Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (24 page)

Since protection of the SEAL facilities was critical, they were given a high priority for imagery coverage. When crop circles started to appear on both sides of the Platte River between Central City and Grand Island, which was only ten miles from SEAL-2, NGA flashed a warning to the facility that landed on Carl’s virtual desk. Since Jack was as confident he could be that no imminent harm would come to Naomi or the others working with the harvesters, he took on the duty to investigate.

“Larvae,” Terje whispered as he compared one of the satellite images with their current position and the location of the
crop circle
they were now staring at. “Impossibly huge. Some of the ones on this image must be as big as a sports field, flattened like a pancake. How is this even possible?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, “but we’d better get them now before they divide.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a calf, its bovine ears twitching, moving toward one of the LAVs. “Captain,” he said to Captain Aaron Lowmack, the Marine company commander. “Shoot it.”

“Sir?” Lowmack glanced at the young cow, a look of incomprehension on his face.

Not waiting for the Marines to react, Terje raised his rifle and took aim at the calf, which was now perhaps fifteen feet away from the other LAV.

The animal froze and jerked its head around to look at the Norwegian just before he fired. The tracer round caught the beast right between the eyes. The calf burst into flame. It was close enough to the other LAV that burning chunks of malleable flesh spattered onto the vehicle, setting the paint and two of the tires on fire. The quick reaction of the vehicle’s crew, which produced a pair of fire extinguishers and put out the flames, saved the vehicle.

The LAVs opened fire on the rest of the cattle with their 25mm Bushmaster cannon and 7.62mm machine guns, blasting the hapless beasts into bloody, smoking meat.

“Cease fire, goddammit!” Jack shouted into his mic, but it was too late. “
Cease fire!
”

The guns fell silent.
 

“Sir,” Lowmack, who was obviously shaken, said, “we thought the rest were…”

“They can only mimic things that are roughly the same size as they are,” Jack said through gritted teeth, “which means about the same mass as a human being.”

“But what if some of them are bigger, sir?” Lowmack asked. “Those larval things are. Why can’t some of the adults be bigger, too?”

Jack opened his mouth, ready to bite the man’s head off for being an idiot, then snapped it shut. Terje was looking at him with a speculative expression on his face.

“It’s a possibility we can’t discount, Jack,” Terje said. “Just because we haven’t seen larger adult harvesters doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“Point taken,” Jack said. “That would be some really bad news.” He looked again at where the cows had been slaughtered, then he offered the Marine captain a grim smile. “Maybe we’ll have filet mignon tonight.”
 

“No complaints here, major,” the man said, “although the owner probably isn’t going to be too happy.”

“He can bill Uncle Sam,” Jack told him. Then in a quieter voice, added, “If he’s still alive.”

“So what are we going to do?” Terje asked.
 

Jack took out his map, which was folded in a camouflaged canvas case. “What sort of ammo are you carrying, captain?”
 

“The LAVs have a full load of M792 rounds, high explosive incendiary with tracer, and the machine guns are loaded with tracer, as well.”

“Okay, so in theory, even a single shot from either should set one of those big bastards on fire. So how about this: let’s head east to 2nd Road and set up a mobile barrier along there from M Road north of us, all the way south to the river, giving each vehicle a section of road to cover. That should let us block the larvae from getting to the airport, the town, and SEAL-2.”

Lowmack looked at the map. “That’s a stretch of over fifteen miles, sir. That’s spreading us a bit thin, isn’t it?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m open to other options, if you’ve got any.” Lowmack shook his head. “That’s only about two miles per vehicle, so if you just keep the LAVs moving in their sectors, shooting any larvae or harvesters they see, we should be okay. No other military forces are available, and Carl doesn’t want to strip any more defenders away from either SEAL-2 or the airport. He promised us a Black Hawk as soon as he can free one up to spot targets for us, but that may be a while. Just tell your men to keep well clear of any of those things, big or small, and light them up as far away as they can.”

The Marine nodded, a skeptical look on his face. “As you say, sir.”

