Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Wasn’t that the truth?

  “We’re coming, we’re coming” she muttered at the comm.

  “Alaric?” Haldin asked.

  Before she could answer, the door Pryce had swapped for the open hole Drogan had punched into the shop wall a few weeks prior swung open, and Johnny stepped in.

  “You guys ready to go share your project with the class?”

  Rachel made a face. “Not really, but it sounds like they’re waiting.” She turned to Pryce. “You sure you wanna come? I can’t imagine you’ll be missing much more than a pissing contest between Krogoth, Alaric, and anyone else brave enough to whip it out.”

  She looked pointedly at Haldin with the last, but he only shrugged and shook his head. Her gaze drifted to Johnny, who gave her a wave and a wink. “I’m your man. Just give me the signal!”

  She shook her head. “Not what I was getting at.”

  Johnny shrugged, and Rachel turned back to Pryce.

  “I’m curious to see what they’re cooking up over there,” Pryce said. “If I have to brave a few waggling genitalia along the way, I suppose I’ll survive. I could use a break anyway.”

  Elise trailed in after Johnny to help Haldin start gathering the cloaking field generators into the duffel bags Pryce had provided.

  “Fair enough,” Rachel said. “How’s the Soldier of Charity’s reboot coming along, by the way?”

  Pryce wrinkled his nose. “Well, Fela’s not what I would call easily patchable. She’s got more layers than a Russian stacking doll. The armor, that’s easy enough to improvise. The bits that do the actual moving, on the other hand … I don’t happen to have any synthetic muscle lying around, but Al and I are toying with integrating some old servos, so …”

  “So that’s … good then?”

  Pryce shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. We always do!”

  “I’m sure if anyone can, it’s you two. What about the other thing?”

  Pryce grinned. “You mean the Big Whacker 2.0?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “I wish we didn’t have to call it that.”

  “Ah, but how else would they know that it’s bigger and whackier in every way?”

  “Oh, I think they’ll know something’s wacky, all right,” Rachel muttered.

  Pryce only grinned wider. “I should be able to wrap up my part and lay down the etchings by this evening if you want to start”—he wiggled his fingers—“doing your thing tonight.”

  She frowned at him. “I think you might be a bit too chipper for a guy who’s trying to help stop the second apocalypse.”

  “What can I say?” Pryce gave a helpless shrug. “I love building stuff.”

  Something told Rachel that the grandiose chamber where they’d been instructed to wait for Krogoth was not of Krogoth’s choice and design but simply the room he’d adopted from the late Zar’Golga as an “office.” Whatever the hell a raknoth needed an office for. And one so decadent at that. Then again, in her book, the same question would’ve been fair enough when reapplied to the doubtlessly richer-than-rich human who’d occupied the space in a past lifetime.

  Haldin, Johnny, Alton, and Pryce stood with her, Alaric, and Alaric’s detail of half a dozen armed guards in the penthouse suite on the eastern edge of what had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.

  Maybe they should call it Krogoth’s Kitchen now.

  The building was one of the few in the area that had avoided complete ruination during the Catastrophe. Most of New York City hadn’t been so lucky, but Zar’Golga had labored, or at least his men had, to scrape together a fairly livable space around his mighty tower. Though “tower” might have been a stretch. The building wasn’t objectively that tall by old standards, just tall compared to those left standing.

  The penthouse was vastly unnecessary in its spaciousness and decked out with glossy, wood-paneled walls and a large skylight whose dozens of glass panes reminded her of a honeycomb. The floor was ridiculously luxurious—and did she mention unnecessary?—dark marble, interspersed with splashes of lighter gray. It was all rather immaculate.

  She wondered how many people had died in that room.

  When that became overly disturbing, she turned to wondering how many more minutes Krogoth would keep them waiting here for whatever posturing bullshit he was up to.

  The answer to both quandaries, she was pretty sure, was too many.

  Even so, the clacking of boots and claws on marble that preceded Krogoth’s arrival several minutes later didn’t exactly bring relief. The warlord strode confidently into the room, flanked by a figure on either side, a raknoth she didn’t recognize on his right, and on his left … Shit.

