The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Read online

  Harmony Bates, a tall, willowy blonde who was the senior researcher in Lab One, beamed. “Yes, Dr. Perrault.”

  “Naomi, please.” There had been a time when Naomi would have taken umbrage at someone not using her formal academic title, but not here. Not now.

  “Yes, Naomi.” Harmony smiled. “As I’m sure you read in the documentation, we’d been working on developing a similar system to what you’d done at New Horizons, creating a mechanism to deliver genetic payloads through food. Our first host plant was a commercial wheat strain, rather than corn, but the underlying principle was the same.” Her smile turned to a frown, which seemed to drag down her entire, thin frame. “We could engineer the payload delivery shell in the mature plant and its seed, but the system wasn’t stable. The shells consistently collapsed, compromising the payloads.”

  “We beat our heads against the wall on that one for a long time,” Randall Wyckoff, Lab One’s second in command, for lack of a better term, growled. “We couldn’t maintain the shell integrity, no matter what we tried, until Dr. Kelso showed us…” He stopped, and shot an uncomfortable glance at Harmony.

  “Tell her everything.”

  They turned to see Morgan standing at the rear of the lab, as if he’d appeared out of thin air. No one had heard the vault door open.

  Harmony bent forward and whispered to Naomi, “I have yet to figure out how he does that!”

  “It’s magic, my dear. Merely magic.” Morgan smiled as he strode toward where the others had gathered in a semicircle around Naomi. Taking a seat, he gestured for Harmony to continue. “Naomi’s fully cleared for this project. If she’s going to help us, she has to know everything.” His eyes swept the room before settling on Naomi. “Hold nothing back.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harmony bobbed her head, then took up where Wyckoff had left off. “A year ago, Dr. Kelso brought us samples of what we call Beta-Three.” She flicked a quick look at Morgan, who nodded. “From what we know from the press and the articles that you and Dr. Kempf published on the topic, we believe they’re samples of the Revolutions seed you were working on at New Horizons. Which generation, of course, we have no way of knowing. But that’s how we made our breakthrough last year. Naomi?”

  Naomi was staring at Harmony. Naomi’s hands were gripping the arms of the chair so hard her knuckles were bled pure white, and her heart was hammering in her chest. She knew that it would have been impossible for them to have obtained a sample of the corn from the New Horizons lab at Lincoln Research University. While that lab’s outward appearance was less imposing than Lab One, the security had been nearly impenetrable.

  That left only one real possibility for the source of the Beta-Three samples. The Bag.

  Morgan stood up and stepped toward her. “Naomi, are you all right?”

  Suppressing her sense of horror, she focused a frigid gaze on Morgan. “Let me get this straight. You have samples of the New Horizons corn seed, the Revolutions variant?” She glanced at Harmony. “Don’t tell me it was a pre-production sample, because that would be pure and utter horse shit.”

  Everyone else in the room shrank back, giving the clear appearance that they wished they were anywhere but trapped in the vault for what was shaping up to be a battle of the Titans.

  Morgan made no attempt to dodge her question or throw up a smokescreen. “Yes, we do have samples of Revolutions.” He returned to his seat and held her eyes. “Naomi, while I have some lofty humanitarian ambitions at this point in my life, I’m also an opportunist. In this industry, with such high stakes, anyone who doesn’t take advantage of every possible opportunity is left behind and eventually crushed or absorbed. Part of my staff is devoted to keeping tabs on what our competitors are doing and, if the opportunity arises, finding ways to leverage their gains for our own purposes.”

  “Industrial espionage, you mean.”

  Morgan shrugged, but the gesture was unapologetic. “Call it what you like. But in this case it wasn’t so Machiavellian.” He looked over at Harmony. “Why don’t you all take a coffee break for a bit?”

  Harmony nodded, then quickly led the others, all of whom had unmistakable looks of relief on their faces, out of the room.

