Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “We just have to do a little buddy breathing with the ones we have here so we can make it down the tunnel,” Jack added.

  Grudgingly, Livingston nodded, but there was something in his eyes that told Jack he hadn’t conceded the point.

  Richards lowered the pistol and put it back in his holster. “Idiot,” he said.

  With everyone’s attention focused on the drama between Richards and Livingston, no one saw Renee’s frown. Stepping close to Jack, she stood up on her toes and whispered in his ear, “He must really be wigged out. It’s not like Wade to argue with Naomi. He worships her.”

  “Christ, Renee,” Jack whispered back, “can you blame him? No matter what Naomi says, locking ourselves back with the silos sounds a heck of a lot better than heading up into a nuclear wasteland.”

  “Maybe,” Renee said, but the frown refused to leave her face.

  “So that’s it,” Naomi said. “We’re getting out of here. Right now. Everyone break into your apartment teams. We’ve got eighteen respirators, so you’ve got to take a couple of quick, deep breaths as we move along, then hand it on to the next person on your team, and keep doing it until we get to the antenna complex. We’ll all be coughing up a storm by the time we get there, but we’ll make it. Keep one hand on the conduit line along the tunnel wall at all times when the smoke gets thick to help keep you from becoming disoriented.” She paused, her gaze quickly passing over every frightened face turned toward her. “This is going to be tough, but we’ll do okay. And when we get to the antenna complex, remember to go right at the junction there and into the storage silo. You don’t want to go to the left.”

  That, thought Jack, was the real reason no one wanted to go out through the auxiliary entrance. The harvester’s prison was in the silo to the left, and they hadn’t heard from the guards there. Worse, all the cats had disappeared. Even Alexander and Koshka had run off, and Jack couldn’t help but be worried for them. On the other hand, he knew they had better sense than to stand around in a growing lake of diesel fuel like Jack and the others were doing.

  “All right,” Naomi finished, “let’s go.” She turned and headed down the tunnel that, almost six hundred feet away, would hopefully lead them to the dubious safety of ground zero on the surface above.

  Jack and the others followed behind her, leaving the dim light of the junction for the enveloping darkness of the tunnel.

  ***

  The line of a hundred and twenty-three people moved quickly through the smoke-filled darkness, trying to cover the distance of nearly two football fields before they were overcome by smoke inhalation.

  In the lead now, Jack crouched down as he walked to get under as much of the smoke as he could, holding one of the few precious flashlights on the floor ahead to look for debris or obstructions. He had passed the respirator to Naomi, who followed right behind him.

  “This is as far as we got,” coughed one of the men who’d accompanied Livingston earlier, walking close behind Naomi. “This part of the tunnel still has power. Some of the lights are still working, but most were broken by the shock of the blast.”

  As if on cue, Jack passed under a surviving ceiling light that cast its rays into the swirling murk.

  “What’s that?” he asked as he heard what sounded like the rush of air passing through a vent, somewhere still far ahead.

  “It must be the antenna terminal ventilator,” Naomi explained, excited. “It was designed to keep humidity from building up in the terminal. Just like the other ventilation systems, it had a blast valve to protect it against the detonation of a nuclear weapon. It must have come back on automatically after the blast pressure wave passed.”

  “If it’s still working,” Renee wheezed excitedly, “that means the terminal still has power!”

  “And the smoke is starting to clear off a bit,” Jack said.

  He heard Naomi behind him taking a few quick breaths on the respirator as it was handed back up through their team. Jack turned to take it from her when she held it out for him, tapping it against his right arm.

  His foot caught on something just as he took hold of the respirator. Off-balance and carried by the momentum of the fast pace he’d been setting, he fell flat on the floor.

  “Shit!” he cursed as he slammed into the concrete, dropping the respirator.

  “Stop!” Naomi shouted. “Stop for just a minute!” She didn’t want Jack to be trampled. With only a few bumps and shoves, everyone behind them stopped in place. “Come on, Jack,” she said. “Now’s not a good time for a nap.”

