Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (13 page)

“I can’t argue with that,” Jack told him.

“We’re coming in,” the pilot said as the Black Hawk quickly descended toward the university complex, the two Apaches breaking off to start circular sweeps of the area. “I’m going to put you down on the helipad at Mitchell Hospital, then I’ll orbit until you call me. I can’t stay on the pad, because it’s one of the only controlled access areas where it’s safe for us to land and take on passengers, and other birds need it.”

As if to emphasize the point, another Black Hawk was on the pad. A group of civilians waiting on the ramp were ushered aboard. A moment later, the helicopter took off, heading east toward one of the waiting ships.
 

“It’s our turn,” the pilot said, bringing his bird in quickly. With a mild thump from the wheeled landing gear, the Black Hawk was down.

“Thanks for the ride,” Jack told him. “We’ll be in contact shortly.”

“Roger that.”

Jack tore off the headset, grabbed his helmet, and jumped out of the helicopter, Terje and the others right behind him.
 

The last man had just stepped out when the Black Hawk lifted off and banked away.

“Ready to look for a needle in a haystack?” Jack said to Terje. From the soft-sided pet carrier beside him, Alexander made an unhappy mewling sound.

The Norwegian shook his head. “I think you’re being optimistic, my friend.”

“Yeah, probably.” Jack grimaced as they made their way to the welcome party, a hospital staffer and a Marine, both of whom looked exhausted. “But we’re not leaving until we find her.”

COLONEL LIVINGSTONE

“She ran away.”

Jack’s mouth dropped open at the doctor’s words.
 

Around them, the wounded, the dying, and the desperate cried and wailed as the overwhelmed hospital staff did for them what they could. Every corridor was packed with patients and their families, and the doctor had to shout to be heard over the din. The air reeked of alcohol, blood, unwashed bodies, and other, even less pleasant things.
 

He leaned closer to the woman, whose skin was stretched tight over the bones of her face, making her look more like a halloween prop than a physician. “How could you let her do that?”

The doctor laughed. “Look around, soldier boy! We don’t have enough people to treat all our patients, let alone play baby sitter. She disappeared sometime last night.”

“She is fully mobile in her condition?” Terje asked. “She would not have required assistance?”

Shaking her head, the doctor said, “No, her condition doesn’t impair her physically. She just got up and walked out. Her parents brought her in for diagnostics by one of our dermatologists who was something of an expert on suspected Morgellons cases before things went to hell.” She shrugged. “They must not have been able to get back here to pick her up. We tried to reach them, just like we have all the other abandoned patients, but we couldn’t get hold of them.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “You said this dermatologist was an expert. Where is he? Can we talk to him?”

“He was killed by a harvester, one of the larvae, when he was off-duty yesterday. I think that may have been why Melissa left. He looked in on her when he could, and she took an instant liking to him.” She rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. “She took his death pretty hard. He was all she had for someone to lean on in this mess.”

“Would she have tried to go home?” Jack asked. “Where did she live?”

“I think her home was in Evergreen Park, but that’s almost ten miles from here, inside the hot zone. Even if she tried to get there, I can’t believe she got past the barricade, and everything west of here has been burned to the ground.” She glanced around as a nurse frantically called her name. “Look, I’m sorry, but…”

“Doctor, listen.” Jack moved up close to the woman so he could lower his voice, speaking into her ear. “I know you’ve got your hands full. But finding this girl is incredibly important. I can’t tell you the details, but she could very well mean the difference between winning and losing this war. I’ve
got
to find her. Is there anyone here who might have a clue where she’s gone? Anyone else she might have confided in? Maybe other patients?”

“They’ve all been moved to make room for more critical cases.” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait, I take that back. Not all of them. One’s still there. Marybeth Cooley. We haven’t moved her because she’s so fragile. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get her out at all.”

A surge of hope ran through Jack. “Where is she?”

“Room 718, down the hall on your right,” the doctor said, pointing. “She’s in the bed by the window. Good luck getting anything out of her.”

“It’s a start, doc. Thanks!”

