Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (33 page)

Naomi didn’t understand until the woman, who was hispanic and looked to be in her twenties, brushed against an older man who was battering away at his neighbors. He screamed and arched his back toward her as if he’d been electrocuted.
 

Then those around him, the people he’d been trying to push back so he could get away from the woman, reacted the same way to him as they had to her.

It was then, as the woman staggered out the doors, somehow dragging the man along behind her, that Naomi realized what was happening. The left half of her body was covered in what looked like a giant amoeba the color of a livid bruise. Her arm was mostly gone, and even as Naomi watched, the nightmarish thing oozed its way past her shoulder to her neck. The television was muted, but she didn’t need the sound turned up to know the woman was shrieking in unimaginable pain.

Behind her, the man struggled, his own mouth open in screams of terror. The amoeba-like thing had brushed against him and stuck.
 

The two of them went down on the concrete just outside the entrance, and there they writhed, being eaten alive by what Naomi knew was a larval harvester.

The torrent of people escaping the theater and the mall streamed past them, doing all they could to keep their distance.

“Dr. Perrault,” Garcia said softly, “what the hell is that?”

Ignoring him, Naomi asked Renee, “Are you seeing this?”

“The scene at the mall?” Renee’s voice was hoarse, and Naomi could tell she was crying. “Jesus, Naomi. Those poor people!”

“Listen. Carl’s got to lie, cheat, and steal to get the SEAL facility reopened. We’re going to need the special containment chambers there, and soon.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line, before Renee said, “What for, Naomi?”

“We’re going to have to learn everything we can about them if we’re going to stop them. To do that we’ll have to capture live harvesters.” She stared at the horrible scene on the television as people continued to pour from the mall. “I’ve got to go. Call me back on this number if you find anything else.”

“You got it.”

Naomi handed the phone back to Garcia. “Call Boisson. Tell her to forget about Morgan Pharmaceuticals and to put a tactical team together. And tell her to make sure they’re armed with the heaviest weapons she can get her hands on. Shotguns with slugs are best, unless you can load up your assault rifles with tracer or incendiary rounds. You can leave your pistols home unless they’re .44 magnums or bigger. Anything smaller is useless. And body armor. Make sure they’ve got that.”

Garcia gaped at her. “I thought you were a geneticist, not a soldier of fortune.”

“I’ve been both.” She stared at him. “Are you going to call her, or not?”

He shrugged. “I’ll call, ma’am, but I’m not sure she’ll take kindly to you trying to tell her what to do.” He was about to punch the quick dial for Boisson when the phone rang, startling them both. He raised his eyebrows. “It’s her. Garcia here, ma’am.” After listening a moment, he punched the button to put the call on speakerphone. “Dr. Perrault can hear you now, too.”

“Good.” It was clear that Boisson was far less than pleased. “There’s been a change of plan, Garcia. We’re on our way there and will pick up your detail and the good doctor in fifteen minutes. Dr. Perrault, I don’t know where you get your pull from, but Assistant Director Richards and the head of our Los Angeles office ordered me to put myself and my team at your disposal. I don’t like it, but I do what I’m told.”

Garcia glanced at Naomi, his eyes wide. “Dr. Perrault told me just before you called that she wanted a tactical team with body armor and heavy weapons.”
 

“We’re loaded for bear. Do you need anything else, doctor?”

“Yes, actually,” Naomi told her. “I need a couple of glass carboys, five or six gallon size, with metal caps.”

“You need what?”

“Two carboys. They look like the big jugs on top of a water cooler. But they have to be glass, not plastic, and the lids absolutely have to be metal that can be tightly sealed without a rubber or plastic gasket. If there’s a winemaking supply store somewhere close by, they’ll have them.”

“Done. Anything else?”

Naomi thought for a moment. “Bottles of lighter fluid, cans of hairspray, and disposable lighters. Get enough for everyone on the team.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

“Not at all.”

Boisson laughed. “Okay, this ought to be good. So where are we taking our cans of hairspray?”

