Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  After sealing her own, she told Richards, “Let’s go see what hell looks like.”

  Richards grunted as he shepherded the FBI agents aboard the big elevator. They were going up first to check on the conditions before bringing up the EDS personnel. “I think we’ve already been there and done that,” he muttered.

  The surface, not surprisingly, was a charred wasteland. There was still a tremendous amount of smoke and steam drifting up from the ground that had been melted into glass. Everything, as far as they could see, was scorched and black.

  It was still hot, but not nearly as bad as Naomi had expected: the fireball had created its own weather system, and cooler air had rushed into the void as the mushroom cloud had risen higher. The roiling maelstrom had taken in moisture from a storm front moving in from seaward, and a warm rain had begun to fall, the black rain that Naomi had remembered reading about after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ground was still hot enough to be uncomfortable through the thick soles of the environmental suits, and the first drops of rain sizzled when they hit the smoldering ground. But soon there was a light but steady drizzle that partly cooled the earth beneath their feet.

  It was a sobering emergence from one surreal universe into another, but Naomi didn’t care. She was alive. And so was Jack. She had no idea what their future might be, or if they had one together, but now they at least had a chance to find out. As did the rest of the human race.

  She looked down at Jack, whose hand clung weakly to hers as two FBI agents bore him out on a stretcher they had pulled from the survival stores. She smiled behind her mask, and could tell from the look in his eyes that he was smiling back.

  “Naomi,” Richards called. “Look.” He pointed to a group of black specks on the horizon that quickly resolved into helicopters.

  “Two Apache gunships and thirteen Blackhawks,” he said. “I guess the gig’s finally up.”

  ***

  The harvester awoke to find that it was alone. The last of its kind that lived, it did not cry in rage or fear as it arose from the sea of stinking diesel fuel.

  It stood there, contemplating its long life and the failure of the great plan as the fuel finally reached one of the open relays in the power switches and ignited.

  ***

  Naomi and the others flinched when a sudden rumble made the earth shiver beneath their feet.

  “The fuel must’ve finally gone off,” Renee noted blandly.

  The Blackhawks settled all around them while the Apaches orbited overhead, their guns aimed at the group of survivors gathered around the antenna silo doors.

  A soldier, dressed in full protective gear, hopped out of the nearest Blackhawk. He was quickly joined by three more men who took up positions on either side and behind him.

  Naomi stepped forward to meet the soldier in the center, whom she assumed would be the senior officer.

  “I’m Naomi Perrault,” she said, her voice muffled through the mask. “We’re unarmed.”

  “That’s smart,” the other man said simply. “I don’t want the President kicking my ass because we had to shoot any of you.” Surprising Naomi, he held out his hand, and she took it. “I’m General Ryan Macaulay from Beale Air Force Base. I’ve got direct orders from the President of the United States to get you and your people to safety and to secure this area.”

  “Orders from President Curtis?” she blurted.

  “That’s right,” Macaulay said. “You all are heroes, he told me. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get you and your folks out of here.”

  Naomi nodded numbly, having a hard time coming to grips with this unexpected turn of events.

  She watched as Macaulay turned and gave some orders to one of his escorts, who she noticed was carrying a radio. The man relayed the general’s instructions, and a moment later troops spilled from the other Blackhawks. Most moved quickly to form a cordon around the base’s scorched perimeter, while others, including a dozen medics, began to help her people into the now-empty helicopters.

  “We’ll take you back to Beale and get you cleaned up,” Macaulay told her as a pair of corpsmen gently carried Jack and put him in one of the Blackhawks. Someone handed her what looked like an empty environment suit, but in fact contained a pair of extremely unhappy cats. Unable to keep from smiling, she put them aboard the Blackhawk with Jack.

  “Let go of me, Godzilla!” she heard Renee cry as she broke away from a soldier who had been trying to get her aboard one of the other Blackhawks. She trotted over to their helicopter, with Richards right behind her.