  Seth Mosen followed Krogoth into the room, jaw tight and gaze held low.

  Alaric’s knuckles cracked like dry wood beside Rachel, but the wiry Resistance commander made no move other than to shift his weight and skewer Krogoth with a cold glare.

  Mosen and the two raknoth drew up to their group, and for a long stretch, no one spoke. Rachel could feel her companions’ desire to spit pointed comments about the wait—wanted to make such comments herself. Krogoth almost seemed eager for them to come.

  Finally, though, Haldin broke the silence, calm and steady. “Shall we get to business, then?”

  Krogoth cocked his head and gave Mosen an expectant look.

  “Father,” Mosen said, eyes still trained on the smooth marble floor.

  Rachel swore she could feel the air itself tense around Alaric as his gaze flicked between Krogoth and Mosen. “What the hell is this?”

  “I believe you might call it an intervention,” Krogoth said, the crimson of his eyes dim against the rust red of his hide.

  Was that a sign of deference or something? She hadn’t cracked the code on raknoth eye glows yet. Krogoth didn’t really seem like the deferent type. Maybe he was just tired.

  “Much as I appreciate the peaceful return of my subject, Commander Weston,” Krogoth continued, “if we are all to share the field of battle, I would prefer to do so with moderate certainty you will not decide to shoot one of my lieutenants. Again.”

  So that was a no on the deference thing—the son of a bitch.

  Judging from the tension in his jaw and the strangled sound that escaped his throat, Alaric seemed to be banking on popping tendons or cracking teeth to provide an answer in lieu of words.

  Rachel wasn’t sure if her heart was trying to break with sympathy for father and son or explode with tension for the rest of them. Alaric, for his part, stared at his son, utterly speechless.

  Thanks to the many uncanny “upgrades” Zar’Golga had treated him to over the years, Mosen had healed quickly enough after Alaric had been forced to shoot him to restrain him during a scrap they’d had in Philadelphia just a few short weeks ago.

  But there were wounds even a raknoth’s miraculous healing gifts couldn’t keep from scarring, and Rachel was pretty sure father shooting son was one of them.

  “You know I wouldn’t,” Alaric finally said. “That was … That’s behind us now. Seth, I—”

  Mosen shot his father a look, his face contorted and his eyes glinting pale red. The words died in Alaric’s throat. And then Mosen was staring at the floor again.

  The Resistance soldiers shifted uncomfortably around them. Pryce looked like he was on the verge of saying something. Rachel felt compelled to help Alaric, to find the right words for him, but …

  What did you say to the son who’d been compelled to murder his own mother—your wife—and systematically trained to hate you for allowing him to fall into enemy hands and become their hybrid puppet?

  Apparently, no one knew.

  “Enough,” Alton said.

  The crimson fire poured back into Krogoth’s eyes, and he straightened as he fixed onto his new challenger.

  Alton kept his eyes pointedly trained on Krogoth’s feet as he spoke. “Might our time not be better spent elsewhere, Zar’Krogoth?”

  Krogoth thought about that for a long secon
d, looking like he might decide to escalate matters, but finally decided he’d had his fun.

  “Very well,” he said. “I believe that will do for now. Let us visit the battlements.”

  Even if the raknoth hadn’t murdered her family, Rachel would’ve been fighting the urge to help Krogoth achieve blast off through his ridiculous skylight by then.

  Krogoth didn’t care one bit about what Alaric and Mosen might do to one another out there, she was sure of it. The display had been intended to hurt, an exercise in psychological warfare that was unhelpful for everyone involved. Unless Krogoth had wanted to get Alaric too upset to speak and probably too pissed to think clearly. Then it had definitely been helpful to Krogoth.

  One day—and she didn’t know when, but one day—Rachel was going to give Alton and Krogoth and all the other scaly bastards what they deserved. But for now, Haldin’s and Pryce’s imploring looks convinced her to stow her arguments now that they were moving on.

