Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (58 page)

The main floor was a disaster area,
with equipment and tables knocked over, and everything covered with
paint chips and dust. Jack had to swallow his fear as he saw cracks
in the dome wall that zig-zagged like lightning bolts toward the
ceiling, disappearing into the smoke above his head. “Make it fast,
Renee,” he told her. “I don’t think this place is going
to–”

A hunk of concrete as big as Jack
suddenly fell from the obscured ceiling, plunging out of the smoke
to shatter on the floor with a jarring crash, nearly hitting the
pair of FBI agents.

“Shit!” Jack cursed. There was no
point in risking more lives than necessary if the dome collapsed.
“You men!” he called to the agents. “Get out of here. Go back to
the junction and help the others.” Giving Jack an unsure look, the
two men didn’t question his orders and made their way back out of
the dome. Turning back to Renee, he said, “Let’s get this
done.”

“Here, help me move this,” she told
him, gesturing at a pile of equipment and debris blocking the door
to the electrical systems area.

After a few minutes of grunting and
heaving, the door was finally clear and Renee opened it.

“Well, that’s some good news,” she
said guardedly.

“What?” Jack asked, looking around
the pitch black room. The only thing he could see was a large bank
of red and green indicator lights off to the left.

“The batteries are okay,” she told
him, moving toward the lights. “Like I thought, the breakers went,
but that we can fix. Here, help me with these.”

In the glow of the indicators, he
saw her move toward a set of six large equipment cabinets, each of
which had a set of large buttons and a single large handle. “Pump
each one of these three times,” she told him, pointing to one of
the handles, “then the handle should lock.”

Jack followed her directions,
pumping and locking the handles. “There’s too much power flowing
through there for a simple mechanical switch,” she explained as she
pushed buttons and flipped breakers on one of the other panels. “So
we get to do it the fancy way.”

“Done,” Jack told her, slamming the
last handle home.

“Okay, here we go...” She pushed one
of six large buttons on the console before her, and the first
cabinet made a loud thunk. They were rewarded by the main lights –
what few were left undamaged by the blast – flickering back on
around the periphery of the dome from where they were suspended
under the mezzanine level.

“Oh, shit,” Renee hissed.

“What is it?”

“Look what we’re standing
in.”

Jack looked down in the flickering
light and saw that the floor was wet. “Water. So?”

She shook her head and moved back
away from the electrical panels. “It’s not water, Jack. It’s diesel
fuel. Can’t you smell it?” She looked up at the wall just below the
mezzanine level, where the tunnel into the exhaust complex was.
There was a trickle of liquid down the wall. “At least one of the
tanks or lines must have been ruptured by the blast.” As they
watched, the trickle grew into a steady flow.

Jack could smell it now, even over
the stench of the smoke. And he remembered Naomi telling him that
there was enough fuel in the tanks up there to power the backup
generators for a couple months.

“Christ,” he cursed, looking again
at the shimmering pool that was quickly spreading across the floor.
“Once that hits those breakers...”

“Yeah,” she told him. “The breakers
will arc and ignite the whole shebang.” She looked at the other
five breakers that needed to be reset.

“Don’t even think about it,” he
warned her, taking her arm and pulling her back. “We’ve got to get
out of here. Right now.”

“We need the power, Jack,” she
protested, but she didn’t struggle against his insistent
grip.

“It’s not going to do us any good as
soon as that fuel hits the first live circuit,” he told her. “This
place is going to turn into an inferno, and we need to be long gone
when that happens.”

Jack turned to head back toward the
door to the junction, and that was when he saw the cats. He
momentarily felt guilty for not even thinking about Alexander since
the trip to Spitsbergen, yet here the big furball was. Koshka was
with him, as usual, and so were three others. He leaned down to try
and shoo them toward the blast door and out of the dome, then
realized that all of the cats were staring in the same direction:
toward the air intake tunnel on the mezzanine level.

Where the larval harvester had been
trapped.

Alexander suddenly arched his back
and stuck up his tail, growling. Koshka and the others joined him,
and all at once they scattered, taking cover where they could
behind the debris strewn across the floor of the lab
dome.

“Renee,” he called quietly over his
shoulder as he scanned the mezzanine. He couldn’t see the mouth of
the intake tunnel through the smoke.

“What?” she said from close behind
him.

“We have to go,” he told her,
drawing his pistol, the big .50 caliber Desert Eagle, and snapping
off the safety. He hadn’t thought to bring a rifle with him.
“Now.”

“What
else
could be wrong?”
she asked, trying to make a joke. Then she saw the cats: silent,
intent, as if waiting in ambush. Or trying to not draw the
attention of a much more ferocious predator. “Oh, God,” she
whispered, realization of their predicament suddenly dawning on
her.

“Come on,” Jack told her quietly as
he began to edge toward the blast door leading to the main
junction.

“Jack, wait,” she said suddenly,
pointing at a white refrigerator that was still standing along the
dome wall, not far from where the animal storage area was. “The
antivenin is in that refrigerator. We should get that
before–”

“No,” he said, catching sight of a
powerful, alien limb slowly descending from the smoke that wreathed
the mezzanine level stairway. The creature was much closer to the
door than they were. “There’s no time. Move! Now!”

Pushing her in the direction of the
door to the junction, he moved toward the stairway and the creature
that was now fully revealed: a harvester, its black exoskeleton
shimmering in the glow of the lights while the malleable tissue
oozed around its core as if unsure of what shape it should
take.

Praying that firing his weapon
wouldn’t ignite the diesel fuel, Jack raised the big pistol and
took aim at the harvester’s center of mass. Just as he pulled the
trigger, the cats broke from cover, yeowling and hissing at the
creature.