Naomi looked at the television, which was showing yet more gruesome footage of the disaster at the mall.
 

Garcia followed her gaze. In a soft voice he said, “Oh, shit.”

* * *

President Miller sat in the Oval Office, staring at the television footage coming out of Los Angeles. “My God, what in blazes is going on out there?”

“It’s
them
, Mr. President.” Carl Richards’ voice carried an edge, but it wasn’t because of any malice toward Miller or anyone else in the room. It was because he held himself responsible for what was happening. They should have found The Bag before any of this happened. The FBI and SEAL had both failed, and now the American people, and perhaps the entire world, were going to pay the price. He had originally thought he was being brought to this meeting as a scapegoat, but that hadn’t been Harmon’s intention. The President was serious about finding answers, and wanted them fast. “It’s the harvesters.”

Beside him, FBI Director Harmon frowned, but said nothing. Richards had shown him incontrovertible evidence in video footage and analysis by Renee Vintner that the “riots” in Los Angeles weren’t riots at all, but an outbreak of an unspeakable biological horror, the same as was happening in Brazil, China, France, India, and Russia.
 

As they watched, the camera caught a dark, glossy insectile shape racing behind a group of screaming people. It stabbed a man with its stinger, then pounced on him as he fell to the pavement. Straddling his chest, it lowered its face to his, and in but a moment the man’s head had disappeared completely into the thing’s mandibles. Then it just sat there, immobile, as more screaming people ran by.

Another view showed a squad of National Guardsmen shooting at a pair of the things dashing toward them. One went down, shrieking and writhing. The other, clearly hit several times, kept coming. It leaped over the Hummer the Guardsmen were behind and savaged two of them before the other members of the squad killed it.

“How many of these things are out there in the city?”

The Secretary of Homeland Security shook his head. “Our best estimate thus far, Mr. President, is at least two hundred, and perhaps as many as a thousand.”

“And those are only the ones you can see.”
 

Everyone turned to stare at Richards. “Remember, these things can perfectly mimic human beings. Why these aren’t, I don’t know. But imagine what could happen if there were hundreds or thousands of these things disguised as people. Remember, Assistant Director Clement was murdered by one of these things last year and it replaced him without any of the rest of us — even people like me who’d worked with him for years — having the slightest clue that it wasn’t him.” He shook his head. “The only chance we may have of stopping these things is while they’re in their natural form and we can see them for what they really are.”

Miller grabbed the remote and angrily switched off the television. He couldn’t bear to watch any more of the slaughter. “So what are we doing about it? We’ve got to protect those people!”
 

“The governor has activated the National Guard and is deploying them to contain the largest infestations,” the Secretary of Defense explained. With a glance to the Secretary of Homeland Security, he said, “Mr. President, I’d like your permission to deploy some of the Marines from Camp Pendleton to backstop the Guard units and provide infrastructure security.” He frowned. “I hate to suggest this, but we might also want to bring in some helicopter gunships.”

“Not a chance in hell.” Miller sat forward in his chair. “I’m not going to have one of the greatest cities in the world look like Mogadishu!”

“With all due respect, Mr. President,” Richards told him, “that’ll be exactly what’s going to happen if we don’t stop these things right now, and we need heavy firepower to do it.” He pointed to the dark television. “You saw how many rounds from their rifles those National Guardsmen poured into the creatures that attacked them. Their weapons were designed to kill other human beings, not creatures with skeletons made out of carbon fiber. You can hammer away at them all day with an assault rifle and you
might
bring them down. But one round from a twenty or twenty-five millimeter cannon like the gunships have would do the job. And the harvesters can’t get at the helicopters like they can the troops on the ground.”

For a moment, Richards thought that Miller was going to charbroil him. Then the President’s expression softened. “All right. All right, dammit. It doesn’t help me to have experts if I don’t listen to them.” He glared at the Secretary of Defense. “But so help me, if those gunships shoot up the city, I’ll be sending you out there in your underwear to fight these things. Clear?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Miller turned back to Richards. “Anything else?”

