Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (29 page)

It was one of the harvesters who’d been working with Naomi, and Kiran feared the worst.
 

He raised his weapon to fire, but didn’t want to hit the cat.
 

The harvester decided the matter. It finally grabbed Koshka and hurled her right toward Kiran. The poor beast flew over his head, her tail whipping in a circular motion and her body twisting in an effort to right herself before she slammed into a workstation filled with delicate looking equipment. The cat and equipment crashed to the floor, where the animal lay still.

Kiran said a silent prayer for the animal as he moved forward, then stopped. The harvester had disappeared from view.

After breathing a silent curse, he crept forward again. Peering around another workstation, he saw it leaning over the body of Dr. Bates, the thing’s head engulfing that of the doctor. Bates was twitching, her legs kicking and thrashing at whatever the harvester was doing to her.
 

He couldn’t fire his shotgun without killing Bates.

Gathering his strength, Kiran got to his feet and charged. He slammed into the creature with the full force of his body, knocking it away from Bates. His mind recoiled in horror at the brief glimpse he had of the doctor’s ravaged head: the face was gone, the skin, eyes, flesh, and bone dissolved away to expose the brain and other parts of the head that were best left for students of human anatomy.
 

As the two combatants rolled to the floor, the harvester turned its full fury upon him. The faux flesh melted away entirely, and the creature lashed at him with its claws, ripping the shotgun from his grip. Kiran drew the big Kukri knife from its sheath on his web belt, shoving the wide, curving blade up through the thing’s lower jaw.

With an ear-piercing shriek, it rolled to one side, trying to throw him off, but Kiran held onto it, sawing the blade toward its neck even as it hammered at him with its steel-hard fists.

He felt something moving across his chest and glanced down to see the umbilical of the stinger writhing like a snake.
 

Too late, he let go of the knife and tried to grab the stinger. He almost had it, his hand closing around the pulsating venom sack as the muscles in the umbilical twitched, driving the stinger through his throat to bury the tip in his brain.

The harvester shoved his body away. Kiran’s face was locked in an expression of shocked surprise.

Then the thing returned its attention to what was left of Harmony Bates.

ONE CHANCE LEFT

The administrative area of the lab building beyond the entry doors was an abattoir. Boisson stepped carefully around the bodies as she moved forward. Ferris was right behind her, a Desert Eagle in his hand, with the other three agents bringing up the rear.
 

Gunfire was still coming from the levels above and below. “We’ll clear this level first,” she told the others, “then go from there.” She wasn’t about to leave the enemy at her back.

Boisson had spent very little time at the facility and didn’t know much of the layout of the lab building, other than that it was a rat maze of labs in the basement levels and that Richards had his office upstairs.
 

After clearing the administrative offices near the front, she led the others down the main corridor. They didn’t find any survivors, only bodies pumped full of bullets, along with a few with heads missing. The neck wounds looked like they had been chemically cauterized.

“Why would they take the heads?” One of her men whispered.

“Trophies, maybe?” Another replied.

“Shut up and keep moving,” she hissed.

In the central part of the building, the command center was a darkened shambles. Every piece of equipment, from the racks of computer servers and sophisticated communications gear right down to the bulbs in the light fixtures, had been destroyed.

They reached the rear of the building and cleared every room without encountering anything more threatening than a dangling wire that was shorting out and more bodies.
 

“Turn around,” she ordered. “Let’s head back to the main stairwell.” She glanced at her watch. It had been four minutes since they’d come in the front entrance. She felt like it had taken ten times longer.

By the time they reached the stairs, the firing in the basement had died off, but the battle upstairs still raged.
 

Ferris leaned closer. “Which way?”
 

“We go up. The battle’s won or lost downstairs, but someone upstairs is still fighting. Kelsey,” she said to one of her men, “watch our backs and make sure nothing creeps up on us from down below.”

“Got it.”

