Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (28 page)

Terje waved at the man, then ran toward the stairwell.

Slinging his rifle, he drew his Desert Eagle, which had more stopping power at such a short range than his rifle. Carrying the pistol also allowed him to bury his nose and mouth in the inside of the elbow of his free arm. Despite the nausea that gripped him, he kept going, moving up the stairs until he reached the landing midway between the first and second floors.

Aside from three bodies, it was clear.

An ear-splitting scream scythed through the sound of the fire from the corridor above.

Melissa.

He bounded up the steps. Leaning out of the doorway, he took a quick look down the hall. To the left, in the direction of the burning room, was nothing. To the right, two men in military garb had Melissa pinned to the floor. One still wore a helmet and gas mask. The other…

The harvester’s black chitinous head, exposed over the neck of the uniform, opened its mandibles wide over the girl’s face. Wispy tendrils uncoiled like feathers from the creature’s maw and left smoking red weals where they brushed against her skin.

Leaning past the door jamb, Terje brought up his pistol and took aim. He squeezed the trigger and the exposed harvester’s head disappeared in a spray of ichor and exploding exoskeleton.
 

As the thing fell atop Melissa and writhed in a macabre parody of sexual union, the thing’s helmeted companion whipped around just in time to catch two .50 caliber slugs that speared through its body armor. It jerked like a marionette as the slugs, their energy largely spent after punching through the kevlar laminate of the armor, ricocheted off the back plate and back into the harvester’s body, tearing its insides to bits.

The second harvester collapsed as the first stopped twitching and lay still atop the girl.

“Terje!”
 

Running to her side, he rolled the harvester off her. As he scooped her up into his arms, he saw that she still held a bundle of pink bandages to her chest. Alexander’s eyes, pupils dilated wide open, stared up at him, but his jaws eased closed. Terje glanced at the harvester that had been about to take her head. The front of the thing’s combat vest had been shredded by the cat’s claws and teeth.

They both were coughing, the smoke filling their lungs as Terje turned and staggered toward the stairwell, then stopped.

The hall by the entrance to the stairs was engulfed in flames. They were trapped.

He was about to fling himself into the flames in a desperate bid to get down the stairs when the stairwell was filled with a whooshing sound. A white cloud boiled from the doorway, driving away the flames before it. A Marine appeared, then another, then a third, all of them blasting at the flames with fire extinguishers.

A fourth Marine, the squad leader, emerged. “Captain!” He held a gas mask, which he slipped over Melissa’s face. Then he took off his own and managed to get it onto Terje. “Here, sir, take this. I can manage until we get outside.”

“Thank you, sergeant.” Terje breathed deep, trying to clear the smoke from his lungs.

“Jesus, sir, are all Norwegians as nuts as you?”

Terje only shook his head. Holding Melissa and Alexander in his arms, he followed the sergeant through the gap in the flames.

RELEASE THE DRAGONS

“They will be coming for us,” the Vijay-thing said as more shots echoed from somewhere outside the secure lab. “We will be easy prey, trapped in here.” The thing spoke in Vijay’s soft sing-song voice, but the false emotion had drained from the harvester’s mimicry.
 

The sound made Naomi shiver.

“Let us out, Naomi.” One of the others, the one masquerading as an attractive young Iranian woman, Zohreh, who had been paired with Harmony, said. “We can fight them.”

“I can’t open the door,” Naomi said, shaking her head. “It’s a failsafe to prevent you from escaping.”

“It is our only chance.” The Vijay-thing turned to her. “Look me in the eye and tell me that Jack left you no way out of here.”

She tried to stare the thing down, but looking into the dark pools of Vijay’s eyes, she had to blink and look away.

The thing nodded. “He is a prudent man. Now open the door so we can, I hope, save your life.”

Still, Naomi hesitated.
 

“Had we wanted to harm you or the others, Naomi,” the Zohreh-thing said, “we would have already done so. We have nothing to gain by harming you, and everything to lose.”

