Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (54 page)

“What the devil is it?” Curtis
asked, his stomach suddenly churning with acid.

“We do not know,” the Clement-thing
said. “We suspect it is either an aerosol or microscopic
particulate. Either could be weaponized easily, but even accidental
release would spell the doom of most forms of life now on Earth,
and there is nothing we could do to prevent it.”

“How do we destroy it?” the
President of the United States asked.

“With nuclear fire,” the creature
told him.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

“This is suicide, Dawson,” Richards
said quietly as they rode the portal elevator toward the surface.
“You realize that, don’t you?”

Jack looked at him and forced a
grin. “You didn’t want to live forever, did you?”

Richards shook his head. “Idiot,” he
muttered.

Around them were a dozen men and
women, all wearing combat gear that was nearly identical to what
the FBI agents wore. Most had G36C assault rifles. Some, like Jack,
had shotguns. They also had a load of grenades. Jack had insisted,
not so much to use against his fellow agents, but on the off chance
that the whatever-it-was that was trapped in the tunnels somehow
got past the blast valves.

“Jack!” Naomi’s voice suddenly
sounded through the radio receiver in his ear as, above him, the
massive doors to the portal entrance began to cycle open. She and
the others in the command center had their eyes glued to what the
FBI agents were doing. “They’ve gotten through the surface vent.
They’ve sent one...now two men down.”

“That’ll be our friends with the
satchel charges,” Richards pointed out unnecessarily.

“Aren’t there any defenses built
into the vent structures?” Jack asked.

“No,” Naomi told him. “Tan had
talked about it, but it never happened.”

“Right,” Jack
said, shoving the
It would have been
nice
thought aside as the elevator reached
the surface. “Here we go.”

As the elevator cage reached the top
of its travel, the frame rising above the level of the massive
concrete casing, they immediately came under a hail of rifle fire
from the FBI agents circled around the vent only one hundred fifty
feet away.

“Smoke!” Jack shouted, and instantly
three smoke grenades sailed through the air to a spot between them
and the FBI agents. In fifteen seconds there was enough smoke that
the agents were totally obscured. Which also meant they couldn’t
see Jack and his people. “Go!”

Richards led the way, leaping from
the portal casing to the right as Jack led the way to the left. The
agents were still pouring a hail of fire in the direction of Jack’s
people, but they could only hope to get lucky.

And they did. Two men to Jack’s left
grunted and dropped to the ground as they were hit.

“Leave them!” he
yelled as others knelt to help the wounded. “We’ll get them on the
way back.”
If we make it
back
, he thought as he ran forward as fast
as he could into the smoke, his weapon at his shoulder, ready to
fire.

Behind him, the portal elevator sank
out of sight, and the massive blast doors closed behind it,
protecting the entrance to the base. Naomi had fought against it,
but Jack had been insistent: if they lost the fight out here, he
didn’t want the agents to have a free ride down the
portal.

As soon as the smoke thinned enough
for him to make out the vague outline of the agents, who had now
spread out in a defensive skirmish line, Jack dropped to the ground
and yelled, “Grenades!”

His team hurled
half a dozen grenades at the agents. Before any of them went off,
he heard and felt the explosions of more grenades thrown by the
team led by Richards.
Cocky
bastard
, Jack thought,
but good in a fight
. The grenades
had found their mark, and the fire from the FBI team slacked
off.

“
Go, go, go!
” Jack screamed as he leaped up and charged forward, firing
in controlled bursts at the agents. There wasn’t any finesse in
what he and the men and women with him were doing now: they needed
to kill their opponents, and do it quickly. There was an unknown
danger lurking below that might be released by the agents with the
satchel charges, but Jack was also worried about death from above.
He knew there must be Predator drones orbiting the base, and he
knew that Predators weren’t just equipped for surveillance. They
could kill, too.

Three more of his people went down
under heavy fire, but then he and his team were in among the few
surviving agents.

“Surrender!” Richards boomed. An
agent who was down on the ground, shot in the thigh, raised his
rifle to point at Richards, and Richards kicked the rifle away and
butt-stroked the agent into submission. “Dammit, we won’t hurt you
if you surrender, you idiots!”

The remaining four agents finally
gave in. Dropping their weapons, they slowly raised their
hands.

“You men down
there,” Jack shouted into the shaft at the two agents who’d gone
down. “We promise you safe passage if you come back up right
now...with the charges intact. Otherwise you’ll be staying down
there with them.” He leaned a little further to try and see them,
and was rewarded with a half dozen rifle rounds
spanging
off the metal of the vent
cover. “Grenade,” Jack said grimly, holding out his
hand.

“The charges might go off if you
drop this,” Richards said, handing him a grenade.

Nodding in understanding, Jack told
him, “Get everyone back to the portal.” Then, to the men below, he
pulled the pin on the grenade and shouted, “Last chance, guys! Come
up right now or you’ll get a grenade down the throat. We’ll haul
you–”

His last words were swallowed by a
fusillade of shots from below, two of them hitting him in his chest
armor, knocking him backwards and spilling the grenade from his
hand. The striker lever flew off, igniting the fuse, and the
egg-shaped weapon rolled right next to his face. Eyes wide and
gasping from the pain of the ribs bruised by the bullets that
struck him, he managed to bat the grenade away, and watched with
relief as it fell through the hole into the gaping air intake
vent.

“Stupid assholes,” he gasped, trying
to roll to his feet. He caught sight of Richards dashing toward him
just before they were both tossed through the air like wads of
paper by the explosion of the two satchel charges, which detonated
when Jack’s grenade went off.