  They made their way silently out to the landing pad built off the posh penthouse, where the Enochians’ hovering ship was waiting beside Krogoth’s smaller parked one. By some unspoken agreement, they saw to it as a group that Alaric stayed on the opposite side of the pack from Krogoth and Mosen until they’d split off to board their separate ships.

  The flight was a short one. Within a minute, the remains of old Central Park stretched out ahead in the view port, dry and largely barren—of greenery and wildlife, at least. The park was most certainly not barren of activity. That, it had in droves.

  The scope of the bustling below was actually quite impressive. All around, Krogoth’s people were busy at work with hand tools and more elaborate machinery, constructing a long-running barricade a little ways in from the southern end of the park. Others were hauling heavy-looking armaments to the turrets interspersed along the fortifications. Out beyond the wall, dozens of men were busy in the dirt planting a variety of smaller traps, and a dozen or so yards behind the wall on their side, still more men labored to dig a pair of huge pits.

  Alton guided them after Krogoth’s ship to a landing near the pits, and they all shuffled out of the ship.

  Krogoth led their party to the closer of the pits. Alaric quietly established a comm call with Nelken and Daniels as they went so the commanders could have a look at Krogoth’s preparations from the relative safety of HQ.

  Pit Number One, like its brother on the other side of their ships, was probably twenty feet on either side, and another twenty or thirty down. A hectic mess of rebar networked its way along the walls and the floor of the pit. As they drew up to the edge, Rachel saw men at work below, anchoring sheets of plywood to the inner surfaces of the rebar network. The old concrete mixer truck nearby solidified their goal in Rachel’s head.

  They were building a cell of sorts.

  “Not bad,” Haldin said. “But we still have to get Gada in there. Assuming he’s careless enough to strike here to begin with. He could still tear the rest of the world apart waiting for his backup to arrive or for us to come out to him.”

  “That’s what we’re worried about,” came Nelken’s voice from Alaric’s comm.

  “The Kul will come,” Krogoth said. “Gada is renowned neither for his patience nor his skill at tactics. He will be burning to prove himself after his defeat in the mountains, and I imagine he will hope to do it before his peers arrive to hear of his earlier failure.”

  He sounded confident enough, but then again, Rachel couldn’t really picture Krogoth sounding unconfident about anything. Aside from his side hobby of psychological sadism, Krogoth struck her as a warrior first and foremost, and one with an ego. If he hadn’t already caught onto the old phrase, “My way or the highway,” Rachel suspected it would be a likely candidate to capture his heart quite quickly.

  Still, Krogoth’s operation looked a whole hell of a lot better than their rag-tag fighting force had flying off to try to get the drop on Gada. If divine intervention or some manner of massive rakul stroke was out of the question, she hoped Gada would be brazen enough to charge into this death trap.

  That hope only grew as she spotted the two long green pressurized cylinders off to one side of the pit.

  “Fire always works,” Pryce said quietly beside her, apparently following her gaze.

  Jesus. At first she’d took the pits to be cells. Cells without tops for the moment, but she’d figured that must be why the men at the other pit had been digging shallow lines to either side of their pit—probably setting tracks for a sliding panel or something. But they weren’t just cells, were they?

  They were giant, custom-made rakul ovens.

  The thought was at once revolting and comforting. Revolting in the carousel of screaming shrieks and charred, smoking flesh that poured through her head. Comforting in that it might just work. And right now, that was better than they could say about most of their plans.

  Trapping Gada wouldn’t be easy—it might even prove impossible—but it was better than aimlessly harrying him and hoping he didn’t inevitably score a hit with those devastating blades of his. And with Krogoth’s army and the Resistance at their backs, their chances seemed a lot brighter. Unless Gada kicked up a big enough furor to bring an army of his own to match.

  But that’s why they’d brought the cloak generators, right? Assuming those actually worked to break whatever army Gada might stir up.

  “Are we sure this thing’ll hold him?” Rachel asked, still looking down at the pit. “You know, assuming the other million steps before that all go off without a hitch?”

  “The interior will be reinforced with plated steel,” Krogoth said. “It should suffice for long enough.”