The harvester reacted with lighting
fast reflexes, leaping back up onto the obscured mezzanine. Jack’s
shot blasted a chunk of concrete from the wall where the harvester
had been, and the cats darted for the door, their desire to survive
overriding the instinct to fight the creature.

“Go!” Jack shouted at Renee, “Get
the hell out!”

“I’m stuck!” she
cried. She had forced her way into the gap between the blast door
and its frame, but one of the straps on her body armor had caught
on an exposed bolt in the door’s locking mechanism. “Help!” she
cried into the junction, which was now empty, the two FBI agents
who had been with them earlier having followed Richards and
Franzman down the tunnel toward the silos. “
Help me!
”

Jack tried to free her with one
hand, holding the pistol with the other. He couldn’t. “Goddammit,”
he growled, shoving the Desert Eagle back into its holster so he
could use both hands, “hold still!”

But no matter what he did, the strap
refused to come off the head of the bolt. Renee’s fierce struggling
had only succeeded in wedging her body in more tightly, and at just
the wrong angle. She was well and truly stuck.

Giving up on using his bare hands,
he reached down and pulled out the flip-out utility knife that he
always carried. “Hold still or I’m going to cut you!” he shouted at
her.

That finally got her attention, and
her struggles ceased. Jack shoved the blade under her armor where
the straps connected and began sawing through them.

He was almost done when he felt one
of Renee’s hands squeeze his shoulder in a death grip.

“Jack,” she
whispered, her eyes wide with terror. “
Behind you...
”

***

“Thank God,” Naomi breathed as she
took the brief casualty reports from the leaders of the three
apartments adjoining the missile silos. Renee had restored the
power to the blast locks just as Naomi and the others had arrived
at the first lock, allowing the others to get out. The worst
casualty had been a young woman with a broken leg. Other than that,
bruises and abrasions were the worst they’d suffered. “What about
the arks?”

“All intact,” said Wade Livingston,
one of the engineers who had helped design and build the
nitrogen-cooled seed storage units inside the silos. His face was
lit only by the reflected light from a dozen heavy duty flashlights
the others carried. The tunnel and the rest of the complex beyond
the first blast lock were still without power and lights, except
for the short-life battery backups in each of the silo complexes.
“There’s a lot of heat bleeding through the silo doors, but the
radiant barriers and ceramic insulation are coping with that. It’ll
cost us some extra nitrogen to keep the temperatures down, but not
as much as I’d thought. The silo batteries are all intact, so we’ve
got backup power for a while until we can get the mains back
on.”

“What about radiation?” Naomi asked,
worried. She was concerned for her people, but the arks were even
more important. They’d poured millions of man-hours into preserving
genetically pure seed, and the last thing she wanted was for any of
it to be compromised by radiation from the bomb.

“All the dosimeters are showing
radiation well below any danger levels,” he told her. “We certainly
took some, but I’m happy that the designers of this complex were as
lavish with concrete as they were. And that whoever decided to
paste us used an air burst and not a ground burst.”

Richards snorted. “If they’d used a
ground burst, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he
muttered. A ground burst would have sent a shock wave through the
ground that would have shattered the concrete. It would also have
produced a huge amount of radioactive fallout, which apparently was
something even the harvesters and their minions hadn’t wanted to
do.

“Other than that, damage was fairly
light,” Livingston went on. “We had some breaks in the utility
lines and some other minor things. The only serious damage was the
tunnel past Blast Lock One: it partially collapsed. I’ve got a team
shoring it up, but that’ll take some work to fix.” Suddenly
breaking into a ragged cough, he told her, “I think the biggest
problem right now is air. We’ve got to get this smoke cleared
out.”

“Renee is working on that,” Naomi
reassured him. “But we’ve got to get the mains back on-line first,
and–”

“What are you idiots doing here?”
Richards suddenly snapped at the sound of approaching footsteps.
The agents he’d left to guard Jack appeared in the flashlights that
were suddenly turned their way.

“Dawson sent us to see if we could
help,” one of them explained. “Chunks of the ceiling were falling
inside that dome they went into, and he ordered us out. So here we
are.”

Naomi saw Richards’ face contort in
anger. He opened his mouth to give the agents a tongue lashing, but
didn’t get the chance as the unmistakable sound of a gunshot boomed
down the tunnel from the direction of the main junction.

“Oh, no,” Naomi moaned.
“Jack!”

Richards bolted down the tunnel in
the direction of the sound, his rifle at the ready. With sick looks
on their faces, the other FBI agents turned and followed
him.

***

“
Behind you!
”

Jack reacted instinctively. Dropping
the knife, he slid his right hand to the grip of his pistol,
holstered under his left arm. He knew he wouldn’t have time to draw
it and turn around, so he leaned over and twisted his torso,
pointing the gun’s muzzle behind him before pulling the trigger
while the gun was still in its holster. He had no idea if he’d hit
anything, but the muzzle blast might startle the creature and at
least give him a chance.

He fired, and was rewarded with an
ear-piercing shriek. Drawing the gun, he turned around and dropped
to one knee so he could take more careful aim.

The harvester had been shoved
backward by the impact of the big .50 caliber slug, one of its
“arms” shattered by the bullet just above the lowermost
joint.

It launched itself at him, the
chopping blade in its thorax slicing through the air toward his
face.

He waited until it was right on top
of him, the muzzle of the Desert Eagle nearly touching the
glistening blade before he pulled the trigger. The creature
staggered backward, and Jack saw tissue and chunks of exoskeleton
blasted into the air behind it. He fired again, blowing a ragged
hole as big as his fist all the way through its thorax, then
again.