Taking a deep breath, Naomi moved to the keypad next to the door. She punched in an eight digit sequence, then simultaneously held down the star and pound keys for two seconds.
 

The door whooshed open, and six of the harvesters, including the Vijay-thing, rushed out without a word. She turned to look at the harvester that had remained with her, and took a step back as its face transformed from a middle-aged Iranian to Vijay.
 

“I hate it when you do that,” she said.

“I apologize that it disturbs you,” it said, “but you are far more comfortable with this likeness than any other that I have available. Consider me a…twin of my companion.”

“Sure,” she said, pressing another sequence on the keypad to close the door.

“I will stay to protect you, should the others fail.”

Somehow, she didn’t find that at all reassuring.
 

***

Harmony Bates blinked, then opened her eyes. She had to squint against the bright light that was pouring into her eyes. She was staring up at the ceiling lights, and a haze of smoke drifted through the air above her.

She coughed, then cried out as a spear of pain shot through her side. She tried to reach for the wound with her hand, but found she was pinned to the floor. Something heavy was draped over her torso and upper legs. The caught a faint scent of aftershave, vying for attention with the far less familiar smells of gunpowder and the stench of burning plastic. Only Nizar Aswad, one of the senior lab techs, a man she’d worked with for years, wore that particular aftershave.
 

The realization brought with it a set of memory flashes. Being trapped in the stairwell as someone opened fire from above. Something hitting her in the side, driving the wind from her and slamming her up against the wall of the stairwell. Falling, rolling through a sea of screaming people and bloody bodies as bullets tore through those around her. Someone grabbing her by the wrist, pulling her from the maelstrom, dragging her through the panicked crowd around the door to the stairs, into the lab before the corridor became a killing ground. More bullets flying, blasting through the walls of the lab. Something slamming down on top of her, crushing the life from her. An explosion of pain in her side that sent her into blessed darkness.

“Nizar,” she gasped, her lungs fighting against the weight of his body pressing down on her chest. “Nizar?”

Turning her head, she saw the face of the man who had saved her life. He was staring at her with his beautiful dark eyes. Except that one of them was gone, replaced by a bloody crater where a bullet had blasted away the eyeball before exploding out the back of his skull.

“No, no, no,” she whispered, shaking her head. She tried to roll his body off. He had not been a big man, and weighed even less than she did, yet he seemed to weigh as much as an elephant.

With a last heave and a scream of pain, she managed to roll his body onto the floor. She lay there gasping. With trembling fingers, she traced the edges of the puckered bullet wound just above her hip.
 

“Help me,” she whispered as the world began to turn gray. She panted, trying to force more oxygen into her blood to forestall the onset of shock, to keep from passing out. “Help me!”

***

Kiran crawled through the lab, leaving a slick of blood behind him from the bullet wound in his leg. A few of the lab workers were still alive, hiding behind desks or equipment. A dark rage burned inside him that he couldn’t do more to help protect them than to motion for them to stay down and hide.

His only thought now was to try and circle back through the labs to reach Naomi. If he was going to die, he wanted to die with honor, defending someone he cared for and respected.
 

An automatic weapon fired somewhere down the hall, followed by a gurgling scream. The handful of survivors in the lab around him cringed and whimpered. Kiran crawled faster, determined to reach the secure lab area before the enemy did.
 

Swiping his badge and pressing the access code with shaking fingers, he passed from this lab into the next, the one that adjoined the secure area.
 

As he entered the second lab, he heard someone cry out in pain. Then, a few moments later, he heard the same voice rasp out the words, “Help me!”

It came from up ahead, near the far end of the lab. It was a voice he had heard before, although it took him a moment to pair it with the name of Dr. Harmony Bates, one of the most senior people who worked with Naomi.
 

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to go faster.

***

Koshka watched as the monsters left the room, save one that stayed close by her human. As always when near the monsters, her instincts were in turmoil. Part of her wanted to flee and hide, while the other part wanted to attack.
 

She and the others of her kind had been free to roam where they would inside the humans’ lair. Most of the others had been killed by the monsters, along with many of the humans that now stalked the rest.