  Waiting until the vault door cycled shut behind them, Morgan continued. “What I’m about to tell you must be held in strict confidence, Naomi. Only three people in my company, including myself, know this. I’m telling you because you need to know everything, but I’d appreciate it if you would keep this to yourself.”

  “All right.” In truth, the only thing preventing Naomi from running from the vault and leaving Morgan’s employ was the burning desire to find out what had happened to The Bag. She, Jack, and the others who had worked at SEAL had been fruitlessly searching for a year for any sign of what had happened to it. And now she had finally found at least one piece to the puzzle. Regardless of her other feelings, she had to find out the story behind it. What she did afterward largely depended on Morgan’s next words. “Go on.”

  “About a month before the New Horizons facility where the Revolutions seed was produced was destroyed, we were approached by a New Horizons employee who claimed to have access to it. He didn’t have access to the technical data, but could provide specimens of the final product. In exchange for a king’s ransom, he did.”

  “How many samples did he provide?”

  Morgan tilted his head to one side. “Precisely two thousand four hundred and thirty-eight Revolutions seeds.”

  Naomi blanched. “Is that all? Only a pound’s worth?” The Bag had held a hundred pounds of seed, every one of which was a potential weapon of mass destruction. If Morgan only had one pound, that meant that ninety-nine more pounds of seed were out there in the world, being handed out by a dealer to totally unsuspecting buyers. The strange incidents Renee had reported in Brazil, China, and Russia snapped into horrible focus. On top of that was Vijay’s mysterious call.

  A wave of cold foreboding swept over her, and she wanted nothing more than to snatch up her phone and call Jack to make sure he was all right. I’ll call him, she promised herself, as soon as we’re finished here.

  Misinterpreting Naomi’s reaction, Morgan smiled. “Only a pound? My dear, I paid more for that pound of grain than I would have for the same weight in fine diamonds. Our contact drove a very hard bargain, and is probably on the beaches of Tahiti right now, sipping a tropical drink.”

  “Please, Howard,” she whispered. “Please tell me that you haven’t planted any, and that none has been fed to anyone or anything.”

  “No, I assure you that we’ve kept it under very strict control. While I’m not aware of the specific nature of the dangers they may pose, I took the government’s gloom and doom story about them being weapons of mass destruction quite seriously. Most of the specimens have been kept in cold nitrogen storage. We’ve actually used only fifteen for research, and Dr. Kelso is the only individual who has direct access to the specimens.” He paused and looked at her significantly. “Aside from you, that is.”

  Looking into Morgan’s eyes, Naomi decided he was probably telling the truth. He certainly hadn’t responded to her concerns with smoke and mirrors. For that, she felt a profound sense of relief. She needed to be able to trust him.

  “Howard, I know you’re not going to like this, but I’ve got to know who your contact was and get the FBI on his trail. I have reason to believe that he’s been selling samples to buyers in other countries, and we’ve got to find out who has them and stop him from selling any more.”

  At that, Morgan slowly shook his head. “Naomi, what I’ve told you about the Beta-Three samples was in confidence and must never leave this room. If you ever mention a word of this to anyone, I’ll deny it, along with firing you, of course, and probably filing charges of slander. While you might think I deserve it, I don’t really fancy finding myself in federal prison.”

  “That’s not what I think at all. But you don’t understand what could — what will — happen if this seed gets out of a stric
tly controlled lab environment. The government wasn’t exaggerating when they said the Revolutions seed was a weapon of mass destruction.” Her brown and blue eyes bore into him. “Please, Howard. If you want to do humanity a true service, help us find the rest of this seed. Before it’s too late.”

  Morgan sat back and crossed his arms, a speculative expression on his face. “I’ll consider it. But that consideration will only be given on two conditions. First, that you tell me exactly what this seed really does. And second, that you give me your word that you’ll help me do what I hired you to do, and take this abomination, whatever it is, and try to create something good out of it.”