  “Naomi, look at this,” he said, his voice thick with dread.

  She got down on her hands and knees to get under the smoke, and gasped at what Jack had stumbled over.

  It was the body of one of the cats.

  “It must have died from the smoke,” she said quietly.

  “Look a little closer,” Jack whispered. “This cat wasn’t killed by smoke.”

  She did, and her skin crawled. The cat’s body, contorted in feline agony with its eyes still open wide and staring, lay in a small pool of blood. There was a perfectly round hole about the same diameter as her thumb in its chest. “Oh, God,” she whispered, pointing a bit further along the tunnel with her flashlight, “there’s another one!”

  In all, Jack could see five cats. Two of them had puncture wounds, while the other three had been brutally mutilated. He silently thanked God that Alexander and Koshka weren’t among them, although he had no idea where they might be.

  “It got out,” he told her. “The harvester we captured at Spitsbergen got free somehow.”

  “What happ...ened,” Renee asked as she duck-walked forward, coming to a sudden stop when she saw the remains of the cats. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Then she saw something else in the gloom further down the tunnel just as the smoke lifted slightly. “Wade!” she gasped.

  Turning to look, Jack and Naomi could just barely see the outline of the barrel-chested engineer’s naked body where it lay against the far wall of the tunnel. He’d been eviscerated.

  Standing up and turning toward the others behind them, Naomi screamed, “Wade Livingston is a harvest–”

  A needle-like stinger lanced out of the smoke just as Jack shoved Naomi aside. The stinger struck him in the right shoulder, sinking deep into the muscle. Gasping in agony, he gripped it with both hands and, with a scream of pain, yanked it free before collapsing to the floor.

  People screamed in confusion and fear, and suddenly there was a stampede as they ran past him toward the antenna terminal. Only Naomi kept him from being trampled by brutally shoving away anyone who came too close.

  As the tendril slithered back into the gloom, Richards was suddenly there, firing at it with his magnum.

  The thing screeched at him before turning and fleeing down the tunnel toward the junction, disappearing into the smoke.

  “Jack!” Naomi cried as she knelt to cradle him in her arms.

  “Oh...God...that hurts,” he gasped as the harvester’s venom went to work. His shoulder was on fire, and already paralyzed: he couldn’t lift his arm.

  “The antivenin,” Renee said as she knelt next to Jack. “It’s back in the lab, in the refrigerator by the animal storage area!”

  “I know,” Naomi interjected. “I’m going back for it,” Naomi said. “Jack, I’ll be right–”

  “No,” he told her as he sat up, cradling his right arm. “You’ve got to make sure everyone gets out.”

  “Jack, you’ll die!” she said. “I’ll just be a minute!”

  “No!” he told her fiercely, turning to look at her. “The antivenin isn’t important. It may not even work.” He hissed as a fresh wave of pain washed over him, and he could feel the progression of the fire in his shoulder, spreading down his arm and into his chest. “We’ve got to make sure the harvester doesn’t get to the silos. It can still open the blast locks and find a way to destroy the seed vaults.”

  “Oh, God,” Renee whispered. “He’s right. It c
an open the blast locks to the rest of the complex while the power’s still on back there, then light off the diesel as it closes itself off. We’d all be dead before we could get out, and it could do whatever it wanted to the seed vaults.

  “But Jack,” she went on, “you can’t go shooting off your gun back there or this place’ll go up in flames like the Hindenburg.”

  “That’s why you have to get everyone out right now,” he said as he got to his feet. “Because that’s exactly what I plan to do.”

  “Jack…” Naomi began, but he hushed her protest with a kiss, drawing her close with his good arm.

  Richards opened his mouth to say something, but Renee elbowed him into silence.

  “Get everyone out,” Jack told Naomi softly after their lips parted. There was a moment, just a breath of time, when he almost said something more.

  Then the moment was gone. Donning one of the respirators, Jack turned and ran down the tunnel toward the junction.

