Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (30 page)

“So who’s the lucky occupant?” he
asked.

“A rhesus monkey,” she told him,
picking up the chart and looking at the notes neatly written there.
“Vlad, one of my assistants, infected it with a sample of the corn
Sheldon found.” She sighed in frustration. “We know a lot already
about the retrovirus, but nothing that’s going to tell us exactly
what it does. I was hoping to be able to run a lot more tests
before we got to this stage, but I can’t help but feel like we’re
running out of time.”

Jack nodded. He was well-acquainted
with the sensation of being in free-fall, plummeting down the
rabbit hole.

“This is interesting,” she murmured
as she compared Vlad’s notes to the readouts on a computer screen
built into a panel on the chamber.

“What is it?” Jack
asked, looking over her shoulder, peering through the clear Lexan
panel. From the tone of her voice, “interesting” didn’t really mean
interesting, it meant “bad.” The monkey, a young male, stared out
at him with wide, sad eyes. Several sensors were taped to its skin,
and a clear tube full of blood ran from a shunt in its arm. He was
surprised the monkey didn’t just tear all of it away, but it seemed
to have surrendered itself to its fate. After blinking twice at
Jack, it turned its attention back to what Jack could swear looked
like a banana sandwich that someone had made for him. He had eaten
about half of it, but seemed to have lost his appetite.
Poor little guy
, Jack
thought.

“Vlad prepped this monkey only a few
hours ago,” she told him, tapping away at the miniature keyboard
embedded in the chamber’s panel, “but it’s already showing
symptoms: its temperature is up three degrees and its heart rate is
fifteen beats per minute above normal.” She was silent as she
pushed a few more buttons, then turned and sat down at a
workstation along the wall behind them. “The chamber’s equipped
with a self-contained diagnostic unit that can perform quite a few
different tests,” she explained as she opened up several windows on
the workstation that displayed a lot of data that Jack didn’t
understand. “Some tests we can’t do without anesthetizing the
animal and doing a biopsy, but we can at least take a look at its
blood serum. The system does that automatically. It usually doesn’t
tell us much for viral infections until the initial infection has
run its course and we can screen for antibodies, but it’s
an...easy...”

Her voice died away as the display
on the screen showed a succession of computer-enhanced images of
blood cells, each image bearing a time stamp. The first ones showed
normal red blood cells, or erythrocytes, that were a roundish shape
and crimson colored. To Jack’s untrained eye, they looked like tiny
red cushions all bunched together.

About halfway through the images,
however, other cells began to appear. Or, rather, they were red
blood cells that had mutated into something else. Where the normal
erythrocytes looked like round cushions, these looked to Jack like
yellow sea urchins with stubby spines. Some of them were about the
same size as the erythrocytes, while others were much
larger.

“What are we looking at, Naomi?”
Jack asked quietly as she intently studied the images on the
screen.

“I don’t know,” she answered
worriedly. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The mutated cells
are somehow attaching themselves to otherwise healthy-looking
erythrocytes,” she glanced over at him, “then absorbing them to
create more cell mass for themselves. And here,” she pointed to the
final four images that had been made over the last hour, where a
torrent of cells that were about the same size as the erythrocytes
but had a lumpy surface had appeared, “neutrophils, a type of white
blood cell, are swarming in, trying to fight the mutated
cells.”

“And getting their asses kicked,”
Jack finished for her. The white cells were being skewered and
absorbed just like the red cells: the neutrophils had absolutely no
effect against the mutated predator cells.

Naomi looked over more data and ran
some numbers in a scientific calculator that popped up on the
screen. “At this rate, the monkey’s entire blood supply will be
converted to these new cellular forms in another hour, two at
most.” She shook her head. “They must still be facilitating oxygen
transport from the lungs, somehow, though: oxygen uptake has
actually increased.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that these new cells are
doing a better job than the monkey’s own red blood cells at getting
oxygen from the lungs to the rest of its body.”

