Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (47 page)

Alexander lashed out with one paw and opened his mouth in a hiss.

“Chill out, cat,” Jack said.
 

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Melissa said. “He scratched me, too.”

Jack was just wishing they had some beer or champagne when one of the Marines pressed a metal flask into his hands.
 

“Drink up, sir,” the man said with a wide grin.

Jack raised the flask in a toast. “To the Corps!” Then he tossed his head back and took a deep swig, hoping it wasn’t filled with spit from chewing tobacco. A trail of liquid fire ran down his throat to his stomach, and he began to cough.
 

The Marines had a good laugh at his expense, then they cheered again as Kurnow appeared through the doorway, with Richards behind her.

Grinning at Kurnow, Jack was just about to hand her the flask and offer up another cheer for the Air Force when everything went to hell.

***

Alexander could sense the enemy falling away from the strange metal box in which he, his feline companion, and the humans were now encased. It was loud and foul-smelling, the strong scent of frightened, unwashed humans intermingled with noxious smells from man-made things and the lingering stench of the enemy. But now, at last, the fear began to leave him.

Except…a single threat signal emerged as the background sensory noise faded. It was clear and constant. It was
here
.
 

His companion felt it, too. She sat on the bunk above him, staring toward the end of the great metal box where the humans had gathered and were making noise.
 

Then the girl came and picked him up. He growled at her to signal his displeasure, but she either did not hear him or, as humans often tended to do, ignored his warnings.

He squirmed, but the girl held him firmly while making soothing noises. He clawed her as a warning, but did nothing more as she carried him toward the gathered humans, toward
it
.
 

His own human hugged the girl and reached down to stroke his head. He batted the human’s hand away and opened his jaws to hiss a warning, a challenge.

The
thing
was close now. So very close.

Then
it
appeared, stepping through the doorway.
 

The enemy saw him, and its gaze locked with his for just an instant before Alexander attacked.

***

The Kurnow-thing’s attention was focused on the big cat in the girl’s arms, and so the harvester had no warning before the other beast, Koshka, dashed through the legs of the humans clustered around Kurnow to sink her teeth and claws into the malleable flesh of Kurnow’s leg.

As Kurnow tried to kick Koshka away, Alexander sprang from the girl’s arms, the partially undone pink bandages streaming behind him like war banners. His fangs bit deep into her throat.

Kurnow screeched in pain as she flailed at the cats with her hands and spun like a top, her arms smashing into the humans around her.

***

The force of Alexander’s leap shoved Melissa backward into Renee, who instinctively pushed her forward again toward the monster. Kurnow —
the harvester
— tried to grab Alexander, but Terje was there, holding onto its wrist while a female Marine tried to grab the other one. Both were sent tumbling into the close-packed group of well-wishers, half of whom were knocked to the ground like bowling pins. Several of the Marines who still had weapons raised them, taking aim at Kurnow, when Jack shouted, “
Guns down! Hold your fire!
”

Mr. Richards tried to grab the thing from behind, but it slammed an elbow into his face, knocking him back into the cockpit.

The stinger on its cord, which looked like a long, skinny, slimy worm, shot out of Kurnow’s chest to strike another Marine in the face. The man screamed and went down. The hand-length stinger, now dripping with lethal venom, pulled free and whipsawed through the air like it had a mind of its own, and everyone scrambled out of its reach.
 

Everyone, that is, except Melissa. Darting under the questing needle while Kurnow was preoccupied with Alexander, Melissa grabbed Koshka and yanked her clear of the harvester’s leg. Koshka raked the back of Melissa’s arm before Melissa half threw and half shoved the cat away.
 

Meanwhile, Alexander was moving with blinding speed, clawing, biting, and shifting position to attack again, just a hair’s breadth ahead of the human-looking hands that were trying to kill him. The big cat shifted position to the harvester’s back, sinking his teeth into her spine between the shoulders, right where Kurnow couldn’t reach him. The harvester whirled around and let out a long shriek as Alexander bit into something more substantial than malleable tissue.