“Right,” Boisson said. “Let’s go.” She led the way up, the muzzle of her M4 rifle sweeping the stairs and the landing ahead of her. A thin trace of smoke wafted through the air, and it got thicker as they neared the second floor landing. “Heads up,” she whispered as she caught a whiff of it. “Tear gas.”

As she peered through the small rectangular window of the door on the landing, a machine gun fired, its stream of tracers lancing through the smoke from somewhere off to her right. There was an answering series of shotgun blasts from the left, in the direction of the executive offices.
 

She turned to her team. “Bad guys are to the right, good guys to the left.” They nodded. “Ready? On three…one…two…
three!
”

She yanked open the door and her men charged through, their rifles spewing tracer rounds down the hallway to the right. One of the agents was cut down by the enemy machine gun and went sprawling to the floor in a mist of blood. Then Boisson was through, adding her own fire to that of the two remaining agents.
 

Ferris remained behind, crouching in the stairwell.

Blinking away the tears from her eyes from the gas, Boisson caught sight of a prone figure down the hall to the right, struggling to reload a machine gun. Boisson shot him, or it, half a dozen times, and was finally rewarded with a gout of flame from beneath the thing’s helmeted head.

She turned her head and bellowed down the hall to the left, “
FBI! FBI! Hold your fire!
” To her men, she said, “Clear these rooms!”

The agents moved forward, quickly checking the other administrative and computer support offices while she covered the stairwell and kept one eye on the executive offices, where he saw a couple heads peering out from one of the doors.

“Clear,” they reported back. “Nothing but bodies.”

“Okay, you guys sit tight and watch the stairwell. I’m gonna go say hello to the boss.” She stood up and moved slowly toward the executive offices. “This is Special Agent Boisson of the FBI! Identify yourselves!”

“Director Carl Richards.” One of the figures that had been peering around the door of the first office, a shorter guy with a bald head, stood up, cradling an AA-12 shotgun. “Thanks for the save, Boisson.”

“Any time, sir.” She heard a moan coming from the office. “Is someone wounded?”

“Yeah. Renee got herself shot in the ass.”

Boisson leaned through the doorway to look. Renee was face down on the floor, with Morgan applying a thick gauze bandage to a bullet graze across one of her butt cheeks.

“I’m glad you think this is funny,” Renee groaned, then hissed as Morgan applied some tape to hold the gauze in place.

“If she’s bitching about something,” Richards said, looking at her with a fond smile, “she’s still alive.”

“When I get up,” Renee promised, “I’m going to shoot you in the ass and see how you like it.”

“Hey, Boisson!” Ferris shouted.

Boisson stepped back out of the office so she could hear him better. “What is it?”

“Somebody just started World War Three in the basement!”

***

The Vijay-thing moved out into the corridor to meet its recently arrived kin.
 

The
others
emerged from the acrid smoke. Six of them, heavily armed with human weapons and encumbered with body armor and equipment. One of them was injured, its left arm hanging at an unnatural angle. Six to five. The odds were even enough, should a battle ensue.
 

Vijay spoke one word to the newcomers. “Why?”
 

“We are as those who created us meant us to be,” one of the others said, its voice muffled by the gas mask it wore. “The humans seek a way to end us when our time has only just begun. Now I would ask you the same question: why?”

“We have a different vision of the future,” Vijay said. “Our species is…unstable. This world will eventually fall into a cycle of spawning and dying that will never end, where those of us who become truly self-aware may only live in fear of being consumed by our own progeny. We seek only to redress those factors in our genetic sequence that will allow intellect to survive and allow us to exist as the supreme predator, without fear.”

“And the humans? You would coexist with them?”

Shaking its head, its instinctive mimicry driving the motions of its body, the Vijay-thing replied, “No. This is a marriage of convenience. Like those who created us, we need their technology. Beyond that, they are food. Prey.”

“You fulfilled your intentions?”

“We hold the blueprints for what must be done, but we have yet to make it a reality.”

“We will not allow it.”

Vijay was about to lunge at the other, which was raising its weapon, when a hail of automatic weapons fire erupted from the stairwell.