  Considering his offer only for a moment, Naomi said, “Agreed, but you won’t believe what I’m about to tell you.”

  Morgan’s mouth curled up into a smile. “Try me.”

  With worried thoughts of Jack circling in her mind, Naomi began to tell him about the harvesters.

  * * *

  “Son of a bitch.” Renee glared in turn at each of the three computer screens arrayed in front of her in her cubicle at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters of the FBI, in Washington, D.C. Each displayed half a dozen web browsers, specialized analysis applications, and FIDS, the FBI Intelligence Information Report Dissemination System. None of the information shown in any of the windows pertained to what she was supposed to be doing. She knew she could get in hot water for it and, worse, get Carl in trouble. But once she was on the trail of something, she couldn’t let go.

  She’d been working on the angle that Jack had suggested, trying to ferret out individuals who had traveled to Brazil, China, India, and Russia within a few weeks of the election the previous November. That search, which had involved cross-indexing records from half a dozen intelligence agency databases and passport lists from the State Department, had yielded one thousand, three hundred and fifteen names.

  Then she began the hard work, ferreting out information on who these people were and their employment background, looking for any potential ties to New Horizons. For some people on her list, that information was easy to find. For others, it took hours of digging.

  Now, with red-rimmed eyes, she stared at the final result: zero matches, even after expanding the date search to a full sixty days around the election.

  Quietly muttering a string of obscenities, she retraced her steps to make sure she didn’t miss anything. She knew that whoever was selling seeds from The Bag could have stayed in the U.S., with buyers coming to him or her. But somehow she doubted it. If someone was peddling something that had been designated by the government as a weapon of mass destruction, he (Renee always thought of bad people as “he” until proven otherwise) wasn’t just going to invite people he didn’t know into his living room to chat about the deal. He was going to feel more comfortable meeting somewhere overseas, most likely in the country that was home to the potential buyer where he’d be safe (or so he hoped) from any prying U.S. Government eyes.

  That supported the initial hypothesis that Jack had come up with, but something was obviously missing.

  She glanced at the State Department passport database again. Upon reflection, the peddler would have been an idiot to be traveling under their real identity. And he could certainly be using multiple passports, which would make even more sense for someone trying to fly under the radar, so to speak.

  It wouldn’t have been easy to pull off a stunt like that, but if her bad guy had managed to put together a portfolio of fake passports, using each one to travel to one or two countries with potential buyers, he wouldn’t have shown up in her initial search at all, nor would any of his aliases have shown up in the relational search she’d run against people who’d worked for New Horizons.

  Of course, if he were traveling under one or more aliases, there was nothing to say that he couldn’t be using non-U.S. passports, as well.

  Calling up the passport database again, she ran searches against all travelers to each of the countries from September through December of last year, saving off the results, including the passport photos.

  Then she ran another search of foreign travelers to the U.S. during the same time period from those countries, and saved off the data.

  Digging through her personal collection of programs and files, she hammered together a routine that would compare the images in the huge pile of results that she had saved off and present her with any likely matches. She knew it would likely generate a lot of junk results, and wouldn’t find her bad guy if he had made any real effort to disguise himself for his passport photos. But it was the only way she stood a chance of finding him in the hundreds of thousands of records she’d saved.

  “Well, this ought to bring the network to a crawl.”

  With a tired grin, she clicked the button and the program began to run.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As the jeep rolled forward toward the darkened village, Jack had to use every ounce of willpower not to beg Kiran to turn them around and get the hell away. The headlights swept across the rutted dirt road, and twice Jack saw large pools of a dark, viscous liquid. He shuddered at the sight, knowing that he was seeing all that was left of one or more human beings.

  In the seat behind him, the girl had begun to moan. Surya had his arm draped protectively around her shoulders, holding her shivering body close. Like the jeep’s headlights, her eyes were fixed straight ahead, unwavering, unblinking.