That’s when Melissa grabbed him. Wrapping both arms around his chest, she yanked him loose, then turned around and sent him flying into the gawking group of terrified onlookers.

Both cats, their flight reflex overcoming that of fight, beat a hasty retreat to the rear of the plane.

Until then, Melissa’s only thought had been to save the cats. She hadn’t given any consideration to getting away herself.
 

In the blink of an eye, Kurnow had her by the throat and had pulled her close.

The stinger was hovering about half an inch from Melissa’s eyeball, and she could feel the umbilical against the back of her head, pulsing and undulating where it emerged from Kurnow’s chest. It made Melissa want to throw up.

“Stop,” Kurnow said. “Put your weapons down or I’ll kill her.”

Then she brought up her other hand, which held a grenade. Bringing it to her mouth, she pulled the pin with her teeth and spat the metal ring out on the deck.

***

Naomi lay on the deck where she had landed after a Marine had bowled her over. She now watched with horrified eyes as the harvester, Kurnow, held Melissa, the damnable stinger pointing right at one of the girl’s eyes.
 

“Stop,” the monster said. “Put your weapons down or I’ll kill her. Try to kill me,” it gestured with the hand holding the grenade, “and you all die.”

Everyone lowered their weapons.
 

Naomi managed to get to her feet with the help of Terje and one of the Marines.

The thing looked at her. “Naomi,” it said, just before its face began to morph, the features losing their clarity as the malleable tissue reformed into a likeness of Vijay.
 

“
You
,” Jack hissed.

“Yes,” it said in Vijay’s voice. It was his face and his head, absurdly out of proportion atop Kurnow’s petite frame.
 

“What do you want?” Naomi asked.

“I should think that was obvious enough,” the thing said. “I want to live. I want to continue helping you. There is much yet that we can accomplish together.”

Naomi laughed. “So you can what, slaughter the rest of us like you and your friends did to the technicians and Marines back at the lab?” She shook her head. “Please. We’re fallible and don’t always make the best choices, but we’re certainly not that stupid.”

“There’s nothing you can offer us for your life,” Jack said. “It’s not worth shit.”

“And hers?” The stinger drew a lazy pattern through the air, just above Melissa’s skin.

Naomi hobbled forward a step, raising her hand in protest. “Don’t! Don’t hurt her. She’s done you no harm.”

“Listen to me, Naomi,” it said. “We acted out of self-preservation.” It turned to Jack. “Tell me that you were simply going to let us go, that we were going to be allowed to live.”

“Actually, I did want to let you go,” Naomi said. “The others didn’t, but I wanted to set you free.”
 

“You’re telling the truth,” it said. “Interesting.” It glanced at the biological sample cooler beneath Renee’s seat. Renee, seeing where the thing was looking, moved to block the thing’s view. “You have the virus?”

“Yes. We took the other flasks from the incubator that your friends left behind.”

“As proof of my good faith, I will tell you something you might wish to know, something that Kurnow knew. Something that will help spread the virus.”

“And that is?”

Vijay smiled. “This plane. This flying gas truck. Did you know that this particular variant has two separate fuel delivery systems? One could be used to hold the plane’s fuel, while the other could perhaps be sanitized and filled with a viral slurry.”

“And then what?”

The thing’s smile widened. “Then you could fly over infested areas, dumping the slurry from the boom, just as the pilots would sometimes jettison excess fuel before landing.”

“Jesus,” Jack said, turning to look at Naomi. “It’d be like a king size crop duster.”

“Quite correct, Jack. It would not, perhaps, be optimal, for a large percentage of the virus would be killed off during dispersal. But much would survive to infect the target hosts.” It looked at Jack. “Just think of the potential applications. In a single sortie, you could create a manageable harvester population over the area of a small city!”

Jack and Naomi exchanged a glance.
My God
, she thought. That could help solve one of their biggest problems, dispersal of the virus. One plane couldn’t cleanse the world, but it could spread the virus far faster and farther than host to host transfer. If more of this particular aircraft type had survived, the possibilities were staggering. A plane like this could dispense thousands of gallons in a single flight.
 