  “I’m riding first class with you guys,” she announced as she climbed into the passenger compartment, sitting down next to Jack and taking one of his hands.

  “I have to keep an eye on her,” Richards grated as he climbed aboard, too.

  Naomi shook her head and smiled. “Thanks, general,” she said, shaking the man’s hand again.

  “I’ll see you back at Beale,” Macaulay told her.

  With that, Naomi climbed into the waiting helicopter. Collapsing into her seat, exhausted, she took Jack’s other hand in hers, and held onto the suit containing the squirming cats with her free hand as the Blackhawk lifted off.

  EPILOGUE

  Jack’s eyes snapped open at the sound of someone knocking at the door. He’d fallen asleep on the couch next to Naomi, who had been reading.

  They were in the Gold Country Inn, which served as the visitor quarters and temporary living facility for Beale Air Force Base. The inn had been cleared out prior to their arrival, and all the EDS base survivors had been quartered there after going through a thorough decontamination procedure. The entire building was cordoned off by a small army of military police, and Jack had been happy to note that the guns were pointed out, not in. Macaulay had made it clear that they weren’t prisoners, but wanted them to stay put for their own safety until “things got sorted out.”

  “I’ll get it,” Jack said. He was still feeling the effects of the harvester’s venom, but the antivenin had worked wonders. The medics had been forced to give him morphine for a while to deal with the pain, which diminished more slowly than the paralysis. But the pain was gone now, and aside from a persistent tingling in his right side and left hand, plus the pain from the two stab wounds from the stinger, he felt more or less back to normal.

  Crossing the room in a few strides, followed by Alexander and Koshka, who were always curious about visitors, Jack opened the door.

  “Special Agent Jack Dawson, I presume,” President Norman Curtis said.

  Jack froze, unable to speak. He felt Naomi come up beside him, her hand on his arm. The last harvester they’d killed had claimed that there were no more, but Jack wasn’t taking any chances. Not now. And even if the man standing in front of them wasn’t a harvester, he was a known collaborator.

  Naomi looked down at the cats, who showed no more than their usual feline curiosity at anything from a human being to an empty cardboard box.

  “It’s just me,” Curtis said, glancing curiously at the cats. “The protective detail is outside...and there aren’t any of them, those things, the harvesters, with me. Not anymore.”

  Jack peered down the hallway both ways. It was deserted.

  “I made the protective detail wait outside,” Curtis said. “Can we talk?”

  Still unsure, Jack nodded and gestured for the President to come in. The three of them took seats around the suite’s small dinette table.

  Neither Jack, nor Naomi said anything. They stared at the President in silence.

  “Very few people know this,” Curtis began, turning from his silent hosts to stare out the window, “but my daughter had inoperable brain cancer some years ago. It came as an utter and completely bitter surprise. It’s one thing to lose someone you truly love. A wife or husband, sister or father. It’s something else entirely to lose a child, especially the only one we could ever have. I prayed for a miracle, and would have gladly sold my soul to save her.” He turned to look at t
hem. “That’s when Dr. Rachel Kempf came to me, offering my daughter a chance to live using an experimental gene therapy program.”

  “And you bought into it,” Naomi accused, not bothering to mask her disgust.

  “You’re damn right I did,” he told her bluntly. “For all I knew back then, which was before you were hired by New Horizons, Kempf was legitimate. And even if she’d been a carnival fraud I would’ve given her a chance to save my daughter’s life.” His voice lowered slightly. “It was only after the treatment succeeded, wiping out my daughter’s cancer and asking nothing in return, that Kempf showed me that she wasn’t any ordinary geneticist. But the form she revealed wasn’t her true one, I know now. Nor did she tell us the truth about ‘The Secret,’ as we called their plan, or at least the version they revealed to us. As you well know, they lied, and those of us who were in on The Secret were taken for a ride. Used.”