While Naomi dove into more data that
scrolled up on the screen, Jack turned back to the chamber and its
quiet occupant. Through the Lexan, which made up about a third of
the cylinder’s surface to give a clear view of the chamber’s
occupant, he took a closer look at the monkey, who studiously
ignored him. Its hair was a mix of tan and light gray, with the tan
covering the crown of its head and cheeks, and most of its back,
while the gray was predominant over the rest of its body.
Periodically, the skin of its back would twitch, as if it were
shrugging away an imaginary bothersome insect. It had given up any
remaining interest in the banana sandwich, and sat at one end of
the chamber, staring listlessly at the shiny stainless steel wall
at the other end of its prison, perhaps looking at its reflection
in the metal.

Jack was just turning away when he
noticed something odd. Looking closer, he saw that a patch of the
monkey’s hair was discolored.

“Naomi,” he called, but she was so
engrossed in the blood work that she didn’t hear him. “Naomi!” he
called, louder.

“What is it?” she said,
startled.

“Come here and look at
this.”

With one last glance at the data on
the screen, she got up and came over to stand beside him to look in
at the monkey.

“What’s that?” Jack asked, pointing.
“See, right there, on the left side of his chest? It looks sort of
like a bruise. Is that from a biopsy or something?”

Naomi shook her head slowly. “No,
it’s not from a biopsy,” she said, looking at the dark blue and
purple patch of skin. “We haven’t done any on this animal, and
there’s no procedure that we might do that would leave a mark like
that.”

Jack peered closer, nearly touching
his nose to the Lexan. “Jesus,” he whispered. “The hair looks
almost like it’s melted into the skin. Do you see that?”

Naomi leaned down for a closer look,
concentrating intently on the nickel-sized area of skin. “Oh my
God,” she breathed, “you’re right! What on earth is–”

The monkey suddenly shrieked and
hurled itself at the chamber’s observation window, its open mouth
and exposed teeth smacking into the Lexan mere inches from their
faces.

Both of them leaped back, with Jack
instinctively shoving Naomi behind him. The monkey, gone completely
berserk, bounced around in the chamber with such violence that the
heavy unit wobbled slightly. After about fifteen seconds, it
stopped.

“Christ,” Jack breathed. “The little
fucker scared me to death.”

“Yeah,” Naomi answered, her hands
resting on Jack’s powerful back. She may have been the acting
leader of the society in Gregg’s absence, and knew she was no
coward, but Jack’s protectiveness toward her had become a sense of
profound comfort. “Me, too.”

What she didn’t tell him was what
she had seen the instant before he pulled her away from the chamber
and the monkey’s ferocious challenge: the inside of its mouth and
tongue were covered with the same blue and purple mottling as the
mysterious patch on its skin.

She was about to say something to
him about it when the base-wide loudspeakers came alive.

“Naomi!” Renee’s voice boomed.
“Naomi and all department heads, get your asses to the command
center immediately. Something’s happened.”

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

“You’ll never believe this,” Renee
said, her face pale from shock as she pointed at the main view
screen at the front of the command center, which showed the frozen
image of the global network news channel and a blond anchorwoman
whose first name, Jack vaguely remembered from watching the news in
the past, was Connie. “Hold on to your hats,” Renee said grimly
before hitting the control to resume the video playback.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Connie the
anchorwoman said, her voice quivering, “we’ve just received
breaking news of simultaneous terrorist attacks across the globe,
with horrific explosions being reported within the last hour in the
United States, Great Britain, Russia, China, India, and Turkey.
While we don’t have confirmation yet, the initial reports say that
hundreds of people have been killed and many more injured. The
attack here in the United States took place on the campus of
Colorado State University just a few minutes ago, and we have Tracy
Bowman live at the scene. Tracy, are you with us? Can you tell us
what’s happening?”

