Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (37 page)

The two agents carrying the big glass jugs set them down. Naomi unscrewed the caps, then dropped the necklaces through the narrow mouths of the carboys before screwing the lids back on.

“Bait, right?” Boisson asked.

“Right. Plastic and rubber has a lot of carbon. We can’t handle the things or allow them to touch us. I’m hoping the plastic will entice them to just crawl right in.”

“Nice. A great new use for plastic baubles. Okay, let’s go.” Boisson motioned for Garcia to start forward again.

“Boisson,” Naomi said, looking up at the ceiling. A lot of tiles were missing, their remains scattered around the floor.

Boisson’s eyes followed where Naomi was looking. The other agents noticed, and looked up, too. “Do you think…?”

Naomi nodded. “Yes. Some crawled along the pipes and wiring up there, then dropped down through the ceiling.”

“Great.” Drawing a deep breath, she called to Garcia, “Move it. But make sure you guys watch the ceiling, too.”

There were muttered oaths from the men and women around her as they began moving forward again, each of them casting fearful glances at the ceiling with every step.

They passed seven more bodies before they reached the entrance to the mall itself. Four of them had been crushed in the panic, and a fifth was an elderly woman who had probably died of a heart attack, a rictus of terror still frozen on her face.

As for the remaining two, they had been decapitated.

Naomi knelt next to the first one to examine it. “Hold them, will you?” She handed the leashes for the cats to Boisson. Naomi knew it was safe at the moment, because the cats were back to merely being terrified.

The body was that of a man, Naomi guessed in his mid thirties. She examined the wound, which looked like something had taken a nearly perfectly semicircular bite out of the top of his torso. But it wasn’t a bite, nor was the wound made by any weapon: the edges were soft, as if the flesh had been dissolved. Of the head, there was no sign. There was a large pool of blood on the floor, although not nearly as much as she would have expected. The victim’s heart must have stopped beating before the wound had been completed.
 

The other body, of what looked like a teen girl, was the same.

“So they just eat heads?”
 

Naomi looked up at Boisson, who was studying the girl’s body with professional interest. “We don’t know anything about their feeding patterns. We captured some of the adults when I was in the Earth Defense Society, but they had refused to eat anything while in captivity. But this?” She shook her head. “Why would they bother to eat the heads over any other part of the body, unless…”

“Unless what?”

Naomi’s mind raced.
That must be how they do it
, she thought. They can mimic a body’s appearance perfectly, but what about the mind? How did they acquire the victim’s mannerisms, how they talked, the things the victim knew that made him or her unique, and in no time at all? There had been a great deal of speculation in the EDS about how the harvesters managed the behavioral side of their mimicry, but they’d never had any hard data from which they could form conclusions.

She feared that she was looking at the answer. Somehow, the things must be able to absorb at least part of the information stored in the victim’s brain. And as they learned more, they could adapt ever faster to new circumstances and environments.

“Naomi?”

“Nothing.” She took the leashes back from Boisson and stood up. “Let’s keep going.”

With a scowl, Boisson signaled Garcia, and the team moved into the mall.

* * *

Garcia had to work hard at controlling his breathing. He’d done a hitch with the Marines and had seen some action in Afghanistan before joining the Bureau, but this was something else entirely. He still couldn’t believe the things he’d seen, both on the television before coming here and then the thing out in the parking lot. He wanted to believe it was nothing more than a huge hoax, that they had been co-opted into some sort of new reality show, and that maybe Boisson was the only one in on the deal.
 

But he’d worked with her long enough to know that she was scared, too. Most people who didn’t know her wouldn’t be able to tell, but he could. And he’d never seen anything scare that woman.

Keep it cool
, he told himself. He scanned ahead of them, swiveling his torso as he aimed the shotgun. The mall here was empty, although he could still hear screams echoing through the corridors. The devastation wasn’t quite so evident as it had been in the store they’d come through, although there were still plenty of signs of panic. Several of the small kiosks in the center of the mall had been upended, their contents spilled over the shiny tile floor, and the displays in the storefronts were in disarray. In one of them, a large glass pane had shattered outward, with some of the shards coated in blood. Garcia imagined that someone must have leaped through it in an effort to escape
them
.