***

In the darkness at the bottom of the
air intake chamber, the creature had finally become. Uncoiling for
the first time in its adult form, it flexed its limbs. Gathering
its strength, the creature stood erect before taking its first
step, then another. It paced the length of its lair, a long dark
recess, the bottom of a great cylinder laid on its side. None of
its kind was here with it in this place, but it could sense that
one of them was somewhere close, and another far, far away. It did
not know how or why it knew this; its mind had not yet matured
enough to form such questions.

At one end of its lair were five
large, round openings. It was just probing them with its claws when
the shock from an explosion on the far side knocked it to the
floor.

***

“The radiation and the extreme heat
of a nuclear detonation will ensure that the genetic weapon is
fully neutralized,” the Clement-thing explained calmly to a shocked
President Curtis. Monica Ridley watched the exchange, her face a
mask of silent horror. “There is no other way to ensure its
destruction. They must not be allowed to vent it into the
atmosphere, or all will be lost.”

“There’s no time,” Curtis said,
shaking his head as he glanced back at the video feed from the
Predator over the EDS base. “It would take hours to get a weapon
ready...”

“And to evacuate the local
population,” Ridley interjected, finally regaining her composure.
“We can’t just drop a bomb in the middle of California without
giving people warning!”

The Clement-thing looked at her
dispassionately. “You must,” it said flatly. “There is no other
way.” It turned back to Curtis. “And it will not require hours. An
aircraft is armed and in the air not far from Beale Air Force Base.
All you need do is issue the necessary orders to deliver the
weapon.”

“A plane is flying
around with a live nuke aboard without my authorization?” Curtis
shouted in dismay. “How the hell did
that
happen?”

“Sir, are you all right?” A Secret
Service agent stuck his head in the door, his right hand under his
left arm, holding his weapon.

“Yes, Eric,” Curtis said, calming
himself with great difficulty. “Please, wait outside.”

With a pointed glance at Ridley and
Clement, the agent nodded and closed the door.

“It happened
because we wished it to be so,” the Clement-thing said in answer to
Curtis’s question. “Remember that in 2007, six cruise missiles
armed with live nuclear warheads were loaded onto a B-52 bomber at
Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and flown across your country
to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, all without proper
authorization.” It paused. “This is not the first time this has
happened, nor was it the last. It was merely an event we…made
possible that, unfortunately, was discovered.” It shrugged, an all
too human gesture that sent a chill down Curtis’s spine. “We have
had people such as you in certain positions in the military
to...enable such contingencies in case an emergency like this
arose. We knew we were close to finding our enemy, your enemy, and
thus we made preparations. We now have the opportunity to stop
them. We must take that opportunity.” Its eyes, suddenly not quite
so human, fixed on Curtis. “
You
must take it, President Curtis. In the name of
humanity.”

Curtis simply stared at
it.

“If it is any consolation,” The
Other went on, “there will be a minimum of civilian casualties. The
B83 nuclear bomb with which the aircraft is armed should be
powerful enough to destroy the base and the EDS weapon, but the
radius of heavy damage will only affect lightly populated
agricultural areas to the north. The Sutter Buttes will shield the
more densely populated areas to the east and south.”

“I...” Curtis began, then snapped
his mouth shut. He exchanged a look with Ridley, who silently shook
her head.

“This is all
wrong,” she said quietly, moving away from Clement. “There’s no way
EDS could have created such a weapon.
You’re
the only ones who understand
genetics enough to create such a thing.” She glanced at Curtis,
then back at the creature. “And I don’t think any terrorist group
that had no prior record could possibly have managed everything
that you claim EDS has done. It doesn’t make
sense.”

“We saved you, Monica,” the creature
said softly, sadly. Turning to Curtis, it said, “And your daughter.
These gifts we gave freely. They could also be taken away,” it
added darkly.

“Then they weren’t gifts,” Ridley
told it harshly. Turning to Curtis, she said, “We’ve been taken for
a ride, Mr. Pres–”

In the blink of an eye, faster than
Curtis could follow as he stood rooted to the floor with fear, the
thing that wore Ray Clement’s clothes leaped at Ridley, drawing her
into a tight embrace with one arm while its free hand clamped over
her mouth to muffle her scream. Her eyes bulged in shock and pain,
then quickly relaxed to stare sightlessly past Curtis. The
Clement-thing carefully placed her in one of the chairs along the
wall, looking for all the world as if she’d fallen
asleep.

“Soon, when she awakens,” it told
Curtis, “she will be as she would have been had we never given her
our gift.” It paused. “We will do the same for your daughter if you
do not do what you must. And you realize what that will
mean.”

“I’ll call in the agents who are
outside and have them arrest you,” he said with more bravado than
he felt as his mind’s eye showed him his daughter dying, clutching
her head in agony as the tumor rapidly swelled in her brain. He
looked at Ridley: even now he could see her muscles twitching,
twisting her limbs as her body withered under the assault of the
Lou Gehrig’s disease that The Others had removed from her years
before. It was as if the Clement-thing had somehow accelerated the
process, and the disease was making up for years of lost time in
only minutes.

“It will be very painful for your
daughter, and for you,” the harvester told him quietly, following
his gaze. “She will lose her thoughts, her memories. Her mind will
perish as the tumor overwhelms her brain, bringing unimaginable
pain. Then she will die.”

Curtis’s insides melted into the
same clutching, deathly fear for his daughter that he had felt when
she had first been diagnosed. At that moment, the most powerful
human being on the planet was reduced to a father, terrified for
his only daughter’s life.