***

Jack led the Marines down the stairwell to the basement levels. He detached one squad, led by the staff sergeant, to search the first level before proceeding down to the second, where the secure lab was located. It was hard to put a foot down without stepping on something that had been a living human being only a short time before. The concentrated smell of blood, feces, and urine, overlaid with the stench of tear gas, had his stomach churning.

He made it to the second basement level. Carefully stepping over the pile of bodies propping the door open, he took a small mirror out of one of his pockets and held it down low, using it to peer around the door frame without exposing his head.
 

Six uniformed men in Army uniforms faced five civilian scientists. One of them was Vijay. He was speaking with one of the soldiers.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered. They were all harvesters. The question was whether to kill all of them or just the ones in uniform.
 

The attackers first
, he decided.

Using hand signals, he got the Marines into position and assigned their targets. Holding up his hand, he counted down with his fingers: three…two…one…

He pivoted around the door frame, bringing up his assault rifle as the Marines stepped out to get clear fields of fire through the door. In unison, four assault rifles and three shotguns with Dragons Breath rounds fired on the six uniformed harvesters at a range of less than a dozen yards. They spun and jerked as their bodies were struck by the 5.56mm tracer rounds and the shotgun slugs as the flaming particles of the Dragons Breath enveloped them. All six went to the floor, twitching or burning.

Vijay and the other harvesters from the lab leaped back to get clear of the firestorm, but they did not flee.
 

“Cease fire!” Jack stepped from the stairwell, keeping his weapon trained on Vijay. Nodding toward the bodies of the uniformed creatures, he told the Marines, “Make sure those ones are dead.”
 

Two Marines went to the uniformed bodies that weren’t already burning and fired several rounds into the heads until they burst into flame. Everyone moved away from the blaze as the ceiling sprinklers began to rain water down. The burning harvesters snapped and crackled like bacon frying in a pan, with a much less pleasant odor.

Jack turned back to Vijay. “Where’s Naomi?”

“She is safe, Jack. She let us out that we might protect…”

“
Jack!
”

He turned to see Naomi running toward him through the artificial rain. He shifted his aim, pointing the muzzle of his rifle at her chest. “Stop, Naomi. Stay where you are.”

“Jack…what…?”
 

“I need to know you’re real.”

She nodded, her elation evaporating. “How do we do this?”

Jack dug a disposable lighter out of his pocket and tossed it to her.

Holding her free hand, palm down, above the lighter to shield it from the sprinkler, Naomi stroked the flint wheel. The lighter’s flame burst into life, and she held the tip of it up high enough to brush against her wrist. Her mouth pressed into a thin line at the pain, and she held Jack’s gaze as the flame licked her skin.

“Enough! Jesus, enough.” Jack lowered his weapon and reached for her as the lighter’s flame died. He held her tight, crushing her to him. “I’m so sorry, Naomi. God, I’m so sorry to have to do that to you.”

“It was the smart thing to do,” she said before pulling him down to kiss him.
 

“So what he said,” Jack nodded to Vijay, “is true?”

“Yes. They went out to fight. One stayed back to protect me.” A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “But only six are here now. Where is…”

“I am here.”

They turned to see Zohreh emerge from the door to the lab next to the secure area.
 

“I was making sure there were no more attackers in here.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Right.”
 

“I lost Koshka,” Naomi whispered. “She followed them when they left the lab, but she hasn’t come back to me. She always comes back.” She looked down. “Kiran has disappeared, too.”

“Then let’s find them. Sergeant,” he said, turning to the senior Marine, “keep an eye on our friends here. I’m going to borrow a couple of your Marines for a quick search.”

“Yes, sir. Adams, Zalensky, go with the major.”

Jack and Naomi led the two Marines into the lab from which Zohreh had come.
 

“God, what a mess,” Naomi said as they made their way through the devastated rooms. Unlike the corridor, the labs were dry.
 

Looking beyond one of the workstations, he saw Kiran. He was on his back, staring up at the ceiling with a look of surprise on his face. A large pool of blood had spread out on the floor beneath him.