Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (7 page)

Dragonfire was the code name that had been given to the huge, desperate effort to find a solution to the harvester epidemic, and President Miller had put Carl in charge of the project. While Carl technically answered to the Secretary of Homeland Security, in reality the President himself held his leash. The billionaire Howard Morgan, head of Morgan Pharmaceuticals, who had unwittingly played a role in the harvester outbreak in Los Angeles, was his technical advisor. Truth be told, Morgan was the brains behind the operation. The man was both an organizational genius and had the necessary science background to sort out the bullshit that, as Carl saw it, was flung by every scientist who thought his or her piece of the pie was the most important thing in the universe. Carl would have preferred to shoot them all, but Morgan was able to smooth ruffled feathers or break out the brass knuckles, as needed, and keep things moving.
 

“As I’m sure you’re aware, sir,” Carl began, “the genetics team has finished mapping the harvester genome. That’s the big news, and I don’t think I can adequately convey just what an incredible accomplishment that is.”

“Yes,” Miller said, nodding. “My scientific advisor briefed me on that. Please convey my personal thanks to everyone on the team. So what now? When can we expect progress on a bioweapon?”

“And what about chemical weapons?” That from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Is there any hope on that front?”

“If I can, Mr. President, let me answer that question first, as it’s a bit more straightforward.” Miller nodded for him to continue. “General, the chemical weapons division has run into a brick wall. Every compound they’ve come up with seems to have little to no effect on the harvesters. The things are like scorpions. We haven’t found any toxins that affect them. The only way to kill them is to light them on fire or blast them to bits.”

The old Marine hissed air out through his teeth. “So there’s nothing we could use?”
 

“No, sir,” Carl said, shaking his head. “The chemical team is still hard at work, but they don’t have any rabbits in the hat at this point.”

“Damn,” the general said quietly.

“On the genetics side of the house, the teams are moving forward, taking advantage of the genome map. But as I’ve cautioned before, progress comes in fits and starts. The harvester DNA is hellishly complex, far more so than ours is. The goal now is to figure out which of the genes are important, and how we can disrupt them.” He slowly spun his pen around on the table. “Naomi Perrault likened it to walking down a long dark hallway, then suddenly finding a door. Once you wrestle it open, you’re in another dark hallway, with another door and hopefully another breakthrough somewhere at the end.” Looking back up at Miller, he said, “She refuses to put a number on it, but from what I’ve gathered from Howard, we’re looking at no less than six months before we have a chance of producing a weapon.”

“Six months?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs pointed at the map. “We may not have six weeks!”

“General, six months would be nothing short of a miracle,” Carl told him. “Remember what we’re facing here. Matching up the genes with the traits they control isn’t going to happen overnight.”

“Then you need to get your candy-ass scientists to stop fucking around,” Lynch said. “People are dying out there.”

Carl glared at him. “In the last two weeks, I’ve had three people die of heart attacks and one from a stroke while they were at their desks. Over a dozen have been hospitalized for exhaustion or malnutrition, and none of them are taking more than a couple hours a day for sleep. My candy-ass scientists are working themselves to death, Mr. Vice President. I’d appreciate it if you’d kindly remember that.”

Vice President Lynch held Carl’s gaze for a moment, then looked away.

“What are the harvester population projections at the six month mark?” Miller asked. “How many will we be facing?”

Carl swallowed hard. “Just short of two billion worldwide, excluding casualties.”

The president’s face paled. “Sweet Jesus.”

MORGELLONS

After the communications team had been unable to reestablish contact with Jack, Naomi went to her quarters. After closing the door, she crawled into bed and alternately wept and laughed. For the first time since she’d been told Jack was dead, she felt alive.

As the tears subsided, Koshka, her cat, hopped up and butted her furry head against Naomi’s side. Propping herself up, Naomi lavished some attention on the Turkish Angora, her fingers brushing against the long scar along the cat’s side.
 

Alexander, Jack’s cat, hopped up on the bed, took one look at Koshka, then jumped back off.
 

