, crying in fear as this new enemy oozed along the floor toward him.

  His white companion hissed and drew back on the nearby table, then suddenly fled to a safer spot halfway to the door that led out of this place. She could not help him.

  He bloodied his paws as he scratched against the slim bars of the cage, trying to get away, and blood oozed from his reopened wounds as his terror drove him far beyond the pain.

  Then a shadow fell upon him as the thing rose up, a pillar of pulsating and undulating matter that was utterly alien to his instincts and feline understanding, now standing high enough to block out the light from above.

  Shivering, Alexander backed into the corner of his cage, panting in fear as he waited for Death to take him.

  ***

  Renee went through the security process to enter the lab dome, stepping wearily through the entryway as the blast door swung aside. As she had both expected and hoped, it was empty. Everyone was over in the command center.

  Except Vlad, she thought. She hadn’t seen the young Russian over there. “Vlad?” she called.

  No answer.

  Then she heard a sound that turned her blood to ice: the snarl of a terrified cat. Then two. But what bothered her even more was that there wasn’t a single sound from any of the other animals, especially the monkeys, which were normally a very boisterous lot.

  With the hair standing up on the back of her neck, she drew her pistol and cautiously moved deeper into the maze of work benches and equipment toward the animal storage area.

  Koshka, Naomi’s white cat, suddenly ran past her and darted behind the lab bench on Renee’s right. Renee could tell the cat was terrified. She could hear another cat hissing and snarling, and the sound of what must have been its paws desperately clawing at the crate: Alexander.

  “Jesus,” she whispered hoarsely. She knew that she should just turn and run to get help, but she couldn’t bring herself to abandon Jack’s cat. Stupid, stupid, stupid! she cursed at herself, even as she continued to move forward.

  She couldn’t see Alexander’s crate yet, as it was around a bulkhead that protruded from the left side of the dome that made up the inside wall of the animal storage area.

  Alexander suddenly stopped hissing, and all Renee could hear in the silence of the dome was the big cat’s rapid panting.

  Taking a deep breath, Renee tightened her finger on the snub-nose .44 magnum’s trigger and quickly stepped to the right between two lab benches so she could see Alexander’s crate and whatever else was there.

  ***

  The thing sensed yet another source of nutrients just ahead, easily in reach, but it paused. It had consumed a great deal, gorging itself on organic matter, and the complex chemical and biological processes that dictated its life cycle triggered yet another set of commands to its rapidly changing body.

  Expelling a large pool of unneeded material, it began to seek a dark, silent place where it could molt. Slithering up one of the mezzanine support pylons along the inside of the dome, it made its way back to the upper deck and silently began to probe around for a suitable place.

  It quickly found the intake tunnel that fed fresh air to the diesel backup generators. It flowed through the grate in the locked safety bulkhead into the dark space beyond, finally coming to rest under the air filtration system that was mounted just before the outer concrete bulkhead and the blast valves that led to the air intake vent.

  There, in the warm dark, it lay still and quiet. Changing. Becoming.

  ***

  Renee’s finger was so tight on the trigger that later she wondered why the pistol hadn’t just gone off, but there was nothing to shoot at. Alexander was in his crate, coiled in one corner and staring fixedly up toward the mezzanine above him, but apparently unharmed.

  She stepped closer, her gun still at the ready, until she saw what was in the animal holding area. Or, rather, what was missing.

  “Shit,” she breathed as she looked at all the empty cages. Every single animal was gone, disappeared. All the snaps were still on the cage doors, and the bars and mesh on the various cages weren’t bent or disturbed. Looking closer, she noticed that there was no waste, blankets, or toys in any of the enclosures, either: they were all nothing but bare metal. “Vlad?” she called again, nearly choking on the young man’s name. “Vlad!” she shouted, louder.

  As before, there was no answer.

  She started to move away, intending to check the biohazard room, when a deep and desperate cry stopped her. Turning, she saw that Alexander had shoved himself up against the door to the crate, one paw stretched out to her as if begging for her not to go. She had never seen a cat look so terrified before, even during the two battles they had experienced with the harvesters here in the base. But if there was a harvester here, she thought, why weren’t the other cats gathering, drawn by whatever unfathomable instinct that had made them such good organic alarm systems? And how the hell could it have done...whatever happened here?

  Looking into the crate, she saw that Alexander was again covered with blood, and noticed that a few of his stitches had been ripped out, no doubt while he had thrashed around, trying to escape.

  “Okay, boy,” she murmured, putting the gun back in her holster. She was reassured slightly by Koshka, who was now right behind Renee’s legs. But the white cat, clearly still spooked by something, was staring up at the mezzanine, just as Alexander had been. Renee suddenly decided that going up there alone maybe wasn’t such a good idea.

  Opening the door to the crate, she took gentle hold of Alexander as he leaped out and clung to her like a terrified child. She grimaced as the big cat’s claws penetrated the fabric of her lab coat and sweater to lance her skin. He was shivering as if he had a terrible fever.

  “It’s okay, big guy,” she told him, ignoring the pain of his claws as she cradled him. “I’ve got you. Now let’s get the hell out of here and go get some help.”

  As she turned to go, she caught sight of something above her on the mezzanine level, an indistinct shadow through the grates in the flooring. But before she had time to think about setting down Alexander and drawing her weapon, it had disappeared.

  Into the air intake tunnel.

  Backing out of the lab, keeping her eyes on th
e mezzanine, she carried Alexander to what she hoped was the relative safety of the main junction. Then, with Koshka safely out of the lab dome, she closed the blast door behind her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Ferris guided the Falcon to a stop next to the executive jets at BWI’s general aviation facility in the northeast corner of the airport. Jack dropped the stairway to the tarmac before Ferris shut down the engines.

  A few yards away was a black Chevy Impala. Special Agent Carl Richards stood stiffly beside it, his fists tightly clenched at his sides.

  “Stay here,” Jack told the others. “Let me talk to him first.”

  “We’ll cover you,” said Hathcock as he brought up an H&K submachine gun.

  “No,” Jack told him sternly. “We’ve got to convince this guy we’re the real deal. We’re not going to kill him. Got it?”

  Hathcock shrugged and lowered his weapon.

  With a last glance at Naomi, Jack went down the steps and walked quickly toward Richards.

  Behind him, Hathcock raised the H&K again and held it steady, the sights centered on Richards’ chest. Naomi nodded in approval, then turned her attention back to Jack.

  Moving into handshaking distance with Richards, but not extending his hand, Jack said, “The F-16s were a nice touch. What’d you have the Air Force tell the pilots?”

  “That you were carrying precious cargo and needed protection,” Richards replied. “You’d better not make a liar out of me, Dawson. The country has gone completely nuts over internal security, as you might imagine. Pulling off this little stunt cost me a lot of favors.”

  Nodding, Jack told him, “Come on. You need to know what we’re up against.”

  “Aren’t your friends going to come down and help with the alien autopsy gag?” Richards asked sarcastically.

  “No. It’s just you and me,” Jack told him. “Believe me, this is one show and tell you’re not going to like at all.”