  “If you’re looking for sympathy,” Naomi told him, “you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  Curtis shook his head. “I’m not looking for anything of the sort,” he told her. “I know there’s a special place in Hell reserved for me for what I’ve done, and that’s that. I can’t wave a magic wand and make it all better. I simply want you to understand that Kempf offered hope for my daughter, and then later offered what I thought was hope for humanity. Had I known...”

  Jack could see that Naomi would never accept his words, but he could understand where Curtis was coming from. He wasn’t an evil man. He had been a desperate father, and then a world leader who’d seen an opportunity to do some good. A dupe, and a fool who hadn’t asked more pointed questions, perhaps, but Jack couldn’t fault him for being human. And it was as close as Curtis was going to come to an apology.

  “So,” Jack asked, “what’s to become of us?”

  “We can arrange for the rest of your people to drop back into society pretty much as they were,” Curtis told him. “They’ll all need to have a cover story of where they were since they went underground, but that can be sorted out. Special Agent Richards is a bit more difficult, but he’ll have a cover story that he was undercover, investigating EDS, and helped bring in the team that took them down. Director Ridley approved it.”

  Jack and Naomi both frowned at her name.

  “She’s another one who ‘didn’t know,’” Naomi said.

  Curtis glared at her. “It may interest you to know that the harvesters, as you call them, cured her of Lou Gehrig’s disease when she was in her twenties,” he said slowly. “That’s how they recruited her. But she found out that it wasn’t a gift when she refused to back my decision to drop the nuke on you, and one of the harvesters…reversed the disease.” He paused. “Director Ridley is currently in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, dying. If you want to think ill of me, go ahead. But Ridley’s courage in standing up to the harvester played a large role in your being alive today, and she’s paid a terrible price for it.”

  Naomi’s face flushed, and she looked away. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I...”

  “Don’t apologize,” Curtis said more gently. “I feel like such a fool for the government hounding you, thinking you were the bad guys when in fact it was I and the others who were manipulated like marionettes.

  “But that brings me back to you two.” He looked at Jack. “There’s no way we can undo the whole most-wanted thing, Jack. It would completely discredit the FBI, which as you know has suffered terribly in this whole mess, and your name would never be truly cleared.”

  Jack nodded. He could shout his innocence from the rooftops, but no one would ever truly believe him.

  “And you, Naomi, are in much the same boat,” Curtis went on. “After being painted as the leader of a notorious band of terrorists, we could try to clear your name, but I don’t think it would ever wash with the public.”

  “So what’s the alternative?” Naomi demanded.

  “To put it simply,” Curtis told her, “I’m offering you the chance to start over, although you’re probably not going to like the cover story.” After a pause, he continued, “You two died in the assault on the EDS base. You had a nuke. It went off. You and lots of other people died and the good guys – a lot of them dead – won in the end.”

  “So we’re the bad guys?” Naomi asked angrily.

  “Naomi,” he told her, “I’d be happy to say EDS was right. I’d even throw myself to the lions to make things better. But how do we explain all of this to the public? To the world? We…I killed over a thousand American citizens with a nuclear bomb,” he said bitterly. “I can only thank God that so few people lived in that area, or the butcher’s bill would have been far, far worse.” His face blanched at the thought of what the same bomb would have done to a major city, certain that he would have still given the order to drop it.

  “Then there’s the destruction of the genebank facilities around the world,” Curtis went on, “and the deaths that went along with them, including more of our own people in Colorado. EDS was framed for all those things. I know that now. But the truth isn’t something the world, or our own people, are going to easily accept.”

  He looked out the window for a moment, the crushing weight of responsibility clearly written in the lines on his face. “Then there’s the little issue of a…non-human sentient species that wants to use us as food, or as hosts, and which had extensive influence over a number of governments in the world.” He had read the preliminary report from Naomi of what the New Horizons seed was really for, and what it did, and it still gave him shivers. “I don’t think you realize just how close to the brink the world is right now in the wake of those attacks and the nuke. Plus the viral outbreak that, as you suggested, is probably the work of New Horizons to drive up demand for the seed. People are already terrified, and the truth of what’s happened would only fan the flames of that fear. The government would collapse, and God only knows what would happen overseas. The Russians and NATO are on alert, and the Indians and the Chinese are at one another’s throats.” He looked at Jack, then Naomi. “Blaming the whole thing on EDS isn’t fair, but people will believe it. I can get the other countries to stop rattling their sabers and work on calming the people here at home. It will buy us time to get everyone back onto saner ground.”