  Naomi watched until he had completely disappeared into the swirling smoke. Then, with Richards and Renee, she turned and followed the others toward the antenna complex.

  ***

  Jack knew he might be running right into an ambush in the tunnel, but there was no time for caution, and he moved as fast as he could. It was a grueling effort, panting through the respirator as the agonizing pain from his shoulder continued to spread through his body. His right arm hung limply now, and he clutched his Desert Eagle in his left hand.

  He expected with every step that the thing he was hunting would lash out at him, but at last his feet splashed into the sea of diesel fuel that was spreading away from the junction. Jack was amazed that it still hadn’t found an open electric circuit somewhere in the power room that would ignite it, but he gave fervent thanks that it hadn’t.

  The door to the lab dome was still open, swung wide after Renee had made her second fix of the electrical system. The lights inside still glowed dimly, the upper level of the dome still shrouded in smoke.

  Moving forward with more caution now, fighting to keep from groaning with every step from the pain, he waded through the wreckage of the lab area. It would have been easy to simply fire his pistol and light off the thousands of gallons of diesel that had poured out, but he had to make sure the harvester was here. He wanted to watch it die. He had to make sure.

  In the back, near the animal storage area, he saw the refrigerator that Renee had mentioned, the one that contained the antivenin. It was on its side, open, the contents spilled over the fuel-covered floor.

  I won’t be needing any miracle cures, he thought grimly.

  He was just turning around to scan the mezzanine level when a searing pain shot through his left hand. He screamed and dropped the gun. Looking down, he saw that the harvester’s lance had passed right through the middle of his palm, and venom oozed out the tip to fall to the floor as a new burning sensation shot up his left forearm.

  The lance suddenly whipped away from him, and Jack spun around to face the harvester.

  “I knew you’d come.”

  There, her nude body glistening in the flickering light, stood Naomi. Or a biological image of Naomi.

  “Jesus,” Jack whispered as he fell to his knees, his right leg finally giving out on him completely. He was helpless without the gun: he had nothing else he could use to ignite the fuel around him. His only hope was to keep the thing talking until the diesel came in contact with one of the electrical circuits. It couldn’t take too much longer.

  “It’s over,” Jack told it, trying not to look at it, unable not to. “You and your other cockroach friends, however many might be left, are finished. You lost.”

  “So you think, Jack,” it/she said. “Soon, in days, weeks, at the most, there will be thousands of us. Then millions. We’ll sweep your kind from this world and make it our own. If your species survives at all, it will be as food.”

  Jack forced a laugh through the increasing waves of pain sweeping over him. Between the agony and the overpowering diesel fumes, he wanted to vomit. Just keep talking, Jack, he ordered himself. “What, are you talking about all those trucks filled with seed and your little retrovirus?” he rasped. “We got them. We got them all.”

  “Lies,” the Naomi-thing hissed at him.

  “Believe what you want. But there’s no way you’re getting out of here.”

  “Getting free isn’t my intention, Jack,” she reassured him, stepping closer. “You know of our vulnerability to open flame. Our kind also suffers greatly from ionizing radiation. What would make you sick would kill me.” It came closer yet, only a few paces away now. “I know you must be in incredible pain,” the creature said. “I could help you, Jack. I could cure you.”

  Something about what the harvester was doing didn’t make any sense to Jack. Why was it hanging around? he wondered. It could just as easily have killed him, then gone through the first blast lock to hide in the missile silo part of the complex and figure out how to destroy the seeds.

  Because it couldn’t, his mind sang out.

  “You don’t know the security codes to the blast locks, do you?” he asked. The door to the lab dome had been left open, but Wade Livingston had closed and sealed the blast doors to the rest of the complex after he had brought everyone out, before his fateful journey to the antenna complex.

  “No, I don’t,” it said. “Give them to me, Jack, and I’ll let you go. And I’ll also let you have this.” It held forth a yellow case. “The antivenin.”

