Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “I can’t believe I’m laying my career on the line for you,” Richards told him as Jack opened the luggage door, revealing a tightly-bound bundle that was roughly the size of a man. “I think I’ve simply gone insane.”

  “No,” Jack told him solemnly. “You’re here because you’re trusting your instincts.”

  Jack quickly undid the bindings of the bundle’s heavy plastic tarp. He paused before pulling back the plastic to reveal what was underneath.

  “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to show you,” Jack told him. “I sure as hell didn’t when I first saw one of these things, with it up and moving around, and it almost got me to let it escape. But it’s real, Richards. And this thing and others like it are trying to take over our home, our world, and kill us all in the process.”

  Frowning with impatience, Richards pushed Jack aside and tore back the flap of plastic.

  “God,” he gasped, briefly turning away. “What’s that smell?”

  “That’s how they smell in their natural form,” Jack told him as Richards turned back to look more closely at the thing in the plastic. “They’re shape-changers, Richards. They can control this stuff,” he pointed to some of the bruise-colored malleable tissue that had pooled around the thing’s head, “and change their shape and color to anything that’s about the same size. Like a person. And when they do, the smell goes away. We don’t know why. Here,” he said, handing Richards a pair of disposable examination gloves. “Put these on, then you tell me if you think this thing is just a bunch of latex and rubber.”

  Richards didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the gloves, expertly snapped them on, and then began to probe at the creature’s flesh, his fingers disappearing into the mottled, slimy surface, then running over the exposed and glistening skeletal structure, even its mandibles.

  The body suddenly convulsed. Both men leaped back, their hands going instinctively to their weapons. They put their hands on the grips, but didn’t draw the guns; they didn’t need any unwanted attention from airport security. Richards’ eyebrows shot up when he caught sight of Jack’s gun, a massive .50 caliber Desert Eagle strapped under his left arm.

  “What’s with the cannon, Dawson? Penis envy issues, maybe?” Richards asked sarcastically as he warily eyed the thing in the tarp.

  “No,” Jack told him nervously, his eyes fixed on the harvester, which again lay completely still. “Their skeletal structure is like an organic carbon fiber material that’s incredibly tough, stronger than Kevlar. That dinky 9mm you’re carrying would barely scratch it.” He glanced at Richards to make sure he had his attention. “I had to empty five .44 magnum rounds into one of these things at point blank range to stop it, and even then it was a close call. After that, I got myself a bigger gun.” He gestured Richards closer. “You haven’t told me you think this is a Hollywood stunt.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think, Dawson. I think I’m still back in my apartment, having a nightmare after eating a bad pastrami sandwich and seeing our President blown to bits on TV. And when I wake up, I’m going to find you and knock your block off, just on principle.” He looked at the thing again, but didn’t touch it. Then he peeled off the gloves and shoved them in his coat pocket. “Dawson,” he said, his voice suddenly losing its usual tone of arrogant self-assurance, “this can’t be real. It just can’t be.”

  “It can be,” Jack told him, “and it is. We don’t know where they came from, and as far as we know there’s no mother ship or any of that garbage. But we do know they’ve got a lot of human collaborators in high places, and they plan to transform our biosphere with the help of genetically engineered crops from New Horizons.”

  Richards glanced sharply at him. “Those are the guys with the cure for the sudden virus outbreak, right? I thought that was a little too coincidental.”

  “Naomi worked for New Horizons, remember,” Jack said. “She worked for one of them, but she didn’t know it until they tried to co-opt her. And when Crane investigated EDS, she showed him the truth and he believed. That’s when he went underground, went rogue. EDS needed someone to penetrate the Lincoln Research University lab, because that was where the crop strains were being created. Sheldon was perfect for the job. He got in, found out what they were doing, and they – the enemy, the harvesters, we call them – killed him for it.”

  “And you got suckered into this same mind game?”

  Shaking his head, Jack told him, “There wasn’t any mind game about three special agents coming to my door and trying to kill me the night of the lab explosion, looking for information that Sheldon had sent electronically that I didn’t even realize I had. One of the agents, Lynette Sansone, was one of these things.” He gestured at the creature. “Naomi and some of the others rescued me.” He stepped closer to Richards. “Carl, their objective is to wipe us out. And there are humans helping them to do it.”

  “Oh, come on,” Richards said. “Why would anyone do that?”

  Jack shrugged. “Greed? Power? Who knows? It’s not like human beings haven’t tried to wipe out other human beings before. Why not help somebody else do it? For all we know it could be some sort of brainwashing, but I don’t think so.” Thinking of Ellen Bienkowski, turning traitor in return for the promise of a cure for Tan’s cancer, he went on, “I think the harvesters are using leverage of some kind on most of the people they’ve subverted. All that matters now is that we stop them, and the New Horizons seeds are the key: we think they’re at the center of what’s been going on, the critical element of their operation. The terrorist attacks, the virus outbreak...” He paused. “Even the assassination of the President. It’s all part of the plan to destabilize things and get those seeds in high demand and out into the world, and it’s working.”

  “What are the seeds supposed to do?” Richards asked, wrinkling his nose as he caught another whiff of the harvester’s odor.