As Lowmack keyed his mic and began relaying orders over the radio, Jack put the binoculars back up to his eyes and watched one of the huge harvester larvae, a circle of mottled, oozing flesh well over a hundred feet across, grow even larger as it greedily consumed the early spring crops in the fields.

***

“Tango Two Nine Four, you’re cleared for landing on pad three.”

“Roger, SEAL-2 Control.” The copilot of the Black Hawk banked the helicopter slightly to the left as he brought it in over the main gate of the complex toward the landing area. The pilot beside him was silent. Dead men usually were. The puncture wound in his back would not be visible to anyone on the ground.

Eleven heavily armed soldiers occupied the troop compartment. While they wore military uniforms and had weapons similar to those carried by the Marines on the ground below, they were not brothers in arms. They wore faces that were not their own, and had thoughts that no human being could fully comprehend.
 

Their journey had been a long and difficult one, spawned by a chance opportunity outside of Chicago when the SEAL-12 facility had been destroyed. A few of those who had come to dig out the survivors had not been human, and had learned a great deal from the brains of several of the recently dead. The knowledge that was absorbed was not as bright or clear as that taken from the living, but it had been enough, more than enough, for them to know where the true threat to their kind lay. It was here, in this place, in the minds of the scientists who worked here, notably the one known as Naomi Perrault.

The members of the assault team were all fully adult, achieving sentience while leaving their perilous reproductive phase behind. They were also what humans might, after a fashion, consider zealots. They knew that their generation had been engineered by The Old Ones, and held them up as what humans might think of as gods. The will of those gods was undeniable, their plan a model of perfect chaos. The humans and the other life that occupied the world was nothing more than prey, and with their extinction would come a time of carnage that would span the ages until the world itself turned to dust.

But for that to happen, the greatest threat had to be eliminated.
 

Naomi Perrault and those in company with her must die.

***

“Holy shit!”

Lowmack’s LAV was at the intersection of 2
^nd
Road and Chapman, about three and a half miles northeast of the Grand Island Airport.
 

An enormous larva, even larger than the one Jack had spotted at their initial scouting position, occupied the field southwest of the intersection.
 

Lowmack had ordered the LAV’s gunner to fire three 25mm rounds at the thing. When the shells hit the thing and exploded, everyone had expected that the larva would burst into flame and that would be that.
 

Instead, the creature had contracted, drawing itself from the flattened pancake form up into what looked like an enormous chocolate kiss before ejecting tons of tissue, including the burning bits, high into the air.

Right toward the LAV.

“Back up!” Lowmack shouted to the driver. “
Back up!
”

Jack and Terje dropped down into the passenger compartment and held on as the driver threw the vehicle into reverse and sent them flying west on Chapman, away from the harvester.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Lowmack cursed as the larval bomb fell toward them.
 

The mass hit the pavement twenty feet from where the LAV had been,spattering like a ripe melon and sending gobs of tissue flying everywhere. Some of the splintered larvae were burning, but many weren’t, and began to slowly ooze their way along the road, leaving ruts in the asphalt behind them.

Of course
, Jack thought.
Asphalt is like congealed oil. Perfect larvae food
.

“Jack, look!” Terje was pointing back at the main body of the larva.

The huge mass swayed and twitched, then suddenly dissolved into countless small, wriggling shapes.

“Jesus,” Jack whispered.
 

He heard the other LAVs opening fire to the north and south. Grabbing Lowmack by the arm, he said, “Tell them to cease fire! Now!”

“Roger that!” The captain passed on the orders, but Jack knew from the volume of fire put out by the other five vehicles that it was far too late. He had given instructions that they were to focus on the largest harvesters first. He felt like vomiting.

Beside him, Terje put his rifle to his shoulder and put a few tracer rounds into some of the smaller larvae, which caught fire and burned fiercely.

The Marines caught on, shooting the things on the road with the 7.62mm machine guns.
 

“I can’t get through to one of the LAVs,” Lowmack shouted, his voice barely cutting through the sound of the firing in Jack’s headphones.