  “Bullshit,” Jack wheezed, suddenly doubling over as the flames raging through his body entered his abdomen. “It’s just a box you grabbed. Oh, God…”

  “It’s the antivenin, Jack,” it said, stepping beside him as he writhed on the floor. “The guards talked about it while I was your captive. I knew what to look for. It didn’t take me long to find it.” After a pause, it added, “I must live, Jack. I’m the last of my kind now. We can sense others of our species, and there are no more. You’ll have me trapped in the missile complex. I won’t be able to cause anyone any harm.”

  Jack coughed, then said, “I don’t think so. Sorry, but you’re going to join the dinosaurs.”

  “Salvation is right here, Jack,” it said softly, standing over him and holding out the box. “All I need is the code to the doors. And you will live.”

  “You’re right about that, you bitch!”

  The creature whirled around to find Naomi standing only a few paces behind it, a Taser in her hands, pointed at her doppelganger’s chest.

  The harvester tried to leap to the side, but Naomi was ready: she fired, and the Taser probes hit the creature in the left breast. The harvester convulsed and stiffened in mid-air, then splashed to the floor. The mask of Naomi’s face quickly dissolved into a mottled blob of flesh.

  The yellow box fell from its hand and Naomi dove after it, snatching it out of the deepening pool of fuel. Then she pulled a large syringe from her vest and stabbed the harvester with it. Formaldehyde to paralyze it, Jack knew.

  “Naomi,” he gasped as the venom’s fire entered his chest. He tried to say something more, but the paralysis had reached his throat. All he could do now was twitch his left arm and leg. The pain was unbearable, as if he’d been cast into an open fire.

  “Hang on, Jack,” Naomi told him. “Don’t you leave me, damn you!”

  “Come on!” Jack saw Richards kneeling down on his other side. “We’ve got to get out of here! Then you can stick him with that!”

  “But–”

  “Now!” Without another word, Richards picked up Jack in a fireman’s carry and began to pound down the long tunnel toward the antenna complex, with Naomi running alongside.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Richards stumbled into the storage silo, gasping for breath as he roughly set Jack down on the floor.

  Behind them, Renee closed the blast door. No matter what happened now, at least the harvester wouldn’t be able to escape.

  “Jesus,” Naomi whispered. �
�Jack.”

  He stared upward, unblinking. His body was totally paralyzed now, and Naomi would have thought he was dead except for the rapid but shallow rise and fall of his chest as he fought to breathe. Peaceful as he appeared, she knew that he was still experiencing excruciating pain.

  Her only relief was that Alexander and Koshka had finally turned up: like the other cats, they had been drawn to the harvester as soon as it had escaped. Unlike the others, however, they had survived the battle with the creature with nothing more than a few lacerations. After the survivors had reached the storage silo, someone had crammed them into a survival suit. They were complaining unhappily, but were alive and would be kept safe on the surface.

  Naomi opened the yellow case and withdrew the antivenin injector. “Please, God,” she whispered, “let this work.” Her face set with grim determination, she plunged the short needle into Jack’s jugular vein and triggered it.

  The result was instantaneous. Jack went into frenzied convulsions. Naomi and Renee, then Richards, fought to hold him down as his muscles rebelled.

  Without warning, he began to scream. Naomi’s soul turned to ash at the sound until she understood that they were screams of pain. He must be coming out of the paralysis, she prayed, wanting to burst into tears at the agony he must have been in.

  The convulsions suddenly began to taper off, as did the screams. Naomi looked at Jack’s face and was rewarded with the sight of him looking back.

  “Naomi...” he finally managed, shakily raising a hand toward her face.

  She took hold of it and kissed it, crying with relief.

  “Come on,” Richards said, “we’ve got to get out of here before the fuel lights off.” He looked at the closed blast door behind them. It was one of the lighter doors, only a few inches thick. “I don’t know if this door will take the stress. If it can’t, we sure don’t want to be in here when it blows.”

  He handed them some environmental suits. Naomi and Renee managed to get Jack into one, then got into their own.

  Naomi kissed Jack, then told him, “You’re going to be okay.” Then she closed the mask, sealing Jack in his suit.