  He’s starting to believe, Jack told himself, overcome by a huge sense of relief. “We’ve got people working on that, but the honest answer is that we don’t know yet. But you can bet it’s nothing good.”

  He closed the plastic over the harvester and shoved the reeking thing back into the luggage compartment, then locked the door. Turning to Richards, he said grimly, “There’s one more thing. The FBI’s been penetrated by at least one collaborator, and you’re not going to believe who it is.”

  “Something tells me I’m not going to like hearing this,” Richards grated.

  Jack shook his head. “No, you’re not. It’s the director herself. There may be more, we have a list of the human collaborators and are trying to pin everyone down, but EDS has known about the director for some time now.” He sighed. “There’s worse.”

  “Oh, please, bring it on,” Richards told him sourly as he leaned back against the plane.

  “The new President is a collaborator, too,” Jack told him, “and I’d wager my next year’s pay – if I had a job anymore – that he was involved in putting together the assassination this morning.”

  That struck Richards like a hammer, and his face blanched. For a moment, Jack thought the man might actually pass out on the tarmac.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  “What kind of a stupid question is that?” Richards snapped as he rubbed his hands over his bald head. “Of course I’m not okay. Everything I’ve believed in my entire life has just been turned upside down, and the thing that’s really making me angry is that I’m actually believing this ridiculous, absurd...shit!”

  “Nothing that you believe has been turned upside down, Carl,” Jack reassured him. “It’s just that we’re being lied to and led down a path toward our own destruction. These things,” he gestured toward the closed cargo compartment where the harvester lay, “may not even be from another world for all we know, although the biologists in EDS believe they must be, because their DNA is so different from ours. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re a threat to our country and our world, and the people we’ve spent our live
s defending. That part of your life, the part that’s been the most important to you, hasn’t changed at all. Only the source of the threat has.”

  Richards blew out a deep breath and looked out across the runway for a long moment, his face unreadable and still except for a vein pulsing at his temple. On the other side of the airport, a Boeing 737 roared into the sky from one of the commercial runways.

  As the airliner quickly shrank to a glitter of sunlight reflecting from the jet’s wings, Richards turned to Jack and said, “All right, hotshot. What’s the plan?”

  “That,” Jack told him uneasily, “is a damn good question.”

  ***

  “I want them found.” President Norman Curtis sat behind his desk in the oval office, glaring at the members of his National Security Council. In what was an unusual circumstance in many respects, he had also instructed the Director of the FBI, Monica Ridley, to attend. Among the other men and women in the room, he was aware that she knew The Secret. The terrible, wonderful Secret. “The people who did this, these Earth Defense Society people. I want their heads on a platter, and I want them now!” Turning to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeffrey Komick, Curtis said icily, “What actions have you taken, Jeffrey?”

  Leaning forward on one of the sofas that suddenly seemed incredibly uncomfortable, Komick took a deep breath before answering. Curtis had never been a well-liked member of the former President’s team. He was an extremely savvy politician and was quite competent, but he had about him an aura of cold arrogance and a fierce temper that had always been well-masked in the presence of his former boss, but would become, Komick and several other cabinet members feared, the norm for the country’s new leader. Komick suspected it wouldn’t be long before he’d be in search of another job, and the greater part of him was already looking forward to it as a relief. However, like the others gathered in the room, he put the needs of his country first, and he would weather whatever Curtis brought to bear on him. For now.

  “Mister President,” Komick began, his rasping voice filling the now-silent room, “starting where the President...” he paused a moment, his mouth hanging open as his mind replayed the horrifying scene of the explosion that killed his longtime friend and hundreds of others, “...where the President was killed, we’ve locked down concentric rings around Madison, Wisconsin, blocking all road and air traffic with the help of the National Guard.”

  The Secretary of Transportation shifted uncomfortably, but kept her eyes firmly fixed on Curtis. When Komick had said that road and air traffic had been locked down, he meant it quite literally: there was an unprecedented gridlock forming around the now-beleaguered city of Madison that was spreading like a tsunami, particularly through the nation’s airspace. On the ground, tens of thousands of people were marooned in their cars, unable to move, and the news had already reported a number of small-scale disturbances that would soon build into riots.

  Curtis merely glanced her way, then dismissed her with his eyes. “What else?” he said to Komick.

  “We’re searching everywhere and everyone in the area,” Komick went on, “and of course we have every available member of the law enforcement community combing the area, looking for witnesses and clues. The various agencies under Homeland Security have received thousands of tips already and we’re coordinating with the Intelligence Community,” he nodded his head at the Director for National Intelligence, “but so far we’ve come up empty.”

  “How about the FBI?” Curtis asked, turning to Monica Ridley.

  Far more relaxed than Komick, Ridley explained, “We’ve got three hundred agents in Madison, with more on the way. They’ve been conducting a thorough forensic examination of the scene, but our analytic capabilities have been seriously hampered by the destruction of the FBI lab at Quantico.” As Curtis opened his mouth to speak, she went on smoothly, “But that hasn’t stopped us from putting some pieces of the puzzle together.” Turning to her notes, she went on, “The bomb appears to be very similar to the ones used by EDS in their earlier attacks on the seed storage facilities: it was an improvised fuel-air explosive that was detonated in the basement of the auditorium where the President was speaking. It was the same chemical composition as the others, and roughly the same size.”

