Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (39 page)

“I don’t think we will,” Naomi said. “The culture that’s incubating in the lab will either work or it won’t. I don’t think we’re going to have time for another run at this.”
 

“If their part in this is over,” Carl said, “then it’s time we got rid of them.”

Naomi shook her head. “Carl, we should let them go after they’re infected. They can help spread the virus, and it would be a perfect field test to make sure it works.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m letting those things walk out of the lab alive. We’ve already got Vijay on the loose, and I’m not going to let any more out. I’m sure we can figure out a way to spread the virus ourselves once we get out of here.” He looked at Jack. “Let’s go put an end to this.”

***

Zohreh smiled at the lab technician, then shyly averted her eyes. He was a middle aged man, as skilled at his craft as he was naive about women. The memories the harvester had taken from Zohreh were filled with such men. In their eyes, she was extremely attractive and highly desirable. Even in the oppressive culture of modern-day Iran, men remained men. A flutter of the eye lids, an inviting smile, a tilt of the hips or a turn of her chest to accentuate her ample breasts never failed to affect them. Men like him tended to be single, because their outward appearance and mannerisms were not highly desirable by women. To be favored with so much as a smile from a beauty such as she made such men stammer and act the fool. She saw the paradox, of course: such men knew they would never possess a beautiful woman, yet they would trip over themselves to please her just the same.

This one was no different from the others the ghost of the human woman’s memories had known. He had watched her since she had arrived at SEAL-2, and she had stoked the fire of attraction while barely speaking a word to him, for she had been assigned to a different section of the human-harvester team. She had done the same with the other men. Not all were quite so foolish as this one, but it was easy for her to gain their attention. That was all that mattered.

With another smile at the man, she glanced around the room, as if wistfully looking for someone to talk to, to ease her boredom. With the computer network down and the synthesis work on the prototype virus completed, there was little for any of them to do now other than wait for the incubators to do their work, replicating the virus into a quantity that they could use.
 

That time had come.
 

Pushing back from her workstation, Zohreh stood up with a tired sigh. Looking at the two Marines, who were only a few feet away, she let the hint of a smile grace her lips as she put her hands on her hips and leaned back into a languid stretch, her breasts straining against the blouse beneath her unbuttoned blue lab coat.
 

With their attention firmly riveted to her chest, she pitched herself forward as the stinger exploded from her blouse, propelled by the tightly coiled umbilical in her thorax. It speared the throat of the Marine on the left side of the door, while the stinger from the harvester working beside her sank into the other Marine’s left eye.

The human scientists in the room were momentarily paralyzed with shock as the Marines’ twitching bodies slid to the floor.
 

The harvesters wasted no time. In a frenzy of thrusting stingers, the humans died.
 

Zohreh watched the demise of the lab technician who’d been so enamored with her. His mouth opened and closed like that of a fish, his body unable to do anything more after a stinger had severed the spine in his neck. The look in his eyes was one of hurt, of surprise. Then he lost all expression as death took him and his muscles relaxed, his gaze still fixed on her.

Turning away, Zohreh moved to one of the two Marines and began stripping him of his uniform and equipment. One of her companions did the same to the second Marine. The other three harvesters took the clothes from the bodies of the lab technicians while commanding the malleable flesh of their bodies to transform, to take on the appearance of their victims.
 

Quickly donning the Marine uniform over her newly transfigured body, Zohreh became Private First Class Gabriel Woodson, a young African-American male.
 

When finished with their transformation, they dragged away the bodies and stacked them behind some lab equipment in a corner of the room, away from direct view from the doorway.
 

An electronic chime sounded from the biological safety cabinet that housed the incubator that had been nurturing the first batch of the cultured virus. The thing that was now Woodson carefully removed one of the trays of culture flasks and extracted some of the liquid with a dropper.
 

Turning around, Woodson found his five companions standing in a row.

Without a word, Woodson went to his companions and put a drop of the clear liquid on their faux tongues, then gave himself a dose. “This will have little effect on us,” he/it said, “as we have already reached maturity. But we will be able to spread the change to others of our kind.”

 
They quickly transferred some of the virus culture from the flask to smaller vials they could carry with them. Woodson had briefly considered destroying the rest of the batch and the equipment, but in the end decided not to. More of the virus here simply meant a greater likelihood of more of her kind being reborn.
 

“Someone is coming,” said the harvester mimicking the other Marine, who had gone to stand watch at the door.
 

The others took their places at the workstations nearest the door, prepared to play their part in the final act of this farcical play. Heavy footsteps could be heard outside in the hall mezzanine. They stopped just outside.

“Let them come,” she said, tightening her grip on her assault rifle. “Let them come.”

ESCAPE

Naomi stood outside the lab, with Jack, Terje, and six Marines behind her.
 

“Remember, we’ve got friendlies in there,” Naomi warned. She reached for the door handle.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jack whispered, gently moving her to the side. To the Marines, he said, “Go.”

The first two Marines opened the door and stepped through, followed by Jack, Terje, and then Naomi. The other four Marines waited outside.
 

They found the two Marine guards still inside the door, and four lab technicians were looking up from their work stations.

She saw white lab coats, but no blue ones.
The harvesters were gone
.
 

Before she could shout a warning, the two harvesters dressed as Marines opened fire, killing the pair of Marines who’d come in with her. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the other harvesters leaping over their desks toward the door before a hard shove from Jack sent her tumbling backward.
 

“
Open fire!
” Jack’s shout was lost in a cacophony of gunshots and screeching as the harvesters mobbed the door. Jack fired a burst from his weapon, then grabbed Terje by the rear of his belt and hauled him out onto the mezzanine.
 

Once they were clear, the Marines outside the lab opened fire, shooting through the doorway and the wall. They brought down one harvester, then another, which exploded into flame barely two feet from where Naomi was lying on the floor.