“Jack will be home soon to take care of you,” she told the big Siberian, who curled up in a corner and stared at her.
 

Knowing that she should be using the time for some badly needed sleep, Naomi felt restless. Reaching for the binder on her nightstand, she opened it to find a copy of the latest Red Team assessment of the harvester infestation by the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a top secret document produced in hardcopy only, with every copy numbered and addressed to a specific individual and hand delivered by government couriers. The first copy of seventeen went to the President of the United States, and she held a photocopy of it in her hands.

In the upper right was a sticky note. “Thought you’d want to see this,” was written in Howard Morgan’s neat script.
 

“How the devil did you get this?” She wondered aloud as she opened it to the first page and began to read.

She soon wished she hadn’t. The ten pages of blunt prose and charts predicted the collapse of the modern world in less than two months. Even if humanity stopped the harvesters much sooner, the report stated, so much damage had already been done to the world’s largest food producing regions that widespread famine on a global scale was inevitable.
 

And all of it stemmed from the one bag of New Horizons seed that we couldn’t find
, she thought bitterly.
 

She threw the document across the room, startling the cats.

Someone knocked on the door.
 

“What is it?”

“Naomi? Are you okay, hon?” It was Renee

“I’m fine,” she lied. “Come on in.”

Renee opened the door and stepped inside. “Listen, we just got confirmation that the Norwegian command post where Jack’s hanging out is fine,” Renee said. “The problem wasn’t EMP, it was some End-of-the-World idiots blowing up a comms center at NATO Headquarters. I wish we could come up with a genetic weapon to make the harvesters just eat morons, but I suppose there wouldn’t be many of us left. Come on, get your skinny ass up.”

Naomi tried to smile.

Renee came to stand beside the bed and put her hands on her hips. “Look at you. You’re white as a sheet and those rings under your eyes are worse than Carl’s. Keep this up and you’ll wind up as bald as he is, too. What would Jack think? He’ll probably dump you so he can shack up with me, and you can have Carl the Sourpuss. You’ll be two bald peas in a pod.”

Unable to help herself, Naomi giggled. “Renee, shut up.”

“I’ll shut up the day hell freezes over, and probably not even then. Now get your ass out of bed. One of your queries hit on something, and Harmony is going to pee her pants with excitement if you don’t get down there this instant.”

***

With a heavy sigh, Howard Morgan sat back in the black leather executive chair in his corner office on the second floor of the lab building. He turned away from the computer to look out the windows. It had never been much of a view, as the facility had been located in the middle of a rather desolate spot in the expanse of Nebraska’s farm country, and it hadn’t changed for the better as his facility had been transformed from a cutting edge genetics laboratory to a heavily defended fortress. What he saw now more closely resembled the pictures he’d seen of firebases in Afghanistan. He was trying to enjoy the sight while he could, as the Army engineers planned to cover up the few remaining glass windows with sheet metal.

He turned around to look again at the report summary on the computer screen. All the labs were on line and functioning, an accomplishment about which he would have felt extremely proud had it really mattered. It wasn’t that all the people in the sixteen labs weren’t working as hard as they could. They were, and they had accomplished miracles, like completing the map of the harvester genome. It wasn’t a question of the intelligence or resources of the people working for him, for he had the brightest people in the country, arguably on the planet, with all the resources the United States Government could provide. More than he could actually put to good use, in fact. He had been told to waste anything but time, for time was the one commodity that was the most precious. Time meant lives lost. Time meant more harvesters to kill.

No, the reason it didn’t matter wasn’t for any of that. It was because the enemy they faced was as biologically complex as it was implacable. They had taken the studies on harvester vulnerabilities originally begun by the Earth Defense Society and the original SEAL organization and expounded on them. But the result hadn’t changed. They had nothing more to use against the harvesters now than they had at the start.
 

Even the genetic work Naomi and her people were doing, while brilliant, would bear fruit far too late to save humanity. The CIA Red Team report had made that abundantly clear. The shame of it was that they had all the major pieces.