  “That’s impossible,” Komick interjected. “How did anyone get something like that past the Secret Service protective detail?”

  “No one got past them, Mr. Secretary,” Ridley said. “The perpetrators were in the detail, not outsiders. We believe that at least two of the Secret Service agents assigned to the President’s protective detail that day were associated with EDS. I doubt it was a coincidence that both of them were on duty in the basement when the bomb went off.”

  “They were suicide bombers?” someone else asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s not what I said,” Ridley said, clearly irritated. “I said that we believe at least two had ties to EDS: they both had received money some time ago from Gary Woolsey, a known EDS terrorist who burned down a New Horizons lab, killing the occupants, and who died in prison shortly after his conviction.” She looked up. “We haven’t found the bodies or remains of the agents in the rubble, and at this point we have every reason to believe they escaped after initiating the bomb, releasing the fuel-air mixture into the basement, but before it detonated.”

  “Jesus!” Curtis exploded. “You mean those bastards infiltrated the Secret Service?” He turned to the Secretary of the Treasury. “I want every agent assigned to my protective detail re-checked and re-cleared. Today.” Turning to Ridley, he ordered, “You handle it. I don’t want this particular investigation accidentally handed over to any moles. Get someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. We don’t need any more screwups.”

  “Mr. President!” The Secretary of the Treasury, under whom the Secret Service operated, blurted. “Sir, I must protest! The Secret Service is not infested with traitors! The director here so much as said she doesn’t have any direct evidence: this is all pure speculation. And–”

  “Enough!” Curtis shouted. Leaning forward, he fixed the man with a glare. “The President of the United States, who was a close friend of mine for the last thirty years, was assassinated this morning. I don’t plan on being the next victim, or have my family fall prey to these...savages. If it causes your department some discomfort to be investigated, too bad. Let’s face it: the only logical answer is that it had to have been an inside job. That school was swept and cleared multiple times, just like every other place that’s visited by the President. Some guy dressed up as a janitor didn’t just wheel a bomb in there.” Softening his voice slightly, he said, “This week has already seen enough tragedies. I don’t want any more. I expect you to give Director Ridley your full cooperation.” Looking around the room, he added, “And that goes for all of you. The gloves come off and the brass knuckles go on. I want these EDS people found.”

  “And then what?” Komick asked quietly.

  Curtis compressed his mouth into a thin hard line before he spoke. “And then,” he said, “I want justice done.”

  ***

  After Curtis brought the meeting to a close, he ushered everyone out but Ridley. Collapsing onto the sofa beside her, he tiredly rubbed his hands over his eyes.

  “I ran a marathon once,” he said quietly. “For two days I felt like I’d been steamrollered. I feel now like I’ve just finished a dozen marathons.”

  Ridley glanced around the Oval Office, a look of concern on her face. She’d only found out the day before that Curtis was in on The Secret, but hadn’t expected him to speak openly about it.

  Curtis chuckled, knowing what she was thinking. “I’ve received assurances from our friends that we’re secure here,” he told her. “But it always makes me wonder what was really said during those eighteen and a half minutes missing from Nixon’s Watergate tapes. I’ll bet they know.”

  “It makes me wonder if we should be speaking at all,” she told him bluntly. It was true that he was the Pr
esident now, and her boss, but they had a very unique relationship because of their shared knowledge of The Secret.

  “We don’t really have a choice,” he told her. “Things have gotten out of control, and we have to be able to coordinate our efforts more closely. And the first part of that is that we have got to stop these EDS bastards. The terrorist attacks were bad enough, but what they did this morning...” He shook his head sadly. Curtis had no illusions that he could be a cold hearted son of a bitch, but the man who had died that morning on the podium had indeed been a close friend. Curtis had hoped to someday reveal The Secret to him, because the President had been a man of vision, a man of dreams. And The Secret, once it could truly be unveiled, would be a dream the likes of which humankind had never known. “We need to find them, Monica. I don’t care how you do it, but we’ve got to make sure they don’t interfere with the rest of the plan.”

  “Is New Horizons ready?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yes. I hate to say it, but the terrorist attacks and the recent virus outbreak have been catalysts we can take advantage of. I’ve received confirmation from Dr. Kempf that the final retrovirus variant is ready. She told me what’s in it: a full-scope cure for almost every disease we have! I can’t believe what they can do,” he said in unabashed awe. “It will cure people of everything from cancer to the common cold! And so easily!”

  “Maybe it’s too easy,” Ridley said quietly.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Years of research and billions of dollars have gone into this. This wasn’t something that just popped out of thin air. It took our technology a while to catch up to their genius, their almost instinctive understanding of genetics, but now...”

  “Now we can play God,” Ridley filled in for him. “Or have them play God for us. Even our brightest scientists don’t understand much of what they’re doing. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “What difference would it make?” he asked. “Would my daughter be alive today if it wasn’t for them? Would you?”