Steeling himself for the President’s response, Richards said, “We should close every airport in the area, sir, including LAX.”

The President stared at him.

Vice President Lynch voiced what Miller was thinking. “Do you have any idea of the disruption, the panic, that would cause?”

“Sir, you’ve got to think of this as a biological threat,” Richards went on, “like an outbreak of a deadly disease. Our strategy has to be focused on containment. The counter-terrorist security procedures we have in place simply aren’t going to work against this threat. Emulating human form, these things will just walk right through. Imagine what could happen — what
will
happen — if they reach other major cities?” He shook his head fervently. “We’ve got to bottle them up in Los Angeles and wipe them out. Otherwise we may lose our only chance to stop them.”

“Mr. President,” Harmon said, much to Richards’ surprise, “I agree. And I’d also suggest that we put up roadblocks around the city and screen anyone coming out. I’m sure we can come up with some procedures to verify that the refugees are human.”

Richards nodded, glad that Harmon was backing him up for a change. He could see that his boss’s eyes were haunted, and suddenly remembered that Harmon had family in LA.

“As much as I hate to,” the Secretary for Homeland Security added softly, “I have to agree. Quarantine the affected areas and flood them with enough firepower to deal with these things as quickly as possible.”

Miller wearily rubbed his eyes. “All right. God help me, but make it happen. What are the casualties so far?”

“Sir,” the Homeland Security chief began, “we really don’t have enough information to give you a good estimate, because we don’t have anyone reporting those details yet. The police are fully engaged in trying to stay alive, and the local hospitals and other facilities are swamped.”

“Just give me a number,” Miller sighed. “I don’t expect anything to the twelfth decimal point. Somewhere in the ballpark.”

Before the Secretary of Homeland Security could dig himself in any deeper, Richards chimed in. He had asked Mozhdeh Kashani, the head of the Intelligence Division, to put something together for him. “Our estimates are at least five hundred dead and two thousand injured, and that’s probably conservative.”

Miller blinked in shock. “That many? But it’s only been, what, a couple hours, if that, since this started?”

“Mr. President,” Richards told him, “you have to understand that these things don’t have any other goal than to wipe us out. That’s what the original harvesters wanted, but they had to go about it in a subtle way over a long period of time because there were only a handful of them. If they were ever exposed for what they really were, they’d be killed. But the things in LA, along with the infestations in the other countries, apparently don’t feel the need for subtlety. But the goal’s still the same. They’re butchering people as fast as they can.”
And eating them
, he didn’t add.

Miller thought for a moment before coming to a conclusion. “All right. Let’s bring everything we can to bear on this.” He looked at the Defense Secretary. “Keep me informed, but do whatever’s necessary with our conventional forces to protect the people in Los Angeles and wipe these things out.”

“Yes, sir.”
 

Richards saw that everyone in the room had picked up on the President’s specification of
conventional
forces. He remembered with painful clarity being on the wrong end of a nuclear weapon at Sutter Buttes the year before, and he fervently prayed that the same fate wouldn’t befall Los Angeles or any other city.

Miller turned to Richards, which made him feel awkward. Harmon, his boss, was sitting right next to him. “Are there any signs of outbreaks anywhere else in the country?”

“No, sir. Not yet. But we’ve informed all of our field offices and legats overseas on what to look for, and we’re coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and emergency responders across the country to get the word out.” He grimaced. “A lot of people just don’t want to believe the information, but we’re telling them and we’ll keep telling them until the crisis has passed.”

Miller nodded appreciatively, and included Harmon in his gaze. “Thank you both.” Then he turned to the Secretary of State. “Do we have anything from the other affected countries?”

She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “Not much, Mr. President. Everyone still seems to be in a state of denial. We’ve passed on the information provided by Director Harmon’s people to the other governments, but aside from notes of bemused thanks, we haven’t gotten much reaction or any deeper insight into their situations. All of them still seem to think that these outbreaks are terrorist or separatist attacks, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.”