“Damn,” he whispered as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips, only to find it empty. He set it down and reached for the intercom to have his secretary bring in a fresh cup when the phone rang.

It was Naomi.
 

He snatched the phone from its cradle. “Morgan.”

“Come down here, Howard,” she said. “There’s something you need to see. Right now.”

“Hang on, I’ll be right there.” With a glance at the empty cup, he hung up the phone and headed downstairs to the genetics lab.

***

“You’re not going to believe this,” Naomi told Howard as he looked over her shoulder at the pair of computer monitors on her desk. Her eyes were bright with excitement, and Harmony Bates, who stood next to him, looked like a proud mother.

“You don’t have to be melodramatic to get my attention,” he told her. “Just please tell me it’s not another mutated super-virus like the one you created last week.”

Naomi made a dismissive wave of her hand. “Forget all that. Everything else is a sideshow now.” She turned to her monitors, which showed a set of base pair gene sequences side by side. “Remember when I asked you to run sequence comparisons with harvester DNA against all non-human DNA samples that have been catalogued?”

Morgan chuckled. “How could I forget? That’s been one of the most expensive parts of this project. We’ve got three server farms dedicated to it, run by the folks at SEAL-7, and we’re running more servers than the two biggest web search engines combined.”

“It was something I knew we had to look at, but I never expected to find anything.” She ignored Morgan’s scowl. “But we did. Look at what Harmony picked up from the latest results.” She pointed to the left monitor, which showed a long sequence of base pairs. “This is harvester DNA from the current generation, what we refer to as Group B, with Group A being the original harvesters that created them. This one,” she pointed to the second monitor, “is from a human tissue sample.” She tapped a few keys, and three base pairs sequences were highlighted in both images. “These are the only deviations in this entire sequence.”

Morgan was stunned. “How can this be? I thought you were only running comparisons against non-human DNA. Why was this sample even considered?” Morgan had made the decision to exclude the mass of human DNA samples from the comparative search on the grounds that even with as much computing capacity as had been dedicated to the Dragonfire project, it would take forever to run through even a tiny fraction of the available human DNA samples. Naomi had agreed after a long, drawn-out argument, but now Morgan wondered at the wisdom of his decision.
What else might we be missing?

“It was a fluke,” Naomi said. “This was from a human patient suffering from a disease called Morgellons that’s been disputed from the outset, with some claiming it’s a hoax and others claiming that it’s real. This DNA sample was tagged as both human and non-human, which is how it made it into our search matrix.”

“Morgellons?” Morgan shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Naomi spun around in her chair to face him. “Most people haven’t. What appears to be the first known modern case was reported in 2002 in Pennsylvania, and thousands were reported by 2008 when the CDC finally launched a study to determine if the disease was legitimate.”

“What did they find?”
 

“The CDC concluded that it was a psychological disorder, but another study published by a dermatology research group determined that it wasn’t, that there was clinical validation that it was a real disease based on analysis of one of Morgellons’ hallmark symptoms. Look at this.” Naomi brought up a web browser with images that, to Morgan, looked like something straight out of a horror movie.
 

“Patients often suffer some clinical symptoms like chronic fatigue or mood swings, which are typical of a wide range of ailments,” Naomi explained, “along with a sensation of bugs crawling or biting under the skin, which has been associated with some skin conditions. But these skin lesions are a unique symptom.” She pointed to a few of the images, which showed areas of skin on different patients that ranged from small lesions, as if the patient had scratched open bad mosquito bites, to large ulcerated patches.
 

“That’s horrific,” Morgan said.

“It is, but this is the strangest thing.” She called up another set of images that showed strange, twisted fibers in a variety of colors. Some were in single strands, while others were clustered together. Some looked like fuzzy cotton balls. Others were individual twisted threads. “These tiny fibrous structures are found in the lesions. There’s been a lot of research to figure out what they are, but the dermatological study demonstrated that they aren’t implanted or embedded. The fibers originate from the skin’s epithelial cells.”