Jack led the others through the crush of people in the hallway. Many were children in blood-soaked bandages, held by weeping parents. Others were alone, staring up at him with wide frightened eyes. Some simply stared off into space, their eyes blank. All of them were dirty and unkempt, their faces streaked with dirt and soot.
 

Jack reached into one of the cargo pockets in his pants and pulled out the contents of the MRE meal he’d dumped in there before leaving SEAL-2. He always put something to nibble on in that pocket so he didn’t have to dig out the entire meal packet. He gave out the crackers and the spread that went with them, the cookies and the candy. He would’ve given away the rest of what he carried in his rucksack, but didn’t have the time now.
 

“Here it is,” he said as they reached their destination. “Room 718. Terje, with me. The rest of you hold here.”

He pushed the door open gently, making sure he wasn’t banging into anyone inside. Seven sets of eyes turned to stare at him. He nodded a curt greeting, but they weren’t the ones for whom he’d come. In a bed next to the window was an elderly African-American woman, in her eighties, Jack guessed, who was attended by a small army of machines and three drip bags feeding liquid into the shunt in her arm. She was staring out the window, which looked out over Washington Park. Jack could see the smoke and flames of the neighborhoods burning beyond the I-94 barricade.

He stepped up to the side of the bed. “Mrs. Cooley?”

For a moment, he wasn’t sure she’d heard. Then, she turned her head to face him, the skull turning on the spindly neck in short, uneven jerks. While her body was withered, her sickly skin draped in wrinkled folds over her emaciated body, the dark eyes that looked up at him were sharp and clear. She stared at him a moment with such intensity that he began to feel uncomfortable.
 

“Ma’am,” he said, “my name is Jack Dawson. I’m looking for Melissa Wellington, the girl who was in here with you. She left the hospital last night, and it’s terribly important that we find her. We were told you might have some idea where she went.”

She stared at him a while longer, and he was about to ask her again where Melissa had gone when she said in a surprisingly deep voice, “I was young once, you know. Beautiful, too. All the boys said so. My Aaron always said so.” She blinked and looked up at the ceiling. “I miss my Aaron. I do so miss him.”

Jack and Terje exchanged a glance, and Jack’s hopes quickly began to fade. “What about Melissa Wellington, Mrs. Cooley? Do you remember her?”

“Beauty is only skin deep,” the old woman said, turning her gaze back to Jack. “Did you know that?” She looked away.

Jack was about to ask his question again when the old woman said, “That girl is beautiful on the inside, gorgeous as a summer’s day. But the Lord sometimes has a mighty twisted sense of humor, with what He did to her on the outside.”

Jack leaned closer. “You’re talking about Melissa, right?”

She turned her gaze back to him, her eyes narrowing. “Do you have all your wits about you, young man?”

Terje put a hand put a hand up to his face and coughed.

Jack threw him an annoyed glance before saying, “Probably not, ma’am. I’m just trying to find Melissa.”

“Is she in trouble with the law? I know that happens a lot with young people these days.”

“No, she’s not in trouble at all,” Jack said. “We need her help. We want to find her so we can protect her.”

Marybeth Cooley’s eyes widened. “It’s what’s in her, isn’t it? The evil inside her, in her body.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I could feel it. That poor child. Such a gentle, tortured soul.”

“Yes,” Jack said, taking Marybeth’s hand and holding it gently. “That evil might help us fight the things out there. We might be able to turn what’s in Melissa’s body against them.” He leaned down. “But we have to find her. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“She misses her grandmother,” Marybeth said. “She wanted to go see her one last time, after she found out her parents wouldn’t be coming.” Shaking her head, she said in a sad voice, “How terrible for a child to hear such a thing, to be left alone here in this awful place.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t like it here, either, but I’m not alone. Aaron should be back any time now. He always takes longer than he should, because he likes to talk to folks. He can’t pass a person on the street without getting their life story, but he’s a good man.”

“I’m sure he is,” Jack said. “Melissa’s grandmother. Do you know where she is?”

“Of course I do.” Marybeth glared at him as if he’d delivered a mortal insult. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m senile, young man.”

