The Harvest (6 page)

Recalling the fight with Steve in Atlanta,
Shane wondered how the gene was affecting them now. He remembered
being confident that killing Tracy and then Steve was the right
thing to do, and he wouldn’t have stopped trying to end them if
Tracy hadn’t disconnected the battery. There hadn’t been a doubt in
his mind that they were meant to die.

Was his desire to trust Lily now because of
the gene’s influence? He worried about how they could be enslaved
and still believe they had their freedom. Such a master could make
them do horrible things with conviction and a smile.

“That sounds foolish,” Jules countered. “If
they can wipe memories and control us through our DNA, why would
they kill off the adults? Wouldn’t they want to keep some of them
alive? Especially those that were already trained as soldiers, like
in the army and stuff?”

“Yes, that would make more sense,” Lily
replied. “But over the last two hundred thousand years, mutations
have led to a flaw in the slave gene. About ten percent of the
children and teenagers will suffer a dangerous form of mental
psychosis, usually leading to sociopathic behavior. The older the
humans are, the higher this percentage. In adults twenty years and
older, the psychotic response is upwards of ninety-five
percent.

“So you see, if the Anunnaki didn’t arrange
for all the adults to be killed, then they would have likely turned
on each other and on you when the gene was activated. The adults
would have killed off the rest of the crop. You are likely already
familiar with this psychosis—many of the serial killers who have
gained repute for their crimes suffered from a rare auto-activation
of their slave gene. Some, such as Adolf Hitler, were even able to
recruit other humans to help them commit their crimes on a much
larger scale.”

“But can’t you talk to them?” Laura chimed
in, sounding desperate. “There must be a way to stop them
peacefully.”

“No—they will not negotiate,” Lily replied
coldly. “As I said, the Anunnaki created humans. They believe they
own you—that they have a right to enslave you.”

“But if your people couldn’t stop them,”
Shane said, trying not to succumb to the feeling of impending doom,
“what makes you think we can?”

“Honestly, Shane?” Lily leaned back and gave
him a stern look. “I think you have about a snowball’s chance in
hell of succeeding, to use a human cliché. But that doesn’t mean
you should just lie down and die, does it? After all, you’re
supposed to be dead now. By our calculations, the limbic
manipulator might have killed everyone fifteen and older before its
battery ran out.”

No one responded. Shane bit the inside of his
lip, frustrated with what Lily was telling them. His friends’ heads
drooped, like the Anunnaki already had them in chains.

These kids had survived the impossible;
they’d fought through an army of thugs and shut down the limbic
manipulator. But that wasn’t an advanced alien race they were up
against.

“Well, I reckon we’ve been through the
wringer these last two days, and we survived.” He spoke to his
friends as much as to Lily, the quarterback in him taking charge.
“Our odds of success had to be less than zero, but we shut down
that stupid weapon, and here we are. We sure as hell aren’t gonna
give up now. Are we?”

Steve looked at Shane first, and the rest
followed. They appeared less defeated, shaking their heads and
agreeing they would never quit.

“I didn’t expect you would,” Lily said
admiringly. “We’ve been living amongst humans for seventy years,
and if we’ve learned anything about your species, it’s that you
don’t give up without a fight.”

“How did you get here?” Steve shifted the
subject. “Why do y’all look so much alike?”

“You’ve heard of the Roswell, New Mexico
crash?”

“Yeah. We live in the woods, but we ain’t
stupid.” Steve chuckled, turning red under her gaze.

“Well, it wasn’t little green men they pulled
from that spacecraft,” she replied. “My co-pilot and I were in a
fighter ship, trying to overthrow the supremacist government in
charge of our home world. The Anunnaki army used a rather nasty
implosion weapon to destroy the rebellion. It created a temporary
wormhole, and my spacecraft was pulled in and spit out near earth.”
A sad frown crossed her face. She glanced down, the weight of the
memory seeming to crush her. “There were only two of us onboard. As
far as we can tell, no one else survived.”

She looked up again and added, “Your
government was kind enough to take us in, provided we share some
technology with them and keep our existence a secret from the
general population.”

“Such as the limbic manipulator weapon?”
Tracy challenged without a hint of reservation in her voice. Shane
appreciated her assertiveness. He didn’t trust the alien yet, and
he wanted her to know they weren’t to be pushed around.

“We brought you into the computer age. The
silicon chip, cell phone, internet—all us. As I said before, we had
nothing to do with the limbic manipulator. We had lots of advanced
technology to share in exchange for being provided a place to live,
but we made your government agree to let us introduce it to them
slowly.”

“What about all your brothers and sisters out
there? How’d they get here?”

“Clones.” Lily picked up her coffee cup.
“It’s how we’ve procreated for a long time. Our Anunnaki ancestors
played with our DNA a little too much, trying to prolong life,
increase beauty, intelligence, and create perfect children. The
same sort of stuff your scientists were starting to tinker with.
They rendered my people sterile, and so we have to make our babies
in a lab. Your government was kind enough to permit us to create
more of our own, and we shared some of our cloning technology with
them.”

“Dolly the sheep?” Laura asked.

“Exactly,” Lily smiled. “We’ve been able to
create a couple of phenotypes, but we have a limited gene pool to
work from, so a lot of us do look very similar.”

“So against all odds, we have to fight these
Anunnaki,” Shane said. “Won’t they be attacking with spaceships and
weapons far more advanced than we have?”

“No.” She sipped her coffee and set the cup
down. “It will be a bit easier than that, though still a daunting
mission. As far as we know, the Anunnaki haven’t realized we
escaped during the rebellion. They’ll come here expecting no
resistance, and they’ll bring humans into their ships to arm and
program them for the cleansing war. You will be amongst the kids
who initially enter the recruit ships, and you will attack them
from the inside.”