“You could cover the globe in a matter of months,” Vijay went on, “rather than decades.”

“All right, so you’ve told us something that we probably could have figured out on our own.” She wasn’t going to give the harvester an inch, other than to pay out the figurative rope she hoped to strangle the thing with. “What else do you have to offer?”

“You know the challenges you will face from the legacy of my creators will be far from over, even after the virus sweeps across the globe to make my kind more…manageable. There will be mutations, possibly even hybridization. Things you cannot now foresee. Even with your genius, Naomi, you will not be able to conquer all these things alone, especially with so few scientists of your caliber left in the world. You will need my help.”

“Naomi…” Jack said uneasily as she stood there in silence.

But he, like the harvester, misunderstood the reason she was silent. She was not considering its proposal. She was thinking furiously about how to free Melissa.
 

Then she had it. The idea wasn’t foolproof by any means, but might work if Melissa and Renee could read her mind. Cocking her head to the side, she said, “You were never infected with the virus, were you?”

The Vijay-thing shook its head. “No. That, perhaps, is my one regret. I would have liked to pass on the gift to others of my kind.”

“Maybe we can accommodate that wish,” Naomi said.

“Here you go, you sorry bastard!”

The thing whipped its head around just as Renee lunged forward, raising the wand of the sprayer and squeezing the handle. While there had still been plenty of the virus-containing liquid in the tank, she’d used up all the pressure and hadn’t had time or the need to pump it back up. But the cabin pressurization was far lower than at ground level, and served the same purpose. A cone of mist hit the harvester right in the face.

The harvester began to laugh.

***

Melissa recognized the spray for what it was: a diversion. As the harvester began to laugh in the weird man’s voice, she grabbed the wavering stinger with her free hand. It was warm and slimy, and she wanted to puke as she touched it. Wrapping her fingers around the base of the pulsating venom sac, she shoved it upward, past her right ear, as hard as she could, right up into the harvester’s fake human-looking lower jaw.

The laugh turned to a strangled screech as the thing let her go to clutch at its own throat.
 

Terje grabbed her and pulled her away as Jack charged forward past her, his body slamming into the thing and driving it backward into the cockpit.

***

Richards had kept quiet after the thing had sent him sprawling into the cockpit, staying out of sight behind what looked like a huge box of circuit breakers that went from floor to ceiling in the rear of the cockpit near the door to the cargo area. Being out of sight and out of mind of the harvester might yield an opportunity.

That opportunity came when Jack sent the thing flying into the cockpit, the grenade still clutched in one of its hands.

Come to daddy
, Richards thought as Jack and the harvester slammed to the deck at his feet. The harvester was already transforming into its natural state, the clawed appendages emerging from the malleable tissue while the stinger whipped back and forth.

Ferris screamed.

Richards fell on the creature, ramming his knee into its head as he wrestled it for the grenade. Jack grunted with pain as the thing clawed him, and the wavy-bladed cutting appendage sliced through Kurnow’s flight uniform, nearly cutting Richards’ leg off.

The harvester twisted and bucked, slashed and jabbed. The stinger caught Richards in the chest, but was deflected by his body armor. He couldn’t grab it, because it took all the strength he had in both hands to hang onto the grenade. The harvester’s grip was too tight for him to pry it away, but he dared not let go.

Jack cried out as the harvester slashed his face just below his eyes. He lost his grip and rolled away from the fight.
 

While still clinging to the beast’s hand that held the grenade, Richards twisted his body and caught the harvester’s head between his thighs in a move he’d learned while wrestling in high school. Locking his lower legs together, he squeezed as hard as he could and twisted.
 

That’s when the stinger found him. It stabbed him in the thigh, the tip driving deep into his femur.
 

The creature tried to whipsaw its body back and forth, trying to break away. Richards rolled with the motion and twisted, bringing the thing next to the opening to the hatch trunk. “Dawson! Push!
Push, damn you!
”