“Marybeth, please tell me where Melissa’s grandmother lives.”

“Only if you promise me that you’ll tell Aaron to hurry on back here to take me home.”

“Sure,” Jack said, glancing at Terje and rolling his eyes. “I promise.” Turning back to Marybeth, he added, “We both promise.”

After a moment of staring at them with suspicious eyes, she nodded. “Her grandmother is in Oak Woods. That’s where you’ll find her.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cooley. Thank you so much.” Jack kissed her hand, and a smile broke through Marybeth’s stern expression.
 

“Don’t you let my Aaron catch you doing that, young man, or he’ll give you the treatment.”

“We’ll send him to you when we find him,” Terje told her.

“Why on earth would you do that?” She made a
pfft
noise with her lips. “My Aaron passed on to the Lord nearly twenty years ago, young man. The last thing I need is a bag of bones.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll see him soon enough on my own.”

Jack grabbed a flabbergasted Terje by the arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Back out in the hallway, they gathered up the other members of the team and tracked down the doctor they’d spoken to earlier. “Mrs. Cooley said that Melissa went to stay with her grandmother at a place called Oak Woods. Can you tell us where that is?”

The doctor stared at him. “I don’t think you’re going to find her there. At least, I hope not.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Oak Woods is a cemetery.”

***

Oak Woods Cemetery, as it happened, was only a mile south of the hospital. Since there wasn’t an authorized landing zone there for the Black Hawk, Jack requisitioned a battered Humvee armed with a .50 caliber machine gun from a National Guard captain by waving a set of written orders issued by Special Operations Command under his nose. Jack rode shotgun while Terje drove, with Hathcock on the .50 and the other three men crammed in the back.

As they left the university hospital complex and turned south onto Cottage Grove Avenue, Terje asked, “How are they going to get all these people out?” He honked the vehicle’s horn in a vain effort to get the crowd of people clogging the street to move aside and let the Humvee pass. “I think a lot more are here than we were told.”

“That’s not our problem,” Jack said. “Just keep moving.”

It took them fifteen minutes to bull their way a quarter mile to 60th Street, but after that the crowd began to thin out and they were able to sustain the heady speed of five miles per hour without running anyone down.
 

“Here it is,” Jack said as they reached the intersection at 67
^th
Street. “Turn left. The entrance should be down there, I think.”
 

Terje turned, honking to get through more people, and headed east, following the eight foot tall concrete wall that surrounded the cemetery.
 

The wall had been topped with concertina wire, and teams of soldiers were rigging Claymore mines along the top, angled down toward the street, and building platforms on the inside so they could see and shoot over the wall. “They’re fortifying it,” Jack said.
 

Terje nodded. “It makes sense. If the harvesters break through the main defensive line, this would make a good citadel.”

“I’m just wondering if they know something that we don’t.” He watched the soldiers more closely. They were working at a frenzied pace.

From the southeast came the sound of jet engines and the distinctive ripping noise made by the 30mm gatling guns of A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, followed by a series of explosions. The man-made thunder continued as artillery fire complemented the ordnance the A-10s had dropped, firing with such intensity that it sounded like a world class fireworks show. Clouds of black smoke rose into the sky to join the thick gray shroud that already covered the dying city.
 

“Here we are.” Terje turned into the entrance, which no longer bore any resemblance to the original. The decorative green wrought iron fence had disappeared behind a set of stacked jersey barriers, flanked by sandbagged machine gun positions on either side. The gate had been replaced with a school bus that had quarter inch thick metal plate welded to its side, with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY neatly stenciled in foot-tall red letters.
 

“I’m sorry, sir,” a very unapologetic-looking National Guard sergeant told him, casting a wary eye at the crowd of civilians in the street who shouted epithets at the guardsmen. “We’re not allowing anyone inside.”

“Who’s your officer in charge, sergeant?”

“That would be Colonel Livingstone, sir. But he’s unavailable at the moment.”

“Listen, I’ll make this easy on you.” Jack held out the orders from SOCOM. When the sergeant hesitated to take them, Jack’s voice hardened. “Read it, sergeant.”