  “What if I wanted to walk out that door,” Naomi said, “and hold a press conference? What if I told the world everything?”

  Curtis shrugged. “I wouldn’t stop you. I’ll even go one better: I swear on my daughter’s life, that if you want me to go before the public right now and tell them everything, I will. Right now. But you have to live with the consequences.”

  “He’s right,” Jack said quietly. Naomi turned to stare at him, a disbelieving look on her face. “Naomi, we have to think of what’s more important. Neither of us is ever going to regain our credibility: you’ll be known at best as a UFO crackpot, and at worst as a terrorist, and I’ll always be known as a traitor to the FBI. We’ll never get our old lives back. And if the President gets up and tells the world that all of this was set up by a race of things that want to wipe us off the planet, and that you could be turned into one of them just by eating corn on the cob…” He shook his head. “There’d be a panic.”

  After a moment, Naomi looked away. “You’re right,” she admitted finally. “I don’t like it, but you’re right.”

  Curtis nodded, relieved.

  “So what do we do now?” Jack asked the President.

  “You enter the Witness Protection Program,” Curtis told him. “You start life with new identities, a new home, the whole works. With one extra twist. Think of it as a personal favor from someone who doesn’t deserve to ask.”

  “What’s that?” Naomi said.

  Curtis leaned forward. “Once your backgrounds have been reconstructed, I want you two to lead a new agency,” he explained. “Call it whatever you like, but I want you to track down any more of these damn creatures and kill them, investigate where they came from, and learn how we can better protect ours
elves. We’ve spent millions of dollars and untold talent looking for other sentient life. You found them. You’ve seen the beast, you know the reality, and I want people like you in charge of helping to keep our planet safe. I’ve already drafted an executive order and I have it on good authority that Congress will roll the necessary funding into the intelligence budget under the cover of a classified think-tank. It’s a done deal. All you have to do is say ‘yes.’”

  Jack and Naomi looked at one another. After a moment, they nodded.

  “Count us in,” Jack told him.

  ***

  Carl Richards strode down the hallway at Johns Hopkins Hospital, ignoring those he passed. This time it wasn’t because he was being rude, but because he was singularly focused on his duty. He had always done his duty for the Bureau. It had been the cornerstone of his life.

  But this was the first time that performing that duty had torn his guts out. Outwardly he was his normal calm, arrogant self. Inside, he felt like crying like a baby. It was an unfamiliar sensation, one that he hadn’t felt since his wholly unpleasant childhood. Any other time he would have banished the feeling with a surge of anger at himself for being weak.

  But not today. Not today.

  He finally arrived at a particular door. It was guarded by four Bureau special agents, all men he had hand-picked. As acting Deputy Director, he had the authority to do that now. He also had the tremendous, crushing responsibility that went with it. Director Ridley’s decision to promote him above many other more senior agents had come as a shock to many, including Richards. But with the battering the Bureau had taken since Sheldon Crane’s death, Richards was the logical choice. He was senior enough, and had received something he had never sought and never wanted in the aftermath of the EDS affair: the title of hero. He had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest award for civilians, and been paraded around like the first astronauts who returned from the moon. His had become a household name virtually overnight as the man who’d led the charge against home-grown terrorists who’d set off a nuke in central California. The story that the spin doctors had come up with had expertly woven fact with lies, and a Hollywood producer had already contacted him about movie rights. The public had swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker. Richards had parroted every word the spin doctors had fed to him, had gotten everything right. And he had hated every minute of it.