The Harvest (33 page)

The wind dissipated, the ship’s engines
whining to a gentle hiss. Lifting his head and shaking the dirt and
sand from his hair, Shane stayed low and took a count of his
friends. They were sprawled around him, their disoriented faces
plastered with dust. Six of them. He hadn’t lost one yet. Laura
still looked shaken, but she appeared to have subdued her panic.
She flashed an appreciative smile at him that didn’t feel deserved.
He hadn’t saved her. If it weren’t for the spaceship vaporizing her
captors, she’d be dead.

He crawled to his feet and surveyed the
surroundings. His heart thumped in his ears such that he could
barely hear the coughs of the dust-choked kids around him. The
cloud kicked up by the Anunnaki vessel obscured everything, and he
didn’t know if he was facing Giza or the ship. A warm breeze
whisked the dust away, and though it wouldn’t have done him any
good, he suddenly wished he’d held on to the AK and his
grenades.

Trotting away from the curtain of bodies, Kelly, Jules, and the
Aussies turned onto the wide boulevard. It was a direct route that
would get them to the pyramids before anyone else.

The Pyramid of Menkaure was their
destination, the furthest from Giza in the necropolis. They were
assigned the fastest route through Cairo, so all the teams would
get to their targets at about the same time. She hadn’t minded the
idea of it when she looked at the map, but she didn’t like how
exposed they were now. The wide street they ran down offered little
cover, and it felt like they’d be easy to spot from several blocks
away.

She feared the people who’d made the gruesome
curtain were camped out in buildings nearby. If they’d done that to
the dead, what might they do if they found someone alive?

“This is way worse than Atlanta,” Jules said,
trotting along next to her.

“Hopefully, these psychos won’t be as
organized as Shamus’ gang was,” Kelly said, clinging to a thread of
optimism.

While the daily runs during training had been
torture much of the time, she was grateful for the peak physical
condition they were in. They moved along at a decent pace, and she
started to feel better once they were a couple of blocks away.

“Whoop, whoop,” came a call from the left
side of the street.

“Down,” Kelly said, dropping behind a
burnt-out SUV. She searched the shadows at the base of the
buildings, looking for the source of the noise.

“I got movement on the right,” Ethan
whispered.

Kelly glanced to the side of the street to
which their backs were exposed, adrenaline flooding her veins and
clearing her mind. At least ten kids crept out of a fast food
restaurant that had all its windows busted out.

“What are they wearing on their faces?” Jules
asked, a tremor in her voice.

“No way,” Ben whispered. “Those sickos are
wearing skin masks.”

“I think I’m gonna chunder,” Joey said, but
he held his rifle at the ready.

The crazies approached the edge of the
sidewalk and hovered cautiously, studying them as if to assess
whether they were accomplices or victims. Kelly’s heart thumped in
her ears so hard it hurt. More crazies were coming out on the other
side of the street, also wearing the peeled off and dried faces of
adults as masks. Their eyes were hidden in the shadowy eyeholes.
The mouths of the mask were distorted, open in ghastly expressions
from the drying process, and revealing the chins and necks of their
wearers.

Closest to Kelly, a skinny girl who was
wearing a bearded face from what must’ve been a fairly large man,
reached slowly to the back of her belt and produced a chef’s knife.
Its blade was soiled, caked with blood and dirt. The sun glinted
off the girl’s otherwise unseen eyes, and Kelly sensed that she was
smiling beneath the rotting beard face.

“We need to run,” Kelly said in a calm and
quiet voice.

“Agreed,” Jules whispered.

“Go!” Ethan shouted.

They pivoted and ran down the street at full
speed, dodging wrecked cars. The crazies cheered and gave chase.
Nothing in the simulations prepared them for this. Though terror
had a firm grip on her, her experience and training helped Kelly
keep her head. She looked back and could see that the scrawny
teenagers, whose brains had come unhinged from the slave gene, were
in nowhere near the physical condition that her team was. Already,
there was a football field between them.

Although he was the shortest, Ben was able to
out-sprint any of them. He was leading the group, running with his
gun held across his chest.

Kelly thought she saw something move between
cars she passed. Quickly dismissing it as her imagination, she
dodged left and followed Jules around a large panel truck.

“Up ahead,” Ben yelled, stopping them and
taking aim with his AK.

Fifty yards down the boulevard, a small group
of skin-masked teens popped up from behind cars. One had a rifle,
and the others had makeshift spears and bats. The shouts of the
crazies pursuing them grew louder. They were corralling Kelly and
her team, closing them in on both sides.

“We can’t stop,” Ethan said.

He raised his gun and fired a shot over the
disturbed kids. As Kelly expected, they didn’t scatter. More kids
wearing skin masks stood up from behind cars, like they’d been
hiding and waiting in ambush.

“Okay, this won’t do,” Joey said
frantically.

He fired a shot, and the boy holding the
rifle dropped dead. His counterparts shrieked, seeming as if they’d
lost the ability for speech. Their brains were completely
scrambled. These poor teenagers had devolved into something less
than human but far worse than any animal. Kelly charged forward
with her team, the sight of her rifle aimed on only those who
blocked their way. They were terrifying, but she also knew it
wasn’t their fault they were acting this way. One of the kids
closed in on her, a knife in his hand. She hesitated, her finger on
the trigger.