And now the creatures her human had mysteriously taken as companions were afoot, moving toward their death-dealing kin.

One of the things stayed with her human. She was about to dart through as the other things departed the room, but the door closed too soon. She hopped onto the shelf where she could see through the glass, and saw her human’s lips moving, but couldn’t hear the sound of her voice.
 

With a single plaintive cry to express her displeasure, Koshka turned and began following after the six monsters, dashing quickly from cover to cover.
 

Before the things reached the door that led to the main corridor, one of them broke away, heading for a door that led to one of the large adjoining rooms. The door, which normally would be closed, was propped open by a body sprawled in the doorway.
 

After a moment of indecision, Koshka followed after the monster that had split from the main group, hoping to ambush the creature. She had fought them before, although she could not claim any victory over this prey. It was as if the instincts that bound her to attack them had been intended for a far larger body. But she could not deny the impulse. It simply was.

Holding her body low to the ground, her eyes fixed on the prey-that-was-not-prey, Koshka watched as it moved toward one of the many desks where the humans occupied themselves. It sat for a moment, moving its fingers over one of the contraptions that glowed and made sounds. It remained there until it heard a human calling in a pain-filled voice from close by. It was a human that Koshka knew well, for it spent many hours each day with Koshka’s person, and had spent time seeing to Koshka’s needs.

The monster got up from the desk and moved in the direction of the human’s voice.

Koshka, so low that the fur on her belly brushed the floor, crept silently behind.

***

Harmony cringed as more shots rang out down the hall. She tried to pull herself into a more concealed spot behind a nearby workstation, but the pain in her side from the bullet wound was too much. She gave up before she passed out.
 

She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head to see Naomi’s cat, Koshka, peering past the corner of a nearby workstation.
 

“Here, kitty,” Harmony whispered, overjoyed to have the cat’s company. “Come here, Koshka.”

But Koshka remained still as a statue. The cat wasn’t looking at her, but was staring at something else behind Harmony.

Harmony turned her head to see Zohreh, one of the harvesters, creeping closer.

“Oh, my God.” Harmony tried to push herself away, but there was no escape. She opened her mouth to scream, but the harvester darted forward and wrapped a hand around her throat, strangling her.
 

Harmony batted uselessly at the thing’s hands, and her eyes widened as the thing lifted up the blouse it wore to release the long, slender needle of the stinger, a drop of venom already oozing from the tip.

Harmony’s mouth opened in a silent scream.

As the harvester jabbed the stinger into her chest, just below her heart, Harmony saw a glimmer of motion, white emerging from the smokey gray around her as Koshka leapt on the harvester’s back, sinking her fangs through the thin layer of malleable flesh into the creature’s spine.
 

Filling the lab with its terrible screech, the harvester twisted and jumped away, yanking the stinger from Harmony’s chest as it tried to throw off the growling cat. Harmony watched the two dance about the lab as the fire of the venom consumed her from the inside out.

Koshka bit and slashed until the harvester was finally able to get a firm hold on her. With a brutal yank, the thing tore Koshka loose and threw her across the lab. The cat slammed into a lab table with a heavy thump and a brief squeal of pain, followed by a crash as some equipment smashed to the floor.
 

Harmony looked up as the harvester loomed over her. The face of the young Iranian woman changed, began to melt away to reveal the dark chitin of the harvester’s true form. The jaws opened and the mandibles spread wide, impossibly wide, as thousands of tendrils, slender and fine as fur, uncoiled to wave in the air above Harmony’s face.

The thing bent down, the jaws enveloping her head, its hands holding Harmony down as she thrashed in agony.

***

Kiran kept moving, working his way through the forest of workstations toward where he’d heard Harmony’s cry.
 

Just ahead, the fierce snarl of a cat cut through the lab, followed by a harvester screeching. Kiran peered over the top of a workstation to see a young woman doing a wild dance with a white cat, Koshka, latched onto the back of the harvester’s neck.