He gulped involuntarily as he thought again of what he’d seen in the parking lot. It was something out of a horror movie, but wasn’t nearly as terrible as the larval forms, as Dr. Perrault called them. The oozing things that he’d seen on the television, and the focus of their mission here, were an abomination.
 

As they passed a shoe store, the cats started hissing and growling again. That, too, was something Garcia found to be terribly unnatural, but at least the cats were on their side.

One of the displays in the store fell over, spilling colorful shoes to the floor, and everyone on the team pointed their weapon in that direction.
 

“Let’s take a look,” Perrault called softly as she reined in the cats. The big black and white one, bigger than any cat Garcia had ever seen, was straining at the leash like a dog, his razor sharp canines gleaming.

Boisson gave him the hand signal to move toward the store.
 

“Watch where you step,” Perrault called. “And watch the ceiling.”

Right
, Garcia thought. He already felt as if he were turning into a chameleon, with eyes swiveling independently in their sockets to look up and down at the same time.

He stepped quickly around one of the black pillars that flanked the entrance to the store, his finger tensing on the trigger.
 

And there, at the base of the toppled over display, was one of the things.
 

“There’s one in here, doctor!” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting all morning.

* * *

“Here, hold them.” Naomi handed the leashes to Boisson again. The FBI agent reached for them, but wasn’t prepared for how hard the cats were pulling, trying to get to the harvester, and nearly lost her grip.

“Jesus!” Alexander almost pulled Boisson off-balance before she got control of him.

Naomi shot her a look, but refrained from saying anything. Instead, she gestured for one of the men carrying the glass carboys to come with her.

The two of them moved into the store where Garcia stood, his gun trained on the oozing mass on the floor.

“Good, Garcia,” Naomi told him, patting him on the shoulder as she stepped past him toward the creature. Turning to the wide-eyed agent carrying the glass jug, she said, “Here, give me that.”

The man gladly handed it to her, then brought up his shotgun. Naomi wondered how he’d react when he discovered that he’d have to continue carrying the carboy, this time with the harvester inside.

The harvester was the size of a small watermelon, and had wrapped itself around one of the shoes that had been on the display rack. The plastic of the shoe was quickly giving way under the acidic assault of the creature, and even now the harvester was extending pseudopods toward the other shoes that had fallen around it.

Using the muzzle of her rifle, she moved those shoes away. She set the carboy down for a moment to remove the metal cap, then gently tipped it over on its side and pressed the open end right up against the larva’s bruised-looking, glistening flesh.

The thing didn’t hesitate. As if it smelled a gourmet dinner, it began to flow through the narrow mouth of the carboy.

Her plan worked perfectly, right up to the point where the harvester tried to pull in the partially digested shoe. The remains of the shoe were still far too large to fit through the neck of the carboy, but the creature had no problem elongating itself to reach the plastic bait.

“Dammit.” She didn’t want the thing to eat the beads and then ooze right back out again. “Knife! Does anyone have a combat knife?”

The agent who’d been carrying the carboy did. Without a word, he unsheathed it and handed it to her.
 

Taking a deep breath, she drew the knife in a smooth motion across the mouth of the carboy. The larva didn’t even flinch as it was cut in two. The part still consuming the shoe fell to the floor with a wet plop, while the other half pulled itself all the way into the carboy where it was greedily consuming the plastic necklaces.
 

Pulling the carboy back from the part of the larva that had fallen back to the floor, Naomi double checked that the cap had nothing in it but metal, then screwed it onto the neck of the carboy as tight as she could.
 

Picking up the container, she shivered as she watched the thing oozing and squirming against the side of the carboy, with only the thickness of the glass between it and her hand.