The scene shifted to a young woman
with dark hair and a face blackened with soot. She had a cut on her
chin that was still bleeding, leaving a crimson trail all the way
down to the top of her blouse, which had once been white but was
now a dirty gray. She was standing in the parking lot of what
looked like a small restaurant with a number of shocked onlookers
visible at the edges of the picture. Behind her was a street, then
what looked like a running track in a park, or what was left of it.
Beyond that was a gigantic pyre with flames licking hundreds of
feet into the sky. Heavy smoke billowed from the conflagration, and
more smoke hung like a dark fog over the park.

“Yes, Connie,” the
young woman said, her voice trembling as she spoke into a
microphone that she clutched in bloody hands. She winced as a
convoy of emergency vehicles went screaming by. “What you see
behind me is all that’s left of the National Center for Genetic
Resources Preservation that is...
was
a part of the USDA’s
Agricultural Research Service. We were here covering this year’s
Mountain West Conference men’s track and field championship at the
Jack Christensen Memorial Track when...” She suddenly put her hand
to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, but managed to regain her
composure after only a few seconds. Once again looking squarely
into the camera, she went on in a shaky voice, “We were here
covering the championship when the center, which is the largest
seed storage facility in the United States, blew up in a...in a
huge explosion. We were on this side of the track when it happened
and only suffered minor injuries. But the bleachers for the
spectators were right across the street from the blast...” She
suddenly sobbed, unable to get out the rest of what she had to
say.

The cameraman took the opportunity
to zoom in across the street and the scorched grass of the track
facility to where the bleachers had once stood. Jack winced and a
few of the others in the command center gasped in horror at the
hundreds of bodies strewn across the ground, most of them charred
or blown apart. Some were still burning.

“There were hundreds of people
there,” Tracy rasped as the camera steadily panned over the
devastation. A few survivors, some of them athletes who had come
for the event, wandered dazedly around the field as the first
emergency personnel rushed onto the scene. “Now...now I think most
of them are dead. And there must have been heavy loss of life in
the surrounding buildings. It looks like the general services and
military science buildings were totally destroyed, with a lot of
damage at least as far as Centennial Hall. As you can see,
emergency crews are just getting here now.”

“When did the explosion happen,
Tracy?” Connie asked, tears in her own eyes.

“Only a few minutes ago,” the young
woman said. “Just a few minutes ago, all those people were
alive.”

“Thank you, Tracy,” Connie told her,
and the young woman’s image was reduced to a small digital portrait
on the back wall. “We’ll be back to you shortly. But now, let’s
take a look at what happened. Ladies and gentlemen, younger viewers
and those who don’t wish to see graphic violence may wish to return
to us in a few moments.” After a deep breath, she said, “This is
the footage of the explosion that Tracy and her cameraman
recorded.”

On the screen, Jack and the others
were treated to a view of Tracy, not yet covered in soot and blood,
eagerly interviewing a young athlete. In the distant background
were the bleachers, crammed with hundreds of spectators. Athletes
were spread around the field, engaged in their various events or
practicing. Other people, most of them students, were busy walking
around the area or standing and watching the events. Beyond the
bleachers was the National Center for Genetic Resources
Preservation building.

In the blink of an eye and
completely without warning, the entire building disappeared in a
titanic fireball. The camera caught a view of the flames and debris
scything through the spectators in the bleachers before the
cameraman, Tracy, and the athlete they were interviewing were
knocked to the ground by the shock wave. The cameraman somehow
managed to roll with the force of the blast, pointing the camera
immediately back at the cataclysm.

Jack had seen many horrible things
in his time, but this had to be the worst. Everyone in the
bleachers, he knew, every single one of the hundreds of people
there, along with most of the athletes on the field and nearby
bystanders, had been killed instantly. Through the smoke and
flaming debris, the pitiless camera showed scorched and dismembered
bodies flung dozens of yards across the field. In only a few
seconds, the aluminum bleachers became so hot that the metal
deformed and, in a few places, started to flow like liquid plastic.
Above the seed storage facility and the devastated buildings
surrounding it, a column of smoke rose in the shape of a miniature
mushroom cloud.