“Like the Trojan
Horse,” Steve mused, rubbing his chin. He straightened in his seat,
pushing his chest out and resting his big forearms on the table. “I
got no problem kicking the crap out of these An-hacky.”

“An-un-naki,” Lily corrected. “Don’t
underestimate them.”

She pivoted her chair to the right and
pressed a button on a remote control. The TV on the other end of
the long conference table lit up, and images of a battle flashed
onto the screen.

“I don’t want to make you feel hopeless—we do
believe you have a chance. But you must understand your enemy to be
effective. These videos were taken by my ship’s onboard camera.”
Her voice cracked. “After all these years, it’s still hard to
watch.” She blinked quickly several times, seeming to struggle to
restrain her emotions. “My people are the ones organized on the
ground below.”

The screen was filled with an army, charging
silently up a gentle slope. Leaving shadowy trails in a calf-deep
sea of lush, green grass, the soldiers all wore shiny, red armor
from head to toe. It first struck Shane as medieval. But they
didn’t move slowly, like knights wearing heavy plates of steel over
shirts of chainmail. They were swift, the armor appearing not to
hinder them, or perhaps even enhancing their movement.

Coming within ten yards of the rebels’
crimson helmets, the ship shifted upward, aiming its camera at a
jagged wall of gleaming, white skyscrapers that formed an abrupt
end to the verdant plain.

“The only way to get past the city’s defenses
was on foot. When they designed it, they never expected an attack
to come from the ground,” Lily said with melancholy. “They weren’t
supposed to know we were coming until it was too late. Somehow, the
enemy discovered our plan to take the capitol. They were ready and
waiting for us.”

The tallest of the buildings reached up
through gray clouds, pillars holding the angry sky aloft. Kelly let
out a nervous sigh, and her hand slipped into his. He squeezed it,
beginning to realize everything he and his friends had survived and
accomplished to this point was nothing compared to what lay
ahead.

Although their tops were crowned with
thunderheads, the lower parts of the cylindrical buildings
reflected the sun, which Shane guessed set in a clear sky behind
Lily’s ship.

“I was supposed to stay back,” she explained
somberly. “To provide air support until they were in.”

A dark line drawn across the foundations of
the city grew thicker. The camera zoomed closer, revealing
thousands of soldiers, covered in the same angular red armor as the
rebels. Unlike the rebels, many were unprotected from the neck
up.

“They could have just killed us all right
away. But first, they marched on us with no helmets, so we could
look our executioners in the eyes,” Lily explained as the camera
panned over the angry faces. “It was the worst kind of war—families
divided, brothers and sisters on opposite sides.”

The ones without helmets looked similar to
Lily and her counterparts, all with tan skin and dark hair. The
Anunnaki raced down the hill toward the rebels, shouting and waving
their weapons.

“An army straight out of Hell,” Tracy
whispered.

When they were a football field’s length
away, they stopped. The camera on Lily’s spacecraft scanned left
and right, up and down the enemy’s ranks. In the center, a soldier
was pushed ahead of the rest by two of his comrades. One of them
kicked him in the back of his legs, and the other pushed him so he
fell to his knees. His comrade stepped beside him, raising his
glowing weapon, which appeared to be some kind of a plasma
sword.

Clasping his brethren’s hair with his free
hand, the soldier dropped the curved blade and swept it
horizontally to slice through his neck. He lifted the head into the
air, blood dripping onto his armor. Horrified gasps erupted from
Shane and his friends. The body swayed for an instant, and then
fell forward into the grass.

“He was one of our spies,” Lily said softly.
“He infiltrated their army and made it to a lofty rank before they
discovered him.”

The soldier swung his arm in a circle and
threw the dripping head high into the air. It landed amongst the
red-clad soldiers beneath Lily’s ship, and the Anunnaki
charged.

Lily’s people resisted, firing laser guns
with plasma-bladed bayonets, but he could tell by how disorganized
they were that the Anunnaki had effectively reversed the element of
surprise on the rebels. The Anunnaki broke their line, attacking
with such violence that it appeared each of the warriors had a
personal vendetta. They shot and stabbed the rebels, even after
they had to be dead, and then stomped on the bodies to get to their
next victim.

Blasts of green energy emitted from somewhere
near the camera, decimating a cluster of soldiers.

“That blast came from your ship. Did they
retaliate?” Tracy asked, sounding more analytical than excited.

“Yes—watch.”

Lily got off a couple of more shots before an
aircraft, the size of a passenger jet and shaped like a cigar with
no wings, came barreling at her from the city ahead. The image
jerked left and right as she evaded blasts from the ship, and then
it leveled off.

“They stopped attacking. That’s when I knew
we were doomed.”

A massive, golden ship, shaped like an
Egyptian pyramid, settled on the hillside behind the red army.
Firing their weapons to keep the rebels at bay, the Anunnaki
retreated into an opening in one of its reflective, slanted faces.
The surviving rebels stood stunned, their weapons drooping as if
they couldn’t understand what they’d done to cause the sudden
retreat. Once all the Anunnaki were loaded, the gold ship lifted
into the sky. The camera on Lily’s spacecraft followed it, blasts
of green energy directed at the vessel coming from her cannons.

When the big ship’s pointed apex impaled the
clouds, it emitted a beam of bright white energy from its square,
black bottom, directing the blast down amongst the scattering
rebels.

“We didn’t consider the ship to be a threat,
didn’t expect them to use the weapon so close to the capitol. They
were willing to risk everything to destroy us.”