“Let’s go find them,” Jack said. The entire field was burning, the heat painfully intense, even at this distance.
 

The driver took them across one of the fields to avoid the flame-filled intersection, then they headed north along 2
^nd
Road. They passed one of the other LAVs, which was now hammering at some of the smaller larvae with its machine guns, before they reached the sector assigned to the missing vehicle.

They found it on the road, just past a grove of trees. The crew had fired on a big larva that had only been a few dozen yards away. The entire vehicle was covered in a blue-yellow mass that writhed and oozed. Another blob of larval tissue burned in the field behind it.
 

None of the men in the LAV had made it out alive.

Without a word, Lowmack took a rifle handed up by one of the men inside. He aimed and fired a single tracer round at the thing that enveloped the vehicle and had killed his men.
 

The larva began to burn.

Jack was thinking of what orders he should give the Marines when he heard the panicked radio call from the command center at SEAL-2.

***

To anyone watching the Black Hawk’s approach, it appeared to be just another landing among many. Routine. Ordinary. Incoming supplies or troops moving around, it really didn’t matter. Boredom and complacency were among the greatest weaknesses of the humans.

When the helicopter was about fifty feet from the ground, the copilot shoved the cyclic stick forward and hauled back on the collective lever, sending the Black Hawk roaring toward the gate of the inner fence line.

As it zoomed over the gate, one of the harvesters tossed out a satchel charge, which landed right at the feet of the startled Marine guards.

The aircraft lurched as the charge exploded. The blast killed the Marines and cats guarding the gate, shattered the few windows remaining in the lab building, and blasted a hole in the fence line twenty meters long.

The copilot brought the Black Hawk around in a gentle right turn, the gunner behind him raking the compound with the 7.62mm minigun mounted in the window just behind the copilot’s seat. The weapon made a deep thrum as it spewed tracer rounds in a solid stream of metal, firing four thousand rounds per minute. Dozens of Marines were cut down, the helicopter hangar was torn to bits, and the two Black Hawks that had set down on the landing pad only a few minutes before went up in balls of flame. Then the gunner walked the glowing stream of bullets through the tent city where the scientists were living, wreaking carnage on those who were off-shift and trying to catch some sleep.

As the helicopter came around to bring the gun to bear on the lab and personnel buildings, the gunner blasted the lab entry doors from their frames, killing the six men and women of the quick reaction team who had just emerged. While the lab building was made of concrete and reinforced with steel and wasn’t vulnerable to the minigun’s fire, the personnel buildings, which used only light wood construction typical of many apartment buildings, certainly were. The stream of fire tore through the ends of both buildings like a buzz saw before the weapon finally ran out of ammunition.

When the pilot dipped the helicopter down to a dozen feet above the ground just beyond the inner fence, the ten harvester soldiers leaped out.
 

Dashing around the smoke-filled crater left by the satchel charge, the group divided into two teams. One charged through the destroyed entry doors into the lab complex, while the other headed toward the entrance to the first personnel building.
 

ATTACK

Everyone in the lab looked up, startled, as a deep boom reverberated through the sub-basement.
 

“What was that?” Naomi’s question was met by a set of blank stares.

Then the alarm went off, a piercing
whoop-whoop
accompanied by flashing strobes set in the ceiling.
 

“That’s not the fire alarm, is it?” Harmony asked.

“I don’t know…”

She saw Kiran, who hadn’t left his post at the door since Jack and Terje departed, stiffen. Then he said something into his microphone. With a gesture of his hand, he sent the two Marines to take up positions near the door to the main corridor. Then he reached for the keypad beside the door and pressed the intercom button. “SEAL-2 team, come out! Harvesters, return to your cells.
Now!
”

Naomi pressed the intercom button on her desk. “Kiran, what is it?”

“We are under attack. Come out, Naomi.” His hand hovered over the big panic button on the security panel by the door. If he pressed that, the active security systems would target the harvesters in the room with the Tasers.