Turning to the agent, she handed him the big jug and its horrid contents. “Hold it upright, and tell me if it looks like it’s trying to force its way out the top. And don’t drop it.”

“Yeah, right.” The man gulped and took the glass container

“And I wouldn’t use this again.” She tossed his knife on the ground. She didn’t want to take the chance that any small bits of larvae were clinging to it.

The agent tried to hold the carboy out, away from his body, but Naomi knew that he’d only drop it. Naomi pressed it toward him. “You’re perfectly safe as long as it stays in the carboy. It can’t get through the glass.” A sudden vision of the equipment in the lab at the Earth Defense Society base after the first harvester larva had done its work flashed through her mind. The only three things that had survived its touch were concrete, metal, and glass.

“Is that it?” Boisson looked at the thing, which had gravitated toward the side where the agent held the carboy against his chest, as if it knew that just beyond the glass lay another tasty morsel.
 

The cats continued to hiss and growl, although now they were behind Boisson, trying to flee.
 

“Not quite.” Naomi turned back to the remaining half of the larva, which was still gorging itself on the shoes. “I’m going to need another one.” She would have taken this one, the second half of the pair that she’d created, but by now it had drawn in half a dozen shoes and was rapidly growing. Trying to play the same game she had the first time would be a bit trickier, and she didn’t want to take the risk.
 

Taking out the bottle of lighter fluid, she sprayed some on the creature and then made a small trail of fluid away from it. Kneeling down, she flicked her lighter and stepped back.

The fluid ignited with a soft
whump
. As soon as the flame reached the larva, the thing erupted.

“Christ!” The agent with the carboy stumbled back, almost dropping it. The others took an involuntary step backward as the harvester burned like jellied gasoline.

“Fire is our best weapon,” Naomi explained as she watched the thing die. “But we can’t use it indiscriminately, for obvious reasons.”

“Let’s go,” Boisson said, handing the straining cats back to Naomi, “before the fire extinguishers in here come on. I don’t like getting my hair wet.”

* * *

Thank God I don’t have to carry one of those things
, Garcia thought as they continued deeper into the mall. He exchanged looks with Cardon, who was stuck with carrying the doctor’s specimen, and could see that the man was frightened out of his wits.
 

Garcia didn’t blame him one bit. He tried to imagine what it must be like having that little monster glommed onto the side of the glass right against his chest, whatever brain it had, if any, trying to figure out how to get through it to the meat on the other side.

“Garcia!”

He looked up at Boisson.

“Pay attention or you’ll be carrying the damn thing!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, feeling ashamed.
Steady, man
, he told himself. Focus on the mission. Just get the job done so we can get the hell out of here and go home.
 

Something wriggling on the floor caught his eye. “There’s another one!” The larva was making a beeline for another body that lay bloodied and broken on the floor.
 

Garcia couldn’t help himself. He went over to the body and dragged it away before the harvester could reach it.
 

“Good job, Garcia.” Perrault flashed him a quick smile as she passed by, again handing the cats, which had again gone berserk, to Boisson. The other agent with a carboy handed it to her, and she knelt down and poked the neck of the jug into the harvester. Just as before, it instantly began to flow into the glass container, hungry for the plastic beads.

Garcia felt a sense of relief, knowing that once Perrault sealed the lid on the second little monster, they could get out of this tomb. The screams from elsewhere in the mall had stopped, and the place was far too quiet.
 

The cats were growling and hissing, carrying on like mad. Boisson was having trouble holding onto them, especially the big black and white one, Alexander. Garcia had learned very quickly, even in the short time they’d been in the safe house, that the cat was a big, purring cream puff. But the nice big kitty was gone. What Garcia was looking at now was an enraged predator.

Then he noticed where the cats were looking. They weren’t looking at the creature Perrault had coaxed into the glass prison. Their attention was focused on something above her.

Garcia looked up at the second floor walkway just in time to see one of the larvae ooze through the railing. But this one wasn’t small, like the one Perrault was capturing. It was the size of a fifty-five gallon drum. “
Up there!
”