“Move out of the way!” she yelled at the boy
in Anunnaki and then Arabic.

Ignoring her, the crazy and his friends came
at Kelly, Jules, and the Aussies. They raised their crude weapons,
coated with the gore of countless other kills they’d made.
Reluctant to take their destroyed lives to the last moment, Kelly’s
finger eased back, and the AK made a loud pop. The skin-masked boy
was thrown onto the hood of the car behind him, and the powder
burns around the bullet’s entry wound testified to how close he was
before she’d fired. Hoping to be merciful, she’d shot him through
the center of his heart, giving the poor boy death before he rolled
off the car to the ground.

The discharge of her weapon seemed to act as
a signal to the rest of the team. The bloodthirsty shrieks of the
crazies were drowned out by the sound of gunfire. A mob
materialized in front of them, and they were forced to stop. Ethan
lobbed a grenade, blasting a path forward.

“Keep going!” he shouted, sounding calmer
than he had before the fight started.

Once she overcame the struggle of making that
first shot, and realized there was no option but to fight their way
out, Kelly settled into the battle. They’d fought so much in
training that she felt more focused once the bullets started
flying. She hated that they were taking lives, but at the same
time, there was a sense of control, something she didn’t feel when
they were on the retreat.

“Behind us,” Jules said.

Flipping her gun over to that direction,
Kelly fired into the fifty charging crazies. She fished out a
grenade, pulled the ring with the pinky finger of her gun hand, and
tossed it into the mob. Then she followed it with well-placed shots
into those closest to her team.

The explosion launched bodies into the air.
One fell at her feet, his mask separated from him in the blast. He
was dead, his chest and neck bloody from shrapnel but his face
undamaged. The Egyptian boy’s slack expression made him look so
innocent that it filled her with sorrow. This was just a
kid—someone’s brother and someone’s child.

Seeing their counterparts killed did not
deter the unhinged teens. They rushed in to take the others’
places, determined to sink their nasty weapons into Kelly and her
friends. Feeling like this had to be a strange and horrible
nightmare, she fired her weapon again and again, keeping the insane
kids back. Their disgusting masks and animal screams weren’t enough
to completely dehumanize them. Kelly was painfully aware that each
shot she fired killed another innocent. She blamed the Anunnaki,
and her lust for revenge swelled even more.

“We gotta get out of here,” she said,
determined to take as few lives as possible. She also worried about
their limited supply of ammunition, fearing there were more crazies
closing in than they had bullets with which to stop them.

“This way,” Ethan yelled, pointing toward a
side street. It was dark and narrow, and she hadn’t noticed it
before.

Relieved to see an exit, Kelly took up the
rear, running backwards alongside Jules. The team crossed the
boulevard in pairs, able to hold off the mob pressing in on either
side. Ethan led the way into a narrow street just as the crazies
came close enough to use their spears.

One made a thrust at Kelly, and she whipped
her AK sideways to deflect the spear, then swung the barrel around
and put a bullet in the kid’s chest. Running backwards and dumping
rounds into the crazies, they moved deeper into the alley. The
buildings on either side forced the skin-faces tighter together,
preventing them from surrounding Kelly and her team.

“We got more on the other side,” Ethan yelled
from behind her.

“Aw, come on,” Kelly groaned, glancing over
her shoulder.

Kids were charging in, most of them armed
with guns. A fresh wave of fear came over Kelly. They were trapped,
and she had only one grenade left. The whole team was going to die
in this alley, and the mission would be over before it really
began. Failing meant the Anunnaki would be one step closer to
getting Nat. She couldn’t let that happen. Fishing the last grenade
out of her vest pocket, she pulled the pin.

“Kelly!” Jules shouted.

She lobbed the grenade into the skin-faces
and at the same time saw a makeshift spear flying through the air.
Time seemed to freeze, at least long enough for her to make out the
details of the crude missile. It was composed of the wooden handle
of a broom or a rake, and had a large kitchen knife lashed on at
its tip. In that frozen moment, she could see dried blood and
little chunks of flesh on the blade and the wooden shaft.

Diving and twisting her body to avoid the
spear, she couldn’t move fast enough. Its gory blade slid deep into
her shoulder above her left breast. She felt the tip pierce through
her, burying itself in the underside of her shoulder blade. She was
more horrified at the idea that she’d be taken out of the
mission—that she’d no longer be able to fight for Nat’s safety—than
at the notion of being killed by the disgusting weapon. As she
crashed to the ground, the handle of the impaled spear smacked a
car’s hood and she yelped in pain.

The
golden spaceship materialized through the dust, resting over the
Great Pyramid of Khufu and looking way too big to ever take to the
sky. It was similar to the one Shane had seen in the simulation,
but much larger. Also unique to the command ship was a spire rising
from its peak, reaching higher than any skyscraper. The reflective
exterior of the ship glowed brighter than the last light of the
setting sun. Although he couldn’t help being frightened, he was in
awe of the vessel. It represented technology beyond his wildest
dreams, and a species as old as time.

He glanced at the kids who’d been chanting
until the gust created by the ship knocked them down and blew them
out of the way. They were changed, appearing to be under a deeper
level of hypnosis. Some rose to their knees and bowed, while others
stood staring at the vessel with slack expressions. Aside from
coughing, no one uttered a sound.