  She thought back to the way Gada had cut through Jarek’s enormous sword with enough force left to tear through Fela’s armor in the same swing and wondered if that were a wise assessment. It wasn’t overly encouraging that everything about this setup seemed to be coming back to Hey, it’s better than anything else we’ve got.

  God knew what they were going to do when the rest of the rakul arrived. If this was the best they had, they were going to need a lot more pits, at the very least. Judging from the markings and the digging equipment further down the line, Krogoth was of the same mind.

  “So all we have to do is push the giant killing machine down there and slam the lid, then,” Rachel said, mostly to herself.

  “Preferably without any … misunderstandings, this time,” Krogoth said.

  Rachel did her best to keep her face composed as her stomach attempted to flee somewhere subterranean.

  Had Krogoth heard about what she’d done?

  A furtive glance at Alton showed he was caught off guard by the statement as well, but Rachel wasn’t sure what else Krogoth could be referring to. The way he was boring holes in her with those glowing eyes right now didn’t exactly suggest an alternative explanation.

  Neither did the predatory wink he shot her from across the pit.

  She resisted the urge to reach out and shove Krogoth into the pit right then and there—or at least to turn and get the hell out of Camp Krogoth—as Haldin mercifully turned the conversation to the cloaking generators and Alton followed his lead.

  A warning, then, Rachel thought as Krogoth continued to stare at her from across the pit, a blood-chilling smile creeping slowly onto his reptilian snout. A creepy-ass warning not to try any funny business around Krogoth or his clan.

  Part of her wanted to reach out and telepathically tell him to shove it out of spite alone. The rest of her succeeded in suppressing that desire and turning to the cloaking generator discussion just to escape Krogoth’s leer.

  They spent the next couple hours going over plans and touring the battlements. No one actually resorted to whipping it out, but Haldin and Krogoth, and Nelken via Alaric’s comm, did hem and haw about the best locations to install the cloaking generators, with occasional inputs from Pryce and Johnny.

  Alaric remained awash in a sea of surly stoicism that was rivaled only by Mosen’
s silent brooding.

  Elise and Rachel followed them all in companionable silence, watching and listening, though Rachel only caught half of what was being said. Mostly, she was busy wondering how it had come to this. Men and women working beside the raknoth who’d laid waste to their world. All of them preparing for the likely necessity of taking down innocent, maddened civilians just to get a shot at the giant red-eyed asshole who wanted to lay waste to them all.

  And eleven more like him on the way.

  If things went poorly, they could all be dead in a week. Less. It was almost too much to process. But this was the hand they’d been dealt, and there was little left to do but keep their heads down and keep swinging until the rakul were gone or they were.

  And what if they did win? What if they beat the rakul and were left standing side-by-side with the raknoth? What then? Were they supposed to imagine they could all just drop the past fifteen years and share the planet happily ever after like good symbiotes?

  Fat chance.

  One way or another, she couldn’t help but think this fight was going to come to a bloody end, followed shortly by another.

  When the meeting had concluded with Nelken, Daniels, and Alaric agreeing to send a portion of their forces to aid Krogoth’s preparation efforts, and they’d returned to Pryce’s to get back to work on a new batch of cloaking generators, Rachel pulled Pryce aside, needing to hear what someone else thought, to know that she wasn’t sliding down a big old sheet of crazy.

  “You know what they say,” Pryce said after some short deliberation. “Sic vis pacem para bellum.”

  It took her a few seconds to register the old adage.

  If you want peace, prepare for war.

  She arched a brow at him. “Really? That’s what you’ve got? You never struck me as a sayings guy.”

  Pryce shook his head. “Oh no. Not in the slightest. I was going to say I think it’s the biggest load of shit ever peddled down through humanity. Well, except for …” He cocked his head thoughtfully, then waved away whatever had occurred to him. “Never mind. Point is, I don’t think the whole big stick, scared enemies policy is long-term sustainable. Case in point, look at what’s happening between the raknoth and the rakul right now. War-making is so often the answer and, I think, never the solution.”