  On the right, barely illuminated by the edge of the beam cast by the headlights, the maize stalks shook as if something large had just passed by.

  “What the devil was that?” Kiran glanced at Jack, then snapped his eyes back to where the maize had been disturbed, now only a few feet from his window.

  The girl’s moans grew louder.

  As the outlines of the village huts emerged from the darkness, a figure stepped from the maize to stand in the middle of the road. It was a woman, one of the villagers. She stared at the jeep with an unblinking gaze.

  Kiran brought the jeep to a stop a dozen meters from her. “Another survivor.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Jack leaned forward, his body tense as a coiled spring. He had expected the harvester — harvesters, he corrected himself — to attack. He’d never believed they’d make it even this far.

  “Wait, no!” Surya’s cry from the back seat was punctuated by the sound of one of the jeep’s rear doors being flung open.

  Jack saw the girl dash past him, running for the woman who still stood in the road, staring at them. “Shit! Stop her!”

  As he and Kiran got out, Surya was already running past them in pursuit of the girl. He managed to grab her just before she reached the woman. The girl began to scream and kick at him, her arms held out toward the woman, who was now watching them with an expression that was utterly, terrifyingly empty.

  “Surya, get back!” Jack watched in slow motion, his gut churning with horror, as the woman’s chest changed. Her right breast seemed to bulge outward, distending the fabric of her sari. In a blur of motion, a stinger the length of Jack’s hand shot out. It struck Surya in the chest, just above his heart, and missed the girl’s face by only a few centimeters.

  “No!” Kiran screamed as he reached his brother. He took Surya’s free hand, as Surya was still clinging to the girl with the other. Kiran tried to drag them back toward the jeep, but the stinger remained firmly stuck in Surya’s chest, and the woman, the thing, refused to let go. Between them, the umbilical of the stinger, which looked like a snake that had been turned inside out, thrashed like the tentacle of a squid.

  Jack knew they only had one chance of survival, and it was perilously thin. Grabbing up a handful of the dry maize husks from the edge of the road, he held his lighter beneath them and flicked the igniter. The flame immediately caught. Holding the tip of the flame to the husks, he watched in growing frustration as the husks blackened and tiny fragments glowed, but it refused to catch fire. “Come on, damn you. Come on!”

  He looked up as he heard a wet rippi
ng sound, and Surya shrieked in agony. Kiran had pulled the stinger, which Jack saw had barbs to which bits of Surya’s flesh still clung, clear of his brother. The two men collapsed to the ground, the stinger dancing over them with obvious menace, venom dripping from its tip. The girl lay beside them, completely still, her eyes closed.

  The woman, the harvester, began to move closer to its prey, and Jack now heard something moving in the maize on both sides of the road.

  They were out of time. And still the damned-to-hell maize husks refused to catch fire. The lighter was so hot now it was burning Jack’s thumb as he pressed down the button to keep the flame going.

  “Kiran! Get up! Get them in the jeep!”

  Galvanized by Jack’s voice, Kiran, who had been staring at the abomination now advancing toward him, got to his feet and bent over to pick up his brother.

  “No,” Surya told him, his face twisted in agony. He pushed Kiran’s hands away. “The girl. The girl!”

  “Bloody hell,” Kiran hissed as he obeyed his older brother. Reaching down, he swept the girl into his arms and dashed back to the jeep.

  * * *

  Surya faced the thing that was now nearly on top of him. The stinger had been pulled back into the creature’s thorax, the wet umbilical disappearing into the flesh. Only the tip of the stinger protruded from the torn fabric of the sari where the right breast should be, glistening in the jeep’s headlights like a serpent’s tooth.

  But something else was emerging from the thing’s chest now, resembling a skinning knife as long as Surya’s forearm. He whimpered in fright and pain and tried to push himself away from the thing with his feet. He could no longer move his arms, for they were completely paralyzed. And behind the wave of paralysis followed a burning agony as he had never before known.