She got up on her hands and knees and tried to crawl away, hoping to find a small eddy in the chaos swirling about her, but was knocked flat by a Marine who tripped over her as he backpedaled away from the door. Still firing, he hit the wall overlooking the lobby below just as bullets struck his chest armor, blasting him backward over the railing. Naomi grabbed for his feet, but couldn’t hold him. With a terrified scream, he fell.

Drawing her Desert Eagle, she got to her knees and turned back toward the fight, but in the glare of the flames she wasn’t sure who was friend and who was foe.

Jack slammed to the floor beside her. His eyes were open, staring toward the ceiling, as he fought for breath.

As she reached for him, someone scooped her up from the floor. It was one of the Marines who’d been posted inside the lab. Woodson. A harvester.

“Fuck you!” She jammed the muzzle of the gun against the thing’s chest, but before she could squeeze the trigger, she was weightless, falling into space.
 

Still clutching her in its arms, the harvester had leaped over the wall overlooking the lobby three stories below.

***

With the computer center destroyed, there was nothing left for Howard Morgan to do in the basement. The only piece of equipment they bothered trying to salvage was the storage unit Renee had brought from SEAL-2, which, for what it might be worth, hadn’t been damaged in the firefight.

After escorting her and Melissa up to the lunch room, he decided to pay Naomi a visit. He’d never been a lab rat, of course, but having owned a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company had given him the opportunity to rattle a test tube or two. If nothing else, he could watch a display or mop up any coffee spills, or just sit there and keep an eye on the harvesters, shotgun in hand. And if Naomi shooed him out as a nuisance, he’d go stand watch with the Marines. He wasn’t a military man, but he could shoot as well as any of them.
 

The only thing he didn’t want was to do nothing. He was a man who’d always enjoyed his leisure time, but otherwise needed to feel, and be, productive, to make a contribution. That was one of the traits that had helped him to become a wealthy man, and he wasn’t about to abandon that philosophy now.

He was halfway up the stairs to the second floor when he heard gunfire coming from above.
 

Taking the steps two at a time, he just made it to the third floor landing when the door to the mezzanine on that level burst open. A Marine with an unconscious woman slung over his shoulder charged onto the landing.

It took him a heartbeat to realize the woman was Naomi, and the Marine had to be a harvester. No one had been on this floor since the Marines had first cleared it.

As he tried to raise the shotgun, the Marine slammed into him, knocking him back against the far wall. Howard’s right elbow cracked against the concrete, and he lost his grip on his weapon as the thing turned for the stairs heading down.

Ignoring the pain in his arm, he rebounded from the wall like a boxer coming off the ropes. Wrapping his arms around Naomi, he tried to wrestle her off the thing’s shoulder.

It was a brief, savage tug of war before the harvester whirled around and used Howard’s momentum against him, pushing him up against the wall with Naomi’s body pinned between them.
 

Something slashed across Howard’s abdomen, just below the lower edge of the body armor. He lost control of his core muscles and felt a sharp tugging sensation in his belly. His legs collapsed under him, and he slumped to the floor as a warm, wet gush flooded over his lower body.

The thing said nothing as it again tossed Naomi over its shoulder and fled down the stairwell.

Howard touched his hand to his belly and recoiled at the feel of something not unlike a string of sausages, only warm and slick, smelling of blood.

“Oh, no,” he whispered as the pain finally hit.

***

Jack blinked his eyes, trying to clear them of the afterimages of one of the harvesters exploding into flame. He was on his back, gasping for air like a kid who’d fallen backwards off a swing to slam into the ground.
 

Terje’s face appeared above him. One side of his face had second degree burns and a deep gash that ran from the temple down to his jaw. Blood was running freely down his neck. “Jack! Are you hurt?”

“No,” he wheezed as Terje helped him up. “Got the wind…knocked out of me.” One glance around told him what he’d most feared. Four of the six Marines were down. They’d killed two of the harvesters, but the other four escaped. “Naomi?”

“One of them grabbed her and jumped over the wall.”

“Jesus.” His heart in his throat, he looked down, expecting to see her and the harvester splattered against the floor.

Instead, he caught sight of a figure in a Marine uniform tearing down the third floor mezzanine, Naomi’s body draped over its shoulder. The mezzanine hallways were designed like ascending terraces. The harvester had only jumped ten feet, instead of forty.
 

Jack shouted at the Marines downstairs, but they couldn’t hear him over the shouts and screams of the harvesters pretending to be terrified lab technicians who’d just burst from the first floor stairwell. They were pointing up at the burning lab.

Pointing up at him.

“All units, all units,” Jack called over his radio. “Those lab technicians are the harvesters! Shoot them!”

One of the two surviving Marines opened fire over the mezzanine wall at the lab-coated harvesters down below.

The Marines downstairs, thinking they were under attack, returned fire.
 

Everyone dove for the floor as bullets blasted hunks of drywall out of the mezzanine wall.

“This is Jack Dawson! Cease fire! I say again,
cease fire!
”

After a moment, the gunfire from downstairs stopped.
 

Carl’s voice come on the radio. “Dawson! You and the others come down with your weapons in the air so we can verify you.”

“Verify the goddamn lab techs and the harvester who’s making off with Naomi!”

“What?”

“They’re harvesters, goddammit!”

The lobby lit up with a flash as a grenade went off, then another, followed by more screams.
 

Jack popped his head up long enough to see that more people were down. In the darkness he couldn’t tell who.

“Jack!” Terje was pointing at the lab, which was now burning fiercely from the dead harvesters. “The virus!”

“
You and the Marines put out that fire! I’m going after Naomi!”

“Understood!” With a few quick instructions to the two surviving Marines, Terje led them down the hall to find fire extinguishers.